6 Musicians Who Accidentally Crapped Out Masterpieces

6 Musicians Who Accidentally Crapped Out Masterpieces | Cracked.com

 

#1.

Tutti Frutti by Little Richard

Little Richard, alongside Elvis and Bill Haley forms the foundation of rock 'n' roll. As Little Richard says himself, "A lot of people call me the architect of rock 'n' roll. I don't call myself that, but I believe it's true." (Also, just for the record, he does occasionally call himself that).

His breakthrough single Tutti Frutti was named by MOJO Magazine as the most influential rock 'n' roll song of all time beating out the likes of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Elvis. In the buttoned down and repressed early 50s, Tutti Frutti's opening scream of 'A wop lop a do wop alop bam boom" must have sounded, at worst, like the opening battle cry in a cultural war between adults and teens, and at its best like a "a torrent of filth wailed by a bisexual alien."

You aren't American, Little Richard ... You are America.

Of course, as you've probably already guessed, this nearly didn't happen. By 1955, Richard had been shuffling around the music scene for half a decade without any notable success. Now on a new and bigger label, he had been hoping for greater things but so far his first recording session wasn't going well. With his new producers trying to mold him in a style somewhere between Ray Charles and Fats Domino, his songs were coming out dull and uninspired.

And "dull and uninspired" are two things Little Richard absolutely refuses to be.

During their lunch break, a frustrated and pissed off Richard wandered over to a piano and started hammering out Tutti Frutti, a song he had been performing regularly in clubs. His producer heard it and immediately realized that this was exactly the kind of thing they should be recording.

There was just one tiny hitch.

If you're not already, you might want to make sure you're sitting down for this next part.

The venues in which Little Richard had been playing and perfecting the song were gay clubs, and the original lyrics demonstrated that:

A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddamn!
Tutti frutti, loose booty
If it don't fit, don't force it
You can grease it, make it easy.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT?!

Now this was 1955. Down South, they were still lynching black men for looking too hard at white women. What they would do to an at best sexually ambiguous black man singing about the joys of anal sex doesn't bear thinking about. A lyricist was quickly summoned to rework the words, and by the end of the afternoon it was done.

The song made it as high as No. 17 in the Billboard charts. An unheard of feat for a black musician back then, but this was sadly trumped by Pat Boones anemic cover which made it all the way to 12. Little Richard was convinced that white kids were buying Pat Boone so they could show the Boone record cover to their parents while they were actually listening to Richard's version. He would gleefully attempt to make all his follow up songs too high pitched and too fast for Boone to be able to cover.