Music: Dancing in the Outer Darkness

Two nifty new books tap the tangled roots of rock

Ooh! My soul! That's what the man said.

Part spiritual and part sexual, that exclamation is about as neat as the package gets: a tidy summation of the worldly power as well as the almost religious delirium of good old rock 'n' roll. The phrase was popularized by Mr. Richard Penniman of Macon, Ga., who used it both as a song title and as a kind of revival call-and-response as he rocked, in concert, with the forces of Satan. Mr. Penniman, known to a wondering world as Little Richard, let blast with rock of such demented power, performed from the 1950s through the mid-'70s, that he seemed possessed of darkling forces. A chimney-high pompadour. Eye shadow, for God's sake, in 1956. Piano-jumping, speaker-climbing stunts onstage, along with dancing that was camp enough to get anyone busted in a back alley. Songs that sounded like nonsense (Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, Slippin 'and Slidin ') but whose beat seemed to hint of unearthly pleasures centered somewhere between the gut and the gutter. Ooh! My soul!

The Life and Times of Little Richard (identified in a subtitle as "the Quasar of Rock," should further amplification be required) chronicles, in no uncertain terms and in effulgent detail, both bouts with Satan and business with the Lord. The book (Harmony; $15.95) is the woolliest, funniest, funkiest rock memoir ever. It rambles from Richard's childhood in Macon to his current calling as a preacher for the Universal Remnant Church of God in California, with plenty of rest stops along the way, so that even the casual reader may catch a whiff of brimstone before, in the sermon that ends the book, great tongues of heavenly fire finally descend.

The credited author, Charles White, is a BBC disc jockey who goes by the name of Dr. Rock and has the good sense to go off-mike when the major talent is in the room. In only a little more time than it might take to recite the immortal refrain from Tutti Frutti (for the record, that's "Awop-Bop-a-Loo-Mop/ Alop-Bam-Boom"), the reader, reeling, will have plunged through Richard's accounts of childhood pranks (he defecated in a box and presented the result, gift wrapped, to old Miz Ola down on Macon's Monroe Street) and sexual initiation, which seems to have taken place about the time he learned to tie his shoes. There was Ruth May Sutton, who "used to be there in the school grounds at night, and the guys would run trains on her—six, seven, ten boys in a row"; and Madame Oop, who worked on the railroad and hung out "with another gay guy called Sis Henry." This unusual childhood led to a great deal of sexual confusion ("I just felt that I wanted to be a girl more than a boy"), a lot of guilt, but no apologies. Not then, not ever. The book is bursting with raunchy backstage tales of orgies, voyeurism, drugs and lust, which are balanced off by Richard's periodic attempts to reform and to seek out the Lord.