‘Tutti Frutti’: The 1950s masterpiece that encapsulates everything great about rock n roll in one song
Little Richard must have been a nightmare to work with. It’s a scene ripped directly out of your worst, most corrosive stress nightmares, isn’t it? You work at a greyhound bus station in the middle of Macon, Georgia. It’s the height of summer in the mid-1950s and you’re lucky enough to call the kitchen your base of operations. This probably wasn’t the future you envisioned for yourself, yet here you are. Here, also, is this flamboyant, incredibly noisy little dishwasher next to you.
Richard is a new hire, out of work after his singing career flopped, and every time he gets through a crate of dishes, every single boiling hot summer day, he crashes them onto the counter and hollers a strange, tumbling pattern of vowels and consonants at the top of his lungs. Every. Single. Time. Perhaps he’s too charming and too charismatic to hate, but it’s getting older by the day.
It probably gets a little better once he starts turning the little vocalisations he hollered out to get through the day into full songs. That way, at the very least, you can realise just how special this guy is as a singer and a performer. The guy is just always on, no matter what. In fact, you’d guess that the only thing stopping him from becoming a fully fledged superstar is just how much time he spends singing about getting fucked into next Thursday by other men.
Maybe you go to one of his concerts and you absolutely see what the world is missing. He’s a genuine, bonafide firebrand, hammering away at the piano and pushing that voice as far and as hard as it’d go. You’ve heard little bits and pieces of what they’re calling “rock ‘n’ roll” music on the radio and sure, it speaks to you a little. If it ever got half as thrilling, filthy and all-out cool as your mate Rich got, maybe you could see what all the fuss is about.
Eventually, his shifts at the station start getting fewer and further between. When he does turn up he’s talking about how all these songs he’s writing and all these shows he’s playing are getting him noticed. He may not be washed up after all, and there may be a well-deserved second chance to be the singer he deserves to be coming his way. Which makes sense, you haven’t been able to get that damned war-cry out of your head for weeks.
Not just because the song he wrote around it is catchier than Spanish flu. You heard it at one of his concerts and it was the undeniable highlight. Takes all the standard sounds you’ve heard in the charts, hypercharging them to about three times the standard speed and making it just as raunchy, hilarious and unforgettable as he is.
His signature call-out has now become the start of the song, an unforgettable roll call before he starts hollering “tutti-frutti / good booty”. Absolutely spectacular. It’ll never make the charts. Then, the strangest thing happens. Rich stops turning up at work. The place suddenly feels a lot quieter and you hope for the best.
To make up for the quiet, you put a radio in the kitchen. You realize that everything on the radio starts sounding a lot like what Rich was doing but… less. Less fun. Less memorable. You realize you may have to settle for this Elvis Presley chump that everyone can’t stop wetting themselves over.
Then you hear it. Unlike the first 40 times you heard it, it brings the biggest, broadest grin you’ve had all week to your face. Because it’s a sign that he did it. The mad bastard actually did it. He took this wild, boundary-pushing act of sheer, bacchanal abandon into the mainstream where it absolutely deserves to be.
By the looks of things, that’s where he’s going to stay. That’s where it’s going to stay. That unmistakable holler is going to echo through history. Everyone, from bus station workers in Macon to the music makers 70 years from now are going to know it like the back of their hand. “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!”
