Crowds So Live They're Coming In Flocks

Sam Cooke: Bring It On Home To Me
from Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 (RCA 1963)

Donny Hathaway: You've Got A Friend
from Live (WEA/Atlantic 1972)

The Temptations: For Once In My Life
from Live at the Copa (Motown 1968)


After my last post, I got on a live-in-concert kick and tracked down several live albums that I've always enjoyed listening too. The thing with live albums are that they usually tend to focus on the performance of the artist(s) to the exclusion of the crowd, which is understandable because you pay to hear your favorite performer. The problem with this is the whole purpose of a live album is that the artist is performing for an audience and not some studio engineer. Sometimes this isn't entirely the fault of the album. If you have an artist who is unable to move the crowd you're usually left with a performance that goes by the numbers, not so with these three tracks.

Probably the greatest soul performance I've ever had the pleasure to hear, Sam Cookes Live at the Harlem Square Club is a perfect example of a great live album. Performed at a small club in Miami in an intimate setting the atmosphere is on fire throughout and it's most evident in the track presented here. Bring It On Home is a gospel tinged remnant of his Soul Stirrer days but listening to Sam perform it here he strips it of any maudlin overtones and presents it in a raspy rendition that's as soulful as it gets. Opening with the ending refrains from the prior song, Sam at this point in the concert is hitting all cylinders and the crowd is literally wrapped around his hand. He takes the urbane and refined You Send Me and reshapes it into a song that you barely recognize but that the crowd instantly picks up on and it's at this point that Sam, King Curtis and the band breaks down into three minutes of the most soulful singing you'll ever hear. No amount of superlatives can cover how impossibly moving this song is so just listen in awe as Sam takes the crowd on a call and response that I don't think any singer can rival, with the possible exception of the performer of the next track.

Donny Hathaway's 1972 Live album can probably be regarded as one of his best albums and I'm sure you wouldn't find too many people that would argue that point. The beautiful thing about this song is how he takes the stripped down Carole King song and drenches it in some soulful juice and makes it uniquely his. Blessed with an expressive voice that punches through any melodrama, it lends a sublime aire to the song which lifts it beyond the hallmark-esque sound that it now seems to possess. Like the previous song, this one is from an album filled with a crowd that's glued to every word that Donny sings, just listen to the chorus after the first verse. The crowd literally takes over the song and Donny just guides them through.

The last track is from The Temptations performance at the Copa. The album was a mix of Broadway standards and classic motown songs and came a little bit after their album In A Mellow Mood where they performed all pop standards, an album that redfined their boundaries. Taking the classic song that Stevie Wonder would also record, Paul Williams' rendition retains the originals mellower tempo and introspective mood. Listening to Williams sing it, his voice sounds as if a weight has been lifted off of his back and the inner struggles that he fought against had finally been purged, but unfortuantely this wouldn't be as he would later commit suiced after struggling with alcoholism.

As an ancillary note, for a pretty good rendition of Sam Cooke's Harlem Club performance, get a copy of the Michael Mann/Will Smith movie Ali. The opening of the film is worth the price of admission alone. And on a sadder and more morose note, all three of the singers, Sam Cooke, Donny Hathaway and Paul Williams would all die early tragic deaths, cutting short their infinitely bright careers.