AWOP BOPA-LOO-BOP…
The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Motörhead, AC/DC and all the rest wouldn’t have existed had it not been for the trails blazed by the barrier-breaking early rock’n’rollers in the 1950s.
‘Awop-bop-a-loo-momp a lop-bomp-bomp!’ That’s the sound of the hard rock atom being split. Little Richard begins Tutti Frutti with just those unaccompanied words, like an abrupt explosion of A-bomb force in a bare field. The phrase is so bizarre, he won’t sing it the same way twice. Soon he’s stabbing his piano in rapid, heart-attack punctuation of his nakedly sexual state of mind. ‘Got a girl, named Sue,’ he hollers, ‘she knows just what to do!’ He ends each line in a breathless gasp. Meanwhile, the crunch and clamour of Earl Palmer’s drums are driving home the breakneck, relentless pace. ‘Awop bop-a-loo-bop a bop-bam boom,’ he concludes, inarguably.
The year was 1955, and Little Richard Penniman was in J&M Studios in New Orleans with producer Bumps Blackwell. There’d been little hint of his taboo-busting, high-voltage potential in the session’s early moribund hours, as if he didn’t dare let it out. Then Blackwell, knowing the singer’s live reputation, lured him into the nearby Dew Drop Inn, where he leapt on stage and his mask dropped. ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty!’ he exulted. ‘If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy…’ Local songwriter Dorothy La Bostrie was brought in to tone down his lyrics just enough.
Tutti Frutti soon tore up every American chart. And then the buttoned-up nation actually saw this alien 22-yearold, with his piled-high, marcel-waved pompadour, heavy make-up, and the omnisexual allure of a boy who, he said, “always felt like a girl”.
With America’s repressive dam burst, further Little Richard hits quickly forced open the breech. Along came Long Tall Sally, who had ‘everything that uncle John needs’, and left the singer sounding huskily burnt out from too much fun. Lucille was a series of screams. And Good Golly Miss Molly? Well, she ‘sure like to ball’.
In the bleak Midwest wasteland of Hibbing, Minnesota, 13-year-old Bobby Zimmerman already worshipped Hank Williams. But when he heard this new sound faintly transmitted along southern airwaves, he had his second idol. At a Hibbing High School show in 1955, the future Bob Dylan stood, hair piled high, screaming and slamming piano keys in front of dumbstruck classmates. In the 1959 school yearbook, his ambition was “to join Little Richard”. When biographer Anthony Scaduto was later shown round his old home’s basement by Dylan’s dad, piles of Little Richard 45s still lay there, like relics in a pharaoh’s tomb. So did Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel and Blue Suede Shoes, Buddy Holly’s Slippin’ And Slidin’, Baby Blue by Gene Vincent And The Hot Rods… The so-called spokesman for the 60s generation was, like all that decade’s icons, a 50s child.
Jimi Hendrix actually played in Little Richard’s band in 1964, and learned from him close up. “I want to do with my guitar what
Little Richard does with his voice,” he said.
And across the Atlantic, a generation unrecognisably different from Richard’s upbringing in the segregated moonshine country of Macon, Georgia felt their own future shift.
“It’s Little Richard’s fault, all of it,” Lemmy recalled years later. “Little Richard is directly responsible for Motörhead. I heard Good Golly
Miss Molly and that was the end of it.”
Listen to Ace Of Spades, the definitive 70s hardrock single: Lemmy’s shredded husk of a voice and the record’s pilled-up, tireless pace replicate Richard’s sense of nothing being held back. “I’m trying to give [listeners] that feeling I felt the first time I heard [Elvis’s] All Shook Up or Good Golly Miss Molly,” Lemmy said. “I just want to send that shiver up their back, because it’s the best thing I ever felt.”
The testimonials in Charles White’s 1984 book The Life And Times Of Little Richard: The Quasar Of Rock confirm the impact of just this one 50s rock’n’roller on the coming classic rock age. “There would have been no Deep Purple without Little Richard,” Jon Lord revealed. David Bowie said: “After hearing Little Richard on record, I bought a saxophone and came into the music business. Little Richard was my inspiration.”
Bowie’s pompadour and billowing clothes for his Let’s Dance phase were a direct Richard steal.
In 1980, meanwhile, AC/DC chose Brian Johnson to replace Bon Scott because of their shared vocal allegiance to Richard. “That was Bon’s big idol, Little Richard,” Angus Young said.
“Little Richard is directly responsible for Motörhead. I heard Good Golly Miss Molly and that was the end of it.” Lemmy
Prince’s pompadour and outrageous omnisexuality then spliced Little Richard with Hendrix as he reclaimed rock for black musicians.
If Tutti Frutti was the 1950s’ most crucial atomic test for a hard rock future where excitement was the whole of the musical law, it was also one link in a rapid chain reaction. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and even Britain’s Cliff Richard & The Shadows were rock’s other necessary shock troops.
The musicians who remembered life before them are from an age as unreachably different as the world prior to electricity. In a tribute he wrote after Chuck Berry’s death, Brian May tried to explain hearing rock being born. “As always when talking about the 1950s,” he said, “it’s very hard to convey… how shocking it was for the world to witness people like Chuck smash the existing world order of popular music into bits… It’s as if he must have tuned in to an alien, or a voice from above, or like in [Back To The Future], copped it from a time traveller from the future.”
That’s how new Chuck Berry’s style was.
The only rip in the musical fabric to equal the one Little Richard made occurred a year earlier, in similar circumstances. The Elvis Presley who walked into the Memphis Recording Service in 1954 was a raw, pimply 19-year-old truck driver with three kinds of grease in his hair, sideburns, black eye make-up and pink clothes. This new kind of punk was just what Sam Phillips needed for his insurgent R&B label Sun Records, which the Recording Service was part of.
‘The big, echoing beat of glam, the leatherjacketed Ramones, the hard rock of Led Zep… it all bowed to the 50s source.’
Phillips tried for two weeks to kindle the spark he sensed. Then Arthur Crudup’s minor R&B hit That’s All Right “popped into my head”, Elvis remembered later. Guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black joined in with his rhythm guitar in a primitive power trio. Phillips told them to repeat it, and ran the tape on what became Elvis’s first single.
‘Well that’s all right, mama,’ he sings, between a sneer and a caress. ‘That’s all right for you.’ His voice is the most sexual sound ever recorded. The irony of its damped, lazy erotic power cruises up into a high shiver. Moore’s lilting picking institutes the guitar solo, and births rockabilly. Then as Elvis heads to the finish, Moore’s guitar is slashing hard. ‘That’s alright,”
Elvis soothes. ‘I need your loving/That’s all right, now, mama, any way you do.’
Then when this bashful truck driver from outer space started to play around the south that summer, his shiver of nerves backstage turned into a different sort of shake on stage. One leg jerked and made a rippling commotion in his loose trousers, and the girls began to scream. When you consider rock, you can’t get around the impact of Elvis’s polymorphous appeal. “As for Presley,” Dylan wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles, “I don’t know anybody my age that didn’t sing like him.”
“On Sun Records,” Dylan further wrote in Chronicles, “the artists… sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet… If you were walking away and looked back on them you could be turned to stone.”
After Elvis left Sun for RCA, Jerry Lee Lewis walked into Sun carrying all the true danger and delinquent allure that rock would ever need. Lewis’s long blond hair was slicked back, and when he sang, he’d draw a comb through it till it tumbled down like a molten river. Where Little Richard’s sexuality was anarchically joyful, and Elvis’s innocently total, Lewis was lascivious.
When his eyes narrowed to snake slits as they sized you up, his nickname, The Killer, looked earned.
Whole Lot Of Shakin’ Going On in 1957 was his calling card at Sun. ‘Oh, let’s go,’ he cries on it, his pounding of the piano more violent than Richard’s. Then later that same year Great Balls Of Fire aced it. ‘Too much love can drive a man insane,’ he sings, before a woman makes him reconsider:
‘I changed my mind, this world is fine,’ he leers.
Buddy Holly seemed cleaner cut. But Little Richard recalls him revelling in shared on-the-road orgies, and when he sings ‘I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be’ on Not Fade Away, there’s a credible, raunchy rasp in his Texan voice. Mick Jagger saw Holly in the incongruous setting of Woolwich Granada in 1958, an introduction to live rock’n’roll still on his mind when the Stones covered Not Fade Away in 1964. Holly’s bespectacled approachability and gentler, more intimate songwriting also influenced Paul McCartney and Ray Davies. Dylan was in the front row to see Holly on January 31, 1959, three days before the fatal plane crash. Holly looked straight at him, as if passing a torch.
Cliff Richard & The Shadows (then named The Drifters) gave the UK decent home-grown rock with 1958’s Move It. Although even less threatening than Holly, in Hank Marvin’s twang they had a great, original guitar sound that Tony Iommi, among many others, worshipped.
The contrasting idea of rock as something socially disruptive that needed to be suppressed was introduced to the UK when Jerry Lee Lewis came over to tour Britain in 1959 with his wife Myra Gayle – his second cousin, the tabloids soon
discovered, whom he’d married when she was
13 – nothing unusual back in his hillbilly home. This “undesirable alien” was swiftly deported.
And all at once rock’n’roll seemed to end. Little Richard quit rock for religion in 1957, Elvis was drafted into the army in 1958, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash on February 27, 1959, and in 1962, Chuck Berry was jailed for transporting a minor across a state line. Berry was, it seemed, wrong: rock’n’roll, straight America believed with relief, had died after all.
But in the UK, its flame still flickered. First, Little Richard toured in October 1962 and, his competitive spirit provoked by sharing the bill with Sam Cooke, rocked again. He jumped onto his piano, tore off most of his clothes and flung them in the audience. At Mansfield’s Granada Theatre he keeled over, apparently dead, only to be spotlit, resurrected and roaring Tutti Frutti. Panicked staff dropped the safety curtain as the crowd rushed the stage. This was the authentic rock’n’roll spirit in which Jerry Lee Lewis had once challenged Chuck Berry to follow him by dousing his piano in petrol and playing through the flames.
Hysteria gripped every venue Richard played, and was widely reported. The four unknowns who would soon provoke even greater mania, The Beatles, had released their first single, Love Me Do, that month, and begged to meet him when they joined the bill for two Merseyside gigs. A photo shows them surrounding Richard, grinning with disbelief. When they joined him for a season playing in Hamburg, he taught McCartney his ‘woo-ooh!’ scream.
When Richard returned to Britain in the summer of 1963, the Stones propped up the bill, and Mick Jagger studied him nightly from the side of the stage. Before seeing him live he had thought Richard’s power was exaggerated. “But it was all true,” he recalled. “Chuck Berry is my favourite, along with Bo [Diddley, also on that bill], but nobody could beat Little Richard’s stage act. Little Richard is the originator and my first idol.”
In September 1963, when the Stones toured with Bo Diddley and the Everly Brothers, Keith Richards learned rhythm guitar with a dramatic, windmilling action from Don Everly. Pete Townshend took it from Keith.
The Who also learned some of their attitude from Eddie Cochran, whose teen rebel spirit was best expressed in his self-written Summertime
Blues, in which he threatens to take his enforced holiday employment ‘to the United Nations’. The Who’s fuzzed-up version of Summertime Blues was immortalised in the Woodstock film and on Live At Leeds, and fitted Townshend’s own frustrations.
Gene Vincent provided a further finishing school for British bands. Vincent was, Mick Farren wrote, “the archetypal greaser”, with “the pinched, ratty features of someone who bites the hand that feeds it”. His greatest hit, Be-Bop-A-Lula, had a stutter inherent in rockabilly’s rhythms, which infected The Who’s My Generation.
With his leg in a metal brace following a 1955 bike crash, and further wounded by the car crash that killed Eddie Cochran at the end of a 1960 UK tour, Vincent was constantly in pain, doped and pilled up, and prone to the use of a knife he called Henry. His popularity as a live performer led to him living in the UK for years, increasing his impact.
“Gene was actually one of the reasons I pursued a musical career,” Jeff Beck said. Robert Plant told The Times: “As a kid I wanted to be Gene [Vincent].” “There was a lot of sex in his voice.”
Vincent’s original guitarist, Cliff Gallup, inspired Plant’s future bandmate Jimmy Page.
In 1964, The Beatles, Stones and Kinks were among those who completed rock’s comeback by invading America. In so doing, they banished their 50s tutors to obscurity. But by 1968, the rock revolution these bands pursued already felt bloated. The Beatles’ Get Back was part of a general return to 50s verities, which recharged the careers of Elvis and others who’d survived and saw Creedence Clearwater Revival rule.
Rock’n’roll’s revival bled into the 70s. The big, echoing beat of glam, the leather-jacketed, thuggishly delinquent Ramones, the year-zero return to basics of the Pistols (whose Svengali Malcolm McLaren previously sold 50s rock to Teddy boys from his shop Let It Rock), and the vastly more amplified hard rock of Zeppelin all bowed to the 50s source.
Its enduring importance was proved at Lemmy’s memorial service in 2016. Dave Grohl concluded it by tearfully reading from a prayer book signed by Little Richard at a random airport meeting, when Richard wound down his limousine window and handed it to him, still the true star of the two. Lemmy had died before Grohl could give it to him, a present inscribed by a man from another time, who had helped gift them their rock’n’roll lives.
Richard’s generation were irreducible and, after the early reckless plane and car crashes, almost indestructible originals. “Before Elvis there was nothing,” John Lennon said, and into that void these wild men had walked, smashing down walls around sex and race with every step, and setting a template for free living and pure musical excitement that rock still reaches for today.
‘Jerry Lee Lewis walked into Sun Records carrying all the true danger and delinquent allure that rock would ever need.’