THE BIG BANG THEORY, OR, "THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LITTLE RICHARD: THE QUASAR OF ROCK"

Little Richard hit ‘50s America like an atomic bomb. Sure, there were precedents – early rock and roll songs like “Rock Around the Clock” were already being blamed for juvenile delinquency, and Elvis was just getting started, but Little Richard was an entirely different beast.

Ladies Love Cool Richard

Listeners accustomed to syrupy strings and exquisite arrangements in their pop music were now confronted with an effeminate African American man screaming gibberish out of their radio. While his songs have been played so much to become defanged of their original danger, you can still hear the rawness and desperation in stuff like “Jenny Jenny” or “Keep a Knockin’,” where you can visualize the recording booth needles staying in the red.            

Richard’s 1984 biography, “The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock,” is exactly what you’d want from a Little Richard memoir – for the most part. The early parts are exuberantly full of sex, drugs, and stories from the early days of rock and roll, as well as the ‘40s and ‘50s southern gay underground.

There could be a whole book written about Richard’s early life in Macon, Georgia. While he wanted to be a preacher, he was also a bad kid, likely to present you with a gift-wrapped turd or push your car down a hill, and also had a very early, very pansexual sex life. As a teenager he went on the road with Dr. Nobilio’s Medicine Show, where he learned the basics of reading fortunes and how to perform. Nobilio was Macon’s town prophet who wore a turban and cape and carried around a mummified baby he called The Devil’s Child.  If you’ve ever been to Macon, you probably wouldn’t imagine anything interesting happening there, much less a town prophet walking around reading fortunes with a baby mummy.

After that, Richard joins bands, tours the south (even stopping in Fitzgerald, Georgia, where my grandparents lived. Again, never would have thought anything interesting went on there), and releases records on small, regional labels until he cleans up the filthy “Tutti Fruiti” and has a monster hit.

From there, it’s gold Cadillacs, drugs, alcohol, money problems, and lots and lots of sex, until a brief religious retirement and marriage. Nostalgia tours bring him back on the road in the mid ‘60s, where the drugs and sex get even more out of hand, so he rejoins the church and writes his memoirs.

Holy crap, is “The Life and Times of Little Richard” a great read. Richard’s voice shines through throughout, with phrases like “He didn’t look feminine. Didn’t look pretty. He looked like a woman who had been hit with a board and didn’t get well,” or “I was a neglectful husband. A terrible husband. I wouldn’t have married me if I had diamond toenails and ruby eyeballs.” My favorite, however, might be “The king returned to his rightful throne, to push everybody off that can’t hold his own,” which really needs to get more everyday usage.

Readers also get a feeling of the electricity and showmanship at those early concerts – women throwing panties on the stage, the band never tuning so as to not stop the energy, and Little Richard throwing out pieces of his wardrobe to rioting fans. Richard also loved to do the fake passing out trick popularized by James Brown, and one of the greatest rock and roll gimmicks ever.

Like fellow rockers Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard grew up steeped in the Pentecostal faith, and a major aspect to his life was the tension between a life of faith and the life of a rock and roller. This means things slow down in the last chapter as he commits to the church and is “cured” of his homosexuality and says things like “I have seen the rock groups and the punk-rock people in this country. And some of their lyrics is demonic. They talk against God. A lot of the beats in music today are taken from voodoo, from the voodoo drums.”  This leaves the book with the flavor of an Evangelical testimony, where the speaker regales the audience with shocking and outrageous tales of sin before being saved.

Those in it for tales of rock and roll debauchery, however, will get exactly what they wanted, and it shines a light on just how dirty the “good ol’ days” actually were.

Drugs/Sex/Bad Behavior - 8/10. Dude was diiiirty and gives all the details. Did Little Richard really have a threeway with Buddy Holly before a performance? He says he did, as well as much, much more, even pre-stardom. If anything, his early days of renown slowed things down for a while. “…but it got difficult to have sex parties after a time, because we were so popular.” Of course, he might wake up the sex partiers the next morning by preaching, but that’s the chance you take attending a Little Richard sex party.

Opens in media res? Yep. Richard is wearing a suit of mirrors in front of 60,000 at the Atlantic City Fest pop festival and about to let loose on the assembled hippies.

Percentage of Music in the Bio – Let’s say 45 percent. Even with all the craziness, there’s still reprinted lyrics and tales from the studio and stage.

Namedropping – not really. Everyone pops up – the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, but they’re integrated in the story well.

Buy, Borrow from the Library, or Pass – Buy it. You can find it cheap, and it’s great to have around to flip through now and then. Buy it now before he dies and copies skyrocket.