Little Richard’s look

I am nine years old, watching Don’t Knock The Rock in High Wycombe’s Rex cinema, when I make a connection between music and the way the person playing it looks. Even at that age I identify something not-quite-right about Bill Haley and his Comets. Agreed, Haley doesn’t sound the same as Dean Martin or Rosemary Clooney or Johnny Ray, but his records are embroidered with the same thread of novelty as ‘The Naughty Lady Of Shady Lane’, ‘Where Will The Baby’s Dimple Be?’ and ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’. It is no stretch to picture Bill and the boys happily performing ‘(How Much Is) That Doggy In The Window?’. And Haley looks how he sounds: cheery, avuncular, uncool.

But when Little Richard shimmies across the screen, a flush of excitement sets my skin on fire. With his brazen eyes, pencil-’tached pout, Mr Whippy quiff and shiny suit, he instantly makes everyone else since the opening credits appear ordinary, which, compared to him, they are. In a film whose message is “Hey, these kids are just having fun,” Richard might as well be wearing a black pointy hat and riding a broomstick, because surely he is the embodiment of white America’s most frightening nightmare? Were make-believe Melonville’s residents to open their door and find a leering Richard Penniman on their front porch, ready for a date with their daughter, most would be reaching for a shotgun.

Side by side with him, Bill Haley is an overgrown boy scout, no more authentically youthful than Terry Scott in schoolboy drag singing ‘My Brother’. I do not share the palpable thrill provoked by Little Richard with my chaperone, Mrs Ord. Even as we are exiting the cinema, she and – treasonously, unforgivably – her son agree that both the film and its music are bilge.

Outside the Rex, while we wait for the bus home, a fight starts, which quickly spills from the pavement into the street. Attackers and victim are teddy boys who have attended the film. There is swearing, spitting, and the fight, brief and one-sided as it is, is a disturbing event. I have never witnessed a real, fierce, mean-spirited fight, only seen boys scrapping at school, all headlocks and rolling on the ground, or indestructible cowboys trading percussive punches in westerns. Most fights, I learn later, are over once the first solid blow lands, which is why you should get yours in first. The teddy boy under attack cowers like a leashed dog being beaten by its owner. As he scrambles bloodily away, trying to avoid both kicks and hooting cars, I glance up at Mrs Ord’s face. Its grim set confirms that, like the good folk of Melonville, she links this violence directly to the music brought so vibrantly to life by Little Richard. Rock’n’roll is delinquency.

The following weekend, I recognise the handsome leader of the brawling teddy boys in the window of the Station Café. I cannot miss him. In place of his acolytes’ brylcreemed quiff, he wears a fringe cut high on his forehead, like Marlon Brando’s Mark Anthony. His hard stare defies passers-by to meet his gaze, so I look away before he can lock eyes with me. I am on my way to buy a 10-inch shellac 78 with ‘Long Tall Sally’ on one side and ‘Tutti Frutti’ on the other – the two songs Little Richard sang in Don’t Knock The Rock. I’ll play first one side and then the other until bedtime.

Without his towering pompadour and zoot suit, jacket long as an overcoat, trousers tapering from tented thigh to a 12” cuff, would Little Richard have bewitched me so completely? Yes, I think he would; the voice would have done that. But would my eye have lingered so long on the cover of Elvis’s Gold Records, if he hadn’t worn that lame suit? No. And when I picture Eddie Cochran, he is knock-kneed in peg-top trousers, singing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ in The Girl Can’t Help It; Billy Fury has his collar turned up, as if against the cold; and my lasting impression of Johnny Burnette at the Slough Adelphi in 1960 is not his hit, ‘You’re Sixteen’, but his white leather suit. With Ray Charles, it would be his dark glasses.

Little Richard… Ray Charles… Little Richard… Ray Charles… I couldn’t choose then, and I can’t choose now. They are the same, but different. Both are from Georgia. Did I know that then? I doubt it. Both play piano and sing. Both have a catch in their voice – a voice, what’s more, that seem to resonate simultaneously on two octaves. Both are backed by similar instrumentation. And yet. And yet.

Has Little Richard ever sounded anything other than happy? As if a twinkle is never far from his eyes or a teasing pout from his lips? Even when he wails about ‘Miss Anne’, who has left him for another man, or vocalises the sound of crying in ‘Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo’, he can’t sound sad. Whereas, when Ray Charles sings about living on a ‘Lonely Avenue’ or that his mother warned him there’d be ‘Hard Times’ or threatens to ‘Drown In My Own Tears’, you believe him. Sure, he celebrates his sexuality and boasts about his woman saving her loving just for him, but you believe that too, because Ray Charles is real.

Plus, he introduces me to jazz, or his version of it. ‘One Mint Julep’, on 1961’s Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz, is the first time I hear an organ or a big band and don’t reach for the off-switch. In pop music organs are habitually a novelty, even on Johnny and the Hurricanes’ hits, although Britain’s best known organ belongs to Reginald Dixon, who plays evergreen medleys on the BBC Light Programme, while making every tune sound like ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, which is where he broadcasts from: Blackpool. Reg manhandles that Mighty Wurlitzer the way a road hog drives a car, but he comes from another era, one whose music sounded a hundred years old the instant rock’n'roll arrived.

After ‘One Mint Julep’ comes the serpentine groove of Booker T. and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’, and then, one after the other, Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff. I take McGriff’s 1962 I Got A Woman album to school and slip it onto the Jazz Appreciation Society’s turntable during a lunchtime session. Several senior members walk out in protest, others who stay insist it isn’t jazz. It’s the same when I play them Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz, which actually explains what it is in that simple equation. What do they know? About as much as the Newport Festival-goers in their bermuda shorts and blinkers who headed for the hot dog stand when Brother Ray was there in 1958. It was the gospel shouting and relentless rhythm of ‘I Got A Woman’ that drove them away: too close to rock’n'roll, man. Which is the way I liked it, and still do.