Knocking on the door of history

Little Richard - Keep a Knockin'



Talking about rock nutters, here comes a man who knows a thing or two about being a lunatic: Little Richard. Despite managing to (roughly) sustain a career that started in 1945, he's done pretty well for being an ordained minister, most notably in terms of the rather liberal sprinklings of drugs and homosexuality that have peppered his career. All that and he still manages to look like Prince's bulldyke birth mother.

And the song? It's raucous, bouncy and nowhere near as camp as something made by Little Richard should be. It's based on an 8 bar blues but, to be honest, that would be like saying that an atomic bomb is based on a firecracker. The drumming is fantastic, all driving and frantic and copied a million times by everyone from Led Zeppelin to Eddie Cochran. The sax is just dirty and Little's voice is straining and multidimensional, while still managing to be louder than the rest of the band put together. You get the feeling that he would consider not having a microphone only a very minor inconvenience. His trademark hoots sound like an owl on crack, having a DH Lawrencian 'crisis', at earth shattering volumes.

Horrific similes aside, this is, along with Muddy Waters' Rollin' Stone, one of the cornerstones of everything that is good and holy in the name of rock and roll. This is a man who gave a young Jimi Hendrix a spot in his band and of whose voice Hendrix stated that he wanted his guitar playing to sound like. How can I review something like this without taking into account its immeasurable importance? I could be churlish and point out that the production is pretty rubbish (they weren't very good with things like levels in those days) and the sound's quite muddy, but that would be disregarding all of the characteristcs that make this one of the first documents of a sound that would sweep the world, leaving so much dead and burned in its wake and ushering in rock and roll, the sound of debauchery and delinquency and all manner of good things.

Verdict: Incomparable

Tomorrow: The Dell-Vikings - Come Go With Me