There was no doubting that excitable voice on the phone 25 years ago. He was coming around for a club gig in in New Haven, but it was much more than gig.
“Knocking it loose like a goose gone to roost!” shouted the pioneering rock ’n’ roller Little Richard, who died Saturday at 87. “Knocking it down to the ground and making a lot of sound!”
And he did, transplendent in spangly suit, thick pancake makeup and poodly black wig-hat. He was about to turn 63, but the look had nothing to do with preservation — Richard shocked audiences 40 years earlier at the dawn of rock ’n’ roll with the same combination of eccentric frills accompanying his distinctive scream and energy.
Starting with “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and throwing in “Lucille,” “Reddy Teddy” and “Long Tall Sally,” he also swung to artists that influenced him (Fats Domino) and those who he influenced (Larry Williams, The Beatles) as well as some country, blues a childrens’ song and vaudeville.
He represented not just “the originator, the innovator, the architect of rock ’n’ roll” as he had been long introduced, but a whole world of American popular music, shot with electricity.
Or as he explained it to me:
“We ain’t playing it – we whoopin’ it! It’s the difference between whoopin’ it and playin’ it. We are actually beatin’ it! We knockin’ the edges off of it!
“Listen, I beat that piano so, I think sometimes it gonna tell me, `You stop hittin’ me!’ ”
Little Richard’s pounding piano and striking scream (not to mention the gassed-up hair, heavy mascara and pronounced mincing) provided the essential link in the jump from rhythm & blues to rock ‘n’ roll.
“When I first started, there wasn’t nothin’ but a few chickens, a few pigs and about one or two ducks!” he said.
“But back in the time, it was really rhythm & blues. They didn’t call it rock ‘n’ roll. That’s the reason I tell people that rhythm & blues had a baby, and they named it rock ‘n’ roll.”
Little Richard, born Richard Penniman as one of 12 children in a Seventh-Day Adventist household in Macon, Ga., began singing gospel and playing piano as a child in a local church.
“Mahalia Jackson was my inspiration,” he said. “Ruth Brown was my inspiration. Along with the Clara Ward Singers with Marion Williams. And I loved Fats Domino. He was playing blues when I was a boy.”
At Little Richard’s early shows – especially after a string of hits for Specialty Records, including “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “Lucille” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” – his audiences began to change.
“The people would pack in to see it, but it was mostly black at that time. And then the white people would come, but they were upstairs `spectators.’ Then they started leaping over the balcony, coming down with the other people, and it really brought integration in sooner. Brought the races together.”
But even as he was breaking down racial barriers, white artists such as Pat Boone blunted Little Richard’s success by doing their own renditions of his songs.
“I love Pat,” Little Richard said in that 1995 phone conversation. “But at the time, I thought he was taking something from me. I felt that he was stoppin’ me from getting out of the ghetto.”
At the height of his success, Little Richard dropped out of the music business entirely.
“What I did, I went to Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala. I went back to college to get a degree, which I didn’t get. But I stopped (playing music). I needed to study business a little bit. I didn’t know enough about business. And to study religion.”
Like a lot of early rock ‘n’ rollers, he had been stung by bad business practices. For his seven gold records, “I was only getting a half cent a record,” he said, voice rising to his famous falsetto. “I had to sell two records to get a penny!”
Besides studying religion in school, he made several appearances in churches at various times in his career.
“At that time, I wanted to be a minister. But I’m not that. I came to grips with myself that rock ’n’ roll is my field, that I’m a rock ’n’ roll singer,” he said. “I realized that this is it for me, that my fingers walk on the piano and play boogie-woogie rock ’n’ roll. Yes!”
By the time he came back to music, things were about to change completely thanks to a fledgling foursome in England who borrowed the sound and energy of Little Richard, as well as recording a few of his songs.
“The Beatles were traveling with me,” Richard said. Brian Epstein booked Little Richard to play shows in New Brighton with the Beatles on the Bill. “At the time, didn’t nobody know ‘em but their mama.”
He also introduced the Beatles to his keyboard player at the time, Billy Preston, who would return to be the only outside musician to be credited by the Beatles on a recording (“Get Back”). Preston was one of several stars who rose through Little Richard’s bands. “Jimi Hendrix was my guitar player — and James Brown was my vocalist!” he exclaimed. “Ain’t that something!”
It may sound like bragging, he said, “but I can’t help it ‘cause that’s the way it happened. I am the architect of rock ’n’ roll.’
Even so, the architect was not happy with the way he was treated at the then-new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum.
Little Richard, among the first legends inducted into the hall in 1986, was certainly one of the biggest stars on the podium when the ribbon was cut on the museum a few months earlier in Cleveland. But he wasn’t invited to speak; the keynote address was given by Yoko Ono.
“They have Yoko talk and didn’t let me say nothin’!” Little Richard said with some amazement. “I couldn’t understand it!”
Then he had to wait for an extended time before he could go out on stage for a big concert the following day. “They made us wait so long before we went on the stage, I was very hurt! It hurt me to have to wait six hours to go on the stage.”
He had been scheduled to go on earlier, he said, “But I go to church on a Saturday. They knew that before I came, but they got mad because I didn’t go on until sunset. And they put me on the bottom of the show.
“I felt like cryin’! I’m sitting’ back there on an iron chair! A 62-year-old man back here on an iron chair, bones rubbing’ the iron!”
Little Richard said he didn’t mind the idea of rock ’n’ roll enshrined – some would say embalmed – in a museum. “But they don’t have nothin’ on me in the museum! They just have an album cover of me on the wall. And everybody else there has a statue.
“They have a statue of Michael Jackson! And David Bowie! People that were inspired by me! And they don’t have nothin’ of me — an album cover on the wall!”
Richard says he wasn’t asked for any of the memorabilia from his long career and “I have a lot of stuff,” he said. “I’d like to put some of it one some of their heads!”
There was entertainment — and some showmanship — in his high-pitched peevishness, but there was a darker truth behind it.
“It makes you think, man. All the years that you spend in this field and have given your whole life. And they got people up there that ain’t got nothin’ to do with rock ’n’ roll! What are these people thinkin’ about?”
At the time, he had no recording contract; a three-disc retrospective wasn’t promoted correctly (“They didn’t even try to push it!”). But he got a boost from a children’s album and had some of his songs picked up in movies, did a duet with Tanya Tucker and got on a Gatorade commercial.
He had just performed in a TV tribute to Frank Sinatra with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Tony Bennett, but wondered why he’d never been the subject of such a salute.
“I been waiting’ on my party for years!” he said. “They ain’t even give me no breakfast! Not even a sandwich stop! I say, ‘What y’all waiting’ for? For me to leave here? Let me enjoy it, too!”