a little old lady down front kept yelling, ‘Sing it motherfucker, sing it!’

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A strange word: funk. It meant the smell of sex to New Orleans musicians. It was the stench of something filthy—a bum rolling in the gutter, Earl Palmer said. Whatever else it meant, in the music it was a repository for unclean feelings, for stuff proper folks kept locked in their subconscious. Connor had his definition, one that he got from watching dancers. “Funk is imagination. You can see a big fat woman walking down the way, she’s got a big booty sliding side to side, doing the jellyroll. You look at their behinds, that’s where I got my rhythm style. I would look at the dance floor, at some woman shaking her butt, and I would boom—do three or four measures of my stuff—then I’d watch her body language.” 

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There’s a bootleg audience recording of James Brown playing at the University of Virginia fieldhouse in Charlottesville on March 12, 1965. It’s muffled and spotty; the horn section is barely audible; the microphone is distorting. But you can hear JB loud and clear. He starts the 45-minute set with “Out of Sight,” singing nice and tough. Halfway through “Prisoner of Love,” though, something comes over him, and he starts screaming so hard that the microphone is quaking under his voice. For most of the next half-hour, he’s howling, possessed, spraying blood. Even the crooned parts of “Lost Someone” sound like they’ve been dragged over miles of gravel. Listening to it, you realize: when he recorded LATA, he knew he was being recorded, and he held back, so he wouldn’t overload the microphone and get distortion all over the recording, because then Syd Nathan would never let him put it out. Live at the Apollo, my friends—Live at the Apollo is the sound of James Brown holding back.