Review: Little Richard: I Am Everything

New Documentary Veers from Sizzle to Snooze

No one else in rock & roll was as indisputably exciting as Little Richard, and Lisa Cortés’ new documentary Little Richard: I am Everything (out today) is a most welcome reminder of that fact. It’s loaded with dazzling performances and whether it’s a late career  gospel number or film of his electrifying 1962 return to rock UK tour (a sweat drenched, explosive display of Penniman pyrotechnics so intense that each gig ended in an actual, venue destroying riot), Richard was so consistently irresistible, dynamic and genuine that he wielded a transportive power which none could rival: As his drummer on that UK excursion puts it “We were rockin’ in the fifth dimension…”

A glorious freak with mismatched limbs and that kingsize Marcel-wave topped cranium, Little Richard was wholly without peer. The multiple interview clips of his joyous ravings and the Beauty is on Duty proclamations are wondrous, as are the firsthand reminiscences of relatives and musicians. The musical performances are, again, uniformly stupefying and the shocking scale of his cataclysmic travails and triumphs never fails to fascinate. “Talk about rock bottom?” Richard says. “I been below the rocks, where there is no bottom.”

The film looks great, with some lovely glitter dusted montages and engaging contextual footage (Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Louis Jordan) but it’s an uneven mix of late-to-the-party archive plundering and morose contemporary psychologizing that eventually collapses under its own weight.

Sandwiched between testimonial reverence from the usual gang of British Sir Boring Rock Stars are a tendentious chorus of inquisitors (toplofty scolds like Yale’s Tavia Nyong’o) who fastidiously bring the post-mortem ‘reckoning’ to Richard. Come to find out, he “caused harm to communities,” “betrayed gay people” and worst of all “was not good at liberating himself.”

Richard’s cyclical rejection of homosexuality and steadfast exaltation of the Lord is especially problematic, prompting such penetrating analysis as “was he running towards God or running away from himself?” It all feels scripted, a blizzard of shame, solemn non sequitur and blowhard jargon about “his true self” that, juxtaposed against John Waters’ salty, bullshit-free observations, becomes downright hilarious.

The damn thing bounces back and forth like a ping pong ball. Rightly upheld at length for what he was—a primary, incandescent nonpareil of unadulterated rock & roll wilding who exerted boundless influence on generations of players—he is nonetheless subjected to the most labored, fault seeking intellectual necropsies courtesy of these “cutting-edge Black and queer scholars.” It is a whiplash conceit which, ultimately, provides the film’s downfall.

While these monotoned, know-it-all sourpusses attempt their perilously acrobatic analytics, not one advances an argument or observation that captures and crystalizes Richard’s pathological undulations between faith and flesh, sin and redemption, spiritual and secular. This is the critical point, yet one gets the impression that none of the ‘scholars’ consider it worthy of a single thought. Jesus, apparently, is not welcome in ‘queer spaces.’

What Cortés and her crew clearly do not understand (and anyone who knew him will tell you) is that Richard, God love him, was flat-out batshit crazy and this dualistic highwire act was in the Penniman DNA—as a cousin tells us: “[His father] was a minister who owned a small nightclub and had a bootleg house at the same time.”

Apple, tree, etc.

Post Script: Forgive the first person singular but I come to this subject not entirely without firsthand knowledge and insight. I was proud to count both Richard’s original drummer Charles “Keep A-Knockin’” Connor and his lifelong muse Lee Angel as friends, conducting interviews and personal hang time with them over the years (even booking Connor on my monthly Messaround revue, once with Pat Boone [!] as guest vocalist on a ten-minute version of “Tutti Frutti” and again for a fundraiser when Angel fell on hard times). The late great Dewey Terry also shared some wig-flipping reminiscences about his early 60s road time with Richard with me and I spent a most memorable afternoon in Richard’s suite at the Sunset Riot House in 1986, interviewing him for LA Weekly on the occasion of his Warner Bros Lifetime Friend album (the disappointing follow up to monster return-to-form single “Great Gosh A-Mighty.”)

Jumpy as a cat, I knocked on his door and Richard himself flung it open, crowing “Ooooh! Pretty blonde boy came to see me! Pretty blonde boy! PRETTY, PRETTY BLONDE BOY!”

Overwhelming doesn’t cut it. All whelms evaporated. Seated next to him on a couch, he began singing old country songs (“Walking the Floor Over You”) to me and when he leaned in close, eyes gleaming, and placed his hand on my thigh, I thought “Well, who knows, maybe I really AM gay?” Richard’s magnetism, charisma and appeal, frankly, beggared description. It was perhaps the single greatest moment of my career, and, between peppering me with “pretty blonde boys” (I still have the cassette), he was forthright, outspoken and generous in all of his responses to my questions (“Lifetime Friend? It’s an R&B album and, to me, that stands for Real Black!”).

Best of all, at one point, the phone rang and his youthful valet (Richard had an adjoining room, Angel told me, “where he kept his hair”) picked it up.

Richard: “Who is it?”

Valet: “John Waters, from Playboy magazine.”

Richard: “Tell him to wait!”

About twenty minutes later, I floated back down to the lobby and there sat Waters, clutching a briefcase and looking, well, jumpy as a cat.

“Waiting for Richard?” I asked him. “You’re going to have a ball!”

PPS I never subsequently met Waters but, years later, he included my Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story on his Top Ten Tinsel Town Books list in Playboy. Always wondered if he thought I was another journalist or just a WLA hustler…