James Brown is dead. It's a sentence I'd hoped never to write. The whole point of legends is that they live on through the ages, but James Brown was one of those rare people who cemented his legend during his own lifetime, and so he seemed immortal. There was physical evidence of his immortality, too-- in early December 2006, 54 years into his musical career, he was still touring, and this was after beating prostate cancer two years earlier. Just days before his death, he was handing out toys for charity, looking forward to an upcoming New Year's Eve concert. He couldn't quite do the splits like he used to, but he wasn't about to relinquish his title of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business.
Brown bestowed that title on himself, but he just as easily earned it. Born in a shack in rural South Carolina, as a child Brown was surrounded by poverty in the segregated South. Only intermittently educated, he spent much of his childhood living in an Augusta, Georgia whorehouse with his aunt Honey Washington, and he developed a knack for the hustle. Injury put an early kibosh on his athletic activities, but he would channel the energy he couldn't devote to sports into his stage show for the rest of his life. Arrested as a teenager for stealing clothes from unlocked cars, Brown received a harsh eight- to 16-year sentence, and was given the first of his many nicknames, "Music Box", while serving three of those years.
In 1952, Brown wrote a letter to the Georgia state parole board pleading for early release so that he could devote himself to singing gospel. On his release, he did sing gospel briefly with Sarah Byrd, but soon found himself touring with Sarah's brother Bobby Byrd, who would spend the next 30 years as Brown's right-hand man. By 1956, Brown's charisma as a performer had moved him to the front of the band, and the group cut a demo as James Brown & the Famous Flames. The song, "Please Please Please", found its way to Cincinnati-based King Records, and though label owner Syd Nathan notoriously thought it was garbage, the imprint still released the song. It hit big, going on to move more than a million units.
It almost became Brown's only hit. Over the next two years, Brown tried nine times to make it back into the charts and failed on each attempt. Where many performers would simply have read the writing on the wall and hung it up, Brown hit the Chitlin' circuit harder than anyone, criss-crossing the country and sharpening his band into one of the tightest units ever heard. King was ready to drop him, but that all changed with his eleventh single. "Try Me" topped the r&b charts, grazed the pop chart, and went gold.
This second hit was huge, both for Brown and popular music as we now know it. Brown was able to ditch the usual session musicians and begin recording with his own band, led by saxophonist J.C. Davis. It was the beginning of Brown's gradual transformation into Soul Brother No. 1, the father of funk, and a band leader who went to extraordinary lengths to extract from his musicians the sounds he heard in his head. And what he heard in the early 60s were the seeds of a musical revolution.
Brown's impassioned, pleading, screaming vocal performances had already played a role in the emergence of soul music from its roots in r&b, but what he would reach for in the first half of the 60s was the evolution of the beat into something harder and more elemental. He could never have done it without a band that was able to lay waste to any rhythm he put at its feet, and he built that band with a grueling tour schedule that topped 300 dates a year.
His shows were frenzied, exhausting affairs, highlighted by perhaps the greatest stage shtick ever: As the final number played, Brown was approached by a cape-wielding stagehand who would cover his shoulders and lead him to the wings. But Brown would burst from the cape two, three, four times-- how ever many he thought the audience could take-- and keep the show going. He and the Flames' live prowess was documented to thrilling effect on October 24, 1962. This midnight performance at Manhattan's Apollo Theater became one of the greatest live albums ever released.
King was reluctant to even release Live at the Apollo-- Brown fought Syd Nathan tooth and nail to put it out, convinced he needed to bring what he was doing every night to a larger audience. Brown had personally financed the recording, given cups of hot coffee to the long line of punters waiting in unseasonably cold weather for tickets to the show-- and the audience repaid him with insane screaming and passionate responses to his every move, leading to a performer/crowd dynamic rarely heard on live records.
When it finally was released, the album brought Brown the larger attention he craved and effectively put the cornerstone of his legend in place. The emcee introduced him as "Mr. Dynamite", and he delivered on what that promised. The studio singles he released around this time palpably illustrate his artistic development-- listen to "Think", "Night Train", "Out of Sight", "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" consecutively and you're listening to the incremental invention of funk, from 1960 to 1965. Brown always liked a heavy downbeat, but by 1965, that first beat of the bar was a kick in the pants and an order to dance.
1967's "Cold Sweat" brought the funk sound to a boiling, seven-and-a-half-minute apotheosis. By now, Brown had realized that two chords could be plenty if you did the right things with them, and he had abandoned notions of traditional songwriting in favor of an intense, stripped groove. It was about as opposite to ornate psychedelia as you could get in the late 60s, and it partially plotted the way toward hip-hop ages before that genre emerged as a true form.
Brown had crossed over to white audiences on his early funk sides, first hitting the pop Top 40 in 1964 with "Out of Sight", and nailing the #3 spot a year later with "I Got You (I Feel Good)". He effectively turned some of that audience away with 1968's charged cry of freedom "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)", a song that positioned him as a spokesman for a generation of disaffected blacks (even if the backup singers shouting "I'm black and I'm proud" were mostly white and Asian students). As Brown's friend Al Sharpton recently said, that song effectively made the word "negro" outmoded. Brown embraced the word "black" and his race at a time when a dark-skinned man with little education was virtually restricted from having a positive impact on society.
Success didn't necessarily make life easy for Brown. He sparred continuously with his label throughout the mid-60s-- "Out of Sight" had been recorded for Smash Records in blatant disregard for his contract with King. Often lost in the discussion of Brown as singer and band leader in this period is Brown the musician. That's him playing drums on "Night Train", and he cut a series of instrumentals for Smash and King on which he played lead on the Hammond B3. (Funkster Larry Grogan thoughtfully compiled some of the best Smash organ sides here.)
As a band leader, Brown required extreme discipline from his musicians, issuing stage uniforms that were essentially a time warp back to the 50s, complete with patent leather shoes and cummerbunds. In a 1994 interview with Fresh Air's Terri Gross, Bootsy Collins, who played with Brown in 1969 and 1970, laughingly described playing for Brown like this: "People would be coming up to the front of the stage wearing bleached jeans and t-shirts and afros and the granny glasses. We was all freakin' out, we was havin' a freakin' party, and here we are playing with James Brown and we're in the army now."
Collins was only in Brown's band because his autocratic ways had caused most of his musicians to walk out on him in 1969-- their independent exploits can best be heard on Fuel 2000's Doing Their Own Thing compilation, credited to Maceo Parker & All the King's Men. Unperturbed by the mutiny, Brown recruited Cleveland band the Pacemakers, which included Collins and his brother Phelps (better known as Catfish). The Collins brothers went on to become two of the most crucial members of George Clinton's P-Funk collective (where their visual style became a bit more flamboyant), but their few recordings with Brown include some of his hardest funk numbers, topped by 1970's "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (Part 1)", a monster groover that still hits like a ton of bricks more than three decades later.
Most of Brown's mutinous musicians eventually returned to the fold as the J.B.'s, led by trombonist Fred Wesley. Brown founded People Records as a forum for his musical entourage to do its own thing-- many of the records cut by the J.B.'s, Bobby Byrd, Maceo Parker, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson, and Hank Ballard for People are nearly as vital (and certainly as heavily sampled) as Brown's own work of the period. The three-volume James Brown's Funky People series is essential listening for funk devotees.
Ultimately, playing with Brown guaranteed funk musicians a degree of respect, and many of them have become renowned in their own right. Saxophonists Maceo Parker, St. Clair Pinckney, and Pee Wee Ellis, guitarist Jimmy Nolen, backup singer and loyal lieutenant Bobby Byrd, the Collins brothers, bassist "Sweet" Charles Sherrell, and drummer Clyde Stubblefield are all funk and soul giants, and all share to some degree the credit for Brown's sound. They were the men James Brown could count on to take it to the bridge when he asked them to, and never sooner.
By the mid-70s, Brown's furious artistic pace had largely caught up to him. He was stuck in a musical rut-- perhaps the groove was just too deep to extricate himself from, but disco passed him right by. 1979's "It's Too Funky in Here" was his last significant track until 1985's "Living in America" briefly returned him to the pop charts, if not the graces of critics. He took a more artistically satisfying turn on Afrika Bambaataa's "Unity", credited as "The Godfather of Soul James Brown", and proved that it was hardly a leap at all from his vocal style in the early 70s to rapping.
Certainly, Brown's impact on hip-hop isn't limited to that appearance and the innumerable samples his music has provided to beat-hungry producers. It's also in his revelation that the groove could be king, and that traditional song structure and melody could be secondary to rhythm.
Brown's 1988 arrest and imprisonment following a widely publicized domestic violence incident and subsequent interstate police chase tarnished his public image, but by that time he was on the radio at least as much as he had ever been, in the form of hundreds of samples that formed the basis for many of the day's hip-hop hits. His legend had solidified, and his influence was apparent in the most unlikely of places, from West African Afrobeat to British post-punk.
Brown was a member of the very first class of inductees to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and perhaps the only member of that class whose relevancy was on the upswing at the time of his induction. The final piece of his immortality was put in place when Polydor released the seminal four-disc Star Time boxed set in 1991, the first truly coherent compilation of much of his most important work, most of which had originally dropped on scattered singles and haphazardly assembled LPs.
The flood of compilations hasn't stopped since, and it seems unlikely to be stemmed any time soon. Fact is, Brown's musical vision was so vital and revolutionary that we're still parsing it to this day. Brown's subpar late-late-period recordings made in the 1990s have been politely ignored-- it seems somehow fitting that his later years, in spite of forgettable recordings like 1998's final studio bow I'm Back, cemented his image as a performer who wouldn't quit.
On the 1960 single "I'll Go Crazy", Brown sang, "You've got to live for yourself/ Yourself and nobody else," and he embodied that sentiment to the end. I've spent the last week listening to his music non-stop, and I'm struck by how fresh it still sounds. After all this time, it's still hard to find better music to drive to than "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" and "Get on the Good Foot". And as a vocalist, he was as powerful as they come-- his anachronistic 1969 big band record Soul on Top sounds more vital today than it likely did when it was recorded.
It seems beyond doubt that Brown would have been heartened by the celebration of his life and art that unfolded outside the Apollo Theater last week at his public wake. People blasted his music, sang of black pride, and danced in the streets. It was a fitting tribute to His Bad Self, a man who did his own thing to the very end.
