From Bill Flanagan: One of the all-time great rock singers, songwriters and showmen, Richard Penniman broke the rules while influencing generations of performers – and those rules stayed broken
Little Richard is dead: the « Quasar of Rock ‘n’ Roll, » one of the biggest influences on The Beatles, perhaps the single biggest influence on the vocals of Paul McCartney.
Born in Macon, Ga., in 1932, Richard Penniman put wild abandon into rock ‘n’ roll. He sang like a cat on a stove. He instructed Lennon and McCartney on how to sing the high OOOOO’s when The Beatles opened for him in Hamburg in 1962. [Billy Preston was in Richard’s band at the time; that’s how The Beatles became friends with Billy.]
Little Richard was a flamboyantly gay child in the segregated South in the 1940s. We will never know what private pain he endured. He was first put on stage by the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe, after he got up the nerve to approach her before a show. The audience loved him. He knew right then that he had a destiny.
He took off with a touring revue, the last gasp of vaudeville and medicine shows. Eventually he made it to New Orleans and started making records.
Those records rocketed around the world. They blew up the imaginations of the young Beatles in Liverpool, and the future Rolling Stones in London. Bob Dylan told me once that he wore his hair so wild in the 1960s to look like Little Richard, his high school hero.
