Wopbopaloobopawopbamboom: The Unearthly Genius of Little Richard

by Emma Burns

Heavily mascara-d eyes. Pink pouting lipsticked lips. A towering, bouffant--ed coiffure.

No, not Jayne Mansfield. Not a girl. A man. A black man in 1950s America.

Little Richard, a visual, sexual, radical force of nature so extraordinary that even Elvis’s pelvis looked tame compared to the unleashing of the raw hysterical wopbopaloobopawopbamboom of this unearthly creature. A brilliant piano player, a blues shouter, he was simply a star, a showman, a jaw dropping insight of another world of freedom, music, ecstasy...

One looks at Little Richard now, in the context of a racially segregated, homophobic, conservative America and wonders: how the hell did he have the nerve to dress, walk, play the piano, sing the way he did?

Like so many performers of the age, Little Richard’s early life was tough, gothic and downright peculiar. He was a snake oil salesman with a travelling medicine show. He performed in minstrel shows. As a teenager, he performed in drag as ‘Princess Levonne’. His father beat him, sometimes naked, and denounced him for not being the son he wanted. At the start of his career his father, a bootlegger, was murdered. Richard later recalled:" I was appearing at the VFW club and I came home… It was pouring down rain, and those houses with the tin tops and you could hear the rain. This guy had killed my daddy and I saw his coat lying on the porch. A raincoat with all this blood on it. It was just… something.”

Was it this upbringing that led him to shed all self-consciousness, shame and fear? Is this why he had all that nerve?

Sex has always been a potent element of music, but it is surely safe to say the music would not be quite the same if Little Richard had never existed. The utter ecstasy, the salacious, whooping excitement he brought to those early records has rarely been equalled in rock and roll music.

In 1955, after months on the road as a jobbing musician, getting arrested at a show in Amarillo, Texas, one night, and at the next, in Lubbock, causing a riot, he cut “Tutti Frutti”. The original lyrics were deemed unacceptably sexual, and so a cleaner version was recorded and hit the airwaves.

America’s youth were entranced by a relentless rhythm, crashing pianos, screaming saxophones – and they had the money to spend on buying records that drove their parents to distraction.

The record travelled around the world and ended up in a record shop in Liverpool: “This record stopped John in his tracks,” a young friend of Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s recalled years later. “His reaction that day was something that stuck in everybody’s memory, because he really was struck dumb by this record. He didn’t know what to say, which for John was most unusual.”

Said John Lennon, much later on the Dick Cavett TV talk show:

“When I heard it, it was so great I couldn’t speak. You know how you’re torn? I didn’t want to leave Elvis. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, not even in my mind. How could they be happening in my life, both of them?”

“Little Richard had invented something,” writes historian Ed Ward of “Tutti Frutti” in his History of Rock & Roll. “Reaching back through years of striving, of living in a shadow world of black Southern gay bars, of hollering his lungs out while washing dishes in bus stations and dives, he had finished inventing Little Richard.”

"I was very beautiful"

“The mere mention of Elvis or Little Richard,” Elton John writes in his recent autobiography, Me, “would set [my father] off on an angry lecture in which my inevitable transformation into a petty criminal figured heavily: One minute I’d be happily listening to ‘Good Golly Miss Molly,’ the next thing you knew, I was apparently going to be fencing stolen goods or duping people into playing Find-the-Lady on the mean streets of Pinner.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that white artists used Richard’s material (Elvis Presley sang Tutti Frutti on one of his first TV live performances), but  it is also sadly unsurprising that the recording labels also had a myriad of sharp practices and rapaciously corrupt exploitations to deny their artists the proper financial rewards for their efforts. Richard always complained about his tiny half-cent royalty rate — and the trouble that exploded if stars exposed it: “If you spoke for your money, you were a trouble maker,” he told a BBC interviewer in the 1980s, “but if you just went along and didn’t say nothing, you were a good boy. Never a man — a good boy.”

By 1957, he had had hit after hit, had appeared in the great rock and roll musical The Girl Can’t Help It, and was a bona fide star.

One of the most bizarre aspects of his career was about to occur. The Russian space program sent the satellite Sputnik into space and it flew over Australia, where Little Richard was touring. Upon seeing the flaming satellite, he became convinced that the Lord was sending him a message to change his ways. He later recalled, “This big light came over and it was frightening to me. I told the guys I was with in Australia, ‘I am coming out of this business’. I have always feared that the world was going to end. We got on a ferry and I said, ‘Well, if you don’t believe I’m going to stop, I’ll throw all my diamonds in the ocean.’ And I threw all my big rings in the water.”

He became a preacher. He married a woman, and clearly subsumed his spectacularly omnisexual proclivities.

It couldn’t last and he was back in the business by the early 1960s, travelling on rock and roll roadshows with The Beatles (John Lennon bashfully asked for his autograph on the souvenir programme) and The Rolling Stones, who soaked up every performance from the side of the stage.

“How do you describe the most fantastically exciting and shatteringly dynamic stage offering you have ever seen?” wrote the NME of Little Richard on that tour. “I’d heard so much about the audience reaction that I thought there must be some exaggeration,” Mick Jagger recalled later. “But it was all true. He drove the whole house into a complete frenzy.”

He found God again, lost him again, spent most of the 1970s crippled with addictions to almost every substance known to man and in the 1980s found another sort of fame as a celebrant at celebrity weddings (marrying Bruce and Demi, and Cyndee Lauper amongst others) and rejected his earlier homosexuality with an intolerance which surprised many.

He spent his final years quietly, and the fact he reached the age he did is something of a miracle, but he is assured in his place in the pantheon of musicians who genuinely changed the landscape for others who followed. He was one of the last links in that history (Jerry Lee Lewis is still with us) and we should all be very very grateful and glad that we saw him strutting and playing and hollering and rule breaking and downright sinfully enjoying in the Devil’s own music. Now there was a PROPER star. With the PROPER nerve.