Review: Little Richard - Here's Little Richard (1957)
Tracks: 1) Tutti Frutti; 2) True, Fine Mama; 3) Can’t Believe You Wanna Leave; 4) Ready Teddy; 5) Baby; 6) Slippin’ And Slidin’; 7) Long Tall Sally; 8) Miss Ann; 9) Oh Why?; 10) Rip It Up; 11) Jenny Jenny; 12) She’s Got It.
REVIEW
Unlike quite a few of his contemporary colleagues, Little Richard wasn’t about the LP market at all — meaning that all (both) of his early LPs are largely collections of singles, and this is cool, because something tells me that if there was going to be serious filler on Little Richard albums, that filler would probably have sounded like his pre-Specialty material from 1951 to 1954: decent, but absolutely not outstanding, conventional jump blues and doo-wop, occasional echoes of which you can still witness on the Specialty era B-sides. For the most part, though, Here’s Little Richard should be called Here’s THE Little Richard — the one and only Little Richard whom we recognize as one of the principal fathers of rock’n’roll, and whose classic tracks still sound every bit as exuberant and exciting more than half a century later as they did back in the mid-Fifties. And I really mean it — look up ‘exuberant’ in Wiktionary and you should be seeing a YouTube link to a video of Little Richard punching out ‘Tutti Frutti’ on his piano.
Anyway, I am not being entirely correct when I say that Here’s Little Richard is just a collection of 45"s: more precisely, 6 out of 12 songs are taken from previously issued A- and B-sides, 2 more would be issued as another single several months after the LP (‘Jenny Jenny’ / ‘Miss Ann’), and 4 more are album-only numbers. Of these, no fewer than four numbers are bona fide classics — four pop music cornerstones, inextricably etched into the public conscience: ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Ready Teddy’, ‘Long Tall Sally’ (notice the rhythmic coherence of the titles?), and ‘Rip It Up’, mostly credited to Little Richard himself or his most loyal and devoted court songwriter Robert Blackwell. What can I say that has not already been said about this stuff? How it invents pretty much everything about rock’n’roll — the furious tempo, the minimalistic melody, the hyper-energetic punch, the scream-your-ass-off wild vocalist, the swaggy rock’n’roll lingo? (That last bit, by the way, is the only one which became dated fairly fast, due to "sock hop balls" and "dungaree dolls" no longer a major part of teenage existence). The only thing it does not invent is rock’n’roll electric guitar: Little Richard himself is strictly piano, and his preferred soloists are in the brass business, most notably tenor sax player Lee Allen who delivers all the most exciting parts and is a bit of a legend by his personal self.
The key word here is probably «stamina»: few of these numbers last longer than two minutes and a handful of seconds, not because this was the maximum length of a 45" (it wasn’t), but because it was hard to maintain the maniacal level of energy from the first to the last second without dropping down for one bit. This is indeed the key difference between Little Richard and everybody else: all these classic songs are «bangers» from top to bottom — the rule is that you can try and wind up the excitement dial, but you can never turn it back down. There is no quiet-to-loud dynamics à la ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On’. There is no settling down into a powerful, but steady, repetitive groove (I love Bo Diddley, but I cannot deny that sometimes I actually find myself in danger of falling asleep to the lulling monotony of the Bo Diddley beat). Instead, you get hit right on the head with an opening wop-bop-a-loo-mop-alop-bom-bom or a ready-set-go-man-go, and it never friggin’ stops until you run right out of gas.
Nobody in the rock’n’roll business could exercise these crazy 100-yard dashes better than Little Richard — Elvis did come close with his covers of ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Ready Teddy’, as well as other material, but when you play them back to back, I think you will be able to feel how, to Little Richard, this style comes totally naturally and how he manages to slice through the tunes without breaking a sweat (figuratively speaking, of course — in the literal sense, he was probably dripping buckets), whereas Elvis, so it seems, actually has to work real hard to achieve a similar effect. The one song that might best illustrate this is ‘Jenny Jenny’: a great, catchy tune which was never covered by any of Little Richard’s contemporaries, simply because, I think, he was the only one to be able to have enough breath to deliver its rapid-fire lyrics at top volume, although even he sounds literally out of breath in a few places — it is quite a gargantuan vocal achievement (the only cover version I know is one by the Sonics, and there is a reason why these guys are known as arguably the wildest band to come out from America’s entire garage-rock movement).
Ironically, this madhouse rush, I think, is the principal reason why Mr. Penniman was able to easily get away with so much blatant sexual innuendo in his lyrics: when you are driving along at top speed, your words assume the blurred shapes of blinking telegraph poles, and by the time you actually start wondering about the true nature of Uncle John’s relationship with Long Tall Sally, you are already well into the next song. (If you ever even start wondering in the first place, that is.)
One other thing worth an explicit mention is that, despite a unified overall mood, all of these classics actually have their own melodies rather than being pure re-writes of each other. Slightly different chord sequences, significantly different vocal hooks; when you put it all together, only Chuck Berry could beat Little Richard and his team at early rock’n’roll songwriting. In mood terms, though, there are precisely two types of euphoria: the dance-your-head-off type (best exemplified by the double punch of ‘Ready Teddy’ and ‘Rip It Up’) and the drool-your-tongue-off type (‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Jenny Jenny’ — perennial anthems to primal, uncontrollable lust). But then again, what other types of euphoria are there in early rock’n’roll? Cars and guitars were hardly Little Richard’s forte — leave that stuff to Chuck.
That said, one should also be able to acknowledge that, for all his greatness when it comes to delivering rock’n’roll headbangers, Little Richard was decidedly a one-trick pony. The non-single material here, while not nearly as boring as his songs from the early 1950s, is decidedly forgettable next to the hits, ranging from OK-level jump blues (‘Baby’) to New Orleans-style R&B better left to the likes of Fats Domino (‘Oh Why?’) to OK-level balladry (‘Can’t Believe You Wanna Leave’). There is some nice sax work to be found (‘Baby’ has a couple of cool descending riffs), and Little Richard’s voice is always strong and in control, but time has not been kind to these songs not just because they weren’t singles — rather because they weren’t so brilliantly reflective of Little Richard’s unique artistic persona.
Essentially, a Little Richard song has to be fast, loud, screechy, and overwhelmingly C-R-A-Z-Y. Anything less than that, and it’s like the Ramones covering a Joni Mitchell ballad or something. Fortunately, Here’s Little Richard is genuinely crazy for more than half of its running time, and at least the slower songs could be justified for giving the listener some time to catch your breath before moving on to the next headbanger. All in all, with its overall short length (12 songs in fewer than 30 minutes), there’s enough musical dynamite here to blast a hole that tunnels well into 2020, and, hopefully, will still be resonating long after all of us are dead and gone.
This review makes very clear why Little Richard was ian Gillan's role model.