Little Richard – The Rill Thing
Little Richard – Freedom Blues
Little Richard – Greenwood, Mississippi
Ran into this recently at Amoeba and instantly remembered how it has one of my all-time favorite drum breaks on ‘The Rill Thing.” I’d run into this album a couple of times before but the price was never right, until now. I can’t remember where I originally picked up this album, but I remember the first time I heard that drum break, it was on a mix tape (still made on a tape!) that I bought from DJ Riddm in Berkeley around 1999. Hearing a short routine using that break on the tape was all I needed to obsess over finding out what it was and where I could find it. Riddm was pretty forthcoming with the information and not too long after that I tracked it down. I remember originally not being all that enthused with the rest of the record and essentially thought of the album as a “one-tracker.”
Getting a second listen these many years later, I’m actually more impressed with some of the other tracks. I’ve always been a fan of Little Richard’s early Rock’n’Roll, with it’s wild rhythm and wilder shouts and screams. He’s toned things down by 1970, but he’s clearly still in good form. Interestingly enough, several of the tracks share credit with Esquerita, spelled Esqrita on the back cover. I’d always heard that Little Richard essentially copied Esquerita’s style, but I never heard of the two working together. It’s possible that it could refer to someone else, who just happened to have the last name “Esqrita” (Esquerita’s real last name of Reeder isn’t used either), but that’s just too much of a coincidence, right? I also hadn’t paid enough attention the first time I had this to the fact that it was cut down at Muscle Shoals, which explains quite a lot of the enduring quality of these songs.
Cheers,
Michael