Bobby Schiffman, the Apollo Theater and the Golden Age of Seeing a Great Artist For a Buck
If you think the price of paper towels or potato chips has skyrocketed lately, you haven’t tried to buy a ticket to a Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift concert.
A couple of hundred dollars might get you in the door, but if you want to be close enough so you don’t watch the whole show through binoculars on the video screen, prepare to sign over the equivalent of your monthly rent or mortgage.
This development has sparked both financial and moral debate, of which I was reminded last month by the passing of Bobby Schiffman.
Schiffman, who was 94 when he died Sept. 6 at his home in Boynton Beach, Florida, was the second and last member of the Schiffman family to run Harlem’s Apollo Theater. His father Frank transformed the former burlesque and vaudeville house into a showcase for black performers in 1935, and Bobby took over in 1961 after a long apprenticeship under his father.
Bobby closed the Apollo in 1976 and it looked like a candidate for demolition before a group headed by former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton bought it in 1981 with the idea of turning it into a performance and production center. That plan hit a number of rough patches and today, more than 40 years later, the nonprofit Apollo Theater Foundation keeps the place alive as an historic site offering performance and educational programs.
That’s good, because the Apollo was the most important black entertainment venue of the 20th century and keeping the Apollo alive helps extend the legacy of the performers who shaped so much of contemporary musical culture.
But what shouldn’t be forgotten is that the Schiffmans didn’t run the Apollo to create a legacy. That was incidental. They ran it as a business. Their product was entertainment and their targets were entertainment fans. The Schiffmans’s calculus, like that of any business, was simple: They had to spend less money on their product than they took in from their customers.
Which brings us back to ticket prices.
In 1935, it cost 15 cents to enter when the week’s first show began, late on a Monday morning. If you wanted to go in only for the prime-time weekend evening shows, a ticket ran 50 cents. By 1947 it was 50 cents to enter early, a dollar to enter late. By the mid-1960s, admission had risen to $6.
And what did the consumer get for that? Glad you asked. The week of August 19, 1949, to pick a random date, you could see Billie Holiday and Machito. We might mention here that if you bought that 50-cent ticket at 10 a.m., you could stay all the way through four shows, the last of which wrapped a little before midnight.
Three weeks later, in early September 1949, you could see Ella Fitzgerald and Jimmie Lunceford. Three weeks after that, Sarah Vaughan and Erroll Garner. A few weeks later, Louis Armstrong with Jack Teagarden and Earl “Fatha” Hines. The next week it was Duke Ellington.
If that isn’t your style, or you don’t remember these particular artists, trust me: Fans of great American music would want to see them the way fans today want to see Bruce or Taylor.
And in 1949 they could. Four shows, for four bits.
So were those the good old days? It depends on your definition of good.
The average weekly pay for an American worker in 1935 was about $1.30. So bringing a date to the Apollo, even at 15 cents a ticket, would have used up more than 20% of your paycheck for that week.
By 1949, the Depression over, average pay had shot up to about $90 a week, so a pair of Apollo tickets would have fit the budget more comfortably.
But that didn’t always translate to more patronage for the theater, despite its extraordinary shows. In the early 1950s, attendance was spotty enough that the Apollo tried presenting live theater instead of musical acts. That did even worse, so it went back to music. Happily for all.
The salient point, however, is that the Apollo had a tight budget for talent, often spread out among three to eight acts. You didn’t get rich playing the Apollo. But then, if you were a black artist in the ’30s, ’40s or ’50s, you didn’t get rich playing much of anywhere in an America still widely segregated.
Larger-venue options were limited to what was called the Chitlin Circuit, a handful of theaters in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington. Artists could always work small joints and clubs, but those places paid even less than the Apollo.
By the 1950s, happily, that would start to change, thanks largely to the explosion of rock ’n’ roll. Popular music artists — slowly including R&B and black performers as well, because they were one of rock ’n’ roll’s taproots — began playing more and larger venues. That increased the competition for a theater like the Apollo, which Bobby Schiffman noted in a 1990 interview was mildly ironic. “The Apollo spearheaded rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “Alan Freed copied the rock ’n’ roll show model from us.”
By the mid-1960s, when rock ’n’ roll felt its second seismic explosion with the Beatles, the multi-artist shows that Frank Schiffman institutionalized at the Apollo began yielding to shows featuring a single artist, perhaps with an opener. These new shows also were filling venues with 6,000 or more seats. The Apollo maxed out at 1,750.
“After a while, the Apollo couldn’t make it as a concert hall,” said Schiffman. “I wouldn’t try it today with less than 6,000 seats. At one point we had plans on the drawing board to expand the Apollo to 4,500. But it didn’t happen. If we could have gotten up to 4,500 seats, I never would have sold.”
By the 1960s, Schiffman said, many of the top artists played the Apollo not because it was the best gig they could get, but because it was the Apollo.
“I had artists who wanted to play for me even though I couldn’t pay them in a week what they could earn somewhere else in a night,” he said.
When Schiffman recalls the Apollo as “a special place,” he’s not romanticizing. Playing the Apollo or winning Amateur Night at the Apollo — like Sarah Vaughan, James Brown, Pearl Bailey, Gladys Knight and a few hundred others — spread your name around the country.
When Sammy Davis Jr. returned to the stage after his near-fatal auto accident in 1954, he made a point of playing his first show at the Apollo, explaining that these were the people who had supported him since he was a pre-teen tap dancer.
In any case, by the 1970s venues like the Apollo were closing all across America, bringing down the curtain on an era that began way back when a live show was the primary entertainment option for much of the country.
That was terrible news for several reasons. While it wasn’t just black theaters that were closing, places like the Apollo, the Howard in Washington or the State in Hartford were part of the community. A show was like family coming to town and the theater was an economic engine for local businesses, from restaurants to record stores. That made the loss more acute when the Harlem riots/revolts of 1935, 1943 and 1964 cut into Apollo attendance by making outside patrons — read, white folks — more hesitant to venture uptown.
In some quarters, that raised the corollary issue of white people owning and running the music business institutions, from theaters to record labels, that primarily featured black artists.
It’s an issue Schiffman says he kept in mind when he sold the Apollo in 1976: “Selling gave us a lot of pain,” he said. “We decided we would only sell to a qualified black buyer, because we had the genuine feeling that the Apollo was so significant it belonged in the black community.”
At the same time, Schiffman admitted “it gnaws at me a little” that the official history of the Apollo as it was being told in 1990 made little mention of the Schiffman ownership. “For whatever reason, the present management has all but eliminated the contributions of previous management,” he said. “My father was a master craftsman. His ingenuity and foresight made the theater what it was.”
As for black artists being exploited by white bosses in general, there’s little doubt that was widespread. It has also been noted that white artists were exploited as well and to some extent the problem was more economic than racial. Two of the most prominent black owners of major record labels, Don Robey of the Duke/Peacock complex and Berry Gordy Jr. of Motown, were accused by multiple artists of not paying them what they had earned.
But that’s another discussion. If Frank Schiffman was a businessman, and Bobby Schiffman inherited that business at a difficult time, they created and sustained a live music enterprise that showcased, promoted and helped popularize music that would not otherwise have reached and influenced as many fans and artists as it did.
Not by chance was James Brown’s 1962 Live at the Apollo considered one of the great live performance albums ever. Not by chance did Elvis and the Beatles want to visit the Apollo when they came to New York. Not by chance did Joe Jackson pile his kids, including Michael, into the car to drive from Gary, Indiana, to New York so they could take a shot on Amateur Night at the Apollo.
They won. When unofficial Apollo house photographer Gordon Anderson asked Joe if he’d like to buy pictures of his kids on the stage, Joe said he couldn’t afford it.
The Apollo had stories. Artists rolled their eyes about the cramped backstage and dressing rooms. The backdoor to 126th Street, where artists could duck out for fresh air, led to some things that were not strictly legal. In-house characters included the tap dancer Sandman Sims, who would chase faltering Amateur Night contestants off the stage, and Doll Thomas, a handyman who made his living by hanging around for decades doing whatever anyone asked. He was discreet about recounting the stories he saw.
By the 1970s, Schiffman explained, many of the fans who venerated the old Apollo had moved on, and many of the artists whose own history was interwoven with the theater were retired or gone.
The Apollo just didn’t work any more, and while there are and will always be plenty of small venues offering live music, no 1,750-seat theater in the age of Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen is going to offer Duke Ellington, James Brown or the Motown Revue for a few a seat.
You had to be there when it did.
