So, Mira’s gravity towards box-sets continues tonight with ‘Star Time’ by James Brown and the complete Columbia Miles Davis / John Coltrane box-set. As Mira pointed out, both are red. I’m saving the Miles Davis for tomorrow (I’m still working on the Bach box as well)… so tonight is about James Brown.

‘The Hardest Working Man In Show Business’ certainly could put on a show. At least that’s what I heard. I had three chances to see James Brown, and blew it each time. My dad saw him in the 70s, and told me about how he would be calling out directions to the group (catching their mistakes!) and dancing the entire time, only to finally crumple to the stage in exhaustion. Of course – this had long been part of the act. Someone comes off from the side, with a purple cape and drapes over the Godfather of Soul, who slowly begins to rise up and sing the word ‘Please’ over and over again before kicking off the end of the show. I would have loved to have seen that.

And while I ‘I Got You’ and ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine’ certainly deserve to pop recognition that these two songs have earned, it is ‘It’s A Man’s World’ and ‘King Heroin’ that I think are really two of the most important songs in his career… for very different reasons. ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ with its soulful singing and string orchestration quite possibly is the foundation for an entire generation of R&B and Soul. Would there have been a Barry White without this song? Isaac Hayes? I imagine there would have been, but this song places a high bar for the artists who follow to reach for. And what is amazing is that they do… Where in most jazz traditions there is competition between choruses, competition (and pushing others to higher heights) often comes between singles. And I would be surprised if James Brown wasn’t conscious of this himself. The fact that ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ is his second version of this song (the original was ‘It’s a Man’s World’… big difference) even shows that James Brown pushed himself.  The original would have been a great soul song on its own. But the addition of the larger orchestra and more fleshed out string parts makes the second version stand out. And James Brown often came back to his songs to try a different feeling with them. He recorded this one again on ‘Soul On Top’ (in a pretty amazing big band version), and there are multiple versions of ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’ and even ‘I Got You’. It’s great that this box set contains a few of these multiple versions so you can hear how his thinking changes as the times change (even if the times are only over a year or two!).

‘King Heroin’ is a different beast all together. It is dark. Really dark. And you get a sense that many of the horrors described in it are from personal experience. Over an bluesy groove James Brown personifies the evils of the drug, and what it can drive a man to do… he isn’t singing, he isn’t quite rapping, but he seems to be preaching. And while I’ve steered fairly clear of drugs and addiction (apparently Nancy Reagan’s appearance on a very special episode of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ did the trick for me), I have a feeling that hearing the four minutes of James Brown telling me what the drug can drive me to do until it leaves me dead would have worked pretty effectively. It is of course sad that James Brown’s last couple decades had him falling in and out of addiction, but I imagine I’m not the only one that is haunted by this song and the lessons it conveys.

My favorite song by James Brown of all time though is ‘Get It Together’. During the course of the song’s nine minutes, you get James Brown singing as strong as you’ll ever here him sing, the launch into director mode… he challenges the horns to keep up with his directions, pulls them out and brings them in one at a time to build up a groove, the finally you just hear him tell the engineer to go ahead and ‘fade it on out’ cause he’s ‘outta here’. The song gives the appearance of James Brown getting a group together to play the song, then spends two-thirds of it deconstructing not just the group and his dynamics with them, but even reveals the unmentionable: that there are other in the studio creating the song that we are hearing, and that even THESE people are under the control of James Brown. Of course, this is really the magical part of James Brown – here was a guy that was obviously a control freak. And he works it into his entire act. Yet the result almost always has a feeling of spontaneity and excitement. What his players had to practice wasn’t the exact musical parts over and over again – I imagine the hardest part about playing with James Brown had to do with the fact that you would’ve had to pay attention to him every moment. The sense that his players were ready for anything, and James could ask for anything, gave his music a level of excitement that is rarely seen live anymore, and is even rarer for the current state of the recording industry.