Little Richard is considered The King of Rock and Roll in
some camps. With due credit. While I myself don’t consider him to be the king (I do that with Chuck Berry),
he doesn’t need to be: if you want to be Little Richard, try shout-singing a B
flat above middle C over and over at repeated gigs. His vocal style is often
copied but rarely achieved. Little Richard belongs to a nebulous of R and B
shouters from his era, and it’s said he met a young James Brown.
Enough about the backstory. Today I want to get into Little
Richard’s fashion sense—and most specifically the fashion sense of his band. They
were miles ahead of their time, and not just because Charles Connor tightened
up the live show like a locomotive train that should have exploded four songs
ago. They wore makeup on stage, something that just wasn’t done by male
performers in this era. While The Upsetters, as Richard’s band was known early
on, generally donned matching suits for the live gig (and dig those suits by the way), it was their makeup that
flouted conventions of the time and paved a way for musicians to come for
decades. And an important element of this style was its very use in terms of
bypassing standard norms for Black artists of the period. Often, good fashion
is more than just about looking good—it can also be an immediate way of making
direct political gestures. With Little Richard at the helm, not only did they
sound good and look good, they also said good things. Rock and roll doesn’t
always have to overtly assert a political stance or feeling for it to be
political. Working in the 1950s as a Black performer, Little Richard faced many
limitations as to what would lead him to break through and become heard by
mainstream ears. The Upsetters, with their coordinated dance moves for the live
show and subtle but noticeable makeup, treaded the line between sheer enjoyment and
breaking down walls with ample grace, and it is, all in all, to be coveted.
Countless other musicians not only copied The Upsetters in sound, they copied
them in style too. It seems that being the “architect of rock and roll” comes with
style in the blueprints.
