Reflections on ... Little Richard: I am Everything (2023)

 

I finally watched the 2023 documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything. (It's streaming on Amazon Prime). Director Lisa Cortés succeeds in making it feel cinematic, and the archival performance footage of Richard in his prime alone is worthwhile. The best “talking head” contributors are Richard’s late exotic dancer girlfriend Lee Angel and pioneering transgender nightclub entertainer Sir Lady Java - and John Waters, of course! (Waters recalls he used to shoplift Richard’s records as a kid, and that his signature pencil-line mustache is a direct “twisted tribute”). By comparison, big name guests like Mick Jagger and Tom Jones mostly offer show biz platitudes (and Billy Porter is self-aggrandizing). 

One thing it accomplishes nicely: so often hidebound rock critics and filmmakers get hung up on "who influenced who" which descends into "who ripped off who" as if it’s always a negative thing. It's common knowledge that when “the Georgia Peach” was just starting out as a performer without his persona cemented, two flaming queer Black male rhythm and blues musicians - Billy Wright and Esquerita - inspired his musical approach and appearance (the towering, processed conk, thick make-up and mustache). As one of the talking heads savvily argues, Richard didn’t “steal” from them: rather, they provided a mirror for Richard to see his true self. 

Similarly, Cortés gives Ike Turner his due. A musical expert notes that Richard's piano playing was beholden to Turner’s, something Richard admitted (he raved about the impact of hearing "Rocket 88", the 1951 Kings of Rhythm track widely considered the first-ever rock'n'roll single). Yes, Ike was a monster to Tina, but his trailblazing musical genius must be acknowledged. 

Also: I am Everything zeroes in on Richard’s commercial eclipse. Various theories are offered: all the acclaim went to Elvis. Richard was simply so black and queer that he threatened the musical establishment. And, of course, he kept jettisoning rock’n’roll to record gospel music instead. But ultimately, as someone clarifies, in the fifties, Richard’s primary audience was teenagers – the ficklest audience of all! By the early sixties, they’d simply moved on to the next big thing. 

The finale where Cortés demonstrates Richard’s effect on modern pop culture with a montage presumably meant to represent his spiritual descendants (Cher! Harry Styles! Lady GaGa! Lizzo!) is misbegotten. Are we meant to think anyone who ever wore sequins owes Little Richard a debt? (At least the inclusion of Lil Nas X - a modern flamboyant Black male performer - is apt). Richard was instilled with a sense of shame and guilt as a child, and throughout his life alternated between extreme hedonism and extreme fundamentalist Christianity. Sadly, as one commentator argues, Richard set a great liberating example for other people but rarely truly enjoyed that liberation himself.

Reflections on ... Little Richard's Obituaries

Some random reflections on Bronze Liberace and all-round Flaming Creature Little Richard (born Richard Penniman, 1932 - 2020) after a week of sifting through the deluge of online tributes and obituaries. Some trends I noticed: a fixation with trying to pinpoint who the majestic Georgia Peach influenced rather than evaluating him as an artist in his own right.  The stale pale male hetero baby boomer guardians of hidebound rock history consistently gave the weird back-handed compliment that “without Little Richard, there would be no Beatles and / or Bob Dylan”, as if Richard’s greatest contribution or achievement was to beget those honkies. Younger writers (I try to never use the expression “millennials”, especially not as an insult) get similarly befuddled when trying to contextualize Richard’s legacy. For them, he’s primarily notable for influencing modern singers like Lizzo, Janelle Monáe, Lady GaGa … and Bjork?!

I haven’t seen a single reference to the late, great pioneering transsexual soul diva Jackie Shayne (1940 – 2019), who I’d argue is one of Richard’s spiritual heirs. (The outrageous and regal Shayne looked and sounded like a hybrid of Little Richard and Eartha Kitt). Or, for that matter, bold soul sister Tina Turner. The relationship between Richard and the turbulent Turners is under-documented. Richard freely admitted that hearing “Rocket 88” by Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm in 1951 “made my big toe shoot up in my boot” and profoundly fired his own musical imagination.  (He “borrowed” the piano intro to “Rocket 88” for his own “Good Golly, Miss Molly”). Ike Turner and Richard were life-long friends (Richard wrote the introduction to Ike’s 1999 memoirs Takin’ Back My Name and delivered a eulogy at Ike’s funeral in 2007). And – let’s face it – the two men shared a cocaine habit in the seventies. The details are vague, but intriguingly, Richard claimed that when young unknown Anna Mae Bullock first joined Ike’s band, Ike begged him to instruct the novice how to sing. “Ike came and asked me to teach her. He asked me, “How would you sing this song?” And when I sang, he would tell Tina, “Now that’s what I want you to do.” But when she [Tina] talks today, she never mentions my name.”” (Having read both of Tina’s autobiographies, he’s right. Tina mentions the personal significance of LaVern Baker, Sister Rosetta Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Otis Redding and James Brown on her singing - but entirely snubs Richard). So, in theory, it could be argued, without Little Richard, there would be no Tina Turner (or at least not the raw, unabashedly sensual lioness Tina Turner we now know and love).  

/ The tempestuous Ike and Tina Turner in the early days /

In fact, for mainstream white straight writers there’s been little attempt to analyze Richard’s musical output or persona outside of the prism of white rock’n’roll or to understand the flamboyant black urban “chitlin’ circuit” rhythm and blues milieu of strippers, drag queens and minstrel shows he emerged from. Tavia Nyong’o’s piece in The Guardian is exemplary for locating him in this context. Richard didn’t invent the wheel or emerge from nowhere. As Nyong’o argues, by the forties – when the teenaged drag queen Richard was performing in travelling minstrel revues under the name Princess Lavonne - there was already a vibrant “black sexual underground” of “freakish men” (this, Nyong’o notes, was how “the black speech of the period named gender-non-conforming males” and not necessarily a pejorative). Richard had no shortage of positive role models to emulate here. There was Richard’s complicated relationship with wild man mentor, friend and lookalike Esquerita (aka Eskew Reeder Jr, 1935 - 1986).  There was "Hip Shakin' Mama" Patsy Vidalia (1921 - 1982), the “femme impersonator” entertainer and emcee of New Orleans night club The Dew Drop Inn, where Richard performed. There was queer R&B singer Billy Wright (1932 - 1991), who encouraged Richard to adopt his own signature dandified style of thick pancake make-up, pencil-line mustache and processed pompadour “conk” hairstyle. In these circles, no one would have batted an eye over Richard’s songs “Lucille” (about a drag queen) and “Tutti Frutti” (a paean to the joys of anal sex). Maybe Richard’s gift to the world was to introduce aspects of this debauched queen-y subculture above ground into white popular culture, thus loosening it up? Provocatively, Nyong’o asserts that white rock critics have consistently dismissed and misunderstood Richard’s gospel records as “inferior” to his rock’n’roll work. Maybe it’s time for those to be reappraised?

/ Below: the enigmatic Esquerita /

/  File Under Sacred Listening: The King of the Gospel Singers (1962) /

In his New York Times opinion piece “Little Richard’s Queer Triumph”, Myles E Johnson vividly evokes Richard in concert in Paris in 1966. At a climactic moment he strips-off his sweat-drenched shirt and hurls it into the crowd. Regardless of gender, everyone there would have fought each other for this sacred artifact, “For those in the audience, it must have been fantastical to see, and a deeply erotic thing to witness. To think, in 1966, a black queer man - over the course of his life he would identify himself as gay, bisexual and “omnisexual” - could be a sex god. He was a symbol of brazen sensuality, three years before Jimi Hendrix would use his tongue and guitar to catapult a nation beyond their prudish sensibilities at Woodstock.”

I also loved David Remnick’s testimonial in The New Yorker. Summarizing Richard’s frenzied musical attack in the fifties, Remnick concludes “he is a human thrill ride.” How succinct is that? He’s also eloquent on Richard’s lifelong, agonizingly painful conflict between his sexuality and his fundamentalist Christianity. Some gay fans find it impossible to forgive the ailing Richard’s disillusioningly homophobic 2017 interview in which he disparages his past and his homosexuality. But walk a mile in Little Richard’s shoes. This was, Remnick reminds us, the kid whose father kicked him out of the family home aged 13 for his effeminacy and who grew up marginalized and bullied (“The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.”). “It seemed evident that Little Richard both thrived on his sexuality but suffered terribly from the time that he had been cast out of his own home as a boy. Despite the flamboyance of his performances and his carriage, he never quite settled, publicly, on a sexual identity. Sometimes, he would say he was gay, sometimes bisexual, sometimes “omnisexual”; there were moments, feeling the weight of his religious background, when he even denounced homosexuality.”

Unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s cult filmmaker and The People’s Pervert John Waters - always voluble about his worship for Little Richard - who says it best. “He was the first punk,” he exclaimed to Rolling Stone. “He was the first everything … to me, he was always a great figure of rebellion and sexual confusion. People didn’t talk about him being gay or anything. I don’t know if he was beyond that because he was so scary. They didn’t even know what he was. He was a Martian more than being gay. It was like he was from another planet.” Maybe that’s Little Richard’s crowning accomplishment. In real terms, his musical heyday was brief. But he defiantly let his freak flag fly and gave others the freedom to follow his example. All hail the queen! We'll never see his like again.

/ Little Richard looked exceptionally beautiful on this day /

/ Below: my boyfriend Pal's tribute to Little Richard. T-shirt via Printers Unknown / 

Further reading:

My account of seeing Little Richard give one of his final public performances at Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender in 2013. 

Lobotomy Room at Fontaine's DJ Set List 24 November 2017

From the Facebook events page:

Attention late night diversion seekers! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! Friday 24 November 2017!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Grainy black-and-white vintage erotica projected on the big screen all night for your adult viewing pleasure!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

It’s sleazy. It’s grubby. It’s trashy - you’ll love it!

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

Not that there's been a public outcry, but I’m trying to ease my way back into blogging regularly again after a lengthy hiatus. Stopping certainly wasn’t by choice! I’ve never stopped jotting-down my Lobotomy Room set lists from behind the Bamboo Lounge's DJ booth – I’ve just never got around to posting them. There have been a few calamities preventing me in recent months. At first the main issue was damned Photobucket. For the first several years of this blog (when I was at my most prolific), I used the photo-sharing website Photobucket to upload pics. If you’re a millennial or non-blogger, you might well have never even heard of Photobucket. They were an obligatory site in the Myspace era! Trust me, I now wish I'd never heard of Photobucket either. Plenty of people still use it for blogging or sharing photos on sites like Amazon and eBay. At first Photobucket was free to use. Later I used to pay an annual fee of something like $39.00 for the privilege. In summer 2017 Photobucket committed reputation-destroying corporate hara-kiri by abruptly notifying its users (it claims to have 100 million of them) by email that their online photo libraries would be held to ransom unless they signed-up for their new package of almost $400 a year! All over the internet, blogs suddenly had blank black squares where photos used to be. It led to a tsunami of negative press for Photobucket and was a PR disaster! Photobucket customer support confirmed to me my existing package was in place (and my blog posts would remain secure) until March 2018, which gave me a deadline to work toward. There was no way I was agreeing to the frankly ludicrous $399.99 a year package, so in the meantime my ambitious and time-consuming art project was to comb through several years’ worth of old blog posts and manually, painstakingly replace Photobucket html links with actual photos one by one. It took months – but I did it! Phew! But that meant for a long time, my priority was fixing old blog entries rather than posting new ones.

Hair hoppers are welcome – at Lobotomy Room!

More disastrously – on 17 November I was burgled! I’ve been living in the same building for about nine years now and the front door lock has always been an issue. For the lock to click shut you have to slam the door hard and most of the other tenants seemed blissfully unconcerned! (Living on the ground floor, I was always aware I was at greater risk of being burgled than them). I’ve complained about it to the landlord over the years. More recently the landlord has been undertaking repairs in the hallway to fix a damp problem and the walls had been stripped back to the exposed brick. In one corner close to my flat it was further stripped to just a panel of thin wood (where the original door used to be). It was a very opportunistic moment for burglars while that was going on. The robbers were able to gain entry to the building (probably because the front door hadn’t been shut properly) and then literally kick a hole in the hallway wall, push the wardrobe out of the way and crawl into my flat! When I got home from work that night there was a gaping hole in the wall, my door was wide open, the lights were on and the place had been completely ransacked.

/ Goodbye, every single hat I've ever owned /

The thieves took my laptop and iPad which is bad enough. I don’t have home insurance and my day job in the charity sector is - shall we say - modestly paid, so replacing these (especially so close to Christmas) is a totally unexpected drain on the finances. I’ve written off the iPad but I can’t function without a laptop so I have had to cough up well over £600 for that. I lost all the contents on the old laptop (documents, photos, music), but that’s not the end of the world. What’s most gutting is the robbers also stole a dark grey Muji weekend bag from the top of the wardrobe – that contained my entire collection of vintage and reproduction hats. I don’t even think they really intended to steal them: they probably just wanted something to stuff the iPad and the laptop into.  My vintage fez, my Scorpio Rising biker cap, my white leopard print fur flat cap … all gone! This is all American stuff I picked up over the years during trips to Las Vegas (for the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender) and San Francisco. Even the reproduction items are now so old they're discontinued and every bit as irreplaceable as the genuine vintage pieces. (I immediately contacted My Baby Jo in California about replacing my biker cap. The company that used to manufacture them has gone bust! ). So at the moment I’m still waking up angry every day, alternating between rage and depression and genuinely grieving for my stolen stuff! Yes, it is "only stuff" but it does feel like a major loss. I had to DJ bare-headed at this Lobotomy Room, which just felt wrong! But yes - I feel pretty despairing at the moment. 

Yikes! What a downer. OK let’s change the subject. This Lobotomy Room was particularly tough in terms of competing events happening on the same night. Dirty Water Records presented King Salami and The Cumberland 3 with Los Coyote Men at The Lexington– an absolutely killer garage punk / surf instrumental double bill that even I would have been tempted to attend! How unlucky! More annoyingly (and a bit suspiciously), a Cramps tribute event called Bad Music for Bad People was held at Paper Dress Vintage (the venue where Lobotomy Room got its start in 2013). That was especially galling considering I’ve been doing Lobotomy Room at Fontaine’s every last Friday of the month now since summer 2015, regularly billing it as a night of “Bad Music for Bad People” and “Songs The Cramps Taught Us!” And they even projected “vintage b-movies”! It’s not even like 24 November represented something significant like the birth of Lux Interior or the anniversary of his death. And it did siphon-off some of my usual crowd! But having said that, some of the Paper Dress Vintage attendees did wind up at my night afterwards (they said it finished by about 11 pm. The reports I heard the next day made it sound fairly tepid). Luckily in the end enough people descended into the Bamboo Lounge to make doing this Lobotomy Room worthwhile – and most importantly, people danced!

/ “The violence that was normally only a promise (or threat) in rock'n’roll was realized in Esquerita’s sound.” Charles Gillett in his book The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock‘n’Roll  /

Some eternal Lobotomy Room favourites celebrated birthdays in November. Such as the flamboyant, pompadoured "kween" of outsider rhythm and blues Esquerita (aka Eskew Reeder Jr, born in Greenville, South Carolina on 20 November 1935. He died in 1986). Esquerita was such a beauty! I made a point of playing “Esquerita and The Voola” – which sounds like he’s shrieking a lunatic voodoo incantation. It's an invitation to human sacrifice!

Meanwhile, glorious Bold Soul Sister, blissed-out and fright-wigged Acid Queen and the absolute tigress of rhythm and blues Tina Turner (née Anna Mae Bullock) turned 78 on 26 November. (Above is the fabulous Tina ripping it up onstage with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in the seventies). I can’t imagine not playing a frantic 1960s Ike and Tina Turner rave-up at Lobotomy Room, but I also threw in Tina’s solo 1975 cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” Does anyone not like Tina Turner? At one point a friendly and garrulous woman with a cocktail in her hand joined me behind the DJ booth and started flicking through my DJ bag. She asked, “Do you mind me doing this?” I smiled and said "No" but of course I did! That’s a real liberty! All DJs hate that, and she was getting in my way. My solution was to say, “I’m going to play some Tina Turner for you. You should dance to this!” And she did! Problem solved! Thank you, Ms Turner!

Anyway, here's what I played:

Tall Cool One - The Fabulous Wailers
Drumble - Dennis and The Menaces
Blockade - The Rumblers
Road Runner - The 5,6,7,8s
Jukebox Babe - Alan Vega
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
I Don't Need You No More - The Rumblers
Johnny Lee - Faye Adams
Commanche - The Revels
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
I Need Your Lovin' - Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford
Bombora - The Original Surfaris
Rock-A-Bop - Sparkle Moore
Wild Wild Party - Charlie Feathers
Let's Have a Party - Wanda Jackson
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
Bop Pills - Macy "Skip" Skipper
Wiped-Out - The Escorts
Let's Go Baby - Billy Eldridge
Big Bounce - Shirley Caddell
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Beat Party - Ritchie and The Squires
Adult Books - X
Intoxica - The Revels
Wipe Out - The Surfaris
Batman - Link Wray and His Raymen
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Shortnin' Bread - The Readymen
Surfin' Bird - The Trashmen
Pedro Pistolas Twist - Los Twisters
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Viens danser le twist - Johnny Hallyday
Ultra Twist - The Cramps
Twistin' the Night Away - Divine
Gostaria de Saber (River Deep, Mountain High) - Wanderlea
Under My Thumb - Tina Turner
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
These Boots Are Made for Walkin' - Mrs Miller
Last of the Secret Agents - Nancy Sinatra
Dance with Me Henry - Ann-Margret
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Somethin' Else - Sid Vicious
Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby - The Earls of Suave
Be Bop a Lula - Alan Vega
Margaya - The Fender Four
Blitzkrieg Bop - The Ramonetures
Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice - The Monks
Year 1 - X
Forming - The Germs
Tunnel of Love - Wanda Jackson
Aphrodisiac - Bow Wow Wow
Viva Las Vegas - Nina Hagen
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Surf Rat - The Rumblers
Love Me - The Phantom
Scorpio - The Carnations
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Vampira - The Misfits
Boss - The Rumblers

Further reading:

Follow me on tumblr for all your kitsch, camp, retro vintage sleaze and fifties homoerotica needs!

Follow me on twitter!

"Like" and follow the official Lobotomy Room page on Facebook if you dare! 

Remember: Lobotomy Room the incredibly strange dance club is the last Friday of every accursed month! Therefore the next one is Friday 29 December (come head-bang away your post-Christmas blues!). The film club is third Wednesday of every month. BBC2 is finally screening the sublime series Feud: Bette and Joan as of Saturday 16 December. Therefore Lobotomy Room is jumping on the bandwagon (I mean, embracing the spirit!) with a themed mini-season of "hagsploitation" horror films starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis - starting on 20 December with the mutha of them all, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Details to follow soon!

15 April 2015 Cockabilly DJ Set List

As promised / threatened on Facebook:

"Drag a comb through your quiff, swallow a fistful of bop pills and rock around the cock – at COCKABILLY! 

COCKABILLY returns to the louche surroundings of The George & Dragon in Shoreditch this Wednesday night (15 April 2015)! Gay greasers, leather boys, cry-babies, prison wives and juvenile delinquents of all ages are welcome at Cockabilly - London’s only regular queer rockabilly night! With DJ Mal Practice and I spinning all your favourite rancid vintage sleaze classicks! FREE admission. 8 - Midnight."

/ Esquerita (1935-1986) - the human face of Cockabilly /

This post will be another quickie. Much as I want to document the most recent Cockabilly, I got back from my American misadventures on 11 April (I went to the annual Viva Las Vegas rockabilly weekender – first time since 2013 – followed by a few days bar-hopping in decadent New Orleans) and devoting an epic tell-all blog to that soon while the putrid details are still relatively fresh in my addled mind is top priority.

Happily, this was one of the best Cockabilles in ages. I had friends in attendance (Pal and Christopher) and no one behind the bar gestured to Mal and I to turn the volume down once all night. (Trust me – there is no greater buzz kill for a DJ!). It definitely made for a more liberating and raucous atmosphere. (Well, that and copious beer).

/ "Blacky" as captured by the great homoerotic Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger. Zurich 1962 /

Musically in my tight and succinct hour-long set I whipped together greasy rhythm and blues, frenzied rockabilly white trash rockers, some twisted atomic-era kitsch pop inspired by Kenneth Anger and David Lynch soundtracks (“I've Told Every Little Star” unforgettably features in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive), then brought things to a punk-y conclusion. (The Bobby Bare track was my tribute to 1950s horror movie hostess Maila Nurmi (1922 - 2008) - I bought not one but two Vampira t-shirts in Las Vegas!). 

My best new recent discovery (via my friend Kevin in New Orleans) is The Ramonetures, who do tough, twang-y instrumental surf versions of punk songs by The Ramones and X. (The Ramonetures aren't new: their debut Ramones cover album came out in 2000 and their X-related follow-up Johnny Walk Don’t Run Pauline in 2001 – but they’re new to me! And destined to become a staple in my sets). 

/ Adorable young Etta James - bad girl of rhythm and blues /

Let's Go, Baby - Billy Eldridge
Your Phone's off the Hook - The Ramonetures
Vampira - Bobby Bare
Beat Girl - ZZ en De Maskers
Beat Generation - Mamie Van Doren
Believe What You Say - Ricky Nelson
Killer - Sparkle Moore ("screaming" version)
Woo-hoo - The Rock-A-Teens
Red Hot Car - Bobby Verne
Train to Nowhere - The Champs
The Flirt - Shirley and Lee
Welfare Cheese - Emanuel Laskey
Party Lights - Claudine Clark
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
Maybe Baby - Esquerita
Rip It Up - Little Richard
Little Darlin' - Masaaki Hirao
I Will Follow Him - Little Peggy March
How Much Love Can One Heart Hold? Joe Perkins and The Rookies
I've Told Every Little Star - Linda Scott
Roll with Me, Henry - Etta James
Hearts Made of Stone - Rudy Gray
Wiped Out - The Escorts
Action Packed - Ronnie Dee
Whistle Bait - The Collins Kids
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Blitzkrieg Bop - The Ramonetures
What's Inside a Girl? The Cramps

Further reading:

Read about the sordid antics at previous Cockabillies here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, here, here and here.

Follow me on tumblr for all your retro, kitsch and homoerotic vintage sleaze needs! 

If you like this kind of thing (and who doesn't?): see a treasure trove of sexy 1950s biker imagery redolent of Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising or Marlon Brando in The Wild One here. The jeans, biker caps, engineer boots and leather jackets are to die for!

22 September 2010 Dr Sketchy Set List

/ Esquerita at the height of his beauty. I only wish I'd been there to light his cigarette for him /
This time as well as the usual ass-shaking vintage sleaze I incorporated some calypso (Robert Mitchum and Mamie van Doren singing calypso = kitsch heaven), latin exotica, doo wop, rhythm and blues and more rockabilly than usual. Obviously I try to take my musical cues from the costumes the models are wearing and the poses they strike. For example, when Peekaboo Pointe posed wearing black sparkly cat’s ears, I went with a feline vibe (i.e. “Sweet Little Pussycat” by Andre Williams, “The Pussycat Song” by Connie Vannett – a song whose single entendre lyrics are so blue the audience always starts tittering). More of a challenge was Bomb Voyage who wore a blood-splattered corset and a nurse’s hat – tricky to know what to do with that! That’s why midway down my set list it suddenly takes on a bit of a morbid horror theme.
Vírgenes del Sol - Yma Sumac
Eso - Conjunto TNT
Oink Oink Mambo - Chuy Reyes & His Orchestra
Thunderbird - The Casualaires
No Good Lover - Mickey & Sylvia
Jelly Roll Rock - Walter Brown & His Band
Beauty is Only Skin Deep - Robert Mitchum
Go Calypso - Mamie van Doren
Intoxica - The Centurions
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Night Scene - The Rumblers
Tight Skirt, Tight Sweater - The Versatones
Near You - Marlene Dietrich
Like Young - Dave Pell
Dancing on the Ceiling - Chet Baker
Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer - Nina Simone
Maybe Baby - Esquerita
I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent - Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers
The Flirt - Shirley & Lee
Vesuvius - The Revels
Daddy Daddy - Ella Mae Morse
The Whip - The Frantics
Crawfish - Johnny Thunders & Patti Paladin
Blue Moon Baby - Dave Diddle Day
Cyclone Bop - Bill Black Combo
Life is But a Dream - The Harptones
Bye Bye Young Men - Ruth Brown
I'll Upset You, Baby - Lula Reed
Hump-A-Baby - Little Ritchie Ray
Blockade - The Rumblers
Jim Dandy - Ann-Margret
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Anytime - Bill Black Combo
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
Pussycat Song - Connie Vannett
Aged and Mellow - Little Esther
Make Love to Me - June Christy
Shangri-La - Spike Jones New Band
Do It Again - Eartha Kitt
Lazy - Marilyn Monroe
Caravan - John Buzon Trio
Frankie and Johnny - Mae West
Stagger Lee - Lloyd Price
I Was Born to Cry - Dion
You'd Better Stop - LaVerne Baker
Kiss Me Honey Honey - The Delmonas
Jungle Drums - Earl Bostic
Wo Ist Der Mann? - Jayne Mansfield
Bloodshot - The String Kings
The Strangeness in Me - The Runabouts
She's My Witch - Kip Tyler
I'd Rather Be Burned as a Witch - Eartha Kitt
Sinners - Freddie & The Hitchhikers
Werewolf - The Frantics
Black Tarantula - Jody Reynolds
Give Me a Woman - Andy Starr
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
Yogi - Bill Black Combo
Boss - The Rumblers
8 Ball - The Hustlers
The Stripper - John Barry (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Mack the Knife - Bill Black Combo
C'est Si Bon - Ann-Margret
Love for Sale - Hildegard Knef
Pop Slop - Bela Sanders und Sein Orchester
One, Two, Let's Rock - Sugar Pie & Pee Wee
Eager Beaver Baby - Johnny Burnette
Rip It Up - Little Richard
Pink Champagne - The Tyrones

I can’t imagine DJ’ing and not playing at least one track by the late, great Esquerita – an endless source of fascination and inspiration for me. Little Richard may be the Queen of Rock'n'Roll, but Esquerita (his chief influence) comes close. I played “Esquerita and the Voola” while Bomb Voyage and Peekaboo Pointe posed together – with Esquerita’s knuckle-pounding off-key piano and blood-curdling whooping, it sounds like the soundtrack to a voodoo ceremony. Read about the demented genius and tragic life of Esquerita on this excellent blog.

Another heroine (and one I had the chance to meet before she died): sex kitten deluxe Eartha Kitt. "Do It Again" tends to be perceived as one of Marilyn Monroe's musical signatures, but I love Eartha's sensual, purring rendition. Check out her singing it on a 1962 television special -- her constant smouldering eye contact is mesmerising.



Keep up with upcoming Dr Sketchy's here.