WSJ: Little Richard Actually Quite Big

Thoroughly appealing column in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal about “Richard, the First,” a – you’ll pardon the expression – seminal influence on the music of the past 55 years.

From Marc Myers’ Journal piece:

Little Richard’s influence wasn’t confined to rock’s golden age. He was a headliner in Europe in the early 1960s and was idolized there by the Beatles and Rolling Stones. He gave Tina Turner charisma lessons at the behest of husband Ike Turner, and he hired and fired Jimi Hendrix. In fact, Little Richard’s influence can be felt in virtually every top rock act since 1955—from Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis to Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Prince and many of today’s rappers.

Not-so-fun fact to know and tell:

In 1957 and 1958, Little Richard’s hits included “Lucille,” “Keep a ‘Knockin'” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” He also became a Seventh-Day Adventist minister, a move some said was designed to let him escape his paltry Specialty Records contract. “That’s not true,” he said. “I became a minister because my family had always loved the Lord and I felt the calling.”

Little Richard also began dressing more flamboyantly. “I wore makeup and wild outfits to keep white people from focusing on me as some kind of a sexual threat,” he said. “I knew that if I looked crazy, not cool, I wouldn’t be seen that way. And it worked. People focused on the music.”

Illustration above by my old friend Ken Fallin, a former Boston Herald artist and the heir apparent to Al Hirschfeld.

Keep a’ Knockin’, Ken.

Esquire: Eye on Newt

Thoroughly appalling (but terrific for the left-leaning crowd) feature on Newt Gingrich in the September issue of Esquire (via Politico’s Playbook).

John H. Richardson got access to Gingrich’s second wife Marianne, who takes occasional breaks from chain-smoking to skewer her former husband’s most pompous posturing and generally take the bloom off the Newt.

Representative sample:

“Newt always wanted to be somebody,” she says. “That was his vulnerability, do you understand? Being treated important. Which means he was gonna associate with people who would stroke him, and were important themselves. And in that vulnerability, once you go down that path and it goes unchecked, you add to it. Like, ‘Oh, I’m drinking, who cares?’ Then you start being a little whore, ’cause that comes with drinking. That’s what corruption is — when you’re too exhausted, you’re gonna go with your weakness. So when we see corruption, we shouldn’t say, ‘They’re all corrupt.’ Rather, we should say, ‘At what point did you decide that? And why? Why were you vulnerable?’ “

Even worse:

He thinks of himself as president, you tell her. He wants to run for president.

She gives a jaundiced look. “There’s no way,” she says. She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones. “He could have been president. But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.”

She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she’s about to say.

“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” she says. “If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president.”

Ouch.

And don’t miss:

• The Rubik’s Cube relationship between Gingrich and Bill Clinton during the ’90s

• The Rube Goldbergesque fundraising machine Gingrich has now created

Fun for the whole family, in other words.