Live at the Apollo

Eight bands in a little over half an hour, and the subtractive test finds little to take. Fats Gonder’s introduction must open: it builds the star before the star sings and tells the listener this is a show, not a set of songs. The four short songs come at speed, about two minutes each, and the speed is the argument: the show will not let the room rest. “Lost Someone” must follow, the long slow plea that turns the rush into a sermon; the medley must close the singing; “Night Train” must close the record, the band playing the singer off. The test bites twice. “Think” and “I Don’t Mind” do the same work, and one could go with small loss; inside the medley, two or three songs are glimpses more than parts.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The record discloses something that can be stated. In this room desire and abjection are public acts, sung to a congregation that answers, and the church’s form of testimony and call carries a secular love song without loss of force. The audience is heard as co-author: in “Lost Someone” the slow vamp is held while Brown pleads and the women in the hall answer him, and their answers shape the length and the turns of the performance. That is a social condition, the Black theatre of the circuit and its covenant between performer and hall, shown rather than described. Held below the gate: the words disclose little beyond the plea, the meaning is carried by the event more than articulated by the work, and much of what is shown is mood and heat.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The first is velocity: the fanfare, then “I’ll Go Crazy” and “Think” at a pace that leaves no breath, the band’s stops landing as one hand. The second is the slow height of “Lost Someone”, where the vamp is held almost still and Brown’s voice climbs from murmur to scream over it, the hall rising with him; this is the summit, and it is sustained for minutes. The medley reaches a second summit in its return to “Please, Please, Please”, collapse and resurrection sung. What holds the figure: the height is ecstatic and warm throughout, never grand or terrible, and the short songs give energy more than transport. Its frequency is close to Kind of Blue’s; its single kind keeps it half a point below that record’s 9.1.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth is built in one pattern, and it bears weight: the revival. The record is laid out as a service. The herald announces the preacher by his titles, “Mr. Dynamite” among them; the congregation is roused; the preacher testifies in “Lost Someone” and is answered; in the medley he is spent, falls, and is raised again into the first song he ever had, so that “Please, Please, Please” is both plea and resurrection. The cape routine that made the collapse visible on stage is not on the record, but the medley carries its shape in sound. Around this, the pleading lover is an old figure, evoked more than built. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven: the particular of each song is thin, the pattern belongs to the show’s form more than to the songs, and the record depends on the listener supplying the stage.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is the rhythm and blues of 1962: a singles market, long-playing records made as collections of hits, and live recording used, if at all, for jazz and for comedy. The turn is to issue the revue as one continuous object, its songs subordinate to the show. The stake was real and personal: by the standard account the label refused to fund it and Brown paid, and a record of songs already sold as singles had no evident market. Held below the gate: the music itself does not turn. The songs, the gospel-derived pleading and the band’s arrangements are the revue as it already played, and the swerve is in format and intent. Brown’s larger turn, to the rhythmic architecture of Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag (1965) and Cold Sweat (1967), lies after this record and is not credited here.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. The same songs in their studio versions are short, conventional rhythm and blues sides; set inside the show, without silence between them, with the hall audible and the band taking its cues from the singer, they become stations of a single rising act. The four short songs are compressed so that the long ones can open time: the form is a ramp, then two plateaus, then an exit. The audience is part of the form, and the listener hears the hall respond and is placed inside it. What holds the figure: the form was the revue’s before it was the record’s, so the album captured a form more than it made one, and the medley is a shape inherited from the stage.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over sixty-three years, and of two kinds. Musicians have studied the band’s discipline, the stops and hits on the singer’s cue, as a model of live ensemble, and the record has drawn a modest literature of its own. Return repays in the performance: Brown’s timing in “Lost Someone”, the way the band holds one figure while the plea stretches, and the response of the hall, which is different on each listen as attention moves among its voices. What holds the figure: the record yields little more in meaning on return, the songs being what they are, and much of the attention given it has gone to its place in Brown’s career and in the history of the live album more than to the record itself.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is the rhythm and blues and soul of the early 1960s and the popular live album. The intrinsic force: the record showed that the live album could be the definitive form of a performer rather than a souvenir, and that a Black rhythm and blues revue, recorded in its own theatre before its own audience, could be issued whole and hold its listeners. It stands at the bar and not above it because the force is in format more than in music, and Brown’s larger redirection of the field came later. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a large commercial success for a King album; by common account, radio stations played whole sides; it carried Brown to a wider audience; and it made the live album a central form in soul and rock, from his own later Apollo records to the rock live records of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over sixty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as issued: the original sequence is in print and streamed, and the expanded editions have not displaced it. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians and critics, the record standing first whenever live albums are counted. It is less present as listening than Brown’s funk singles, which are sampled and played far more, and that keeps it from the top of its span. The fabric is a live tape of 1962, clear enough to carry the event, and the hall’s noise is part of the work, not a fault of age. It stands level with A Hard Day’s Night and Let It Bleed at 8.8, and below Kind of Blue at 9.0, which has the widest presence of the records of its span.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with invention weighed elsewhere. The performance craft is load-bearing: the band moves between songs and tempos without a gap, hits every stop on Brown’s signal, and holds the slow vamp of “Lost Someone” for some ten minutes without slackening; Brown’s voice moves from croon to scream with exact control of when to withhold. The medley, a run of songs passed through in about ten minutes, is a feat of ensemble. The recording itself is adequate rather than masterly: the balance favours the voice and the hall, and the horns and guitar are at times indistinct. The songs as written are conventional. Very high in performance and ordinary in the medium of record, the making stands between, well below Kind of Blue at 9.3.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One law governs the record: the show’s pressure on the hall, rising to release and returning. The two most distant elements obey it. Gonder’s spoken introduction is all promise and “Night Train” is all departure, and they frame the singing as the arrival and leaving of one event. Between them the fast songs, the slow sermon and the medley are each a turn of the same ritual. The law holds without a break, and the continuous running of the bands enforces it. What holds the figure is narrowness, which is not coherence: the range is rhythm and blues pleading in two tempos and one instrumental, with a single mood of ardour, and the law governs a small territory. A wider record held by this law would stand higher.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Desire and loss are held, in every song. The congregation is held: a Harlem audience in 1962, its women’s voices answering the singer, a community made present in sound, and with it the Black theatre circuit and its economy of the star who works hardest. The sacred is held by transfer, the church’s forms inside a secular show. What holds the axis lowest: the family, labour except the performer’s own, the state, history and the natural order are absent. The night of the recording fell inside the Cuban crisis, and nothing of it is in the record, and nothing is credited for it. A record of love songs a little over half an hour long holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.8 / 10