The screams start before the band has finished tuning. James Brown, the American singer and dancer known as the Godfather of Soul, is standing in the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, and the audience is already losing its mind. On October 24, 1962, Brown recorded a live album in that theatre, and he paid for the whole thing himself. Brown had been born in Barnwell, South Carolina, and by the time he walked onto the Apollo stage he had already spent nearly a decade in music. He was far more than a singer: he wrote songs, danced, and produced records. The man who paid for this live recording was already a force in American music.
From Toccoa to the Apollo
The Apollo was the room where rhythm and blues careers were made, and Brown had spent years building his. He had started as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia, then became the leader of a vocal group called The Famous Flames. By 1956 their single "Please, Please, Please" had sold more than a million copies, and in 1958 the ballad "Try Me" topped the rhythm and blues chart.
But a live album was a different gamble. His label, King Records, refused to pay for it. The executives saw no profit in a concert record with no new songs, so Brown and his manager Bud Hobgood had to convince them to release what Brown had already recorded. Brown himself is credited as the producer of the original album. The original master tapes of the album were later lost, which meant that for years the only way to hear it was on vinyl. They were found only decades later, and the CD reissue finally appeared after that. For a long time, the recording that had made history was itself almost impossible to preserve.
What the audience added
The recording captured something no studio could. The audience's loud, piercing reactions, especially during the slow ballads, became part of the music. The album's famous ten-minute track "Lost Someone" stretched a love song into a test of endurance, with Brown working the crowd through every moan and pause.
The album's famous ten-minute track "Lost Someone" stretched a love song into a test of endurance, with Brown working the crowd through every moan and pause.
When "Live at the Apollo" came out in May 1963, the label's doubts collapsed. The album climbed to number two on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart and stayed there for 66 weeks. It sold more than a million copies, and record shops across the southeastern United States could not keep up with demand. The album's reputation grew with every decade. In 1998 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2004 an expanded edition appeared with remastered sound and extra tracks. By then the record had become a landmark not just of soul music but of American recording history.
There was one quiet injustice in the original release. The Famous Flames, the group that had backed Brown for years, were not named on the cover or the label. Their participation was officially recognised only decades later, when the album was reissued on CD.
The record never stopped gathering honours. Rolling Stone called it the greatest live album of all time, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry. The gamble that King Records refused to fund became the standard by which every other concert record is measured. Brown himself went on to become one of the most honoured figures in popular music. In 1986 he was among the first ten artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 1992 he received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. He died of pneumonia, but the Apollo album remains one of the clearest proofs of what he could do on a stage.