i lost someone

Compared to other great soulmen (and there are only a few at the very pinnacle … Otis Redding, Al Green, who else?), James Brown was too rough to be completely likeable. Likeable wasn’t the point … his many nicknames suggested what was important. Mr. Dynamite, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Soul Brother Number One, The Godfather of Soul … you can tell from titles like those that this was a man to be reckoned with, not someone you could ignore, not someone you would want to ignore.

But, with all due respect to Otis (my own favorite) and Al (who doesn’t love Al Green?), James Brown was the most innovative soulman. Hell, a case could be made for James Brown as the most influential figure in the popular music of the last fifty years. Hip-Hop long ago became the primary music of the young people who drive pop music, and James Brown was hip-hop before it existed. Not just musically, although it was there in his funk, but also in his presence, which was always strong, capable of jaw-dropping brilliance one moment and startling misfires the next.

It was (is?) the fate of popular musicians that they aren’t always taken seriously as artists … entertainers, yes, but artists? This is doubly true for black pop stars … when Bob Dylan said Smokey Robinson was a great lyricist, people thought he was kidding. James Brown was an artist. He was a true innovator who, in his mid-thirties when Steven’s Rule of Pop Music Career Trajectories meant that JB was in decline, took his music in a direction that was both radically different from the past and an organic outgrowth of everything he’d done before, resulting in Funk, a great musical genre in its own right that was the direct precursor of the hip-hop revolution to follow.

I am not a musicologist … when I teach music in my classes, I focus on the cultural context because that’s what I know, I don’t have the theory chops. When teaching a class on the 1970s, I did a lecture on the difference between disco and funk, and there are cultural differences, to be sure, but there is also something fundamental about the music itself, and I don’t have the vocabulary to explain it. So I played two songs for the students. The first was a standard disco song … I can’t remember which one, I think it was Donna Summer … and as the song played, I pounded out the beat on the table, explaining that disco had a consistent beat that held from one song to the next, which made mixing easier for the dance floor. Then, to show how funk differed from disco, I put on “The Payback” by James Brown. I couldn’t rap out the beat on the table, it was too intricate, but neither could I resist moving my middle-aged white body to the insistent guitar lick that drives the song. The students laughed, but they, too, were moving in their seats, and I dare say more than one of them thought that very unfunky man in front of the classroom was cooler than they thought … I knew “The Payback.”

James Brown was instantly recognizable, so much so that we had a running joke about it. You’ve all heard those television ads for compilation albums that include dozens of old hits, repackaged to squeeze a few more bucks from consumers. One song after another will appear, with a few seconds offered to remind us, oh yeah, I remember that song, I liked it. A few seconds, that is, unless it was a James Brown song … you knew JB from a snippet so brief the clock wouldn’t have moved even a single second. A quick “BAY-BAY!” and you knew instantly that Mr. Dynamite was in the house. I can recall reading something, probably apocryphal, that argued the reason James Brown was popular the world over was because you didn’t need to speak English to understand what he was saying. Just last night, as the xmas music played in the background, a song started up, and although only a couple of notes had been played, Neal instantly said “James Brown!”, and he was right, two drumbeats, a burst of horns, and “Christmas Is Love” was playing.

For me, the greatest of all James Brown recordings is “Lost Someone” from the first Live at the Apollo album. In its original vinyl form, the song was split in two, the first half ending Side One, the second beginning Side Two. In the CD era, you can hear the entire glorious 11 minutes at once. Hearing James plead, exhorting the audience … no one could match his aching power. He turned “Gee Whiz, I Love You” into a phrase of consummate intensity.

Recently I picked up a DVD of a concert JB played in Boston in 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and violence was taking place in cities across the country. Brown had a concert scheduled in Boston, and the mayor wanted to cancel it, along with all other events, but the mayor was informed that cancelling a James Brown concert might cause a riot all by itself. And so James Brown took the stage at the Boston Garden, and the local PBS station broadcast it, hoping to keep people off of the streets. The DVD is a low-fi copy of that telecast, but the power comes through: James Brown at the peak of his performing powers. And when, near the end of the show, the fans started going crazy, rushing the stage, and the cops think they’re gonna take care of business, but James is there, and it’s he who takes care of business. He gently admonishes the crowd, cranks up the show another notch, and the danger subsides. Performing power … I dare say Mick Jagger wasn’t as successful at Altamont as JB was that night in Boston.

James Brown … gee whiz.