Little Richard's life was full of painful internal conflict, but no one better defined the freedom and raw energy of rock & roll
, Roy Brown, and Billy Wright, but also one song that hadn’t been recorded and began with the hipster glossolalia Richard used to curse out his boss: “Tutti Frutti.” It was a wild and lewd number about the joys of “good booty” — too raunchy to record — and Richard used to crack up white crowds. “If it don’t fit, don’t force it,” he sang. “You can grease it, make it easy.”
Specialty — a Los Angeles label that had scored hits with swinging blues from Roy Milton and Joe Liggins, as well as gospel from the Soul Stirrers and Dorothy Love Coates — had brought Richard to J&M in New Orleans because the band there was rock & roll’s first great studio unit.
Richard with manager, songwriter, and producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 1970When they reconvened at J&M the next day, Blackwell was worried he’d have nothing much to show for his trip to New Orleans. He had Richard and the band try a few tunes, and then, frustrated, he broke for lunch at a nearby club, the Dew Drop Inn. “And, of course, Richard’s like any other ham,” said Blackwell. “The girls are there, the boys are there, and he’s got an audience.
In later years, Richard talked about how covers of his songs by Boone and Elvis opened doors for him. But he also remembered that in 1955, he was furious. “I said, ‘I’m going to Nashville to find him.’ I wanted to get him at that time, because to me, he was stopping my progress. I wanted to be famous, and here’s this man who came and took my song.
In roughly 16 months, Richard cut nine Top 40 hits for Specialty — recording in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. — and also appeared in three movies. The best of them — 1956’s, directed by former Looney Tunes animator Frank Tashlin — dramatized Richard’s already-understood modernizing impact by starting in black and white, with a brief orchestral overture, before shifting to color and letting a jukebox playing Little Richard’s title track drown out the narration.
He bought a house in Los Angeles and moved his mother and brothers and sisters there. He’d come back from tour with a suitcase packed with cash. One night, James Brown and the Famous Flames found themselves sharing a New Jersey bill with Richard and asked for funds to get back to Georgia. Richard opened the trunk of his car, which was full of money, reached in without looking, and handed over a fistful of bills.
The next day on a ferry he told his band he was leaving show business. They didn’t believe him, so he took off a gold ring and tossed it in the water. He was done with Babylon. He was ready for the Lord.at Oakwood College — a Seventh-day Adventist religious institution and historically black college in Huntsville, Alabama — some months later, he was following a holistic diet as the church instructed and was already involved in a courtship with Ernestine Harvin, a recent high school graduate.
The arrest came during the sessions for his third gospel album, produced by Quincy Jones for Mercury, where Bumps Blackwell was now an A&R man. Richard, however, hadn’t entirely given up secular music — Specialty had enough in the vault to continue releasing singles until 1959, and in 1960 he sat in on an Upsetters session in New York, though the two Fats Domino covers that would be issued didn’t include his name.
Richard returned for a third U.K. tour in 1964, bringing along his brother Marquette — who hadn’t known about the first two.
Richard could not understand why it didn’t go higher. In 1972, he played to a packed Wembley Stadium on a bill with Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry. So why did the next two albums he made for Reprise go nowhere at all? They had their moments, and “Money Is,” a track produced by Quincy Jones for the soundtrack to the Warren Beatty movie, was as good a combination of old-school grit and Seventies strut as could be imagined.
Richard was terrified, but the bottom had yet to be reached. People around Richard began to die, and Richard felt darkness drawing in. He told White a story about a party after he’d returned from a gig in Miami. He was supposed to see his brother Tony, but instead he found a Hollywood hotel and a girl willing to let him and a few friends cover her body with cocaine. “We were crawling around about on the floor naked, like animals.
In 1991 he contributed a track to a Disney album of children’s songs to benefit the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. A video of him singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” began playing regularly on the Disney Channel. A children’s album for Disney,, followed in 1992. He would make one more album in his lifetime, a collaboration with guitarist Masayoshi Takanaka, released in Japan the same year.
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