Little Richard playing for women he invited from the audience to dance at the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill on Monday night in Manhattan.
A Little Richard show includes a lot of talking and a lot of fascinating, ephemeral fuss; a couple of songs with the power of mule kicks; and a fair percentage of music that seems to have been created in an Anytown sports bar. But the subtext, now, is the limitations of the body. Age really has no business advancing on this singer, born Richard Penniman, and so what you remember is the disjunction between his lovely, widened, overexcited eyes and the frailty of his joints.
At B. B. King’s Blues Club & Grill on Monday night, he appeared in a gold-striped yellow suit, with a long, four-button jacket and an extravagant, rooster-cut hairpiece. He is 74 now, and a helper and two canes supported him.
At the piano bench he dabbed at his makeup with a tissue, taking in screams of approval. He identified what he heard, as if it were bird song. “White ladies say ‘Aaaaa!’ ” he noted. “Black ladies say ‘Uuuuh!’ ”
Someone mentioned James Brown. “I’m so sorry about my friend James,” he said, making his face into a moue. “He loved me so much. He said, ‘Oh, you got some pretty skin.’ ”
The band — big enough to suggest the Mack-truck vibe of his best music, with two drummers, four horn players, an organist, a bassist and two guitarists — started with “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” Little Richard sang casually, not really ready, unable to deliver his falsetto shrieks. The song ended quickly.
“It’s so nice just sitting here, being beautiful,” he said. “I feel so unnecessary.” Someone yelled. “Shaddup,” he shot back.
Ruminative, he started pounding the triplets of Fats Domino’s “Every Night About This Time,” and sang a few of its sad verses, then shut down the band entirely. “My mama had 12 children, and we were pretty but we were poor,” he regaled. “All that beauty, and wasn’t nobody on duty. All that honey and no money.” He started the song again in the middle.
Little Richard is wary of photography. During “Blueberry Hill,” he noticed a lot of digital cameras. “Nobody do no video,” he ordered. “I ain’t hired you. Ain’t nothing going on unnoticed on this planet. The angels keep a record. You can take my money, but your child may get killed.” Quite a few people in the crowd drew a sharp breath at that.
“Could I get two black ladies to dance?” he ventured. “I’d like to have two fat white ladies, too. Juicy ones. And two Mexicans.”
Most of his order was shortly processed, and he enjoyed himself, smiling broadly, as the band played “Bama Lama Bama Loo”:
Got a gal named Lucinda, we call her the great pretender.
Got a gal named Lucinda, we call her the great pretender.
’Cause when she talks, she says bama lama loo.
During “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard asked his trumpeter to sing the first verse — as if anyone wanted to hear somebody else sing it. But he didn’t care. He unzipped one of his jewel-encrusted boots, and placed it on the piano for the room to admire, deeply pleased by the sight himself. By “Lucille,” he was beginning to get warm, sliding up to a scream.
Finally the sky opened up, in the slow blues “Directly From My Heart to You,” (which he dedicated to the pianist Allen Toussaint, who was in the audience). Over the guitarist’s initial riff, he muttered: “Baby? Baby? Oh, baby.” He hoisted himself up, leaning against the piano, and sang the song seriously. During the guitar solo, he ordered a lemon and sucked it, spitting out the seeds in front of the stage monitors.
The two drummers were playing a simple synchronized groove, but Little Richard pushed for even simpler. “Relax, relax,” he said. “No fancy stuff.” He saved that for the next number, a version of Mr. Brown’s “I Feel Good,” featuring the singing of James Brown’s nephew Earl Swindell, a spaghetti-limbed man with an unruly voice.
A few false endings later — including a version of Hank Williams’s “I Saw the Light,” and about five minutes of signing LP covers — and he was done.
“Was you glad to see me?” he asked, tenderly. “If any of you can help Earl get a recording deal, give me your number and I’ll give it to him. And remember, the Lord is coming soon. Never put a question mark where God has put a period.”
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