Rocking the Apollo at the Stanley Theatre, 1979

for S.S.

It wasn’t James Brown, cape running with sweet sweat and swimming
with stars like the Monongahela River. But Brown’s Please, please, please
reached this burg’s brothers and sisters like echoes from the Great Migration,
like thunder from the god’s lyre: make music, change your lives.

It wasn’t Harlem’s neo-classical temple, that landmark music hall,
the Apollo whose columns rise like fresh gardenias behind Billie Holiday’s
ear, like Mahalia Jackson’s hymns to the divine, like Ella Fitzgerald’s golden
basket, like Louis Armstrong’s legendary trumpet sounding at heaven’s gate.

It was Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatre, in 1979. The Stanley, once a movie palace
whose 20-foot chandelier shivered crystal tears when Bill “Bojangles”
Robinson tapped onscreen with little Shirley Temple—but chimed
when he danced there live—and jived with Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington.

Eras shifted; rock stars supernovaed. On that stage in 1980, another god,
Bob Marley, would burn with love in his last public performance,
beads rising from his dreadlocks like the flares of a thousand Zippo lighters,
wailing—against the cancer of our world—his redemption song.

But this was 1979. Pittsburgh’s own Phyllis Hyman was opening
(like a flower, a red iris in a slit satin gown) for the smooth Peabo Bryson.
I didn’t know who they were when the music editor at the magazine
where I was an intern handed me the tickets. Didn’t know that my

poor-little-college-girl uniform of sweater, jeans, and Mia clogs
(just like my roommate’s) in which we’d trekked the Himalayan slopes
of The Syria Mosque for Bonnie Raitt, wasn’t right for this evening—not
against the gleaming dresses that swirled and dipped and swooped like jazz,

the slick hair spangled with blossoms, the stilettoes scaling like skyscrapers,
the sharkskin suits and shiny ties, the bronze and ebony brilliantine,
o god, if you want to know the beauty of black, sink like two lumps of dough
into a concert hall where the only other white face is the Elton John-ish dude

tickling the ivories for Phyllis Hyman. Don’t shoot the piano player. He is doing
the best that he can. His grin caught the groove like our own dim reflection, while
Phyllis was beautiful, a torch song glowing in the first act of her trilogy. An eon
away from the day she canceled her engagement at Harlem’s Apollo with one note:

I'm tired. I'm tired. Those of you that I love know who you are. May God bless you.
(Yes, the god is creation and destruction, his eyes pitiless and blank at sundown.)
But in 1979, Phyllis stood radiant before the coiled crowd waiting for Peabo.
When Bryson appeared, a groom in his cream tuxedo, the ladies’ man, the crooner,

better than wedding cake trimmed with silver roses, the hall erupted like Vesuvius.
The wan bouffant teenagers who swooned like falling dominoes for Beatlemania
had nothing on the ladies of all sizes and ages giving it up for Peabo, sacrificing
like vestal virgins, screaming like Maenads—bridal and funereal, lustful and divine.

Later, Peabo crossed over to Disney to duet “Beauty and the Beast” with Celine,
became the promise tinkling like music boxes in white girls’ princess bedrooms,
but that evening he belonged to his people, the black and proud, and no, he wasn’t
James Brown, but something was liberated in me that night, rising like a small star

formed by that explosion, triumphant despite the set faces of pale bristling cops
whose cordon sanitaire could not contain the celebration, the joy spilling down
the steps of The Stanley Theatre, and yes, it was enough to make me into a poet,
that night in Pittsburgh, in the year of Apollo and the Good Lord Jesus, 1979.