Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely played in big bands, served in the Army during World War II and entered the record business in the late 1940s. He met controversial producer Syd Nathan and budding blues sensation James Brown.
All the stories about the recording session of James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please” were as equally diverse as those surrounding his demonstration tape. Most of the major players agreed that it took place at King Records in Cincinnati the first part of 1956. In Neely’s memoirs he insists that James Brown and his group showed up without an appointment in March. That was not how Brown recalled it in his autobiography.
Brown said the Flames were working in a club in Tampa, Florida, several weeks after the signing. Since so much time had passed they had just about decided Ralph Bass had changed his mind about the contract with King Records. Then they received a phone call from their manager, Clint Brantley, telling them to go to Cincinnati immediately. Brown’s assertion matched with an interview in which Ralph Bass said he called the group to come to King Records and told them he would put them up in a hotel.1
Upon the arrival of Brown and the Flames in Cincinnati, they were supposed to check into the hotel Bass had selected for them, which Brown described in his autobiography as a “fleabag.” Instead, the Flames went straight to King Records studio and slept in their car. According to one account, Neely came to work on a cold morning to find an old Ford station wagon in the parking lot with a bull fiddle tied to the top. Inside were six or seven sleeping men. He woke them up and discovered they were there for a recording session. Neely told them Nathan would not be in the office until noon and referred them to the Manse Hotel where black musicians stayed when they were in Cincinnati.2
Neely emphasized in his memoirs, however, that because Brown had shown up without an appointment, there was no studio space available on that date. Even though still working for Allied Records, Neely came to Cincinnati from time to time to produce records independently. On this particular day Neely was in the studio with Earl Bostic, an old friend. In his autobiography Brown concurred that Bostic was at King Records that day.
Earl Bostic and Hal Neely went back together to the old big-band days in Hollywood during the 1940s. Born in Oklahoma in 1913, Bostic attended Loyola University in New Orleans. By the late 1930s he was playing his saxophone for major bands in New York, arranging music for Luis Prima, Artie Shaw, Lionel Hampton and others. When he met Hal Neely in the 1940s Bostic had gone from jazz to playing standard tunes in a rhythm and blues style. The black musician began recording for King Records in 1949.
When James Brown sat in on the recording session in early 1956 Earl Bostic was one of the top rhythm and blues performers in the country. While accounts do not specifically say what Bostic was recording that particular day, discographies reveal that Bostic did record “I Love You Truly” and “’Cause You’re My Lover” during that time period.3
“We were supposed to record the next day, but when we showed up we found out Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had come in unexpectedly,” Brown continued in his autobiography. “Everybody at the studio was tied up in a big meeting with them, so our session was postponed until the following day.”
Ballard was another big star for King Records, making both money and controversy with his 1954 hits “Work With Me, Annie” and “Annie Had A Baby”. He was born John Henry Kendricks in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, and was considered one of the first rock ‘n roll artists.
Neely, in his memoirs, kept calling Brown’s group the Royals, but that was the name of Ballard’s group in 1953 when it was signed to King Records. The group changed its name to the Midnighters in 1954.4
A major event in the relationship between Ballard and Neely came with Ballard’s big hit “The Twist.” Neely had gotten Ballard scheduled to perform the song on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, but Ballard disappeared after a show in New Orleans with a female fan and did not appear at Clark’s studio in Philadelphia. A janitor named Leonard Pendergrast said he could sing the song, and, after a few quick rehearsals, was introduced to the national audience as Chubby Checker and sang “The Twist.” He later made his own recording of the song which became the version known today. Clark subsequently told Neely no one from King Records would ever perform on American Bandstand again.5 When James Brown hit his peak, he did appear on American Bandstand even though he was with King Records.
When Brown arrived at King Records the day following Ballard’s session, he said in his autobiography, “Little Willie John had come in to record, and our session was put off again. Little Willie John was just a shade over five feet tall, and he looked really sharp. Later on he came to mean a lot to me, but when I met him that day, I was thinking more about whether my own session would ever come to pass.”
Little Willie John was another money-making talent for King Records. He was born in 1937 in Arkansas.6 After his family moved to Detroit, Michigan, he formed a gospel singing group with some of his siblings, and it wasn’t long before he came to the attention of big-time musician Johnny Otis and King A&R man Henry Glover who brought him to Nathan in 1955. Glover alleged to have signed him and had him in a studio three hours later recording “All Around The World” which within a month had gone to No. 5 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart.7
Glover said about John, “He was a really, truly great singer. The blues came so natural to him that he was just a master at that and no one living in that day could touch him. He could perform some of the greatest blues gymnastics and voice gyrations that you could ever dream of a person having.”8
In his memoirs Hal Neely claimed to be at the meeting in New York on June 27 when Willie John first met Henry Glover. Neely also said he was the one who arranged for John to meet Glover in the first place.
The day Willie John bumped James Brown and the Flames at the studio, he was probably recording either “Need Your Love So Bad” or “Fever.” John’s original version of “Fever” earned a gold record; however, the song became an even bigger hit for Peggy Lee in 1958.9
Brown and the Flames finally got their recording session. About 20 people crowded into the studio. In his autobiography Brown said he could see through the glass into the control booth where Ralph Bass, Syd Nathan and musical director Gene Redd were discussing the project. Brown didn’t like the idea of having a musical director but went along with it anyway. The first song Brown and the Flames went into was “Please, Please, Please” but Nathan quickly erupted with one of his infamous outbursts.
“Stop the tape! Stop the tape! This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever heard in my life! Nobody wants to hear this crap. All he’s doing is stuttering, just sang one damn word over and over,” Nathan screamed, according to Brown’s autobiography. “That it doesn’t sound right to my ears. What’s going on here?”
The Flames did not get any support from musical director Redd who shrugged and told Nathan he didn’t understand it either.10
Philip Paul, a drummer for King who was there that day, said, “Myself, and the other musicians said, ‘What was that?’” He remembered one of the studio guys saying, “If that’s the music to come…”
“We all cracked up,” Paul said. “These guys were really good musicians, and when they hear all the hollering and screaming, we all said, ‘What is this garbage?’”11
“I sent you out to bring back some talent, and this is what I hear,” Brown’s autobiography quoted Nathan as blustering. “The demo was awful, and this is worse. I don’t know why I have you working here. Nobody wants to hear that noise.”
But Ralph Bass came to their defense. “It’s a good song, Syd. Give them a chance.”
“A good song? It’s a stupid song. It’s got only one word in it. I’ve heard enough,” Nathan yelled before leaving the room, according to Brown’s memoir.
Hank Ballard, who was at the King studio that day, said, “Ralph Bass was a Russian Jew but he had black ears! Syd Nathan couldn’t hear a hit if you put it in his lap.”12
As far as Brown and the Flames were concerned, according to his autobiography, the recording session was a fiasco. They thought the only money they would ever see out of this project was the $150 apiece Nathan paid them for the recording session. Later they got a bill from King Records for the hotel, studio time, tapes, long-distance phone calls and even the food they ate. Back in Georgia, the members of the group returned to their old day jobs. Brown worked at a plastics factory; others to jobs as nursing home attendants.
According to Neely’s memoirs, he came back to Cincinnati on business for Allied, just in time to witness another epic fight between Syd Nathan and James Brown and the Flames.
“Hal, throw them out, unless you want to work something out and take them on,” Nathan said.
Neely then took the group into an office where he wrote a contract. The three-year agreement contained an option for King to renew for another three years. Neely would get a producer’s royalty of 3%. Neely said he called Clint Brantley in Macon to ask him to be the group’s manager. He also claimed to have changed the group’s name from the Royals to the Flames. (Other sources say the group was never known as the Royals.) Then, according to Neely’s memoirs, the group recorded “Please, Please, Please” with Neely as the producer and Eddie Smith as the engineer. Nathan liked it, Neely said.
Back in Georgia, Brown was busy with his factory job and going back and forth between his wife in Toccoa and his girlfriend in Macon. “Anyway, we carried on doing our little thing locally,” band member Byrd said. “But we had no idea the record was selling. See, we didn’t hear it on the radio.” Billboard Magazine first listed “Please, Please, Please” as a “territorial tip” at the end of March and then listed it as a “Buy O’ The Week” the first week of April. Billboard called it “a sleeper to watch. Atlanta and Cincinnati for two weeks have reported very strong activity.” By April 21, 1956, it joined the rhythm and blues charts, going to No. 6 and staying in the top 20 for 19 weeks. “And we certainly didn’t know nothing about no Billboard nowhere,” Byrd said. “Charts? What’s that? We were so down. We didn’t realize that – what we had been doing was getting out behind it and working the record.”13
“Now the aftermath of the story is that Syd never discussed how great this record was and what a great job I had done,” Bass said in an interview.14 “He could never do that. But I was in the studio there one day, waiting for someone to do a session. Syd came in blustering with some other cat who was evidently not in the record business. I could hear it all because of Syd’s loud voice. Syd said to the guy, ‘You know why we’re so successful in here at King Records? Because we don’t do things like anybody else. I’m gonna show you what I’m talking about.’ And with that, he went to the record player and put on a copy of ‘Please, Please, Please.’”15
Everyone, it seemed, had his own spin in the record industry.
Footnotes

1King of the Queen City, 90.
2The One, 74.
3Marion, J.C., Hurricane Blues: Earl Bostic.http://home.earthlink.net/jaymar41/bostic.html.
4Nite, Norm, Rock On: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock ‘n’ Roll (The Golden Years) Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974.
5Buddy Winsett Interview, July 2012.
6 Whitall, Susan, Fever Little Willie John A Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul, Titan Books, London, 20.
7 Ibid., 58.
8 Ibid., 56.
9 Ibid., 73.
10The One, 75.
11 Ibid.
12 Sullivan, James, The Hardest Working Man, How James Brown Saved the Soul of America, Gotham Books, New York City, 2008, 64.
13The Life of James Brown, 42.
14King of the Queen City, 91.
15 Ibid.