Review: Little Richard - The Fabulous Little Richard (1958)
Tracks: 1) Shake A Hand; 2) Chicken Little Baby; 3) All Night Long; 4) The Most I Can Offer; 5) Lonesome And Blue; 6) Wonderin’; 7) She Knows How To Rock; 8) Kansas City; 9) Directly From My Heart; 10) Maybe I’m Right; 11) Early One Morning; 12) I’m Just A Lonely Guy; 13) Whole Lotta Shakin’.
REVIEW
Little Richard’s third and last LP before he gave himself to God and switched his gender to Gospel... oh, wait, The Fabulous Little Richard actually came out after he did that, so does that mean being obliged to change the lyrics of ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’ to "come on over baby, we got the Bible in the barn?" No, of course not. The answer is simple: Little Richard may have abandoned the devil’s music, but Little Richard’s fans most certainly did not, and that meant Specialty Records were not simply going to sit on the dozen or so outtakes that were archived from the man’s recording sessions. Instead, all through 1958 and 1959 they managed to keep up a steady flow of singles, and at some particular date on the border of 1958 and 1959 (data sources are in conflict here) they even put most of them together on one great big LP, which should have born the honest title of The Dregs Of Little Richard, but they ultimately chose the next best thing and called it The Fabulous Little Richard instead.
Unless you are already a Fifties’ historian, chances are that you won’t recognize any of these titles by name, with the obvious exception of ‘Kansas City’ — because everybody knows ‘Kansas City’, and it is this particular version of ‘Kansas City’, with but a snippet of the actual song written in 1952 by Leiber and Stoller seguing seamlessly into a reprise of ‘Hey Hey Hey Hey’, already released earlier, that would later be covered by the Fab Four on Beatles For Sale. Amusingly, the call-and-response vocals which we all remember so well ("hey baby — HEY BABY!") have nothing to do with Little Richard as such and everything to do with the production work by Sonny Bono, who was asked by Specialty to «commercialize» these outtakes a little — so what he did was hire a bubblegum girl group called the Stewart Sisters to overdub backup vocals, both on this song and a number of others. Actually, on ‘Kansas City’ it works well, because all those "hey baby", "hey child", "hey now" vocal taunts almost screamed to be replied to already in the original, and the girls do a good job taunting the lead singer back (with the Beatles, it turned out to be different since the backing vocals were left to the guys, which gave a bit of a gang-stalking impression). On the more soulful numbers, the effect is different — too much of a discrepancy between Little Richard’s monumental vocal tone and the Stewart Sisters’ teenage bleating.
However, the main problem with the album is certainly not the overdubs, but the simple fact that most of these songs were originally left out for a reason: they are all fairly generic, formulaic, and inferior to the similar, but better tunes that had already been published. At least half of the tracks are based on the exact same ‘Send Me Some Lovin’ chord progression — ‘Shake A Hand’, ‘All Night Long’, ‘The Most I Can Offer’, etc. — and the only way to distinguish them is by noting the subtle changes in Little Richard’s own emotions, or, to put it simply, remember on which songs he screams his head off and on which ones he consents to a bit of soulful crooning (before screaming his head off).
The problem is, Little Richard as a soul singer is simply of little interest to anybody. What comes naturally and uniquely to Little Richard is being the madman of rock’n’roll — whenever he slows down and tries to outbalance the madness with seriousness, soulfulness, and sentimentality, it’s like he is leaving his native turf. A song like ‘Shake A Hand’ does not really work, because the way he belts out "just leave it to me, don’t ever be ashamed, just give me a chance, I’ll take care of every thing" does not convey any genuine feeling — you can sense it is still the raving madman calling, and who would be stupid enough to "leave everything" to a raving madman? This is the sphere in which the teacher — Little Richard — comes off as a sore loser next to the student — James Brown. James Brown could never be enough of an aggressive madman to beat Little Richard in singing ‘Tutti Frutti’, but Little Richard could never muster enough subtlety and humility to beat James Brown in singing ‘Please Please Please’. And this is why most of these songs were outtakes; this is why he never had a big hit in this particular style; this is why you never recognize any of these titles.
It is only the last track on the first side of the record that actually begins to remind us why Little Richard was unique in the first place — although, truth be told, ‘She Knows How To Rock’ is nothing more than a tiny variation on the formula of ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘She’s Got It’, even regurgitating some of the same lyrics, so it is only a relief in the context of all the same-sounding slow soul ballads on this LP, but hardly a song worth mentioning otherwise. Slightly more interesting is Richard’s take on Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’, a song which he probably wished he’d written himself — however, unlike Jerry Lee, Little Richard knew or cared nothing about the powers of loud-and-quiet dynamics: his own songs had always been 2 minute-long outbursts of non-stop energy, and so in the case of ‘Shakin’ he simply rips out the titillatingly «teasing» "all you gotta do honey is stand in one spot, wiggle around just a little bit" part of the song, depriving it of its main attraction and, ironically, making it ever so much «safe» and «polite» than Jerry Lee’s version in the end. Curious, instructive, and, once again, fairly disappointing.
Actually, if there is a genuine «surprise» on the entire record, the award should rather go to the slow blues ‘Lonesome And Blue’, the only song here that switches to a minor key, with the singer actually trying to switch his mood to frightened and paranoid — even when he takes these high-pitched sustained notes, they feel like trembling with subtle horror. It would be interesting to know more about the context of this recording — again, not that it is an atmospheric masterpiece or anything, but it is the only song on the LP and, in fact, one of the very few songs in the entire pre-gospel era Little Richard catalog, on which Richard Wayne Penniman seems to be playing somebody other than «Little Richard». This one at least might be worth checking out of genuine curiosity.
To add yet another injury, the tracks date from several different sessions stretched all the way from 1955 to 1957, meaning that the sound quality is vastly uneven — the extremely stupid ‘Chicken Little Baby’, for instance, sounds like a lo-fi demo, particularly in regard to the piano playing, while the recording of ‘Kansas City’ is totally in line with Specialty’s finest production samples. But it is not so much the sound quality itself that is the problem as the fact that those early 1955 songs were still deeply rooted in Little Richard’s early, pre-‘Tutti Frutti’, R&B career. Imagine a Beatles album where half of the songs date back to their Decca audition days, and the other half are outtakes from the Rubber Soul sessions, and the tagline goes «The Fabulous Beatles!»... and the Beatles themselves have only just accepted Jesus in their hearts and singing "I read the news today oh boy, about a lucky man who saved us all", and there you have it — 1958 in a nutshell.
Only Solitaire: Little Richard reviews