Fleapit revisited:Little Richard:I Am Everything.

"Awopbopaloobopalopbombom" - Tutti Frutti, Little Richard

"It was a Saturday, it was one o’clock, and it was a sunny day - and this woman was going 'and now, from America, we have Little Richard'. And it was this fucking black guy with this fucking ridiculous hairdo and teeth. He was fucking prettier than a woman. And it was Tutti Frutti. What the fuck? There was nothing and then there was this" - AC/DC's Brian Johnson on first seeing Little Richard on TV.

The raw energy, the confidence, the bouffant, the campness, the putting the foot up on the piano, the screaming, and the songs. Oh the songs. Tutti Frutti (of course), Good Golly Miss Molly, Rip It Up, Long Tall Sally, Lucille, Slippin' and Slidin'. Every one a classic. Little Richard was, as he never tired of telling people, the emancipator, the original, the architect of rock'n'roll. He was the man who changed music forever. As Brian Johnson said "there was nothing - and then there was this".

Of course, it's a little bit more complicated than that but Lisa Cortes' excellent film, 'Little Richard:I Am Everything' - shown last night on Channel 4, didn't shy away from showing that but neither did it (and neither should it or could it) throw shade on the extraordinary music made by Richard Wayne Penniman (1922-2020) from Macon, Georgia.

The standard of talking heads alone make it clear just how widely admired Little Richard was. There's Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Nile Rodgers, Tom Jones, Nona Hendryx, Valerie June, John Waters (who admired Richard so much he copied his pencil moustached and has now worn it for half a century), Lloyd Price, Lee Angel, and Dorothy LaBostrie. But there's also family members, neighbours from Macon, scholars, historians, booking agents, ethonmusicologists, and LGBTQ+ activists who discuss how Little Richard was a pioneer of intersectionality long before anybody had even heard that term.

The film tackles Richard's obsession with his legacy, his sexuality, and his complex relationship with his Christianity but it starts with Richard as a young man in Macon. One of twelve children, he ate rice and collard greens and lived in a world of medicine shows, white lightning, and segregation where people listened to blues and gospel.

He was called a cissy, a punk, and a faggot because he wore make up but it seemed to only strengthen his resolve to be himself. Music was the route and he became a huge fan of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Ma Rainey as well as Ike Turner's piano playing on Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats' Rocket 88.

 

In the early days, and at a time when both homosexuality and cross dressing were illegal, he'd perform in drag as Princess Lavonne. In Atlanta, he was inspired by the flamboyant R&B performer Billy Wright. He liked Billy's clothes, he liked Billy's hair, and he liked Billy's music, and he liked that Billy was openly gay. Another early influence was Esquerita who was also completely out of the closet and used to stand up when he played the piano.

 

All of this would later go into Little Richard's act but, at this point, he'd yet to really make it and was working as a dish washer at a Greyhound bus station (where, because of his colour, he was not allowed to eat or even use the toilets). Early producers wanted Richard to model his sound on the likes of Ray Charles and BB King but he was tired of that sound and he figured out a lot of other young kids were too so he gave them something edgier and that something was Tutti Frutti.

 

The only trouble was the lyrics were, obviously, about anal sex. "Tutti frutti, good booty. If it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy". Nobody wanted to be the person selling that to America so songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie was called in to tone it down a bit. She did so by cleaning up the lyrics but the primal power of the song remained - and remains to this day.

 

It was too much for some record company types who immediately got the white guys to knock out covers of it. Elvis Presley's wasn't bad (if still not close to Richard's) whereas Pat Boone's version is simply embarrassing. It didn't stop him. Little Richard would go out on tours as support and end them as headliner as nobody would want to follow him. He'd played a blacks only show one night and a whites only show the next but the white kids would come to the black show too. The black kids, of course, did not have the option of going to the white show.

While the young white kids of America were going mad for Little Richard, some of their parents' generation were burning rock'n'roll records, moaning about juvenile delinquency, and using some very unpleasant racist terms to slag off the music and the people making it. Little Richard was arrested, and beaten up, on multiple occasions.

Again, it didn't stop him and the 1956 release of The Girl Can't Help It spread rock'n'roll around the world. Little Richard met Lee Angel in Savannah, Georgia. She was a she so not really his thing but he asked her to marry him anyway. She said no though now she describes herself as being the love of his life.

 

Little Richard began to worry that his critics were right. Was he making the devil's music? Would he go to hell? He started to think so so he burned his own records, asked his fans to send him the records of his they'd bought so he could burn them too, cut his hair, and started carrying a bible with him everywhere. As other rock'n'roll stars fame grew, Little Richard - the original - was turning his back on it all.

 

 

He married a woman (Ernestive Haven - the marriage lasted five years) and he continued to put out records but the gospel sides he released were pretty uninspiring. Then, in something that becomes a pattern in his life, he returned to rock'n'roll. Touring the UK with Jet Harris and Sam Cooke. Playing such venues as the Adelphi in Slough and the Gaumont in Doncaster.

 

It was the full on Little Richard experience again and when he played Liverpool he met a new band that had yet to make a record and had never before met anyone famous. Little Richard told The Beatles to go to Hamburg and they didn't need telling twice. Still today, Paul McCartney suggests that the whooping and hollering he does in early Beatles songs is a complete take off of Little Richard.

 

Not long after The Beatles met him, he played a gig where he was supported by fellow admirers The Rolling Stones (Bo Diddley and The Everly Brothers were also on the bill - oh. to have a time machine) but there was a sting in the tail for Little Richard when the British invasion succeeded where Pat Boone had failed and started to turn rock'n'roll into a white person's music.

 

It was neither the fault of Jagger or McCartney that the white artists were starting to replace the black artists in the US charts and Elvis Presley took Little Richard aside to tell him he considered him to be the "true king of rock'n'roll". Which he was.

 

 

It got worse in the seventies and Richard started taking heroin and PCP (and anything else going it seems). He'd witness friends overdosing, other friends got murdered, and his nose got big enough, as he joked often later, to park "diesel trucks" in. So he went back to God, his soft landing, and started to refute his own homosexuality and denounce all homosexuality very loudly and very vocally.

 

It's not sure he ever fully came to terms with the person he was but it does seem he came to peace with the music he made even if he remained understandably bitter about the lack of respect he received for everything he'd achieved - "shut up" became a regular catchphrase on chat shows. There are scenes near the end, footage of Little Richard looking very old, that I'd never seen before and there's also lots of wonderful archive footage of the likes of Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Elton John, Culture Club, Fishbone, and Bad Brains.

 

Some of the footage I'd seen before on YouTube (though I'd not had the pleasure of hearing Lucille's Bogan filth filled classic Shave 'Em Dry before - check it out, it's pure smut) but it was all put to great use by Cortes and her team to tell a truly fascinating story. In places it reminded me of Brett Morgen's Moonage Daydream (fast cuts, seemingly unconnected imagery popping up at random times) but, like Little Richard, itself it was something of a true original.

 

Towards the end of his life he did at least appear to find some kind of way of living with his music, his homosexuality, and his Christian beliefs. I hope he found some peace. After all the noise he made he certainly deserved it. Little Richard:I Am Everything is a brilliant film about a brilliant, and complex, man. With a subject like Little Richard how could it not be? Awopbopaloobopalopbombom.