![James Brown at the Apollo in 1962]( "James Brown at the Apollo in 1962")
James Brown at the Apollo in 1962
50 moments that changed the history of rock & roll
We were a bunch of country boys from Georgia," says Bobby Byrd of the James Brown Band's 1962 stint at Harlem's Apollo Theatre that resulted in Live at the Apollo. "We'd come up to New York and put it down rough."
The sixteen-piece band was booked for a week of shows in October 1962, on a bill that included soulman Solomon Burke and Texas blues-guitar great Freddie King, as well as the tough R&B of the Valentinos and comedian Pigmeat Markham. Brown played five shows a day.
Though Byrd claims the notoriously tough Apollo audience always made the band nervous ("Those people would say and do anything"), James Brown himself disagrees: "I was fully convinced that we were going to blow them away."
He was right, of course. In the three years since his first opening gig at the Apollo in 1959, Brown had turned his band into one of the tightest groups in all of R&B. One reason was that the band played more than 300 shows a year. Another was the harsh fines Brown imposed on band members for everything from flubbed notes and missed dance steps to scuffed shoes. On Wednesday, October 24th, though, the fines were especially harsh. "You made a mistake that night," says Bobby Byrd, "the fine would move from five or ten dollars to fifty or a hundred dollars."
That's because the midnight show that evening was being recorded as a live album, and Brown's own money was riding on it. Inspired by Ray Charles' 1960 live In Person, Brown wanted to cut a live album that would showcase what he and his band could do during the course of an entire performance (and that was a lot -- Brown's relentless performances were said to leave him drenched in sweat and almost seven pounds lighter). But Syd Nathan, the head of Brown's label, King, refused, arguing that record buyers were interested only in new singles, not the same show they'd already paid to see. So Brown financed the recording himself, at a cost of $5,700. "That was all the money there was in those days," Brown remembers today.
The resulting album proved how right Brown was to gamble his own money when it sold an unprecedented 1 million copies. Brown's band slammed through songs so quickly, DJs had trouble spinning individual cuts. King Records made single edits, but the reaction to the album was so fierce, listeners demanded the whole thing, and some DJs would play an entire side of the album straight through. "I wanted the feeling of tent meetings, when you got the spirit going at gospel conventions," Brown says. "It will probably be the best album I ever cut."
