Little Richard screamed Tutti Frutti in 1955 and the world lurched forward. A queer Black man from Macon, Georgia, one of twelve children, wearing pancake makeup and a pompadour, playing piano like it was on fire. The Beatles opened for him and asked how to scream. He told them. He renounced rock and roll for gospel at the peak. Came back. Renounced again. He contained multitudes.

Tutti Frutti. Long Tall Sally. Good Golly Miss Molly. Lucille. Songs so explosive they had to be sanitized by Pat Boone for white audiences. His voice was a hurricane. His stage presence was something between a Pentecostal revival and a riot. He was too queer, too Black, too wild for the 1950s -- and that's exactly why he changed everything.

He spent his later years wrestling with his legacy: the rock star and the evangelist, the sinner and the saved, the man who threw his jewelry into the ocean and then bought more. Little Richard contained contradictions that would have destroyed a smaller man. He was a monument built from his own contradictions.

Little Richard screamed Tutti Frutti in '55 and invented rock and roll. The Beatles asked him how. Pancake makeup. Pompadour. Contained multitudes.