May 9, 2020 - Steve Pieczenik
03:50
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, this is Dr. | |
| Pachenik. | |
| Today I want to pay tribute to somebody I really admired and never met, and that's Little Richard. | |
| His real name is Richard Penniman. | |
| He was born in 1932 in Macon, Georgia, and he was one of the great rock and roll artists of all time. | |
| For many of you who've read my book, The American Warrior in Crisis, you will know that as a young man from the age of 9 to about 15, 16, I was really a concert pianist, concentrating on playing Schubert, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky. | |
| But at the same time, what I did in the 1950s was to hide and listen to this incredible individual named Little Richard who could sing Long Tongue Sally. | |
| She's real sweet. | |
| She's got everything that Uncle John needs. | |
| And I said, hmm, I think he's talking about sex. | |
| And he sounds phenomenal. | |
| And he sounds great. | |
| And this was the beginning of rock and roll. | |
| And then he talked about, good golly, Miss Molly, she likes to ball all day long and all night long. | |
| So I'm saying to myself, wow, here I am in an upper middle class environment learning about Chopin and learning about Schubert. | |
| But what I really want to know is what is America about? | |
| Not just white America, because I was going to go to Cornell and Harvard. | |
| I wanted to know what the real America was about. | |
| And lo and behold, Little Richard brought me in. | |
| And what he said to me was, in effect, in those songs, if you like to ball all day long in the morning, in the night, that means you like to screw and you like to fuck. | |
| And that was the beginning of my understanding that in America, there was this overlaying hypocrisy that was inculcated by the church or the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and it was... | |
| It was demonstrated by the elite universities, Cornell and Harvard, that I went to, but beneath it were these young men who were vital from the South, from Macon, Georgia, from Tennessee, from Alabama, and they were talking about sex, and they were talking about really getting it on, and lo and behold, Little Richard was androgynous, and he was gay, and nobody, but nobody could care about it in the 1950s. | |
| He also, through his music, broke the barrier, For blacks, for browns, for Hispanics, and for whites because integration had come in way before into rock and roll, way before there was Martin Luther King. | |
| I grew up in Harlem and went to Booker T. Washington, but there were no problems between the whites, the blacks, and the Hispanics. | |
| Rock and roll brought us all together in this one unity of music. | |
| At the same time, years later, I would use Little Richard And implement his singing into creating agitation propaganda in the Soviet Union, in Poland, and in the Middle East, where I would use all of that music that made me feel vibrant and alive to create a bit of agitation propaganda in the Soviet Union. | |
| And lo and behold, what happened when we shipped rock and roll records and we used Radio Free Europe to transmit all of Little Richard's songs to The Soviet Union began to have problems with their teenagers, just as I had problems with myself and my surrounding playing all these classical music. | |
| I really want to thank Little Richard for everything he did for America. | |
| He will be criticized for many things, but for this refugee who came from Cuba, grew up in France, he was the personification of a vitality in America that I was going to enjoy and began to understand And made me proud to eventually serve this country. | |
| I bless you, little Richard. | |
| And as Chuck Berry said, roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news. | |
| And I know, little Richard, there'll be a rock and roll heaven for you. |
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