july 15th extract-james brown

James Brown-Funky President   

From Alton Ellis and the Flames to James Brown and his Famous Flames. What a link. But I don’t think that the Famous Flames played on this track, which is a shame, because it would have had a certain symmetry. Nevertheless, it’s a brilliant James Brown track from 1974, written in the midst (or the immediate aftermath) of Watergate crisis.Since then it’s been sampled over and over again on dozens and dozens of hip hop tracks, from A Tribe Called Quest through Public Enemy to NWA to Wee Papa Girls. A good lineage therefore.

James Brown was a funny old cove though. “Live at The Apollo” is one of my favourite live albums, in fact it’s probably one of my favourite ten albums of all time. James Brown himself doesn’t seem to have been one of the easiest people to get along with, either professionally or personally. His private life was well documented to have been, quite frankly, a bit of a mess. It had it all-prison, drugs, guns, disputed paternity cases, domestic violence allegations, police car chases, knives, drugs, court cases across America and drugs. Even after he died there was a massive squabble over his will. I’m surprised he had much time for music. How he managed to squeeze all those shows in and all those recordings is a mystery. But professionally he was a bit of tyrant to work for as well. He drilled his band over and over again, and would fine them if they played a bum note or missed a cue. He’d even fine them for not wearing the right clothes-bow ties, cummerbunds or if their shoes weren’t shiny enough. Whenever he sacked someone from his band-which he did quite regularly he made sure that they handed their uniforms back before he sent them on their way.

I wonder if this trait (of tyranny) is a common trend among artists that have produced work that’s different and special.  It might be, that as fans we over-romanticise the driven tortured artist cliché and impose this upon people who are actually not very nice. It’s a kind of chicken and egg situation. Is the music so good and that much better than the rest because the artist pushes at the boundaries irrespective of any other considerations or the pushing at boundaries and treating people like shit etc causes the music to turn out the way it does? It’s a bit of a fine line but other people who fall into the James Brown school of band-leadery are Frank Zappa (infinite rehearsals, perfectionist on stage),Mark E Smith (60 plus line ups of The Fall in thirty years,“if it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s The Fall”, Captain Beefheart (imprisoning the Magic Band during the recording of Trout Mask Replica and teaching them, through near-starvation, to play the songs backwards). But for all of these four, Brown, Zappa, Beefheart and Smith (now doesn’t that sound like the best firm of accountants you have ever heard of in your life?) it doesn’t just seem to be the artistic vision that drove them to such heights of creative intensity but an intense Protestant work ethic as well-they all appear to have acted like some sort of malevolent Victorian mill-owner.

(I’ve just written over 500 words about a track called Funky President and not mentioned Barack Obama once.)