http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/go ... le1482730/
Real rock and roll makes you do things tonight you can't believe tomorrow morning you actually did. If it's not dangerous, in other words, it's not the real thing. And in spite of 50 years of artistically degenerative dilution, wanton trivializing commercialization and simple overexposure, the best of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis' music remains dangerous. Just like people need to pray in order to remain in contact with what they consider holy, it's just that we need to be reminded occasionally.
Two recent volumes from Continuum Books (publishers of the popular 33 1/3 album studies series) attempt to spread the good news anew, and if neither David Kirby's Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n' Roll nor Joe Bonomo's Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found will make many new converts out of a public conditioned to believe that Tutti Frutti and Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On are at, best, harmless oldies, their authors can't be accused of apostasy or even slackened spirits. To ask any writer to convey the enduring anarchic energy of the Georgia Peach and the Killer's finest music is to request a literary performance of nearly equally savage artistry.
Kirby's subtitle is only slightly hyperbolic. Whichever song was in fact the first rock and roll record (a maddeningly nebulous, impossibly indeterminate title for such an inherently evolutionary form anyway) – whether Rocket 88, That's Alright Mama, Richard's own Tutti Frutti, or some lesser known tune lost to the musical mists of time – the ingredients that came to make up what we call “rock and roll” were there from the beginning of Little Richard's career. Like every song that's a contender for rock and roll's prime-mover status, Tutti Frutti, Richard's first hit from 1955, was basically blues with a beat performed by a young man accustomed to singing gospel music. And like almost every genre-shattering artistic breakthrough, its originators had very little idea what they were doing.
“Tutti Fruitti, Good Booty, “ a paen to anal intercourse that had been a staple of Richard's stage act in low-end black nightclubs and white frat-parties where he'd work in drag for drunken frat boys, was not on the agenda the first day Richard recorded for Specialty Records. After a fruit(i)less morning recording conventional blues with which no one was particularly impressed, however, the crew retired to the nearby Dew Drop Inn where Richard, always the ham, commandeered the piano and proceeded to unleash the most ribald tune he knew on the assembled onlookers.
The song was subsequently cleaned up lyrically, but untouched musically, and “A-Wop-Bop-A-Lu-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom!” the world of popular music was never the same. (On hearing Tutti Frutti for the first time, Keith Richards claimed “it was as though the world changed suddenly from monochrome to Technicolor.”) Neither was Little Richard Penniman ever the same. The poor, black, homosexual from Macon, Georgia, enjoyed the fruits of his musical revolution – the money, the sex, the drugs, the fame – as much as much as anyone who ever grew up underprivileged, deeply religious and sexually repressed. Even if it wasn't the best book on Little Richard yet published, Charles White's The Life and Times of Little Richard would be necessary reading just for the X-rated story of Little Richard, his 17-year-old girlfriend and Buddy Holly backstage at the Paramount Theatre. Peggy Sue had no idea what she was missing.
Jerry Lee Lewis's musical incubation period included blues and gospel as well, but also country and western, in particular the songs of Hank Williams. The first country-rocker wasn't Gram Parsons, it was the Killer. The flipside of 1957's seminal Great Balls of Fire was Williams's hardcore honky-tonk You Win Again. Lewis's shows were just as riotous as Little Richard's (he didn't wear mascara or eye-liner or perform splits and leaps on stage, but he did use his feet to pound the piano and once set his instrument on fire when Chuck Berry refused to let him close a show, exiting the smoking stage with, “Try and follow that, Chuck”), but there was always something slightly sinister about the Killer even at his happiest, when on-stage.
Watch a YouTube video of each man in his prime, and while Little Richard is wild-eyed and manic, it's a joyous energy that lifts off the screen, not unlike an enraptured Baptist minister at his most beatifically overwhelmed. Lewis, on the other hand, is almost as equally animated, but his movements are aggressive rather than merely hyper-energetic, and there's a not-so-subtle hostility in his eyes, as if the audience is there for his pleasure, and not the other way around.
Opening for the Doors once in the late 1960s (Jim and the boys were all big fans), Lewis told the mostly indifferent audience of nearly 20,000, “I hope ya'll get cancer.” Even his chemical and licentious excesses seem desperate rather than Dionysian: countless arrests for DUI and disorderly conduct; an arrest for shooting a band member in the chest; several divorces and mysteriously dead wives; frequent hospitalization for chronic chemical abuse.
Kirby and Bonomo both hit the majority of the highlights of their respective subjects' creative existence with enthusiasm and accuracy, although most of the fascinating life story of each is ignored. Particularly for artists like Richard and Lewis, whose religious consciences, for example, have frequently clashed with their musical careers – each quit show business more than once to join fundamentalist Christian ministries – such omissions are unfortunate.
The best book on Jerry Lee Lewis is still Nick Tosches' incendiary Hellfire, a case of one talented artist crawling inside the uncomfortable skin of another. And the already mentioned The Life and Times of Little Richard remains the superior Richard volume not because of Charles White's musical observations, but because of the frequent, extended and extremely candid interviews with Little Richard himself. The British novelist Ford Maddox Ford wrote, “For it is your hot love for your art, not your dry delvings in the dry bones of ana and philologies, that will enable you to convey to others your strong passion.” Hot love. Sounds like a song Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis would have sung.
