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James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Twenty-One

Previously in the book: Hal Neely began his career with big bands and then entered the recording business, working with controversial producer Syd Nathan and soul star James Brown.
Hal Neely’s relationship with James Brown revolved curiously around specific events which evoked different memories from everyone involved. One of the best examples of this phenomenon was the creation of the history-making “Live at the Apollo” record album.
In April of 1959 James Brown was booked into the Apollo Theater for the first time. He was still riding high from the success of “Try Me,” and his booking agent Ben Bart, in charge of Universal Attractions, wanted to take advantage of it. The engagement brought back a former member of the Famous Flames, Bobby Byrd, who would spend the rest of his career flying in and out of Brown’s orbit.1
“I was a seasoned performer, but under the circumstances I was a nervous wreck,” Brown said in his autobiography. “The Apollo was a special place: it was the venue for black entertainers; it made a lot of people, but it broke a lot too. The audience was very tough and if they didn’t like you, they let you know.”
The Apollo Theater, on 125th St. off Eighth Avenue in the Harlem section of Manhattan, began as a burlesque house called Hurtig and Seamon’s Music Hall. A city crackdown on stripper shows in 1934 transformed the facility into what became the crown jewel of the “chitlin circuit”– a collection of theaters in the South and on the East Coast, allowing black audiences to enjoy black entertainers during the Jim Crow era.2
By the fall of 1962, James Brown was a major act but still not in the same league as Ray Charles or Jackie Wilson. Charles, for example, had already made a recording of a live show in 1969 called “In Person”. Brown wanted to do the same thing.3
Hal Neely, in interviews given later in his life, claimed the idea of a live recording was his. Whoever’s idea it was, Syd Nathan hated it, calling it silly. Very few live performances had been recorded because they could not be controlled.4 Another problem was that King Records made its money through the sale of singles which could be marketed easily on the radio. Nathan believed no hit single could come out of a live recording, and he wasn’t concerned with long-playing albums anyway.5
After Nathan so emphatically rejected his idea, Brown went to his booking agent, Ben Bart, with a proposition to make Bart his partner/manager. After some persuasion Bart agreed negotiating details with Brown’s other manager, Clint Brantley. He also turned over Universal Attractions duties to his son Jack Bart, according to Brown’s autobiography.
“We got into many battles over those years after my father passed the management of James over to me,” Jack Bart said. “This was due to the fact that James felt why should he pay a booking agency, why should he pay a manager? If it had been two separate families and our last names had been different, he probably wouldn’t have objected.”6
Brown gave one more shot at convincing Nathan to support the live at the Apollo album. Chuck Seitz, lead engineer with King at that time, described the meeting this way:
“I remember James came in one day needing money. He wanted Syd to give him $5000. Syd said, ‘I’ll give you $5000 if you’ll sign with me five more years.’ And James must’ve been up against it so he signed for five more years. And in that five-year period, the Apollo thing came around.”7
Bobby Byrd had a different recollection of the situation. “Didn’t nobody believe in us – none of the company executives at King Records believed in us. But see, we were out there. We saw the response as we ran our show. James took the money we had saved for an upcoming Southern swing ($5700) and gambled it on one night.” The gamble to which Byrd referred was Brown’s investment in the Apollo show.8
“Usually James fined his band members $5 or $10 for making a mistake, but this time, he put out the word that if anyone flubbed one note at the Apollo, it would be $50 to $100.” Instead of the usual arrangement with the Apollo, Brown and Bart put down the $5700 as theater rental.9
“Once Mr. Nathan saw I was going to go ahead with a live recording, he started cooperating,” Brown said in his autobiography. “Mr. Neely took care of getting the equipment from A-1 Sound in New York, the only ones who had portable stuff—Magnacorders, I think.”
Neely’s memory of the preparations were more detailed. The Apollo had the usual public address system, a mixer, four microphones and headphones. Neely rented and placed the additional equipment. There was no multi–tracking so what one got on the acetate single tape was the final product. Mixing was done on the fly. Drums and bass came in on different speakers. The board had switches instead of the sliders used today to control and come from speakers which were placed on the left, right, above and in front of the stage. Neely said he was not given credit for the recording, but the credit went to the company he rented the equipment from.10
“We had opened on the 19th (of October) and were building up to recording on the 24th, a Wednesday, which meant amateur night,” Brown said in his autobiography. “I wanted that wild amateur-night crowd because I knew they’d do plenty of hollering. The plan was to record all four shows that day so we’d have enough tape to work with.”
Once the concert had begun, Brown worried that Neely might have done too good a job stringing the microphones around the stage. One of them was right over an audience member–a woman who looked like she was 75 years old. In the middle of “I Love You, Yes I Do” Brown sang the line “from the way I look at you.” The mike clearly picked up her screaming “Sing it, mother***ker, sing it!” During a quiet rendition of “Lost Someone” which was supposed to be a serious song, the same old woman screamed loudly which caused the audience to laugh, according to his autobiography. Brown recovered and called for another “yeah” from the audience, causing them to continue to call out.11
“I wanna hear you scream. I wanna hear you saying OW!” After the response he added, “Don’t just say ow, say OW!”12
In the middle of the performance of the song “I Don’t Mind” the microphone picked up a minor argument between two audience members. A woman squealed, and a man rumbled back at her. When Brown sang “you gonna miss me” a woman yelled in response, “Yeah, you, baby, you! Ha-ha-ha … Yeah, you!” As it turned out, that was the same old woman who screamed “mother***ker.”13
Another version, however, said the old lady’s outburst was garbled and probably not the word “mother***ker”. Less than 30 seconds later, a scratchy, male voice says, “Sing a song, James.” This source conjectured that the garbled outburst was merely a squeak from the drum kit or the organ speaker. It went on to surmise that the audience mikes had been turned down when the crowd was expected to cheer and was turned up to catch the unexpected exclamations in the middle of songs.14
After the first show Neely brought the tape backstage for Brown and the rest of the musicians to hear, according to Brown’s autobiography. When Neely replayed the disputed outburst, everyone in the band laughed out loud. Neely did not catch the joke until the band explained what they thought the woman said. At first Neely thought it was terrible and the woman had to be kept from the other shows but when he saw the reaction of everyone backstage, he said, “Hey, maybe we’ve got something here.”
The legend15 developed that Neely went out to the lobby and found the old woman, bought her candy and popcorn and paid her $10 to stay for the next three shows. As if on cue she shouted at all the right places.
One last story that contributed to the legend of the night concerned a meeting between Brown and his long-lost mother. Neely said, “James hadn’t seen his mother in 20 years, and she showed up backstage at the Apollo that night.” 16 However, Brown said in his autobiography that the emotional reunion with his mother actually occurred during his first appearance at the Apollo Theater in 1959 when he opened for Little Willie John.
The controversy over credit for the recording did not end with the concert that cold October night in 1962. Again in the middle of the dispute was Hal Neely and his role in the final editing process. For one thing, the album cover credited Tom Nola as “location engineer” but Neely said he recorded it himself.17 James Brown in his autobiography gave Neely full editing acknowledgement, saying “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 be 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.”
Chuck Seitz, King’s chief engineer, also claimed responsibility for the successful editing of Live at the Apollo. “All I know is that tape came in to us, and we listen to the damn thing. We listen all the way through, and I thought it was terrible. For one thing you couldn’t always tell it was live. The trouble was the basic recording approach, which only intermittently picked up the crowd’s reaction. If this was going to be a document of a concert, pandemonium had to be reinjected18
“I suggested we try to boost the audience up. I went to Roselawn (in Cincinnati) to a sock dance they used to have out there. I knew the DJ, so I went out there with a tape recorder. He got them (a group of white teen-agers) to applaud and cheer, and I went back and inserted it where it was needed.” Seitz acknowledged that the exclamations by the old woman were authentic and from the original Apollo track.19
One point everyone apparently agreed on was that Syd Nathan’s initial reaction was that he hated it. He did not want to finance a publicity campaign to have the album played on radio stations around the country. Nathan considered releasing it on the Deluxe subsidiary label which would have doomed it to failure because the smaller label had less marketing possibilities. That way he could take a tax write-off on a project he had not even invested his money in.20
Brown said in his autobiography that Nathan did not like the way the album went from one tune to another without stopping. Nathan evidently thought there would be polite applause between each number which would give a disc jockey a place to begin and end a song on the radio. That was the only way he knew how to sell records.
Nathan’s plan to bury the album enraged Brown. Jerry Blavat, a Philadelphia disc jockey, remembered seeing Brown backstage at an Atlantic City concert. “He told me, ‘you have got to hear this new thing, man. That f**king Syd Nathan, he don’t want to release this, he don’t have a f**king ear! I’m gonna release it myself.’” Blavat said Brown gave him a copy which he took home and listened to. “It was the most exciting live album; this was raw, and it captured what he was on stage, man. Forget it! I busted that f**king thing wide open, just played the hell out of it. The whole f**king thing, because you couldn’t really just play one song the way it was put together.”21
The next stage of Brown’s campaign to promote Live at the Apollo was to send a copy to his favorite disc jockey and event promoter Allyn Lee in Montgomery. Lee said, “It hadn’t hit the streets yet. I was on the air on Sunday and I played it for the first time. I played it all the way through, and that sort of sealed my fate in Montgomery. One million phone calls came in – see, they didn’t really know James Brown in Montgomery; they knew ‘Please’ but they had never heard him in that form. Now they did.”22
Nathan relented in May 1963 and released the album even though he said he still couldn’t see the sense in it. He ordered an original pressing of only 5000 copies—a cautious if standard procedure for Nathan, according to Seitz, King’s Chief Engineer.
“Syd’s theory was that he’d put 1000 copies of a record out, and then watch it real close – he wouldn’t advertise until something started to take off.”23
Brown, in his autobiography, gave special credit to Neely. “I think Mr. Neely was the one who finally sold him on it.” He also gave another example of how stubborn Syd Nathan could be. Nathan still insisted that singles be spun off of the album so they could be played on the radio.
“When Mr. Nathan checked the radio stations to see what was being played off the album, he got a surprise,” Brown said in his memoirs. “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. Mr. Nathan couldn’t believe it, but it convinced him to let the album keep going on its own.”
Live at the Apollo stayed on the LP charts for 66 weeks, an amazing feat considering the first pressing was for 5000. The album reached number two on the Billboard national pop charts and was the 32nd top selling album in 1963. However, total record sales numbers will never be known because Syd Nathan never got RIAA certification for King Records which made exact sales accounting impossible.24
Nathan did, however, eventually buy the master tape from Brown.25

Footnotes:
1 The One, 93.
2Wolk, Douglas, Live at the Apollo, Continuum, New York, 2004, 1.
3Fever, 119.
4The One, 108.
5Live at the Apollo, 6.
6 Life of James Brown, 77, 78.
7The One, 111.
8Ibid. 110.
9 Ibid.
10Roland Hanneman interview.
11Live at the Apollo, 70.
12Ibid. 57.
13Ibid. 85.
14 Ibid. 107.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17Roland Hanneman Interview.
18The One, 120.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 121.
23Night at the Apollo, 120.
24 Ibid., 112.
25Ibid. 114.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story

Previously in the book: Hal Neely began his career with big bands touring the Midwest and California. Then he entered the record business where he met volatile record magnate Syd Nathan and soul star James Brown.
Hal Neely was not a stranger to the darker side of the record business, beginning with dealings with the Mafia and going on to just barely escaping federal repercussions in the payola scandal. It seemed to start out fairly innocently. King Records, as all music corporations, placed records in stores on consignment. What a store could not sell was returned to the company for credit. One time a record store owner tried to return 500 or more copies for credit. Neely balked because the store had held them so long, but eventually he took them back.1
In due course Neely realized he could sell the returned records to the Mafia for cash. The next step was to over-press intentionally records by several thousand copies and sell them to the Mob for a dollar apiece. The unauthorized over-pressing orders were done in the middle of the night when everyone else had gone home. The Mob then sold the records on the streets for a tidy and untraceable profit. Neely never dealt face to face with any of the leaders of organized crime but rather met with nondescript messengers who gave him envelopes stuffed with cash. The pick-up points changed for every transaction. Sometimes a Mafia front man appeared at a record store looking like they were picking up returns but actually were getting a new product. Neely made sure no one snitched on him, and he never felt intimidated by the crime bosses. It was with this undocumented cash that Neely used for payola payments.2
He kept tabs on which record representatives were given cash. When Neely dealt with radio station people, they always knew to look in his top jacket pocket for the bills. He was also busy at the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention every year where radio disc jockeys received special “comps” such as escorts, food, and shows. Of course, the disc jockeys knew when they went home to their radio stations it was time to show their appreciation for the hospitality by pushing the records. Neely never felt he was necessarily doing anything wrong because all the other labels were doing it too, and they needed payola as a promotional tool just to survive.3
In fact, in the beginning payola was not even illegal, but the practice came to the attention of the national news media after a story in the Miami News on May 30, 1959. Details of the shady operations at a recording industry convention swept across the nation. The official name of the event was the Second Annual International Radio Programming Seminar and Pop Music Disc Jockey Convention, but Miami News reporter Haines Colbert described it more as a Roman orgy than a staid businessmen’s meeting.4
“There were expensive prizes, free liquor around the clock in at least 20 suites and girls, imported and domestic,” Colbert wrote in his article. “There are about 2,000 record companies,” a spokesman for one of the major companies told Colbert, “and all of them send all their releases to every disc jockey. The only possible way to get them on the air is by giving the disc jockey personal attention. And that means giving him whatever he wants.”5
The newspaper expose triggered hearings in Congress by the Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight. Chief Counsel of the special subcommittee, Robert W. Lishman, had recently honed his investigatory skills with his work delving into rigged television game shows. His definition of payola was as follows:
“Bribes paid to disc jockeys to plug certain songs … It also includes charges of secret payment for plugging products and individuals on television and radio, kickbacks for promoting sales, and conflicts of interest by disc jockeys who have an interest in the manufacturing and sale of records.”6
Another form of payola was a radio station’s “Spin of the Day” which was paid for by the record company. That fact was never announced on the air. While being a “Spin of the Day” did not assure success for a mediocre product, it could help a good performance by a new artist get the recognition it deserved.7
By November of 1959 the scandal had taken its first victim, Alan Freed, a New York disc jockey who had been given the title of the “inventor” of rock ‘n’ roll. He was fired by both radio station WABC and television station WNEW.7 In the same month Frank Hogan, New York district attorney, subpoenaed several independent record companies including King. Cities where disc jockeys were allegedly bribed included Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York and Detroit. These were considered the important regional centers where new records were introduced to the public.8
Syd Nathan lost no time in giving an immediate interview to the Cincinnati Post in which he said that King “has paid off disc jockeys all over the country and that he has the checks to prove it,” although he qualified that statement by saying he “never paid more than $10 a month to any one disc jockey, although some firms might have paid as much as $300-$400 to get their records plugged.”9
Payola “is a dirty rotten mess and it has been getting worse in the last five years,” Nathan told the newspaper. There are more than 10,000 disc jockeys in the country and less than 200 demanded payola. That small amount could make or break a record. So we cut it out.” He added that King made regular monthly payments in 1957 and 1958 in the amount of $18,000 a month mostly to disc jockeys in Philadelphia and New York.10
He explained why he paid by check. “How else could we account for the money unless it was on our books for what it was? We told the disc jockeys that if they didn’t want to declare it on their incomes, it was their business, but if they were going to get paid it would be by check.”11 Nathan illustrated how out-of-control the practice had become by explaining how he once received a telegram from a disc jockey in Arkansas. Receiving your records periodically, but never any checks. What’s wrong?12
While his statement of culpability may have seemed brave on the surface of it, Nathan nevertheless shifted some of the blame by telling investigators that payola transactions were handled out of King Records’ New York office operated by Henry Glover who had been employed by Syd Nathan since the early 1940s. Glover had been instrumental in bringing several R&B artists to King, including Little Willie John. In later years, Glover told interviewers he felt Nathan had thrown him under the bus during the payola scandal. Shortly after Nathan’s statements Glover resigned as King’s A&R man in New York, though some in the industry say King fired him. Glover immediately formed his own Glover label in association with Old Town Records.13 Hal Neely defended Glover, claiming that he had left the company voluntarily.
“The only two people guilty of payola at King … were Syd Nathan and Hal Neely. The other guys were just doing what they were told,” Neely said. “They might have passed money, but they didn’t unless it was approved. They didn’t get the cash until it was approved,” he reiterated. “I’m the only record executive they didn’t indict for payola, and I am as guilty as anybody.”14 Neely conceded that they knew the company was going to be in trouble.
“We were hot, and we knew we had to stop. It was only a matter of time before an investigation would come. It was out of hand. We stopped two years before the committee came around and that’s what saved us because they only went back two years. I prepared the audit, and we knew we were guilty but we stopped. Everyone was guilty and should’ve shared the blame. Including Dick Clark.”15
Neely bragged about the day federal agents came to his office to look at the books. He turned to his secretary to ask her to bring in the files. The agents asked for accounts starting three days after Neely stopped paying payola. He also re-pressed records with recycled materials from returns of failed artists so there were no files of fresh material. At this same time supplies of records disappeared mysteriously from King storage. Neely had suspicions that his Mafia connections may have destroyed the evidence in an attempt to protect him because he had made so much money for them.16
Ralph Bass also left King Records at this time. Some felt Nathan had shifted some payola blame onto him, and Bass said, “I figured my operation with Syd…well, I was losing something with Syd. I thought he was doing things behind my back. It didn’t feel like he was on my side anymore. I had to get away, to start fresh. I felt I was stagnating at King. So I got a better deal from Leonard Chess and I went over to Chess Records.”17
The irony of the payola scandal was that R&B artists never benefited from it. White radio stations could not be paid enough to put artists like Hank Ballard, Little Willie John and James Brown on the air. This was not to say payola did not exist on black radio stations. For example, one of James Brown’s childhood friends was Allyn Lee, a master of the practice at WAPX in Montgomery, Alabama.18
Lee, who was paid little or nothing by a radio station, made his living from payments by local businesses for on-air promotions. He also arranged local performances by the record artists he broadcasted.19
“Whenever James Brown appeared disk jockeys from within a 200-mile radius came out,” Lee said. “And they would never leave until the manager came out and greeted them because James Brown always gave out an envelope of money. Always. My chauffeur–they once gave him an envelope of money. I said, ‘James, but he’s not a disc jockey.’ And he said, ‘He might be one next week.’ Back then you had 15 to 20 disc jockeys in the area, and depending on your position there might be $50-$500 in the envelope. He would always be appreciating you for you playing his records. ‘Play my records, man, keep me heard.’”20
Jim Crow laws made a black disc jockey in the South like Lee a very powerful person as a promoter for personal appearances by an artist like James Brown. Lee would take 10% for himself and the remainder went to Brown. The reasoning behind this was that the disc jockey had more incentive to sell tickets if some of that money was coming back to him. The disc jockey was now a business partner.21
“That’s why James Brown became more of a legend than the guy who slipped you something in a handshake,” said Bob Patton, a former disc jockey who later was on Brown’s staff. “He made you out to be a businessman, not a whore.”22
Brown may have made some disc jockeys feel like businessmen, but in the mid-1970s, one of them ended up in jail. Frankie Crocker was called one of the most important black disc jockeys in the world. During a new government investigation of payola, Crocker swore to the FBI he had never taken payola; however, the investigators brought in James Brown’s most trusted lieutenant Charles Bobbit who testified he had given Crocker $6,500 over eight years. When Brown took the stand, he claimed he did not know anything about the deal. Crocker went to jail for a year on perjury and Bobbit left Brown’s employ and the country to work for the president of Gabon.23
Footnotes
1 Roland Haneman Interview.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Record Breakers and Makers, 454.
5 Ibid.
6Bryan Powers.
7Fever, 122.
8Record Breakers and Makers, 455.
9Bryan Powers.
10King of Queen City, 158.
11 Ibid. 159.
12Bryan Powers.
13King of Queen City, 29.
14Fever, 122.
15Brian Powers.
16 Roland Hanneman Interview.
17King of Queen City, 93.
18 The One,100.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 101.
21 Ibid., 102.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 316, 317.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Nineteen

Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely hit it big with Big Bands in the Midwest and California. After World War II he worked for a record manufacturing company before joining Syd Nathan’s King Records where he produced James Brown’s records.
Perhaps the most important change to occur at King Records–and for James Brown–in 1958 was the hiring of Hal Neely because he became a buffer between Brown and Nathan during the rest of their business relationship.1
One of the first benefits Brown received with Neely on board with King Records was a new contract. “Mr. Neely had been a bandleader and a trumpet player and knew something about music,” Brown said in his autobiography. He credited Neely with getting him a 5% royalty even though 3% was the standard for musicians in the 1950s.
In a May 5, 1958 article, Billboard Magazine reported Neely joining the executive staff of King Records. Nathan said hiring Neely was the first step in a “new look” program. “Neely will team with King Records execs Jack Kelly, Howard Kessel, Al Miller and Jack Pearl in a concentrated drive to attain major status for the label in the next two years.” The drive included expansion of the artist roster, the creation of a larger pop Long Play line, and the revamping of the Deluxe and Federal labels.
Neely also adapted the recording session to Brown’s performing style. Most singers would stand in one place in front of the microphone, but not James Brown. Each time he sang it was a full out performance with dancing and jumping around. Neely realized recording James Brown in the conventional way was virtually impossible because he would always move away from the microphone. He gave him a hand-held microphone so he could prance around the studio for two takes. He also had another microphone placed on the studio piano. Neely would tell the engineer to fadeout to end the song even if Brown was still singing. This was the same technique he had used in his first producing session in California back in the 1940s.2
During one session, Brown headed for the piano, and Neely turned to the engineer and asked if the microphone on the piano was working. When the engineer replied that the microphone was off, Neely told him to bring it up. Brown put down the hand-held microphone and played the piano. When he finished at the piano, he picked up the hand-held microphone and continued singing.3
As soon as the session was over, Brown rushed out the door to catch the tour bus for the next performance destination. Usually the recording session was done after a performance because Brown either “had a girl waiting for him or a bus to catch.” Neely sat with a razor blade to cut the tape so the performance would fit the time the record format allowed. Ten days later the recording was in the stores.4
Neely’s music production savvy was essential for King Records because Nathan did not understand music; he only knew how to play it tough in business. Once he gave $100 to writer Pee Wee King for a song. As King was leaving the building, he heard the pianist play the tune again and decided it was worth more than $100. He turned around and went back into Nathan’s office and asked for more money. Nathan told him to hand over the check which he tore up, handing the music back to King. “You can’t change the deal.” King took his song, “Tennessee Waltz,” to another record company who produced it with Patti Paige, which became a national sensation.5
Nathan did not care if he missed out on a hit as long as he was tough in the deal. He had little respect or compassion for any artist. Neely’s music production style helped soothe the way with musical talent.6
During this time Neely apparently had no problems finding people to work for him and King Records, according to reports in Billboard Magazine. In the Feb. 29, 1960 issue, the magazine reported Neely had signed Gene Redd, Bobby Keyes and Lenny Wilson to recording contracts as the production team for sixty albums. The March 23, 1960, issue had two articles about Neely; one that he had re-signed Earl Bostic to an exclusive King contract for ten years, and another that he devised a clever promotion gimmick for Hawkshaw Hawkins’ latest album. He taped a dime to the press release to all disc jockeys so they could call King’s office for information on the country singer’s music.
This procedure was perhaps an omen of the future practice of payola which shook the music industry to its roots, but somehow did not taint Neely one bit.
Footnotes
1 The Life of James Brown, 54.
2 Roland Hanneman Interview.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story

(Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely began on the Big Band Circuit, served in World War II, worked for Allied Record Manufacturing and moved on to King Records where he met infamous producer Syd Nathan and up-and-coming Soul singer James Brown.)
(Author’s note: chapters written in italics denote they are the memoirs of Hal Neely and do not necessarily reflect the stories of others involved in the vinyl years of Rock and Roll.)

My first job at King was to rebuild the plant. It was obsolete and in disrepair, needing new modern equipment and a new mill. Its machine shop was good with experienced workmen who could build all of the new machines we needed. I redesigned the whole plant—mill, boiler room, press room and printing, and added a photo and art department and rebuilt the recording studio.
Syd was ill more and more. He and Zella, now married, were spending much of their time in the condo in Miami Beach. When in Cincinnati he usually came in after lunch time and left early, but we talked every day even when he was in Miami.
We rearranged the operations offices and staff over the press room. Syd, Ralph Bass and I had our officers there. Over in the newer third building on the second floor was reception, our general office staff (paperwork, billing, accounting, etc.) and the new art/photo department complete with a darkroom. On the first floor was shipping and inventory. In the back were a parking lot and our re-built recording studio.
Cincinnati was a good record town. Several other small labels called it home. The biggest of these was Fraternity Records owned by Harry Carlson who recorded in our studios and pressed with us. Another big customer was Don Pierce’s Starday Records in Nashville. Our plant was good. Our record sales were good.
James Brown in those early years came out to my house in Cincinnati several times to eat with us. He loved my wife Mary. She taught him the rudiments of correct table manners.
I produced The Famous Flames several more times in the King studio, but it had no more hits. Syd wanted to drop the group. I still believed in them. Syd agreed to let Andy Gibson, a King man in New York, record one more session. He recorded “Bewildered,” and it was an instant hit going to No. 1. (Author’s note: Neely had a penchant for exaggeration. According to music historian John Broven, Bewildered was a No. 8 on the R&B chart in 1961)1 King picked up the Flames option for another three years and now released the group on the King label, but as “James Brown and The Famous Flames.” The rest is history.
I continued to produce the group when I was available. Single record sales soared. James was in charge of all music and shows, and Bobby took care of the books. After several years of constant touring, James took the Flames, with Mr. Brantley’s approval, to a new manager/booker in New York. He was Jack Pearl’s wife’s brother-in-law. Pearl was King’s long-time attorney.
James Brown and The Famous Flames sold out tours/shows/concerts. They worked steady. I saw little of him– only occasionally going to one of the shows. I was always welcome when I did. We remained close for many years. We recorded him in our King studio in Cincinnati. This was the “James Brown Sound.” Ron Lenhoff, our engineer, became James’s favorite engineer.
When it came time for him to record, if the band was too far away on tour, James would fly in, always accompanied by his featured girl singer of the time. He changed his girl singer, whom he never placed under contract, often.
The band personnel also kept changing–for the better, but always with the nomd’ plume ‘the JBs.”
The JBs created a problem one night in Charlotte, South Carolina. They gave James an ultimatum and refused to do that night’s show unless James gave them a big raise. He called me in Cincinnati. We decided to secretly replace the JBs with King’s house band. They had recorded with him several times and knew him well. I chartered a small plane to take them to Charlotte. Bobby Byrd met them and took them to the auditorium to set up their gear.
Bobby delayed the band’s bus driver by picking up the old JBs. When they got to the auditorium Bobby met them.
“You’re fired. Here are your final checks,”he said. It was done.
It was Syd Nathan’s “My way or no way.”
At that time James sold only single records, no albums. In the King Cincinnati studio I produced the album “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”. It made it to No. 1 on the “soul” charts. It was pure James Brown. From then on it was a “let the good times roll.” Hit after hit. Album after album.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Seventeen

Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely began with dance bands in the Midwest during the 1930s and became a recording manufacturing exec and record producer at King Records.
(Author’s Note: Chapters written in italics are from Neely’s personal memoirs and do not always agree with outside sources.)
Meanwhile, I was still working for Allied, living in New Jersey. There was a daily Smoke Rise commuter bus to Manhattan leaving at seven each morning and returning at 6 p.m. If I had to go to my Manhattan office in the Port Authority building on 39th Street first, I took No. 507 to No. 17 in Hackensack New Jersey and then to No. 3 in Union City and the Lincoln Tunnel. If I went to the plant first, I got on No. 17 near Lindhurst, then to the Lincoln Tunnel terminal. Going home at night I reversed the procedure.
On many nights, when I couldn’t get home, I stayed at a small hotel on 54th and Broadway. The King Records office was across the street. For all commuters to Manhattan, from wherever, such a complicated procedure was the way it was if you did not live in town. Doing too many jobs was wearing me out. Mr. Broadhead gave me a choice, Allied’s vice president of sales stationed in Manhattan or manager of the new Allied pressing plant in Jersey. I chose sales.
Syd was getting more and more ill. He and Zella were spending much of their time in their condominium in North Miami Beach. I was at King’s in Cincinnati on a regular basis. All the staff and employees treated me like one of them. Allied’s government prime production contract was terminating soon in 1957. It was time for me to move on. I wanted to be a producer.
ZIV/World offered me a contract to produce “I Led Three Lives” and the World Transcription Library. I would be based in New York.
I talked to Syd at least two or three times a week. I was in Manhattan and called Syd in Cincinnati about 10 in the morning.
“Syd, just wanted you to be the first to know. I am leaving Allied to join ZIV/World as a producer tomorrow.”
There was a long silence on the phone.
“Hal, you promised me that if you ever left Allied you would come to work for me.”
“I didn’t remember it that way.”
Syd hung up on me. About seven that night I received a call.
“Hal, can you come and see me? I’m at the Sheraton.” Syd always stayed there when in Manhattan. For Syd, he was being nice and polite.
I had no idea what he wanted to talk about. Syd was like a second Dad to me so of course I would go see him. “Yes, I’ll be there.”
I walked into his room. Sitting with him was Dr. Richard Nathan, Sid’s younger brother from Miami Beach. I was greeted warmly. I’d always been like family. We talked and talked. They wanted to know why I had decided to leave Allied after almost ten years. It soon became evident to me that they were serious about working something out for me to come to King. We got down to the nitty-gritty. I now sensed the ZIV/World may not be what I really wanted. This could be as good or better a deal for me.
“Hal, just what is it you want in the near future?” Richard asked. “You’re not getting any younger.”
Boy, I knew that. This might be my chance. “My own record company someday.”
There it was on the table. We talked and talked some more.
“Hal, we will give you a 10-year contract deal and whatever else you want,” Syd told me. “You will run King. Richard and I have talked it over. We will also give you a first refusal option, no time limit, to buy all the King music and publishing assets, but not my personal property, for $1,676,000.”
It was almost sun-up, time for breakfast. Syd was very, very ill. They gave me everything I asked for. We shook hands. I wrote it up, in my hand, a simple contractual sale agreement on a blank page in a notebook I always carried in my briefcase. We had it notarized in the morning in the Sheraton office. Richard went back to Miami Beach, and Syd stayed in Manhattan a few days with me. I called ZIV and Mr. Broadhead in Hollywood. The plan was that I would join King as vice president and chief operating officer and be a member of the board on January 1, 1958.
I would sell my house in Smoke Rise as soon as possible and King would move my family to Cincinnati. In the interim I would work out of and live in Syd’s brownstone building on 54th Street and Broadway for free. It was across from Al and Dick’s Café, a local music industry hangout. I would be on King’s payroll and help Allied until they replaced me. Mary, our son, and I packed up and moved everything in a moving van to Cincinnati. King furnished me with a new Buick station wagon.
We first moved into a temporary apartment. Mary wanted a house. Jack Kelly, a true Kentucky gentleman of the old school and chief financial officer of King, assisted us in the move. Kelly had helped Syd in his buy-out of the House of the Blind pressing plant in Louisville. We decided on a beautiful small rural residential community, Terrace Park. Mary picked out a house under construction on a dead-end side street. I would be about 30 minutes from the King plant. The house had two stories, a full den and storage room in the basement, a nice front hall entrance, large living room and a dining room with fireplace, and yard. The first thing Mary did was add a big screened porch off the dining room just like the house in Smoke Rise.
We felt we were home, joining the Terrace Park country club and the local Presbyterian Church. Our neighbor was a doctor who became our doctor. We made a host of new friends. At work I was in charge, but Syd was still the boss.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Sixteen

Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely toured with big bands and transitioned to the record manufacturing business, eventually meeting King Records Syd Nathan and future soul star James Brown. He played a role in Brown’s first big hit but he continued his rise with Allied Recording while James Brown struggled after his initial success, “Please, Please, Please.”
After the success of “Please, Please, Please,” Hal Neely continued his steady rise with Allied Record Company, moving his family from the West Coast to New Jersey where he could commute into downtown New York to the main headquarters. A May 1, 1956, Billboard Magazine article reported that Neely was now national sales manager of both Allied and American Sound, a joint venture of Allied and Bart Manufacturing. He was temporarily assigned to the takeover of Urania Records to complete the necessary planning and change.
James Brown’s career, however, did not move along as smoothly. His next productions from the King studio did not receive the same enthusiastic response as his first hit. In June 1956, “I Don’t Know” and “I Feel That Old Feeling Coming On” seemed to get lost in the aftermath of the “Please” hurricane. A month later King released “No, No, No” and “Hold My Baby’s Hand” to the same lukewarm reception. Another commercial failure in October with “Just Won’t Do Right” and “Let’s Make It” only justified Syd Nathan’s original opinion of James Brown and the Flames. In his autobiography, Brown said he felt he was competing with himself.
Brown’s cure for the record doldrums was to take the group back on the road, playing his old hometown of Augusta, Ga., and then up north to Richmond, Virginia, and back down to Florida, getting gigs in Jacksonville, Bradenton, and Miami. Their next lucky break came when they played the same club as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Ballard was so impressed with their act that he called his booking agent in New York City, Ben Bart of Universal Attractions. Bart began in the music business during the 1940s, founding his own agency, Universal Attractions, in 1949. He represented the majority of the hot rhythm and blues acts of the 1950s, including Dinah Washington and Billy Eckstine. Bart saw in Brown a raw talent with unfettered energy and a potential to be open to instruction.1
Bobby Byrd described the relationship in these terms: “Ben and Syd Nathan and King’s lawyer, Jack Pearl, are all inter related in some way either through blood or marriage, so it was like if you recorded for King you are automatically booked by Universal Attractions. When we first went up to Cincinnati to record ‘Please, Please’ I’m sure we signed all three contracts at the same time, for recording, publishing and booking. Of course, we didn’t know nothing about contracts back then. We all just signed on the dotted line.”2
Universal Attractions opened doors for Brown and the Flames with more bookings in the North. As is often the case after an initial success, cracks began to show in the team that was James Brown and the Flames. Bobby Byrd, who had been Brown’s close friend ever since the Toccoa days, found out that Brantley was paying James Brown more money, even though every member of the group had agreed from the beginning that income would be divided equally.3
The next crack happened when Bart wanted to change the billing from the Famous Flames to James Brown and the Famous Flames. The flame, so to speak, went out. Bobby Byrd went back to Toccoa to be a darkroom assistant. Most of the others, including Johnny Terry whom Brown had met in prison, continued to work in the music business. The close bond Brown had developed with Byrd withstood the business disappointments. In coming years Byrd would rehearse Brown’s bands, rewrite and co-write many of Brown’s most famous tunes even though he did not receive credit on some of them.4
In late 1957 Little Richard announced he was leaving rock ‘n roll to devote his life to Christian ministry.5 This allowed Brown not only to pick up some of Richard’s bookings but also his band members, including Fats Gonder who was with Richard the night he first heard Brown. The new gigs prompted Nathan to give Brown another chance in the King studio. The results were “That Dood It,” released in February 1958, and “Begging, Begging” in May. Both flopped, and, according to Browns autobiography, Nathan declared, “James Brown is all through, washed up. He’ll never record for me again.”
After that, Brown went back on the road with his new members of the Famous Flames and developed a new song called “Try Me.” Bobby Byrd said Brown had gotten the lyrics for “Try Me” from someone—nobody writing music history knows his name–in Hollandale, Florida. “It was something like the way we got ‘Please, Please’, an adaptation from something else.” Byrd explained, “This boy was singing the song around and he gave James the lyric. But it was originally more complicated. We went back and did it again in New York, simplified it structurally but made it smoother and more sophisticated sounding musically. I wasn’t on the original demo but I was a part of the issued recording, singing and helping with the lyrical adaptation.”6
According to Brown biographer Geoff Brown, “‘Try Me’ is a heartfelt plea for love and if Brown did rein in his vocal then the restraint has worked to the benefit of the lyric because the understatement gives his singing a vulnerable quality that is at the center of the record’s success. Self-pity is kept at bay by the energy yearning in his voice.”7
That was not the reaction of Syd Nathan when he first heard it. “I’m not spending my money on that garbage,” Nathan said, according to Brown’s autobiography. Brown and Brantley personally financed the demonstration record of “Try Me” and took it back to Nathan but to no avail. “It doesn’t make sense,” the King executive said. “I don’t want it.” Not deterred, Brown paid for copies of the record to be pressed and took them around to disc jockeys who knew him. When the song got airtime, orders started coming in to King Records. Nathan tried to ignore them at first but when they reached 20,000 he gave in and called Brown to bring back the master recording.
“Oh, you don’t want that tape, Mr. Nathan,” Brown recalled saying in his autobiography. “It’s just a demo, a little something I paid for myself.” He knew he was on the rebound when he was able to force Syd Nathan into paying for a new recording of “Try Me” with top-of-the-line production values. King released it in October, 1958 with maximum marketing effort. Nathan even tried to get the song played on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. “He turned it down flat,” Byrd said about Clark. The record still reached No. 1 in the rhythm and blues charts.8
Footnotes
1The Life of James Brown, 53.
2Ibid. 54.
3Say It Loud, 28.
4The One, 81
5 Ibid., 83.
6The Life of James Brown, 51.
7Ibid. 52.
8Ibid. 53.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Fifteen

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.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Fourteen

Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely played in dance bands in the Midwest and California before joining the Army in World War II. After he graduated from college he worked for both Allied Record Manufacturing and King Records where he met the irascible Syd Nathan and the incomparable James Brown.

Someone once said, “Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is a bastard.” James Brown was one of those successes with a thousand fathers. Hal Neely in his memoirs dismissed the claim that Ralph Bass discovered and put Brown under contract Brown. He said he was visiting King that day when a package with a demo record arrived in the mail from a nightclub owner in Macon, Georgia.
It may well be true that the first time Neely heard a recording of James Brown’s voice was in Cincinnati but other music historians say that Ralph Bass heard Brown first while he was at the King branch office in Atlanta Georgia early in 1956. Even he wasn’t the first King employee to hear Brown sing. The office manager Gwen Kesler told Bass he had to hear this.1
“Who the hell was that?” Bass asked. “I had never heard anything like that. It was so different. My theory as a producer has always been: Let me find someone who’s different and at least I have a chance.”2
That chance Bass wanted to take was a young man who “wasn’t supposed to be James, wasn’t supposed to be Brown and wasn’t supposed to be alive. You see,” Brown said in his 1986 autobiography, “I was a stillborn. My mother and father lived in a one-room shack in the pinewood outside Barnwell, South Carolina.”
However, what a person writes in his autobiography often cannot be taken at face value. Critics accused Brown of half-truths, self-justifications and re-writing history.3 For example, James Brown said he was born May 3, 1933, in Bramwell, South Carolina; however, his birthday was also listed as June 17, 1928, in Pulaski, Tennessee, birth records. A Penthouse magazine article listed his birth date also in 1928. The 1933 birthdate has been deemed more likely to be accurate because “if he had been born in 1928 he would’ve been 21 years old when first imprisoned and 24 when released. In fact, he was still legally a minor, under 21, when paroled in 1952.” Some musicologists think he was trying to make himself out to be younger than he really was by releasing to the public birthdates.4
By the time he was 15 years old, Brown had grown proficient in breaking into cars and stealing whatever he could find inside; however, his luck finally ran out and the police caught him in the spring of 1949. Young James was sentenced to eight to sixteen years in the Georgia Juvenile Training Institute in Rome, Georgia. While there, Brown met Johnny Terry who eventually became a member of the Famous Flames. In prison they formed a gospel quartet with two other inmates. Two years later in 1951, he was transferred to the Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Georgia.5
A twist of fate led Brown to meet one of his best lifelong friends at the Toccoa reform school. That friend was not one of the inmates like Brown and Terry, but the valedictorian of the local high school who brought his a cappella gospel singers to perform for the prisoners.
Bobby Byrd was everything that James Brown was not – educated, respectable, religious and an all-around nice guy.6 Byrd’s family vouched for Brown and guaranteed a job for him at a local car dealership which led to his parole in 1952. Brown almost blew this opportunity when he “borrowed” a customer’s Jeep and then wrecked it. Only after further assurances from the Byrd family did the judge agree to let Brown continue on parole.7
Another person—other than Neely and Bass–who claimed responsibility for James Brown’s career was Barry Trimier, Toccoa’s only professional black music entrepreneur in the1950s. He claimed to be the group’s first booking agent and manager. He also ran a café, club and pool room called Barry’s Recreation Center. Trimier worked with the group from 1954-55. 8
Brown’s early career had a major advancement when he and his group met Little Richard at Bill’s Rendezvous Club in Toccoa in 1955. The Flames asked Richard if they could play during intermission. “I could hear them from backstage and what they were doing to the audience. James sang ‘Please, Please, Please.’ I thought they weren’t going to give me my microphone back!” Richard said.9
Fats Gonder, Richard’s band manager, recommended the Flames to Clint Brantley, Richard’s manager in Macon. A casual passerby might mistake him for the janitor of his nightclub, the Two Spot, but he was an influential character in the early years of rock ‘n’ roll. The new arrangement did not seem to bother Trimier. “He was somebody unusual,” Trimier said about Brown. “He had to have people like Clint Brantley to take him further. There was no way in the world that I could go out there and socialize.”10
Brantley immediately began booking the Flames all around Georgia and South Carolina, but the group really took off when Little Richard moved to California and to a new agent after his big hit, “Tutti-Frutti.” The Flames took the contracted dates which Brantley had originally signed for Richard.11
The Flames had been playing their first record “Please, Please, Please,” refining it for two years. Byrd said that the song had evolved into a blisteringly emotional, hypnotic fervent supplication which became a vehicle for Brown’s gripping showmanship.12
One of the demo records, cut at station WIBB in Macon in November 1955, wound up at Southland Record Distributing Company in Atlanta where it was forwarded to the King branch office. “It’s a monster,” Ralph Bass praised the record, according to Brown’s autobiography. “Where can I find these guys?”
Bass said he went to Macon and called Brantley. “Now at eight o’clock you parked your car in front of this barbershop, which is across the street from the railroad station. When the lights go on and the blinds go up and down after they go down you come in,” Bass reported Brantley as saying.13 The reason for such a bizarre request was that the white establishment in Macon did not want strange white people–perceived to be outside agitators–to come into town and have any social interaction with “their” Negroes. “An out-of-town white cat could be in trouble in those days,” Bass said. Brantley was taking precautions for Bass’s safety. Once inside Bass watched James Brown and the Flames perform. He paid Brantley $200 and within a few months the Flames were on their way to Cincinnati and the big-time.14
There are, however, a several other versions—all equally unsubstantiated–of how James Brown and the Flames were signed to a contract with King Records.
In one account, Bass was driving through Atlanta listening to the radio when he heard “Please, Please, Please” and rushed to Macon to close the deal.15
In a second story, rhythm and blues pioneer Henry Stone said he was in Miami when Syd Nathan called him about this hot new record being played on the airwaves around Macon. Before Stone could drive to Georgia, Bass–who supposedly was in Birmingham, Alabama–caught wind of the new sensation and got to Macon first.16
A third report had Leonard Chess of Chess Records mailing a contract to Brantley and announcing that he was flying down to Macon immediately. However a heavy snowstorm kept the plane grounded, and Bass beat him to Brantley bearing an offer that exceeded the Chess contract.17
A fourth version appears in Hal Neely’s memoirs in which he said a Macon disc jockey sent the demo record to Syd Nathan and King Records in Cincinnati, and he was in the room when the record was played. “In my opinion,” Neely remembered Nathan saying, “that’s a horrible record, but that kid singing lead has something, and that song is a hit song.” Neely also said Bass was in the room at the time, and Nathan sent him to Georgia to check the group out. While Bass said he signed James Brown and the Flames to a contract, Neely insisted only Syd Nathan himself could sign contracts for King and its subsidiaries.
We will never know what truly transpired.
As the wise man said, success has a lot of daddies.

Footnotes

1 Rhodes, Don, Say It Loud! My Memories of James Brown, The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2009, 26.
2King of the Queen City, 89.
3Brown, Geof, The Life of James Brown, 5.
4 Ibid., 15,16.
5Ibid., 19.
6 Smith, R.J., The One, The Life and Music of James Brown, Omnibus Press, London, 2008, 50.
7The Life of James Brown, 20.
8The One, 58.
9 Say It Loud, 22.
10The Life of James Brown, 30.
11The One, 67.
12 The Life of James Brown, 39.
13The One, 74.
14 Ibid., 73-74.
15 Say It Loud, 26.
16 Ibid., 26.
17The Life of James Brown, 39
17Say It Loud!, 26.
18The One, 72-74.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Thirteen

Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely began playing the trumpet with Big Bands in the Midwest before moving on to California. After his time in the Army during World War II, he graduated from college and worked for Allied Record Manufacturing Company. He also worked part-time for Syd Nathan of King Records.
(Author’s note: Chapters written in italics denote Neely’s own words from his memoirs.)
Many people with “convenient memory” claim that Ralph Bass who worked for King discovered and put James Brown under contract, but it was I and not Ralph Bass. I was visiting King that day when a demo record arrived in the mail from Clint Brantley, a nightclub owner in Macon Georgia. The record featured a young man named James Brown.
James Brown was born in Georgia. His father James Joseph Brown joined the U.S. Navy when James was five years old. His mother abandoned him at the same time. Little James at the age of five went to live with his aunt Minnie who lived in the black ghetto of Macon, Georgia, where she ran a house of “ill repute.” He worked the streets shining shoes and “pimping” for Aunt Minnie to the soldiers from the Army camp near Macon. James grew up fast, learning the ways of survival.
At the age of 15 he was involved in a local gang street fight. A young boy was killed. Police conjectured that “this kid Brown hit him (the deceased) with a baseball bat” but young James was only charged with stealing car hubcaps and sentenced to three years in the Georgia prison system.
While James was in prison, his future friend and music associate Bobby Byrd brought his five-piece band from Toccoa, Georgia, Byrd’s hometown, to play a “freebie.” The prisoners shouted for the young James and his musical partner Johnny Terry whom he had met in prison. Byrd called them to the stage to play with his group.
James was soon transferred to the prison in Toccoa, Georgia, where he paroled for good behavior. Byrd’s mother signed papers with the prison to be legally responsible for him He worked as a janitor in her church and started playing drums, singing, and dancing with Byrd’s group, “The Five Royals”. (Author’s note: music historian John Broven says Bobby Byrd’s group was originally called The Gospel Starlighters and later used the names The Avons and The Flames.)1 They performed at local area dances and clubs. Johnny Terry got out of prison and came to Toccoa to join Byrd’s band.
Little Richard—who would later go on to national fame as a rock ‘n’ roll artist–played a club in Toccoa. The audience shouted for The Five Royals. They joined Richard on the stand and jammed with him. Richard was very impressed with the group. Little Richard was coming into fame and popularity, traveling most of the time. He was booked and managed by Mr. Clint Brantley who owned a black club in Macon, Georgia. Richard told Mr. Brantley about The Five Royals and it was arranged for them to come to Macon and audition for him. He liked the group which soon became the house band for his club. Simultaneously, Little Richard and his band went to Hollywood to record for Specialty Records. They stayed on the West Coast.
The Five Royals started earning popularity and a loyal fan following. It was soon evident that James Brown’s singing and dancing was the major star of the band. The band played several Little Richard “gigs” with James posing as Richard. The audience never caught on.
Mr. Brantley took The Five Royals to Macon’s black radio station where they cut a demo recording on “Please, Please, Please,” a song written by Johnny Terry. The local DJ sent the demo to Syd Nathan and King Records in Cincinnati.
“In my opinion,” Syd said, “that’s a horrible record, but that kid singing lead has something, and that song is a hit song.”
Also present at that meeting was Ralph Bass, an independent producer for King’s Federal label. Syd sent Bass to Macon to check out the group. Bass falsely claimed he signed the group to a Federal contract. However only Syd Nathan at that time could sign contracts for King and its subsidiary labels. Bass’s claim was invalid. (Author’s note: Broven points out Bass may have exaggerated his authority to sign contracts but his role in bringing Brown to Nathan’s attention is valid.)2
The Five Royals were planning a gig in Memphis in March. They drove, with no appointment, to Cincinnati to meet with Mr. Nathan. There was no studio time available. I was in Cincinnati recording Earl Bostic, an old friend from my Hollywood band days, that week. The Royals would have to come back.
On April 25, 1956, I was again in Cincinnati. As always I stayed in my room at Syd’s and Zella’s big house in the Jewish section of town. Syd and I met with The Five Royals. James claimed he was the leader and Bobby Byrd claimed he was. James rubbed Syd the wrong way, and Syd got mad.
“Hal, throw them out, unless you want to work something out and take them on.”
I believed in the group and took the boys to a room across from Syd’s office which I used when in Cincinnati. Utilizing my University of Southern California business law degree, I formed a limited partnership of the original five members with each member holding a 1% ownership, a group royalty rate of 5% on net paid sales paid directly to the each member of the group and on each record said member recorded with the group. The original contract was for three years with a King option to renew for an additional three years on the same terms and conditions.
I called Clint Brantley in Macon and asked him to be the group’s manager. King would pay him a royalty of 1%, same as each band member. The group would need a new name as there was another Five Royals. In the discussion someone mentioned the name The Famous Flames. That was it. I would be their producer at a 3% royalty. All royalties would be paid on a net paid sales basis. The Famous Flames would be released by King on its subsidiary Federal label.
On March 26, 1956, the group came back to Cincinnati, and we went into the King studio. I produced, and Eddie Smith was the engineer. We cut four sides. One song was “Please, Please, Please”. Syd liked it. The single record was released on the Federal label and was an instant hit in the R&B music charts, going to No. 3. (Author’s note: I have tried to respect the details of Neely’s memoirs; however, his recollection of the dates and the group’s name in this episode are obviously at odds. At one point he said he wrote the contract for Brown and the Flames—also identified as the Royals–on April 25, 1956 yet produced the record on March 26, 1956. Also he said he was in California for the birth of his son April 26, 1956. Historian Broven says the “Please, Please, Please” recording session was Feb. 4, 1956, and Ralph Bass was the producer.) 3


Footnotes
1 John Broven interview.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.

James Brown’s Favorite Uncle The Hal Neely Story Chapter Twelve

Previously in the book: Nebraskan Hal Neely started as a trumpet player in the Big Band era, served in World War II, graduated from college, and worked for Allied Record Manufacturing and King Records.
(Italics denote chapters from Neely’s memoirs.)

After getting King’s pressing business for Allied in 1949, I was in Cincinnati on a regular basis. All the staff and employees treated me as if I were one of them. I’d reassess Syd’s operations for him. They were obsolete and needed to be rebuilt with new, more modern equipment much of which could be built in King’s own machine shop. King was “hot.” Good deal all around.
I was now very active in Allied government production and supervised its recording schedules in five New York studios and on Riker’s Island where the Army had a production facility. I commuted between New York, Hollywood, Washington D,C and Cincinnati. It was hectic but rewarding. I loved my job, even the travel. It reminded me of my old band days, different town each day.
Jim O’Hagan died in January of 1950. It happened suddenly with no warning, and I was promoted to vice president and board member. Mary and I moved back into our house in Woodland Hills, California.
In 1952 I was spending most of my time in the East. Mary rented our house, put her little red MG Roadster in storage, and moved to New York. We rented a nice one-bedroom apartment on the East Side at 72nd St. and Second Avenue. Very nice. Mary would help out at the plant each day. We bought an Olds 88 convertible, parked it in a garage on the corner and drove to work each day. Also in 1952 the Army asked me to reconstruct my old 16-piece show band for a concert for 6,000 American and British troops at Wiesbaden Germany Army Air Base. I wore my captain’s uniform.
Union problems developed at the Allied plant. Allied decided to get out of the state of New York and move its business to New Jersey where it built a new plant. I would be the manager. I moved my office back to Hollywood. Mary and I drove back to California, spending a week in Cincinnati seeing Syd and my brother Sam and his wife Hazel who now lived in Dayton. We moved back into our house in Woodland Hills. I began a lucky and happy time. We and some friends went up to Lake Arrowhead and the mountains above San Bernardino over a long weekend. Our son was to be conceived there.
April 26, 1956, Mary went into labor. I cut it pretty close and got there late that evening. A neighbor picked me up at the plane. We took Mary to the hospital about 7 a.m. She and John Wayne’s wife had the same doctor and were both in labor at the same time. Both of us had sons. Mildred Stone, Mary’s mother from Lyons, came out to stay with Mary for as long as necessary. I was under great pressure to get the new plant operational and still take care of my sales duties. I only got home on several weekends and then back to Jersey.
Eventually we decided to move the family to Newark, New Jersey. Mary shipped her MG to the East Coast, and I found us an apartment in a nice section of Newark. She, our son, and I were on an American flight to New York, changing planes in Chicago. The Chicago airport ground crew went on a “sit down” for some gripe. We sat in the airport for about four hours with everyone else. American was able to get us a flight, but it was going to the Newark airport and not LaGuardia. What the hell. We took it. We got in very late that night and took a cab to the apartment which I had rented.
Mary walked in and said, “No way! I want a house.”
Friends of ours, Sid Bart and his wife, lived in a beautiful upscale closed enclave called Smoke Rise in the wooded hills of northern Jersey, close to the village of Mahwah. It was 40 miles from Manhattan.
We found a small house on a hillside, surrounded by trees and a beautiful lawn. It was two stories, two bedrooms, big basement and a huge screened-in back porch. In the back were flowers and a small spring-fed pond. Mary fell in love with it at first sight. We took out a mortgage and moved in. Mary found a nice widow lady to babysit our son, and we joined the country club. I was lucky again and had a good life.