Album: Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963
Year: 1963
. . .
In January 1963, Sam Cooke and his label RCA decided to immortalize his current stage show by recording a set at the Harlem Square Club in Miami. And the results were so revelatory, so indicative of where Sam was going with his music — a much grittier, harder R&B sound than he’d previously gone after — that it freaked RCA the fuck out and they didn’t release it for 22 years. In their mind, Sam Cooke was a pop artist, and this anything but pop.
But of course, Sam Cooke contained multitudes, and when the tapes were discovered and released in 1985, Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 almost instantly took its place as on of the greatest live albums ever released, a thrilling document of an artist at the top of their game.
And no song more illustrates its greatness than the take on “Twistin’ The Night Away,” which in its studio version is polished to within an inch of its life, as the Wrecking Crew brings its normal precision, and the backing vocalists chant dances over handclaps. It’s pretty great, no doubt, but the live version ups it to a whole new level.
Just listen to how the how band slams in every time Sam sings “twistin” on the chorus.
They’re twistin’, twistin’
Everybody’s feeling great
They’re twistin’, twistin’
They’re twistin’ the night away
And when King Curtis steps up to take his sax solos, they utterly leap out of the mix, no doubt completely knocking the first few rows over.
After the second sax solo, the studio version is basically done, but now its time for Sam to ad-lib, exhorting the audience to go “round and round” while guitarists Clif White and Cornel Dupree shred on their guitars, eventually asking them to take out their handkerchiefs and twirl them around. Which if the audience actually did this, probably looked really fucking cool.
Twistin’ The Night Away (Harlem Square Club, 1963)
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