James Brown: Live At The Apollo Vol. 1

Release Date: 1963. Label: Polydor. Producer: James Brown

Given the acclaim now accorded James Brown’s Live At The Apollo (Volume 1), it’s hard to believe that the Godfather of Soul had to pay for the recording of this album himself. But that’s exactly what happened.

Syd Nathan, owner of King Records, the label to which Brown was then signed, reckoned that no one would buy a record with live versions of songs that had already been hits. So James Brown stumped up $5,000 of his own money, confident that the energy of his live shows would translate to vinyl.

Brown was certainly right, though no one could have foreseen the success of the album he recorded on October 24, 1962 at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. The initial pressing was just 5,000 copies, but it sold over one million in the first year, and has since gone on to shift so many units worldwide that his record label has no idea what the grand total is.

Live At The Apolllo arrived at the moment when Rhythm & Blues was transforming itself into Soul. Solomon Burke and Arthur Alexander were hitting the charts for the first time, and the Falcons’ ‘I Found a Love’ was tearing up the airwaves. Ever the opportunist, James Brown was making a similar transformation. In the 1950s, he had been a gruff, sometimes derivative R&B performer who glowed rather than shone. But as a Soul singer he was incandescent. His decision to record the show on the Apollo’s notorious ‘Amateur Night’, where the audience would eat you alive if you weren’t up to the task, showed a performer confident in his ability to slay his audience. And slay them he did.

Live At The Apollo is an astonishing document, melding the earliest evidence of the Funk for which he is now best remembered with vocal trickerations any Gospel singer would be proud of. All of it is shaded by classic 1950s R&B forms – it was, after all, the earliest part of the 1960s and Soul was still in its infancy.

Brown was a master at wringing every ounce out of himself, his band and, most especially, the crowd. Listen as he exhorts the audience to scream in ‘Lost Someone’. That same intense reaction can be heard in ‘Try Me’, where Brown’s voice drapes languidly across the band like a damp shirt on a drying frame. Brown invokes the syncopated, Chicago ‘blowing’ style of vocal group harmony popularised by the Flamingos and Moonglows in ‘I Don’t Mind’ and his version of Bullmoose Jackson’s ‘I Love You, Yes I Do’.

Harder-edged R&B cues can be heard in his takes on the 5 Royales’ ‘Think’, Amos Milburn’s ‘Bewildered’ and Roy Brown’s ‘Please Don’t Go’. This is 1950s R&B transmogrified into something almost unearthly.

Many have assumed that James’ ultra-tight stops and starts during ‘Please Please Please’ were achieved by editing, but the recently discovered original master tape proves this was all done live. That’s how good this band was. (The CD version mastered from the original tape also adds slightly more time to the closing track, James’ version of Jimmy Forrest’s ‘Night Train’, which fades abruptly on the vinyl version.)

The James Brown of the early- to late-'60s, before the Funk took over completely, was a Deep Soul singer who could work a ballad with equal parts pain and passion, tenderness and toughness. This was Brown’s golden period, the time when he could scarcely put a good foot wrong, when even his ad-libs became a generation’s catch phrases. ("Hot pants," you’d cry. "Smokin!" your friends would answer by rote.) At his peak, he even stopped the black community in Boston from rioting following the murder of Martin Luther King. You can hear the stirrings of that power in the grooves of Live At The Apollo (Volume 1).

Today, in his seventies, James Brown’s private life has become an even bigger cabaret act than his stage show, while his career has been reduced to a suitcase full of samples (samples that have launched a dozen MTV-generation careers). James Brown’s self-anointed ‘Godfather of Soul’ sobriquet was never more appropriate than on this album. Live At The Apollo (Volume 1) is hailed as the greatest live recording of all time. It is too: in 1962 it had the impact of a neutron bomb; nearly 40 years after it was recorded it still sounds astonishing.