Heaven Is a Playlist, Track 1: Little Richard, “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me”

Hey, everybody: Today begins what I intend to be a long-running series on the songs I think about the most. They’re not necessarily my FAVORITE songs — that’s a different list. These are the songs I obsess over, the songs that have come to mean something to me beyond the notes and the words. They’re the songs that move me in ways I don’t fully understand — sometimes, when I listen to one of them, I’ll start crying for no apparent reason. But then, when it’s over, I’ll want to hear it again.

The title for the series is lifted from the great Rick Telander book “Heaven Is a Playground” about street basketball in New York City in the ’70s. Everybody has their own personal version of heaven. Mine would be one where I could listen to an endless loop of these songs.

I should say out front that I’m not a music scholar — the stories here are to the best of my knowledge through my research. Feel free to let me know with corrections or context. I’m also not going to put a lot of links in these pieces — I hope you read the story through, then maybe go check out some of the songs and artists I mention along the way. I’ve created a Spotify playlist to collect the songs as I write about them. Of course there’s only one song on there right now. But I plan to add many more.

*****

It’s 25 years ago, at least, and I’m driving through small-town South Carolina. Every weekend back then I’d go to the record store and come out with an armload of CDs. Some of them were the newest stuff I heard on the radio or saw on MTV. The rest was to fill out my musical education. Every time I went on a road trip, I’d throw a few in the car.

Part of the stack this time around was a Little Richard greatest-hits CD.

It was put out by Motown, even though he never recorded for Motown — they licensed it from one of his old labels that fell on hard times. I knew the first eight or nine tracks, the songs that just about everybody knows, the red blood cells of rock ‘n’ roll — “Lucille,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Long Tall Sally.”

The back half of the CD was songs I hadn’t heard, mostly for good reason. But then it got to track 13. I happened to be coming into a town just as the song started. I listened to most of it over the span of a couple of red lights. And it hit me so hard I pulled into the parking lot of a Family Dollar to catch my breath.

I later found out that the song — like all the tracks on the CD — had been part of recording sessions he did in 1964 and ’65. In the 15 years before that, Little Richard had failed as a blues singer; went back home to Macon, Georgia, to wash dishes for a living; gave music another shot and basically invented rock ‘n’ roll; quit at the height of stardom to sing gospel and become an evangelist; switched back to keep from being upstaged by Sam Cooke on a concert tour; headlined a different tour with the Beatles as his opening act; and disappeared from the charts so completely that he was re-recording his old hits, hoping somebody would remember. That’s six semicolons worth of switchbacks, and it’s still oversimplifying things. Anything anybody could write about Little Richard is oversimplifying things.

Artists borrow or steal or recycle all the time, but Little Richard was burgled more than most. The history of rock ‘n’ roll is built from his spare parts. Some of it is direct and specific: the guitar riff in “Oh, Pretty Woman” came from the bass line in “Lucille,” and the drum lick that opens Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” is lifted from “Keep a Knockin’.” Most of it is the vibe, the clothes, the hair, the sweat, the dance across the boundaries of gender and sex. Without Little Richard there’d be no Elton John, no Bowie, no Prince, not the way we know them.

The thing about Little Richard, as great as he was, is that he never let you forget he was giving a performance. The piano frills, the falsetto woooooo!-s, even his schtick when he did interviews, cracking a joke and waiting for the laugh and then glaring at the audience in mock outrage and hollering “Shut up!”

It was a fantastic act. But he never quite created that suspension of disbelief, that moment in a book or a movie or a song when it transmutes from entertainment to something that strikes bone, as deep and real as anything you can touch.

That’s hard to do in any art, and especially hard in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, which was mostly about sex and cars and dancing. The deeper, more adult emotions didn’t fit the music yet. The Beatles and Stones and Dylan were starting to change that, but in 1964, when Little Richard was trying to get back in the game, that depth belonged to country music, and especially soul music. Little Richard had never really been that type of singer.

One of his famous sayings was “I’m not conceited…” long pause … “I’m convinced.” It’s a great line, and he got a lot of mileage out of it. But it’s the kind of thing somebody says when they’re not convinced. Gay, straight, black, white, rock, gospel, funny, furious — Little Richard was a little bit of everything, as wide as the Nile. But when you spread that wide, it’s hard to go deep.

Sometime in early 1965, with all that life already behind him, he sat down in a studio in New York City to record “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me.”

*****

Good Lord, what a band on this record. The drummer was Bernard Purdie, who played with everybody from Aretha to Steely Dan, and invented a lick so widely copied they call it the Purdie Shuffle. The organist was Billy Preston, who later played with the Beatles and had five top-5 hits as a solo act. The guitar player was a young guy who at the time called himself Maurice James. Later he would go out on his own under his real name: Jimi Hendrix.

The songwriter, Don Covay, was also around. Covay had once been Richard’s chauffeur, and later built a modest career as an R&B singer, but his best work was as a songwriter — he wrote two of Aretha’s biggest hits, “Chain of Fools” and “See Saw.” “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got” is a straight-up Memphis ballad, something Otis Redding would’ve sung.

Hendrix kicks it off with a short guitar lick and the song eases in slowly, carried on a bed of horns. When the vocal comes in, if you didn’t know it was a Little Richard record, you might not guess it was him. He’s not rushing through the words, not shouting so loud he throws the mic into overdrive. He’s singing to a lover. He’s stretching out the words, begging for relief.

The target of his pleas isn’t much to look at, and doesn’t have any money. But this mean, ugly, broke lover has hooked Richard so deep that he sings down in the low end of his range, letting Covay float over the top in high harmony. It’s all beautifully put together. You can the couples slow-dancing to it in a sweaty club somewhere.

Then, a couple of verses in, Richard starts to preach. And all of a sudden Little Richard the entertainer is back.

Baby, baby, baby, I feel so all alone. Sometimes I just cry! I sigh! Sometimes I even moan!

He spins a tale about how his best friend comes to tell Richard something he needs to know about his lover, but Richard doesn’t understand what the friend is saying, he’s innocent, and pretty soon he’s going full Baptist on us. The Stax groove sure is pretty, and it’s fun to listen to Richard break into a sermon. But it feels like that the moment the song got too real, he pulled back.

This goes on for about a minute — an eternity on a pop record — but then he starts singing again, catches his breath, slows down. He understands now. His lover has cheated on him. He pleads let me beeeee, but you know he doesn’t mean it. A little more than three minutes in, Richard transitions from the verse to the chorus with one ad-libbed word:

Honey.

But he sings it:

HUHHHHHHHHHHHney!

It comes out coarse, like he’s ripping the notes from his throat, but there’s still a vibrato underneath, the barest hint of control. It’s the sound of a man barely hanging on.

I always want to romanticize these moments, make them more than they might really be. Maybe Little Richard was just a pure professional, steeped in black gospel, who was so good he could out-Otis Otis if he felt like it.

Or maybe it was the sound of a grown man reaching deep to share a truth he’d never shared. Maybe one he didn’t even know he had.

And the weird thing is, it wouldn’t hit as hard if it weren’t for the preaching right before it. It’s like Richard reminds you of who you thought he was before he shows you who he might really be, under the sweat and the makeup, somebody who kept trying to quit this earthly music for the glory of God, only to find the glory of God in this earthly music.

The song rolls into the outro and the temperature rises. Covay rides the high notes. Purdie steps in with drum fills. Hendrix places little two- or three-note licks in the open spaces. In the last 30 seconds, Billy Preston comes in with an organ line over the top of everything. And Little Richard, singing his ass off on the long fade, rushes just one line: I feel sometimes like I wanna die.

Right as he is proving his immortality.

*****

The song made it to no. 12 on the R&B charts — his last hit there of any size. On the pop charts, it never got higher than no. 92. There is some debate over who played what on the recording sessions, but most Jimi Hendrix scholars believe “I Don’t Know What You Got” is the only Little Richard record Hendrix ever played on. Not long after the recording, Little Richard fired Hendrix from his touring band. He was either late to too many gigs or took too much of Richard’s spotlight, depending on what version you believe.

Little Richard spent the rest of his life declaring, correctly, that he was the architect of rock ‘n’ roll, and complaining, correctly, that he was never appreciated enough. “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got” is so deep on his bench that I can’t find a clip of him playing it live. But it stopped me cold in that little town in South Carolina. And ever since then, a few times a year, something will remind me of it, and I’ll go spend a day or two with it all over again. When Little Richard died it was the first song I thought of, and since his death I’ve played it every day. And never just once.

I’ve spent my life paying attention to music — probably too much attention. Sometimes it’s just medicine — something to help me let off steam or move my feet or get past a heartbreak. But every so often, if I listen enough, I hear something that changes my life — that puts a name on a feeling I couldn’t describe, or sends a message to some far-off part of myself.

I write for a living, but music makes me feel more deeply than any other art. Part of the idea behind this series, for me, is trying to understand why. For now, most of it is still a mystery. I don’t know what it’s got, but it’s got me.

— TT