Uptown Radio

James Brown performing live in 1991 (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)

Before Pappa’s Got A Brand New Bag, It’s A Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World and Sex Machine, James Brown wasn’t quite the megastar we remember.

But that all changed 50 years ago this fall. That’s when James Brown recorded a show at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre which later became a seminal live album.

To mark that anniversary, a deluxe box set of Apollo recordings is on the way. 

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PAUL SMITH: A group of teenagers is getting a tour backstage at the Apollo Theatre. Billy Mitchell, the Apollo’s historian, is their guide. He points to a wall covered with performers’ autographs.

BILLY MITCHELL: We’ve got Snoop Dog, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Will. I. Am from the Black Eyed Peas….

PS: Mitchell says one autograph is missing. He was a teenager when he first came here. In the 60s, he’d mooch outside the stage door on 126th Street after school. One day one of the stars appearing at the theater gave him a $25 tip for fetching some fried chicken – a lot of money in those days. The man who gave him that money was James Brown.

Six years after his death, Brown still draws crowds to Harlem, Mitchell says.

Billy Mitchell: I get people that come here from tours all over the world who say they have that album.

P.S: That album is Live At The Apollo, recorded on this stage on October 24th 1962 and released a year later.

MUSIC: Fats Gonder Intro. 

“Mr Dynamite, the amazing Mr Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and The Famous Flames”

P.S: But MC Fats Gonder’s introduction and the rest of the show nearly didn’t get recorded. Douglas Wolk is the author of Live At The Apollo, an in-depth examination of the concert and album. He describes the album as a tug of war between a stubborn young artist and the equally stubborn boss of his record label.

Douglas Wolk: He went to Syd Nathan, the guy who ran King Records – his label – and said, really the heart of what I do is the live show, I want to make a live recording, will you fund this? And Syd Nathan said No absolutely not.

P.S: Nathan wondered why anyone would buy an album of songs they already owned as singles. Singles made artists famous…not albums.

But Brown was determined. He offered up $5,700 from his own pocket to produce the live record and prove Nathan wrong. That’s just over $40,000 in today’s money,

As the crowd lined up outside the Theatre, New York was under nuclear threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis was on.

But inside the Apollo, there was a different kind of tension.

MUSIC: JAMES BROWN I’LL GO CRAZY

Y’know I feel alright. Y’know I feel alright children. I feel alright.

P.S: With the tape reels turning, Brown bolted on stage, accompanied by an orchestra, dancers and a trio of sharp suited male backing singers… the Famous Flames.

Music Up for first chorus: “If you leave me, I’ll go crazy. I love you too much.”

P.S: Bobby Bennett is the last surviving Flame. He now lives in the suburbs of Washington, DC. He’s proud of the recording and says it’s all the more impressive given the band’s grueling schedule.

BOBBY BENNETT: We did five or six shows a day. We would do a midnight show and we would have as many people out there at midnight trying to get into our show as we would at 10 o’clock in the morning.

P.S: That’s how Brown earned the epithet the hardest working man in showbiz. He was a formidable band leader, something Bennett experienced when he forgot to do his laundry.

BB: Well if we wouldn’t be clean like we’d supposed to be, we’d get a fine. If your pants wasn’t pressed right, if your jacket was wrinkled.

MUSIC – please please please

P.S. As the show went on, Brown screamed, sweated and slid across the stage on his knees. Author Douglas Wolk says Brown topped off the spectacle with a signature move.

DW: He would fake a heart attack and collapse and clutch his chest. His valet or someone would come over, put a cape on him and lead him off stage. Then he’d throw the cape off, rush back to the center of stage, sing another chorus and then collapse again and repeat the whole procedure a couple of times.

P.S: Brow’s antics sent the crowd berserk. You can hear it on the original 1963 vinyl. Or so it seems. Harry Weinger [Wine-grrr] is the vice president of A&R for Universal Music Enterprises. He holds the key to the master recordings. When he found the reels in a vault two decades ago, he noticed something strange. He could see where the tape had been cut and new crowd noise inserted.

HARRY WEINGER: If you go back to the original record, the very loud screams are not from the Apollo. They are white teenagers from a roller rink.

P.S: This was label boss Syd Nathan’s doing. He thought the record wasn’t thrilling enough. So he sent an engineer with a microphone to a Friday night social in Cincinnati. Then he edited the resulting screams into Brown’s record. They were removed from later pressings. But even after this studio trickery, Nathan still seemed unconvinced. Weinger dug up the record’s initial pressing order.

HW: Because album sales were low. Because James Brown was not someone who sold albums. Syd Nathan put in a purchase order for 5000 copies.

P.S: But Nathan was soon buying more because everyone was buying Live At The Apollo.

MUSIC: Night Train 

P.S: The record spent 14 months in the pop charts – pretty rare for an r&b album back then. It rose to #2, but couldn’t quite knock crooner Andy Williams off the top of the charts. Weinger says it became something of a party favorite for white audiences.

HW: It happens in every generation. There’s some record that distills the African American experience for a white audience and the white audience grabs it and runs with it.

P.S: Apollo Theatre Historian Billy Mitchell saw James Brown return to the venue again and again. He says the singer noticed little change.

BM: He would go up to the dressing rooms and reminisce and say these dressing rooms still looking raggedy, huh.

MUSIC: Night Train outro 

P.S: Brown recorded at the Apollo again too. Weinger says when the Live At The Apollo boxset comes out, it’ll include a previously unreleased recording from 1972, as well as three other shows from over the years.

Adults don’t know everything – it’s a tough lesson we learn when we’re young. For commentator Paul Smith, this realization came at a perilous moment.

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Bedbugs are visible to the naked eye and also leave physical reminders of their presence. AP Photo.

Bed bugs…that scourge of living in New York City. They could be anywhere: festering in your apartment, hiding in your office space, or even lurking in your theater seat. But there’s a new indication that the frenzy may be slowing down. For the first time in nearly a decade, the number of bed bug complaints in rental housing is leveling off. But, as Paul Smith reports, don’t stop checking your sheets just yet.

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HOST INTRO: There’s a good chance you’ve received an invite from a friend. Or a friend of a friend. Or someone more distant. To donate money to a Kickstarter project.  The online collection box for creative projects is changing the way the arts are funded. And it’s spawned several copycat sites, all aimed at turning members of the crowd into patrons of the arts. Paul Smith reports.

PAUL SMITH: Last Thursday was a late night for Astrograss, a Brooklyn band that performs bluegrass songs for kids. They’re used to playing at birthday parties or schools. But this was a rare show for grownups, in a Park Slope bar.

The musicians are looking for money to produce, release, and promote their new record. They aren’t passing round a hat for spare change. Instead, they’re using Kickstarter to try to raise $8000 dollars.

That means they have thirty days to convince fans to pledge that much. If they do, the band releases its record and Kickstarter keeps a 5% cut. If not, the band and the website get nothing – and donors get to keep the money they pledged.

30 hours into the campaign, progress is sluggish, says bandleader Jordan Shapiro.

JORDAN SHAPIRO: I can check my email right now. Let’s see if somebody has recently posted…

PAUL SMITH: He consults his iPhone.

JORDAN SHAPIRO: Oh, new backer alert! Someone I don’t know. $10! So we have $330 pledged towards the $8000 goal.

PAUL SMITH: Kickstarter’s doing pretty well right now. In a recent interview, one of its founders said this year, the site is on course to pay out more money than the National Endowment For The Arts.

The idea is known as crowdsourcing. It’s inspired a wave of copycat sites: Power To Give, Indie Gogo, Open Indie, Genius Rocket, RocketHub, and a slew of other new startups.

The New York Foundation For The Arts has its own version, called Artspire. Eleanor Whitney manages it. She says Crowdsourcing is changing the artist’s job description.

ELEANOR WHITNEY: Artists need to be both producers of work but also their own PR agents, their own marketers, their own fundraisers now, and I think those are some new skills that artists are working very hard to learn.

PAUL SMITH: Not all artists are comfortable with that. Chin Chih Yang is one of them. Earlier this week, he failed to receive full funding for a performance on another crowdsourcing nonprofit, called USA Projects,

His piece is called Kill Me Or Change. He wants to fill a fishing net with 30,000 empty aluminum cans. Then he’ll stand underneath it, pull a string and release them all on himself. He says it symbolizes man’s wastefulness.

CHIN CHIH YANG: This is the can I’m going to drop to my head.

PAUL SMITH: He demonstrated the work in his Astoria studio, showering himself with cans he found in the trash.

To perform the work on a larger scale, he needs to rent a crane, book a public space and advertise it.

But as an artist raging against consumerism, he hates begging for money online.

CHIN CHIH YANG: I’m just not comfortable yet to do these kind of things. I feel bad, because it’s just not a good way for me to ask people to give me money to do these things.

BRIAN NEWMAN: At the end of the day, if you’re getting it from the crowd, it’s a popularity contest, so to speak.

PAUL SMITH: That’s Brian Newman, a consultant to filmmakers and former CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute. He says… crowdsourcing is great for certain projects. But it doesn’t work for everything.

First of all, it may be getting too popular. He can no longer afford to reply to the dozens of Kickstarter invites he receives EVERY DAY.

He also worries the shift towards artistic democracy is coming at the expense of the traditional model for the arts: trained experts sifting through ideas and deciding what’s worthy. Newman says crowdsourcing can’t always open the public’s eye to more challenging work.

BRIAN NEWMAN: What you lose is some of the diversity for example that you might find with other types of support.

PAUL SMITH: Some artists have ideas that might not appeal to funders with deep pockets. Leon Reid stands below the space he hopes to transform for Halloween 2014 while he describes his ambitious plan.

LEON REID: It’s my intent to create a massive inflatable spider to be placed inside the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge.

PAUL SMITH: His proposal is called A Spider Lurks In Brooklyn. It should resemble an inflatable in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Without fundSing it’s just hot air.

So far, Reid’s cobbled together $1000 dollars. Mainly from family and friends. But he’s looking to raise $800 thousand dollars, solely on Artspire.

He’s optimistic. But, he says, even if he fails to reach his goal, he’ll end up learning something.

LEON REID: If I fail on a crowd funding organization, I can say, ‘Hey I was 50 dollars short.’ Whereas if I apply to a grant and get a letter saying 500 people applied and you weren’t successful, then it’s like, what could I have done better?

PAUL SMITH: While Leon Reed waits to see if he can raise $79 thousand more dollars, Chin Chih Yang has returned to the old model. He’s just received funding for Kill Me Or Change from private organizations.

"The Hunger Games" premiered at midnight on Friday. Photo by Paul Smith

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BY PAUL SMITH

INTRO: As Harry Potter’s magic fades and the lifeblood trickles from the Twilight series, there’s a new teen franchise to get excited about. The big screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games, opens today.

PAUL SMITH, REPORTER: The novel has been a New York Times bestseller for three years. And the movie’s predicted to shatter box office records. But the story is violent, perhaps too violent for a young audience. The plot centers on teens killing teens in a brutal quest for survival. Paul Smith staid up past his bedtime for a midnight screening. Two hours before the movie opens, there’s a line snaking round AMC Loews Lincoln Square cinema. People clutch kindles and dog-eared paperbacks. And many are in costume – pink wigs, sparkly blazers, some are carrying fake bows and arrows. These diehard fans look slightly older than Harry Potter or Twilight nerds. Elizabeth, a NYU student, is dressed from head to toe in pink, in homage to character Effie Trinket. She says she’s read the novels ten times and just spent her spring break reading them again.

ELIZABETH: As much as I love Harry, it’s nice to have a woman hero for once.

The bravery and resilience of Katniss Everdine appeals to both girls and boys. And being a teen movie, there’s an angsty love triangle too, which entices super fan Kyle.

KYLE: Like Twilight, there’s like team werewolf and team vampire. Hunger Games, Paul, is team Peta or team Gale. Personally, I’m team Gale because he’s so sensual and masculine and quiet and you fall in love with that man.

PAUL SMITH: But wait a minute, let’s rewind. The story is set in a bleak future, when 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to fight in the annual Hunger Games, a humiliating public spectacle, intended to punish the innocent.  The contest makes Katniss a celebrity. But to be the winner, teens must methodically kill each other off.  Tonight, all the Lowes Theater’s multiple screenings sold out, starting at 12.01, 12.02, and so on.  Literary crossovers on this scale are pretty rare says Laura Miller, a cultural critic for salon.com.  The Hunger Games’s  success, she says, is partly literary clout, but also has to do with word of mouth, shrewd marketing campaigns, tantalizing cliffhangers and a not-so-secret allegory for older readers.

LAURA MILLER: What adults respond to is this vulture like voyeurism of highly mediated eea not just reality tv but paparazzi all this stuff the idea that we just consume other peoples lives in a heartless way.

PAUL SMITH: And in a gory one. Kids impale kids with spears. Or they get set on fire.  Or attacked by killer bees. The movie’s struggled to earn a PG-13 rating.  Beth Puffer runs the Bank Street Bookstore on the upper west side, specializing in children’s literature. She’s been shifting plenty of copies lately, but with a warning.

BETH PUFFER: We do have parents of younger children coming in wanting to read it because they’ve heard about it and we discourage them because we’re very honest about what it’s about and that it can be very troubling to a younger child.

PAUL SMITH: Some moviegoers found it troubling too. At 3.am, the crowd trickled out of a screening downtown, including Dan Walsh.

DAN WALSH: It was a lot more disturbing than I originally thought. When you’re reading it you don’t think about teenagers killing each other but now it’s so blatantly obvious.

PAUL SMITH: Disturbing or not, it’s already hit. Advanced box office sales have pulled in more than $100 million dollars.

The theater where Charles Dickens attended a ball on Valentine’s Day, 1842. Image from Columbia University Libraries Exhibition

A music and computer shop now occupies the place on Park Row where the Park Theater once stood. Photo by Adam Elmquist

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BY PAUL SMITH

Campaign workers man the phones at the Romney headquarters on Feb. 27 in Montpelier, Vt. Vermont is one of seven states across the country that will be voting on Super Tuesday. Photo by Toby Talbot, AP.

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BY PAUL SMITH

HOST: Earlier this week, Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for Real Clear Politics, called the Republican primary campaign is “an even bigger mess than most realize.” He wrote that before Mitt Romney went on to win the Michigan and Arizona primaries. Now, with Super Tuesday looming, Trende says the GOP campaign is still pretty messy.

John Glenn took his legendary space flight 50 years ago this week. Most New Yorkers, won't be in Glenn's shoes for a while, in the meantime The American Museum of Natural History has a space exploration exhibit (AP Photo/NASA)

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Fifty years ago this week, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. These days, Newt Gingrich wants to build colonies on the moon and millionaire Richard Branson plans to fly us there on vacation with Virgin Galactic.  But that’s still while away. If you want to travel into space today, at least in New York, the closest you can get is at the American Museum of Natural History.  Their current exhibition, Beyond Planet Earth, begins on the moon, before orbiting Mars and finally landing on Europa.

BY PAUL SMITH

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New research says those drawn out ‘awws” and tough-talkin’ inflections of the New York accent may soon be something you hear only in the movies. While you may still hear variations of that accent across the five boroughs, that ‘New Yawk” drawl, like so many regional accents, is changing.

BY PAUL SMITH

Drop your bagel. Spit out your coffee. New research shows the New York accent– with its drawn out AWWWS and tough talkin’ associations – may soon be something we mostly hear in the movies. You can still hear variations of the accent across the five boroughs, but like so many American regional accents, it’s changing.

You can spot New Yorkers on screen right away: the accent is part of their characters.  Like Olympia doo-caucus in 1988’s Working Girl. 25 years ago, Doo-caucus’s character was already a throwback, and that’s even truer now, says. Linguist Kara Becker, of Reed College. She spent the last couple of years in New York listening to how people talk. Becker focused her research between 14th Street and the Brooklyn Bridge.

“What we found on the lower east side was that a few features we associate with the New York City accent are not being used by groups we expect to be using them,” says Becker.

She’s talking about people under the age of 50. She says their vowel sounds are different from those of older generations.

Becker traces this shift to the World War II era. Before then, lots of people here spoke with a kind of New York accent—including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was born well-to-do in the Hudson Valley, and had what was considered an upper class accent. Becker says that after the war, the prestige of the New York accent began to wane. It became associated with working class people in popular culture. That’s when mass self-consciousness kicked in.

“It’s a place where we say there’s a high amount of linguistic insecurity meaning there are speakers who have New York accents who might seek out a dialect coach or make a real effort to lose their accent,” says Becker.

That’s what Queens native Jo Ann Smith did in the 70s, when she landed a job as a secretary at NBC. Soon after she got there, she had a heart to heart with her boss.

“I told her I was insecure that I didn’t have this college degree,” says Smith. “She said, ‘Oh I don’t have a college degree either. The most important thing for you to do is to read the New York Times every day and you must get rid of that New York accent. If you want to get ahead, you just got to get rid of it.’”

She took accent reduction lessons and her Queens drawl vanished. Back then she paid $20 per class, the equivalent of nearly $100 today.

Voice coaching is still a lucrative business, says Patricia Fletcher, who teaches from her home studio on the Upper East Side. Go see her for an accent exorcism and she’ll probably begin by working on your jaw.

Fletcher has a business to run, but she says eliminating an intrinsic part of someone’s personality can be heartbreaking.

She’s been a coach for so long, she can often tell what your voice sounds like just by staring at you on the subway. She says native New Yorkers have muscular jaws, but they’re active speakers in general. “The kind of stereotypical picture we have is a stereotype for a reason,” says Fletcher. “So, often the talking with their hands and being very muscular in the delivery.”

Lots of Fletcher’s clients are actors who want to sound like New Yorkers. Some of them already are. Once, actress Drea de Matteo, a Queens native, came to Fletcher to shake off her accent. But when she got cast as Adriana in the Sopranos, Fletcher helped her find it again.

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News headlines for February 17, 2012

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