Review: Little Richard - Little Richard (1958)
Tracks: 1) Keep A-Knockin’; 2) By The Light Of The Silvery Moon; 3) Send Me Some Lovin’; 4) Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo; 5) Heeby Jeebies; 6) All Around The World; 7) Good Golly Miss Molly; 8) Baby Face; 9) Hey Hey Hey Hey; 10) Ooh! My Soul; 11) The Girl Can’t Help It; 12) Lucille.
REVIEW
The second and last truly indispensable album by Little Richard, released on the Specialty label, was even more of a compilation than the first one: at the time of its release, all but one of the tracks (‘By The Light Of The Silvery Moon’) had been issued as A- or B-sides, and even ‘Silvery Moon’ would also be issued as an A-side half a year later. Furthermore, by the time Little Richard came out, the man himself no longer played the Devil’s music: having seen the light in October 1957 after a very special plane flight, he was touring the country not with a backing rock’n’roll band, but with the Little Richard Evangelistic Team, something which might, perhaps, explain why the LP failed to chart, despite featuring fully authentic rock’n’roll.
In any case, God may have possessed Little Richard, but it was Specialty Records who possessed the rights to Little Richard’s recorded output, and as long as rock’n’roll was not dead (and in 1958, it was still hanging on), the option to just sit on it was a non-option. The best stuff always gets rolled out first, and for this 12-song collection, the label diligently put together most of the A- and B-sides they had released up until July 1958, not forgetting even the three singles which had not originally been included on Here’s Little Richard, though they could have: ‘Heeby Jeebies’ (October ’56), ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ (December ’56), and ‘Lucille’ (February ’57). These were later followed by ‘Keep A-Knockin’ (August ’57), ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ (January ’58, though recorded as early as October ’56), and ‘Ooh! My Soul’ (May ’58).
These are, almost naturally so, the best songs on the entire album; my only problem with them is that I do not really have any illustrious insights to explain what makes them delightfully different from ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Ready Teddy’. Well, except for ‘Lucille’, perhaps. ‘Lucille’ is different — of all of Little Richard’s early singles, it is the most musically intriguing, since its major hook comes neither from the vocals nor from the lead instruments, but from Frank Fields’ iconic train-style bassline. This makes the song feel unusually deep and heavy for Richard — hardly a coincidence that Deep Purple loved to cover it on stage — yet at the same time, it has a flying feel, due to the bassline’s steady rising-and-falling pattern. In contrast with the wild and noisy sound of most of the other hits, ‘Lucille’ feels sharp, collected, almost a little mystical, all because of that bass power. (Do not laugh, but I think that my very first childhood acquaintance with the song was through Paul McCartney’s 1988 cover on his Back In The USSR album — and even in that Eighties-colored context, it managed to sound distinctly different and more threatening than any other song on that record). There’s also the deal with its bridge section, whose "I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight..." does sound like a distant, yet personalized, threat, as if the wildman whose wildness used to be fairly abstract suddenly began to focus his attention on somebody in particular. All in all, this goes farther than innocent party fun.
The others really don’t. ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ also calls a girl by name, but merely to express admiration at her crazy dancing skills, and there is no creepy bassline to spoil the atmosphere, either. Lyrically, it is more innocent than ‘Long Tall Sally’, though, of course, not being able to "hear your momma call" does bring on certain implications anyway. Just how many Miss Mollies were seduced by these devilish howls into selling their souls (and their parents) for rock’n’roll remains statistically unclear, but I’d bet anything that their number by far exceeded the number of souls Father Pennyman was trying to bring closer to the Lord at the very same time his latest single hit the stores.
‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, a song that ended up as a lustful ode to the allure of Jayne Mansfield in the famous rock’n’roll movie of the same name, slows down the tempo just enough for us to be able to make out each single word — "if she smiling, beefsteak they come well done" (how the hell did this ever make its way past censorship?). And the old joke tune ‘Keep A-Knockin’, which Richard re-credited to himself on the formal basis of new and improved lyrics, put Louis Jordan to sleep forever, as it whipped up Richard’s already classic frenzy to even higher levels — this is rock’n’roll madness incarnate right from the opening «knocking» drum fills, which even John Bonham saw fit to eventually incorporate into Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock’n’Roll’ — as if saying, «You say rock’n’roll, you think keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in».
That said, already here a few of the entries are marginally less hot than classic competition. For some reason, every once in a while Little Richard chose — or was forced to choose? — to perform old show standards, such as ‘Baby Face’ and ‘By The Light Of The Silvery Moon’; one theory says that this was the record company’s evil plan to make peace between the terrifying rock’n’roller and the terrified parents of his fans, while another theory says that this was essentially a joke on Richard’s part, since the numbers would be recast in his wild rock’n’roll mood anyway. There is no denying that he does a solid singing job on both tunes, but they do come across as comical rather than exciting, especially if you are familiar with the source material — and, therefore, cannot really hold a candle to the «genuine» stuff.
There are also a couple strangely softer numbers, such as ‘All Around The World’, written by the trusty Robert Blackwell but cast in a poppier style, with kid-friendly sax riffs and a rather bland approach to belting out those blues triplets. ‘I’ll Never Let You Go (Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo)’ is also a bit of a throwback to Little Richard’s earliest days of R&B singing, though still worth experiencing just to hear the unique vocal register juggling over all the "boo-A-hoo-A-hoo-A-hoo"s. For the record, this is also where you will find ‘Hey Hey Hey Hey’, which, I think, most people believe always comes bundled with ‘Kansas City’ after the Beatles did the bundling, but in reality they are quite different entities — ‘Hey Hey Hey Hey’ begins with "going back to Birmingham, way down in Alabama", which the Fab Four might have found a tad too... localized to sing about (or perhaps they did not want any unnecessary political connotations, given the situation in 1963–64).
Anyway, the simple truth is that fast Little Richard is almost always preferable to slow Little Richard, and not the least because, somehow, all the fast songs on this album sound different, while most of the slow ones sound exactly like ‘Miss Ann’ and ‘Oh Why?’ from the previous record. But then again, there was a good reason why most of the slow songs were B-sides and most of the fast ones were A-sides — and, fortunately for us and for Specialty Records, Little Richard puts together enough of the latter to still produce a terrific, awe-inspiring impression.
Only Solitaire: Little Richard reviews