'Shut up!': the tall tale of Little Richard

Summer in New Haven. These four words are capable of striking fear into the hearts of ambitious Yalies: Davenporters and Branfordians who spend their summers on Wall Street interning for mammoth investment houses, Stilesians and Piersonites who win grants and go to Namibia to study the effects of Diet Coke on rhinoceri. Many fear that a summer beneath the elms of Connecticut's queen city would be a summer wasted.

After all, three months in a New Haven that doesn't have 5,000 alternately stressed and drunken Yalies around to stir things up can seem, well, boring as hell. What do you do to kill time in a town that doesn't have a first-run movie theater? What do you do when your closest acquaintances staying in town are Annette the Flower Lady and the two immigrant guys that run Krauszer's? What do you do for fun in a place where the liquor stores close at 8 p.m. and the sudden summer influx of high school students forces even the most freshman-friendly bars to start carding? What do you do?

Oddly, you wind up doing a lot. Although the New Haven summer was often quiet, there were a fair number of activities--music, artsy movies, festivals--to keep things moving. And there was also enough interesting stuff--multiple car accidents, the destruction and rebirth of Old Campus, the neverending protest over the relocation of the Chapel Street bus stops--to just plain look at when things got dull.

The International Festival of Arts and Ideas was the most in-your-face Interesting Event that went down in New Haven this summer. It was huge, with big wooden statues and a stage dominating the Green all through the last week in June. But, until the last day, the Festival was only a moderate amount of fun. Sure, they had one of those gyroscopic things that you climb into and swirl around in for five minutes and then puke because your sense of gravity is all screwed up. Sure, they had an African drill sergeant guy who banged on drums and yelled and made audience members bend themselves into funky multicultural positions, community service-type booths, and guys on stilts dressed up in big ant costumes that just kinda paraded up and down Chapel Street, but something seemed to be missing. That something was Little Richard. He played on the last night of the Festival, and wow, did he put on a show. It's not often that a rock'n'roll icon/Seriously Disturbed Individual gives a concert on the New Haven Green, but the folks who organized the Festival made it happen.

Little Richard's music wasn't particularly memorable. "Good Golly Miss Molly" and "Long Tall Sally" sounded pretty much the same as they have for the past 40 years. Richard's voice sounded shot, and his piano virtuosity was compromised by the fact that he had the keyboardist in his band play the hard parts of his songs for him. But all this was irrelevant. The concert was great because Little Richard talked and acted like a complete and utter crazy person. His first words to the audience were: "I AM THAT BEAUTIFUL LITTLE RICHARD! SHUT UP!" and he became less coherent from that point on.

He got really pissed off when the audience started singing along to "Tutti Fruitti." He screamed, "That's my song, you're doing it wrong, if you can't do it right, SHUT UP!" He demanded that the lighting crew fix a blue spotlight on him, and wouldn't play until they did. He covered the Police's "Every Breath You Take" with the precision and emotion of someone who's forgotten half the words. He sang the first verse over and over and then repeated the phrase "I'll be watching you" until his band stopped playing. And then he celebrated his recent conversion to Judaism by telling some jokes that were in really, really bad taste.

And it only took like two days before the man's legend was firmly established in New Haven history. There were Little Richard sightings all over the general New Haven Green area. The Advocate reported that he was spotted drinking beer at Anna Liffey's on Whitney Ave., and a rumor started going around that some random guy met him at the Omni Hotel elevator bank and paid him $1000 to play his wedding reception, which was taking place downstairs. No one really knew if any of this was true, but hey, it would be cool if it were.

After the Festival of Arts and Ideas came the New Haven Jazz Festival, which took place over the first three weekends of July. The coolest part of the jazz festival was a funky '70s band called the Jazz Crusaders whose trombonist wore a zebra-skin apron and chef's hat.

After the jazz festival, things quieted down for a bit. York Square featured not one but two movies (Buffalo 66 and The Opposite of Sex) starring the lovely Christina Ricci. Silliman became the home of a group of international students who wore really, really short shorts and could often be spotted kicking each other with surprisingly oafish capoeira moves.

The Backstreet Boys played in front of nine trillion screaming teenage girls at the New Haven Coliseum--but the real star of the show was the opening act. It was none other than Aaron Carter, the 11-year-old brother of one of the Backstreeters who wore a fly orange jumpsuit and Flava Flav-style neck clock and looked and acted like a superbadass version of Zac Hanson.

Bands played and left, shows opened and closed, reruns of Ally McBeal were shown and forgotten, but one summer saga dragged on and on. It began only one week after Commencement and lasted until the very end of August. It was impossible not to follow, capturing unmatched interest throughout the Yale area. It was the complete and total destruction of Old Campus.

On Mon., Jun. 1, students living in Vanderbilt woke up to find a mammoth wood partition thrown up in the archway. Students living in Lanman-Wright woke up to find an ominous orange plastic fence sealing them off from the rest of the Old Campus. Signs suddenly designated the quad a "RESTRICTED AREA--HARD HAT REQUIRED." Within hours, Marlboro-puffing construction guys were frightening the squirrels away by grinding Truckasaurus Rex-sized pieces of equipment through the High Street Gate.

The signs said something about a pipe renovation project. But all of that was invisible to the naked eyes of non-hard-hatted students peeping through the gate. Grass was removed, and the underlying dirt was dug up by the metric ton and dumped in a gargantuan heap in the center of the quad.

Old Campus now resembled the obstacle course the winning team had to run at the end of each episode of Nickelodeon's Double Dare; there were pitfalls and giant mechanical wheels everywhere, and one huge freakin' dirt slide in the center of it all. By early August, people began to wonder if everything would be in place by the time Claire Danes, CC '02, arrived--and then, miraculously, the dirt was replaced, miles of sod were rolled out, and the quad was greener and more beautiful than it had ever been.

In a lot of ways, it was like summer in New Haven never happened; when everyone returned last week, Store 24 was still open, the Green was quiet, and Au Bon Pain was still overpriced. But stuff had gone on. And if you were't here, you have no idea what you missed.

Graphic by Jason Heller.

Back to A&E...