A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
JAMES BROWN (1933-2006): Legendary and Iconic musician, composer, singer, songwriter, arranger, ensemble leader and social activist
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER TWO
THELONIOUS MONK
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ESPERANZA SPALDING January 31-February 6
MARY LOU WILLIAMS February 7-13
STEVE COLEMAN February 14-20
JAMES BROWN February 21-27
CURTIS MAYFIELD February 28-March 6
ARETHA FRANKLIN March 7-13
GEORGE CLINTON March 14-20
JAMES CARTER March 21-27
TERENCE BLANCHARD March 28-April 3
BILLIE HOLIDAY
April 4-10
[In glorious tribute and gratitude to this great legendary artist we celebrate her centennial year]
VIJAY IYER April 11-17
CHARLES MINGUS April 18-24
In
the Funk World
If
Elvis Presley/ is King Who is James Brown, God?
--Amiri Baraka
THE MUSIC OF JAMES BROWN:
AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. BROWN:
James Brown - Full T.A.M.I Show Performance, 1964:
T.A.M.I. Show is a 1964 concert film released by American
International Pictures. It includes performances by numerous popular
rock and roll and R&B musicians from the United States and England.
It was shot by director Steve Binder and his crew from The Steve Allen
Show using a precursor to High Definition television invented by the
self-taught "electronics whiz," Bill Sargent. Electronovision" TV
cameras, the second of a handful of productions that used the system.[1]
By capturing more than 800 lines of resolution at 25 frame/s, it could
be converted to film via kinescope recording with sufficient enhanced
resolution to allow big-screen enlargement. It is considered one of the
seminal events in the pioneering of music films, and more importantly,
the later concept of music videos. The acronym "T.A.M.I." was used
inconsistently in the show's publicity to mean both "Teenage Awards
Music International" and "Teen Age Music International".
The
concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28 and
29, 1964. Free tickets were distributed to local high school students.
The best footage from each of the two concert dates was edited into the
film, which was released on December 29, 1964. Jan and Dean emceed the
event and performed its theme song, "Here They Come (From All Over the
World)". Jack Nitzsche was the show's music director.
T.A.M.I.
Show is particularly well known for James Brown's performance, which
features his legendary dance moves and explosive energy. In interviews,
Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones has claimed that choosing to follow
Brown & The Famous Flames was the biggest mistake of their
careers,[2] because no matter how well they performed, they could not
top him. In a web-published interview,[1] Binder takes credit for
persuading the Stones to follow James Brown, and serve as the
centerpiece for the grand finale where all the performers dance together
onstage. The show also featured The Supremes during their reign as the
most successful female recording group of the era. Diana Ross would go
on to work with the director Steve Binder on several of her television
specials, including her first solo television special and her famous
Central Park concert, Live from New York Worldwide: For One and for All.
Throughout
the show, numerous go-go dancers performed in the background or beside
the performers under the direction of choreographer David Winters.[3]
Among them were Teri Garr and Toni Basil.
According to filmmaker
John Landis, he and David Cassidy, both seventh grade classmates at the
time, were in the audience for the show.
In 2006, T.A.M.I. Show
was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by
the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in
the National Film Registry. Dick Clark Productions acquired ownership of
the concert from Sargent.
"Say It Loud, I'm Black And I'm Proud" by James Brown--1968:
"Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" is a funk song performed by James Brown and written with his bandleaderAlfred "Pee Wee" Ellis in 1968. It was released as a two-part single which held the number-one spot on the R&B singles chart for six weeks, and peaked at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100.[1][2] Both parts of the single were later included on James Brown's 1968 album A Soulful Christmas and on his 1969 album sharing the title of the song. The song became an unofficial anthem of the Black Power movement.
"Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" was Brown's first recording to feature trombonistFred Wesley.
[Bridge 3]
Ooh-wee, you're killing me
All right, you're out of sight
All right, you're out of sight
Ooh-wee, ah
Ooh-wee, you're killing me
Ooh-wee
James Brown Greatest hits full album
Best songs of James Brown:
01. It's a man's world 02. I got you 03. I got the feelin' 04 Give it up or turnit a loose 05. Super bad, super slick 06. Return to me 07. Gravity 08. Please, Please, Please 09. Living in America 10. Mother popcorn 11. Lets get personal 12. If I ruled the world 13. There was a time 14. Goliath 15. Spinning wheel 16. Cold Sweat 17. Caldonia 18. Out of sight 19. I want you so bad 20. I've got to change 21 It hurt to tell you
JAMES BROWN Revolution Of The Mind album:
James Brown - "SUPER BAD"--full length!
'Funk Power-A Brand New Thang' (1970)
A James Brown concert album from 1971:
Intro/It's A New Day 00:00:00 Bewildered 00:03:48 Sex Machine 00:11:43 Escapism/Make It Funky 00:16:49 Try Me 00:32:43 Fast Medley 00:35:27 Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose 00:36:45 (Call Me) Superbad 00:39:07 Get Up Get Into It Get Involved 00:43:29 Soul Power 00:46:50 Hot Pants 00:53:27
JAMES BROWN Foundations Of Funk CD set:
Out Of Sight 00:00:00 Papa's Got A Brand New Bag 00:02:26 I Got You (I Feel Good) 00:06:30 Money Won't Change You 00:09:15 Out Of Sight/Bring It Up 00:13:30 Let Yourself Go 00:19:24 There Was A Time 00:23:16 Cold Sweat 00:27:42 Get It Together 00:35:06 Goodbye My Love 00:44:00:00 I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me) 00:49:34 I Got The Feelin' 00:56:53 Say It Loud I'm Black And I'm Proud 00:59:54 Cold Sweat 01:04:45 Licking Stick (1968 concert version) 01:11:28 The Popcorn 01:15:53 Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose 01:20:15 You Got To Have A Mother For Me 01:24:46 I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing 01:30:25 Let A Man Come In And Do The Popcorn 01:40:08 It's A New Day 01:47:55 Ain't It Funky Now 01:54:21 Brother Rapp 02:03:51 Funky Drummer 02:10:52 She's The One 02:16:26 Mother Popcorn (1969 concert version) 02:19:25
James Brown live on Soul Train in 1974 + Mix of other performances:
Hot Pants Get Up (I Feel Like A) Sex Machine 2:36 Get On The Good Foot 4:06 Soul Power 6:51 Make It Funky 9:53 Cold Sweat 11:07 Try Me 14:22 Please Please, Please 17:21 Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud 17:57 Super Bad 23:53 Papa Don't Take No Mess 26:18 My Thang 29:57 Hell 33:33 The Payback 35:57 Fred Wesley & the JB's Damn Right, I Am Somebody 40:25
'Soul Survivor - The James Brown Story' (Documentary)
Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose (Mike Douglas Show) 1970 00:00:06 Georgia On My Mind (Playboy After Dark) 1970 00:01:59 Sex Machine (Italian TV Show) 1971 00:06:18 Soul Power (Italian TV Show) 1971 00:11:37 It's A New Day (Olympia Theater, Paris, France) 1971 00:16:46 Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose (Olympia Theater, Paris, France) 1971 00:20:53 Ain't It Funky Now (Olympia Theater, Paris, France) 1971 00:25:42 World (Dinah Shore Show) 1971 00:31:41 Sex Machine (Mike Douglas Show) 1971 00:34:39 Superbad (Soul Train) 1973 00:38:01 Get On The Good Foot (Soul Train) 1973 00:40:28 Soul Power (Soul Train) 1973 00:43:12 Escapism/Make It Funky (Soul Train) 1973 00:45:47 Sex Machine (Soul Train) 1973 00:47:34 Try Me (Soul Train) 1973 00:49:34 Papa Don't Take No Mess (Soul Train) 1974 00:52:34 My Thang (Soul Train) 1974 00:56:11 Cold Sweat (Soul Train) 1974 00:59:51 Can't Stand It (Soul Train) 1974 01;01:04 Papa's Got A Brand New Bag (Soul Train) 1974 00:01:01:47 The Payback (Soul Train) 1974 01:03:02 Damn Right I Am Somebody (Soul Train) 1974 01:07:30 The Payback (Zaire festival concert) 1974 01:11:27 Cold Sweat (Zaire festival concert) 1974 01:14:58 Can't Stand It (Zaire festival concert) 1974 01:16:07 Get Up Offa That Thing (Mexico concert) 1978 01:17:35 Get On The Good Foot (Mexico concert) 1978 01:20:31 Doing It To Death (Mexico concert) 1978 01:23:11 It's A Man's World (Mexico concert) 1978 01:26:48 Sex Machine (Mexico concert) 1978 01:31:10 Eyesight (Santa Cruz concert) 1979 01:31:34 It's Too Funky In Here (Toronto concert) 1979 01:40:30
James Brown Live in Paris at the Olympia theatre 1968:
"Cold Sweat" (Uncut) - by James Brown July, 1967
James Brown - Bologna, Italy - BOOTSY COLLINS - April, 1971 - Complete Broadcast
At the Palasport in Bologna, Italy, April 1971.
James Brown: vocals, organ Bobby Byrd: MC, vocals, organ Darryl "Hasaan" Jamison: trumpet Clayton "Chicken" Gunnells: trumpet Fred Wesley: trombone St. Clair Pinckney: tenor saxophone Phelps "Catfish" Collins: lead guitar Hearlon "Cheese" Martin: rhythm guitar William "Bootsy" Collins: bass guitar John "Jabo" Starks: drums Don Juan "Tiger" Martin: drums
"Mother Popcorn" by James Brown performing live on David Steinberg's television program in 1969:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eoSXpNZD9o
SMOKING!! JB and the legendary funk saxophone virtuoso MACEO PARKER (then 25) burning down the house. OMG!!
ALL, IT WAS INCREDIBLE THEN. IT'S INCREDIBLE NOW. AND IT WILL ALWAYS BE INCREDIBLE. BEHOLD THE SHEER FLATOUT GENIUS OF THE LATE, GREAT JAMES BROWN. POWERFUL!! GOOD GAWD!!!!
James Brown - 20 All Time Greatest Hits || Best Songs Collection:
TRACKLIST: 01-I Got You (I Feel Good) 02-Get Up 03-I Got The Feelin' 04-Mother Popcorn 05-Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose 06-Make It Funky (Pt. 1) 07-Papa's Got A Brand New Bag (Pt. 1) 08-Think 09-It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World 10-Try Me 11-Night Train 12-Cold Sweat 13-Get On The Good Foot (Pt. 1) 14-Papa Don't Take No Mess (Pt. 1) 15-The Payback 16-Say It Loud - I'm Black And I'm Proud (Pt. 1) 17-Super Bad (Pt. 1 & 2) 18-Hot Pants (Pt. 1) 19-Get Up Offa That Thing 20-Please, Please, Please
RAP Since 1960:
From Political Ideology To Popular Culture
by Kofi Natambu
St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC) April-May, 1992
What’s truly significant about RAP as a form of public discourse in the United States over the past three decades is the fact of its transition from a pop culture context (e.g. radio broadcasting, novelty recording and vernacular communication within the community) to a more formal and intellectualized political format during the mid and late 1960s, and its even more complex evolution into a form that today encompasses both social ideology and popular culture. From Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and H. ‘Rap’ Brown to Richard Pryor, Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets in little over a decade (ca. 1963-1976) is quite a leap even for the extraordinary pace of most black cultural change in the U.S. during the 20th century. That these major innovations in the form and content of language use have taken place in a social context that has been as strained and tension-filled as the explosive cultural terrain of American life since the 1950s only highlights the intense aesthetic seriousness and commitment of RAP to social and cultural transformation. This examination of the “modernist” roots of RAP in the period before the seemingly “unprecedented” appearance of the New Wave of rappers since 1980 also helps to clarify just how integral and profoundly influential these pioneers from the 1960s and 1970s have been.
A good place to begin this investigation would be the political styles and behavior of the leading advocates of ‘Black Power’ thinking and activity during the volatile 1960s. What is distinctive about the public rhetoric of such important political figures and activists as Malcolm X, H. ‘Rap’ Brown (dig the nick-name!), Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale (as just four representative examples) is that they all consciously used and included in their public speech and writings, phrasings, cadences, tropes, rhythms and stances that come directly out of the RAP tradition. These particular techniques and values also characterized the cultural aesthetics and politics of such leading African-American writers and intellectuals as Amiri Baraka (aka Leroi Jones), Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Don L. Lee, Etheridge Knight, David Henderson, Quincy Troupe, and lshmael Reed.
A very good case can be made that the widespread public appeal of these political and cultural figures in the black community was precisely their perceived ability to communicate in the vernacular mode as well as use the “King’s English.” This double-voiced quality of black verbal and cultural expression is characteristic of rappers who rely heavily on innuendo, irony, satire, inversion of tropes and what is known as the “put-on” (and “put-down”) to subvert and manipulate conventional significations. This highly creative and innovative approach to language allows these speakers and writers to connect with their audiences on a visceral level that often enhances and gives deeper social-cultural resonance to what they say.
As Henry Gates points out in The Signifying Monkey (1988), this double-voiced discourse is designed to critically examine and question the mainstream as it simultaneously celebrates (again in a critical or “negative” sense) an alternative vision. Much of the so-called “boasting” done by black male and female rappers alike is derived from ancient African rituals of verbal expression that invokes a playful yet highly serious response to the complexities of human behavior. In this way parody, ridicule, in-jokes, punning and double-entendre serve to create and sustain an independent universe of social and linguistic communication. The act of refiguration in language leads to a fundamental revision and transformation of what is received or given. Thus black vernacular modes like RAP actively seek to intervene on and thereby revise previous texts or modes of expression. The very idea of sampling is concerned with just this kind of implied celebration and critique of the past since as a method it consciously “brings back” the past while commenting ironically on its presence in the present. This is accomplished through using melodic and rhythmic material from earlier songs as an integral part of the rap’s structure. Through the textual manipulation and restructuring of the sound-text we encounter an understanding of the actual root meaning of the word “text” which is derived from the ancient Latin root-word textus and the past participle texere which means “to weave.” In a major study by the distinguished linguist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong, entitled Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982), we get a definition of the significance of this etymology:
‘Text’ from a root meaning ‘to weave’ is, in absolute terms, more compatible etymologically with oral utterance than is ‘literature,’ which refers to letters etymologically/ (literae) of the alphabet. Oral discourse has commonly been thought of even in oral milieus as weaving or stitching rhapsodien, ‘to rhapsodize,’ basically means in Greek to “stitch songs together.”1
In any event, it is the intersecting dimensions of orality and literacy that constitutes the real form and content of all rapping regardless of context. This is what characterizes the speech and writing styles of African American cultural and political figures who are compelled to be fluent in both areas because of their heavy involvement in public media. But what is fascinating in this synthesis of writing and oral expression is that they are used to not only “communicate” certain ideas and feelings, but to involve the listener (or reader) in a total experience that allows them to respond in a direct, visceral way to the information being presented to them. This transmitter/receiver relationship in black cultural settings is crucial to any examination of these language modes as both expression and critique. For the fundamental purpose of most black discourse in this context of social media is precisely to engage in critical theory about what (and how) meaning is conveyed. In fact, much of the often vociferous white academic and media response to the use of these methods of black “signifyin (g)” is a result of them not understanding or liking what is being said/written. This is important to acknowledge in as much as one of the major codes of the ideology of racism is that blacks are intellectually incapable of just this kind of subtle parody, satire, and critical analysis, especially of the sacred philosophical and aesthetic cows of the (white) Western tradition.
Masters of this (re)codifying strategy include the RAP group PUBLIC ENEMY and their extraordinary wordsmiths CHUCK D and FLAVOR-FLAV, as well as LL COOLJ, KRS-One, ICE-T, A TRIBE CALLED QUEST, ERIC B & RAKIM, QUEEN LATIFAH, DE LA SOUL, MC LYTE, ICE CUBE, and RUN DMC, all of whom have emerged as leading cultural figures in the past five to seven years(!). In a later chapter we will examine just why they are so important to this development.
But suffice it to say, for now, that these “new” rappers (as distinct from the previous generation of the 1960s and ‘70s) represent a decided leap forward in the complex semiology of figuration and (re) figuration that characterizes innovation in language use during this epoch. In the 1960s the black cultural nationalist and revolutionary nationalist movements as represented say, by the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa; the Nation of Islam and SNCC, as well as such fundamentally black Marxist groups as Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers, all used rapping strategies to translate and express complex political ideas and philosophies about the dialectics of “race,” class, gender and political economy to a popular audience of blacks (and even some radical whites) who were well-versed in the signifying traditions of Afro-America where meaning is derived from historical experience and the myriad ways in which this experience is inscribed (figured, translated, interpreted, expressed) in language. The importance of italicizing this idea is that much too often critics and theorists mistake or substitute sociology and (pseudo) psychology for linguistic and cultural phenomena when dealing with black cultural reality. This is the result of venal racial mythology which attempts to reduce the “identity” of African-American culture to extremely narrow, predetermined essences of authenticity and ‘naturalism.’ What this acknowledgment foregrounds is the awareness of the signifier as being integral to any on-going, indeterminate conception of the signified in black culture. This is accomplished of course at the level of a creative and signifying challenge to the sign of meaning itself as encoded in the conventional English word signification. In other words, the black use of the word “signifyin (g) signifies on (that is, revises and transforms) the very term signification (i.e. meaning) itself.
Thus in the rapping tradition we find a different conception of how and why any particular meaning is conveyed through language. In the context of black political and cultural activists like Carmichael, Brown, Huey Newton, Kenny Cockrel, Baraka, Cortez and Scott-Heron, we encounter the continually creative (re) appropriation of conventional English words and phrases that are consciously revised, transformed and redefined to construct an entirely new or fresh approach to projecting meaning in society. The classic model for this kind of quick-witted revision and dynamic use of language was the great Malcolm X whose speeches, writings, and public statements are suffused with copious references to, and modern take-offs on, traditional folk expressions, tales, tropes and values. The highly personalized ‘spin’ that Malcolm would put on these modal elements was the adaptation of the urban hipster persona who through inside knowledge (the very definition of the word ‘hip’) and a razor-sharp manipulation of irony, paradox, and innuendo laced with a wicked sense of humor could slyly redefine and frame the terms of discourse in any given situation.
As a past master at the subtle and sometimes brutal art of signifying, Malcolm X excelled at the droll practice of what the English call “one-up-manship.” One of his favorite ploys was asking a seemingly innocent question, then when the person he was addressing couldn’t come up with an answer (and of course any response that they gave would be the ‘wrong’ one) he would delight in what in African-American culture is called “smacking someone upside the head” by giving the devastating ‘right’ answer to his own question. One question that he often asked of stuffy, pretentious black intellectuals (or any black authority figure) he was debating in a public forum would be the following:
Malcolm: Sir, what do they call a black man with a Ph.D.? Respondent: I don’t know (or some other response) Malcolm: A Nigger!
The point of this exchange would be to frame the very terms of the discourse by establishing immediately that racism was an ideological and social force that didn’t go away or become less destructive merely because an individual black person had ‘succeeded’ at something in the general society. Malcolm’s discursive strategy here was to foreground his critique of American society by including even the person(s) he was debating as an example of that which he was indicting. The fact that he did this equally with black and white men and women (either to make a negative orpositive point) meant that he was highly conscious of, and adept at, using the power of language to tell complex truths about the society and culture. That this was largely accomplished through the practice of signifying only made Malcolm’s ideas and perspective more accessible to the largely young audience that he was trying to reach.
The rapping aspects of Malcolm’s oratorical style were most clearly demonstrated in the syncopated cadences and staccato phrasings that he often used. Alternating with a sly, sometimes sinister sounding chuckle and highly dramatic, almost ominous silent pauses, Malcolm would often keep an audience spellbound by deftly weaving a pastiche of historical allusions, folk proverbs and admonitions, ironic jokes, satirical puns, the inversions of tropes and indirect discourse (a prime element as we’ve noted in the art of signifying). He was also a brilliant storyteller whose allegorical tales epitomized the innovative use of the rapping tradition. As the linguist Mitchell-Kernan points out: “Signifying does not always have negative valuations attached to it; it is clearly thought of as a kind of art—a clever way of conveying messages.”2In Malcolm’s most famous collection of speeches MALCOLM X SPEAKS (Grove Press, 1965), we find many examples of just this sort of artful “cleverness.” In fact, this book and the world famous AUTOBIOGRAPHY published in 1965 after his death by assassination, (and now in its 40th printing!), are classic texts that clarify exactly why Malcolm is revered as a major sampling source for the current generation of rappers. A few examples of his singularly innovative style follows (all taken from Malcolm X Speaks and his Autobiography):
“I’m the man you think you are. ..If you want to know what I’ll do, figure out what you’ll do. I’ll do the same thing—only more of it” I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate,and call myself a diner...Being here in America doesn’t make you an American.” “I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”8 “Shorty would take me to groovy, frantic scenes in different chicks’ and cats’ pads, where with the lights and juke down mellow, everybody blew gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who were fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings.’4
“You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom, then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it.”
What is impossible to convey with these written examples is the subtle nuances of inflection, tone, cadence and phrasing that characterized Malcolm’s speaking style and how it directly affects his ability to signify in the terms we have already outlined. What most impresses the current generation of RAP artists is precisely Malcolm’s ability to transgress cultural and political sacred cows through his mastery of the verbal modes of parody, satire, circumlocution and mockery. Many of Malcolm’s speeches consciously set out to revise and transform conventional ideas about the nature and meaning of American history through the art of troping. By (re)figuring standard notions of what constitutes historical and social reality in the United States we get a critical narrative of the content of race relations, cultural expression, political philosophy and economic theory through a withering investigation into the mythology of these structures within the institutional parameters of the larger society. Malcolm was extremely adept at using indirect discourse and the implied or highly suggestive statement or phrase in lieu of literal minded posturing. The emphasis would always be on foregrounding the actual reality of conflict and contradiction in American culture vis-a-vis the given or received myth of how things “should be.” The result was often provocative and insightful.
The inspiring example of Malcolm X in the glaringly public arena of national and world politics led the next generation of African-American activists to base their oratorical and writing styles in the tradition of the vernacular. The bold, brash and scathing verbal expressions of such well-known figures as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale and the great boxer/poet Muhammad Ali were the very epitome of the rapping tradition in that humor, irony, parody, troping, and ingenious turns-of-phrase were the very content of their “messages.” The fact that rhyming, repetition, riffing, and indirect discourse (as well as scatology, insults, and folklore) were so integral to their cultural speech put them and others (like the comedian/philosophers Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, and Bill Cosby and the legendary singer/musician/dancer James Brown) right into the ‘mainstream’ of the signifying styles so widely used and expressed in the general black community.
In the cultural work of Richard Pryor for example, one finds a particularly ingenious use of the official mythology of African-American identity in the United States as it confronts or contradicts the historical reality of actual cultural experience. Most of Pryor’s brilliant routines of the period from 1973-1983 (his era of greatest influence as an artist and as a cultural icon) concern themselves with signifying on or about America’s most treasured and insidious myths and lies about racial relations as they were connected to matters of political economy, sex, social consciousness, sports and everyday life. In his stand-up monologues Pryor spent a great deal of time having a discourse with his various characters as they related to the mass audience. These characters were drawn largely from the black working and lower middle class who were struggling to maintain a tenuous connection to their society despite the brutalizing and patronizing aspects of economic exploitation, political corruption, racial discrimination and street crime. The role of rapping in this context was to allow the audience to perceive, as in a Brechtian drama, just how and why their real lives served as a social counterpoint to the personas being “acted out” by Pryor in often tragicomic terms.
In all of these performances on records, concert stages, television, and film, Pryor was able to bring pathos and humor to the utterly idiosyncratic languages that his characters would use to engage the audience in an on-going psychodrama with the dilemmas of being human in a context that tried to deny cultural difference through crudely reductive appeals to “racial” myths that obscured how relations between people were grounded in the material conditions of their lives. The RAP aesthetic served to arm Pryor with the linguistic tools of signifying and vernacular expression necessary to cut through official lies (or ignorance) advanced by the general culture. Once again it is impossible to convey the incredible range of verbal signifiers encoded in a dazzling collection of voices, inflections, accents, cadences, and phrasings. A great place to begin an investigation into the hilarious and poignant world of Pryor’s imagination would be his award-winning recordings That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), Is It Something I Said? (1975), and Bicentennial Nigger (1976), three of the truly radical masterpieces in modern comedic history.
What the RAP tradition has learned from Pryor is that linear narrative styles can be used to tell cautionary tales in the folkloric tradition or that it can be seen as a structural foundation for highly improvisational strategies of critique or celebration. Thus specific methods of signifying can be revised, inverted or extended to make a point or deliver a message while using humor and laughter as a “weapon” in the war against racial ideology. Allusive language, allegory, scatological imagery, and cultural analysis/criticism can all be included in the density of effects (or “mix) that make up the environmental theater that is contemporary RAP. The seminal role of sound in this particular process can’t be underestimated since it is an element that so closely corresponds to the role of inflection, accent, and phrasing in the RAP-oriented poetic styles of such ‘70s figures as Ali, the Last Poets, and Scott-Heron (who was also a singer and musician). Many of the finest, most creative rappers today have mastered this synthetic/syncretic unity of persona, voice, and sonic mix, particularly the PUBLIC ENEMY crew (Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Terminator X), as well as LL Cool J (and his DJ, the amazing ‘Cut Creator’), Eric B & Rakim, Paris, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah (and her extremely versatile posse called ‘The Flavor Unit’), and the political activist/philosopher/poet/storyteller KRS-One.
It’s no coincidence then that this generation of RAP artists have listened so closely and carefully to the great ‘70s artists. The pervasive influence of Scott-Heron, the Last Poets, Pryor, and Ali can be heard very clearly in nearly every major (and minor) RAP album, CD and cassette-tape since the first recordings began to appear on the open market in 1977. However, the most important and seminal influence on the present generation, and a man whose entire career since the early 1950s embodies a highly sophisticated synthesis of music, language, performance, and social activism is the one and only “Mr. Please, Please, Please, the Godfather of Soul, The Inventor of funk, and the hardest working man in show business, Mr. Dynamite Jaaaammmess Brown!”
What makes James Brown (1933- ) so important is his profound understanding and use of the myriad African-American folk traditions in music (e.g. Blues, Gospel and Jazz), language (e.g. rapping, signifying, melisma, narrative, metanarrative), performance art (e.g. historical rituals of dress, stagecraft, public rites of communion and testimony, confession and mass participation); as well as a commitment to the principles of social justice, political and personal freedom, economic self-determination and independent cultural expression). What Brown represents so deeply and embodies so clearly in his very life is an elegant embrace of his own “blackness.” This is a blackness not of a contrived or fake essentialism but a cultural identity and philosophy forged out of an agonizing and joyous struggle with the vicissitudes of living. The idea of what the writer/poet/playwright/ critic Amiri Baraka calls “the verb force” dominates Brown’s aesthetic. The recurring preoccupation with history that permeates Brown’s massive collection of songs and performance (e.g. “There was a Time,” “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Money Won’t Change You,” “Think”); the fearless political statement (“I Don’t Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing—Open Up the Door and I’ll Get Myself,” “Soul Power,” “It’s A New Day,” “Get Up, Get Into It and Get Involved,” “New Breed”); the fervent celebrations of sex (“Cold Sweat,” “I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me,” “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” “Sex Machine,” “Sexy, Sexy, Sexy”); the brash, bold (so-called) ‘boasting’ songs that celebrate the sheer art of living (“Superbad,: “Ain’t It Funky Now,” “Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn,” “You GotTo Have a Mother For Me,” Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “I Got the Feelin’,” “Mother Popcorn”); and his overtly educational or “message’ songs which provide the major transitional link between current RAP and the Rhythm and Blues tradition that Brown pioneered (“King Heroin,” “Brother Rapp,” “Don’t Be A Drop Out,” “Get On the Good Foot,” “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothin,” ‘The Payback,” “There It Is,” “Ain’t That a Groove”); not to mention the hard driving rhythmic dance music that revolutionized what could be done with Beats in popular music (“Get ItTogether,” “Funky Drummer,” ‘The Popcorn,” “Let Yourself Go,” “Licking Stick,” “Cold Sweat,” “There Was A Time,” “Make it Funky,” “I Got Ants in My Pants,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Papa Don’t Take No Mess”). All these monster hits and many, many more (Brown has over 50 platinum records to his credit!) have established Brown as the biggest single influence on the new rappers whose age group (largely 21-30) were only small children or pre-adolescents when Brown was in his glorious prime (1965-1975).
What’s fascinating about Brown’s impact however, is how every aspect of his act from singing to dancing to his tireless community activism off the stage has been lionized, emulated, copied and incorporated into the form and content of contemporary RAP. His influence has been so great that he is the only artist whom all sectors and factions of today’s rappers readily agree on. This particular fact accounts for the legendary status that his music, language (from lyrics to oral sounds), performance sensibility, and fidelity to certain political and moral stances regarding his social and personal identity continues to have among the leading aesthetic and political forces in the RAP world. As a result, Brown provides an excellent point of departure for clarifying our understanding of the history of RAP in the 20th century.
Bibliography:
The Death of Rhythm and Blues. Nelson George. Pantheon Books, 1988.
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Oxford University Press, 1988
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Walter J. Ong. Methuen, 1962.
Malcolm X Speaks. Malcolm X (Edited by George Brietman). Grove Press, 1965.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Grove Press, 1965.
The Beer Can By The Highway. John Kouwenhoven. Doubleday, 1961.
“Repetition As A Figure of Black Culture.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. James Snead Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Methuen, 1984.
Fresh: Hiphop Don’t Stop. Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker and Patty Romanowski. Random House, 1985.
Black Music. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). William Morrow, 1968.
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace. Ecco Press, 1990.
Mikhail Bahktin. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. Harvard University Press, 1984.
The Dialogic Imagination. Mikhail Bahktin. Edited by Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981.
Production Of New James Brown Film Reveals Structural Persistence of the Cultural Politics of White Supremacy and Capitalist Expropriation In the U.S.
“If I Steal It, Is It Mine?”: Racism, Cultural Expropriation, and the African American Artist in the U.S. by Kofi Natambu The Poetry Project Newsletter New York December, 1990
appropriation: 3. To take to or for oneself; take possession of. To make one’s own. The act of appropriating.
expropriation: 1. To take (property, ideas etc.) from another, especially without his permission. 2. To deprive (a person, business etc.) of property. To be separated from one’s own. —The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
A critical analysis of the structural relationship between the African American artist and the political economy of culture in the United States must begin with a theoretical investigation of the social and cultural history of aesthetics and “race” in this country. However, the major problem with the teaching of this history is that the writing of it is monopolized by “white Americans” who don’t know anything about the subject.
For example, it is painfully clear that 98% of all the books written about ‘culture’ in the United States don’t have the slightest idea who the following people are or what they’ve “contributed” to American culture: ‘Native Americans (“Indians”), African Americans (“Negroes”), Asian Americans (“Orientals”), Latino Americans (“Hispanics”). As a result these same writers can’t really talk coherently or accurately about the actual historical experience of the Euro Americans (“white people” of English, Irish, Scottish, Italian, French, German and Eastern European descent). Obviously this creates tremendous confusion when it comes to any clear understanding of the complex meaning of these various histories. This is largely because of a profound ignorance of even the empirical details of what the cross-cultural contacts and conflicts of the many heterogeneous groups that make up the North American continent actually represent. Thus it is not surprising that the ideology of racism (the most powerful instrument of oppression in the world today outside of capitalism itself) dominates contemporary discourse about culture, aesthetics and ‘identity’ in the United States.
THE RELENTLESS HEGEMONY that this ideology wields continues to distort, obscure, and confuse the issue when it comes to a critical assessment of the major role that appropriation plays in cultural theory and praxis today. This is no less true within so-called “avant-garde” circles than it is in the academic/institutional oligopoly known as the “cultural mainstream.” In fact, what both of these aesthetic communities have in common is an equal disdain for, yet voracious exploitation of, other cultural ideas, practices, traditions and values stemming from different social/cultural groups (e.g. African Americans). These reactionary attitudes and philosophical limitations constitute the basis of the historical expropriation of black cultural forms in all the arts (i.e. music, dance, literature, visual arts, ‘performance art’, theater, etc.) by white artists and critics who seek to not only use (or appropriate) the techniques, methods and conceptual ideas of African Americans but to co-opt, absorb and consume them as their property through the systematic ‘legal’ and criminal theft of their cultural productions.
This is carried out by the massive structural domination of the art market by huge corporations owned and administered by predominately upper-class white males who, through bureaucratic managerial control, inherited wealth, and monopolistic manipulation of the vast economic network of marketing, distribution and exchange outlets (the various sites of Capital in the political economy of culture in this country as well as globally), determine what the schools and mass media teach about “who did what, when, where and how” when it comes to American cultural history.
There is nothing necessarily conspiratorial or sinisterly “planned” with respect to this on-going condition. It is simply the way things are when it comes to political, economic and social reality in the United States. The fact that the cultural/artistic communities (‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’) largely support and accept the rather heinous status quo only exposes the vested interests of the “art world” when it comes to their own privileged position within the system. So the point is not merely that individual white artists “stole” their own “personal” aesthetic styles (and much of their content) from blacks but that as a necessarily privileged group of artists (by dint of their “race”, class, and sometimes gender) they were able to do much more than merely “appropriate” information (i.e. creatively use thematic and stylistic material as aesthetic source, cultural reference or energy conduit). The truth is that white artists have always sought to own the economic rights to, and residual benefits of, African American cultural artifacts and conceptions. What made this possible for them is the surplus value of what black artists and cultural workers have produced (in the form of usurious “contracts”, absurdly exploitive royalty arrangements and rigidly segregated markets at the points of both material production and exchange).
THE MOST BLATANT and notorious example of all this is the recording industry whose monumental profiteering off the creative genius of such legendary and seminal musicians, composers and singers as Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Theolonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Louis Jordan, Charles Mingus (and just about every blues artist in history) is scandalous. These are just a very few of the huge number of black artists who have revolutionized music as an art form in the 20th century and who have been mercilessly exploited. Who is the great Jimi Hendrix but a man whose extraordinary talent and vision has been plundered by a whole cottage industry of artistic and financial parasites who continue to bilk millions of dollars from his estate, while doing third-rate imitations of his artistry? In this context, who is Eric Clapton? Who are Mick Jagger & Keith Richard? Who is every ho-hum heavy metal guitarist since 1971? What does the multi-billion dollar music industry represent under these conditions? It’s important to note that this is not simply a matter of “trashing” your favorite white musician/songwriter either. After all, I’m not interested in examining the motives or intent of personalities involved in this process. What’s significant is the political, economic and cultural context that they are a part of, and what they decide to do about these conditions as far as their own cultural work is concerned.
In this light it’s easy to see the implications of the infamous “cover song’ tradition of the 1950s and early 1960s by white artists (a situation in which a popular white artist records the song and/or music of a black artist that often results in black artists not being paid royalties for their work and simultaneously being stymied from getting airplay and openly selling their music to a wider audience). Everyone from Pat Boone to Elvis Presley have cashed in on this little strategy. And while the economics and academic recognition of this situation have improved to a certain degree (more people are aware of what is happening and why) it still remains a major concern within the African American cultural community. Just ask the attorneys representing Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the estates of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and yes, James Marshall Hendrix, all of whom are currently involved in massive lawsuits against their respective recording companies. I’m sure there are many more examples.
Another cultural area where this syndrome of white appropriation turns into its ugly linguistic cousin is literature, where three generations of black writers in this century have been ignored, neglected and ripped-off with hardly anyone in academia or the avant-garde batting an eyelash. How else does one explain the colossal ignorance surrounding the important literary contributions of such major ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ writers as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Melvin B. Tolson, Adrienne Kennedy, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Bob Kaufman, Clarence Major, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Samuel Delany, Gayl Jones, Jayne Cortez, Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, June Jordan, Al Young and even Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (whose towering achievements are far too often dismissed as the infantile rantings of a ‘bitter nigger’). There are many other people I could mention but I think you get the point. How many of you reading this essay have heard of/read Sterling A. Brown, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James or Ida B. Wells? On the other hand how many of you know the work of W.C. Williams, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Ezra Pound, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac? Many more, I’ll bet.
The fault for all this lies of course with the public educational system whose curriculums and policy decisions throughout the country mirror the already established ideology of the bourgeois class that does indeed “run” the nation. The mere fact that the American literary canon is made up almost exclusively of European and white American males makes this clearly self-evident. The expropriation of the oral tradition in ‘American literature’ begins with the poetic and narrative strategies of Thomas Woolfe and William Faulkner in the 1920s and reaches its apex in the Beat Generation poets of the 1950s (check out Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso for starters). Again the issue is not the individuals who choose to use/appropriate material from other traditions and folk forms, but the supporting political economy that promotes and markets their cultural productions as “representative” or “central” to a certain aesthetic expression. At the same time the culture industry ignores or renders invisible the work of the seminal forces in the field.
THIS HISTORICAL DYNAMIC continues today with the myriad innovations in popular dance, painting (graffiti, mural art, etc.), ‘performance art,’ multimedia and film by black artists all being mined by white American artists with scarcely any real critical attention being paid to the nature of their technical and expressive achievements. One very significant example of this is the lack of serious critical analysis and commentary surrounding the powerful new hybrid/synthetic form known as RAP. Most white critics and journalists seem more interested in determining whether young black people inventing the form are “underclass criminals” or simply “obscene illiterates.” This is cultural racism of a particularly insidious and manipulative kind, especially in light of the tremendous popularity (as both form and artifact) that RAP enjoys among middle class white suburban youth (records don’t consistently go double platinum without this demographic audience). The corresponding fact that many white and black scholars are beginning to write in literary and cultural journals about the aesthetics and cultural politics of the form also exposes the dangerously reductive and racist attitudes of such middlebrow publications as Newsweek, The New York Times, New Republic, and The New Criterion. Between the “gliberals” (thanks, Ishmael!) and the neoconservatives, African American art is getting slapped around (and expropriated) from all sides.
But this historical assault on the intellectual and spiritual vitality, creative innovation, and liberating vision of African American art in all its forms cannot and will not stop the contemporary black artist any more than the imitators of Armstrong, Hughes, Hurston, Ellington, Parker, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, Young and Holiday were able to stop their legendary contributions to the 20th century cannon (sic) of world culture. WORD!
His Own Godfather James Brown Is Celebrated in ‘Get On Up’ By NELSON GEORGE JULY 23, 2014 New York Times
Chadwick Boseman as Brown in the new biopic “Get On Up.” Credit D. Stevens/Universal Studios
It’s just the kind of movie clip YouTube was made for. In the 1965 Frankie Avalon vehicle, “Ski Party,” James Brown and his backing vocal group, the Famous Flames, enter a ski lodge after rescuing a frozen reveler. Resplendent in a white-and-red sweater, tight black slacks, black pointy-toed shoes and a regal pompadour, Brown performs “I Got You (I Feel Good),” giving the lily-white crowd of clapping skiers a taste of the showmanship that had made him a star on the so-called “chitlin circuit” among blacks. Even in a movie as disposable as “Ski Party,” Brown turned a corny scene into genuine entertainment.
In the biopic “Get On Up,” opening Friday, the filmmakers recreate this moment, trying to see it from Brown’s point of view. While he glides through his steps, we see slow-motion shots of the listeners as if they were creatures from another, whiter planet, one Brown is reluctantly visiting in hopes of reaching a wider audience. In that scene, Brown dances off the set. In the new film, he does a split but doesn’t come up, apparently having ripped his pants. The new moment is slightly comic but undercuts Brown’s mastery.
Depicting James Brown on screen has always been a seductive proposition. As one of the greatest stage performers of the 20th century, he has inspired documentarians, playwrights, comedians and other artists who see the outlines of his greatness. But capturing the man inside, and the meaning of his life, is a tricky business.
There was a fluidity to his identity that was reflected in his many stage nicknames: Mr. Dynamite, the hardest working man in show business, Soul Brother No. 1, the Godfather of Soul and the Original Disco Man, as he variously billed himself. All enduring pop stars have the ability to shift with the culture, but Brown’s moves — from staunch integrationist to proto-black nationalist and back, from civil rights role model to wife beater, from disciplined bandleader to drug addict — suggest an inner turmoil that belied his outer confidence. Shortly after his death, I helped edit a collection of articles that spanned Brown’s long career, and in reading the pieces was struck by how many journalists saw the contours of the man but struggled to truly penetrate his psyche. With a feature film about to arrive and a coming documentary, it’s time to take stock of this imposing figure.
Brown, who died on Christmas Day 2006, began his career in the ’50s under the spell of Little Richard and ended it as a major influence on current singer-dancers like Usher and Chris Brown. Michael Jackson and Prince, of course, were acolytes. Reared on gospel, blues and jazz, Brown was a dominant force in the soul ’60s, created funk, inspired disco and laid hip-hop’s foundation with his beats.
As important as Brown was on vinyl, his stage show and personality are legendary: Tilting a mike stand far forward and, before it hit the stage, pulling it back via the cord. Dropping into and rising out of splits. Feigning exhaustion and donning a regal cape before returning to sing again. Executing every new dance from the ’60s to the ’80s with deft steps and body control made Brown a dominant figure during an explosive era for pop music.
Brown was a self-made man who as a child was abandoned by both his parents. So, with success, he constructed his own world in which few could address him by his first name (for employees and interviewers alike it was strictly Mr. Brown), and musicians were fined midshow. An immense ego strove to mask any insecurity. His drive to succeed was as unrelenting as his dancing. During the civil rights movement, he emerged as a leader capable of preventing a riot in Boston after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But he was also an eccentric, who would give up his processed hair for an Afro during the “Black Is Beautiful” era, only to return to the retro style because he loved having straight hair.
“Get On Up,” directed by Tate Taylor from a clever screenplay by the brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, attempts the difficult task of capturing a driven artist whose career spanned six decades and whose public persona overshadowed his inner life. Just as hip-hop would take break beats from the middle or end of Brown’s records to make new sounds, the Butterworths eschew a linear structure, jumping from 1988 to 1968 to 1938 and so on to put you at important turning points in Brown’s life.
The producer Brian Grazer, a Brown fan since his teenage years, first got rights to the star’s story 13 years ago, he said. At one point, Spike Lee was to direct, with Wesley Snipes to star. When Brown died, “it made making the film impossible,” Mr. Grazer added. “All the relationships we’d cultivated dissipated.” Struggles over the estate made Mr. Grazer and company step away.
“Then about a year after his death, Mick Jagger called,” Mr. Grazer said. “He’d cleared all the key rights and read the script. He wanted to partner up.”
Mr. Jagger thought Brown’s “life and times and his struggle against adversity” deserved a film treatment, he said via email. Not only did he push to get “Get On Up” made but he is also producing a coming documentary about Brown directed by the Oscar-winning Alex Gibney.
“James was an early influence on me in many ways,” Mr. Jagger said. “He showed me how to interact with an audience and that you always have to give 100 percent of your energy every show.”
Though not close friends, Brown and Mr. Jagger did interact quite a bit in the ’60s. Both performed in “The T.A.M.I. Show,” a multi-act concert filmed in 1964, a sequence that plays a small part in the biopic.
It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon of the Obama presidency that a surprising number of films focused on black American history have both been financed and successful: “42,” “Django Unchained,” “The Help,” “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and the 2014 Oscar winner for best picture, “12 Years a Slave.” In addition, two separate films centered on Nelson and Winnie Mandela have been released. A film about Jimi Hendrix is due in September. A biopic of Nina Simone has been filmed; a feature about the 1965 civil rights march that began in Selma just wrapped; one about Miles Davis is shooting now; and projects about the rap group NWA and the rapper Tupac Shakur are in the works.
African-Americans tend to view any Hollywood treatments of their history with at best guarded optimism and often with dread. Decades of omissions, half-truths and outright lies about their role in this nation’s history tend to make black viewers skeptical of the most well-intentioned projects. There is also a sense that black directors and writers are being excluded from telling these stories in Hollywood since, with a few notable exceptions (Mr. Daniels, Steve McQueen of “12 Years a Slave” and Ava DuVernay of “Selma,” among them), these films have been told by white producers, writers and directors. That said, many of these projects have languished, in some cases, for decades until the current epoch. Certainly, they have been a boon to many black performers. Chadwick Boseman, a relatively unknown young actor, has, with Jackie Robinson in “42” and now Brown, played two of the most important cultural figures in American history.
Portraying Brown is complicated by the singer himself, who sometimes seemed to be a caricature of soul music emotion as well as an expression of it. This was particularly true in the last decades of his life, when in the “Blues Brothers” movies and TV appearances he played cartoonlike versions of himself.
Even back at his height as a best-selling recording artist and cultural figure in the ’60s and ’70s, Brown was ridiculed by stand-up comedians for his guttural singing, sweaty histrionics and massive ego. One of Eddie Murphy’s signature “Saturday Night Live” moments was the 1983 skit “James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub Party,” in which he parodied Brown’s vocals and processed hair, and, backed by a funky band, squealed about the virtues of relaxing in bubbling hot water. It was a wickedly funny take on Brown that showcased Mr. Murphy’s genius for mimicry and made it hard to watch Brown again without a knowing smile. Mr. Murphy’s version of Brown was so compelling that even when he played James (Thunder) Early in “Dreamgirls” (2006), a character who looked a lot like the soul singer Wilson Pickett, it was hard not to see it as another version of Brown.
Truthfully, Brown’s legacy is much richer than just passionate singing. With the aid of the arrangers Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley, Brown reworked the bluesy basis of rhythm and blues so that every instrument worked as part of the rhythm section, creating funk music in the process. Though “Get On Up” doesn’t spend much time on Brown’s creative process, there is an effective scene in which Brown browbeats his band, making every musician, from guitarist to trumpeter, testify to the notion that everyone is playing “a drum.”
At the film’s end, a title card explains how widely his beats have been sampled. But there are no scenes showing Brown’s initial irritation with his music being reworked, his struggle to understand sampling or his collaborations with hip-hop figures like Afrika Bambaataa. Hip-hop samples, both of his music and his vocals, have kept Brown relevant to young listeners in a way that have eluded most of his ’60s soul peers. The spit-and-polish Brown trying to relate to saggy-pants M.C.s could have been fun.
Like many musicians, Brown suggested in interviews that you’d learn all you need to know about him by listening to his music, but that actually isn’t true. His ideas about ownership and control of his career were visionary. Before running into tax troubles in the mid-’70s Brown owned a number of radio stations, fast-food restaurants, record labels and a private plane well before it became a rock-star staple.
My favorite sequence in “Get On Up” is not a stage performance or a temper tantrum, but a moment when Brown’s smarts are depicted. His manager and booking agent Ben Bart gives him a Cadillac as a gift, a clichéd way for white authority figures to reward black stars for achievement. Brown is not impressed. Later, he outlines a new system of touring, assuming a central role in booking his shows and thus minimizing promoters’ ability to pocket most of the gate.
Brown would sit in his dressing room after every show going over the box office ledger and greeting local radio D.J.s and record store owners until he’d shaken every hand, all the while getting his hair done. Brown, no doubt, was over the top. But young James Brown was also a forward thinker who would thrive in the current music environment, in which artists are self-contained enterprises who rely not on record company largess but on their own talent, innovations and moxie.
Why Did Mick Jagger Produce The James Brown Movie, 'Get On Up'? Let Him Tell You by Christopher Rosen July 29, 2014 Huffington Post
Mick Jagger has been a James Brown fan for actual decades. The Rolling Stones lead singer, who turned 71 on Sunday, has admitted he copied many of Brown's dance moves on stage. As the men rose to prominence as two of the biggest singers of the 1960s, they even became acquaintances. It was a relationship that lasted until Brown's death in 2006.
"I saw him at a show in Cleveland. I can't remember when, but we were both there together," Jagger told HuffPost Entertainment when asked about the last time he saw Brown alive. "I went to see his show, and he came to see me. We had a good time."
For Jagger, his connection to Brown has only increased in the eight years since the pioneering singer died. Peter Afterman, Brown's estate manager and Jagger's long-time friend, asked the Rolling Stones frontman if he wanted to make a documentary on Brown's life after securing music rights to Brown's catalog of hit songs. Jagger thought to take it one step further: a feature film about Brown that could work in concert with documentary. It was then that he connected with producer Brian Grazer, who had been working on a Brown movie himself for a decade with little triumph. Using a script written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, Jagger and Grazer put together "Get On Up," an unconventional biography about Brown that jumps through the singer's life, from his troubled upbringing in Georgia to his incredible career as a performer to his numerous issues with the law. (Brown was arrested multiple times on domestic violence charges and also spent time in prison for other offenses, including a three-year stint after leading police on a high-speed chase in 1988.)
Starring Chadwick Boseman as Brown and directed by Tate Taylor, "Get On Up" hopes to capitalize on audiences who helped make "Lee Daniels' The Butler" and Taylor's previous film, Best Picture-nominee "The Help," surprise box office hits in the month of August. For his part, Jagger has everything in his power to make the film a success: In addition to being a hands-on producer for "Get On Up" during production, Jagger has promoted the film on the "Today" show and in interviews with TIME magazine, Billboard, USA Today and The Huffington Post. We spoke to Jagger about his involvement in "Get On Up" at the world famous Apollo Theater in New York on a hazy, hot and humid Saturday afternoon in July. An edited transcript of our conversation is below.
You were producing the Alex Gibney documentary, "Mr. Dynamite: James Brown and the Power of Soul," and, as the story goes in the press notes, woke up one day and thought a feature on Brown would be great too. Why?
It's just a different animal, isn't it? Obviously I thought of "Ray." I thought "Ray" was a great movie. I loved that movie and people loved that movie. But I thought, in a way, that James Brown's life story and his onstage persona was more interesting. The onstage performances are more vivid and alive than in Ray's story. As much as we love Ray Charles, and he's one of my favorite singers, but I mean, when I thought about it, I thought, "Wow, if you could make a movie like that [with Ray Charles], we can certainly do a movie about someone like James Brown." But without copying "Ray" in any way, so why not make a feature of it too? And we can do the documentary, too. They can both be fantastic.
You've discussed how James Brown influenced you. Watching the movie, I couldn't help but think of how we can see parts of James Brown in singers like David Lee Roth and Axl Rose and also modern hip-hop artists like Kanye West and Jay Z. Do you think people even realize how influential Brown was across all genres of music?
Well, probably not. Why would they? But he was definitely a role model on many levels. He's a role model as a guy who comes out on stage and really works his butt off. He always gave his best. He came out and did it. I never thought, "I want to be like that!" But obviously that rubs off on you. The other person I toured with was Little Richard. Every night he went out there -- didn't matter who the audience was, whether they were good, bad or indifferent -- and he just worked it. That rubs off on you. These are guys who were just always working it. So that's the way you want to be. On the other level, James Brown wanted to be in control of his own destiny. This movie is about someone who wants to be in control of their career and their life, especially when they came from a place where they weren't in control or they had very little to start with.
The movie depicts the infamous T.A.M.I. concert, and shows a screen version of The Rolling Stones watching Brown perform. How familiar were you with Brown before that show?
Very familiar. I had everything. I had all his music. I had seen his music here at the Apollo. I talked to him. I hung out with him.
How much influence did you have on who was cast as a Mick Jagger for that scene?
Not much, in the end. I was somewhere far away. I don't want to talk about it really. How can I talk about it without sounding ... there was a little bit of poetic license in that scene. In the end the scene works. It's a fun scene. It wasn't really what happened, but it works well.
As a producer was there one moment that you really fought to keep in the finished film?
I can't really remember. My thing was, I wanted you, the audience, to be pulling for James. Sometimes when I read the script, I felt there was some feeling that you ... I was really saying, "I'm not pulling for this guy enough." It was quite simple really: It was just a question of juxtaposition of a few scenes. It wasn't really taking things out, it was where things were in the story. It's just where you put the accentuation. It doesn't matter how bad he is or how good he is, you want to see both sides of a character. But nevertheless, you do want to be pulling for him.
You obviously don't need to be a producer. Why do you do it?
I quite enjoy doing it. It's a different discipline, but it has a lot of things that are the same [as leading the Rolling Stones]: managing large groups of people, making sure they get on with a common goal. But you've also got a lot of competing parties and you have problems to solve and so on. I also like the literary part of it, which I don't really get to do that much. I like the scripts. I like solving the puzzles. I kind of enjoy the dealmaking. I mean, as long as it doesn't go on forever. It's a lot of moving parts! As long as it doesn't take all my time, because I like to do creative things in other ways, it's a great thing. It's still a creative thing, it's not a business only thing. So it depends which route you take. Being a producer can mean many things. For this particular movie, it was quite interesting because it did have a good literary beginning. Other movies you're presented with a script and there is very little you can say. It's done. It could even be cast. You still get the same credit. With this, it was a much longer process.
You weren't just a rubber stamp of approval.
I'm not really interested in doing that. I don't mind doing that, you know, if it's a project you really love.
With this film and the documentary, you've become the de facto caretaker of James Brown's legacy for a generation of young viewers. Do you think about who will do that for you and the Rolling Stones?
Not really. I don't think about that much [laughs]. I always get asked about it!
With that in mind, did you feel any pressure to make sure James Brown's legacy was shown in a way that was true to him?
Yeah, I want it to be true to him. I think he's a wonderful artist and I didn't want it to be over-glamorized or too de-glamorized and sleazy. In making the documentary, it was the same thing. By shading and nuancing, you can destroy someone's reputation. In the documentary, for instance, it would be very easy to accentuate the negative side -- which everyone has in their life -- and that would be a mean thing to do. What I tried to do in both these films is to show not only the creative and other side, but to show him as a complete person as much as possible. But still really leave people with an uplifting feeling, which I think is a correct thing to do for an artist of his status.
How did you decide on Tate Taylor as director?
Brian and I, once we decided to partner up but before we had a deal, we decided to look for directors. We looked at lots of directors, and Tate was on the top of our list of people. We thought that even though Tate was relatively inexperienced, he did have experience with doing "The Help," which we liked. It was a bit of a leap of faith with Tate because he hadn't done a lot. But he convinced us that he could do this and he had boundless enthusiasm and energy and vitality to push the project through, especially for the limited amount of money that we had to make it. We decided that Tate could do it. I think we were vindicated at the end.
When did you realize it was the right decision?
When you start seeing the first assembly cut, after the first couple of weeks. You know, "Okay, I think it's working. We're going to keep going!"
Tate's going to be forever connected with James Brown, and I wanted to ask you about your connection with Martin Scorsese. Do you have a favorite scene from his movies set to your music?
I can't remember. He's used "Gimme Shelter" a lot. I'm doing this HBO series with Marty now. I think we're talking about using Stones music in that. Some of it. But, yeah he has a really great flare for using music. He was one of the first who used loud rock music, like, in your face. Before, it was sort of in the background, and he lets the music sometimes take over the scene in a really great way.
Brian Grazer Reveals Why Spike Lee Was Replaced By Tate Taylor To Direct James Brown Biopic
BY TAMBAY A. OBENSON
JANUARY 16, 2013
Shadow And Act
On Cinema of the African Diaspora
James Brown in Alex Gibney's "Mr. Dynamite."
Recapping what we've known until today...
First Spike Lee spent years trying to get his Jackie Robinson project financed and produced (unsuccessfully), only to eventually watch Legendary Pictures and Brian Helgeland launch their own Jackie Robinson picture, with Chadwick Boseman starring (scheduled to be released in 2013).
And then it was announced in October that Spike would have to, once again, sit back and watch (this time) Tate Taylor (director of The Help) helm a James Brown biopic, with super producer Brian Grazer producing, and Mick Jagger joining Grazer as producer.
You'll recall that a film based on the life of the singer has long been in the works, with Spike Lee directing, and Brian Grazer overseeing the production. Obviously, something happened, since Spike is no longer attached to direct, but Brian Grazer is still on to produce.
In the October post announcing the director change, we all wondered what could've happened that inspired the director change; now, 3 months later, we have our answer.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, posted on their website this morning, producer Brian Grazer was asked that question specifically. Here's the section of the interview where it's all addressed:
RS: What happened with Spike Lee, who was said to be directing the original movie project before Brown's death?
BG: He was the choice when I had the rights. I had just produced Inside Man with him. When the rights left me, I didn't have any control, and I couldn't make director choices. So when it came later with new people and new rights holders, we weren't doing it with Spike Lee anymore. The world was different then. Now you have to make movies for less money.
RS: When it was announced that Lee was no longer involved and that a white director, Tate Taylor, was on board, the blogosphere went nuts. How do you respond to those comments?
BG: What would I say? I view that a bunch of different ways. Mick and I don't see the world that way. I started my career making Boomerang and CB4. I've made so many movies where I've supported black artists. Tate made The Help, and that had almost an entirely black population. I just want to try to make the best movie.
RS: Were you surprised by those reactions?
BG: Well, I didn't read them! I can't make movies like that, where I'm going to look at some blog and change the course of the whole movie. I also think Mick is so amazing. For him to decide he's going to participate and split half the money – he's a man of integrity, and I feel pretty good about that.
Well, after reading all that, what I gather from his response is that the choice for who to direct was out of his control, after James Brown died, and the rights issues became more complicated as they now fell under a different set of rights holders, who, we can assume, didn't want Spike Lee to direct.
Is that what you read in all this as well?
He adds that the world was different then, and now movies have to be made cheaper. Does that mean we can also infer that Spike's asking fee was higher than Tate Taylor's? Or the budget for Spike's version of the film was more than what financiers were willing to spend on a Spike Lee-directed film about James Brown?
So, while we get answers we didn't have before, the answers themselves raise even more questions, which means, even more speculation.
In the interview, Grazer reveals how much of a James Brown fan he is, and how long he's been trying to get the project off the ground (12 years since he bought the rights), as well as how much of his own money he's invested in it thus far ($2 million). He also shares that, at one point, Al Sharpton was a consultant on the movie.
And as for whether James Brown (whom Grazer said he met several times while he was alive, and even discussed the project) was at all concerned about a warts and all telling of his life story on film, Grazer said he seemed OK with that.
And finally, with regards to casting, Grazer says they haven't decided yet, but are about to begin the process of testing/auditioning actors, and believes they'll likely be looking at a lot of actors before they find the right one.
You might recall that, at one point, Wesley Snipes was Spike's man for the starring job, but my guess is that Wesley's tax problems meant a change in plans.
In fact, as recently as 2009, it seemed like the project was as close to a sure-thing as any can get, with Spike saying in an interview with MTV News, "We're doing it together – it's going to happen... He’s my man."
He was referring to Wesley Snipes in that quote back in January 2009 (S&A hadn't been born yet).
Spike added that he intended to use James Brown's "authentic voice" during for any musical sequences in the film; essentially, Wesley would lip-synch.
Years later since that interview, little seemed to have further developed on the project, and it looked like it was dead.
In a 2011 interview, James Brown's daughter, Dr. Yamma Brown, said that the family was considering Eddie Murphy, Chris Brown & Usher to star in the Godfather of Soul’s biopic - an announcement which, as I recall, took a lot of you by surprise.
Whether or not any of the above gentlemen are still being considered, or if there are others, we'll find out eventually; although, I doubt it.
As I've said before, go with an unknown - definitely not a star.
The screenplay has been penned by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth (they wrote the script for Fair Game, the Naomi Watts and Sean Penn film).
The August 1, 2014 release of the James Brown biopic Get On Up has been a long anticipated event for many music fans and people that grew up with Soul Brother Number One
as an integral part of their lives. The film has been praised by
mainstream critics and ripped by many who believe it did a disservice to
one of the greatest African Americans that ever lived. I thoroughly
enjoyed the film. Many of Brown’s closest supporters such as Bootsy Collins and Charles Bobbitt have stated that while flawed, they enjoyed the film also.
If nothing else, the release of the film has given many of us
“insiders” into the discourse of soul music a reason to publicly
reassess the narrative of one of the most important black musicians –
and black people – of our generation.
Chadwick Boseman as James Brown
While Chadwick Boseman’s role as James Brown has
been universally praised, and the producers have delivered an
entertaining treatment of Brown’s rags to riches story, there are some
omissions and issues of emphasis that stand out more and more as sins of
omission, particularly when the subject matter is one of the Greatest
African Americans that ever lived.
There has been strong criticism that of all the writers, producers
and directors associated with the film, none of them are African
Americans. This is not a reason to avoid the film, but it is one reason
why I was trepidatious when I went to see it.
One should approach the film more accurately as “Mick Jagger presents
Get On Up” and the perspective will become clear. Jagger, lead singer
of the Rolling Stones, is a very sympathetic and strong
supporter of soul music and the legacy of black entertainers in his
work and of Western popular music in general. He and the other
producers are nevertheless coming from an outsider’s perspective and it
is revealed in the film in many places.
Here is a – pared down – list of sinful omissions from the film:
1-Emcee Danny Ray does not exist in the film, yet Danny Ray was with James Brown longer than Bobby Byrd
was, and was the reliable voice introducing “Mr Dynamite, Mr. Please
Please Please himself…” at countless concerts and events for over 40
years. Danny Ray also donned the cape on Mr Brown during the shows and
was integral to the stage act for decades. During music performances,
the film shows numerous times when the cape is placed on Mr. Brown but
the cape holder is conspicuously anonymous. This is inexplicable to any
JB fan. Why his character was omitted is unconscionable. Similarly,
longtime (black) business manager and confidante Charles Bobbitt
was eliminated from the film altogether. There were many backstage
scenes in which Bobbit’s sage council and trustworthiness could have
been shown, however briefly. Bobbitt’s loyalty was and is legendary, and
for it to be rewarded by his omission is also unconscionable.
Fred Wesley was omitted from the movie
2-Fred Wesley
does not exist in the film. As Mr. Brown’s bandleader off and on from
1969 to 1975, Wesley was responsible for such classics as “Get On the Good Foot” “The Payback,” “Papa Don’t Take No Mess” and “Mother Popcorn” all of which were heard or referenced in the film, yet Wesley is nonexistent.
Further, Maceo Parker’s character was played by a heavy set, comic actor Craig Robinson
that resembled Fred Wesley both visually and in terms of
temperament. Robinson did not in any way resemble or reflect the smooth,
slender dark chocolate hued Maceo. Essentially Fred and Maceo were
fused into one person. This was unforgiveable. (It is plausible however
in light of the fact that Fred Wesley was among the first of the
sidemen to pen his own autobiography which delineated the trials and
tribulations of working for the Godfather of Soul. It is possible that
the family members that “approved” the script were petty enough to
request that Fred Wesley be removed from the story line)
Many of us music collectors figured that once the JB reissues came out in the 1980s, with liner notes from Cliff White and later Harry Weinger,
that the days of ignoring the genius of the James Brown band were over…
but with the omission of Fred Wesley from this film, they are back
again.
Further, during Brown’s 1971 Paris concert, his last great one in the
timeline of the film, there are cutaways to the white bandleader (David Matthews
most likely) that night. This was a subtle nod to the worldliness of
James Brown, and a subtle erasure of Fred Wesley once again. This was
troubling to me because it reflects once again an outsider’s view of
Brown’s music which ignores the genius of Fred Wesley in the creation
and maintenance of the JB’s funk sound of the early 70s.
3-The
women are all cardboard cut-out characters with lines that a film
school intern could have written, and probably did. They were
dimensionless tragic victims of Brown’s ambition, without any
complications, back stories or personality. Viola Davis’
role as Brown’s mother was particularly troubling, not because she
can’t act, but because we’ve seen that act so many times before. Almost
no references to who these people were and how they dealt with life as
black women during Jim Crow, was consistently troubling.
Furthermore, there were many other important women in Brown’s life and career, such as Anna King, Martha High, Lyn Collins, Marva Whitney and Tammi Montgomery a.k.a. Tammi Terrell, which the movie chose to wipe away from the narrative.
Brown’s third wife Adrienne was left out of the film, as was Brown’s companion Tomi Rae
at the time of Brown’s death. These were white women that Brown was
passionate about and should have been seen. While the chronology of the
film did not make a necessity of their roles, their absence denies a
particular element of Brown’s racial ideology that is more complex –
and reflective of the complexity of black life in America – and deserved
to be seen as such. This leaves little doubt that the film was from a
white Brit’s viewpoint of blackness. In the absence of these women,
Brown is seen as a racial simpleton, a victim of the binary logic of Jim
Crow and little more. He was far more than that.
H Rap Brown
4-The film re-creates absurd encounters with white pop culture such as the “Ski Party”
sequence in great detail. However Brown’s encounters with radical
black leaders, while well documented in the literature on Brown, were
only mentioned in passing. Brown writes in his autobiography of a
face-to-face meeting with black radical H. Rap Brown on
the Harlem streets. This would have been a priceless encounter and
priceless opportunity to educate the audience, black white and other, of
Brown’s steadfast positions on black pride and black power. This was
clearly a dimension that the (entirely white) team of writers and
producers were not equipped to develop with any authority.
Further, the only references to Brown’s relationship to black power
were portrayed in the context of his revealing to his confidante, his
white manager Ben Bart. It is an incongruity that would only be
generated by a writer/producer with more affinity with the white manager
than to the brother from the block. This is where the ‘center’ of the
story gets lost. James Brown is a product of America to be sure, but he
is first and foremost a product of Black America, and the film lost
touch with this point just as the racial consciousness of the nation was
on the rise, compelling Brown to remain in touch with his people in
ways he saw fit.
5-The
film could have dealt with Brown’s visits to Africa – his trip to
Nigeria in 1970 when he and his band witnessed the genius of “The African James Brown,” Fela Kuti, and most importantly, his 1974 performance in Zaire ahead of the Muhammad Ali – George Foreman fight, the “Rumble in the Jungle.” This was a true cultural moment appropriately named in the 1996 film When We Were Kings. The filmmakers chose not to emphasize Brown’s worldwide impact as a musician and cultural icon of African / Black identity.
6-The encounter with Brown’s recording of “Say it Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud”
while exciting, was unsubtle and cartoonish. Out of the blue – and
inconsistent with the plot up to that point – the characters were
dressed in African garb and natural hair. Then just as quickly, that
moment ends and the story moves on. As if Black Power – and Brown’s
popularization of Black Power came and went in a whiff, yet it is
perhaps Brown’s most lasting contribution to the world.
There are any number of live performances on tape that could have
been re-created to show Brown’s towering stance in the community at that
moment. Cutaways to the 1968 Olympic games, with the triumphant black
power fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos could have been shown, as “Say it Loud” was the #1 R&B song on the radio at that very moment.
Visual images of the Black Panthers, of Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Ron Karenga
and others that represented what “black and proud” meant to the black
community and the world community could have been shown. This is the
singular moment where James Brown did not simply cross over to the
mainstream as a black artist, he made the mainstream cross over to black. This is perhaps his greatest accomplishment, and the greatest omission from the film.
The cutaway from the gleeful chorus of “I’m Black and I’m Proud” in
the film to Brown’s character shoveling dirt on a casket with a Jewish
symbol is the most jarring and incomprehensible edit in the film. This
is a moment when a sensitive director (of color?) would have embellished
the “Say It Loud” moments with cutaways to Brown’s influence on black
popular culture, fashion, language, style and identity.
A few seconds would not have been difficult to produce, but instead a
moment was cut off, crushed in order to emphasize Brown’s sentiment
toward his white manager – deliberately identified as Jewish – just as
the film was embellishing Brown’s blackness. It was an inexplicable
jump cut from a film making perspective, and a racially insensitive
one. It is hard to imagine an African American director making that
kind of edit on this film, in that moment. (Furthermore, the son of
manager Ben Bart contends that Mr. Brown did not even attend Ben Bart’s funeral….) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VRSAVDlpDI
7- The film could have easily referenced a young (black)Michael Jackson doing the “James Brown moves”
as part of the Jackson 5 audition for Motown. Mick Jagger was not the
only superstar transformed – note for note and move for move by James
Brown. During a lifetime achievement award for Brown on BET in 2003,
Michael Jackson emerges (at the peak of his popularity) to introduce his
mentor James Brown and to educate the mass of MJ supporters where he
got his funk from. This is on tape and could be reconstructed like the
other Jim Crow era events on tape. The King of Pop’s profound debt to
James Brown could have been mentioned in less than one sentence but was
omitted.
8- The final performance sequence in which Brown walks to a stage and sings “Try Me” with Bobby Byrd and Vicki Anderson
in the audience was given a deliberately intimate feel. But anyone
that saw James Brown in the years after his prison release in the early
1990s saw a spectacle of a stage show, with tall glamorous dancing girls
and a sprawling stage set reflecting the scope of Brown’s triumphant
return. This final scene implied that Brown was a shell of his earlier
star power, which was not the case.
Further, the decision to render the climactic scene of Brown’s
triumphant life to a forlorn Jim Crow era ballad speaks volumes about
the orientation of the all white, predominantly British filmmakers.
This did not reflect the triumphant nature of the man’s life. The
previous scene, in which Brown is seen as a young boy, still wearing the
painted number one on his chest (from one of the few illuminating
scenes about the racism of Jim Crow) speaks to the camera and says “I paid the cost to be the boss.” That would have been the proper moment to end the film. On the undisputed triumph of Brown’s life. Period.
9-
The film harps on Brown’s isolation and loneliness in the years from the
death of his son Teddy in 1973 until his arrest in 1988, as if those
intervening years were not relevant to his life. Only to outsiders to
the black experience would this be plausible.
The narrative should have continued until The Payback in 1974, and should have featured Browns’ dominant presence on Soul Train, and his strong relationship with Soul Train
host Don Cornelius. A behind the scenes dialogue between Brown and
Cornelius about the state of black people and black music would have
been priceless. But apparently this was “not important enough” in this
film about yet another self-made Jim Crow survivor.
In addition there exists footage of a young Al Sharpton on Soul Train
during an interview giving Brown a “Black Record” (a prize for having
the best black song of 1974, “ThePayback”). Sharpton would go on to
become a “surrogate son,” stand-in for Teddy, and an important part of
Brown’s self-recovery. But the producers chose to simplify Brown’s
loneliness, as if he was in a death spiral for 15 years and not a single
event was worthy of inclusion until 1988. And yet to these filmmakers
the entire comic-tragic highway chase was worthy of detailed
reconstruction on film.
10-James
Brown, through his raw Soul Power in the late 1960s and early 70s,
taught us how to frame our blackness. Perhaps more than Malcolm, more
than Huey & Bobby, it was Soul Brother Number One that gave us the
fuel for our emerging black identity. During the first half of the 70s
with songs like “Get on the Good Foot,” “Make it Funky,” “Hot Pants,” “Doing it to Death,” “Funky President,” “My Thang,” “Papa Don’t Take No Mess,” “Take Some, Leave Some,” “Mind Power,” Lyn Colllins’ “Think,” Fred Wesley’s “Damn Right I Am Somebody” and “The Payback”
all helped us define our “blackness” in a certain way. This film
completely missed a means of truly bringing that to light. A quick
passage to a deejay in the mix, or a montage of rappers sampling JB,
might have illuminated this essential aspect of the great man’s life. The entire creation of hip hop should be seen as an outgrowth of this
fact, yet the fact that hip hop has taken over the world, and is STILL
and FOREVER based on the work of James Brown was barely even mentioned.
Having said all of this, I truly enjoyed the film and would recommend that people go and see it while it is in the theaters.
People should realize that it has been many years since we have all
been able to see a truly impactful performance of The Godfather of
Soul. He was performing up to his death in 2006, but those later shows
were relatively mild showcases of a pop superstar rather than a burning
beacon of black self-awareness. This film brings back Soul Brother
Number One in many entertaining ways despite all of its flaws.
There have been complaints of “why can’t black filmmakers do projects
like these” and that white film producers have such privilege they can
just peruse wikipedia and stumble on a black cultural icon and get a
film green-lighted about them. It is not that simple. The Ray movie
took years to get approved, and it was produced by Taylor Hackford, a white man. I also noticed with chagrin that at the peak of the popularity of black film makers in the 1990s with Spike Lee, the Hudlin Brothers, John Singleton, Mario Van Peeples,Oprah Winfrey
and others, I don’t remember any of them seriously taking on a
biographical project involving a black musical icon. So stop hating on
this very thoughtful and professional production and Get Up Offa That
Thang and do something to change this situation!
Get On Up should open the door for other films to focus on more
events in Brown’s life with greater detail, emphasis and affection.
It is a good first step, on the good foot…
written by Professor Rickey Vincent.. author of History of Funk, Party Music and Host of KPFA’s History of Funk
The Godfather of Soul invented funk, befriended presidents and laid the foundations of rap. And he did it by defying the laws of space and time. Inside the private world of the baddest man who ever lived
In Augusta, Georgia, in May 2005, they put up a bronze statue of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, in the middle of Broad Street. During a visit to meet James Brown and observe him recording parts of his new album in an Augusta studio, I went and had a look at it. The James Brown statue is an odd one in several ways. For one, it is odd to see a statue standing not on a pedestal, flat on its feet on the ground. This was done at James Brown's request, reportedly. The premise being: man of the people. The result, however: somewhat fake-looking statue. Another difficulty is that the statue is grinning. Members of James Brown's band, present while he was photographed for reference by the statue's sculptor, told me or their attempts to get James Brown to quit smiling for the photographs. A statue shouldn't grin, they told him. Yet James Brown refused to do other than grin. It is the grin of a man who has succeeded, and as the proposed statue struck him as a measure of his success, he determined that it would measure him grinning. Otherwise, the statue is admirable: flowing bronze cape, helmetlike bronze hair perhaps not so much harder than the actual hair it depicts, and vintage bronze microphone with its base tipped, as if to make a kind of dance partner with James Brown, who is not shown in a dancing pose but nonetheless appears lithe, pert, ready.
This article appears in the June 29, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.
Still, as with postage stamps, statues of the living seem somehow disconcerting. And very few statues are located at quite such weighty symbolic crossroads as this one. The statue's back is to what was in 1993 renamed James Brown Boulevard, which cuts from Broad Street for a mile, deep into the neighborhood where James Brown was raised from age six, by his aunts, in a Twiggs Street house that was a den of what James Brown himself calls "gambling, moonshine liquor and prostitution." The neighborhood around Twiggs is still devastatingly sunk in poverty's ruin. The shocking depths of deprivation from which James Brown excavated himself are still intact, frozen in time, almost like a statue. A photographer would be hard-pressed to snap a view in this neighborhood that couldn't, apart from the make of the cars, slip neatly into Walker Evans' portfolio of Appalachian scenes from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Except, of course, that everyone in Augusta's Appalachia is black.
So, the James Brown statue may seem to have walked on its flat bronze feet the mile from Twiggs to Broad, to which it keeps its back, reserving its grin for the gentlefolk on and across Broad Street, the side that gives way to the river — the white neighborhoods to which James Brown, as a shoeshine boy, hustler, juvenile delinquent, possibly even as a teenage pimp, directed his ambition and guile. Policemen regularly chased James Brown the length of that mile, back toward Twiggs — he tells stories of diving into a watery gutter, barely more than a trench, and hiding underwater with an upraised reed for breathing while the policemen rumbled past — and, once the chase was over, he'd creep again toward Broad, where the lights and music were, where the action was, where Augusta's stationed soldiers with their monthly paycheck binges were to be found. Eventually, the city of Augusta jailed the teenager, sentenced him to eight-to-sixteen for four counts of breaking and entering. When he attained an early release, with the support of the family of his friend and future bandmate Bobby Byrd, it was on the condition that he never return to Augusta. Deep into the Sixties, years past "Papa's Brand New Bag," James Brown had to apply for spu permits to bring his band to perform in Augusta; he esentially had been exiled from the city for having the dacity to transverse that mile from Twiggs to Broad. Now his statue stands at the end of the mile, facing away. Grinning. Resolving nothing. James Brown, you see, may in fact be less a statue than any human being who ever lived. James Brown is kinetic; an idea, a problem, a genre, a concept, a method — anything, really, but a statue.
This we know: the James Brown Show begins without James Brown. James Brown, a man who is also an idea, a problem, a method, etc., will have to be invoked, summoned from some other place. The rendezvous between James Brown and his audience — you — is not a simple thing. When the opening acts are done and the waiting is over, you will first be in the hands of James Brown's band. It is the band that begins the Show. The band is there to help, to negotiate a space for you to encounter James Brown; it is there, if you will, to take you to the bridge. The band is itself the medium within which James Brown will be summoned, the terms under which he might be enticed into view.
The James Brown Band takes the form, onstage, of an animated frieze or hieroglyphic, timeless in a very slightly seedy, showbiz way but happily so, rows of men in red tuxedos, jitterbugging in lock step even as they miraculously conjure from instruments a perfect hurricane of music: a rumbling, undulating-insinuating (underneath), shimmery-peppery (up on top) braided waveform of groove. The players seem jolly and amazed witnesses to their own virtuosity. They resemble humble, gracious ushers or porters, welcoming you to the enthrallingly physical, jubilant, encompassing groove that pours out of their instruments. It's as if they were merely widening for you a portal offering entry into some new world, a world as much visual and emotional as aural — for, in truth, a first encounter with the James Brown Show can feel like a bodily passage, a deal your mind wasn't sure it was ready for your body to strike with these men and their instruments and the ludicrous, almost cruelly anticipatory drama of their attempt to beckon the star of the show into view. Yes, it's made unmistakable, in case you forgot, that this is merely a prelude, a throat-clearing, though the band has already rollicked through three or four recognizable numbers in succession; we're waiting for something. The name of the something is James Brown. You indeed fear, despite all sense, that something is somehow wrong: Perhaps he's sick or reluctant, or perhaps there's been a mistake. There is no James Brown, it was merely a rumor. Thankfully, someone has told you what to do — you chant, gladly: "James Brown! James Brown!" A natty little man with a pompadour comes onstage and with a booming, familiar voice asks you if you Are Ready for Star Time, and you find yourself confessing that you Are.
To be in the audience when James Brown commences the James Brown Show is to have felt oneself engulfed in a kind of feast of adoration and astonishment, a ritual invocation, one comparable, I'd imagine, to certain ceremonies known to the Mayan peoples, wherein a human person is radiantly costumed and then beheld in lieu of the appearance of a Sun God upon the Earth. For to see James Brown dance and sing, to see him lead his mighty band with the merest glances and tiny flickers of signal from his hands; to see him offer himself to his audience to be adored and enraptured and ravished; to watch him tremble and suffer as he tears his screams and moans of lust, glory and regret from his sweat-drenched body — and is, thereupon, in an act of seeming mercy, draped in the cape of his infirmity; to then see him recover and thrive — shrugging free of the cape — as he basks in the healing regard of an audience now melded into a single passionate body by the stroking and thrumming of his ceaseless cavalcade of impossibly danceable smash Number One hits, is not to see: It is to behold.
The James Brown Show is both an enactment — an unlikely conjuration in the present moment of an alternate reality, one that dissipates into the air and can never be recovered — and at the same time a re-enactment: the ritual celebration of an enshrined historical victory, a battle won long ago, against forces difficult to name — funklessness? — yet whose vanquishing seems to have been so utterly crucial that it requires incessant restaging in a triumphalist ceremony. The show exists on a continuum, the link between ebullient big-band "clown" jazz showmen like Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan and the pornographic parade of a full-bore Prince concert. It is a glimpse of another world, even if only one being routinely dwells there, and his name is James Brown. To have glimpsed him there, dwelling in his world, is a privilege. James Brown is not a statue, no. But the James Brown Show is a monument, one unveiled at select intervals.
James Brown lives just outside of Augusta, so while he is recording an album, he sleeps at home. He frequently exhorts the members of his band to buy homes in Augusta, which they mostly refuse to do. Instead, they stay at the Ramada Inn. James Brown, when he is at home, routinely stays up all night watching the news, and watching old western movies — nothing but westerns. He gets up late. For this reason, a day in the recording studio with James Brown, like the James Brown Show, begins without James Brown.
Instead, I find myself in the company of James Brown's band and his longtime personal manager, Charles Bobbit, approximately fourteen people whom I will soon in varying degrees get to know quite well but whom for now treat me genially, skeptically, shyly but mostly obliviously. They've got work to do. They're working on the new James Brown record. At the moment they're laying down a track without him, because James Brown asked them to, and because since they're waiting around, they might as well do something — though they do this with a degree of helpless certainty that they are wasting their time. It is nearly always a useless occupation, if you are James Brown's band, to lay down a track while he is not present. Yet the band members do it a lot, wasting time in this way, because their time is not their own. So they record. Today's effort is a version of "Hold On, I'm A-Comin'," the classic Sam and Dave song.
The setting is a pleasant modern recording studio in a bland corner of Augusta's suburbs, far from where the statue resides. The band occupies a large room, high-ceilinged, padded in black, with a soundproof-windowed booth for the drummer's kit and folding chairs in a loose circle for the band, plus innumerable microphones and cables and amplifiers and pickups running across the floor. On the other side of a large window from this large chamber is a room full of control panels, operated by an incredibly patient man named Howard. It is into this room that James Brown and the band will intermittently retreat in order to listen to playback, to consider what they've recorded. Down the hall from these two rooms is a tiny suite with a kitchen (unused) and a dining room with a table that seats seven or eight at a time (used constantly, for eating takeout).
The band is three guitarists and one bassist and three horn players and two percussionists — a drummer in the soundproof booth and a conga player in the central room. They're led by Hollie Farris, a trim, fiftyish, white trumpeter with a blond mustache and the gentle, acutely Mid-western demeanor of an accountant or middle manager, yet with the enduring humor of a lifelong sideman; a hipster's tolerance. Hollie now pushes the younger guitarists as they hone the changes in "Hold On, I'm A-Comin'." Howard is recording the whole band simultaneously; this method of recording "live in the studio" is no longer how things are generally done. Hollie also sings to mark the vocal line, in a faint but endearing voice.
One of the young guitarists, cheating slightly on the "live in the studio" ethos, asks to be allowed to punch in his guitar solo. This is Damon Wood: thirtysomething, also blond, with long hair and a neat goatee. Damon, explaining why he screwed up the solo, teases Hollie for his singing: "I can't hear myself with Engelbert Humperdinck over there." Howard rewinds the tape and Damon reworks the solo, then endears himself to me with a fannish quiz for the other guitarists — Keith Jenkins, another white guy, but clean-cut, and Daryl Brown, a light-skinned, roly-poly black man who turns out to be James Brown's son. "What classic funk song am I quoting in this solo?" Damon asks. Nobody can name it, not that they seem to be trying too hard. " 'Lady Marmalade,' " Damon says.
"Well," says Hollie, speaking of the track, "we got one for him to come in and say, 'That's terrible.' "
Keith, a young man with a trace of disobedience in his eyes, asks if they're going to put the horns on the track. Hollie shakes his head. "He might be less inclined to throw it out," Keith suggests. "Give it that big sound. If all he hears are those guitars, he'll start picking it apart."
Hollie offers a wry smile. He doesn't want to add the horns. Hollie, I'll learn, has been James Brown's bandleader and arranger on and off since the early Eighties.
It is at that moment that everything changes. Mr. Bobbit explains: "Mr. Brown is here."
When James Brown enters the recording studio, the recording studio becomes a stage. It is not merely that attention quickens in any room this human being inhabits. The phenomenon is more akin to a kind of grade-school physics experiment: Lines of force are suddenly visible in the air, rearranged, oriented. The band, the hangers-on, the very oxygen, every trace particle is charged in its relation to the gravitational field of James Brown. We're all waiting for something to happen, and that waiting is itself a kind of story, an emotional dynamic: We need something from this man, and he is likely to demand something of us, something we're uncertain we can fully deliver. The drama here is not, as in the James Brown Show, enacted in musical terms. Now it is a psychodrama, a theater of human behavior, one full of Beckett or Pinter pauses.
James Brown is dressed as if for a show, in a purple three-piece suit and red shirt, highly polished shoes, cuff links and his impeccably coiffed helmet of hair. When we're introduced, I spend a long moment trying to conjugate the reality of James Brown's face, one I've contemplated as an album-cover totem since I was thirteen or fourteen: that impossible slant of jaw and cheekbone, that Pop Art slash of teeth, the unmistakable rage of impatience lurking in the eyes. It's a face drawn by Jack Kirby or Milton Caniff, that's for sure, a visage engineered for maximum impact at great distances, from back rows of auditoriums. I find it, truthfully, terrifying to have that face examining mine in return, though fear is alleviated by the rapidity of the process: James Brown seems to have finished devouring the whole prospect of me by the time our brief handshake is concluded.
I'm also struck by the almost extraterrestrial quality of otherness incarnated in this human being. James Brown is, by his own count, seventy-two years old. Biographers have suggested that three or four years ought to be added to that total. It's also possible that given the circumstances of his birth, in a shack in the woods outside Barn-well, South Carolina, in an environment of poverty and exile so profound as to be almost unimaginable, James Brown has no idea how old he is. No matter: He's in his midseventies, yet, encountering him now in person, it occurs to me that James Brown is kept under wraps for so long at the outset of his own show, and is viewed primarily at a distance, or mediated through recordings or films, in order to buffer the unprepared spectator from the awesome strangeness and intensity of his person. He simply has more energy, is vibrating at a different rate, than anyone I've ever met, young or old. With every preparation I've made, he's still terrifying.
James Brown sits, gesturing with his hand: It's time for playback. Mr. Brown and Mr. Bobbit sit in the two comfortable leather chairs, while the band members are bunched around the room, either seated in folding metal chairs or on their feet.
We listen, twice, to the take of "Hold On, I'm A-Comin'." James Brown lowers his head and closes his eyes. We're all completely silent. At last he mumbles faint praise: "Pretty good. Pretty good." Then, into the recording room. James Brown takes his place behind the mike, facing the band. We dwell now in an atmosphere of immanence, of ceremony, so tangible it's almost oppressive. James Brown is still contained within himself, muttering inaudibly, scratching his chin, barely coming out of himself. Abruptly, he turns to me.
"You're very lucky, Mr. Rolling Stone. I don't ordinarily let anyone sit in on a session."
"I feel lucky," I say.
Fussing his way into place, James Brown decides he doesn't like the microphone. "I want one with no felt on it. Get me a cheap mike. I made all those hits on a cheap mike." The mike is swapped. He's still irked, turgid, turned inward. "Are we recording this?" he asks. The answer comes back: Yes. "The one we throw out will be the best one," he admonishes, vaguely.
Now he explains to the band that it's not going to bother with the track it recorded before he arrived. Go figure: Hollie was right. "Sounds good," James Brown says, "but it sounds canned. We got to get some James Brown in there." Here it is, the crux of the matter: He wasn't in the room; ipso facto, it isn't James Brown music. The problem is fundamentally one of ontology: In order for James Brown to occur, you need to be James Brown.
He begins reminiscing about a rehearsal they enjoyed the day before, in the practice space at the Ramada. The Ramada's room provided a sound James Brown liked, and he encourages his band to believe they'll recapture it today: "Gonna bring that room in here."
Now that the gears are oiled, a constant stream of remarks and asides flows from James Brown's mouth. Many of these consist of basic statements of policy in regard to the matter of being James Brown, particularly in relationship to his band: "Be mean, but be the best." These statements mingle exhortations to excellence with justifications for his own treatment of the men he calls, alternately, "the cats" and "my family." Though discipline is his law, strife is not only likely but essential: "Any time a cat becomes a nuisance, that's the cat I'm gonna want." The matter of the rejected track is still on his mind: "Don't mean to degrade nobody. People do something they think is good. But you're gonna hear the difference. Get that hard sound." Frequently he dwells on the nature of the sound of which he is forever in pursuit: "Hard. Flat. Flat." One feels James Brown is forever chasing something, a pure hard-flat-jazz-funk he heard once in his dreams, and toward which all subsequent efforts have been pointed. This in turn leads to a reminiscence about Grover Washington Jr., who, apparently, recently presented James Brown with a track James Brown didn't wish to sing on. "He should go play smooth jazz. We got something else going. James Brown jazz. Nothing smooth about it. If it gets smooth, we gonna make it not smooth." Still musing on Grover Washington Jr.'s failings, he blurts, "Just jive." Then corrects himself, looking at me: "Just things. Instead of people. Understand?"
Throughout these ruminations, the members of James Brown's band stand at readiness, their fingers on strings or mouths a few short inches from reeds and mouthpieces, in complete silence, only sometimes nodding to acknowledge a remark of particular emphasis. A given monologue may persist for an hour, no matter: At the slightest drop of a hand signal, these players are expected to be ready. There's nothing new in this. The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business is one of the legendary hard-asses: His bands have always been the Hardest-Worked Men in Show Business, the longest-rehearsed, the most fiercely disciplined, the most worn-out and abused. Fuck-ups, I'll learn, will be cold-shouldered, possibly punished with small monetary fines, occasionally humiliated by a tirade. These men have been systematically indoctrinated into what begins to seem to me less even a military- or cult-style obedience than it is a purely Pavlovian situation, one of reaction and survival, of instincts groomed and curtailed. Their motives for remaining in such a situation? That, I'll need more time to study.
"I'm an old man," James Brown says. "All I can do is love everybody. But I'm still going to be a tough boss. I'm still going to give them hell. I got a family here. I tried to meet everybody's parents." At this, he suddenly squints at Damon, the guitarist, and says, "I don't know your people." Permission has apparently been granted to reply, and Damon corrects him. "Yes, you met them in Las Vegas. Just briefly." Then James Brown points to his son, saying cryptically, "I don't know where this cat's coming from." Daryl dares a joke (which it dimly occurs to me was perhaps the point): "But you do know my people."
"That's what I'm talking about," says James Brown, irritably. "Love." He poses a question, then answers it: "You go to the blood bank, what do you want? Human blood. Not baboon."
Throughout the afternoon, even as the band begins to record, these ruminations will continue, as though James Brown's mind is on permanent shuffle. Sometimes the subject is the nature of his art. "Jazz," he states simply at one point. Or he'll segue into a discourse on his relationship to hip-hop: "I'm the most sampled and stolen. What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine, too." At this, the band laughs. "I got a song about that," he tells me. "But I'm never gonna release it. Don't want a war with the rappers. If it wasn't good, they wouldn't steal it." Thinking of his influence on contemporary music, he mentions a song by Alicia Keys with a suspicious riff: "Sometimes you find yourself meeting yourself." Yet he's eager to make me know he's not slagging Keys: "I don't want to scrape nobody." Later, in a moment of seeming insecurity, dissatisfied with something in his own performance, he blurts, "The minute they put up that statue I was in trouble."
Much of the afternoon is spent working on an arrangement of a medley comprising another Sam and Dave song, "Soul Man," and one of James Brown's own most irresistible and enduring classics of the early Seventies, "Soul Power." James Brown tinkers with the guitars, indicating the desired tones by wailing in imitation of a guitar, as well as by issuing what sound like expert commands: "Diminish. Raise nine. Flatten it." Of Damon's solo, he requests, "Go psychedelic." It seems to be the nature of the guitarists — Keith, Damon and Daryl — that they are the center of the band's sound but also the source of considerable problems.
A horn player — a large, slightly hound-doggy saxophonist named Jeff Watkins — interjects. Raising his hand like a schoolboy, he suggests, "They might have it right, sir. They just didn't play it with conviction." To the guitarists, Jeff says, ever so gently, "Play it like you mean it."
They do, and James Brown listens, and is persuaded.
"I'm wrong," the Godfather says, marveling. "Play it like you mean — I like that, Jeff." James Brown's deadpan is perfect: It is as if he's never heard that particular phrase before.
Now he coaches his bass player, an aging, willowy, enigmatically silent black man named Fred Thomas, on the bass line: "Ding-dong, ding-dong." Again, he emphasizes: "Flat. Flat. Hard." Fred Thomas does his best to comply, though I can't hear any difference. James Brown turns to me, urgently, and introduces me to Thomas. "It's all about 'Sex Machine,' " he says. "This man's on more hits than any other bass player in history." I nod. Of course, it will later occur to me that one of the most celebrated partnerships in James Brown's career was with the future Parliament-Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins — and anybody who cares at all about such things can tell you that Bootsy was the bass player on "Sex Machine." Fred Thomas was, in fact, Bootsy's replacement, which is to say he's been in the band since sometime in 1971. Good enough. But in this matter we've at least briefly entered what I will come to call the James Brown Zone of Confusion: James Brown now puts his arm around Fred Thomas. "We're both cancer survivors," he tells me gravely.
Suddenly, James Brown is possessed by an instant of Kabuki insecurity: "I'm recording myself out of a group." This brings a spontaneous response from several players, a collective murmur of sympathy and allegiance, most audibly saxophonist Jeff's "We're not going anywhere, sir." Reassured, James Brown paradoxically regales the band with another example of his imperious command, telling the story of a drummer, a man named Nat Kendrick, who left the room to go to the bathroom during the recording of "Night Train." James Brown, too impatient to wait, played the drum part himself, and the recording was completed by the time Nat Kendrick returned. "Go to the bathroom, you might not have a job."
The two-inch tape is now in place, and James Brown and his band attack "Soul Man/Soul Power" once again. "It's about to be as good as it was yesterday," he says, reminding them again of the Ramada rehearsal. "We're not recording, we're just having fun." Indeed, everything suddenly seems to come together. "Soul Power" is an unbearably funky groove when taken up, as it is now, by a James Brown who sings it as though he's never heard it before, with crazy urgency and rhythmic guile, his voice hopped up on the crest of the music like a surfer riding a curl. In a vocal improvisation, James Brown shouts in Gatling-gun time with the drums: "Food stamps! Welfare!"
This take sounds better by far than anything that's gone before it, and James Brown, seated on his stool at the microphone, looks half a century younger now. At the finish, he rushes from his stool directly to where I sit and slaps me on my knee. "That was deep, Mr. Rolling Stone!" he exclaims, then dashes from the room. The band exhales a burst of withheld laughter the moment he's through the door. "Food stamps!" several of them cry out. "Never heard that before." His son Daryl says, "Damn, I almost dropped my guitar when he said that." They seem genuinely thrilled and delighted now to have me here as a witness and go rollicking out the door, into the room where James Brown, ever impatient, is already preparing to listen to playback. They've done it, cut a classic James Brown funk jam! Never mind that it is a classic that James Brown already cut in 1971!
The laughter and conversation cease, as Howard is commanded to roll the tape. Midway through the first time he's heard the tape, James Brown's head sinks in weary dissatisfaction: Something's not right. When it ends, after a single beat of total silence, James Brown says soberly, "Let's do it again, a little slower." And so the band trudges back in, in dour, obedient silence.
During the playback session, guitarist Keith leans in and whispers to me, "You've got to tell the truth about what goes on here. Nobody has any idea." I widen my eyes, sympathetic to his request. But what exactly does he mean?
Someday, someone will write a great biography of James Brown. It will, by necessity, though, be more than a biography. It will be a history of a half-century of the contradictions and tragedies embodied in the fate of African-Americans in the New World; it will be a parable, even, of the contradictions of the individual in the capitalist society, portentous as that may sound. For James Brown is both a willing and conscious embodiment of his race, of its strivings toward self-respect in a racist world, and a consummate self-made man, an entrepreneur of the impossible. This is a man who, out of that shack in the woods of South Carolina and that whorehouse on Twiggs, mined for himself a career and a fortune and a legacy and a statue; who owned an airplane; who has employed hundreds; whose band begat many famous and lucrative careers; whose samples provided, truly, the foundation for hip-hop; who had his photograph taken with presidents and whose endorsement was eagerly boasted of, first by Hubert Humphrey, then Richard Nixon; who was credited with singlehandedly keeping the city of Boston calm in the twenty-four hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; a man who owned radio stations, controlling the very means of control in his industry; and who did all of this despite the fact that no likelihood except desolation, poverty and incarceration may seem to have existed.
He's also a martyr to those contradictions. That James Brown should succeed so absolutely and fail so utterly is the mystery. For no matter his accomplishment and the will that drove it, he has no fortune. No plane. No radio stations. The ranch home that he so proudly bought for himself in a mostly white suburb of Augusta was claimed by the IRS in lieu of back taxes. Unlike those whose fame and money insulate them from scandal, James Brown has been beset: divorces, 911 calls, high-speed road chases ending in ludicrous arrests and jail sentences. This great exponent of black pride, of never dropping out of school, of making something of yourself, found his way, relatively late in life, to the illegal drugs not of glamour and decadence but those of dereliction and street life, like PCP. With their help, he nearly destroyed his reputation.
The shadow of his abuse of musicians and wives, disturbing as it may be, is covered in the larger shadow of his self-abuse, his torment and unrest, little as James Brown would ever admit to anything but the brash and single-minded confidence and pride he wishes to display. It is as though the cape act is a rehearsal onstage of the succor James Brown could never accept in his real life. It is as though, having come from being dressed in potato sacks for grade school and in the drab uniform of a prisoner to being the most spectacularly garbed individual this side of Beau Brummell or Liberace, James Brown found himself compelled also to be the Emperor With No Clothes. What his peculiar nakedness reveals is the full range of the torment of African-American identity. Oblivious to racism, he was also its utter victim; contemptuous of drugs, he was at their mercy. And the exposure of his bullying abuse of women might seem to have made squalid hypocrisy of his calls for universal love and self-respect.
For my part as a witness, if I could convey only one thing about James Brown it would be this: James Brown is, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, a man unstuck in time. He's a time traveler, but unlike the HG Wells-ian variety, he lacks any control over his migrations in time, which also seem to be circumscribed to the period of his own allotted lifespan. Indeed, it may be the case that James Brown is often confused as to what moment in time he occupies at any given moment.
Practically, this means two things. It means that sometime around 1958 — approximately the year he began voyaging in time, if my theory is correct — James Brown began browsing through the decades ahead — Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and perhaps even into the Nineties — and saw, or, more correctly, heard, the future of music. This, if my theory is correct, explains the stubbornly revolutionary cast or his musical efforts from that time on, the way he single-handedly seemed to be trying to impart an epiphany to which only he had easy access, an epiphany to do with rhythm, and with the kinetic possibilities inherent but to that point barely noticed in the R&B and soul music around him. From the moment of "Night Train" — the track, oddly enough, during which Nat Kendrick went to the bathroom and James Brown had to play drums himself — onward, through one radically innovative track after another — "Out of Sight," "I Got You," "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "Cold Sweat," etc. — James Brown seemed less a musician with an imperative either to entertain or to express his own emotional reality than one driven to push his musicians and listeners to the verge of a sonic idea, and then past that verge, until the moment when he became, more or less officially, the inventor of an entire genre of music called funk: "Sex Machine," "Super Bad," "Hot Pants," etc. That sonic idea has never been better expressed than by critic Robert Palmer: "The rhythmic elements became the song…. Brown and his musicians began to treat every instrument and voice in the group as if it were a drum. The horns played single-note bursts that were often sprung against the downbeats. The bass lines were broken into choppy two- or three-note patterns... Brown's rhythm guitarist choked his guitar strings against the instrument's neck so hard that his playing began to sound like a jagged tin can being scraped with a pocket knife." Another way of thinking about this: James Brown seemed to hear in the interstices of soul and rhythm & blues — in the barked or howled vocal asides, in the brief single-chord jamming on the outros, in the drum breaks and guitar vamps — a potential for discarding the whole of the remainder of the music in favor of a radical expansion of these interstitial moments, these transitional glimpses of rhythm and fervor. James Brown was like a filmmaker who gets interested in the background scenery and fires the screenwriter and actors, except that instead of ending up with experimental films nobody wanted to watch, he forged a style of music so beguilingly futuristic that it made everything else — melody, lyrics, verse-chorus-verse — sound antique.
This time-traveler theory would best explain what is hardest to explain about James Brown, especially to younger listeners who live so entirely in a sonic world of James Brown's creation: that he made it all sound this way. That it sounded different before him. This time-traveler theory would explain, too, how in 1973, right at the moment when it might have seemed that the times had caught up, at last, with James Brown's sonic idea, that the torch of funk had been taken up and his precognitive capacities therefore exhausted, James Brown recorded a song, called "The Payback," that abruptly predicts the aural and social ambience of late-1980s gangsta rap.
My theory also explains the opposite phenomenon, the one I so frequently witnessed in Augusta. If the man was able to see today from the distance of 1958, he's also prone to reliving 1958 — and 1967, and 1971, and 1985 — now that 2006 has finally come around. We all dwell in the world James Brown saw so completely before we came along into it; James Brown, in turn, hasn't totally joined us here in the future he made. That's why it all remains so startlingly new to him; why, during one playback session, he turned to Mr. Bobbit and said, "Can I scream and moan? I sound so good, I want to kiss myself!" He spoke the phrase as if for the first time, and that may be because for him it was essentially occurring to him for the first time, or, rather, that there is no first time: All his moments are one. James Brown, in this view, is always conceiving the idea of being James Brown, as if nobody, including himself, had thought of it until just now. At any given moment James Brown is presently reinventing funk.
This theory also neatly explains what I call the James Brown Zone of Confusion: Fred Thomas as the bass player on "Sex Machine," and so on. It's hard, for a man of James Brown's helplessly visionary tendencies, to know what happened today, yesterday or, indeed, tomorrow. All accounts are, therefore, highly suspect. Nat Kendrick may in fact have gone to the bathroom during the recording of "Think" or "I'll Go Crazy." Nat Kendrick may not, indeed, have gone to the bathroom yet.
The faster James Brown thinks, the more fiercely his hipster's vernacular impacts upon itself, and the faster he talks, the more his dentures slip. So, though transcribing James Brown's monologues as they occur is my goal, much of what he says is, to my ears, total gibberish. As today's session begins, James Brown is recalling members of his band who've passed. "Jimmy Nolen gone. What about the tall cat?" Hollie, apparently, knows who he means by "the tall cat," and replies, "Coleman? He's alive." This leads James Brown into the subject of health, primarily digestive health. He speaks of dysentery while on tour in third-world countries: "Doing number one and number two at the same time" and exhorts the band: "Maintain yourself." To me: "Olive oil. I always tell them, 'Bring olive oil on the road.' " I don't ask what the olive oil is for. This reminds James Brown of the dangers of the road, generally, especially of exotic locations, which he begins to reel off: "Jakarta. Cameroon. Peru." He recalls, "We were in communist Africa…. At the end of the show there were baskets of money… protected by machine guns, though. Got confiscated for the government." He recalls the Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko attempting to keep him and his band from departing when George Foreman's injury delayed the Foreman-Ali boxing match: "We got out. We got paid. One hundred grand." James Brown seems torn between bragging of munificence — painting himself an "ambassador to the world" who paid his own way to Vietnam to entertain the troops — and bragging of his shrewdness in always getting paid in cash, even in circumstances of maximum corruption and intrigue: promoters dying mysteriously, funds shifted through Brussels.
Shrewdness wins, for the moment, as he switches to tales of his gambling prowess, though he seems initially most keen on Mr. Bobbit's confirming a time when he came within a digit of winning a million-dollar lottery. "Yes, sir, you almost hit that pot," agrees Bobbit. James Brown then tells of playing craps on the road. "I won enough from the Moonglows to buy myself a Cadillac. Them cats was so mad they stole my shoes. Wilson Pickett, all these guys, I look so clean, they don't think I can play. I was a street man even though I had a suit on." But his stake in being thought of as the luckiest man alive is compromised by an eagerness to divulge his secret: "shaved dice," which always came up the way he wanted them to. Later this day, I ask several members of the band whether James Brown is babbling for my benefit. Not at all, they explain. "He's making us ready for the road," Damon tells me, reminding me that on Monday, James Brown and his band are heading to Europe for a month of shows. "He knows it's going to be hard. He wants us to remember we're a family."
When, what seems hours later, work at last begins for the day, it will be on two different fronts. First, James Brown records a ballad that trumpeter and arranger Hollie has written and arranged in his off-hours. The ballad, it turns out, has been lurking in the background for a while, with Mr. Bobbit and several band members gently inducing James Brown to give it a chance to be heard. Today, James Brown has — impetuously, suddenly — decided to make use of it. Hollie, given this chance, hurriedly transposes the changes for the guitarists and hands out sheet music. The simple ballad is swiftly recorded.
James Brown then goes into a small booth, dons a pair of headphones and, in the space of about fifteen minutes, bashes his way through a vocal track on the second take. Audibly, James Brown is inventing the melody and arriving at decisions about deviations from that melody (syllables to emphasize, words to whisper or moan or shout, vowel sounds to repeat or stretch) simultaneously, as he goes along. With uncanny instincts married to outlandish impatience, he is able to produce a result not wholly unlistenable. Understand: This is a matter of genius but an utterly wasteful sort of genius, and after we listen to the playback, and James Brown is out of range of the band's talk, Hollie and Keith agree that if James Brown were to regard the track he just recorded as a beginning — as a guide vocal to study and refine in some later vocal take — they might really have something. But they also seem resigned to the fact that James Brown considers his work on the track complete.
Next, James Brown writes a lyric, to record over a long, rambling blues-funk track titled "Message to the World." For anyone who has ever wondered how James Brown writes a song, I have a sort of answer for you. First: He borrows Mr. Bobbit's bifocals. James Brown doesn't have glasses of his own, or left them at home, or something. Second: He borrows a pencil. Third: He sits, and writes, for about fifteen minutes. Then he puts himself behind the microphone. The result is a cascading rant not completely unlike his spoken monologues. Impossible to paraphrase, it meanders over subjects as disparate as his four marriages, Charles Barkley, Al Jarreau, a mixture of Georgia and Carolina identities he calls "Georgia-lina," the fact that he still knows Maceo Parker and that Fred Wesley doesn't live very far away, either, Mr. Bobbit's superiority to him as a checkers player, the fact that he believes himself to have both Asian and Native American ancestry, and, most crucially, his appetite for corn on the cob and its role in his health: "I like corn, that's a regular thing with me. Gonna live a long time, live a little longer."
Afterward, we gather in our usual places, for playback. Late in the eleven-minute song, James Brown issues a universal religious salute: "Salaam-aleikum-may-peace-be-unto-you, brother…. Believe in the Supreme Being!" As these words resound, James Brown glances at me and then abruptly commands Howard to roll the tape back to that point: There's something he wishes to punch in on the vocal. Hustling into the booth, when the tape arrives at the brief pause between "brother" and "believe," James Brown now wedges in a brief but hearty "shalom!" Re-emerging, he points at me and winks. "Shalom, Mr. Rolling Stone!" James Brown has pegged me as Jewish. So much for being invisible in this place. He has apparently tampered with the spontaneity of his own vocal, merely in order to appease what he imagines are my religious urgencies.
Indeed, he now fixates on me, for a short while. During this same playback session, while deeply engaged in transcribing what I've heard around me, my head ducked to the screen of my Powerbook, I notice that James Brown has begun singing, a cappella, a portion of the song "Papa Was a Rolling Stone." I continue typing, even transcribing the lyrics of the song as he sings them: "Papa was a rolling stone/Wherever he laid his hat was his home…." Odd, I think: This isn't a James Brown song. Then I hear the band's laughter and look up. James Brown is singing it directly at me, trying to gain my attention.
"Oh," I say, red-faced, as I look up at him. "Sorry. I forgot my new name."
"That's all right, Mr. Rolling Stone," says James Brown. "I was just missing you."
Roosevelt Johnson, known always as R.J., sits with me and explains his role, a role he's occupied since he was nine, forty-two years ago: "Hold the coat." Excuse me? "Hold the coat, hold the coat." R.J. expands, then, on the basic principle of life in the James Brown entourage: You do one thing, you do it right and you do it forever. It is the nature of traveling with James Brown that everyone treats him like a god: "The people that show up in every city, they all fall back into their old jobs, like they never stopped. The doormen stand by the door, the hairdressers start dressing his hair." R.J. is being modest, since his responsibilities have grown to a performing role, as the second voice in a variety of James Brown's call-and-response numbers ("Soul Power," "Make It Funky," "Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved"), replacing the legendary founding member of the Famous Flames — James Brown's first band — Bobby Byrd. R.J. sounds uncannily like Byrd when he sings — or "raps" — Byrd's parts in the classic songs, and in concert R.J.'s ebullient turns often draw some of the mightiest cheers from the crowd, who nonetheless can have no idea who he is. Yet for him, his life is defined by his offstage work: "Someday I'm going to write a book about my life, called Holding the Coat."
(Hearing this, Cynthia Moore, one member of James Brown's backing singers, the Bitter Sweets, interrupts: "My book's gonna be called "Take Me to the Bridge, I Want to Jump Off.")
The greatest exemplar of the Entourage phenomenon is, of course, Danny Ray, the little man with the pompadour and the voice familiar from so many decades of live introductions. Danny, from Birmingham, Alabama, joined James Brown in the Fifties, when they met at the Apollo Theater. He joined as a valet. And, though he has become nearly as recognizable a voice as James Brown himself, he is still a valet; indeed, his concern for the band's clothes obsesses Danny: He is the human incarnation of James Brown's lifelong concern with being immaculately dressed. Valet, and master of ceremonies, Danny Ray is also the proprietor of "the cape routine" — i.e., he comes onstage to settle the cape over James Brown's shoulders when he collapses onstage, and he receives the cape and takes it away when James Brown has shrugged free of it.
R.J. and Danny Ray briefly allude to another responsibility that tends to devolve to valets: wrangling James Brown's irate girlfriends. Danny Ray cites a few vivid episodes: "Candace. Lisa. Heather. The one from Las Vegas that came to his house carrying a .357. She said, 'What is your intention?' " It is R.J. who finishes the story, laughing: "Brown said, 'My intention is for you to get on the plane, go back to Las Vegas. Get out of here.' "
Keith and Damon, the guitarists, ask me if I'd care to join them at a bar. We arrange to meet in Jeff the saxophonist's room at the Ramada. It is here that I learn Jeff's nickname: Sizzler. Sizzler is named for how there's always something aromatic burning in his room — a candle, incense or "something else." And, sure enough, Jeff's room is a haze when I arrive to find Keith and Damon there, along with Hollie, drummer Robert "Mousey" Thompson and George "Spike" Nealy, the second percussionist. Here, safely distant from either James Brown's or Mr. Bobbit's ears, I'm regaled with the affectionate and mocking grievances of a lifer in James Brown's band. I think I'm beginning to understand what story it is Keith feels has never been told: the glorious absurdity of the band's servitude.
"We're supposed to follow these hand signals," Keith explains. "We've got to watch him every minute, you never know when he's going to change something up. But his hand is like an eagle's claw — he'll point with a curved finger, and it's like, 'Do you mean me, or him? Because you're looking at me but you're pointing at him.' "
They take turns imitating James Brown's infuriating mimed commands to them during live shows. "It's like rock-paper-scissors," jokes Damon. Each of the band members, I gradually learn, has a spot-on James Brown impression available. Each has memorized favorite James Brown non sequiturs: "Sixteen of the American presidents were black," or the time he asked an audience for thirty seconds of silence for a fallen celebrity he called "John F.K." To these men, James Brown is both their idol and their jester, their tyrannical father and ludicrous child.
Jeff tells me of going on the David Letterman show for a three-minute spot. "We didn't discuss what we were doing until we got out there. Sound-checked a totally different song. I didn't know I was doing a solo on TV until he waved me out front."
Hollie, the longest-enduring among them there, says, "I don't think there's another band on the planet that can do what we do."
Damon adds, "I like to call it Masters of the Impossible." Yet they hurry to make me understand their vast reverence and devotion — for you see, they're also the luckiest musicians on earth. Keith tells me, "Brown told us, 'You got it made. You cats are lucky, you're made now.' Eleven years later, I get it. The man hasn't had a hit for twenty years, but we'll work forever. We're going to the Hollywood Bowl, Buckingham Palace, the Apollo Theater, it never stops. We could work for a hundred years. You play with someone else, you might have two good years, then sit for two years, wondering if anything's ever going to happen again. With James Brown, you're always working. Because he's James Brown. It's like we're up there with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse. There's no other comparison."
"Listen," says Jeff. "There's something we want you to hear." I've been corralled into Jeff's room for a purpose: the unveiling of the secret recordings of James Brown's band. The frustration these musicians feel at having no voice in composition or arrangement has taken its toll, a certain despair about the prospects for the present recording sessions. James Brown, they complain, just won't let his band help him. Yet these frustrations have, in turn, found an outlet.
Sizzler fires up his iTunes, connected to fair pair of desktop speakers, and there, seated on a Ramada bedspread, I'm treated to an audio sample of What Could Be, if only James Brown would allow it. The songs are original funk tunes, composed variously by Damon, Mousey, Jeff and Hollie, and recorded, under cover of darkness, in hotel rooms while the band travels, or while they assemble, as now, for official sessions. The songs are tight, catchy, propulsive numbers, each with one foot in Seventies funk and another in a more contemporary style. They have the added benefit of being something new.
No one has dared tell James Brown that this music exists. He might fire them if he knew. In this, the band's wishful thinking tangles with its sense of protectiveness of the boss's feelings. For James Brown, it seems, has had so many important musicians outgrow his band — Bootsy, Maceo, Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley — that his passion for control has outstripped his curiosity about what his present roster might have to offer him. Anyone showing signs of a life of their own, musical or otherwise, tends to be the target of elaborate and vindictive humiliations. "It's abandonment issues," says Keith. "Has to do with being abandoned by his parents." James Brown will deliberately schedule mandatory rehearsals to clash with weddings or funerals. Keith tells me, "At the Apollo, the first time my wife was going to see me play, he sat me down offstage, didn't let me go on."
The funniest of the secret recordings is a song called "Pimp Danny," which, unlike the others, consists not only of live instruments played directly into laptop computers but of samples of old James Brown records. By pasting together various introductions to shows over the years, the band has created a track where Danny Ray takes the role of lead vocalist, saying things like, "I like to feel dynamite, I like to feel out of sight! I like to feel sexy-sexy-sexy!" "Pimp Danny" also samples the voice of Bobby Byrd and a drumbeat from Clyde Stubblefield, one of the great drummers from James Brown's Sixties band. In this way, "Pimp Danny" is not only a celebration of Danny Ray, who seems in many ways the band's talisman-in-servitude, but a kind of yearning conflation of the legendary past eras of the band with its present incarnation. And there's a plan: Fred Wesley, James Brown's trombonist and bandleader throughout the Sixties and Seventies, has promised to come to the studio tomorrow to record a few trombone solos, for old times' sake. (Everyone comes back.) The band wants to try to sneak Wesley back to the Ramada so he can add his horn to "Pimp Danny."
Many sizzles later, Keith and Damon and I have made it to the Soul Bar, where loud rap is on the soundtrack, which spurs a brief rhapsody from Keith: "You hear a Chuck Berry song, a Jerry Lee Lewis song, it's an oldie. It's got no relevance. James Brown comes on, it's got relevance. Some rapper has a hit, it's got a little piece of him in it. He hears himself everywhere. His relevance sustains him." Keith and Damon go on some more about what they'd do if only they could seize control of the sessions. "James Brown should go out like Johnny Cash did," they say. Keith says, "We're like a blade of grass trying to push up through the concrete."
Now, to note that James Brown is self-centered or egotistical or pleased with himself is hardly an insight worth troubling over. That James "I want to kiss myself" Brown dabbles in self-adulation hardly makes him unique in the history of art. James Brown's subjugation of his various bands' musical ambitions to his own ego, to his all-encompassing need to claim as entirely an extension of his own genius every riff invented by anyone within his orbit, is, needless to say, a cause of much dispute. To put it simply: The James Brown sound, its historic sequence of innovations, depends on a whole series of collaborators and contributors, none of whom have been adequately acknowledged or compensated. Yet the more I contemplated the band's odd solicitude toward James Brown's ogreish demands, the more completely I became persuaded that James Brown is re-enacting an elemental trauma: the abandonment by his parents into a world of almost feral instability and terror. One doesn't have to look far. His own 1986 autobiography, James Brown, bears the dedication "For the child deprived of being able to grow up and say 'Momma' and 'Daddy' and have both of them come put their arms around him."
This is a child who ate "salad we found in the woods" in his first years, a child who was sent home from school — in the rural South — for "insufficient clothes" (i.e., potato sacks). This is a teenager who was nearly electrocuted by a pair of white men who whimsically invited him to touch a car battery they were fooling with. This is a man who, during his incarceration in the 1980s, long after he'd drowned his nightmare of "insufficient clothes" in velvet and fur and leather and jeweled cuff links, was found to be hiding tens of thousands of dollars in cash in his prison cell, an expression of a certainty that society was merely a thin fiction covering a harsh jungle of desolation and violence, and if James Brown wasn't looking out for James Brown, no one was.
His, then, is a solipsism born of necessity. When it most mattered, there was nobody to jump up and kiss James Brown except himself. His "family" is therefore a trickledown structure, practically a musical Ponzi scheme, and anyone willing to give him his best is going to be taken for as long a ride as he can take him on. Gamble with James Brown, and he will throw the shaved dice, until, like the Moonglows and Wilson Pickett, you are forced to understand that you are dealing with a street man. And much as in the cases of Duke Ellington or Orson Welles, James Brown's ability to catalyze and absorb the efforts of his collaborators is a healthy portion of his genius.
And discipline is good for the child, after all. When James Brown sings, as he does, of corporal punishment: "Mama come here quick/Bring me that lickin' stick" or "Papa didn't cuss, he didn't raise a whole lot of fuss/But when we did wrong, Papa beat the hell out of us," it is with admiration, and pride. Though his band consents to call itself his family, the structure bears at least an equal resemblance to jail-which is where James Brown was more likely to have absorbed his definitive notions or authority. So when his musicians begin to bristle under his hand, they find themselves savaged for their "betrayals" — for daring, that is, to risk subjecting James Brown to further experience of abandonment. This explains what I encountered in Augusta: The band James Brown has gathered in 2005 is the vanishing endpoint of his long struggle with Byrd, Maceo, Bootsy, Pee Wee, Wesley and all the others; a band more inclined to coddle his terror than to attempt to push him to some new musical accomplishment, however tempting it might be.
James Brown is in his mid-seventies, for crying out loud. What more do you want from him? What's really special about James Brown is how undisguised, how ungentrified, he remains, has always remained. Most anyone else from his point of origin would long since be living in Beverly Hills, just as his peers in the R&B and soul genre of the Fifties and Sixties smoothed down their rough edges and negotiated a truce; either went Motown, meeting the needs of a white audience for safe, approachable music, or else went jazzily uptown, like Ray Charles. Whereas James Brown, astonishingly, returned to Augusta, site of his torment, and persistently left the backwoods-shack, backwoods-church, Twiggs Street-whorehouse edges of his music raw and on view. His trauma, his confusion, his desperation; those are worn on the outside of his art, on the outside of his shivering and crawling and pleading onstage. James Brown, you see, is not only the kid from Twiggs Street who wouldn't go away. He's the one who wouldn't pretend he wasn't from Twiggs Street.
Today is Fred Wesley day, and everyone's excited. The studio is more populous than before: For unclear reasons, today is also family day. James Brown's wife, Tommie Rae Brown, a singer who is a part of the band's live act, has brought along their five-year-old son, James Brown II. Then appears James Brown's thirty-one-year-old daughter, Deanna, a local radio talk-show host. Deanna has, variously, sued her father for royalties on songs she claimed to have helped write when she was six years old and attempted to commit her father into a mental institution; lately, they're on better terms. Also on the scene is another son, whose name I don't catch, a shy man who appears to be in his early fifties, and with two sons of his own in attendance — James Brown's grandsons, older than James Brown II.
These different versions of "family," with all their tangible contradictions, mingle politely, deferentially with one another in the overcrowded playback room, where James Brown and Fred Wesley are seated together in the leather chairs. Wesley, his red T-shirt stretched over his full belly, is a figure of doughy charisma and droll warmth, teasing and joshing with the children and with the room full of musicians eager to greet him. His eyes, though, register wariness or confusion, as though he's trying to fathom what is expected of him here, a little as though he fears he may have wandered into a trap.
James Brown, startlingly, has abandoned his three-piece suits today for an entirely different look: black cowboy hat, black sleeveless top, snakeskin boots and wraparound shades. What we have here is the Payback James Brown, a dangerous man to cross. I wonder whether this is for Wesley's benefit, or whether James Brown just woke up on the Miles Davis side of the bed this morning. James Brown is giving Wesley a listen to "Message to the World," plainly hoping to please him. Wesley nods along. The two of them slap hands when the song comes to James Brown's references to Maceo and to Wesley. The smile James Brown shows now is by far the warmest and most genuine I've seen from him.
Next James Brown commands Howard to play an instrumental track for Wesley, a shuffle that James Brown calls "Ancestors." Wesley listens closely to "Ancestors" once through and then says simply, "That makes all the sense in the world, Mr. Brown. Thank you very much." He fetches his trombone, in order to lay a long solo over the shuffle. I gather that, once again, a track is to be unceremoniously slammed together before my eyes.
The entire band, as well as the many family members, lingers to gaze through the sound room's long glass window at Wesley as he plays. Wesley makes a rollicking figure there, his red T-shirt and gleaming trombone spotlit in the otherwise darkened studio. The band members I've come to know seem both exhilarated and tired; these long sequences of not playing are wearing on them, but Wesley is a genuine inspiration. Hollie, meanwhile, is troubling over the track's changes, trying to anticipate the next crisis: "Ask him if he wants me to transpose that keyboard, just so he'll be in D."
Wesley concludes and re-enters the playback room. Next, James Brown enters the studio to lay a "rap" over the top of the track. The moment the boss leaves for the soundproof chamber, the band members laugh with admiring pleasure: "Damn, Fred, you come in here and just start blowing, man!" They're thrilled at his on-the-spot facility. "Just went with those changes, never heard them before. I told him. 'It goes up a half-octave' — bam!"
Wesley laughs back: "What could I do — damn! Shuffle in F."
Now we listen as James Brown begins what he calls "rapping," a verbal improv no one seems to want to call a sheer defacement of Wesley's solo. The spontaneous lyrics go more or less like this: "Fred Wesley. Ain't nothing but a blessing. A blessing, doggone it. Get on up. Lean back. Pick it up. Shake it up, yeah. Make your booty jump. Clap your hands. Make your booty jump. Dance. Ra-a-aise your hands. Get funky. Get dirty. Dirty dancin'. Shake your boo-tay. Shake you boo-boo-boo-boo-tay. Plenty tuchis. Plenty tuchis. Mucho. Mucho grande. Shake your big booty. Mucho grande. Big booty. Cool-a. Tuchis!" On delivering this last exclamation, an exhilarated James Brown rushes from behind the glass and, rather horrifyingly, in a whole room full of colleagues and intimates, points directly at me and says "Tuchis! You got that, Rolling Stone?"
I say, "That'll go right into the piece, sir."
James Brown then makes a shape in the air and says, "South American boo-tay." We all laugh, at the helpless insanity of it, at the electricity of his delight. "Jewish boo-tay," he says. "Jewish boys and Latina girls get up to a lot of trouble!"
Unfortunately, James Brown demands that we listen to "Ancestors" five times in a row — which we do, as usual, in a state of silent reverence, heads nodding at each end to the track. James Brown makes a "tuchis" joke every time the song resolves on that word, as if surprised to find it there. Then, heart-crushingly, he asks for a playback of "Message to the World" — the eleven-minute rant. A few band members have gradually crept out, but most sit in a trance through all the replays.
Next we listen to Hollie's ballad, recorded the day before. James Brown tells his wife the ballad's lyric is dedicated to her (the innocuous sentiments are along the lines of "If you're not happy, I'm not happy either"). At this, James Brown's wife gets nervous, and in a quiet moment I overhear her asking Damon exactly what it says.
"For me?" she asks again.
In irritation, James Brown says, "For all wives." This seems to put an end to the subject.
Afterward, in front of us all, James Brown's wife urges him to consider breaking from his work for a snack. His blood-sugar level, I learn, has been a problem. "I put a banana in the fridge for you," she says. This information displeases James Brown intensely, and the two begin a brief, awkward verbal tussle.
Mr. Bobbit leans in to me and whispers, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Taking the hint, I go and join Wesley and the band, most of whom have tiptoed out of the playback room and are hanging out in the kitchen.
There, an ebullient Wesley is teasing a rapt circle of admiring musicians for having the audacity to kvetch about how hard the James Brown of today rehearses his band. "Y'all don't know nothing about no eight-hour rehearsal," he tells them. "Y'all don't got a clue. Y'all don't know about going to Los Angeles, nice bright sunshine, sitting there in a dark little studio for eight hours, all those beautiful women, all the things we could do, stuck rehearsing a song we've been playing for fifty years, going, 'Dun-dun-dun' instead of 'dun-dun-doo."'
Seizing their chance, the cats confide in Wesley about "Pimp Danny" and how they hope Wesley will contribute a solo. "So is that why I'm here?" Wesley replies warily, as if sensing a conspiracy of some kind. "I'll play trombone on anything," he explains to me. "You know the story about the $200 whore? Guy says he's only got fifty dollars, she says, 'That's all right, I'll fuck you anyway.' 'Cause she just likes to fuck. That's me: I like to play."
Suddenly, Mr. Bobbit has arrived with a vast delivery of takeout food: several gallon buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, assorted sides and a few boxes of doughnuts, too. These are spread on the table, and James Brown emerges from the playback room and joins us. The blood-sugar issue, it appears, is to be addressed, and not by the banana in the fridge. Mrs. James Brown and James Brown II are now nowhere to be seen.
James Brown, still in his black hat and shades, fills a plate with chicken and plunks himself down between me and Wesley. "You gotta talk to this guy," he says, indicating Wesley. "That's twenty percent of your story, right there."
Wesley demurs: "People always try to tell me that, but I'm always saying, there couldn't be nothing without The Man. It all comes through him. You need someone who thinks unbounded. I used to be contained within the diatonic scale. He'd tell me something and I'd say, 'It can't be written down, so it can't be played.' He'd say, 'Play it, don't write it down.' It took me years to understand. Now I'm a teacher."
James Brown and Keith begin reminiscing, plainly for Wesley's sake, about having to teach the Black Eyed Peas' bass player how to play a James Brown bass line. Usher's people, too, needed a tutorial. James Brown and Keith laugh at how slow others are to get it — the guitarist who said, "That's the wrong chord," and James Brown's reply: "How can it be wrong, when it's never been played before?"
Following this five o'clock lunch break, James Brown leads the Bitter Sweets in some more vocal arrangements, leaving the band and Wesley sitting on their hands. Though James Brown's energy is phenomenal, as the evening drags toward seven the general belief is that nothing further will be accomplished here today. Jeff says, wonderingly, "I never even took my horn out of my case today. Checked my e-mail, smoked a twist, ate some Kentucky Fried Chicken." Yet it is on this cue, seemingly as if he has gleaned the risk of mutiny, that James Brown sends the Bitter Sweets home and calls instead for the band — the whole band.
James Brown's mood has turned again. He's so determined, he's almost enraged. "Got to be ready," he chastises while they assemble. James Brown has decided he wants to play his organ but snaps at Howard and snaps at Jeff as the amplifier cables get tangled and, briefly, unplugged. He also castigates Fred Thomas, who he claims has missed a cue: "You want to play bass? Then play." Next he rages at Mousey, who, trapped in a separate booth, can't watch the hand signals. James Brown actually steps in and briefly plays the drums for Mousey, ostensibly showing him how it's done — shades of Nat Kendrick! The silence in the room, during these attacks, is suffocating. I can't help thinking of the present band's embarrassment in front of Wesley, and of Wesley's embarrassment in front of the present band. Here's living proof of every complaint they've wished to register with me.
The tinkering preparations and ritual outbursts at last conclude. James Brown takes his place behind the keyboards, looking ferocious in his shades and sleeveless top. He leads the band through an endlessly complicated big-band jazz-funk piece, which, after three or four false starts, he runs for a perhaps fifteen-minute take, long enough for him to request, by hand signals, two Fred Wesley trombone solos, a bass solo from Fred Thomas and three organ solos from himself. During his own solos — his famously atonal and abstract keyboard work is truly worthy of Sun Ra or Daniel Johnston — James Brown looks fixated, and again appears to have shed thirty years. At the end of his last solo he directs the horns to finish, and laughs sharply: "Takes a lot of concentration!" He turns to me and slaps me five. Fred Wesley turns to the ashen Fred Thomas and, perhaps trying to put a chipper face on what they've been through, says, "Playing that bebop, damn."
I rendezvous with the band in England ten days later, for a performance in Gateshead. The players are in another kind of survival mode now, keeping themselves healthy under punishing travel conditions, while trying to stay in the mood to put on The Show. Donning their red tuxedos, the guitarists point out details they can guess will amuse me. "Danny Ray had jackets made without pockets," says Damon. "He doesn't want to see any lines. So I don't have any place to put my picks onstage." I obligingly examine his tux — sure enough, no pockets. Damon explains that he has no recourse but to stack a supply of picks on an amp, where they invariably vibrate off, onto the floor.
I ask them how the tour's been to this point. Damon, while not critical of the previous week's shows, says, "He needs to warm up on tour, too. Think of all the bits he has to remember. If he screws up, you notice." Damon recalls for me a night when the floor was slick and James Brown missed his first move, and as a result "lost confidence." Lost confidence? I try not to say, "But he's James Brown!" It is somehow true that despite my days in his presence, my tabulation of his foibles, nothing has eroded my certainty that James Brown should be beyond ordinary mortal deficits of confidence. And with this thought I discover that a shift has occurred inside me. I wish for the show tonight to be a triumphant one, not for myself, or even for the sake of the band, but so that James Brown himself will be happy.
I'm wanting to take care of him, too.
It's as if I've joined the family.
Bumbling along with the red costumed tribe in the tunnel to the stage, I find myself suddenly included in a group prayer — hands held in a circle, heads lowered, hushed words spoken in the spirit of the same wish I've just acknowledged privately to myself: that a generous deity might grant them and Mr. Brown a good night. I still haven't seen Mr. Brown himself. Now I can hear the sound of the crowd stirring, boiling with anticipation at what they are about to see. As the players filter onstage into their accustomed positions, bright and proud in their red tuxes, to an immense roar of acclaim from the Gatesheadians, I settle into a spot beside Danny Ray.
When the band hits its first notes and the room begins to ride the music, a kind of metamorphosis occurs, a sort of transmutation of the air of expectation in this Midlands crowd. They've been relieved of the first layer of their disbelief that James Brown has really come to Gates-head: At the very least, James Brown's Sound has arrived. After the band's long overture, Danny Ray, every impeccable tiny inch of him, pops onstage. He says, "Now comes Star Time!" and the roof comes off. Under Danny Ray's instruction, the crowd rises to its feet and begins to chant its hero's name.
When James Brown is awarded to them, the people of Gateshead are the happiest people on Earth, and I am one of them. Never mind that I now know to watch for the rock-paper-scissors hand signals, I am nevertheless swept up in the deliverance of James Brown to his audience. The Sun God has strode across a new threshold, the alien visitor has unveiled himself to another gathering of humans. I see, too, how James Brown's presence animates his family: Keith, fingers moving automatically on frets, smiling helplessly when James Brown calls out his name. Fred Thomas bopping on a platform with his white beard, an abiding sentinel of funk. Hollie, the invisible man, now stepping up for a trumpet solo. Damon, who during Tommie Rae's rendition of "Hold On, I'm A-Comin'," can be heard to slip a reference to "Lady Marmalade" into his guitar solo.
The show builds to the slow showstopper, "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." The moment when James Brown's voice breaks across those horn riffs is one of the greatest in pop music, and the crowd, already in a fever, further erupts. When they cap the ballad by starting "Sex Machine," it is a climax on top of a climax. The crowd screams in joy when James Brown dances even a little (and these days, it is mostly a little). Perhaps, I think, we are all in his family. We want him to be happy. We want him alive. When the James Brown Show comes to your town — when it comes to Gateshead, U.K., today, as when it came to the Apollo Theater in 1961, as when it came to Atlanta or Oklahoma City or Indianapolis anytime, life has admitted its potential to be astounding, if only for as long as the Show lasts. Now that James Brown is old, we want this to go on occurring for as long as possible. We almost don't wish to allow ourselves to think this, but the James Brown Show is a precious thing that may someday vanish from the Earth.
Now James Brown has paused the Show for a monologue about love. He points into the balconies to the left and right of him. "I love you and you and you up there," he says. "Almost as much as I love myself." He asks the audience to do the corniest thing: to turn and tell the person on your left that you love him. Because it is James Brown who asks, the audience obliges. While he is demonstrating the turn to the left, turning expressively in what is nearly a curtsy to Hollie and the other horns, James Brown spots me there, standing in the wings. The smile he gives me is as natural as the one he gave Fred Wesley, it is nothing like the grin of a statue, and if it is to be my own last moment with James Brown, it is a fine one. I feel good.
There were several meetings. Eight white men and two white women. Was
this a meeting of the Mormon Glee Club? The New White Citizens Council?
Perhaps a Klan meeting? No. That meeting was the creative team for the
new James Brown movie, "Get On Up."
Welcome to post-racial
Hollywood where if you host a fundraiser for Barack Obama, you're freed
of the burden of hiring black writers. And where a rich white producer
can jokingly declare, "I'm black."
Indeed,
all the producers, writers, and the director of the James Brown movie
are white. No black people were hired until a few weeks before the
cameras started rolling, the actors. In fact, several of the people
involved in this whitewash are British. The Brits have a fetish for
black projects.
This is the Donald Sterling message: don't bring them to the game. There areover fifty black iconic biopics
and black-themed movies in development in Hollywood, including multiple
Richard Pryor projects, five Martin Luther King projects, multiple
Marvin Gaye projects, and civil rights projects, and only one or two
have an African American writer. Our entire history has been given over
to white writers.
When the late David Wolper was producing "Roots"
thirty-something years ago, he hired no black writers. When asked why,
he was quoted as saying: "They're too close to the material." I guess
we're still too close.
This Hollywood apartheid against the
African American writer could be understood if the writers being hired
were of such quality as to be beyond reproach artistically. With rare
exception, that is not the case. Sift through the morass, and you'll
find a group of hacks, insiders, and drinking buddies. The executives
are trading our icons around like baseball cards.
How do these
insiders, pals of the executives, become experts on black culture
overnight? Wikipedia. In case you didn't know, the entire black
experience is on Wikipedia. Here is a typical day in Hollywood. Agent
calls a writer, tells him he got him an interview for "this black guy
who was really important." The writer says cool, goes to the wiki pages,
memorizes them, takes the meeting and wings his "knowledge" of the
black icon. That's it. He gets the job.
You see, the first thing
people do in this town before hiring someone is look in the mirror. What
I see in front of me is beauty, brains, and competence, Oh, and
hipness. Yep, that's who I'm gonna hire: me!
If ever a project
required black creative involvement, it was this one. James Brown was
the blackest entertainer in the history of America. The blackest. There
was nothing integrationist about his art, at all. He never tried to
crossover. You had to come to him. He was iconic and not just musically.
And
yet, where did producer Brian Grazer hire to embody this blackest of
black men? Three white writers, two of them from England. Then more
producers were added, all white, and a white director, who has said that
he sees this as a movie about singing and dancing. Bingo. Now we're
ready to make a black movie. It doesn't matter a bit that one of the
producers is a famous rock star who played with Brown a few times and
lifted some of his moves. James Brown belongs to us, the black masses,
and for us to be excluded from the creative team that made this movie is
an obscenity. I'm aware that Spike Lee was involved briefly, but the
finished product looks like a Mitt Romney family reunion.
Let me tell you who James Brown was, really, not the Wikipedia James Brown.
He
was a civil rights icon. Put James in the pantheon of the most
impactful black men of the 20th century, and he would not be out of
place. How can I make such an assertion? One song: "I'm Black and I'm
Proud."
Before that song, if you wanted to start a fight with a
man of color, all one had to do was call him black. Up until the
mid-sixties, we were trying define ourselves: not colored anymore, now
Negro. But black was not something we called ourselves. And along comes
this little man and proudly states, "I'm black and I'm proud!" He took
the thing that the oppressor used to bludgeon us and made it a weapon of
pride for us.
That song caught on like wildfire. One day, our
heads were down, the next day, our heads were held high, proud of who we
were. We had all these groups, civil rights groups, Muslims, Panthers,
but it was JB who gave us our swagger. That song lifted up an entire
race! He put us on his back and carried us. Dr. King gave us our rights.
JB gave us our dignity. Civil rights icon? You better believe it.
When
that song came on the radio, cars stopped in the street. People turned
up their radios, came out of their houses, and sang along with it;
radio stations put it in a loop and played it for hours. The next day
people greeted each other with "Hello, black man!" "My black brother."
JB made black beautiful overnight.
But the focus of this movie is
singing and dancing. When we are kept out of the room, that is what you
end up with, a pale Wikified imitation of what a great man was.
And
yet, if someone decided to do the Gloria Steinem story, you better
believe women would be involved; they'd have to be. Can you fathom ten
men sitting in a room, male writers, directors, and producers all
staring at their navels grunting: "I am woman, hear me roar"? But that
won't happen because people in this town respect women.
It's too
late to save JB, but maybe there's hope to save the other icons from the
Wiki-fueled humiliation of having their stories told by people who have
no organic connection to us or our struggle.
Chadwick Boseman plays James Brown in a movie directed by Tate Taylor.Credit Illustration by Concepción Studios/John W. Mosley/Blockson Collection/Temple University.
In
many ways, James Brown defies comprehension. He performed relentlessly
for nearly six decades, beginning in the early nineteen-fifties. When he
put his shows together, he rehearsed every move, every step, every
interlude. In front of an audience, however, he surged beyond
calculation, and entered a region both frenzied and rapturous. Other
R. & B. and soul performers may have had greater gifts (Otis
Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke) and some rock-and-roll stars may
have been just as entertaining (Little Richard, before he found God),
but no one else had Brown’s convulsive blend of musical genius and
ecstasy. He was strong enough and shrewd enough to cast aside good
taste; he screamed and grunted and, turning his head, telegraphed
indecipherable messages to his backup players, all of it part of an
unstoppable flow. He was an overwhelming talent, and also an overtly
sexual presence onstage—something that whites did not see much of in
black male celebrities in the fifties and the early sixties, before
Muhammad Ali changed everything. For many in the audience (especially
the white audience), James Brown was exciting and discomforting in equal
measure.
“Get On Up,” the bio-pic devoted to
Brown’s life and music, is surprisingly candid. The movie insists that
“the godfather of soul” could be soulless—at least in his personal
relationships. Again and again, Brown (Chadwick Boseman) is
manipulative, violent, greedy, and just plain elusive. He hurts many of
the people who are close to him (though the film only hints at the
brutalities of his later years). At the same time, “Get On Up” does
something that most fans would not have thought possible: using the
original recordings and a lot of lip-synching, staging, and
choreography, the movie re-creates Brown in full cry. Surrounded by his
band and his singers, he gives everything of himself to his audience. That’s
where the man’s soul was, the movie tells us. It’s hardly a fresh
insight, but to see it reënacted with this much skill is thrilling.
Bette Midler, in “The Rose” (1979), brought her mixture of pungent wit
and emotional vitality to the role of a self-destructive genius—Janis
Joplin in all but name. “The Rose” has been forgotten, and it should be
revived, but “Get On Up,” as a portrait of a singer-songwriter,
surpasses it. This movie will never need reviving. Brown’s innovative
rhythms will always make his music sound contemporary. It
has taken a long time for Hollywood to recognize what Brown and other
soul musicians accomplished. Taylor Hackford struggled for fifteen years
to get his Ray Charles bio-pic, “Ray” (2004), off the ground. The
producer Brian Grazer obtained the rights to James Brown’s story
thirteen years ago. He developed a script with the British screenwriting
team of John-Henry and Jez Butterworth. But Brown died in 2006 and the
project stalled, until Mick Jagger, who then held the rights, proposed
to Grazer that they join forces. (Jagger, who learned so much from
Brown, has been making his own film about him—collaborating with Alex
Gibney on a documentary.) Grazer and Jagger hired Tate Taylor, a white
Southerner, who directed “The Help” (2011), the soft-grained movie about
black servants and white bosses in early-sixties Mississippi.
Taylor’s
involvement turns out to be a mixed blessing. Altering the
Butterworths’ screenplay, he has attempted to elevate the standard
tropes of a Hollywood bio-pic into a radical new form. As Taylor shows
us, James Brown had a terrible time as a child. Abused and beaten by his
father (Lennie James) and abandoned by his mother (Viola Davis), he
grows up in Depression-era rural Georgia, under the protection of Aunt
Honey (Octavia Spencer), an all-seeing woman who runs a brothel, and who
tells him that he’s meant for greatness. His mother, before she left
(for unexplained reasons), told him the same thing. These solemn
predictions give a corny, quasi-mythical aura of destiny to a triumph
that was actually built on talent, hard work, daring, and opportunism;
if anyone was self-made, it was James Brown. But Taylor can’t let go of
his pretentious design: imitating Alain Resnais and other modernist
directors, he dissolves linear narration, plowing backward again and
again, giving us more Southern-gothic moss—often when we’re most
fascinated or appalled by Brown and would rather not leave the moment to
search for the root cause of his behavior. Didn’t anyone tell Taylor
that you can’t explain a phenomenon like James Brown any more than you
can explain Mozart?
As Brown, Chadwick Boseman
is sensational. In “42,” he played Jackie Robinson, who could make
history in the major leagues only if he ignored the race-baiting snarls
from other players and from the stands. Boseman’s lionlike eyes conveyed
some of what Robinson went through, but, except on the field, the
performance never took off physically. He conquers all restraint in “Get
On Up.” Thirty-seven years old, he assumes the role of Brown as the
performer turns seventeen, squeezing his words into the young Brown’s
strangled, high-pitched blur. (Eddie Murphy said that he never
understood a word Brown said.) Acting with his arms and his
shoulders—Brown’s body wasn’t yet fully liberated—Boseman makes him a
little overeager: a young man with a killer smile and enormous charm,
especially when he wants something from someone.
Brown
and a group of other young musicians, obsessed with the impassioned
style of Pentecostal gospel music, form a group called the Famous
Flames. At the demand of a booking agent, Ben Bart (Dan Aykroyd), and a
record producer, Syd Nathan (Fred Melamed), the name of the group is
changed to James Brown and His Famous Flames. The rest of the band is
furious, but Brown agrees. He makes everyone, including his friend and
musical collaborator Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), address him as “Mr.
Brown.” At first, the formality seems a hipster joke, a way of
announcing that he has arrived. But Brown takes it very seriously, and
also fines anyone in the group who plays a wrong note or does drugs—any
drugs, including marijuana. He insists on respect from whites, too, but,
in Taylor’s apparently ironic telling, Brown’s ways with black
musicians become increasingly domineering and egotistical. The situation
grows worse when Brown starts making millions but denies his salaried
musicians base pay and taunts them into quitting.
As
Brown’s music moves from gospel to rhythm and blues (and later to
funk), audiences go crazy, and Boseman reveals what success does to
Brown’s body. The smile is no longer welcoming; it’s sharklike, a demand
for recognition. Offstage, Boseman gently swings his torso as he walks,
as if Brown were teasing the sexual opportunities that are open to him.
He enters a room with his head slightly turned; he has his own angle on
what’s going on, and won’t submit to anyone else’s. He does look
directly at Bart, a fond and protective music pro, but otherwise he’s
distant and impersonal, a man incapable of acknowledging anyone who
isn’t a member of his audience.
Onstage, in blue
silk, and with abundant ascending hair, Boseman in one continuous
motion grabs the mike, drops it, pulls it back by its cord, and launches
into “Night Train.” The beat is driving, constant, even ferocious, but
Boseman’s movements are liquid. A spectacular dancer (the choreographer
Aakomon Jones worked with him), he does Brown’s swivelling side to side,
his scissoring splits. To my eyes, his performance is both accurate and
a marvellous interpretation, an extension of Brown’s greatness. The
filmmakers give us plenty of music-making: the famous night at the
Apollo, in 1962, which became a hit album and brought Brown to national
attention; the 1964 T.A.M.I. Show, filmed at the Santa Monica Civic
Auditorium, in which he blew the Rolling Stones off the stage; and the
Paris concert of 1971, when he performed three stunning numbers—“Get Up
(I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,” and “Soul Power.” In a
rarity in these bio-pics, the movie captures a musician’s shifts in
style. Rehearsing, Brown teaches his rebellious backup band to emphasize
rhythm rather than melody. “Every instrument a drum,” he says, and
persuades the horns to play, in unison, a single chord. Funk takes shape
before our eyes, with hip-hop beckoning down the road.
The
presentation of Brown’s music is extraordinarily generous, and I have
only one quarrel with it. Brown made records from 1956 almost until his
death. The filmmakers transferred all the recordings to a different
digital format, adding some new sounds and deleting some old ones. These
versions tame the rawness of the original records, particularly the
early ones—the incomparable assault, aimed at your heart and your body,
that leaped out of radios, loudspeakers, hi-fi equipment. Grazer,
Jagger, and Taylor (and probably a host of sound technicians)
undoubtedly wanted clarity and dramatic emphasis. But, no matter how you
heard it, James Brown’s music was devastating, and it shouldn’t be
plumped and smoothed. Brown helped create the contemporary taste for
rawness in popular music; it’s what people have always loved him for. ♦
This is a discography chronicling the musical career of James Brown. Brown joined the Flames in 1953, first as a drummer, and then as leading front man. Later becoming The Famous Flames, they signed with Federal Records in 1956 and recorded their first hit single, "Please, Please, Please", which sold over a million copies.
After the hit release of "Try Me",
following nine relative failures, the group scored a series of hit
albums and recordings in the early 1960s. Brown's solo aspirations
started around 1962. By the time of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag",
he used the Flames less and less as he became a full-fledged solo
artist who was now involved in the development of a new R&B
subgenre, funk. Eventually the Famous Flames left him as did his James Brown band by 1970 and Brown hired The J.B.'s
who helped contribute to his continuing success in the 1970s. After
their disbanding, Brown struggled for a number of years with recordings
before the release of 1985's "Living in America", and having success with the albums Gravity (1986) and I'm Real (1988). Brown charted at least 96 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 and at
least 110 entries on the R&B chart. Seventeen of Brown's singles,
including five credited as "James Brown and the Famous Flames", hit
number-one on the R&B chart. He recorded several more hits
pseudonymously, notably "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" and "Doing It to Death". In addition to his own hits, Brown wrote and produced charting records by many other performers, including Bobby Byrd, Hank Ballard, Tammy Montgomery, Lyn Collins, Marva Whitney, and The J.B.'s. In contrast to his chart success, few of Brown's hit recordings were certified by the RIAA, partly due to the reluctance of his record labels to pay the required fees.[1] He had just two certifiedgold singles - "Get on the Good Foot" (1972) and "The Payback" (1974) - and one gold album, 1974's The Payback.[2]
"This Old Heart"Credited as James Brown and The Famous Flames
79
20
-
King releases
Listed below are the charting singles James Brown released on the King record label between 1960 and 1971. Several of these songs feature The Famous Flames on background vocals through 1965.
Wolk, Douglas. (2004). Live at the Apollo, 114. New York: Continuum.
Bloom, Steve. "Anything Left in Papa's Bag?" Down Beat September 1, 1980. Rpt. in The James Brown Reader: Fifty Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul. Ed. Nelson George and Alan Leeds. New York: Plume, 2008. 160-170.
White, Cliff (1991). "Discography". In Star Time (pp. 54–59) [CD booklet]. New York: PolyGram Records.
James Joseph Brown[1] (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer. One of the founding fathers of funk music and a major figure of 20th-centurypopular music and dance, he is often referred to as "The Godfather of Soul". In a career that spanned six decades, Brown influenced the development of several music genres.[2]
Brown recorded 16 number-one singles on the BillboardR&B charts.[6] Brown also holds the record as the artist to have charted the most singles on the Billboard Hot 100 which did not reach number one on that chart.[7][8] Brown was honored by many institutions including inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame.[9] In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Hot R&B Songs, James Brown is ranked as number one in The Top 500 Artists.[10] Brown is ranked seventh on the music magazineRolling Stone's list of its 100 greatest artists of all time.[11]
James Brown was born on May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, to 16-year-old Susie (née Behling; 1917–2003) and 22-year-old Joseph "Joe" Gardner Brown (1911–1993) in a small wooden shack.[12]
Brown's name was supposed to have been Joseph James Brown, Jr.;
however, his first and middle names were mistakenly reversed on his birth certificate.[1]
Brown later legally changed his name to remove the "Jr." designation.
His parents were both African-American; in his autobiography, Brown
stated that he also had Chinese and Native American ancestry.[13][14] The Brown family lived in extreme poverty in nearby Elko, South Carolina, which was an impoverished town at the time.[7] They later relocated to Augusta, Georgia, when Brown was four or five.[15] Brown's family first settled at one of his aunts' brothels and later moved into a house shared with another aunt.[15] Brown's mother later left the family after a contentious marriage and moved to New York.[16] Brown spent long stretches of time on his own, hanging out in the streets and hustling to get by. Brown managed to stay in school until sixth grade.
Brown began singing in talent shows as a young child, first appearing
at Augusta's Lenox Theater in 1944, winning the show after singing the
ballad "So Long".[17] While in Augusta, Brown performed buck dances for change to entertain troops from Camp Gordon at the start of World War II as their convoys traveled over a canal bridge from near his aunt's home.[17]
Brown learned how to play piano, guitar and harmonica during this
period. Brown became inspired to become an entertainer after seeing
footage of Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five performing "Caldonia" in a short film.[18] During his teen years, Brown briefly had a career as a boxer.[19] At 16, Brown was convicted of robbery and was sent to a juvenile detention center in Toccoa.[20]
Brown formed a gospel quartet with four fellow cellmates, including
Johnny Terry. Stories differ as to how Brown was eventually paroled,
including a story that Bobby Byrd's
family had helped to secure an early release, while another stated that
Brown got his parole after a car and motor manufacturing company owner,
S.C. Lawson, agreed to be a sponsor after Brown had promised to look
for a job guaranteed for two years.[21] Brown was paroled on June 14, 1952.[21]
Upon his release, Brown joined a gospel group and worked at several
jobs, including the Lawson Motor Company and as a janitor at a local
school.[22] Brown and Bobby Byrd reportedly met following his release from prison and the two became friends.[23]
Brown joined Byrd's group, which highlighted under two names, as an a cappella gospel group called the Gospel Starlighters, and an R&B band known as the Avons.[23] Brown had allegedly joined the band after one of the group's members, Troy Collins, was killed.[24]
With Brown and Byrd, the group consisted of Sylvester Keels, Doyle
Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Nash Knox and Nafloyd Scott. Influenced by
R&B groups such as Hank Ballard and The Midnighters, The Orioles and Billy Ward and his Dominoes, the group changed their name, first to the Toccoa Band, and then to the Flames.[22][24]
Nafloyd's brother Baroy later joined the group on bass guitar and
Brown, Byrd and Keels switched lead positions and instruments, often
playing drums and piano. Johnny Terry later joined while Pulliam and
Oglesby had long left.[25]
Berry Trimier became the group's initial manager booking them at
parties near college campuses in the Georgia and South Carolina areas.[26] The group had already gained a reputation for being a live act when they renamed themselves the "Famous Flames".[27] By 1955, the group had gotten in contact with Little Richard, who Brown idolized, while performing in Macon.[28][29] Richard convinced the group to get in contact with Richard's manager at the time, Clint Brantley, at his nightclub.[30] Brantley agreed to manage them after seeing the group audition for them.[31] Brantley then sent them to a local radio station to record a demo session, where they performed their own composition "Please, Please, Please",
which was inspired when Little Richard wrote the words of the title on a
napkin and Brown was determined to make a song out of it.[31][32][33] The Famous Flames eventually signed with King Records' Federal
subsidiary in Cincinnati, Ohio and issued a re-recorded version of
"Please, Please, Please" in March 1956. The song became the group's
first R&B hit, selling over a million copies.[34]
None of their follow-ups produced similar success. By 1957, Brown had
replaced Clint Brantley as manager and hired Ben Bart, chief of the Universal Attractions Agency. That year, the original Flames broke up after Bart changed the name of the group to "James Brown and The Famous Flames".[35]
In October 1958, Brown released the ballad, "Try Me",
which hit number-one on the R&B chart in the beginning of 1959,
becoming the first of seventeen chart-topping R&B hits.[36] Shortly afterwards, Brown recruited his first band, led by J. C. Davis and reunited with Bobby Byrd, who joined a revived Famous Flames lineup that included Eugene "Baby" Lloyd Stallworth and Bobby Bennett, with Johnny Terry sometimes coming in as the "fifth Flame". Brown,The Flames, and his entire band debuted at the Apollo Theater on April 24, 1959, opening for Little Willie John.[24][37]
Federal Records issued two albums credited to Brown and the Famous
Flames. By 1960, Brown began multi-tasking in the recording studio
involving himself, the Famous Flames and his band, sometimes named the
James Brown Orchestra or the James Brown Band. That year, the band
recorded the top ten R&B hit, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" on Dade Records, owned by Henry Stone, under the pseudonym "Nat Kendrick & The Swans", due to label issues.[38] As a result of its success, King president Syd Nathan shifted Brown's contract from Federal to King. While under King, Brown, under the Famous Flames lineup, released the album, Think!
and the following year, released two albums with the James Brown Band
earning second billing. With the Famous Flames, Brown sung lead on
several more hits including "I'll Go Crazy" and "Think", songs that hinted at his emerging style.[24]
Mr. Dynamite
By 1962, Brown scored a hit with his band with their cover of the instrumental, "Night Train",
becoming not only a top five R&B single but also Brown's first top
40 entry on the Billboard Hot 100. That same year, the ballads, "Lost Someone" and "Baby You're Right", the latter a Joe Tex
composition, added to his repertoire and increased his reputation with
R&B audiences. On October 24, 1962, Brown financed a live recording
of a performance at the Apollo and convinced Syd Nathan to release the
album, despite Nathan's beliefs that no one bought live albums due to
the fact that Brown's singles were already bought and that live albums
were usually bad sellers.
Live at the Apollo was released the following June and became an immediate hit, eventually reaching number two on the Top LPs chart and selling over a million copies, staying on the charts for 14 months.[39] In 1963, Brown scored his first top 20 pop hit with his rendition of the standard, "Prisoner of Love". He also launched his first label, Try Me Records, which included recordings by the likes of Tammy Montgomery (later to be famous as Tammi Terrell),
Johnny & Bill (Famous Flames associates Johnny Terry and Bill
Hollings) and the Poets, which was another name used for Brown's backing
band.[24]
In 1964, seeking bigger commercial success, Brown and Bobby Byrd
formed the production company, Fair Deal, linking the operation to the Mercury imprint, Smash Records.[24][40] King Records, however, fought against this and was granted an injunction
preventing Brown from releasing any recordings for the label. Prior to
the injunction, Brown had released three vocal singles, including the
blues-oriented hit, "Out of Sight", which further indicated the direction his music was going to take.[41]
Touring throughout the year, Brown and the Famous Flames grabbed more
national attention after giving an explosive show-stopping performance
on the live concert film, The T.A.M.I. Show.
The Flames' polished choreography and timing as well as Brown's
energetic dance moves and high-octane vocals upstaged the show from
proposed closing act, The Rolling Stones. With a new deal with King, Brown released his composition, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", which became his first top ten pop hit and won Brown his first Grammy Award.[42] Later in 1965, Brown issued "I Got You",
which became his second single in a row to reach number-one on the
R&B chart and top ten on the pop chart. Brown followed that up with
the ballad, "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" which confirmed his stance as a top-ranking performer, especially with R&B audiences from that point on.[42]
Soul Brother No. 1
By 1967, Brown's emerging sound had begun to be defined as funk music. That year, he released what some critics cited as the first true funk song, "Cold Sweat", which hit number-one on the R&B chart and became one of his first recordings to contain a drum break and also the first that featured a harmony that was reduced to a single chord.[43][44] The instrumental arrangements on tracks such as "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" and "Licking Stick-Licking Stick" (both recorded in 1968) and "Funky Drummer" (recorded in 1969) featured a more developed version of Brown's mid-1960s style, with the horn section, guitars, bass and drums meshed together in intricate rhythmic patterns based on multiple interlocking riffs.
Changes in Brown's style that started with "Cold Sweat" also
established the musical foundation for Brown's later hits, such as "I Got the Feelin'" (1968) and "Mother Popcorn"
(1969). By this time Brown's vocals frequently took the form of a kind
of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only
intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody. This would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping, which would come to maturity along with hip hop music
in the coming decades. Brown's style of funk in the late 1960s was
based on interlocking syncopated parts: funky bass lines, drum patterns,
and iconic guitar riffs.[45] The main guitar ostinatos for "Ain't It Funky" and "Give It Up or Turn It Loose"
(both 1969), are examples of Brown's refinement of New Orleans funk;
irresistibly danceable riffs, stripped down to their rhythmic essence.
On both recordings the tonal structure is bare bones. The pattern of
attack-points is the emphasis, not the pattern of pitches. It's as if
the guitar is an African drum, or idiophone. Alexander Stewart states
that this popular feel was passed along from "New Orleans—through James
Brown's music, to the popular music of the 1970s."[46]
Those same tracks were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians
from the 1970s onward. As a result, James Brown remains to this day the
world's most sampled recording artist,[47] with Funky Drummer itself becoming the most sampled individual piece of music.[48] "Bring it Up" has an Afro-Cuban guajeo-like
structure. In fact, on a 1976 version, Cuban bongos are used. All three
of these guitar riffs are based on an onbeat/offbeat structure. Stewart
states: "This model, it should be noted, is different from a time line (such as clave and tresillo) in that it is not an exact pattern, but more of a loose organizing principle."[49]
Brown's band during this period employed musicians and arrangers who
had come up through the jazz tradition. He was noted for his ability as a
bandleader and songwriter to blend the simplicity and drive of R&B with the rhythmic complexity and precision of jazz. Trumpeter Lewis Hamlin and saxophonist/keyboardist Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (the successor to previous bandleader Nat Jones) led the band. Guitarist Jimmy Nolen provided percussive, deceptively simple riffs for each song, and Maceo Parker's
prominent saxophone solos provided a focal point for many performances.
Other members of Brown's band included stalwart Famous Flames singer
and sideman Bobby Byrd, drummers John "Jabo" Starks, Clyde Stubblefield and Melvin Parker, saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney, trombonist Fred Wesley, guitarist Alphonso "Country" Kellum and bassist Bernard Odum.
In addition to a torrent of singles and studio albums, Brown's output
during this period included two more successful live albums, Live at the Garden (1967) and Live at the Apollo, Volume II (1968), and a 1968 television special, James Brown: Man to Man.
His music empire expanded along with his influence on the music scene.
As Brown's music empire grew, his desire for financial and artistic
independence grew as well. Brown bought radio stations during the late
1960s, including WRDW in his native Augusta, where he shined shoes as a boy.[42] In November 1967, James Brown purchased radio station WGYW in Knoxville, Tennessee for a reported $75,000, according to the January 20, 1968 Record World
magazine. The call letters were changed to WJBE reflecting his
initials. WJBE began on January 15, 1968 and broadcast a Rhythm &
Blues format. The station slogan was "WJBE 1430 Raw Soul". Brown also
bought WEBB in Baltimore in 1970.
Brown branched out to make several recordings with musicians outside
his own band. In an attempt to appeal to the older, more affluent, and
predominantly white adult contemporary audience, Brown recorded Gettin' Down To It (1969) and Soul on Top
(1970)--two albums consisting mostly of romantic ballads, jazz
standards, and homologous reinterpretations of his earlier hits—with the
Dee Felice Trio and the Louie Bellson Orchestra. In 1968, he recorded a number of funk-oriented tracks with The Dapps, a white Cincinnati band, including the hit "I Can't Stand Myself". He also released three albums of Christmas music with his own band.
Brown after a concert in Tampa on January 29, 1972
In March 1970, most of Brown's mid-to-late 1960s road band walked out
on him due to money disputes, a development augured by the prior
disbandment of The Famous Flames singing group for the same reason in
1968. Brown and erstwhile Famous Flames singer Bobby Byrd (who elected
to remain in the band during this tumultuous period) subsequently
recruited several members of the Cincinnati-based The Pacemakers, which included Bootsy Collins and his brother Phelps "Catfish" Collins;
augmented by the remaining members of the 1960s road band (including
Fred Wesley, who rejoined Brown's outfit in December 1970) and other
newer musicians, they would form the nucleus of The J.B.'s,
Brown's new backing ensemble. Shortly following their first performance
together, the band entered the studio to record the Brown-Byrd
composition, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine";
the song and other contemporaneous singles would further concretize
Brown's influence in the nascent genre of funk music. This iteration of
the J.B.'s dissolved after a March 1971 European tour (documented on the
1991 archival release Love Power Peace) due to additional money disputes and Bootsy Collins' use of LSD; the Collins brothers would soon become integral members of Parliament-Funkadelic, while a new lineup of the J.B.'s coalesced around Wesley, St. Clair Pinckney, and drummer John Starks.
In 1971, Brown began recording for Polydor Records
which also took over distribution of Brown's King Records catalog. Many
of his sidemen and supporting players, including Andre Beeka, Fred
Wesley & the J.B.'s, Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson and former rival Hank Ballard, released records on the People
label, an imprint founded by Brown that was purchased by Polydor as
part of Brown's new contract. The recordings on the People label, almost
all of which were produced by Brown himself, exemplified his "house
style". Songs such as "I Know You Got Soul" by Bobby Byrd, "Think" by Lyn Collins and "Doing It to Death"
by Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s are considered as much a part of
Brown's recorded legacy as the recordings released under his own name.
That year, he also began touring African countries and was received well
by audiences there. During the 1972 presidential election, James Brown openly proclaimed his support of Richard Nixon for reelection of the presidency over Democratic candidate George McGovern.[52] The decision led to a boycott of his performances and, according to Brown, cost him a big portion of his black audience.[53]
As a result Brown's record sales and concerts in the United States
reached a lull in 1973 as he failed to land a number-one R&B single
that year. Brown relied more on touring outside the United States where
he continued to perform for sold-out crowds in cities such as London,
Paris and Lausanne. That year, Brown also faced problems with the IRS for failure to pay back taxes, charging he hadn't paid upwards of $4.5 million, five years earlier, the IRS claimed he owed nearly $2 million.[54]
In 1973, Brown provided the score for the blaxploitation film Black Caesar. He also recorded another soundtrack for the film, Slaughter's Big Rip-Off.
Following the release of these soundtracks, Brown acquired a
self-styled nickname, "The Godfather of Soul", which remains his most
popular nickname. In 1974, he returned to the No. 1 spot on the R&B
charts with "The Payback", with the parent album reaching the same spot on the album charts; he would reach No. 1 two more times in 1974 including "My Thang" and "Papa Don't Take No Mess". Later that year, he returned to Africa and performed in Kinshasa as part of the buildup to The Rumble in the Jungle fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Admirers of Brown's music, including Miles Davis
and other jazz musicians, began to cite Brown as a major influence on
their own styles. However, Brown, like others who were influenced by his
music, also "borrowed" from other musicians. His 1976 single "Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)" (R&B #31) used the main riff from "Fame" by David Bowie, not the other way around as was often believed. The riff was provided to "Fame" co-writers John Lennon and Bowie by guitarist Carlos Alomar, who had briefly been a member of Brown's band in the late 1960s.[55]
Brown's "Papa Don't Take No Mess" would be his final single to reach
the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts and his final Top 40 pop single of
the 1970s, though Brown continued to occasionally have Top 10 R&B
recordings. Among his top ten R&B hits during this latter period
included "Funky President" and "Get Up Offa That Thing", the latter song released in 1976 and aimed at musical rivals such as Barry White, The Ohio Players and K.C. and the Sunshine Band.
Brown credited his then-second wife and two of their children as
writers of the song to avoid concurrent tax problems with the IRS.
Starting in October 1975, Brown produced, directed, and hosted Future Shock, an Atlanta-based television variety show which ran for three years.
Decline and resurgence
James Brown performing in Hamburg, 1973
Although his records were mainstays of the vanguard New York underground disco scene exemplified by DJs such as David Mancuso and Francis Grasso from 1969 onwards, Brown did not consciously yield to the trend until 1975's Sex Machine Today.
By 1977, he was no longer a dominant force in R&B. After "Get Up
Offa That Thing", thirteen of Brown's late 1970s recordings for Polydor
failed to reach the Top 10 of the R&B chart, with only "Bodyheat" in 1976 and the disco-oriented "It's Too Funky in Here" in 1979 reaching the R&B Top 15 and the ballad "Kiss in '77"
reaching the Top 20. After 1976's "Bodyheat", he also failed to appear
on the Billboard Hot 100. As a result, Brown's concert attendance began
dropping and reported disputes with the IRS
caused Brown's empire to collapse. In addition, Brown's former band
mates, including Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker and the Collins brothers, had
found bigger success as members of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic
collective. The emergence of disco also stopped Brown's success on the
R&B charts as its slicker commercial style had superseded his rawer
funk productions.
By the release of 1979's The Original Disco Man, Brown was not providing much production or writing, leaving most of it to producer Brad Shapiro,
resulting in the song "It's Too Funky in Here" becoming Brown's most
successful single in this period. After two more albums failed to chart,
Brown left Polydor in 1981. It was around this time that Brown changed
the name of his band from the J.B.'s to the Soul Generals (or Soul G's).
This band's name remained that way until his death. Despite a decline
in record sales, Brown enjoyed something of a resurgence in this period
starting with appearances in the feature films The Blues Brothers, Doctor Detroit and Rocky IV, as well as guest starring in the Miami Vice episode "Missing Hours" (1987). In 1984, Brown teamed with rap musician Afrika Bambaattaa on the song "Unity". A year later he signed with Scotti Brothers Records and issued the moderately successful album, Gravity, in 1986. It included Brown's final Top 10 pop hit, "Living in America", marking his first Top 40 entry since 1974 and his first Top 10 pop entry since 1968. Produced and written by Dan Hartman, it was also featured prominently on the Rocky IV film and soundtrack. Brown performed the song in the film at Apollo Creed's final fight, shot in the Ziegfeld Room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and was credited in the film as "The Godfather of Soul." 1986 also saw the publication of Brown's autobiography, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, co-written with Bruce Tucker. In 1987, Brown won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for "Living in America".
In 1988, Brown worked with the production team Full Force on the new jack swing-influenced album I'm Real. It spawned his final two Top 10 R&B hits, "I'm Real" and "Static", which peaked at No. 2 and No. 5, respectively, on the R&B charts. Meanwhile, the drum break
from the second version of the original 1969 hit "Give It Up Or Turnit A
Loose" (the recording included on the compilation album In the Jungle Groove) became so popular at hip hop dance parties (especially for breakdance) during the late 1970s and early 1980s that hip hop founding father Kurtis Blow called the song "the national anthem of hip hop".[56]
Final years
James Brown performing in June 2005
After his stint in prison during the late 1980s, Brown met Larry
Fridie and Thomas Hart who produced the first James Brown biopic titled James Brown: The Man, the Message, the Music, released in 1992. James Brown returned with the album Love Over-Due in 1991. It included the single "(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On", which peaked at No. 48 on the R&B chart. His former record label Polydor also released the four-CD box set, Star Time, spanning Brown's career to date. Brown's release from prison also prompted his former record labels to reissue
his albums on CD, featuring additional tracks and commentary by music
critics and historians. That same year, Brown appeared on rapper MC Hammer's video for "Too Legit to Quit". Hammer had been noted, alongside Big Daddy Kane,
for bringing Brown's unique stage shows and their own energetic dance
moves to the hip-hop generation, with both Hammer and Kane listing Brown
as their idol. Both musicians also sampled Brown's work, with Hammer
having sampled the rhythms from "Super Bad" for his song, "Here Comes the Hammer", from his best-selling album, Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em.
Before the year was over, Brown, who had immediately returned to work
with his band following his release, organized a pay-per-view concert
following a show at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theatre, that was well received.
Brown continued making recordings. In 1993, his album Universal James was released. It included his final Billboard charting single, "Can't Get Any Harder",
which peaked at No. 76 on the US R&B chart and reached No. 59 on
the UK chart. Its brief charting in the UK was probably due to the
success of a remixed version of "I Feel Good" featuring Dakeyne. Brown also released the singles, "How Long" and "Georgia-Lina", which failed to chart. In 1995 Brown returned to the Apollo and recorded Live at the Apollo 1995.
It included a studio track titled "Respect Me", which was released as a
single; again it failed to chart. Brown's final studio albums, I'm Back and The Next Step, were released in 1998 and 2002 respectively. I'm Back featured the song "Funk on Ah Roll", which peaked at No. 40 in the UK but did not chart in his native US. The Next Step included Brown's final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In".
Both albums were produced by Derrick Monk. Brown's concert success,
however, remained unabated and Brown kept up with a grueling schedule
throughout the remainder of his life, living up to his previous
nickname, "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business", in spite of his
advanced age. In 2003, Brown participated in the PBSAmerican Masters television documentary James Brown: Soul Survivor, which was directed by Jeremy Marre.
The beginning of 2005 saw the publication of Brown's second book, I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul,
written with Marc Eliot. In February and March he participated in
recording sessions for an intended studio album with Fred Wesley, Pee
Wee Ellis, and other longtime collaborators. Though he lost interest in
the album, which remains unreleased, a track from the sessions, "Gut Bucket", appeared on a compilation CD included with the August 2006 issue of MOJO.[59] He appeared at Edinburgh 50,000 – The Final Push, the final Live 8 concert on July 6, 2005, where he performed a duet with British pop star Will Young on "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". He also performed a duet with another British pop star, Joss Stone, a week earlier on the United Kingdom chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Before his death, Brown was scheduled to perform a duet with singer Annie Lennox on the song "Vengeance" for her new album Venus,
which was released in 2007. In 2006, Brown continued his "Seven Decades
of Funk World Tour", his last concert tour where he performed all over
the world. His final U.S. performances were in San Francisco on August
20, 2006, as headliner at the Festival of the Golden Gate (Foggfest) on
the Great Meadow at Fort Mason. The following day, August 21, he
performed at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA, at a small theatre
(800 seats) on campus. His last shows were greeted with positive
reviews, and one of his final concert appearances at the Irish Oxegen festival in Punchestown in 2006
was performed for a record crowd of 80,000 people. He played a full
concert as part of the BBC's Electric Proms on October 27, 2006, at The
Roundhouse,[60]
supported by The Zutons, with special appearances from Max Beasley and
The Sugababes. Brown's last televised appearance was at his induction
into the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2006, before his death the following month.
James Brown Revue
Brown's most famous MC was Danny Ray (center) who was with him for over 30 years
For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant
productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his
band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers,
three horns and a percussionist.[61]
The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of
comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified
string section that played during the ballads.[62]
Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and
members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all
over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all
of the shows as one-nighters.[63][64]
Concert introduction
Before James Brown appeared on stage, his personal MC
gave him an elaborate introduction accompanied by drumrolls, as the MC
worked in Brown's various sobriquets along with the names of many of his
hit songs. The introduction by Fats Gonder, captured on Brown's 1963
album Live at the Apollo album, is a representative example:
So now ladies and gentlemen it is star time, are you ready for star
time? Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure
to present to you at this particular time, national and
international[ly] known as the hardest working man in show business, the
man that sings "I'll Go Crazy" ... "Try Me" ... "You've Got the Power" ... "Think" ... "If You Want Me" ... "I Don't Mind" ... "Bewildered" ...the million dollar seller, "Lost Someone" ... the very latest release, "Night Train" ... let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy" ... Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and The Famous Flames!!.[65]
Concert repertoire and format
Brown and MC Danny Ray during cape routine, BBC Electric Proms '06 concert
James Brown's performances were famous for their intensity and
length. His own stated goal was to "give people more than what they came
for — make them tired, 'cause that's what they came for.'"[66] Brown's concert repertoire consisted mostly of his own hits and recent songs, with a few R&B covers mixed in. Brown danced vigorously as he sang, working popular dance steps such as the Mashed Potato
into his routine along with dramatic leaps, splits and slides. In
addition, his horn players and backup singers (The Famous Flames)
typically performed choreographed dance routines, and later incarnations
of the Revue included backup dancers. Male performers in the Revue were
required to wear tuxedoes and cummerbunds
long after more casual concert wear became the norm among the younger
musical acts. Brown's own extravagant outfits and his elaborate processed hairdo
completed the visual impression. A James Brown concert typically
included a performance by a featured vocalist, such as Vicki Anderson or
Marva Whitney, and an instrumental feature for the band, which sometimes served as the opening act for the show.
Cape routine
A trademark feature of Brown's stage shows, usually during the song
"Please, Please, Please", involved Brown dropping to his knees while
clutching the microphone stand in his hands, prompting the show's
longtime MC, Danny Ray, to come out, drape a cape over Brown's shoulders
and escort him off the stage after he had worked himself to exhaustion during his performance. As Brown was escorted off the stage by the MC, Brown's vocal group, The Famous Flames, continued singing the background vocals "Please, please don't go-oh-oh".[67] Brown would then shake off the cape and stagger back to the microphone to perform an encore. Brown's routine was inspired by a similar one used by the professional wrestlerGorgeous George, as well as Little Richard.[68][69][70]
Brown demanded extreme discipline, perfection and precision from his
musicians and dancers — performers in his Revue showed up for rehearsals
and members wore the right "uniform" or "costume" for concert
performances.[71] During an interview conducted by Terri Gross during the NPR segment "Fresh Air" with Maceo Parker,
a former saxophonist in Brown's band for most of the 1960s and part of
the 1970s and 1980s, Parker offered his experience with the discipline
that Brown demanded of the band:
You gotta be on time. You gotta have your uniform. Your stuff's got to be intact. You gotta have the bow tie. You got to have it.
You can't come up without the bow tie. You cannot come up without a
cummerbund ... [The] patent leather shoes we were wearing at the time
gotta be greased. You just gotta have this stuff. This is what [Brown
expected] ... [Brown] bought the costumes. He bought the shoes. And if
for some reason [the band member decided] to leave the group, [Brown
told the person to] please leave my uniforms ....
Brown also had a practice of directing, correcting and assessing
fines on members of his band who broke his rules, such as wearing
unshined shoes, dancing out of sync or showing up late on stage.[73]
During some of his concert performances, Brown danced in front of his
band with his back to the audience as he slid across the floor, flashing
hand signals and splaying his pulsating fingers to the beat of the
music. Although audiences thought Brown's dance routine was part of his
act, this practice was actually his way of pointing to the offending
member of his troupe who played or sang the wrong note or committed some
other infraction. Brown used his splayed fingers and hand signals to
alert the offending person of the fine that person must pay to him for
breaking his rules.[74]
Brown's demands of his support acts were, however, quite the reverse. As Fred Wesley
recalled of his time as MD of the JBs, if Brown felt intimidated by a
support act he would try "To undermine their performances by shortening
their sets without notice, demanding that they not do certain
showstopping songs, and even insisting on doing the unthinkable, playing
drums on some of their songs. A sure set killer."[75]
Social activism
Education advocacy and humanitarianism
Brown's main social activism was in preserving the need for education
among youths, influenced by his own troubled childhood and his forced
dropping out of the seventh grade for wearing "insufficient clothes".
Due to heavy dropout rates in the 1960s, Brown released the pro-education song, "Don't Be a Drop-Out".
Royalties of the song were donated to charity used for dropout
prevention programs. The success of this led to Brown meeting with
President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House.
Johnson cited Brown for being a positive role model to the youth. After
the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 in
Memphis, Tennessee, Brown provided a free city-wide concert in Boston to
maintain public order (over the objections of the police chief, who
wanted to call off the concert, which he thought would incite
violence.). A lifelong Republican like his best friend, Ray Charles,
James Brown gained the confidence of President Richard Nixon, to whom he
found he had to explain the plight of Black Americans.[76]
Brown's outspoken support of President Nixon and the Republican Party
in the election of 1972 led groups such as the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the NAACP and the National Urban League to launch
a nationwide boycott of his businesses, at a time when Brown was the
most successful Black entrepreneur in America (below). He was also
harassed by J. Edgar Hoover and the IRS, probably because Hoover thought
it "dangerous" that a young "Black radical" had the ear of the
president.[76]
Throughout the remainder of his life, Brown made public speeches in
schools and continued to advocate the importance of education in school.
Upon filing his will in 2002, Brown advised that most of the money in
his estate go into creating the I Feel Good, Inc. Trust to benefit
disadvantaged children and provide scholarships for his grandchildren.
His final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In", advocated against
murders of young children in the streets. Brown often gave out money and
other items to children while traveling to his childhood hometown of
Augusta. A week before his death, while looking gravely ill, Brown gave
out toys and turkeys to kids at an Atlanta orphanage, something he had
done several times over the years.
Civil rights and self-reliance
Though Brown performed at benefit rallies for civil rights
organizations in the mid-1960s, Brown often shied away from discussing
civil rights in his songs. In 1968, in response to a growing urge of anti-war advocacy during the Vietnam War, Brown recorded the song, "America Is My Home". In the song, Brown performed a rap,
advocating patriotism and exhorting listeners to "stop pitying
yoursel[ves] and get up and fight." At the time of the song's release,
Brown had been participating in performing for troops stationed in
Vietnam. A day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Brown gave out a televised concert at the Boston Garden to calm concerned Boston relatives.[42] The show was later released on DVD as Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968. According to the documentary, The Night James Brown Saved Boston, then-mayor Kevin White
had strongly restrained the Boston police from cracking down on minor
violence, and protests after the assassination and religious and
community leaders worked to keep tempers from flaring.[77] White arranged to have Brown's performance broadcast multiple times on Boston's public television station, WGBH, thus keeping potential rioters off the streets, watching the concert for free.[77]
Angered by not being told of this, Brown demanded $60,000 for "gate"
fees (money he thought would be lost from ticket sales on account of the
concert being broadcast for free) and then threatened to go public
about the secret arrangement when the city balked at paying up
afterwards, news of which would have been a political death blow to
White and spark riots of its own.[77]
White eventually lobbied the behind-the-scenes power-brokering group
known as "The Vault" to come up with money for Brown's gate fee and
other social programs, contributing $100,000. Brown received $15,000
from them via the city. White also persuaded management at the Garden to
give up their share of receipts to make up the differences.[77]
Following this successful performance, Brown was cautioned by President
Johnson to visit cities ravaged from riots following King's
assassination to not resort to violence, telling them to "cool it,
there's another way".[78]
Responding to pressure from black activists, including H. Rap Brown, to take a bigger stance on their issues and from footage of black on black crime committed in inner cities, Brown wrote lyrics to the song, "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud", which his bandleader, Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis
accompanied with a musical composition. Released late that summer, the
song's lyrics helped to make it an anthem to the civil rights movement.
Brown only performed the song sporadically following its initial release
and later stated he had regrets recording it, saying in 1984, "Now 'Say
It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud' has done more for the black race
than any other record, but if I had my choice, I wouldn't have done it,
because I don't like defining anyone by race. To teach race is to teach
separatism."[79] In his autobiography he stated:
The song is obsolete now... But it was necessary to teach pride then,
and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people... People
called "Black and Proud" militant and angry – maybe because of the line
about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if
you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song. That's why I had
children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride...
The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my
concerts was mostly black after that. I don't regret it, though, even
if it was misunderstood.”[80]
With the release of a movie about his music and life, there has been a
strong resurgence of interest in Brown's importance to civil rights and
the black community. In the summer, 2014, the website Portside posted
this commentary on the impact of the song "Now 'Say it Loud - I'm Black
and I'm Proud"
"He was a civil rights icon. Put James in the pantheon of the most
impactful black men of the 20th century, and he would not be out of
place. How can I make such an assertion? One song: "I'm Black and I'm
Proud."
Before that song, if you wanted to start a fight with a man of color,
all one had to do was call him black. Up until the mid-sixties, we were
trying define ourselves: not colored anymore, now Negro. But black was
not something we called ourselves. And along comes this little man and
proudly states, "I'm black and I'm proud!" He took the thing that the
oppressor used to bludgeon us and made it a weapon of pride for us.
That song caught on like wildfire. One day, our heads were down, the
next day, our heads were held high, proud of who we were. We had all
these groups, civil rights groups, Muslims, Panthers, but it was JB who
gave us our swagger. That song lifted up an entire race! He put us on
his back and carried us. Dr. King gave us our rights. JB gave us our
dignity. Civil rights icon? You better believe it.
When that song came on the radio, cars stopped in the street. People
turned up their radios, came out of their houses, and sang along with
it; radio stations put it in a loop and played it for hours. The next
day people greeted each other with "Hello, black man!" "My black
brother." JB made black beautiful overnight." (Portside.com, 2014)
In 1969, Brown recorded two more songs of social commentary including "World" and "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing",
the latter song pleading for equal opportunity and self-reliance rather
than entitlement. In 1970, in response to some black leaders for not
being outspoken enough, Brown recorded "Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved" and "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing". In 1971, Brown began touring Africa and was made "freeman of the city" in Lagos, Nigeria by Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, for his "influence on black people all over the world."[81] With his company, James Brown Enterprises, Brown helped to provide jobs for blacks in business in the communities.[82] As the 1970s continued, Brown continued to record songs of social commentary, much prominently, 1972's "King Heroin" and the two-part ballad "Public Enemy", which dealt with drug addiction.
Political views
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Brown endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and appeared with Humphrey at political rallies. Brown began supporting Republican president Richard Nixon after being invited to perform at Nixon's inaugural ball in January 1969.[83] Brown's endorsement of Nixon during the 1972 presidential election
negatively impacted his career during that period with several national
Black organizations boycotting his records and protesting at his
concert shows.[84] Brown stated he was neither Democratic nor Republican despite his support of Republican presidents such as Nixon and Ronald Reagan.[85] In 1999, when being interviewed by Rolling Stone, the magazine asked him to name a hero in the 20th century, Brown mentioned John F. Kennedy and Republican Senator and former segregationist Strom Thurmond,
stating "when the young whippersnappers get out of line, whether
Democratic or Republican, an old man can walk up and say 'Wait a minute,
son, it goes this way.' And that's great for our country. He's like a
grandfather to me."[86] In 2003, Brown was the featured attraction of a D.C. fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.[87] Following the deaths of Ronald Reagan and his friend Ray Charles, Brown said to CNN, "I'm kind of in an uproar. I love the country and I got – you know I've been around a long time, through many presidents
and everything. So after losing Mr. Reagan, who I knew very well, then
Mr. Ray Charles, who I worked with and lived with like, all our life, we
had a show together in Oakland many, many years ago and it's like you found the placard."[88]
Personal life
At the end of his life, James Brown lived in a riverfront home in Beech Island, South Carolina, directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Brown had diabetes that went undiagnosed for years, according to his longtime manager Charles Bobbit.[89] In 2004 Brown was successfully treated for prostate cancer.[90]
Regardless of his health, Brown maintained his reputation as the
"hardest working man in show business" by keeping up with his grueling
performance schedule.
Marriages and children
Brown was married three times. He married his first wife, Velma
Warren, in 1953. Over a decade later, the couple had separated, with
their divorce finalized by 1969. Despite this, Brown and Warren
maintained a close friendship that lasted until Brown's death. Brown
married his second wife, Deidre "Deedee" Jenkins, on October 22, 1970.
The couple were separated by 1979 and their divorce was finalized less
than a year later on January 10, 1981. His third and final marriage was
to Adrienne Lois Rodriguez (March 9, 1950 – January 6, 1996). Brown
married her in 1984. After a contentious marriage that made headlines
due to domestic abuse complaints, Rodriguez died in January 1996. Less
than a year after her death, Brown hired Tomi Rae Hynie to be a background singer for his band. Brown and Hynie began dating shortly afterwards.
On December 23, 2002, Brown and Hynie held a wedding ceremony that
was officiated by Rev. Larry Flyer. Following Brown's death, controversy
surrounded the circumstances of the marriage, with Brown's attorney,
Albert "Buddy" Dallas, reporting that the marriage wasn't valid because
Hynie was married to Javed Ahmed, a Bangladeshi whom Hynie claimed
married her for a Green Card in an immigration fraud. Though Hynie contended the marriage was annulled, the annulment didn't occur until April 2004.[91][92] In an attempt to prove her marriage to Brown was valid, Hynie produced a 2001 marriage certificate
as proof of her marriage to Brown, but she did not provide King with
court records pointing to an annulment of her marriage to him or to
Ahmed.[93]
According to Dallas, Brown was angry and hurt that Hynie had concealed
her prior marriage from him and Brown moved to file for annulment from
Hynie.[94]
Dallas added that though Hynie's marriage to Ahmed was annulled after
she married Brown, the Brown-Hynie marriage was not valid under South
Carolina law because Brown and Hynie did not remarry after the
annulment.[93][95] In August 2003, Brown took out a full-page public notice in Variety featuring Hynie, James II and himself on vacation at Disney World to announce that he and Hynie were going their separate ways.[96][97]
Brown had numerous children and acknowledged nine of them including
five sons – Teddy (1954–1973), Terry, Larry, Daryl and James Joseph
Brown II and four daughters – Lisa, Dr. Yamma Noyola Brown Lumar, Deanna
Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown.[98]
Brown also had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Brown's eldest son, Teddy, died in a car crash on June 14, 1973.[99] According to an August 22, 2007 article published in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph,
DNA tests indicate that Brown also fathered at least three extramarital
children. The only one of them who has been identified is LaRhonda
Pettit (born 1962), a retired air stewardess and teacher who lives in
Houston.[100]
During contesting of Brown's will, another of the Brown family attorneys, Debra Opri revealed to Larry King that Brown wanted a DNA
test performed after his death to confirm the paternity of James Brown
II — not for Brown's sake but for the sake of the other family members.[101] In April 2007, Hynie selected a guardian ad litem whom she wants appointed by the court to represent her son, James Brown II, in the paternity proceedings.[102]
Drug abuse
For the majority of his career, Brown carried around a strict drug
and alcohol-free policy with any member in his entourage, including band
members, firing people who disobeyed orders, particularly those who
used or abused drugs and alcohol. Some members of Brown's vocal group
the Famous Flames were fired due to alcohol use. Despite the policy,
some of the original members of Brown's 1970s band, The J.B.'s, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, intentionally got high on LSD during a concert gig in 1971, causing Brown to fire them after the show because he had suspected them to be on drugs all along.[103]
However, by the mid-1980s, it was alleged that Brown himself was
using drugs. After meeting and later marrying Adrienne Rodriguez, she
and Brown began using PCP ("angel dust"). The drug resulted in domestically violent outbursts from Brown and he was arrested several times for domestic violence against Rodriguez while high on the drug.[104]
After a 1988 arrest from allegedly hitting his wife with a lead pipe
and shooting at her in their car during an argument, Brown went on the CNN program Sonya Live in L.A.
and appeared to be behaving erratically in response to questions asked
by host Dr. Sonya Friedman, refusing to discuss the domestic issue with
Rodriguez, instead wanting to bring more focus on his professional life.
At one point during the interview, Brown began shouting out his song
titles to one of Dr. Friedman's questions. The interview later went viral and led some to assume that Brown was either drunk or doped up.[105]
One of Brown's former mistresses recalled in an GQ magazine article on Brown some years after his death that Brown would smoke PCP "until that got hard to find," and cocaine, mixed with tobacco in Kools cigarettes.[106] In January 1998, he spent a week in rehab to deal with an addiction to prescription painkillers; a week following his release, he was arrested for an unlawful use of a handgun and possession of marijuana.[107]
Legal troubles
Brown's personal life was marred by several brushes with the law. At
the age of 16, he was convicted of theft and served three years in
juvenile prison. On July 16, 1978, after performing at the Apollo,
Brown was arrested for reportedly failing to turn in records from one
of his radio stations after the station was forced to file for
bankruptcy.[54][108]
In 1988, Brown was arrested twice, first for drugs and weapons charges
in May, and later in September of that year following a high-speed car
chase on Interstate 20 near the Georgia-South Carolina
state border. He was convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol and
assaulting a police officer, along with various drug-related and driving
offenses. Although he was sentenced to six years in prison, he was
eventually released in 1991 after serving only three years of his
sentence. Brown's FBI file, released to The Washington Post in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act,[109]
related Brown's claim that the high-speed chase did not occur as
claimed by the police, and that local police shot at his car several
times during an incident of police harassment and assaulted him after
his arrest.[110] Local authorities found no merit to Brown's accusations.
In another incident, the police were summoned to Brown's residence on
July 3, 2000 after he was accused of charging at an electric company
repairman with a steak knife when the repairman visited Brown's house to
investigate a complaint about having no lights at the residence.[111] In 2003, Brown was pardoned by the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services for past crimes that he was convicted of committing in South Carolina.[112]
For the remainder of his life, Brown was repeatedly arrested for domestic violence.
Adrienne Rodriguez, his third wife, had him arrested four times between
1987 and 1995 on charges of assault. In January 2004, Brown was
arrested in South Carolina on a domestic violence charge after Tomi Rae
Hynie accused him of pushing her to the floor during an argument at
their home, where she suffered scratches and bruises to her right arm
and hip. Later that year in June 2004, Brown pleaded no contest
to the domestic violence incident, but served no jail time. Instead,
Brown was required to forfeit a US$1,087 bond as punishment.[113]
In January 2005, a woman named Jacque Hollander filed a lawsuit
against James Brown, which stemmed from an alleged 1988 rape. When the
case was initially heard before a judge in 2002, Hollander's claims
against Brown were dismissed by the court as the limitations period for
filing the suit had expired. Hollander claimed that stress from the
alleged assault later caused her to contract Graves' Disease,
a thyroid condition. Hollander claimed that the incident took place in
South Carolina while she was employed by Brown as a publicist. Hollander
alleged that, during her ride in a van with Brown, Brown pulled over to
the side of the road and sexually assaulted her while he threatened her
with a shotgun. In her case against Brown, Hollander entered as
evidence a DNA sample and a polygraph result, but the evidence was not
considered due to the limitations defense. Hollander later attempted to
bring her case before the Supreme Court but nothing became of her
complaint.[114]
Death and aftermath
Death
James Brown memorial in Augusta, Georgia
On December 23, 2006, Brown became very ill and arrived at his dentist's office in Atlanta, Georgia, several hours later than his appointment for dental implant
work. During that visit, Brown's dentist observed that Brown looked
"very bad ... weak and dazed." Instead of performing the dental work,
the dentist advised Brown to see a doctor right away about his medical
condition.[115]
Brown checked in at the Emory Crawford Long Memorial Hospital the next day for a medical evaluation of his condition, and he was admitted to the hospital for observation and treatment.[116]
According to Charles Bobbit, Brown's longtime personal manager and
friend, Brown had had a noisy cough since he returned from a November
trip to Europe. Bobbit also added that Brown never complained about
being sick, and often performed while ill.[115][115] Although Brown had to cancel upcoming shows in Waterbury, Connecticut and Englewood, New Jersey,
Brown was confident that the doctor would discharge him from the
hospital in time to perform the New Year's Eve shows. For the New Year's
celebrations, Brown was scheduled to perform at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey and at the B. B. King Blues Club in New York, in addition to performing a song live on CNN for the Anderson CooperNew Year's Eve special.[116] However, Brown remained hospitalized, and his medical condition worsened throughout that day.
On December 25, 2006, Brown died at approximately 1:45 am EST (06:45 UTC) from congestive heart failure resulting from complications of pneumonia, at age 73, with his personal manager and longtime friend Charles Bobbit at his bedside.[117]
According to Bobbit, Brown stuttered "I'm going away tonight", and then
Brown took three long, quiet breaths and fell asleep before dying.[118]
On September 12, 2007, almost nine months after James Brown's death, Bobby Byrd, the original leader and founder of The Famous Flames vocal group along with Brown, died of cancer at 73 years old.[119]
Memorial services
Public memorial at the Apollo Theater in Harlem
Public funeral in Augusta, Georgia, with Michael Jackson attending
Brown's public and private memorial ceremonies were elaborate,
complete with costume changes for Brown and videos featuring him in
concert performances. Brown's body, which was placed in a Promethean
casket, which is bronze polished to a golden shine, was driven through
the streets of New York to the Apollo Theater in a white, glass-encased horse-drawn carriage.[126][127]
In Augusta, Georgia, the procession for Brown's public memorial visited
Brown's statue as the procession made its way to the James Brown Arena.
During the public memorial at the James Brown Arena, nachos and
pretzels were served to mourners, as a video showed Brown's last
performance in Augusta, Georgia and the Ray Charlesversion of "Georgia on My Mind" played soulfully in the background.[121][128][129]
Brown's last backup band, The Soul Generals, also played the music of
Brown's hits during the memorial service at the James Brown Arena. The
group was joined by Bootsy Collins on bass, with MC Hammer performing a dance in James Brown style.[130] Former Temptations lead singer Ali-Ollie Woodson performed "Walk Around Heaven All Day" at the memorial services.[131]
Last will and testament
James Brown signed his last will and testament on August 1, 2000, before Strom Thurmond, Jr., an attorney for Brown's estate.[132]
The irrevocable trust, separate and apart from Brown's will, was
created on Brown's behalf in 2000 by his attorney, Albert "Buddy"
Dallas, who was named as one of three personal representatives of
Brown's estate. Brown's will covered the disposition of his personal
assets, such as clothing, cars and jewelry, while Brown's irrevocable
trust covered the disposition of music rights, business assets of James
Brown Enterprises and Brown's Beech Island estate in South Carolina.[133]
During the reading of Brown's will on January 11, 2007, Thurmond
revealed that Brown's six adult living children (Terry Brown, Larry
Brown, Daryl Brown, Yamma Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha
Brown) were named in the will. Hynie and James II were not mentioned in
the will as parties who could inherit Brown's property.[132][134]
Brown's will was signed ten months before James II was born and more
than a year before Brown's marriage to Tomi Rae Hynie. Like Brown's
will, his irrevocable trust also did not mention Hynie and James II as
recipients of Brown's property. The irrevocable trust was established
before, and had not been amended since, the birth of James II.[135]
On January 24, 2007, Brown's children filed a lawsuit against the
personal representatives of Brown's estate. In their petition, Brown's
children asked the court to remove the personal representatives of
Brown's estate (including Brown's attorney and estate's trustee, Albert
"Buddy" Dallas) and appoint a special administrator because of perceived
impropriety and alleged mismanagement of Brown's assets.[136][137]
To challenge the validity of the will and irrevocable trust, Hynie also
filed a lawsuit against Brown's estate on January 31, 2007. In her
lawsuit against Brown's estate, Hynie asked the court to recognize her
as Brown's widow, and she also asked the court to appoint a special
administrator for the estate.[138]
On January 27, 2015, Judge Doyet Early III ruled that Tommie Rae
Hynie Brown is officially the widow of James Brown. The decision was
based on the grounds that Hynie's previous marriage was invalid and that
James Brown abandoned his efforts to annul his own marriage to Hynie.
If the ruling stands, Hynie could be entitled to a share of the James
Brown estate.[139]
Legacy
James Brown received a variety of awards and honors throughout his
lifetime and after his death. At one city, fans voted to honor Brown by
naming a bridge after the entertainer. In 1993, the City Council of Steamboat Springs, Colorado conducted a poll of its residents to choose a new name for the bridge that crossed the Yampa River
on Shield Drive. The winning name with 7,717 votes was "James Brown
SoulCenter of the Universe Bridge". The bridge was officially dedicated
in September 1993, and James Brown appeared at the ribbon-cutting
ceremony for the event.[140]
Although a petition was started by a local group of ranchers to return
the name of the bridge to "Stockbridge" for historical reasons, the
ranchers backed off after citizens defeated their efforts because of the
popularity of Brown's name. Brown returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado on July 4, 2002 for an outdoor music festival, performing with other bands such as The String Cheese Incident.[141]
During his long career, James Brown received several prestigious
music industry awards and honors. In 1983, Brown was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Brown was named as one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. However, the members of his original vocal group, The Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) were not inducted.[142]
However, on April 14, 2012 The Famous Flames were automatically and
retroactively inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside
James Brown, without the need for nomination and voting, under the
premise that they should have been inducted with him back in 1986.[143][144] On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards.[145] A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997 to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[145]
On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee for the New York
Songwriters Hall of Fame. On August 6, 2002, James Brown was honored as
the first BMI Urban Icon at the BMI Urban Awards. His BMI accolades include an impressive ten R&B Awards and six Pop Awards.[146] On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees who performed at the ceremony.[147] In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003.[145] In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked James Brown as No. 7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.[148] In an article for Rolling Stone, critic Robert Christgau cited Brown as "the greatest musician of the rock era".[149]
Brown was also honored in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia
for his philanthropy and civic activities. On November 20, 1993, Mayor
Charles DeVaney of Augusta held a ceremony to dedicate a section of 9th
Street between Broad and Twiggs Streets, renamed "James Brown
Boulevard", in the entertainer's honor.[145] On May 6, 2005, as a 72nd birthday present for Brown, the city of Augusta unveiled a life-sized bronze James Brown statue on Broad Street.[145]
The statue was to have been dedicated a year earlier, but the ceremony
was put on hold because of a domestic abuse charge that Brown faced at
the time.[150]
In 2005, Charles "Champ" Walker and the We Feel Good Committee went
before the County commission and received approval to change Augusta's
slogan to "We Feel Good". Afterwards, Official renamed the city's civic
center the James Brown Arena, and James Brown attended a ceremony for the unveiling of the namesake center on October 15, 2006.[145]
On December 30, 2006, during the public memorial service at the James Brown Arena, Dr. Shirley A.R. Lewis, president of Paine College, a historically black college in Augusta, Georgia, bestowed posthumously upon Brown an honorary doctorate
in recognition and honor of his many contributions to the school in its
times of need. Brown was scheduled originally to receive the honorary
doctorate from Paine College during its May 2007 commencement.[151][152] During the 49th Annual Grammy Awards presentation held on February 11, 2007, James Brown's famous cape was draped over a microphone by Danny Ray at the end of a montage in honor of notable people in the music industry who died during the previous year. Earlier that evening, Christina Aguilera
delivered an impassioned performance of one of Brown's hits, "It's a
Man's Man's Man's World" followed by a standing ovation, while Chris Brown performed a dance routine in honor of James Brown.[153]
As a tribute to James Brown, the Rolling Stones covered the song, "I'll Go Crazy" from Brown's Live at the Apollo album, during their 2007 European tour.[154]Jimmy Page
has remarked, "He [James Brown] was almost a musical genre in his own
right and he changed and moved forward the whole time so people were
able to learn from him."[155] On December 22, 2007, the first annual "Tribute Fit For the King of
King Records" in honor of James Brown was held at the Madison Theater in
Covington, Kentucky. The tribute, organized by Bootsy Collins, featured appearances by Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D of Public Enemy, The Soul Generals, Buckethead, Freekbass, Triage and many of Brown's surviving family members. Comedian Michael Coyer was the MC for the event. During the show, the mayor of Cincinnati proclaimed December 22 as James Brown Day.[156]
Discography
For an extended list of albums, compilations and charting singles, see James Brown discography.
In addition, Brown's 1970 double album Sex Machine was ranked 96th in a 2005 survey held by British television station Channel 4 to determine the 100 greatest albums of all time.[158] Other notable albums, originally released as double LP records, feature extensive playing by The J.B.'s and served as prolific sources of samples for later musical artists, including:
The 1968 Live at the Apollo, Vol. II
double LP album was notably influential on musicians at the time of its
release. This classic album remains an example of Brown's energetic
live performances and audience interaction, as well as providing a means
of documenting the metamorphosis of his music from the R&B and soul
styles into hard funk.
Notable singles
Until the early 1970s, Brown was famous mostly for his road show and
singles, rather than his albums (with his live LPs as a major
exception). Six of his hit singles appeared on the Rolling Stone Magazine's 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time:[159]
In 2006, Hip-O Select Records began a multi-volume reissue of James Brown's complete singles (both A-sides and B-sides)
on CD. Eleven volumes have been released, covering the periods 1956–60,
1960–63, 1964–65, 1966–67, 1967–69, 1969–70, 1970–72, 1972–73, 1973–75,
1975–79, and 1979–81.
Get on Up (2014), Mick Jagger and Brian Grazer
began producing a documentary film on Brown in 2013. A fiction film had
been in the planning stages for many years and was revived when Jagger
read the script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth.[160] The film Get On Up was released in theaters on August 1, 2014. Chadwick Boseman plays the role of James Brown in the film.
In other media
Games
In the video game World of Warcraft, the first boss character
of the Forge of Souls dungeon is Bronjahm, "the Godfather of Souls".
His quotes during the fight are musical references, and he has a chance
of dropping an item called "Papa's Brand New Bag".[161]
A different version of "I Got You", recorded in 1974, is playable in the rhythm video game Rock Band 3. In addition, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (Pt. 1)" is available for download across the series, while "Super Bad (Pts. 1 & 2)" was released later, only for the third game.
In the Worms Armaggedon and Worms World Party
video games, many of James Brown's song titles are used in the "Soul
Man" custom voice setting like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "Like a
Sex Machine", clear references to James Brown.
Television
Appeared as Lou DeLong in the 1987 Miami Vice episode "Missing Hours"
Sussman, M. (producer). (December 25, 2006). Arts: Soul classics by James Brown (multimedia presentation). The New York Times. Retrieved January 9, 2007.
James Brown. (1998). Notable Black American Men.
Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale (Document no. K1622000047).
Retrieved January 12, 2007, from the Biography Resource Center database.
George, N. (1988). The Death of Rhythm & Blues, 101. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-55238-5.
Vincent, R. & Clinton, G. (1996). Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One, 123. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0-312-13499-1.
Slutsky, Allan, Chuck Silverman (1997). The Funkmasters-the Great James Brown Rhythm Sections. ISBN 1576234436
Stewart,
Alexander (2000: 306). "Funky Drummer: New Orleans, James Brown and the
Rhythmic Transformation of American Popular Music." Popular Music, v.
19, n. 3. Oct. 2000, p. 293-318.
Gottschild, B.D. (August 2000). James Brown: Godfather of dance. Dance Magazine, 74(8), p. 54 (Document no. A63735725). Retrieved January 11, 2007 from the Biography Resource Center database.
Fred Wesley's sleevenotes to Honey & the Bees "Dynamite!" (Jamie4009) 1999
South Carolina pardons James Brown for past crimes. (June 9, 2003). Jet Magazine, 36. Retrieved January 14, 2007 from the Lexis-Nexis Academic database.
James Brown's legal troubles delay statue unveiling. (May 1, 2004). The Augusta Chronicle. Retrieved January 14, 2007 from the Lexis-Nexis Academic database.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Chadwick Boseman as Brown in the new biopic “Get On Up.” Credit D. Stevens/Universal Studios
James Brown during the NBA All Star Game jam session in 2001.
