“A bowel movement in a box”: Little Richard’s bizarre scatological birthday gift
Plenty of controversy surrounds Little Richard, one of the most colourful and perplexing rockers the world has ever known. Yet, he lived life to the fullest, and to be fair to him, as an “omnisexual” Black man growing up in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era, he bravely traversed barriers and remained himself when so many would hide their true selves from the outside world in fear of bloody retribution.
Being his colourful self was what Richard did until the end, and this is what opened the eyes of so many when he burst onto the scene with his ribald songs and charismatic personality. A true entertainer, he instilled genuine transgression and sleaze into rock ‘n’ roll. He set the scene for all to come, whether it The Beatles, Led Zeppelin or even The Velvet Underground with their darkly erotic art, and played a crucial role in setting the scene for the sexual revolution.
Everyone liked doing it, and Richard knew it. As a man with his own voracious appetite for bonking, he wasn’t to be swayed by any social mores from shouting it loudly in his music. Bringing this gleeful sexual defiance into full view, one of his most influential songs, ‘Tutti Frutti’, was originally written as an ode to anal sex. The first version of the 1955 hit, before it was changed for being too on the nose, included the lines: “Tutti frutti — good booty! / If it don’t fit — Don’t force it! / You can grease it — Make it easy”.
Like all of the stars of his era, Richards’ life is heavily mythologised, with the line between fact and fiction blurred beyond all recognition. This wasn’t helped by the Macon, Georgia native also playfully messing with the press and contributing his old red herrings to the narrative, amping up the lascivious filth attached to his name.
Richard wasn’t just about sex and music – if another notorious tale is to be believed. In Charles White’s 1985 book, The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography – a work that Richard later swore to be full of untruths – it was claimed that when a child, the future star would sometimes gift people rocks, a relatively sweet and benign present. However, one day, the devilish young man is said to have opted for a different offering, a much softer object that would strike fear into the heart of any recipient.
“I had a bowel movement in a box, a shoebox or something like that and I packed it up like a present and gave it to an old lady next to Mathis Groceries, on Monroe Street, in Pleasant Hill,” he recalled.
The unlucky recipient of the excrement was an elderly neighbour called Ms Ola, and Richard gave it to her on her birthday. The story goes that she happily accepted the box and thanked the kind boy for it. However, all was not as it seemed, and the trickster waited by her house to hear her reaction after she opened it. She screamed and threatened to kill Richard. Allegedly, he claimed he laughed “like a cuckoo”.
In 1987, the legendary director John Waters interviewed one of his heroes, Little Richard, for Playboy, which he later remembered in The Guardian in 2010. In it, he revisited Richard’s assertion that the book claimed many untruths, heavily suggesting that some of the most notorious moments in it were fallacies.
As for the scatological birthday gift, we will never know if it was actually true or not, as Richard passed away in 2020. One thing is sure, though: It certainly fits in with the direction of his life and some of the other filthy situations he got embroiled in.
