Long Tall Sally

If "Tutti Frutti" was the explosion, this is what the explosion looks like in motion — more sustained, slightly more structured, but no less ferocious. The tempo is relentless and the arrangement is deliberately spare, keeping the focus entirely on Richard's voice, which here reaches for something almost superhuman: the way he stretches certain vowels and then snaps back into the groove suggests a performer who understands rhythm as a physical force. The piano work is fluid and driving without ever becoming merely decorative, and the horn section adds bursts of color that feel like exclamation points the song didn't need but is better for having. Lyrically it operates in the same territory as the companion track — a tall, electric woman, a sense of barely-contained desire — but there's a narrative specificity here that gives the exuberance somewhere to land. Richard's delivery makes the subject feel genuinely extraordinary, which was part of his essential gift: his enthusiasm was never ironic, never performed at a remove. This song mattered enormously to British musicians in the late 1950s and early 1960s — the young Beatles covered it, and you can hear why, because it demonstrated that rock and roll could sustain genuine velocity without collapsing into noise. It belongs to parties, to rooms where the furniture gets pushed back, to the specific joy of music that demands a physical response.