1. Please, Please, Please
After James Brown died on Christmas Day in 2006, many obituary writers felt there was something that needed to be mentioned as a priority before they listed his many achievements, that the former Hardest Working Man In Show Business really was a nasty piece of work. I have no desire to buck this trend here. Few musicians who worked with him stayed the course for long, and they sometimes parted ways with him acrimoniously. Some left his employ feeling he had ripped off their ideas, not credited them fully for their work, or owing them money. In his biography, The Life of James Brown, Geoff Brown notes that he was an “ill-tempered, inveterate, emotional and physical scrapper” before adding: “A list of people physically assaulted by him would not be a short one, nor would it be restricted to the male of the species.”
Perhaps one could make a posthumous defence for Brown’s behaviour based on biographical facts. He entered this world in a one-room tin shack, outside Barnwell, South Carolina, on 3 May 1933. He was born in ill health: he came close to dying during childbirth and had to be resuscitated. He was an African American/Cherokee in a deeply racist and still segregated society. His mother left when he was four. As a child he picked cotton, cut sugar cane and shined shoes. When he was 10, he moved with his aunt into a boarding house cum brothel and gambling den, where he was beaten regularly by his father and others. By the age of 11 he was forced into petty crime: shoplifting and stealing hubcaps and car batteries to buy food and clothes.
While scraping by as a child, Brown was also busy learning to play organ, bass, guitar, saxophone, trumpet and drums. One of the accusations levelled at him by those who presumably never looked beyond Living in America and Sex Machine is that Brown was little more than a bullying band leader who bellowed childish gibberish over simplistic grooves played by other, more talented musicians. But the truth is that he could play more instruments than most. At 15, the budding musician was caught breaking into a car and sentenced to eight to 16 years at Georgia Juvenile Training Institute. Brown seems to have prospered while incarcerated, despite harsh conditions. He founded a gospel quartet, , and he met Bobby Byrd, whose family’s sponsorship helped him get parole after only three years. Byrd would become Brown’s right-hand man for most of his adult life.
Please, Please, Please was James Brown and the Famous Flames’ first single, released in 1956 by Federal. And there, from the outset, is that voice: torrid, strident, awash with powerful emotion. The song is raw and special, and it became a sleeper hit – yet one that the Famous Flames would struggle to follow up – eventually reaching No 6 on the Billboard R&B chart. There’s a case to be made for this first single being Brown’s signature song. He closed the vast majority of live shows with it, right up until the year he died, usually combined with his flamboyant and electrifying cape routine.
2. Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag
Brown was involved in the production of a landmark record in 1963, the game-changing Live at the Apollo. This phenomenal LP spearheaded a change in the perception of black musicians being only singles rather than album artists. Yet it would be another two years before the musician started living up to his initial promise as regards the Billboard chart. From 1965, he kicked off a series of hits, which included It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, I Got You (I Feel Good) and the mighty Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag. With this track, stripped back and minimal, with a breakbeat that could fell a rhino. , Brown was now creating a trailblazing sound all of his own.
3. Cold Sweat
When the accolade for creating a genre of music is awarded to one musician, there is usually critical dissent. The boundaries between musical styles of are often poorly defined and open to interpretation. But if there is one person from the canon of late 20th-century music who can e awarded this prestigious honour, it is James Brown. You only have to listen to Cold Sweat once and compare it to contemporaneous soul fare from 1967 such as It Takes Two by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, or Mustang Sally by Wilson Pickett, to see what a huge leap forward Brown had taken in hammering soul into funk. In fact, it was Pickett that Brown had in his sights when he said: “Before I let them take my sound, I’ll break out in a cold sweat!” His record company, too, must have been perspiring in fear when they heard this monstrous groove with its sickly, elastic, one-chord bass line, demented screaming and thunderous breakbeat – until, that is, it got to No 1 on the Billboard R&B chart, where it stayed for three weeks.
4. Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud
The events surrounding the release, in 1968, of the single Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud provide a glimpse into the complex and sometimes contradictory belief systems of Mr Dynamite. Brown was, among other things, part traditional southern gent, part bootstrapped American dreamer, part avariciously cold-blooded capitalist and part Afro-conscious black radical. His pragmatic desire to be able to flit between these roles helped created the stress fractures along which his career would eventually crumble. Brown had hitherto kept the radical black left at arm’s length despite being courted furiously by them, but sensing his profound talismanic power over young black America in the late 60s, his dedication to the cause went into overdrive after the murder of Martin Luther King in April 1968. But Brown’s initial move was to release a couple of singles with a decidedly conservative overtone. First came the curious Licking Stick – a functional and loose jam about corporal punishment – followed closely by the subpar, conservative funk of America Is My Home – an attempt to write a new, shamelessly consumerist, anti-peace movement anthem. As he said at the time: “I’m attempting to spread black power through ownership.” The release of Say It Loud in August changed things drastically, albeit temporarily. It was inevitable that the song would be seized upon as a radical black anthem, but the uneasy detente that Brown struck with the militants didn’t even last for six months. It was shattered for good when he played Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball in January 1969. Perhaps Brown’s political philosophy could actually be better summed up by the self-explanatory 1969 single I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself). The simple message of this track is more radical, incisive and germane in relation to the civil rights movement of the late 60s than the entire lyrical output of Bob Dylan.
5. Funky Drummer
I wouldn’t want to downplay the significance of Clyde Stubblefield’s break on this long funk jam, given that it is one of the 20th century’s most instantly recognisable drumbeats. It certainly ranks alongside the Winstons’ Amen Brother and the Honey Drippers’ Impeach the President in terms of the number of times it’s been samped. However, it does feel like an afterthought when heard in the context of the whole track, which was almost certainly semi-improvised, so maybe it was. The lyrics, such as they are, mainly serve as instructions to the musicians, Stubblefield being prime among them: “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got … Don’t turn it loose, ’cause it’s a mother.” Brown is so made up with the eight bars of unaccompanied drums when they arrive that he immediately christens the song in Stubblefield’s honour: “The name of this tune is the Funky Drummer!” They made making history look so simple.
6. Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine
Sick of Brown’s half-century oeuvre being reduced to this one track, funk devotees can often display a kneejerk dismissiveness to this song. Sex Machine can feel like it’s never off certain radio stations and it has been featured in countless TV shows and films, simply because it has become universally understood shorthand for “funk”. But there’s a damn good reason for that: it’s a stone-cold classic. You could be forgiven for thinking that Brown’s backing band had been together for a decade, such is the tightness they display, but nothing could be further from the truth. This was one of the first tracks his new crew, the JBs, recorded, with the teenage Bootsy Collins on bass and his older brother Catfish on guitar. Brown himself plays the piano lick in the inimitable style with which he attacks all instruments, and again reveals himself to be a true artist in the sense that his work was ever evolving. The song started life as an onstage improvised vamp that eventually solidified into Give It Up or Turnit a Loose. Brown was unable to rest on his laurels, though. He would never quit reworking material until it often developed into something brand-new. Check out the next stage in the Sex Machine evolution: the utterly berserk Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved and listen to the armour-piercing horn stabs and death metal-strength vocal exhortations for an example of constant musical evolution in action.
7. Talking Loud and Saying Nothing
There’s a well-worn phrase attributed to Detroit legend Derrick May that describes techno as sounding like “George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in a lift”. As much as I love Funkadelic and Parliament, there is something too fluid and spaced-out about their grooves for this description to be 100% accurate. May should have paired the Düsseldorf quartet with the JBs, who, by the mid-70s, were one of the most fearsome house bands on the planet. The precision of their mechanical, muscular grooves was, no doubt, guided by a tyrannical Brown who would hand out on-the-spot fines to anyone who played bum notes. Talking Loud and Saying Nothing is the band at their most fearsomely tight, and arguably the most effective funk track ever recorded. Bootsy Collins’s bass playing is terrifyingly hypnotic and the metronomic force that drummer Jabo Starks and conga player Johnny Griggs are locked into. Check out the bravura, instrument-free breakdown during which Brown and Bobby Byrd keep the rhythm pounding through their call-and-response chants. Pure, unadulterated dancefloor dynamite, a white-hot explosion of funk.
8. The Payback
Brown’s fortunes took a turn for the worse through his ties to Nixon, an association that damaged his standing with many of his black fans. He went from being the man who’d sold a million tickets at the Harlem Apollo in 1969 to someone who had debts totalling $5m by 1978, though the reasons for this were more complex than just political conservatism. The only notable cash spike during this downward slide happened because of The Payback album. Never one to ignore a new trend, Brown got on board with the blaxploitation boom and recorded the original film soundtracks to both Black Caesar and Slaughter’s Big Rip Off in 1973. He produced a third that year, for the film Hell Up in Harlem, but it was rejected by studio bosses for being “the same old thing” and, apocryphally, for not being funky enough. It was released by Polydor as The Payback, and one listen to the title track reveals a low-slung, low-BPM groove monster that is not only funkier than a mosquito’s tweeter, but clearly owes a stylistic debt to blaxploitation dons Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes. It is both brilliant and entirely on message. It was the studio’s loss: it would be Brown’s only certified gold studio album.
9. Funky President (People It’s Bad)
Things were starting to unravel creatively for Brown by 1974. Even as a fan, one has to admit that the Reality LP is pretty much a collection of worthless tracks – with one notable exception. Brown had just turned 40, and suddenly the idea of releasing five new singles and three new albums in one year was starting to look like idiocy. This LP was clearly the runt of that year’s litter, recorded in NYC with session men instead of the JBs, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Funky President remains one of Brown’s most overlooked singles. Watergate had brought down Nixon, Gerald Ford was interim president and, given Brown’s public political endorsement, it’s not too much of a stretch to see this call for black self-determination as a frantic attempt to distance himself from the scandal. It’s not the only time Nixon’s downfall and Brown’s financial crisis intertwine in his discography: when Brown leads the chant: “I need some money!” in the JBs’ You Can Have Watergate, Just Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll Be Straight, he isn’t lying.
10. Get Up Offa That Thing
It would be wrong to pretend that Brown’s career ended after the mid-70s, as he enjoyed several bursts of popularity in later years. New generations would be introduced to the power of his music by sampledelia, hip-hop and the mid-90s funk revival. And that’s before we get to Rocky IV and The Blues Brothers. However, Get Up Offa That Thing really is Brown’s star finally going supernova. In creative terms, it’s a last massive expulsion of energy. He hadn’t scored a hit for a year and was clearly on the downward slope, something that was playing on his mind. In his 1986 autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, Brown describes the anguish he felt one day when looking out from the stage to see his entire audience sitting down despite the typically high energy show he and his band were putting on: “I looked out at all those people sitting there, and because I was depressed, they looked depressed. I yelled, ‘Get up offa that thing and dance til you feel better!’ I probably meant until I felt better.” And what a fightback this incident inspired. Get Up Offa That Thing was released 20 years after his debut single and it combines disco and funk into one glorious, explosive whole. It remains dancefloor catnip to this day.
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