Is there anything we in this compound fractured, politically polarized, permanently, irrevocably SNAFU-ed kinda world anyone can agree on? Yes - James Brown A.K.A. "Soul Brother Number One," "The Godfather Of Soul," "The Hardest Working Man In Show Business," "Mr. Dynamite", belongs on the short list of greatest, most influential performers, recording artists and bandleaders of the 20th century.
And here are just a few slices of video from his long career to illustrate:
As Count Basie, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane did, Mr. Brown employed monster musicians - only the best and baddest jazz guys would do - to play and write charts for the JBS: trombonist/arranger Fred Wesley, saxophonists Pee Wee Ellis, Maceo Parker and St. Clair Pinckney: power-packed percussionists Jabo Starks, Clyde Stubblefield and Melvin Parker; the electric bass/electric guitar 1-2 punch of Bootsy and Catfish Collins (A.K.A. the original Funk Bros.) - to name just a few.
Invariably, friends, music fans and pop culture buffs who read this will remind me that James, as Miles Davis, Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin did, had some serious personal problems over the decades, and that his leadership style was more in the Bobby Knight/Woody Hayes taskmaster model than the ultra-cool Phil Jackson approach. However, whatever we armchair quarterback-bandleaders say now, the music stands - holy shit, does it stand!
Had enough? I haven't - here's some more!
This blog extends a propulsive, polyrhythmic, cosmic and utterly funk-drenched tip of the Jimmie Hatlo top hat to Mr. Ike Dyson for posting so many amazing Godfather Of Soul performances on his James Brown/JBS/Famous Flames YouTube channel.
Big thanks to Dash Riprock (A.K.A. "Ross The Boss", "Our Man In Thailand") for this early 60's French Scopitone singing the praises of "copacabana". Obviously, Barry Manilow's agent asked the Scopitones people for too much money. And that's just as well.
For that special blend of 1960's-style cheesiness, absurdism, both winsome and subtle-as-a-sledgehammer sexiness, AquaNet-drenched hairdos, bouncy tunes, inexplicable dance moves and one gas-guzzlin' SUV full of WTF, you can't beatScopitones.
My day before the calcium lights in 2007, playing the "obnoxious villager heckler" in "Now I Lay Thee Down", a music video by metal gurus Machine Head, is now out for the world to see. And I would like this video even if I wasn't in it! Machine Head's excellent headbanging performance is wrapped around a tragic and operatic play that could be described as "The Elephant Man" meets "Romeo And Juliet"; the former, a shunned and reviled outcast, decides to end it all and asks the latter, the sole person who loves the good-hearted but miserable grotesque, to do him in.
The play was shot at San Francisco's historic Regency Theater (built 1909) in the style of equally operatic silent movies, those from around 1918-1919 - I think of D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms in particular. It closes, appropriately, with the cast taking a bow.
This music video in the style of silent movies premiered on October 4th, the birthday of Buster Keaton, that most visionary of all silent screen artists.
