Ooh! My Soul

It did not move him to shout, “Good golly, Miss Molly.”

“Awop bop a-loo bop, awop bam boom” did not screech from his lips. He did not appear to shake a whole lot.

That all came later. Instead, getting the first look at his wax likeness at the Movieland Wax Museum Thursday, Little Richard, 64, was plainly honest.

“It makes you look like [you] died when you look at this thing,” he said with a chuckle, posing for news cameras as Dick Clark mopped Richard’s sweaty brow.

All in all, though, the ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll pioneer seemed pleased: “I think it’s nice. I think I look better. It’s a handsome guy.”

Clark assured him, “I think it looks very good.”

Richard’s figure became the museum’s 297th, joining the likenesses of such celebrities as Humphrey Bogart, Carol Burnett and Marilyn Monroe.

The museum has wanted a Little Richard figure for years, but it wasn’t until almost two years ago that his schedule lined up with theirs, and the painstaking making of the figure began. It depicts him seated upright at a black piano, with his mouth agape, as if in mid song.

With picture time over, Richard stepped out to the warm night before more than 200 fans and museum guests. He repeatedly thanked them and told them how much he loved everybody.

When the mayor handed him the key to the city, Richard shouted, “I’m gonna unlock it now. It was locked up, and I’m gonna open it up.”

With the anticipation of the crowd growing, he turned to the piano and banged out a few songs, including “Boogie Woogie” and “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On.” Pausing, he said, “ ‘Tutti Frutti’? ‘Lucille’? ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’? Them songs still sound good today. They make your big toe shoot up in your boot.”

Afterward, some fans toting original albums from the ‘50s waited to see if Richard would sign them.

“He had the guts to scream in the middle of a rock ‘n’ roll record,” said Richard Ruffo of Huntington Beach, who put his age at “old enough to be there at the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Born Richard Perriman in 1932 in Macon, Ga., Little Richard gained fame in the 1950s as a pioneering rocker who fused gospel, rhythm-and-blues and rock ‘n’ roll.

His backstage sexual and drug exploits, chronicled in a 1984 authorized biography, and his outrageous stage persona, outlandish costumes and makeup won him as much notoriety.

He has variously described himself as “the King and Queen of rock ‘n’ roll,” “the liberator,” “the originator,” “the prime mover” and “the emancipator of rock ‘n’ roll.”

But he had an on-again, off-again affair with the music that made him famous. He took a break in 1957 to attend Bible school. He left the scene again in the mid-1970s to focus on gospel music and preaching, once appearing as a preacher in an episode of NBC’s “Miami Vice.”