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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Richard Penniman is outrageous. The present tense, "is," matters there because as far as we know, he still is. He still plays live occasionally and probably shows his age when he goes out on stage, especially currently as he recovers from recent hip surgery. The things life has dragged rock & roll through now, right? Hip surgery! But there's no doubt his eyes are still wide and crazed, no doubt he's still a mess of contradictions and passions. We know because that's what he always was, even as a child, the boy whose rebellions against his strict parents (how cinematic) got him kicked out to join a medicine show and then finally form his life elsewhere, turn himself into Little Richard. Six decades hence, as he prepares to enter his eighties, he remains Little Richard.
And not in name only, and regardless of the absence of creative output since he was a young man. The point of a figure like Penniman is that he exists on a continuum; he doesn't craft new material because he doesn't have to, because when he gradually revealed his massive, world-altering style to the world, it was just a laying down on tape of a base impulse, a force of liveliness deep inside him that he'd been struggling his whole life to know what to do with. He learned it and documented it, and everything since has just been celebration, well-deserved at that. We know all this because Anthony Burgess was wrong; Alex and his Droogs in A Clockwork Orange were never really destined to change, their destructive and awful forces always brewing underneath as much as you and I might always be good-hearted or complacent or just centrally strange. Penniman's acts of violence, his gleeful, giggling lashes out against all notions of order within the world, weren't meant to hurt anyone, and they didn't, but that doesn't mean they weren't explosive. They were all on record, in his vocal tics and bops and hoots and snarls on "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly." The gurgling fury and fire within him that emitted these things is a force so frightening, so persuasive, so wild that it's no wonder Penniman's confusion about his possession of it -- and love-hate relationship with the person it, this thing, created -- caused him to derail his career more than once for sacred concerns.
And only too appropriate, given that Little Richard's records at his peak, all of which were recorded for and released on Specialty Records, call so vividly to mind the hopping exuberance of a Sunday morning revival -- the steady but complete loss of grip on everything, the surrender that is at the core of both religion and rock & roll. As in the souls of so many other performers, this diabolical disparity and similarity between the carnal and the sacred has defined everything for Little Richard: his attitude, his losses, the path of his life. In the beginning, it was just the devilish impulse in him that turned a bawdy old joke into the most frenetic and nightmarishly hammerheaded 45 recorded up to that point, "Tutti Frutti." From there, the intensity of his hits over the precious few years to follow never flagged, and never failed to provide everything you could want from two minutes of outrageously steamy rock & roll music. There was no time for tension on Little Richard's records -- maybe "Lucille" had a little, but not much -- because everything was constantly breaking, bursting. There was no time to breathe.
That's how Little Richard wanted it; initially it was just because he was and is the liveliest of wires. But later, you sense a wicked craft in play. The key to all of the essential Little Richard classics -- "Rip It Up," "Ready Teddy," "The Girl Can't Help It," "Long Tall Sally," "Slippin' and Slidin'" -- is that they cannot fall victim to any kind of reductionism or recontextualization. What year it is doesn't matter, these songs command the room if they're playing, and provided they're loud enough they're more than capable of exuding the same sexuality and Pied Piper voodoo control as they ever did. These records are a documentary of a force, and they will always endure as an enthralling and powerful glimpse and touch of something we can't feel anywhere else. The total joy of these recordings shrouds and owns us. They're still just about as good as music -- or anything, really -- gets.
An early peak of the CD era (issued in 1989), The Speciality Sessions is one of the greatest boxed sets ever released and one of a handful of two or three that can be described as essential. It isn't a good way to get acquainted with Little Richard if you're not already, but if you're not, why are you reading music blogs!? I kid, but get thee promptly to Youtube or Spotify or whatever and find a Little Richard greatest hits package with the original Specialty material; it seems incredibly unlikely (and sad) to me that anyone could be raised in America without some awareness of Penniman's music. I don't actually have a single-disc collection of his work anywhere, but I understand The Georgia Peach is the one to beat.
Assuming you're already pretty aware of the basic facets of Little Richard's music and career, you'll find this box a worthwhile investment. It's available in two versions: the full-fledged six-disc set that encompasses every note of music Penniman put down for Specialty, and a condensed three-disc version with the highlights. Both are pretty exhaustive, embodying all of the hits but a fair number of obscurities and a wealth of alternate takes and other curiosities. Both boxes are out of print now but used copies of the three-discer are relatively affordable. If you can find it, I recommend picking up the larger box, which is known in some parts of the world as The Specialty Box Set. The reason is that while the six discs may seem a bit much and they are certainly comprehensive to the point of clearly being designed for the hardcore fan, Little Richard deserves some pretty intensive scholarship sooner or later; you can program the redundant stuff out for now and just hear the highlights, but he's too damn brilliant for there not to be some point in your life when you want to hear everything he did, and the white-hot moment is clearly the 1955-57 period captured here. The larger set is a keen purchase because it allows you to enjoy the recordings at your own pace, with lots of options available. I mean, if you're going to hoard and analyze anyone's whole body of work, this is the man to choose.
Whatever version you end up with, you'll find the sound quality stunning: the sharpness of the vocals and music bring home another key point about these singles. Little Richard had already developed his vocal style on the pre-"Tutti Frutti" material that's more or less generic jump blues. Even on those songs, which sound like everything else that was coming out of the south at the time, he's mesmerizing; he makes even the nth outtake of "Baby" interesting." To hear these performances sparkle like they do here, with none of the maxed-out EQ bullshit you'd get on a modern release, makes for an enormously compelling headphones or dance-party experience. Something else that separates this from a lot of "sessions" boxes, incidentally, is its listenability. Today we listened to something like five versions of "Good Golly Miss Molly," all right in a row, and it didn't get old. Not in the least. It never will. To boot, Penniman, like Buddy Holly, loved to experiment and play around with his compositions, and he had a good ear for which offered the most intriguing opportunities for alternation, tweaking, contrast. As it turns out, Penniman and Holly both were fascinated by the former's composition "Slippin' and Slidin'," one of the most immaculately written rock & roll songs. On each of the alternate takes of the song provided here, the instrumentation changes; there's a version with pounding drums, one with brushes, a perverse bongo variation, and the ridiculously hot 45 mix. Each is a top-caliber recording that could surely have been a hit; you're getting a lot more than you think with this session material.
Inevitably, the boxed set malaise applies here, which is one reason that unless you're engaging in some serious study of Little Richard's artistry, you'll want to make heavy use of the "program" function (as I'm sure early-period CD advisers would tell you) or take the whole thing in small doses. The midsection, disc two on the compressed set and discs three and four on the extensive one, is appallingly addictive and batshit fun and worth hearing in complete form again and again. The rougher going bits are the slow buildup, finally cresting and breaking out with "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally," and the slide back down into decline as we approach the epiphany that led to Little Richard's retirement from the industry to find God and righteousness. The final discs culminate in some entertainingly bizarre moments like a Royal Crown hairdressing ad and a giggly, half-assed run through "Hound Dog" that simply must have been a joke. Of course this dilutes the overall impact a bit, but that's the nature of the beat, and you're also treated to such loveliness as Richard's tackling of "Well, Alright" and the wonderful low-rent "Good Golly Miss Molly" variant "Bama Lama Bama Loo," which nearly surpasses the hit in its subliminal energy.
That just adds to my conviction of how much you really get with this set. You can use it to make a sweet and simple Little Richard greatest hits set, which would easily rate A+ on my scale, or you can craft a shorter but still revealing cross section of his evolution in those two and a half magical and frightening years when the world was in his hands thanks to what amounted to an entirely new form of communication -- one which I believe has lost not one iota of its brightness, vitality, sheer beauty.
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