#esquerita

[culturalappreciator]

[billboard-hotties-tourney]

Esquerita (1935/1938-1986) solo Songs: "Green Door," "Hey Miss Lucy" Propaganda: "An early rocker and a terrific one. Influenced Little Richard (you can see and hear it EASY). Super gay, always wore wigs and makeup and sunglasses. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a pic of him without sunglasses, but this is the 'masks are sexy' website so I'm not worried. A personal favorite track is 'Hole in my Heart.'"

Rick Wright (1943-2008) Pink Floyd - keyboards Songs: "Summer 68," "The Great Gig in the Sky" Propaganda: none

[mydaroga]

Rip It Up c/w Ready Teddy was a bolt from the blue for Paul McCartney. He too experienced the epiphany: first Elvis and now this! ‘Little Richard was this voice from heaven or hell, or both. This screaming voice seemed to come from the top of his head. I tried to do it one day and found I could. You had to lose every inhibition and do it.’ Jim McCartney didn’t like it at all, but Paul was singing like a boy possessed, and in a very real sense he was. Absorbing Elvis, Little Richard and Gene Vincent was glorious, and it could block out other feelings. Paul revelled in the sounds of his great American heroes. He loved the way Little Richard hollered in his songs, a high-pitched ‘Wooooooo!’ evident in almost every recording, and found he had the range and talent to imitate this too. Paul would know it as his ‘Little Richard voice’, though Richard himself admitted to having purloined it from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Wynonie Harris, and Esquerita, the artist whose look, voice and sound he’d all but cloned.

Mark Lewisohn, Tune In, quote from interview by Johnnie Walker, BBC Radio 2, 11 May 2001.

[whitetrashsoul]

Esquerita going wild. Dragnet Club, Dallas 1958.

[thespliffbunker]

“Oh baby”

Esquerita

[just-theo]

[mymusicbias]

[haveyouheardthisband]

[megasaeruhebi]

Ignore grief, ignore grief, ignore grief

ESQUERITA, LITTLE RICHARD by XIU XIU

[disease]

ESQUERITA, LITTLE RICHARD XIU XIU | IGNORE GRIEF, MAR 2023

Poor little head my mind is not where it belongs Always in a narrow space Rended Ceded between death and not death Apart

[bitter69uk]

I finally watched the 2023 documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything. Director Lisa Cortés succeeds in making it feel cinematic, and the archival performance footage of Richard in his prime alone is worthwhile. The best “talking head” contributors are Richard’s late exotic dancer girlfriend Lee Angel and pioneering transgender nightclub entertainer Sir Lady Java - and John Waters, of course! (Waters recalls he used to shoplift Richard’s records as a kid, and that his signature pencil-line mustache is a direct “twisted tribute”). By comparison, big name guests like Mick Jagger and Tom Jones mostly offer show biz platitudes (and Billy Porter is self-aggrandizing).

One thing it accomplishes nicely: so often hidebound rock critics and filmmakers get hung up on "who influenced who" which descends into "who ripped off who" as if it’s always a negative thing. It's common knowledge that when Richard was just starting out as a performer without his persona cemented, two flaming queer Black male rhythm and blues musicians - Billy Wright and Esquerita - inspired his musical approach and appearance (the towering, processed conk, thick make-up and mustache). As one of the talking heads savvily argues, Richard didn’t “steal” from them: rather, they provided a mirror for Richard to see his true self. Similarly, Cortés gives Ike Turner his due. A musical expert notes that Richard's piano playing was beholden to Turner’s, something Richard admitted (he raved about the impact of hearing "Rocket 88", the 1951 Kings of Rhythm track widely considered the first-ever rock'n'roll single). Yes, Ike was a monster to Tina, but his trailblazing musical genius must be acknowledged.

The finale where Cortés demonstrates Richard’s effect on modern pop culture with a montage presumably meant to represent his spiritual descendants (Cher! Harry Styles! Lady GaGa! Lizzo!) is misbegotten. Are we meant to think anyone who EVER wore sequins owes Little Richard a debt? (At least the inclusion of Lil Nas X - a modern flamboyant Black male performer – is apt). Richard was instilled with a sense of shame and guilt as a child, and throughout his life alternated between extreme hedonism and extreme fundamentalist Christianity. Sadly, as one commentator argues, Richard set a great liberating example for other people but never truly enjoyed that liberation himself.

[cosmicanger]

Esquerita

[billboard-hotties-tourney]

David Coverdale (1951-) Deep Purple - lead vocals Songs: "Lady Luck," "Stormbringer" Defeated Opponents: Bob Weir, Smokey Robinson, Justin Hayward Propaganda: none

Rick Wright (1943-2008) Pink Floyd - keyboards Songs: "Summer 68," "The Great Gig in the Sky" Defeated Opponents: Esquerita, Fats Domino, Alvin Lee Propaganda: none

[whitetrashsoul]

Hype sticker for the New York Dolls legendary 1973 demos by Norton Records.

[dustedmagazine]

Little Richard: I Am Everything (Magnolia)

How does one tell the story of an artist as influential as Little Richard? The same way you tell the story of the Universe, by keeping it simple: A long time ago there was the Big Bang. 

Little Richard: I Am Everything, a new documentary directed by Lisa Cortes, presents Little Richard’s existence as an analogous cosmic event. Rock ‘n’ roll as we know it exists because on December 5, 1932, Richard Penniman was born in Macon, Georgia.

Cortes isn’t the first to frame Little Richard in terms of cosmic energy. As Nick Tosches once put it, “[v]ia his pure white-energy raunch and total over-simplification, [Little Richard had] the power to make people say 'fuck it' and turn their backs on their own control conditioning and just go out and debauch and catch a glimpse of the violent, drunken, loving, dancing Universe.” I Am Everything is similarly reverential, but the power of the film stems from its focus on Little Richard’s strange, conflicted human experience. 

Growing up, Little Richard, as he would later be nicknamed, was scolded in church for singing too loud — an impressive feat for a Pentecostal. He exuded a preacher’s charisma and even as a young boy parishioners asked him to pray for them. When he started playing piano, he banged on the keys the way that Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an early influence, banged on her guitar. The idea, Little Richard said, was to drum away at your instrument until you reached “the peak.” 

The nature of that “peak,” would remain a lifelong tension. That erratic blurring of sexual and spiritual extasy, one of rock music’s central paradoxes, is what made his music both threatening and irresistible. 

Fans of Little Richard specifically and rock history in general are likely familiar with the raw information that I Am Everything offers. But in addition to the more expected talking heads —  Mick Jagger, John Waters, Billy Porter — some fresher contextualization comes from Black, queer academics and music historians. “The south is the home of all things queer” says writer and sociologist Zandria Robinson, and she means “queer” in every sense of the word. Homosexuality was illegal, as was drag (the maddeningly circular nature of culture emerges as one of I Am Everything’s subtler themes) but the edges of that reality were “soft.” Little Richard performed with minstrel shows and on the vaudeville circuit, sometimes appearing as Princess LaVonne. 

Like many raised in the church, Little Richard always suspected that rock ‘n’ roll was the Devil’s music. That persistent belief, Jagger notes, “can’t be much fun for those involved,” an observation that further emphasizes how heavy Little Richard’s baggage was in comparison to some of his imitators. 

In 1957, the story goes, Little Richard saw Sputnik in the night sky and interpreted it as a sign from God to repent. He enrolled in Bible school, hosted a buy-back/burning of his records, started making Gospel music, and married a woman. Over the course of his life, he would waffle between publicly denouncing homosexuality and embracing it. As one commentator puts it, “He was good at liberating other people by example, he was not good at liberating himself.” 

Little Richard didn’t come from nowhere: Artists like Billy Wright and Esquerita heavily informed his flamboyance. But it seems most everyone else came from him. Jimi Hendrix, of course, got his start in Little Richard’s band. The Beatles opened shows for him when, as he said, “only their mothers knew their names.” Paul McCartney developed his wild yelp by imitating Little Richard, and Jagger copped his stage moves. 

When Little Richard is given his due, he’s credited with inventing not only rock ‘n’ roll but helping to invent the teenager. Greil Marcus called it “Little Richard’s First Law of Youth Culture:  attracting kids by driving their parents up a wall.” As Waters puts it, “the first songs that you love that your parents hate are the beginning of the soundtrack to your life.” In a recent New Yorker profile Paul Schrader, another artist pulled between the spiritual and carnal, recalls his mother smashing the radio after catching him listening to rip-off artist Pat Boone. One imagines that if it had been Little Richard, she might have burned the house down. 

Eternally offered a kind of ambient credit by musicians and critics, the lion’s share of the specific attention (and money) is paid to the (often white) artists Little Richard inspired, or who arguable just straight up stole his shit. (In terms of respectful homage, there’s a chasm between McCartney’s “Long Tall Sally” and Boone’s “Tutti Frutti.”) It’s as if the man is at once too bright to look at directly, and too Black and queer and alien to fully acknowledge. 

He often made his rightful frustration known. In one clip, Little Richard and David Johansen, fully in his Buster Poindexter era, present the 1988 Grammy for Best New Artist. Little Richard, usually unpredictable on live TV, says of Johansen’s pompadour, “I used to wear my hair like that. They take everything I get. They take it from me.” He opens the envelope and declares himself the winner. It’s a joke but it isn’t. “I have never received nothing,” he continues. “Y’all ain’t never gave me no Grammy and I been singing for years. I am the architect of rock ‘n’ roll and they never gave me nothing. And I am the originator!” He gets a standing ovation, which is something, but it isn’t enough. 

Almost every review of the film mentions this moving, uncomfortable scene, because it teases out one of Little Richard’s most powerful realities. He didn’t always seem to know what he was supposed to be doing, or even who he should be, but he always knew what he was worth. 

Margaret Welsh

[highbrow-hepcat]

All Hail Esquerita!