Dancing in the Outer Darkness

By JAY COCKS

Two nifty new books tap the tangled roots of rock

Ooh! My soul! That's what the man said.

Part spiritual and part sexual, that exclamation is about as neat as the package gets: a tidy summation of the worldly power as well as the almost religious delirium of good old rock 'n' roll. The phrase was popularized by Mr. Richard Penniman of Macon, Ga., who used it both as a song title and as a kind of revival call-and-response as he rocked, in concert, with the forces of Satan. Mr. Penniman, known to a wondering world as Little Richard, let blast with rock of such demented power, performed from the 1950s through the mid-'70s, that he seemed possessed of darkling forces. A chimney-high pompadour. Eye shadow, for God's sake, in 1956. Piano-jumping, speaker-climbing stunts onstage, along with dancing that was camp enough to get anyone busted in a back alley. Songs that sounded like nonsense (Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, Slippin 'and Slidin ') but whose beat seemed to hint of unearthly pleasures centered somewhere between the gut and the gutter. Ooh! My soul!

The Life and Times of Little Richard (identified in a subtitle as "the Quasar of Rock," should further amplification be required) chronicles, in no uncertain terms and in effulgent detail, both bouts with Satan and business with the Lord. The book (Harmony; $15.95) is the woolliest, funniest, funkiest rock memoir ever. It rambles from Richard's childhood in Macon to his current calling as a preacher for the Universal Remnant Church of God in California, with plenty of rest stops along the way, so that even the casual reader may catch a whiff of brimstone before, in the sermon that ends the book, great tongues of heavenly fire finally descend.

The credited author, Charles White, is a BBC disc jockey who goes by the name of Dr. Rock and has the good sense to go off-mike when the major talent is in the room. In only a little more time than it might take to recite the immortal refrain from Tutti Frutti (for the record, that's "Awop-Bop-a-Loo-Mop/ Alop-Bam-Boom"), the reader, reeling, will have plunged through Richard's accounts of childhood pranks (he defecated in a box and presented the result, gift wrapped, to old Miz Ola down on Macon's Monroe Street) and sexual initiation, which seems to have taken place about the time he learned to tie his shoes. There was Ruth May Sutton, who "used to be there in the school grounds at night, and the guys would run trains on her--six, seven, ten boys in a row"; and Madame Oop, who worked on the railroad and hung out "with another gay guy called Sis Henry." This unusual childhood led to a great deal of sexual confusion ("I just felt that I wanted to be a girl more than a boy"), a lot of guilt, but no apologies. Not then, not ever. The book is bursting with raunchy backstage tales of orgies, voyeurism, drugs and lust, which are balanced off by Richard's periodic attempts to reform and to seek out the Lord.

Whether it is for God or for the flesh, however, this book is full of fervor. There's a lot of preaching, but sanctimony can't even creep in the back door. Richard's descriptions of an earlier search for the Lord, when he forsook show business to study the Bible at Oakwood College, are rich not only in regret but in comedy, much of it knowing. "The elders didn't like me taking my yellow Cadillac on the campus," Richard confesses. "They had discovered that I was a homosexual, and I resented the discovery . . . They forgave me, oh, definitely they did forgive me, but I couldn't face it and I left the church."

He was back again, for good, in the mid-'70s, after giving himself up to dissipation and one last, long bout with the hard-rock life. The book concludes with a sermon compiled from various of Richard's exhortations: "[God] made Adam and Eve. Not Adam and Steve." And: "Take that Bible out of your trunk, and get up from those soap operas! Stop trying to watch Search for Tomorrow and search your Bible." Richard may not be making rock 'n' roll any more, but it's obvious the fire has not burned low.

The power of Richard's music, low-down as it may have been, is, like his religion, essentially evangelical. Like a preacher, a rocker is always more effective smelling of sulfur than holy water, a point amply, lovingly and sometimes hilariously demonstrated by Nick Tosches in his Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll (Scribners; $18.95). "Elvis may very well have been the most important figure in rock 'n' roll," Tosches writes. "But had it not been for those who came before him, there would have been no rock 'n' roll." Indeed, most of the 26 pioneers chronicled in these pages were forgotten by the time Little Richard came leaping onstage. Wynonie Harris, Amos Milburn, Hardrock Gunter (who, at 33, joined the Army in 1951, "perhaps fearing a Chinese takeover of his beloved Alabama"). Jackie Brenston, Stick McGhee. These are what have been called roots artists, and they sang the kind of mean and raggedy rhythm and blues that still sounds rightly raw and impolite today.

When he is at full boil, Tosches writes the way Little Richard talks. Wanda Jackson, purveyor of 1958's excellent Fujiyama Mama ("When I start eruptin', ain't nobody gonna make me stop"), was simply "too hot a package to sell over the counter." Louis Jordan "made party music . . . in which every aspect of the expanding universe was seen in terms of fried fish, sloppy kisses, gin, and the saxophone whose message transcends knowing." Very hep and very fond, Unsung Heroes also includes an "Archaeologia Rockola," which can direct the untutored reader to such diverse selections as Brenston's Rocket "88"and a Johnny Mercer-Nat King Cole collaboration called Save the Bones for Henry Jones ('Cause Henry Don't Eat No Meat). This book is so sharp about the music, and so tantalizing about some of the obscure material, that it really ought to have come packaged with a set of twelve records. Which way to the vaults?

--By Jay Cocks