“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Okeh Club. We’re featuring here tonight the king of rock n’ roll and when I say the king of rock n’ roll I mean his majesty! A big round of applause for the one and only Little Richard!”
Whether you agree with the emcee’s exalted claim in the intro for this album or not there’s no doubting Little Richard’s phenomenal influence on the birth and shape of rock n’ roll. This piano pounding, mascara wearing, dynamo gave rock and roll it’s groove, or as James Brown said, “Little Richard put the funk in the rock n’ roll beat”.
It took Richard Wayne Penniman a while to find his groove though. His early recordings were generally slower blues based numbers that barely raised an eyebrow, but as the story goes it was while taking a break in a bar from a recording session with producer Robert Blackwell that Richard jumped on the piano and started performing an outrageous song from his early days on the club circuit that Blackwell got excited. They cleaned up the dirty lyrics and Little Richard became a star thanks to Tutti Frutti.
When questioned by the station manager at KGFJ Los Angeles about the lyric a wop bop a loo bop la bop bam bop DJ Jim Witter (Doctor Soul) said to his boss: “I don’t know what the cat’s sayin’ Jack, but I sure dig the way he’s sayin’ it”.
Over the next 3 years Little Richard chalked up a string of hits including Long Tall Sally, Rip It Up, Lucille and Good Golly Miss Molly. His outrageous behaviour and explosive performances drove audiences wild, particularly the women, who began throwing their phone numbers and underwear on stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FySm6otYoX0
Then towards the end of 1957 while touring Australia with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran he found a new way to shock the world – Little Richard announced he was retiring to join the ministry. In the decades that followed Little Richard would switch between his guilt driven allegiance to god and his many comebacks.
The first comeback took place in Europe in the early 60’s where the manager of a new band from the north of England secured some opening slots for a bunch of unknowns called the Beatles. Those dates had a significant impact on the Fab Four with Little Richard teaching a young Paul McCartney his vocal techniques. It was also the beginning of a long friendship between the Beatles and Richard’s organ player Billy Preston, who years later would play on a number of Beatles’ tracks.
Invariably Little Richard’s repeated comebacks would involve re-recording new versions of his classic 50’s hits, as was the case with Little Richard’s Greatest Hits – Recorded Live at the Club Okeh, Hollywood. In reality “Club Okeh” wasn’t a club at all, Okeh was the record label (owned by CBS) and while the album was recorded live on 25th January 1967, it was not within the confines of a club, but at the CBS studios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z06nanypgXQ
The performances on this album are fast. Real fast. Where the originals were clocking in at just over 2 minutes apiece, many of these versions are timing out well under that. It’s possible that he’s just tearing through them as fast as possible because he’s done them so many times before, but it doesn’t sound like it. I’d argue the reason is that Richard is giving such an energised performance to these songs that they’re just being played faster. It’s almost as if Richard (and his band) are on speed.
Of course Little Richard was so crazy you always suspected that the guy must be on something, but the banter on this record seems no crazier than usual. Amongst the woo hoos, yelps, screams and cat calls we’re fed a host of “Oh my soul’s!” and the understated humility of lines like “I want you to know that I’m the best lookin’ man in show business”. How can you not love this guy!
I can still listen to a song like Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On (originally a hit for Jerry Lee Lewis in 57) and smile at those bawdy lyrics. You just know when Little Richard sings “come over baby, we’ve got a chicken in the barn” he isn’t inviting her over for dinner. On this live performance of the song Little Richard is as sexually charged as ever, it’s just that by 1967 nobody was shocked by the inference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahkD422brKM
Little Richard rips through fab versions of Lucille, The Girl Can’t Help It, Jenny, Jenny and Good Golly Miss Molly but oddly it’s the slower numbers like One More Time (and the longest at over 5 minutes) when Richard gets into soul shouter mode and the R & B standard Send Me Some Lovin’ that gives Richard and his band the chance to push some real feeling into the set.
This record is hardly the definitive album for these Little Richard classics. Even though Mr Penniman later resented his label’s insistence on adding horns to these arrangements to give them more of a Motown feel as an album it still sizzles with the excitement of a live performance from one of the greatest showmen rock and roll produced.
*Note: Without any live footage available from this concert I’ve sourced live performances from this era. Send Me Some Lovin’ is from the same year as this album (67) and the rest are taken from the Toronto Peace Concert 2 years later where Little Richard tore it up and stole the show.
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