Throwback Thursday: Soul Music Historian Peter Guralnick's Top 7 Moments Of Live Soul

Peter Guralnick is one of the foremost living historians of the American cultural phenomenon we call Soul Music. His resumé is far too long to list here but for a quick primer, you can begin with two of his best-known books Sweet Soul Music and the Sam Cooke bio Dream Boogie. Okayplayer is extremely proud to present his hand-curated playlist of Top 7 moments in live soul as this week's Throwback Thursday, accompanied by Guralnick's extensive liner notes and firsthand reminiscences on these essential bits of soul archaeology, from Gene Chandler to James Brown. Read on, and click through all 7 to feel a flash of the spirit that not even the best studio can bring out of these performers; some the greatest talents of the last century.

There’s nothing like live music.

I don’t know what it is. Many record producers and engineers see it as an illusion – it looks better than it sounds – but for me it’s the essence of all music. From the first time I saw Lightnin’ Hopkins when I was sixteen years old to catching James Brown and Solomon Burke in person (not to mention Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis) when I wasn’t much older, I’ve never found anything to match it. With the soul and gospel shows it’s more of the incantatory nature of the experience – I don’t know of anything that can equal the wildness and out-of-control control of a groove that draws you in even as it keeps you at a tantalizing remove. Often the live versions of familiar songs are slower, more drawn-out, they deepen the emotional resonance of lyrics you thought you knew by heart – but not always. It’s the unexpectedness, the spontaneity of the moment that makes it different (same as jazz), whatever expression that hypnotic moment may take.

So little of this music has been recorded the way it actually sounds – in the clubs, on-stage, with an audience that is as much a part of the experience as the performer him or herself. Here are just a few, a very few, live recordings that suggest some of that untrammeled freedom. In answer to the Desert Island Disc question (what’s the one record you would take with you to that mythical desert island, assuming all obstacles of technology could be overcome and records still existed?), I’ve always said that I would gladly give away all my records, CDs, recorded music, just to see Howlin’ Wolf shatter reality one more time.

He was one of so many who was never recorded properly in his own milieu. In fact, apart from B.B. King Live at the Regal, I can’t think of any of the great blues singers who were recorded live in a manner that reflected the unparalleled range of moods and emotions that you could take from their in-person performance – unless you count the history-before-it-happened Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings of Muddy Waters and Son House. Or the Harry Oster field recordings collected in the electrifying Country Negro Jam Sessions on Arhoolie, featuring the fiddle-guitar duo of Butch Cage and Willie Thomas. From my perspective – and I know this is heresy – I would argue that neither Aretha nor Otis Redding nor Al Green, say, was ever adequately captured in the full flowering of an unvarnished live performance.

But then personal preference is always a matter of personal taste. So without begging the question, and without seeking in any way to invite invidious comparison, here is a select selection of live soul(ful) performances, with directions toward a few more. But, seriously, don’t stay home pondering my list or anyone else’s – or even dwelling on memories. Go out and hear some live music – right now!

1. Ray Charles – "Drown In My Own Tears
" Live at Herndon Stadium

Slow, slower, slowest. There is no one who can tease out a feeling – the feeling – better than Ray Charles, even as he continues to keep the pulse of the music going, keeps the listener on the edge of his/her feet. Listen to the way he uses the horns to permit his voice to weave sinuously in and out of the arrangement, to delay and deliver the message until finally, toward the end, the Raelettes come in for the first time and Ray plays off of them instead, in a warm human interchange that culminates in a searing falsetto originally inspired by Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Only to be followed, after many professions of faith have already been elicited from the audience, by the reassuring repetition: “I want to know, don’t it make you feel, all right?” And it DOES. [Note: the audio of this performance was recorded  in 1959 and can be found on the album Ray Charles in Person, the clip above is the same song performed live at Newport Jazz Festival. - ed.]

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2. James Brown – "Lost Someone"

Much the same could be said of James Brown’s historic 1962 live album (recorded at his own expense because his record company had so little faith in its potential). Listen to the way James draws out the tension with his mastery of repetition and homespun advice. (“Don’t go to strangers / Come on home to me…. You know, we all make mistakes sometimes. And the only way we can correct our mistakes/We got to try one more time.”) Listen to the way he draws in the audience (us), listen to the way he teases and tantalizes in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock moment by moment intensifies the suspense in his films. (Suspense, as Hitchcock defines it, is not a surprise – everyone knows what’s coming, we just don’t know when.) And then the audience explodes as first James, after a suitable tease (“I feel like I want to scream.” “Scream!” comes back at him) lets loose with his own apocalyptic version of the Archie Brownlee-inspired scream, then takes it one step further by getting the audience to scream, too. Then, and only then, as James declares after nearly ten minutes of apocalyptic drama, “I believe my work will be done.” And so it is – until the next time, the next show, the next moment of revelation.

If this only whets your appetite for more (and how could it not?), check out Live at the Apollo Volume 2, from 1967, just five years later, for an entirely different (but no less satisfying) experience, when everything has become rhythm and James dances madly on the precipice of funk. Or try “Oh Baby Don’t You Weep” from the faux-live Live at the Royal (with faked audience applause), which in its own way is just as apocalyptic in its studio recreation as it ever was on stage. . And don’t under any circumstances miss Alex Gibney’s brand-new documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. You won’t believe your eyes (and ears).

3. Wilson Pickett – "If You Need Me"

Don’t be put off by the mis-titling; it really is “If You Need Me.” This is the song that Solomon Burke popularized after Jerry Wexler bought the publishing but forgot to lock up the record. So both artists had hits with it, on different labels. Solomon always sang the hell out of the song in his warm, pleading style, but I don’t know if anyone ever beat Wilson Pickett’s version, recorded here at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theatre with all the harsh intensity of Pickett’s imperiously scoured voice. After a long, exhortatory introduction (it goes on for almost half the length of the song itself) Pickett offers up the same sermon that Solomon interjected into his version virtually word for word (“People have always said that I didn’t mean you no good….But one thing I know, way deep down in the bottom of my heart I’ve done the best I could”) – but with an entirely different tonal meaning. And, of course, as befits a song of such sturdy melodic construction, you get full audience participation, underlining the sense that what is being shared here is a particular experience, but universalized in such a way that it can evoke both an inner core of aloneness and a spirit of community at one and the same time. This is what Sam Phillips sought in the studio, music that is at once real (“R-E-A-L,” Sam always said) and fully aware of how hard it is to create a convincing simulacrum of reality. Not unlike a Bruce Springsteen concert. Can I get a witness?

4. Sam Cooke - "Bring It On Home To Me"

This, of course, is not just one song – it’s a symphony of Sam Cooke, arranged as a kind of showcase (in much the same way that Solomon Burke or James Brown, but not Ray Charles, arranged their medleys) for his various songs, moods and styles. It was conceived very consciously as a reaction to the way that he and his friend and business partner, J.W. Alexander, felt he had been upstaged by Little Richard, by all the explosive energy that Richard put into every performance, on a tour of England in the fall of 1962. Sam came home and consciously constructed an act of his own to match that energy, and this January 1963 date at the Harlem Square Club was one of its earliest unveilings. Not only that – spurred on by the news that James Brown had recorded his show at the Apollo three months earlier (James Brown Live at the Apollo would not come out for another few months), Sam persuaded RCA to record his Harlem Square Club performance in Miami for an album that was to be titled One Night Stand. It might just as well have been titled Another Night on the Chitlin Circuit as far as RCA was concerned, because it was almost immediately set aside – and was not in fact released until 1984, twenty years after Sam’s death. What is most notable about it, apart from the immediacy of the musical experience is that it really was another night on the chitlin circuit, one of the very few club dates of this sort that was ever recorded. But more to the point, Sam is singing in that hard-edged gospel style that he seemed to have abandoned altogether with his departure from the Soul Stirrers in 1957. It stands as solitary, secular testament to the intensity of that style – and to the way in which Sam was loved by his audience, something which you can hear over and over again in an audience response that turns almost into a singalong. I can’t think of an album with greater charm, or greater intensity. It continually arrives at a point where it seems both singer and audience are about to lose control, only to be deflected by the saving grace of Sam’s polished showmanship, as, much in the manner of one of his most accomplished students, Solomon Burke, he declares, “I better leave that one alone,” every time the temperature in the room threatens to get too hot.

One time when he didn’t leave anything alone was on the Specialty album, The Great 1955 Shrine Concert, which presents the Soul Stirrers and half a dozen other Specialty Records gospel acts, live at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sam’s “Nearer to Thee,” perhaps his greatest gospel composition, goes on for over eight-and-one-half minutes, with Sam and second lead Paul Foster trading leads until the tension becomes almost unbearable and then in the end, just as in the secular world of soul, finally finds release.

5. Gene Chandler - "Rainbow '65"

An epic tale of doomed romance, recorded at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, the furthest point of the chitlin circuit theater tour that also included the Apollo and the Uptown, along with the Howard and the Royal in DC and Baltimore. Once again we are drawn in by the incantatory pulse – at one point it seems almost as if the needle has gotten stuck in the groove, as the singer repeats, “I’m asking you baby / I’m asking you baby” over and over again, until finally he breaks into an extended, wailing, squealing falsetto “Pleasssse.” And then, after playing with words and sounds and clicks and gasps (words at this point no longer have meaning – or at least that is not their primary purpose) finally arrives at his cataclysmic conclusion: “I just want to ask you one thing [three times, four times] I want you to stop, stop THIS RAINBOW….IN MY HEART.”

6. Etta James – "Something's Got A Hold On Me"

This could probably be better called rock ‘n’ soul, of which, if Solomon was the king, Etta James would surely make a fitting queen. (There is, of course, only one Queen of Soul.) It’s the only uptempo number in the group – I think most people would agree that deep soul, in order to get deep, generally takes a more measured pace – but here Etta adopts another mode and loses nothing in the process. The raw power of her voice alone, particularly in the extended intro, with its straight-out evocation of the church, would be enough in itself, along with the pumping gospel piano and lyrics that could just as easily be applied to the sacred (and unquestionably have) as the profane. A sense of transport fills the New Era Club in Nashville – here, once again, it need hardly be said, it’s not the song, it’s the feeling. [Just ask Flo Rida - ed.]

7. Solomon Burke - "Silent Night"

Listen to the laughter. That says it all, expressing the sense of delight that not just soul music but gospel music, too (hell, all kinds of music) is able so effortlessly to convey. In the end it’s the sound of surprise, the exultation of discovery, the sense on the part of both audience and performer that – hey, (s)he/I didn’t just do that, did we? In Solomon’s case, it is, of course, amplified by one of the most glorious voices you are ever likely to hear –along with the most astonishing talent for improvisation, verbal, musical and, not entirely irrelevantly, comical, too. In this case the listener doesn’t really have to know that the number was recorded in a Macon church on a steaming July day (“It was at least 105 degrees, Pete!” Solomon told me with that sense of conspiratorial wonderment) to appreciate the anomaly of the situation. Nor is it necessary to put your full, literal faith in Solomon’s pronouncement to producer Fred Mendelsohn as he pointed out the church window, “Look, Fred, it’s snowing!” to recognize the extent to which music can take you away from the literal, the diurnal, your everyday cares and woes. If you put your faith in music, Solomon says over and over again in his songs, both sacred and secular, you can move mountains, you can change the world. (Don’t forget, it was Solomon who announced without irony in one of his early hits, “There’s a song that I sing, and I believe if everyone was to sing this song, it would save the whole world.”)

Now – if you want to get a dose of Solomon at his most gloriously secular (and at his most alive), you can’t by any lassitude of the spirit allow yourself to overlook his Rounder album Soul Alive! captured with wall-to-wall verisimilitude and fervor at a Washington D.C. club in 1981, it’s like Sam Cooke’s live album, a true symphony of soul. But the thing about it is, as Solomon would be the first to tell you, when the feeling’s right, whether it’s at a little church in Georgia, a bedraggled club that hasn’t bothered to remove its Christmas tinsel in years, or a command performance for the Pope, it really doesn’t matter – when the feeling is right, that’s when a true miracle is achieved.