https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/nyregion/apollo-theater-amateur-night-joe-gray.html

NEW YORK — “Be good or be gone” has long been the slogan of the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night, an open-mic talent show where the audience can boo lackluster performers off the stage. Joe Gray has done the warmups for the last 30 years, getting the crowd fired up before the first contestant goes on.

After he turned 69 in June, he decided it was time for him to be gone: It was time to retire. The search for a replacement began. In September, a casting agency held auditions.

Then Gray changed his mind. He decided that not working — not bantering with the audience, and not hanging out with performers and stagehands behind the scenes — was not for him.

He was on the way to work one day in the fall when he started thinking about his path toward retirement. “I said, ‘I still have love for this place and I am feeling good, except for my knees,” he recalled, explaining that he had surgery to fix tears in both menisci several years ago. One had popped while he was onstage.

He decided to make a career U-turn. “I told them I’d like to stay on,” he said.

So there will not be a changing of the guard at Amateur Night, the competition that propelled careers long before “American Idol” came along — Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown and Stevie Wonder survived Amateur Night, as did Luther Vandross, although he was booed off a couple of times before he won.

Gray will continue to be the good guy of Amateur Night. He is not the bad guy. That would be left to a character known as the executioner, who kicks contestants who bomb off the stage, a role played by C.P. Lacey, himself a six-time Amateur Night winner.

Gray has his own history with Amateur Night. He sang in an Amateur Night segment the first time he set foot in the Apollo, in the 1960s, after driving in from North Carolina with his mother and girlfriend. He chose the Al Green song “Let’s Stay Together.”

“I didn’t win,” he said, “but I didn’t get booed off, either.”

He also met his wife, Yvonne, at an Amateur Night show. He spotted her in the front row when her niece was on the bill.

After 30 years on the professional side of Amateur Night, Gray said the Amateur Night audience had changed with Harlem. When he started, he said, “There were guys, I can’t call them drug dealers, who would sit in the boxes and throw $100 bills at the kids on the stage.”

Now the Apollo, which last week announced plans to expand in the redeveloped Victoria Theater nearby, says the audience is about 50 percent tourists. “You don’t see many of us in here for Amateur Night — black people,” Gray said.

The Amateur Night show has changed, too. Amateur Night started in 1934 and eventually gave rise to the syndicated television program “Showtime at the Apollo,” which ran from 1987 to 2008. The pace is faster now and the show “is kind of scripted,” Gray said.

But the script includes some segments in the warmup that he started. In one, he has the audience members join hands.

“Right now, there are no white people, there are no black people, there are no Chinese people,” he says. “Right now, there’s only one thing that’s happening in this place, and that’s the human race. We’re all one human race.”

He also borrowed an idea from a stagehand and introduced a segment called the “Soul Train” dance line. He picks a couple of people in the audience who join him onstage for a short dance number.

At least that is how the segment is supposed to go. One night, a woman jumped on his back, clamping her hands around his neck in what he remembers as a chokehold. People on the stage crew and the security detail pulled her off. Gray did not know her and said he does not know what prompted her to do it.

Another unplanned moment happened because of a language breakdown. A Japanese singer was onstage, and Gray was trying to boost the energy level of the performance.

“I said, ‘Move! Dance!'” he said. “She thought I said, ‘Moon!’ and turned around and mooned the audience.”

Amateur Night was not Gray’s only assignment on the stage crew, and there were times when he helped stars through emergencies. One night, singer Phyllis Hyman took her shoes off while performing. The stage had not been painted in a while, and the surface was rough. Before long, she was shrieking from a splinter in one foot. She hobbled toward Gray in the wings, put her leg in his lap and said, “Get this out.”

But the Apollo was all but empty for some of his favorite performances — his own, during sound checks. That was when he got to play with James Brown’s band and with Green’s band — “I sang ‘Let’s Stay Together’ — and with Herbie Hancock, whose drummer was late. “They started playing,” Gray said. “Nobody was on the drums. I just jumped up there.”

He also whistles. He was the whistler on Stephen Marley’s “Revelation Part 1: The Root of Life,” which won a Grammy Award as the best reggae album in 2011, and on a video with the Harlem Globetrotters theme song.

He moved to New York when he was in his 20s, as the drummer with Cameo, an R&amp;B; funk band. A few years later, the road manager from Cameo had become the technical director at the Apollo and told Gray to stop by. “They were loading in Stevie Wonder,” he said.

He learned the routine, and when a stagehand on the crew for “Showtime at the Apollo” did not report for work, he was hired.

So what about those auditions for a replacement when he was planning to retire? Fatima Jones, a spokeswoman for the Apollo, said the theater had hired Greginald Spencer, who won an Amateur Night-style competition on the “Apollo Live” show on the BET network in 2013, as a standby.

Which means, she said, that Gray can take the occasional night off.

“I haven’t really missed a show in 10 years,” he said. “It’s good to have a person in place, to be ready. Back when I was thinking about retiring, I was thinking, ‘I’ve been doing it so long, do I want to do this again tonight?’ Then the curtain goes up and all those thoughts just vanish.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/nyregion/apollo-theater-amateur-night-joe-gray.html" id="abd0e58f-85c4-3f0b-adff-d0ddddcdcc03">The New York Times</a>.

The Warm-up Master of Amateur Night at the Apollo Is Retiring. Wait, He Changed His Mind.

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The Warm-up Master of Amateur Night at the Apollo Is Retiring. Wait, He Changed His Mind.