Little Richard wasn’t conceited; he was underappreciated
Alarm was central to the Little Richard experience. He wailed like a siren and screamed for his life. Every song was an emergency, every punched and pounded piano key an ecstatic dialing of 911.
Something was always on fire with him. His loins, his fingers, his tongue. All of this burning alarmed the country, woke it up, amused and inspired it. He was ridiculous, and he knew it: equal parts church, filth, lust, androgyny, comedy, passion. And eventually anger. You see, this man built rock ’n’ roll’s rambunctious wing, its anything-goes department. People looted.
And anybody who was around in the 1980s and 1990s got to hear him ring the alarm about how robbed he was. This was well after Little Richard’s inventions of the 1950s (the mischievous swagger, the zooming sense of rhythm, the joy grenades) had gone molecular by way of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, David Bowie and Prince, just to identify the biggest molecules.
He’d emerged from some personal lows in the 1970s and could still recognize himself everywhere.
At the 1988 Grammys, someone had the idea to have him present best new artist with David Johansen. Johansen was the lead singer of the proto-glampunkers New York Dolls, who were influential in their own right, and had reinvented himself as a louche lounge act named Buster Poindexter. His cover of the calypso song “Hot Hot Hot” had been all over MTV the previous summer. He approaches the microphone with Little
Richard, who’s in a golden tuxedo, sunglasses and his legendary pile of hair. Before they start, he proceeds to take in Johansen’s sky-scraping pompadour.
“I used to wear my hair like that,” Little Richard says, to big laughter.
“They take everything I get. They take it from me.” The laughter subsides, and you can feel the room begin to suspect that this isn’t a bit. Johansen wears one of those “help me” grins and tries to move things along. He even lets out a paltry, dismissive “woo” that merely permits Little Richard to take another bite: “He can’t get that though.”
When it’s time, Little
Richard says, “And the best new artist is … me.” The audience cheers. “I have never received nothin’. You all ain’t never gave me no Grammy. And I been singing for years.”
He has moved away from the microphone, working the house like a megachurch preacher who’s found his groove. His right arm’s waving, his left remains on his hip, holding the winner’s card with Jody Watley’s name. “I am the architect of rock n roll!” he shouts. The audience is on its feet. “I am the originator.” But he goes on longer than that, maybe too long, cracking himself up along the way, letting out a proper “woo.” Half aggrieved king, half giddy queen. The
winner really is me!
He was 55 that night. You’d have sworn, though, that Johansen was the elder. “Richard,” he calls out, like a testy father.
What choice, though, did Little Richard have? Gathered that night was an industry coursing with his genes. He needed to exalt in the results of this paternity test. I am your daddy!
If it was too much, it was also too true. This was Little Richard’s last act: self-historian. He had to tell it because no one else would — not Hollywood, not the Grammys. He was a living legend who taught a generation of kids how to appreciate him.
One night in 1990 Arsenio Hall donated most of his talk show to him. He tore through “Lucille” and “Tutti Frutti,” wondered how he’d only just received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, told rap’s many would-be censors that they were too old to get it, and spoke his famous nonmusical line: “I’m not conceited,” he told Hall. “I’m convinced.”