DadMog #4: Little Richard- The _True_ King of Rock and Roll
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Artist:
I spent last week in Los Angeles, hanging with my family. Along with the cooking, laughing and listening I did, I was finally able to coerce my dad into writing another "DadMog". Hope everyone enjoys reading this as much as I did:
It's 1985, we're in a radio studio in Santa Monica with the architect of rock and roll, Little Richard himself, and he can't stop talking about Buddy Holly's schlong. "He was so huge. I never seen nobody that big in my life. He was huge, huge, Huge. Huge, huge, huge. HUGE!!" Then he adds, as a gratuitous postscript: "I loved Buddy."Richard's dressing room in Alan Freed's gigantic stage shows in New York in the mid to late '50s was, in the singer's own words, a raving bordello of big names. "They should have had 'Little Orgy' written on my door at the Brooklyn Paramount," he laughed.The occasion for this conversation was the publication of his autobiography, written by a Irish podiatrist, Dr. Rock, called "Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock and Roll." You don't hear a lot of Richard on the airwaves anymore, but a casual perusal of his extraordinarily influential catalog reveals a broad range of styles in addition to his adrenal-ripping piano-pummeling hits. Proto-soul and gospel stand proudly alongside the easy lope of "Send Me Some Lovin'," and irresistible dance raveups like "Good Golly Miss Molly," "Rip It Up," "She's Got It" and "Lucille." I tell him that I could never figure out the line in the latter where he shouts, "I asked my friends about her, but all....what?" A look of recognition passes across his handsome unlined 50-something face. "Ah, we had to cover them up so that Pat Boone and those others wouldn't be able to cover them. I was saying, '...but all their lips was tight'." Pat Boone is to rock and roll what imitation margarine is to fine French cuisine, but his versions of songs by Richard, and black groups like the El Dorados ("Crazy Little Mama") often outsold the originals. Most mainstream AM radio stations were black-averse. It took Hollywood to help change that. Richard co-starred in what many observers, myself included, believe was the greatest rock and roll movie of the founding era, Jayne Mansfield's "The Girl Can't Help It," whose title song was performed in a rollickingly erotic rendition by Richard. As a tightly corseted Mansfield enters a nightclub, her waist impossibly small and her massive mammaries threatening to burst over the top of her strapless silver gown, Richard leers, "She walks by, the bread slice turns to toast/she's got a lot of what they call The Most..." Cut to a milkman delivering a bottle whose top bursts explosively as Jayne passes by. You get the idea.That film also featured Eddie Cochran, the Platters, and other early stars. "To me, the first videos were made at that time." Richard also was featured prominently in most of Alan Freed's ground-breaking black and white rock movies, most of them knocked out in just four or five days by bent-nosed producers making a fast buck on what appeared to be a brief fad. "I always wanted to be a movie star in my home town," explained Richard. "And I felt that I was when I was movin' from city to city, a movin' star."His frenetic yells, bat shrieks and banshee howls inspired more than one rock band, but most especially the Beatles and Paul McCartney. With the Stones and the Beatles in tow, Richard came out of a brief, religious, retirement in 1961. In Hamburg, "Mick Jagger slept on the floor of Bo Diddley's room, because my room was full as always. I was yelling next, NEXT!" I ask if Paul really learned that yell from him. "Oh, yes. I was going 'Woooooo! Woooooooooo! And Paul would go, 'wooogh,' a sound like someone being punched in the solar plexus. "And what", I inquire, "do you think Mick Jagger learned from you?" "Oh," coos Richard, a delicious smile spreading his features, "How to walk!"After his initial burst of years of top ten hits designed to send Fifties parents into paroxysms of horror (the only time I heard my very conservative Irish Catholic mother swear was when I would play Richard's 45s over and over, and she'd shout upstairs, "Turn off that god-damn booga-wooga jungle music!"), Richard started to ask for his money. "And they stopped playing my music. That's what happened. That's the way it was." When he claimed to have seen a huge bright light pass over a stadium he was playing in Australia, thinking it was Sputnik (which, if visible, would have been only the tiniest pin-prick of light), he decided to quit the business, and threw all his diamonds in the ocean. (Thirty years later, regretfully, he demands, "Whatever fish got my rings - give them back!!") He returned to the States and entered a southern Bible college, arriving in an ostentatious Cadillac. "As a kid, I met Lloyd Price in Macon, GA in the Douglas Theater. He had a black and gold Cadillac. I wanted that Cadillac so bad. In my town, the only person who had a Cadillac was the funeral parlor, you had to die to ride!" Then, turning to the London Weekend Television cameraman who was filming our interview, he addressed a newcomer then making his initial splash on the music scene: "Prince, I had a purple Cadillac before you was born, baby! Prince is me in this generation. I love him."Richard was also a pioneer in gender-bending stage appearance, one of the first men to use heavy makeup and eye-liner, sequins, spotlights and other attention getters. Among his main influences was a flamboyant pianist named Esquerita. "He was inspired by me to be in show business. I met him at the bus station in Macon, Georgia. I would sit there all night and watch people get off, (you know what I mean), and I said, 'Oh, boy!' He got his hair style (a heavily pomaded pompadour) from me, but he taught me how to play piano, with 'One Mint Julip' by the Clovers." His musical interests had started much earlier, however, at age 6, with his brothers in a gospel group, The Tiny Tots Quartet. Other influences included Mahalia Jackson and the Clara Ward singers, Ruth Brown, Sister Rosetta Tharp, and New Orleans rock legend Fats Domino. (Today it's almost unimaginable that fifty and more years onward, the founding class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is still mostly amongst us: Richard, Fats, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.)For young people who love to dance their butts off, the fever-pitch rhythms of Little Richard have never lost their luster. Today, live, he may not be leaping atop his piano anymore, but his pipes are as good as ever, the blood-curdling high notes intact and terrifying. If you've only heard a couple of his hits, his body of work is well worth (re)visiting, the very spirit of Rock and Roll itself.If you would like to read the rest of the MOG posts by my pops, here are the links:#1: Fela Kuti#2: Lord Buckley#3: Nina Simone
It's 1985, we're in a radio studio in Santa Monica with the architect of rock and roll, Little Richard himself, and he can't stop talking about Buddy Holly's schlong. "He was so huge. I never seen nobody that big in my life. He was huge, huge, Huge. Huge, huge, huge. HUGE!!" Then he adds, as a gratuitous postscript: "I loved Buddy."Richard's dressing room in Alan Freed's gigantic stage shows in New York in the mid to late '50s was, in the singer's own words, a raving bordello of big names. "They should have had 'Little Orgy' written on my door at the Brooklyn Paramount," he laughed.The occasion for this conversation was the publication of his autobiography, written by a Irish podiatrist, Dr. Rock, called "Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock and Roll." You don't hear a lot of Richard on the airwaves anymore, but a casual perusal of his extraordinarily influential catalog reveals a broad range of styles in addition to his adrenal-ripping piano-pummeling hits. Proto-soul and gospel stand proudly alongside the easy lope of "Send Me Some Lovin'," and irresistible dance raveups like "Good Golly Miss Molly," "Rip It Up," "She's Got It" and "Lucille." I tell him that I could never figure out the line in the latter where he shouts, "I asked my friends about her, but all....what?" A look of recognition passes across his handsome unlined 50-something face. "Ah, we had to cover them up so that Pat Boone and those others wouldn't be able to cover them. I was saying, '...but all their lips was tight'." Pat Boone is to rock and roll what imitation margarine is to fine French cuisine, but his versions of songs by Richard, and black groups like the El Dorados ("Crazy Little Mama") often outsold the originals. Most mainstream AM radio stations were black-averse. It took Hollywood to help change that. Richard co-starred in what many observers, myself included, believe was the greatest rock and roll movie of the founding era, Jayne Mansfield's "The Girl Can't Help It," whose title song was performed in a rollickingly erotic rendition by Richard. As a tightly corseted Mansfield enters a nightclub, her waist impossibly small and her massive mammaries threatening to burst over the top of her strapless silver gown, Richard leers, "She walks by, the bread slice turns to toast/she's got a lot of what they call The Most..." Cut to a milkman delivering a bottle whose top bursts explosively as Jayne passes by. You get the idea.That film also featured Eddie Cochran, the Platters, and other early stars. "To me, the first videos were made at that time." Richard also was featured prominently in most of Alan Freed's ground-breaking black and white rock movies, most of them knocked out in just four or five days by bent-nosed producers making a fast buck on what appeared to be a brief fad. "I always wanted to be a movie star in my home town," explained Richard. "And I felt that I was when I was movin' from city to city, a movin' star."His frenetic yells, bat shrieks and banshee howls inspired more than one rock band, but most especially the Beatles and Paul McCartney. With the Stones and the Beatles in tow, Richard came out of a brief, religious, retirement in 1961. In Hamburg, "Mick Jagger slept on the floor of Bo Diddley's room, because my room was full as always. I was yelling next, NEXT!" I ask if Paul really learned that yell from him. "Oh, yes. I was going 'Woooooo! Woooooooooo! And Paul would go, 'wooogh,' a sound like someone being punched in the solar plexus. "And what", I inquire, "do you think Mick Jagger learned from you?" "Oh," coos Richard, a delicious smile spreading his features, "How to walk!"After his initial burst of years of top ten hits designed to send Fifties parents into paroxysms of horror (the only time I heard my very conservative Irish Catholic mother swear was when I would play Richard's 45s over and over, and she'd shout upstairs, "Turn off that god-damn booga-wooga jungle music!"), Richard started to ask for his money. "And they stopped playing my music. That's what happened. That's the way it was." When he claimed to have seen a huge bright light pass over a stadium he was playing in Australia, thinking it was Sputnik (which, if visible, would have been only the tiniest pin-prick of light), he decided to quit the business, and threw all his diamonds in the ocean. (Thirty years later, regretfully, he demands, "Whatever fish got my rings - give them back!!") He returned to the States and entered a southern Bible college, arriving in an ostentatious Cadillac. "As a kid, I met Lloyd Price in Macon, GA in the Douglas Theater. He had a black and gold Cadillac. I wanted that Cadillac so bad. In my town, the only person who had a Cadillac was the funeral parlor, you had to die to ride!" Then, turning to the London Weekend Television cameraman who was filming our interview, he addressed a newcomer then making his initial splash on the music scene: "Prince, I had a purple Cadillac before you was born, baby! Prince is me in this generation. I love him."Richard was also a pioneer in gender-bending stage appearance, one of the first men to use heavy makeup and eye-liner, sequins, spotlights and other attention getters. Among his main influences was a flamboyant pianist named Esquerita. "He was inspired by me to be in show business. I met him at the bus station in Macon, Georgia. I would sit there all night and watch people get off, (you know what I mean), and I said, 'Oh, boy!' He got his hair style (a heavily pomaded pompadour) from me, but he taught me how to play piano, with 'One Mint Julip' by the Clovers." His musical interests had started much earlier, however, at age 6, with his brothers in a gospel group, The Tiny Tots Quartet. Other influences included Mahalia Jackson and the Clara Ward singers, Ruth Brown, Sister Rosetta Tharp, and New Orleans rock legend Fats Domino. (Today it's almost unimaginable that fifty and more years onward, the founding class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is still mostly amongst us: Richard, Fats, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.)For young people who love to dance their butts off, the fever-pitch rhythms of Little Richard have never lost their luster. Today, live, he may not be leaping atop his piano anymore, but his pipes are as good as ever, the blood-curdling high notes intact and terrifying. If you've only heard a couple of his hits, his body of work is well worth (re)visiting, the very spirit of Rock and Roll itself.If you would like to read the rest of the MOG posts by my pops, here are the links:#1: Fela Kuti#2: Lord Buckley#3: Nina Simone
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