http://chervokas.typepad.com/trickster/2006/12/living_with_jam.html
Living With James Brown
I've interviewed governors and mayors, shaken the hands of a couple of vice presidents, dined with famous athletes, and hung out backstage with rock stars. But the greatest thrill of my professional life was the chance to interview James Brown.
It was a phone interview--I was in New York and Mr. Brown (the only name I would dare call him) was in his office in Augusta, GA. Hearing Brown's voice on the other end of the line was a powerful experience.
For anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, that voice was a cultural totem--a ubiquitous sound on the radio that signified the era the way FDR's voice had for Americans in the depression.
Brown had more hits than just about any man who ever lived. Ninety of his singles made the R&B top 40 since "Please, Please, Please" in 1956; 114 of his records had charted in total (the most of any act in the history of the Billboard R&B charts); and 17 of those records had hit number one. But it wasn't just the hits, it was the way he sang, if you could even call it singing: multi-octave swoops that resolved into squeals, grunts, screaming, and the occasional gospel croon.
Half of his vocalizing--some of the most memorable parts of the songs--consisted not of singing at all but of chants and speech: Mr. Brown calling for a solo from Maceo Parker, asking bandmaster Bobby Byrd if he could count off and do his thing, or carrying on about smothered steak on the version of "Make It Funky" from Revolution of the Mind: Live at the Apollo Vol. III.
As a singer Brown treated pitch as a quaint notion for old-fashioned singers. Even at its sweetest his voice was a hoarse rasp which seemed to articulate at two pitches at once, like a dial tone. And his performances glided microtonally, soaring through songs, darting in the direction of the melodies without ever willingly landing on the branch of any distinct pitch.
Brown was famous for the authoritarianism with which he ruled his band, over-rehearsing them, fining them for missed notes and poorly polished shoes, jangling their nerves until they lived on the knife's edge of a deliberately evoked fear. These were the techniques that made Brown's band the devastatingly precise and powerful machine that it was. But it sometimes seemed as if Brown wanted the band that tight so it could provide a kind of safety net, or at least a balancing force to his own wildly histrionic performances as a singer.
I regret not asking Mr. Brown more about the evolution of his music that day (later I would have long conversations on the subject with both Bobby Byrd and Bootsy Collins, who at 16 played bass in the JBs). But the topic of my conversation with Mr. Brown was the impact of hip hop digital sampling. At the time (the early 1990s) there was no legal framework in place for sampling and there was no man whose records were more widely sampled.
I remember the Godfather of Soul saying "when they take our music, they take the only thing we have to sell," or something to that effect, and I heard in his voice something I hadn't become accustomed to from all those records--vulnerability. This was the voice of a man who had grown up in a Georgia whorehouse, passed through reform school, and came out on the other side to build a business empire--including TV and radio stations--all on the back of the one thing he could sell, himself. The man who recorded all those socially conscious anthems ("Don't Be A Drop Out," "Say it Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud"), the man who had met with presidents, the man who seemed to me like a force of nature was a vulnerable striver who, like all great Americans, had reinvented himself, but unlike some, had never tried to distance himself from the circumstances into which he was born.
Of course James Brown was a titanic musical figure, one of the giants of 20th century music, up there with Louis Armstrong and Igor Stravinsky. He invented funk. It wasn't a single handed invention--the crackerjack musicians of the James Brown Show had a lot to do with it--and of course funk had roots in hambone blues, the second line rhythms of New Orleans, and the centuries old Yoruban music of West Africa. But in 1965, with the release of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," Mr. Brown did something new--orchestrating a drum beat across the whole band the way Duke Ellington spread his Debussyan chords across the brass and reeds.
In retrospect "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" doesn't sound all that radical. It was still more or less a straight R&B record with a rhythmic horn vamp and minimal changes. But it was the first shot in a revolution. Over the next few years things got more intense, with the music stripped of chord changes entirely. The breakthrough came with "There was a Time." The song evolved from the out vamp of the group's live arrangement of a forgettable mid-1960s hit "Let Yourself Go." In performance the out vamp came to dominate the song, soon stretched out to seven minutes, with Brown improvising his autobiography over the furious pump of the music. Although my favorite version of "There Was a Time" can be found on the 1970 classic album Sex Machine (on the second LP which was actually cut live), you can hear the development of the song in the "Let Yourself Go/There Was a Time" performance from Live at the Apollo Vol. II.
The overpowering influence of funk on world music in the latter decades of the 20th century sometimes obscures the influence of Brown's early years as the greatest soul singer of all. Like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Brown did things that other singers couldn't go, so his influence as a singer is not all that deeply heard today. But the first generation of hard rock singers stole everything from James Brown. Listen to the justifiably celebrated Live at the Apollo (the greatest live soul performance ever recorded) back-to-back with either of the first two Led Zeppelin albums. No singer more deliberately (or successfully) copped Brown's style then did Robert Plant.
And those of us who had the scintillating pleasure of seeing James Brown live will always remember the relentless drive of Brown on stage. George Clinton once said that if you asked James Brown to give you a split, he'd give you five. It was part of Brown's impossible work ethic--never leave a single customer with his dick hard. Nothing will top Brown at the top of his game in the mid 1960s (if you have a chance to see his Ed Sullivan appearances or his set on the TAMI show you'll know what I mean), but my friend Al still says the greatest concert he ever saw was a JB gig we saw at a defunct club in Times Square during one of Brown's few fallow periods between "It's Too Funky in Here" in 1979 and "Living in America" in 1985. It was the era of "disco sucks," the era of punk, and a few years since Brown last decent single (a remake of "The Big Payback" called "Rapp Payback"). Already in his 50s Brown was a living legend with nothing to prove. But the fallowness of his career and smallness of the crowd (for a man who had played 20,000 seat venues) seemed just to make Brown work harder.
Hard, relentless, these were the adjectives that Brown carefully cultivated, constructing a sound that seemed to be holding back a barely contained fury, something novelist Jonathan Lethem captured brilliantly in his excellent Rolling Stone profile last year. Lethem observes Brown at a recording session trying to get the band to play "hard" and "flat," not adjectives normally associated with great musical performances. But Brown didn't just eschew nuance, he spit it out. In his early years Brown was brilliantly dynamic in performance, and a great balladeer albeit a sui generis one. But after he hit upon the sound of funk, Brown began to eliminate songs like "Prisoner of Love" from his sets in favor of things like "Hot Pants." ("It's a Man's Man's Man's World" stayed in the set but became something of a set piece during which JB paid tribute to great musicians who had died.)
He had already stripped his music of much of it's harmony and melody when, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he began further refining its rhythms. Bootsy Collins told me that the thing he learned from James Brown was the importance of "the one." What Bootsy literally meant was the first beat of every measure, but in practice Brown turned every song into something along the lines of a 1/1 time signature with every beat just pummeled home. On top of the one Brown could layer parts for bass, guitar, and horns until he had something almost architectural to swoop through with his voice.
We should have known from the start that Brown's gift to the world was going to be rhythmic. "Please, Please, Please," Brown's first single from 1956, isn't much of a song--a desperate, almost inarticulate plea not to be abandoned over piano triplets playing a I-IV-V. But in the third verse St. James performs his first miracle--repeating the word "please" nine times in a rhythmic alteration that proceeds from something speech-like to a voice articulating a backbeat. Then he turns around and repeats the trick in the next verse on the word "I."
It was just a harbinger of things to come--a universe of Africanized music in which rhythmic development through altered repetition would replace melodic, harmonic, and even lyrical variation as the primary element in moving a song from beginning to middle to end.
James Brown is gone. But we're all still living in the musical world he left behind.
--
Colin Brace
Amsterdam