R.I.P. Little Richard

Little Richard: 1932 - 2020

My musical tastes have expanded in numerous directions, over the years.  But, like anyone of my vintage, the popular music I grew up with was pretty much all contextualised by the legacy of Rock & Roll.  When I first started to take serious notice, in the early to mid 1970s, we were still less than twenty years from that music's first flowering.  There was even a diluted revival of those early stylings occurring in the Pop charts (if only in the fashions worn on 'Top Of The Pops').  However, like any hybrid form, its recognisable components had been around somewhat longer.  The same might be said of one of its founding fathers, 'Little Richard' Penniman - who recently died, at the age of 87.

Little Richard was the most exotic of those pioneering Rock & Rollers (of whom, I guess - only Jerry Lee Lewis now remains).  And, for me, he was always the most striking.  I've plenty of time for the early work of both Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee, and will still cheerfully hang around for Elvis' 'Jailhouse Rock', or 'Hound Dog', should they crop up.  Nevertheless, Richard's stuff seems to contain a greater edge of genuine hysteria - carrying it just a little further than the others, to my mind.  And, ultimately - isn't that what Rock & Roll was always supposed to be about?  As a cultural form, its ludicrous extremes always seemed self-justifying.  Previous musics had  sought to liberate the Id, to loosen the hips and feet, or to prioritise the groin over the head - it's true.  But, it feels like this was about doing all that with an even  glossier, almost cartoonish abandon.  The artifice of it all seemed integral.  Even more than all the other sleazy predators, macho brooders and redneck hell-raisers - Little Richard really seemed to get that.

The difference, of course, stems from his sexuality.  As if expressing the oppressed Black perspective to White audiences in still-segregated America wasn't enough - here was a patently gay man doing it, with nothing more than heavy make-up, an exuberant pompadour, and a swishy suit, for protection.  Richard preferred to label himself 'Pan-sexual', it seems.  Certainly, he must have grown up in the knowledge  that to be both Gay and Black, in the 1940s, was to almost invite a lynching, amongst certain denizens of his native Georgia.  But no one can have been in any real doubt - can they?  Alienated from his family - he'd been fourteen-year-old drag act before Rock & Roll took off, and the lyrics of many of his songs suggested a degree of sexual ambiguity, at best.  Tutti Frutti', even began life as a celebration of anal sex, by all accounts.  When Richard whooped and hollered, and, above all - screamed, it was a voicing of the outrage felt by someone fighting society's prejudice on two fronts.  Like generations of Gay entertainers, before and after, he took the fear and anger, and transmuted them into exuberant performance art.  The lyrics may have been superficially upbeat, but the right to party is often code for the right to be accepted and heard also.

Famously, Little Richard's real moment was over, almost as soon as it began.  Having released all of his most memorable records between 1955 and late 1957 - he retreated into the Pentecostal Christianity to which he was originally raised.  Whether or not his ministry  was a sincere act of penitence for the life he'd lived - only he could say.  Either way, it would certainly suggest an understandable degree of psychological conflict.  When he returned to performance, in 1962 - it was largely as a Gospel singer.  He revisited secular Rock & Roll in 1964 - but who of us can really name a memorably rockin' Little Richard composition after '57 (apart from possibly, 'Bama Lama Bama Loo')?

His star would wax and wane over the following years - and incorporated the almost requisite substance-abuse and routine personal tragedy of the Rock & Roller, before he returned to active evangelism in 1977.  A year or two later, I was busily absorbing the implications of Bob Dylan's back catalogue - just around the time he too announced an alarming right-turn into Born-Again Christianity.  Disappointing though this may have been, it was also intriguing to learn that Dylan's own evangelising was often done on a double bill - with none other than Little Richard.  And the debt that American popular music (particularly Black music) pays to religion, must be acknowledged, of course.  His early songwriting was as knowing as all Hell, but the manner of its delivery was only a step away from what would have been commonplace in the church services of Richard's youth.

  

Ultimately, what really matters is that 'Long Tall Sally', 'Lucille' , and all those other early classic cuts still sound as fresh and urgent as they did a lifetime ago.  And, as others have pointed out: without Little Richard - would we have ever had James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, or McCartney's vocal stylings and Jagger's camp strut, or Elton John's piano-bound theatrics, or Bowie's androgynous shape-shifting and Prince's actual, and seemingly voracious, pan-sexuality - at least in the form in which we now recognise them?  And, with reference to the above - let's not forget that Bob Dylan's earliest-known, teenage recording, was a ham-fisted tribute to the man himself.

With the passing of Little Richard - it feels like a certain era might also have come to a close.  Certainly, the World will be a drabber place without him.