James Brown
“It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time — nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in show business... the man that sang ‘I’ll Go Crazy,’ ‘Try Me,’ ‘You’ve Got the Power,’ ‘Think,’ ‘If You Want Me,’ ‘I Don’t Mind,’ ‘Bewildered,’ 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: James Brown and the Famous Flames.”
Those words are shouted above the rising screams of a legion of female fans by organist and emcee Lucas “Fats” Ponder at the beginning of James Brown Live at the Apollo (Polydor). He’s introducing a man who, at the time this 1962 concert was being put to tape to result in one of the best live albums ever made, truly needed no introduction. Add to that list “Please Please Please,” “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Prisoner of Love,” “ Soul Power,” “The Payback,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “ Cold Sweat,” “ Licking Stick — Licking Stick,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Out of Sight,” “Sex Machine,” and “Living in America” and the titles become a roll call of some of the most vital tunes recorded in the rock era, and a memorial to their maker — a hardscrabble kid who got in trouble with the law and found salvation, if not always peace in music, and became the Godfather of Soul.
Brown died from congestive heart failure on December 25, Christmas day, at a hospital in Atlanta after being admitted for pneumonia 48 hours earlier. During his 73 years on Earth, Brown revolutionized popular music and set a standard for frenzied live performances that few musicians have equaled. Although age slowed his splits, high-speed pirouettes, and frenetic footwork in recent decades, the 1965 film The T.A.M.I. Show captures Brown at the climax of one of his concerts in peak form — wailing “Please, Please, Please” into the microphone, dropping to his knees and weeping in spasms, being draped in a cape and helped to his feet by his backing singers the Famous Flames only to run spinning and dancing back to center stage to do it all again until the crowd crackles with a howling intensity that’s the aural equivalent of fireworks.
Brown’s voice remained arresting until the end, shredded and distinct — a soul voice sprung from the clay of the city he called home, Augusta, Georgia, where he was buried on Saturday, and from the church, where he first experienced the evangelical fervor he injected into his shows.
The odds were stacked against Brown from the start. He was born on May 3, 1933 in a shack in Barnwell, South Carolina. Four years later he was taken to Augusta by his aunt Honey, who ran a brothel. Soon he was at work: picking cotton, shining shoes, and dancing for pennies in the streets. He was barred from school because his clothes were too shabby. And in 1949 he broke into a car and was sent to prison where he spent three years before parole.
Brown started singing in jail and, when he was released, joined the Gospel Starlighters, a group led by future Famous Flame Bobby Byrd. As the Starlighters evolved into a pop band, Brown, who played drums and swapped lead vocals with the other members, came to the fore. As the Flames, with Brown providing ignition, they cut “Please Please Please” in a basement studio in Macon in 1955. A talent scout heard the tune on local radio and signed them to a contract with King Records, who recut the song and released it nationally in 1956.
“Please Please Please” sold a million copies, and when “Try Me” hit the top of the rhythm and blues charts two years later, Brown’s stardom was concrete — at least in the realm of “race” artists. In 1963 he crossed the color line with the elegant “Prisoner of Love,” a sweet, soaring ballad that offset his raspy croon with an orchestra. It reached number 18 on the pop charts and was followed into the mainstream by Live at the Apollo, which became the number two album in America.
During these early years of his career Brown was still formulating his style. As the late musician and journalist Robert Palmer explained in his entry on Brown in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, his blend of clarion voiced gospel harmonies, driving horns, and exaggerated shuffles wasn’t unique. Ray Charles had crystallized the sound of soul music in 1953 with “I’ve Got a Woman.” But Brown began incorporating Latin cross-rhythms, and his guitarist Jimmy Nolen had invented a choked style of playing chords that amped up the group’s rhythmic thrust. By 1964, the bass and horn lines of Brown’s band had become so percussive under his direction that the entire unit had morphed into, essentially, a giant drum kit. All rhythm.
On his own, Brown had reached back to his roots and pursued his musical vision to distill a style that embraced the fundamental qualities of African music, but with a distinctly Western pop-, blues-, and gospel-informed spin. Many of his compositions began to be based on a single chord, offset by one-, two-, or three-note bursts from the horns, staccato guitar riffs, and bass lines of two- or three-notes. It was mesmerizing, hypnotic, and at its best — in tunes like “Cold Sweat” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” — almost heart-stopping. Riding this raft of rhythms, Brown’s dancing became even more physical and percussive.
With his razor wire voice, Brown might’ve become the most popular artist in America if the British Invasion hadn’t nudged him out of the limelight. He was arguably the only rock and roll era performer to equal Elvis Presley in vocal authority, charisma, stage presence, song interpretation, and sexual magnetism.
As it was, Brown opened the locks of the mainstream for Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Joe Tex, Al Green, and other soul testifiers who followed him up the charts. More than seeding an audience for the artists who recorded for labels like Stax and Goldwax in the 1960s, Brown continued to influence the direction of popular music in the ’70s. His chiming, choked guitar chords, terse bass patterns, and hypnotic one-chord foundations became the building blocks of disco and spread throughout the world to embed themselves in reggae and African music, from the Afro-beat pioneered by Fela Kuti to the juju exemplified by King Sunny Adé. And when hip-hop arrived, he became the most sampled man in show business. The beats of “Funky Drummer” alone have been used more than 100 times by rappers.
Brown also knew how to take care of business. When he became dissatisfied with the King label’s ability to get his recordings into stores and onto radio in sufficient numbers, he formed his own Fair Deal Productions in 1964. His next sides went to Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury Records, and some of his biggest hits including “Out of Sight” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” followed. At a time when many African-American performers were getting Cadillacs instead of the royalty checks they’d justly earned, Brown not only controlled his master recordings; he also became his own manager.
Brown’s and Boston’s history became intertwined in 1968. On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Violence exploded in major cities as African-Americans reacted in pain and anger. Boston mayor Kevin White feared that the Hub might also burst into flames; racial tensions were already near a flashpoint. He considered canceling all public events, including an April 5 James Brown concert at Boston Garden. After advisors suggested to White that scrapping Brown’s show could, itself, be tinder for a riot, the mayor visited the Godfather to ask if they could work together to keep the peace. After network TV stations declined, local PBS affiliate WGBH volunteered to broadcast the show.
Brown soothed his mourning audience by dedicating the concert to King and delivering a million-watt performance packed with hits. He invited White to speak to the crowd and the cameras. And when frenzied fans went wild and rushed the stage, Brown assured police that he could handle things himself and talked the crowd back into their seats.
But Brown’s politics were perplexing. He performed often for US troops abroad, including tours of Vietnam, but endorsed Richard Nixon’s second-term election bid.
Brown’s last chart hit was “Living in America,” which reached number four on Billboard’s Top 40 chart and won his second Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording in 1985. That year he also became one of the first inductees in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Although the hits stopped coming, the accolades continued. Brown got a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992 and Kennedy Center Honors in 2003. He kept performing until the end and was scheduled to appear in New York City on New Year’s Eve.
His personal life also earned Brown attention. In the 1970s he got whacked for back taxes by the IRS and was compelled to sell his Lear Jet and three radio stations to pay $4.5-million. And his oldest son Teddy died in a 1973 car crash. In ’87, high on PCP, he interrupted a seminar in the office building he owned brandishing a gun and led police on a chase that landed him in prison once again. Eight years ago, after firing a rifle and another police pursuit, he was sentenced to a 90-day drug rehab program. And in 2004 he was charged with domestic violence against his wife, Tomi Rae Hynie. In a final bizarre twist, Hynie and their five-year-old son, James Brown II, were locked out of Brown’s home by his attorneys — who claim Hynie and Brown’s marriage is invalid — the day after his death.
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