Music Arcades: James Brown: Live at the Apollo (1962)

As with Sign 'O' the Times, I bought this album to accompany the book that was written to accompany the album. I've used the Continuum 33⅓ series a few times to find my way into supposedly classic albums where I knew I wouldn't get the full picture of what made them classic without someone pointing the way.

Doug Wolk's book about Live at the Apollo was the first I read in the series, and remains far and away the best of the three and a half I've read so far (including the one I contributed to). Here's the appreciation of it that I wrote almost five years ago now.

Douglas Wolk's Live at the Apollo is one of eighteen (and counting) 'classic' album profiles in Continuum's 33⅓ series. This is one of those books, like Charles Shaar Murray's analysis of Jimi Hendrix, manages to pick apart the derivation of its protagonist's work without taking away his aura.

These are some of the good things Wolk does.

He traces where James Brown's repertoire borrows and steals from earlier songs in the R&B tradition.
He pokes gentle fun at some of the accounts of the Live at the Apollo period in Brown's two autobiographies, pointing out their inconsistencies from documented facts.
He encourage closer listening, second by second, to the album, noting details from bum notes in the horn section to shouted exchanges in the audience.
He looks forward from Live at the Apollo to future developments in James Brown's career, for example in how It's a Man's World later took over the centrepiece "protracted-ballad" role in JB's set that Lost Someone holds in this album.

Also Wolk makes great use of the historical gift of coincidence whereby Live at the Apollo was being performed and recorded at the exact moment that the Cuban missile crisis was coming to a near-apocalyptic head. By 'cutting away' from the action at the Apollo for just a paragraph or two (for example: "On October 24, 1962, [the day of the recording] John F. Kennedy, in a meeting with his cabinet, asked if there was any way in which the U.S. could evacuate its cities before an invasion of Cuba. Somebody at the table assured him that 'the only real protection' from nuclear bombs was cities"), Wolk is able to give an acute sense of the period and its psychological, geopolitical distance from the present day.

Douglas Wolk writes well on many areas of music, and maintains a blog linking to things he's published, as well as providing more informal commentary.