| An appreciation of Little Richard, one of rock 'n' roll's originators. DAVID KIRBY'S brief biography of Little Richard reads the way Richard's shows of the past few decades have played. It's an engaging, intermittently exciting but ultimately frustrating mix of assertion, reminiscence, free association, repetition, clowning and showing off, with just enough talent on display to keep you from walking out. Kirby, a poet and critic who teaches English at Florida State University, has plenty to say about the rock 'n' roll "originator," as Little Richard likes to call himself. It's carving the good bits out from everything surrounding them that's the problem. Kirby would probably argue that his spirited digressions - on the banana pudding in Macon, Ga., Little Richard's hometown; on Southern stereotyping in the television series "Friday Night Lights"; on Kirby's African-American playmates when he was growing up in Louisiana in the 1940s and '50s - are as essential to understanding the importance of Little Richard as the music itself. A more straightforward discussion of his career, in this view, has either been done or would be too staid. Fair enough - to a degree. Charles White's "Life and Times of Little Richard," from which Kirby draws liberally, is a riveting book and would be nearly impossible to displace as the definitive biography. But one of Kirby's stated motivations for writing "Little Richard" is that his subject, who is 77, is a vastly underrated, if not forgotten, figure. It seems disingenuous to maintain simultaneously that Little Richard has fallen off the cultural radar but is also too well documented to warrant a more comprehensive examination. More troubling is Kirby's insistence on establishing Little Richard as a denizen of Greil Marcus's "old, weird America," a now ubiquitous term that has run the spectrum from "brilliant formulation" to "desperately in need of a moratorium" in little more than a decade. Kirby devotes considerable energy to the ways in which Little Richard - black, anarchic, flamboyantly gay and, as the singer has said of himself, "so necessary" - stands as a living rebuke to the ruthlessly segregated world where he grew up. No doubt. But it's more satisfying - when your thinking is as deft and your writing as subtle as Marcus's, which is not the case here - to illustrate the complex ways subcultures transform the mainstream. Then there's the cuteness factor. The dynamo born Richard Penniman has inspired many nicknames, beginning with the sobriquet "Little," which, as with Stevie Wonder and many other African-American musicians, signaled his precocious gifts. However, Kirby's calling him "the Macon Meistersinger, the Wagner of rock 'n' roll, . . . an anti-Hitler" just seems silly. And, whatever the song's lubricious origins in Little Richard's early club performances, "Tutti Frutti," his 1955 breakthrough hit, is not best described as "a paean" to anal sex that helped transform him into "a cultural icon on the scale of the founding fathers." Indeed, exploring the significance of "Tutti Frutti" is another of the book's projects. Perhaps because the song has long been acknowledged as one of the detonating blasts of the '50s rock 'n' roll explosion, Kirby feels compelled to up the stakes. "Tutti Frutti," he maintains, is "a seminal text in American culture, as much as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' 'Song of Myself' and the great documents of the civil rights era are. In a sense, it's America's Other National Anthem." "Tutti Frutti," in plain fact, is a groundbreaking rock 'n' roll single by one of the music's peerless singers, a locomotive of unrestrained joy and freedom that has lost none of its power since its release more than half a century ago. If that's not enough, none of Kirby's fancy comparisons make any difference. The lesson of Little Richard's greatest recordings -"Long Tall Sally," "Miss Ann," "Lucille" and, yes, "Tutti Frutti" - is that less is more. It's a lesson Kirby should have taken to heart. Anthony DeCurtis is the editor of "Blues and Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer." |
