Note: This one is relatively recent — a mere five years old — with a few bonus features that weren’t in the original post.
Little Richard with an upstart band of nobodies way back when.
It took a long time for me to fully grasp the appeal of Little Richard or appreciate the enormous impact he had on the music and cultural life of America. Oh, he was entertaining — a veritable wild man on stage and at the piano — but in so many ways I just didn't "get it.” Maybe that's what happens when you grow up in the sticks milking goats every evening as part of a family that didn't have a television until I was eight years old. Then one fine afternoon I stepped off the bus after school — mine was the very last stop on that narrow, winding two-lane road — and looked across the valley to see something astonishing: a TV antenna rising from the roof of our house.
This was a very big deal. It meant I'd no longer have to make the long, dark walk to and from our nearest neighbor's house every Sunday night to watch The Wonderful World of Disney, because now my family could gather around our own Cathode Ray Gun — the new technological hearth — to enjoy The Ed Sullivan Show, The Honeymooners, Amos and Andy, Have Gun: Will Travel, and Gunsmoke, among others. I had no idea that any of those shows were filmed or broadcast in color — by the time my folks got a color TV, I had one foot out the door on the road to Hollywood.
At some point I saw Little Richard perform "Tutti Frutti" on that TV, and didn't really know what to think. He was clearly something else … but what?
Thirty years later, I worked as the gaffer on a commercial for the game "Trivial Pursuit," filming a series of shot spots starring DeForest Kelley ("Bones," from the original Star Trek series), Don Adams ("Maxwell Smart," from the series Get Smart), Evel Knievel, and Little Richard. Having more or less come of age watching Star Trek and Get Smart, I was tickled to work with Kelly and Adams, and Evel Knievel made a huge impression on me during my late teens, but truth be told, I still didn't know what to think of Little Richard.
So there we were, setting up to film in a lovely house in the wealthy enclave of Hancock Park, and in came Little Richard, dressed to the nines and as flamboyant as ever. He sat at a gleaming white piano and riffed for a while as we prepared to do the shot. I kneeled right next to the lens of the camera holding a white bounce card to reflect light onto his face mere feet from the man. At the call of "action!" he hit a big chord on the piano, then turned to lean right into that lens and yell "A wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-BOOMB!" at the top of his lungs.
It felt like a bomb had gone off in that room. My jaw dropped as I felt the focused energy and concussive power of this man at close range, and suddenly — finally — I understood in a visceral way what a force of nature Little Richard really was, and why he'd been so wildly popular. That's a moment I'll never forget.
He was also a very nice guy, gregarious and friendly with everyone on set, gifting each of us a little book of religious aphorisms at the end of the day … and always with a big smile.
RIP, Little Richard — thanks for allowing me to see the light.
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Bonus Extras!
A little Googling — and some help from an old pal who’s vastly more skilled than I at navigating the digital realm — turned up the four spots we filmed that day.1
(Note: you might have to double or triple-click on these to activate the links, then click the “play” icon again once you get there. Digiliterate that I am, I have no idea why…)
Little Richard
“Bones”
Don Adams
Evel Knievel
Thanks, Jim!
A classic example of “film crew privilege”. An indelible image, etched into your memory, courtesy of a small square of foamcore. Thanks for sharing it with us.