rare & never published 1971 pictures of little richard from LIFE magazine

LIFE: Movie stars like Liz Taylor and Sophia Loren could be, and frequently were, celebrated in LIFE for their sex appeal, appearing on the magazine’s cover striking poses and wearing outfits that were, if one squinted just right, downright salacious. But let rock and rollers cross that invisible line between Hollywood’s idea of the erotic and the delightedly raunchy approach to the topic taken by, say, Zeppelin, and the latter’s chances of showing up in LIFE sank very close to nil.

All of which makes the Little Richard photographs in this gallery, taken by LIFE’s Ralph Morse in 1971, all the more fascinating, and mysterious. None of these pictures ever ran in LIFE, and there’s no indication in the LIFE archives of why they were taken in the first place. Morse, for his part, doesn’t remember making them (“I have no idea who that guy is,” he recently told LIFE.com, when shown a few of the photos), which suggests that they might have been part of an impromptu photo shoot — perhaps at the Time & Life Building in New York, maybe backstage at a concert — and that they were never meant to appear in the magazine at all.

What’s certain is that, four decades after they were made, these portraits of the Macon, Georgia, native — published here on Little Richard’s 80th birthday, December 5, 2012 — capture at least a small part of the unnerving and somewhat unhinged charisma of the man many credit as the true originator of rock and roll. (Little Richard, his backers argue, was the first, true, living, breathing, screaming bridge between R&B and rock.)