There Was a Time, Alan Leeds
There Was a Time, Alan Leeds
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

There Was a Time
James Brown, The Chitlin' Circuit, and Me

Author: Alan Leeds, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

Narrator: Peter Berkrot

Unabridged: 8 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/25/2020


Synopsis

A behind-the-scenes look at the Chitlin' Circuit during America's most vital period of soul music—from the eyes and ears of a young, Jewish kid from Queens who joined the team of the hardest working man in show business and learned the art of the music business at the hand of the performer who mastered it.

In the mid-'60s, Alan Leeds was a young DJ looking for his way into the music business. An interview with James Brown to promote a local show in Virginia led to an opportunity to promote one of Brown's concerts, which then led to Brown hiring him to help run his tours. Soon Leeds was wearing many hats and traveling around the country as Brown battled a complicated web of local promoters and managers, all too willing to try to rip him off.

In this riveting book—part memoir, part history—Leeds weaves a wholly new and remarkable portrait of Brown as an idiosyncratic iconoclast, determined artist, and forceful businessman. It is a rare look into a world little known to white America immediately following the Civil Rights Movement. Leeds discovers that Brown is a fascinatingly complex man and their experiences, both business and personal, range from emotional to humorous. All the while, they navigate the complicated world of popular black music in America, told by someone who actually lived it.

About Alan Leeds

Writer-producer-tour manager, New-York-born Alan Leeds is a music business veteran. First hired by James Brown as a publicist in 1970, Leeds was soon Soul Brother #1's tour director. From 1975 until 1983 Leeds was a freelance tour manager, working with Kool and the Gang, Bootsy's Rubber Band, and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass, Kiss, and Cameo. In 1983 he moved to Minneapolis to begin a ten-year stint as Prince's personal tour manager and then president of his Paisley Park Records joint venture with Warner Brothers. In 1992 Alan formed a tour management company whose clients have included Sheila E., Bootsy Collins, Morris Day and The Time, the late Barry White, Maxwell, D'Angelo, Raphael Saadiq, Roy Hargrove, Renee Neufville, and Chris Rock.

As a writer-producer Leeds has a long-standing consultancy agreement with Universal Music to coproduce their ongoing schedule of James Brown-related products, including writing liner notes and helping compile over thirty different albums. He has also contributed to the production and liner notes for CDs by Prince, Weather Report, Funkadelic, Mavis Staples, Hugh Masekela, D'Angelo, Bootsy Collins, Eddie Palmieri, LP Music, and Bob Belden.

Leeds won a Grammy Award in 1992 for his liner notes to the James Brown Star Time box set. Alan was also a regular contributor to Wax Poetics magazine, and in 2008, Penguin Books released the critically acclaimed The James Brown Reader, edited by Leeds and Nelson George.

Alan currently resides in Minneapolis with his wife of thirty-plus years, Gwen.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Karim on June 21, 2020

Questlove does the foreword on this book and I’m glad I went with the audiobook. Overall this is a curious time to put a book like this out. Mr. Leeds as he’s known is just a hobbyist who loved soul music and fell into managing James Brown and countless other acts after. The book is a tell-all that......more

Goodreads review by Jazz on April 05, 2020

Entertaining and colorful. I enjoyed his perspective on what it was like on the road with the amazing, and tragic James Brown. Cranking up a Bootsy Collins album right now.......more

Goodreads review by Scot on August 09, 2020

Starting out on the chitlin' circuit, which the nickname for the small market show tours, mainly in the South, that hustling musicians grinded out to keep doing what they loved, is where Alan Leeds got his start. He took a hard-fought for meeting with James Brown and turned it into a career promotin......more

Goodreads review by Sean on June 11, 2020

I'd never heard the name Alan Leeds before picking this book up, but was looking for something to read in the world of books about bands/musical artists (a genre I go back to frequently) and had recently just finished listening to LOVE, POWER, PEACE (the live James Brown album that is better than LI......more

Goodreads review by Kathy on November 04, 2021

Interesting info.......more