When Mr. Nathan heard how good the tape was, he wanted to get the album out real quick. I had to tell him it wasn’t his tape; it belonged to me. I said I paid for it, and if King wanted it, they could buy it from me. We argued about it for a good while until I think he finally cross-collateralized it in my royalties. The funny thing was he hadn’t even heard the tape and here he was already squabbling about it.
I wanted to get the record out fast, too, but first they had to do a lot of editing. Meantime, I kept on working—touring, recording, and writing—the whole conglomerate of being an entertainer. I was always working on the revue, too, changing it, adding people, keeping the music current. Baby Lloyd and Byrd started doing solo spots in the first half of the show. Bobby Bennett and Baby Lloyd also did an act called “Johnny and Bill,” so called because originally I had Johnny Terry and Bill Hollings doing it. Johnny had brought me a singer named Danny Ray who later took over the announcing because of his great announcing voice. He’s been with me ever since, and he and his voice are famous all over the world.
Right after doing the live recording I added a very special young lady named Tammi Montgomery to the show. Later, as Tammi Terrell, she had some big hits on Motown with Marvin Gaye, but when I met her at the Uptown in Philadelphia, where she was from, her name was Montgomery. She was the niece of Bob Montgomery, the fighter who’d had the matches with Beau Jack to sell war bonds during the war. She was just a kid really, and I helped her all I could to learn to be a performer. We became very close very quickly, and then I fell in love with her.
In December I did a session at Bell Studios in New York where I recorded four tunes with chorus and strings, arranged by Sammy Lowe. I did it because Mr. Nathan didn’t think I could sing a ballad, and I wanted to prove him wrong again. “You can’t sing ballads,” he said, “all you can do is holler.” The tunes eventually wound up on the Prisoner of Love album that came out in the summer of 1963.
A lot of people don’t understand about the hollering I do. A man once came up to me in a hotel lobby and said, “So you’re James Brown. You make a million dollars, and all you do is scream and holler.”
“Yes,” I said, very quiet, “but I scream and holler on key.”
I was branching out in a lot of directions. At the end of 1962 I formed my own song publishing company, Jim Jam Music, and got King to give me my own label, Try Me. I had already been producing on Federal and King and Dade and wanted to bring it all together on Try Me. I wasn’t content to be only a performer and be used by other people; I wanted to be a complete show business person: artist, businessman, entrepreneur. It was important to be because people of my origin hadn’t been allowed to get into the business end of show business before, just the show part.
By this time Mr. Neely had finished editing the Live at the Apollo tape. He had a good mix of the performance and the audience, and he had fixed all the cussing so it wasn’t right up front. He figured it would become an underground thing for people who knew what the lady was screaming; he was right, too. He worked on the tape a long time and did a fantastic job of mixing it.
When Mr. Nathan finally heard the tape he hated it. “This is not coming out,” he said. “We have a certain standard, and we’re going to stick with it.” What he didn’t like now was the way we went from one tune to another without stopping. He just couldn’t understand that. I guess he was expecting exact copies of our earlier records, but with people politely applauding in between. He had all kinds of theories about how records should be. He wanted the hook right up front because he knew that disc jockeys auditioned hundreds of records every week by putting the needle down and playing only the first fifteen or twenty seconds. If that didn’t grab them, they went on to the next record. The same thing happened in record stores, where they usually let you hear fifteen or twenty seconds on a record player on the counter. A lot of my things were more like stage numbers, and he couldn’t understand that. After more conversation, he finally agreed to put the album out. I think Mr. Neely was the one who finally sold him on it.
After all the editing and all the arguing it was January 1963 before Live at the Apollo was finally released. Then discussion began about what singles to release off it. Byrd thought “Think” should be spun off it, especially since the live version was so different from the version we’d put out before. Some people thought “Try Me” was going to do it again, some people had faith in “Lost Someone.”
The idea of a smash album was far from anybody’s mind. Those were the days when most popular albums had only one hit on them plus filler. Mr. Nathan was waiting to see which tune the radio stations were going to play from the album, and then he would shoot it out as a single. I said, “What do you mean? We’re not going to take any singles off it. Sell it the way it is.”
“James,” he said, “all the money I’ve made in this business I made off singles. That’s how it’s done. As soon as we get the reports from the radio stations, we’re going to start releasing singles.”
“Nosir, Mr. Nathan,” I said. “No singles.”
“You’ve been paid. You have no say in it anymore, James.”
I didn’t give him no more argument. I still had faith in the album. While he was waiting to see what would break off the album, King put out the “Prisoner of Love” single in April; it crossed over into the pop market and made it to the top twenty. It was very different from the raw stuff on the Live album, which was starting to build momentum.
When Mr. Nathan checked the radio stations to see what was being played off the album, he got a surprise. They told him that there wasn’t a tune the stations were playing. They were playing the whole album. It was unheard of for a station to play a whole album uninterrupted, but a lot of stations with black programming were doing it. You could tune in at a certain time each night to some of them and they would be playing it. Mr. Nathan couldn’t believe it, but it convinced him to let the album keep going on its own.
In May my show went back into the Apollo for a week. Olatunji, the Ward Jubilee Gospel Singers, Jimmy Pelham, “Johnny and Bill,” and Tammi were all part of it. Ever since my first time at the Apollo the audiences had been good to me, and along about the third time I really felt the place was mine. But this time there was something different. I could feel it from the stage. I could tell that the album was really beginning to catch on because the audience seemed excited even before we started. It was like a lot of ’em had come to see what they’d heard on the live record. And it was like the ones who’d seen it before couldn’t get enough of it.
Right after we left the Apollo this time, the Live album showed up on the charts, but by then the Prisoner of Love album, with the strings and things, was out, too. I was competing with myself again, and that album didn’t really take off. But the Live was really building now. I even tried to find the woman who’d done all the screaming to thank her, but I couldn’t find her.
I toured all around, putting together various shows. I think this was when we did a show in Richmond and had Otis Redding on it. I knew Otis from the talent shows at the Douglas Theater in Macon, and he now had his first hit with “These Arms of Mine.” During our first rehearsal I found out Otis didn’t have any charts. At that time, St. Clair Pinkney, who played sax, was my bandleader. I had known him in Augusta when we were kids. He joined me sometime in 1961 and wrote the charts for the band. Certain parts of the show were written out, and Byrd rehearsed the band until they had it memorized. I didn’t believe in music stands on the stage. To play in my band you had to be able to play and dance at the same time, and you can’t do that with music stands in your way. Anyway, I got St. Clair to do charts for Otis, the first ones he ever had, and I think they really helped him get over.
On October 4 I went back in the studio. Records were being released all year, but I hadn’t actually recorded since the “Prisoner” sessions back in December. I recorded only one song that day—“Oh Baby, Don’t You Weep”—because I had a gig to get to. I based the song on the Davis Sisters’ version of the gospel tune “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep.” Right away I got into a big argument with Gene Redd about it. I was playing piano, and he didn’t like what I was doing. I had arguments with him like that lots of times. He didn’t know what he was talking about. Neither one us would back down, and I was in a hurry to get to my gig.
“Let’s call Mr. Nathan,” I said, “See what he says.”
We called him at home. It took him only a minute to make up his mind—I had been right so many times Mr. Nathan was on my side. He told Gene Redd that everybody better do whatever James Brown wanted or they were fired immediately. That was the last time anybody at King gave me any trouble about the way I recorded—except Mr. Nathan himself.
Somewhere during this time I cut Tammi on my Try Me label. I was crazy about her by then, but I think her family wanted her to do something else. They took her away from me because she had a lot of talent. I think they wanted me to groom her, not fall in love with her. I wanted to keep her with me, but I couldn’t stop it. They took her away. But she always kept coming back whenever she got the chance and tried to talk to me. It was painful to me. I found out she even talked to the woman I was living with later on, saying to her, “You have the best man in the world, and if you ever have a problem, I’ll come back and take him from you.” She still loved me.
I was glad when she had all those hits with Marvin: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and “You’re All I Need to Get By.” But she was just a kid that people ran too fast and took advantage of. She was very talented and very warm, and they used her. She was operated on for a brain tumor, and they put her back on tour again. She collapsed in Marvin’s arms on stage in 1967. While she was trying to recover I had her brought to the Apollo and made comfortable in the wings to watch the show and see her old friends. She was seriously incapacitated, and it was sad to see her like that. Three years later she died. Her death affected me very badly. It still does.
By the time I came back into the Apollo in November, she had left the revue and Anna King had replaced her. On that show I had Major Lance, who had “Monkey Time”; Betty Harris, who had “Cry to Me”; the Chiffons, who had “He’s So Fine”; Jackie and the Starlites; and Pigmeat and his group. “Johnny and Bill” had their spot in the show, and Byrd had his. Sometimes Bobby Bennett did some comedy routines with Pig, too.
We were all sitting in our dressing rooms before the first show of the run when Sandman Sims, the stage manager, came around and told us we ought to take a look outside the theater. “Man, y’all got ’em lined up around the corner,” he said. “You got to come see this.” Byrd, Baby Lloyd, and I, and a few others, went out to the lobby, but the minute the people outside saw us they started hollering, screaming, and going crazy. We couldn’t go out that way, so we went to the back door. It was the same thing on 126th Street. We ducked back inside. I said, “I want to see how long the line really is.” The only time you ever saw lines was on amateur night, and this was the middle of a workday, a Friday—and it was cold out, too.
We got some big old hats, sunglasses, and overcoats and went out the back door and got in a car. We went down 126th and whipped out onto Eighth Avenue. A line went way down Eighth. We turned onto 125th to check out the front of the place. Police barricades were up and the line was doubled so that it stretched the other way, too, down to Seventh Avenue. We cut up Seventh to see the line going up to Small’s Paradise. We drove back around to the stage door and ran back inside the theater. We hadn’t even seen the part of the line that stretched down Eighth below 125th. We had lines like that the whole week we were there. Smashed all the attendance records.
I knew the Live album was doing well, but I wasn’t ready for that. It stayed on the charts for sixty-six weeks and eventually made it to number 2. That means a bunch of white folks must have been buying it, too, but the funny thing was that white stations weren’t playing it at all. Somehow the word had gotten around, though. As a result of that album things just got bigger and bigger, bigger than I had ever imagined. I was ready to do things I never thought I would be able to do. But just like after “Please,” I had to go through a whole lot of changes first.