Little Richard plays his greatest hits live.

For me, (Little) Richard Penniman has always been one of the most iconic rock and rollers of the Fifties, along with Chuck Berry, not so much Elvis Presley, because he, like Fats Domino too but more frenetically, represented the transition, or acceptance, of R & B and blues styles to rock and roll without much of a change in the music.

Little Richard came from pounding piano led R & B with gospel roots and infusion, and a big beat, and he didn’t have to change anything much to fit right in. in that sense, inasmuch as Elvis Presley combined the more sedate blues of Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup with country influences and amped up the energy levels to create his vision of rock and roll, echoes by so many rockabilly bands, one can argue that rock and roll was also no more than R & B renamed for a White American audience.

Anyhow, Little Richard screamed and hollered “A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom” and pounded the piano,  which took his career from being a R & B prodigy, but probably doomed to the chitlin’ circuit,  to the national and international stage. His “greatest hits’ collections are all very familiar to rock and roll aficionados.

Somewhere between probably 1979 and 1981 I bought an LP called Little Richard’s Greatest Hits Live, mostly because it was very cheap. The tracks were recorded at the Okeh (Okay?) Club, wherever that  might have been, but there was no information on the date of the recordings or the backing musicians. It’s only because the MC who introduces Little Richard mentions the name of the club that I got that much information.

The quality of the vinyl deteriorated quite quickly and the snap, crackle, hiss and pop detracted from the listening experience, which meant that I never taped the record, as was my habit with most of my record collection and played the album less and less. I gave my record collection away about 10 years ago, in late 2009 or early 2010, and  the LP is long gone, and I’d kind of forgotten about it until, while doing an idle search on Little Richard’s hits on Apple Music the other day, it came up as a suggestion, along with compilations of the  studio versions of the hits, and even some re-recorded versions.

Over the years I’d replicated the record collection with CD versions of the records, and more recently, with digital copies from Apple Music, but this Little Richard collection just never came to mind at all.

My guess always was that the tracks were recorded in the mid-Sixties, possibly with Little Richard’s standard touring band, but he might have followed the Chuck Berry route and played with a house band because his tunes were so well-known and ingrained in the rock and roll vernacular that many musicians knew them, or could pick them up quickly enough to provide the backing.

Today, after looking at the Wikipedia Little Richard discography, I’ve learnt that the performance was recorded in 1967 at the CBS Studios in Hollywood, and that the “Okeh Club” referred to, was the Okeh record label to which Little Richard was contracted at the time. It does sound as if there were an audience in front of Little Richard as he played, going by some of the apparent ad libs, but even in those days it was not unknown for audience response to be dubbed onto the studio tapes.

I now know who the musicians were:  Little Richard (vocals, piano), Billy Preston (organ), Eddie Fletcher (bass), Glenn Willings (guitar) and Johnny “Guitar” Watson (guitar.) the drummer is unknown; no records were kept by Okeh. There is also an unidentified horn section.

Billy Preston was a session musician who played with the Beatles and George Harrison and then had a briefly successful solo career in die Seventies. Johnny “Guitar” Watson was a bluesman in the Fifties who had a career revival as a funk artist in the Seventies.

It seems, therefore, that the performance was either live in the studio for an invited audience or the “live” element and ambience were tacked onto studio recordings  to fake a gig.

The album I bought was not, if memory serves, on the Okeh label at all and must’ve been licenced to another, budget re-issue label, or perhaps to the South African outlet of Okeh Records’ parent label. The photograph of Little Richard on the front cover is the same on the original LP, as the CD re-issue and as on the download, but the graphics, as I recollect them, are different.

The performances are energetic and loud, with a hot band and classic screaming Little Richard giving it his all. One has the sense that, as was eventually the case with all the rock and roll stars of the Fifties, Little Richard performed the same sets over and over because his audiences wanted to hear the hits, not any new material he might have recorded.

More than stars from any other era, it seems that the rock and rollers struggled to continue successful recording careers into the Sixties and Seventies, when they were, after, still relatively young. Most of the big rock stars of the Sixties and Seventies kept on recording, for better or worse,  through the decades beyond, even if these more mature recordings are never going to be held in the high regard as the records of the first decade or so of their careers.

With rock and roll stars, the audience appears simply to want to hear the first hits, and it seems that the record companies might have seen it that way too and didn’t care to support the Fifties stars in whatever ambition they might have had to move beyond the hits of their breakthrough years. Of course, there were exceptions. Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich pursued careers in country music, leaving behind the R & B component of rock and roll, and concentrating on the country element. Conceivably, Little Richard’s new focus would have been on soul music because it had the gospel element Richard’s rock and roll had.

At the Okeh Club (which Little Richard commends as if it were real) the tunes are indeed some of Richard’s great hits and he sure sounds as if he’s putting heart and soul into them, hoary as they might have been by them. But for me the standout tracks were the ones I didn’t know that well, like “Send Me Some Loving,”  “True Fine Mama,”  “Get Down With It” (which I always wondered whether Slade covered it), “Anyway You Want Me” and “You Gotta Feel it,” all of which sound less like rock and roll than bluesy soul, as suited to Little Richard’s vocal style as the raucous rock and roll of, say, “Tutti Frutti.”

Listening to this album, after such a long time, was a let-down in that it does somewhat like a contractually necessitated re-tread of past glories, with some forced-sounding showbiz  histrionics from Richard that are supposedly ad libs come across as schtick. Little Richard entertains as if he has a Las Vegas residency, like Fats  Domino, and must please the paying audience who came to see the wild man of rock and roll.

As a live performance album the record is great; both Richard and band play well and strongly. The weak part, ironically, is that it’s a collection of old favourites done quite straightforwardly and almost perfunctory. Richard doesn’t stretch out the tunes, he doesn’t improvise, he doesn’t  bring anything new to the songs and, apart from being for a different label with a new performance royalty stream, there seems to be no point in re-recording the old hits and one almost wants to revisit those original versions for the pureness of first phase rock and roll.

It’s not a bad party album but it’s not an essential album other than as an example of how these songs were being played in the mid-Sixties.