Little Richard made most of his definitive recordings in the 1950s, when he was an absolute revelation. Instead, he offered an ecstasy you couldn’t refuse. He wasn’t calling himself Lucifer, smearing himself in stage blood, striving to shock or shouting out gang affiliations. If Little Richard was a forerunner of countless pop taboo-breakers, theatrical figures and bad boys (and girls), it wasn’t as a dissident or a delinquent. He made it sound like he had already banished them and was laughing at them, having sweaty fun entirely on his own terms. In his music, he wasn’t obviously pushing back against all the obstacles in his life. He invented a larger-than-life role for himself and inhabited it whenever a camera or audience could see him. He had the stage savvy of a longtime trouper, built by a decade of performing before he recorded “Tutti Frutti.” He had a spectacular presence in every public appearance: eye-popping outfits, hip-shaking bawdiness, sly banter and a wild-eyed unpredictability that was fully under his control. He plowed across the piano with a titanic gospel-and-boogie left hand and a right hand that hammered giant chords and then gleefully splintered them. He had a voice that could match the grit of any soul shouter ever, along with an androgynous, exultant falsetto scream that pushed it into overdrive. He had deep experience in the sanctified church and in the chitlin’ circuit of African-American clubs and theaters, along with drag shows, strip joints and, even in the 20th century, minstrel shows. He hit American pop like a fireball in the mid-1950s, a hopped-up emissary from cultures that mainstream America barely knew, drawing on the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the carnal.
Wild and outrageous don’t begin to describe Little Richard.
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