Albums I Love, Part I: James Brown, “Live at the Apollo”

Posted: June 12th, 2009 | Filed under: Features, Music | 8 Comments »

There are too many reasons and so many ways to talk about this seminal album.

Let’s start with Hugh Jarrett.

In the early sixties, the most important radio station in the land was 50,000 watt clear channel WLAC-AM in Nashville. It had morphed through the decades into an outlet which played blues and R & B to an audience that spanned the eastern half of the northern hemisphere.

In the winter and spring of ‘62-’63, Robbie Robertson listened. Johnny Winter listened. So did my buddies and I, eschewing homework to twist and turn the wireless knobs in our bedrooms to catch every funky beat. Spinning the platters were the legendary quartet of John R (Richbourg), Hoss Allen, Gene Nobles and Herman Grizzard.

Between shilling for White Rose petroleum jelly, Royal Crown pomade and mail order specials from Randy’s Record Shop in Gallatin, Tennessee (7 records, pure vinyl, either 45 rpm or 78, your choice), they exposed a generation to this whole world of black music that would, as John Lee Hooker sang, “rock the nation.” These deejays were white guys — much to many listeners’ surprise — who adopted black southern patois and rode the night train to notoriety.

At some point, Hoss Allen decided to become a rep for the station and gave up his DJ gig, replaced by Jarrett, known to acolytes as Big Hugh Baby. A former member of the Jordanaires, the gospel group that became Elvis Presley’s back up singers, Big Hugh was master of the double entendre. Such that he opened his phone lines during his nighttime double shift to college and high school kids like me in need of an airwaved 55 gallon drum of White Rose or a Big Hugh Baby bird. Which sounded disarmingly like one of Uncle Joe’s beer and sausage farts. (Several years ago, I tracked Jarrett down to a small station in Georgia or Alabama, where he had a weekly gig, playing gospel music. I wrote him an email. He never responded.)

I called in from Florida during spring break in ‘63, and still have some of the White Rose left almost a half century later. 55 gallons is heap o’ petroleum jelly. It helps me get better, but I never get totally well.

When “Live at the Apollo” was released in the spring of ’63 — it was recorded 10/24/62 — Big Hugh played the album all the way through. Every night. It was epiphaniac, you know, like an epiphany.

What I can say is at the time I’d never heard anything as powerful or emotionally stirring. And, all things considered, probably haven’t since. I just tried to explain it all to my sweetie, and the juices started flowing again.

From Fats Gonder’s seminal intro — “It is star time. Are you ready for star time?” — to Hubert Perry’s pulsing, propulsive bass on “Night Train,” this performance is nothing but  visceral energy from start to finish. To a kid growing up in a middle class home in middle America, this was other worldly. James Brown was more than “the hardest working man in show business,” he was a pied piper to another ethereality.

Here’s James Brown singing “Please, Please, Please.” (It is not from this album. It’s probably from the T.A.M.I. Show, recorded in late October, 1964. At the time, Brown was doing essentially the same show as ’62. This will give you a flavor of it, until you go out and buy “Live at the Apollo.”)

The album almost didn’t come about. Brown was signed to King Records, whose owner Syd Nathan wouldn’t lay out the cash to record the live performance. Brown knew better, and had the wherewithal and foresight to underwrite the project himself.

Upon release it became an immediate sensation and a portal for white American teens who knew the Beach Boys were good, but not quite enough.

Brown and his entourage were skin tight that Wednesday night this was recorded. They’d been doing the set for a good while, and five times a day for almost a week at 253 West 125th Street, where the lines were long despite the biting cold.

It was the time of Cap’n Crunch and “How’d ya like a nice Hawaiian punch?”

The week this album was recorded, JFK blockaded Cuba.

But this set of music was funk that cut through the junk. The hit singles of the day were “Sugar Shack” — haven’t heard much from Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs lately — and the Singing Nun’s “Dominique.” The album charts were topped by Andy Williams’ “Days of Wine and Roses,” and Allan Sherman’s “My Son, The Nut.”

The live show Syd Nathan didn’t want to pay for spent 66 weeks on the pop charts, bulleting at #2 in the summer of ‘63.

That fall, my first college concert at Washington & Lee, then a small antebellum all-male, all-white university in rural Virginia: The James Brown Revue.

I was ready for star time. Still am.

James Brown’s “Live at the Apollo” is no less powerful today than the night it was recorded. It’s a thirty minute shot to the solar plexus. Listen and you’ll want to jump back and kiss yourself.

It’s the best live music ever recorded.

---