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It can be debated for a long time whether the father of rock and roll was Elvis Presley, the first planetary icon of the genre or Chuck Berry, boatman of that revolutionary sound of the black to white audience. But it certainly wouldn’t have exploded like a bomb if it hadn’t been there to detonate in the mid-1950s: Richard Pennyman for all of Little Richard. He left at the age of 87, for reasons not yet specified (for example, it is not yet known if he is also a victim of the coronavirus). But in a way, as if it’s been gone for almost half a century, artistically speaking.
Because the unique and dazzling race Little Richard locked in a five-year period, from 1955 to 1959, where he launches like a machine gun destined to become a true rocknroll standard, covered by virtually anyone: Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, Lucille, and Good Golly Miss Molly. An explosive explosion of sounds because this child from a religious family, the third of twelve children from a deep south family, Macon Georgia, will bring the almost animistic dimension of the gospel to the born rock and roll: screams, moans, tarantulas permeate the body de Richard rises from the piano and approaches the microphone, overwhelming the audience like a tsunami. And the beliefs of the puritanical, racist and segregationist America of the time.
Richard’s rock and roll and of all his brothers he knocks down the walls of the concert halls divided between black and white, enters the radios and emerges at the top of the charts. In that five-year period, Little was the best of all, including Elvis. The soft mop, the exaggerated attitudes and a certain sexual ambiguity choose him to the tutelary number of the intolerant young people to the bourgeois and conservative nannies of that America of the well-being, but medieval in the interpersonal relations. And heralds the roaring and rebellious 1960s
Almost intimidated by this roleRichard cannot bear the tension and leaves the scene for the first time in the late 1950s to devote himself to preaching. The Beatles and Rolling Stones of the origins, in a bipartisan aflato, will remove it from the pedestal a few years later, forcing it to go on tour in England in 1962, as if it wanted to baptize the nascent scene. In addition to confirming another future god of rock, Jimi Hendrix, also in love with Little’s revolutionary charm, both to dress and to dress like him. And join his gang.
The creative streak by interruptions and Little will no longer produce any meaningful passage from then on, alternating between hell and heaven, orgies and abuse in the 1970s and a return to Christian evangelism in the late decade. Yes, from 1977 onwards, he devoted himself definitively to preaching, with rare forays into show business, a cameo with U2, a look at rap and little else. Rising for a legend still alive, with the continuous tributes of the greatest, from Jagger to Mc Cartney, from Bowie to Mercury. Because without it, rock and roll would not be among us.
May 9, 2020 (change May 9, 2020 | 5:42 PM)
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