2023-08-19 00:48:55
Richard Penniman, the wild Little Richard, had his right leg shorter than his left, he walked with a limp and dragged his feet, his head was very large in relation to his body and one of his eyes stood out greatly over the other.
The singer of songs as unique and far-reaching as ‘Tutti Frutti’, with his famous «a-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom», or ‘Lucille’, was called in the school “girl, prick and monster”, as one of the kings of rock and the undisputed ‘queen’ of the genre, who never hid his gay identity, recalled. She put on makeup and perfume with what her mother had in the bathroom, and imitated her shrill voice, a vocal apprenticeship that became one of the hallmarks of her personality as a singer.
The journalist Mark Ribowsky has just published in Spanish ‘The extraordinary life of Little Richard’ (Libros Cúpula), a detailed biographical and recording account of the musician who gave rock an indelible stamp. Like so many other black singers, he grew up in churches listening to and performing gospel. But in the forties the winds of rhythm and blues were already beginning to blow. From there to rock there were only a couple of steps.
He lived in Macon, a city of about 70,000 Georgian inhabitants (today twice as many), with a black majority descended from slaves, and from which Ottis Redding and James Brown also emerged, as well as later The Allman Brothers. He was thinking of being a preacher to please his father, very pissed off by the eccentricity of his son. From the age of ten he presented himself as a healer and visited the sick, to whom he offered his show. “Many swore that they felt better and sometimes they gave me money,” said the singer about his childhood beginnings.
At 17 he was already on the road, making a living in nightclubs. Unable to afford a room in the cheapest hotel, he ended up sleeping in the fields of the Deep South. “They used to beat me up for nothing. They beat me in the face with sticks. The police would stop me to clean the blood off me. I tried not to affect me. I knew there was a better way and that the King of Kings would show it to me. I was a child of God and I knew that God would open the door for me.
A revolution on the way
By his late teens, his physique had turned upside down. He was over six feet tall, very thin, and his high cheekbones made his smile stand out from under his thin mustache. He wore a gelled toupee several inches high and was still not reconciled with his father, Bud, who had a club in Macon and couldn’t stand anything outside of the canonical blues. He only accepted him when he began to succeed, and did not live to see the high points of his son, as he was killed at age 41 in a shootout with one of his clients.
In 1951, Little Richard signed his first recording contract, which didn’t go far. In the recording studios he was not half as brave as he was on the gay ‘underground’ scene and the ‘chitlin’ circuit, exclusive to African-American artists in the days of segregation.
In that decade the rock revolution was brewing. From Broadway came Bill Halley, with his rockabilly undertones; and from Chicago, a still little-known singer and guitarist from St. Louis, Chuck Berry. In the South of the United States there was Elvis, and also the pioneer Fats Domino. Meanwhile, Little Richard worked to survive in the kitchen of the Macon bus station, washing dishes and writing songs from the conversations he overheard, because his records didn’t quite gel.
With ‘Tutti Frutti’ it was different. All the producers saw the song as a ‘hit’, if the references to homosexual sex were removed, which they did. During the recording, Richard handled the piano in his own way. Instead of playing the melody chords with his right and the bass notes with his left, he played the entire melody with both hands, pounding the higher notes, reinforcing the song’s rhythm. To get an idea of the song’s success, the person who edited her lyrics, Dorothy LaBostrie, received checks for $50,000 two or three times a year until her death in 2007.
At the height of his career, after the mid-fifties, he decided to become a preacher. After a homosexual ‘affair’ at the university where he was preparing for his new job, he chose to get married. He began a relationship with an 18-year-old mixed-race woman, Ernestine, his future wife. “If he was gay, he hid it from me very well,” said his wife. They spent the day praying and reading the Bible.
Little by little he was returning to show business. After her tour with The Beatles, already in the United States, she went back to the recording studio. His wife, with whom he had had a child, understood that, contrary to what he had promised, he was not made for a simple life.
Little Richard found himself adored by a new generation of musicians, including Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Jim Morrison, though Jimi Hendrix summed up his experience within his band this way: “Underpaid, underpaid, and burned out.” What there is no doubt about is his legacy: «Before they called me a fagot, weirdo, sarasa, because I dressed like that. Now all the groups dress that way and put on makeup,” observed the great rock legend.
The Beatles, opening act for the maestro in Liverpool and Hamburg
The Beatles idolized Little Richard. Thanks to the fact that the managers of the band and the soloist knew each other, they planned a series of concerts together, with those from Liverpool as opening acts. The British used to play ‘Lucille’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ at their live shows, but when they started touring together they stopped for fear of offending the maestro.
“I don’t think they will.” This is how Richard summed up the future of the band. Managers thought otherwise and got a couple of joint gigs in Liverpool and fifteen in Hamburg. “They followed him like lap dogs, soaking up his talk about the music industry,” writes the author of the biography. «They came to my dressing room and had dinner there. They had no money, so I paid,” Richard recalled.
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