The radical measure James Brown took to save an album from being kiboshed by his label: “They thought it was crazy”
Many people will have differing opinions on who the greatest live performer of all time is, but anyone who was fortunate enough to have witnessed James Brown in his prime will almost certainly attest to the ‘Godfather of Soul’ being on an entirely different level.
Sometimes, this can come at a cost, where the studio recordings don’t quite live up to the sheer levels of entertainment taking place at concerts. As a consequence, there were numerous artists in the 1960s who were highly regarded for their high-octane live shows, yet widely ignored for their studio material, and this frequently ended up with these acts being lost to time due to there not being enough of a record of their brilliance available to the public.
For Brown, he was able to do it all, and while his recorded material doesn’t have the additional visual element of Brown commandeering the stage, he still managed to capture a sense of energy that made him beloved. He may well be the artist to have the most top 40 hits without ever achieving a number one single, but that doesn’t mean that Brown’s work wasn’t celebrated outside of his incredible commitment to putting on a show.
However, when it came to trying to make a record that captured the true essence of what he was like live, it would have been near impossible to create something that truly did Brown’s shows justice, given how his live performances had a tendency to go on for upwards of two hours and were reliant on his presence just as much as they were the musical elements.
“The songs were a lot different live,” he would later admit during a 2003 interview with The Guardian. “Any artist, if he’s really got his act together, his live show will be twice as good as the record.” Given his own conviction about how good his live shows were, he decided that he’d try to convince his label, King Records, to record and release a live album in 1962.
It wasn’t ever going to be easy to get them on board or to agree to anything, and as a consequence, he eventually had to take matters into his own hands with an unprecedented move, effectively doing everything in his power to ensure that his visions were realised.
In a remarkable turn of events, Brown chose to finance the recording of a live album out of his own pocket, renting out the Apollo in Harlem for a grand sum of $5,700, with the additional costs of recording equipment being sourced for a hefty fee from A1 Sound in Manhattan. It was a gigantic risk on Brown’s part, but he was utterly convinced that he’d be able to fill the auditorium for a few nights and produce something of remarkable proportions.
On October 24th, five days after the start of his residency at the venue, the official recording for ‘Live’ At The Apollo took place, with the album eventually being released on King Records in May 1963. The fact that Brown had managed to make this come to fruition entirely off his own back and through spending his own hard-earned cash was not just mind-boggling, but unheard of in this period, defying the very purpose of there being a music industry there to finance such things.
“They thought it was crazy,” Brown later said of King Records’ reaction. Crazy it may have been, but without Brown’s ludicrous levels of risk-taking and self-belief, the world wouldn’t have been blessed with one of the greatest live albums ever made.
