The musician Joe Walsh called the founding father of rock: “He was at his best”
It’s not exactly easy to pinpoint when rock and roll came into existence. The ‘Big Bang’ definitely happened somewhere during the late 1950s, but the debuts of everyone from Chuck Berry to Buddy Holly to even the bluesy sounds of Robert Johnson have been credited for birthing the genre as we know it today. If you ask Joe Walsh where everything got started, it didn’t get any better than what Little Richard was doing.
Then again, is that necessarily fair? Little Richard did have some of the best tunes that the world had ever seen at the time, like ‘Tutti Frutti’, but how does rock and roll, a genre synonymous with the guitar, not have someone like Berry as the patron saint of everything that it stands for?
Berry did leave an impressive mark on culture, but Richard had something that no one else had: a raucous attitude. From the minute that he got up onstage, he was the ideal showman whenever he got behind the piano, either putting his leg up every time he played or singing until his voice was raw on tracks like ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’.
There’s even a case to be made that he perfected what husky vocals were supposed to be. The gold standard for the genre is and forever will be Freddie Mercury, but in terms of real grit in someone’s voice, there’s a straight line to be drawn from Little Richard to Paul McCartney to Robert Plant all the way to singers like Chris Cornell.
While the Eagles prided themselves on having some of the most soaring harmonies in the world, even Walsh had to bow down to Little Richard. When talking about his pre-Eagles band James Gang supporting the music pioneer, Walsh said that he needed to keep up half the time, saying, “It was about fifteen minutes long because he just wouldn’t stop. I got it down to about six or seven minutes, which was the essence of the jam. He is one of the Founding Fathers of Rock and Roll, and he was at his best.”
In fact, are we sure that Walsh didn’t take a few cues from how Little Richard conducted himself onstage? For all the seriousness that comes whenever Don Henley gets involved with anything, hearing Walsh’s rapport with his bandmates feels like a court jester in the middle of all the serious stuff.
And while a lot of acts from Little Richard’s time have come off as dated these days, tracks like ‘Keep A-Knockin’ are still as energetic as they were when they were released. Even future generations are being introduced to him secondhand, with ‘Rock and Roll’ by Led Zeppelin and ‘I’m Down’ by The Beatles being some of the most blatant, shall we say, ‘homages’ to the man’s work.
Rock and roll might not have become a movement until the likes of Elvis Presley and The Beatles came around, but Little Richard was the architect who built everything that those icons stand on today. Yes, it was a shock for everyone when he came out, but Richard was so far ahead of his time that it took almost a decade for people like Lemmy Kilmister to catch up to him.
