James Brown – I got you
“You like blues, huh?” Charlie asked. I nodded. “OK, I tell you what,” he said. “Cats gonna come in here all night, ask to hear some record, and I’m gonna play it for ’em. Why don’t you slide down to the other end of the counter, and if you hear something you like, wave your hand or gimme a sign, something, and I’ll pull a copy of that record for you. Whenever you’re ready to check out, come back over and I’ll add you up.”
“Solid!” I said, getting me a grin. (I listened to Symphony Sid on the radio every night, and knew how to talk that hipster jive.) And that’s what I did. An hour later, just in time to catch my movie, I walked out with a pile of eight or ten fantastic 45s, still some of the primest records in my collection — including Junior Walker’s “Shotgun” and James’ big hit of the summer, “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”.
The movie (when it finally started) was fun, but I couldn’t concentrate on it very much after my adventure in the record store. The music had been great, but even greater was the pleasure — the privilege of just being there — in a store full of black men and women, sharing an occasional joke or remark, catching a smile cast in my direction, digging the music of the voices, feeling so comfortable I would never have believed it.
I hated the thought of returning to the uptight white folks back at the hotel. In some inexplicable way, I felt that I had found my way…home? Wait! How could this be home? I was a white kid from New York City. Sure, I loved black music and knew something about it, and had a couple of black acquaintances. But how could this black record store in the heart of the Miami ghetto feel like home?
I didn’t have any answer to that question then, so I got in the cab the theater manager called for me, and went back to the cosmetology convention. And eventually I went back to New York. But as the years passed, and I found myself moving slowly but steadily closer to, and finally into, the black communities of New Orleans, Oakland, and Trinidad, I realized that, like James Brown, I had found a brand new bag in ’65.
Later that year, I saw footage of Brown onstage for the first time. It was in a concert movie, The T.A.M.I. Show, filmed in “the miracle of electronovision” (whatever that was, if it was anything at all) at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with 2,600 screaming fans in attendance. This legendary film catches Brown at the top of his game, in a performance good enough to make a blind man see and a dead man walk. I mean, Lord have mercy!
Brown, who invented the moonwalk long before Michael Jackson put a name to it, dances so bad he seems to float a millimeter above the stage. Looking at it now, a lot of his hot, hot, super-hot footwork reminds me of New Orleans second-line steppin’ (or maybe it’s the other way around): sudden flurries of ultra-syncopated steps that hit too fast to see, plus the occasional fluid spin, seemingly almost accidental, while his hips and shoulders float, unconcerned, too cool to notice what his feet are doing. Fingers snapping, arms pumping, head swaying to closely-related-but-not-identical beats, a one-man polyrhythm factory.
Not to mention the splits.
And driving it all, the band, that band, rolling on micro-precision horn riffs dialed into time signatures that might be too tricky to annotate on paper. So hot that they had to mix it up, dropping slow ballads in between the uptempo tunes so the crowd wouldn’t explode into flames. Only one catch: The slow ballads were, like “Prisoner Of Love”, so lowdown funky that they provided almost as much incendiary danger as “Please Please Please”.
Brown could sing, too. And scream as good as you want. You remember, of course, how Spike Jones said if you’re gonna replace a B-flat note with a pistol shot, it has to be a B-flat pistol shot. James Brown could scream that way, very musically, the same way Eric Dolphy could play some note on his bass clarinet that would have sounded wrong, even unpleasant, if anyone less masterly and knowledgeable had tried it, yet it was the perfect sound for that moment in that particular jazz performance. Brown could scream like that. When he’d built the performance as high as it could go, reached the top step, run out of emotional dynamics, he’d scream — and it was like a man taking flight to reach another life.
Then he’d fall down on his fucking knees, still singing, because that was his only remaining emotional option; it was all he had left. And some guy would come out of the wings with a cape, and he’d let it fall around James’ shoulders, and James would stagger to his feet, and they’d be leading him offstage, only…suddenly you could see the spirit come down on him, riding him, and he’d start to lose it, start to quiver and shake, and he’d fling off the cape, and step-by-dancing-step he’d make his way back to the microphone, and this time the chorus would be just a wordless chant, mostly the word “I” repeated over and over and over and over, “I…I…I…I…” And then Brown would run out of headroom and he’d be screaming again, and then he’d grab the heavy microphone stand, lift it up, let it tilt sideways, and then, holding onto the microphone stand for dear life, he’d fall back on his knees again!
And the guy with the cape would come back, and this circular rite of spiritual possession would repeat as long as it had to before Brown or the audience gave it up first. Or maybe they’d get there together. Totally contrived, perfectly genuine. James was absolutely and unquestionably possessed by the music.
The concept of a “groove,” was only then starting to come into focus in America, largely thanks to Brown and the African-American musical aces in his band. We all know where that groove went. People talk about the great Duke Ellington band of 1941. They should also talk about the great James Brown band of 1965.