Review: James Brown - The Amazing James Brown (1961)

Tracks: 1) Just You And Me Darling; 2) I Love You, Yes I Do; 3) I Don't Mind; 4) Come Over Here; 5) The Bells; 6) Love Don't Love Nobody; 7) Dancin' Little Thing; 8) Lost Someone; 9) And I Do Just What I Want; 10) So Long; 11) You Don't Have To Go; 12) Tell Me What You're Gonna Do.

REVIEW

By mid-1960, Brown’s future as a reliable pop hit maker seemed so assured that he got to sign a new contract directly with King Records, of which Federal, his previous label, was but a subsidiary — but while this may have increased the payouts and the promotional benefits, I wouldn’t say that the transition made any direct impact on the music. The Famous Flames continued the same way as they always did, and the steady flow of hit singles and LPs, for the time being, continued to milk the same musical directions that worked so well on Think!. In all actuality, I believe that the titles to those two LPs should have been reversed in retrospective, because the word amazing fittingly applies to Think! — this was the kind of album that nobody probably expected from Brown back in 1960 — but after Think!, James’ potential to amaze his listeners with something truly unpredictable got held up for a bit.

Not that The Amazing James Brown is any kind of major disappointment, though; continuing the analogy started in the previous review, it’s a bit like Beatles For Sale after A Hard Day’s Night — temporarily riding the safe waves of an established formula that can still yield plenty of nutritious milk. It’s just a little less inventive, a little less diverse, and does not contain nearly as many glorious musical moments where you want to hit pause and just think and talk about them and then think and talk about them some more. But it is still an essential entry in James’ early discography, and I think it does have the second largest number of songs on it (after Think!, of course) that ended up on Live At The Apollo, and it is not just because this was the latest studio LP at the time of the actual Apollo performance (it wasn’t). So let us take a closer look, as usual, along with several contemporary singles that never made it to the LP (which, just like Think! before it, was also put together as an album, containing a large bunch of songs that had not previously been issued as singles, though some of them still ended up as singles later on).

The only two tracks that were taken off of a late 1960 single — Brown’s very first record for King, actually — were ‘The Bells’ and ‘And I Do Just What I Want’. The former, somewhat surprisingly, was a piece of slow, moody soul-blues whose most distinguishing feature was probably James’ crying hysterics, with the man ad-libbing sobs, howls, and tragic screams all over the place. In all fairness, though, for all his pioneering moves in «pop theatricality» he did not invent this one: ‘The Bells’ is actually a cover of an old Billy Ward & The Dominoes R&B hit from 1952, with none other than the great Clyde McPhatter on vocals. And it is interesting to go back and forth between the original and the cover, because no matter how many times I do, I still cannot determine where my preference lies. Both versions try to be as somber as possible, but Clyde and his pals do that through the power of spooky doo-wop backing vocals and some actual bells, which play a large role throughout the track; Brown achieves his own effect with instrumentation, namely, the atmospheric interplay between the echoey blues guitar of Les Buie and the sax parts by Alfred Corley and J. C. Davis — owing more to the Chicago blues scene in this case than to the doo-wop tradition.

Back in 1952, ‘The Bells’ was actually quite strikingly macabre for a doo-wop performance — any song that opens with lines like "there are four black horses with eyes of flaming red" would have to be pretty macabre for that period — and it was also the gloomiest song so far in Brown’s own catalog, with the singer basically confessing to the fact that he is at least indirectly responsible for his loved one’s funeral and probably awaiting for some creepy Edgar Allan Poe-style retribution to come. To drive the point even further, Brown ad libs "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" at the end of the song (not there in the original performance), rather bravely invoking death upon his own head and doing it in a much more straightforward manner than, say, somebody like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins would (the latter would probably play things out in a more tongue-in-cheek, vaudevillian manner). I would probably call the Clyde McPhatter performance more «angelic» in nature and Brown’s more «demonic», but both are equally worthy. (Strangely enough, the song never made it to Live At The Apollo despite quickly becoming a permanent fixture in James’ live repertoire).

The B-side, ‘And I Do Just What I Want’, was far more lively and dynamic in comparison; credited to James himself, it was a not particularly original stylization of a New Orleanian pop melody, but with a tremendously sharp bass riff and a slightly «twisty» touch to the rhythm section that probably got you moving from the first couple of seconds. The stop-and-start structure somewhat predicts the future kick of ‘I Feel Good’, too. Many artists at the time released such contrasting singles with completely different moods for the A- and B-sides — but few could take these moods to such searing, almost absurdly hyperbolized extremes. One thing was for sure: Mr. Brown was not going to go down under a middle-of-the-road moniker, regardless of whether you bought his singles or not.

And he was making his band run up a heavy sweat, too: two of the following singles were almost completely instrumental (apart from a few vocal ad libs) — ‘Hold It’, ‘The Scratch’, ‘Suds’, and ‘Sticky’ all amply demonstrate that The Famous Flames tolerated no competition when it came to establish a tight, fast, danceable groove. ‘Hold It’, in particular, which used to be a pleasant little R&B hit for organist Bill Doggett, is sped up, enlivened by Nat Kendrick’s loud, crackling, and complex percussion shots, and turned into a bit of a battleground between James and his brass players. All the other three instrumentals are fun as well, with ‘The Scratch’ featuring guitarist Les Buie in a bit of a sinister, proto-Batman-theme mood; ‘Suds’ being a cool bluesy variation on the old ‘One Mint Julep’ theme; and ‘Sticky’ presenting an experimental mix of time signatures for which, I believe, the term «intelligent dance music» should have originally been reserved.

Indeed, one of the reasons why I always urge people not to neglect all those early British Invasion covers of (usually black) American artists — by the Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds etc. — is that they typically provide a fresh perspective by tightening up whatever might have been too loose and lax about the originals, be it intentional artistry or simply technical deficiency. There can be a stronger kind of adrenaline produced from listening to the early Stones covering Chuck Berry than listening to Chuck Berry himself (although the «fun» vibe thrown out by Chuck cannot be beat by the exaggerated seriousness of the Stones). But there are artists who are totally and completely immune to that, and James Brown is at the top of that list: nobody improves on James Brown when James Brown really goes to work.

Case in point — ‘I Don’t Mind’, arguably the most famous song off this LP, and not least because the single made such a big impression on British youngsters that it was covered both by The Moody Blues and The Who over the course of 1965. But other than, perhaps, Mike Pinder’s valiant (but not tremendously interesting) attempt to transpose the melody to piano, there is absolutely nothing about these cover versions that would make them recommendable — and yes, we are talking about The Who, a band famous for breeding terrifying musical golems out of humbler beginnings by the likes of Mose Allison, Eddie Cochran, or Johnny Kidd. But they themselves seemed to be so terrified of James Brown that they did not even try to convert ‘I Don’t Mind’ to classic early Who style — and considering that Roger Daltrey in 1965 was a street hooligan type of singer rather than a true «soul man», and also considering that the band’s group harmonies were down­right terrible compared to the Flames, this was a rather obvious embarrassment for the young mod pack, forgivable only as an amusing side effect of youthful maximalism.

Not that ‘I Don’t Mind’ is a particular personal favorite of mine. Several things about this explosive blues-soul ballad have always felt clunky to me — such as, for instance, the absurdly rapid "Idon’mind!" backing responses after James’ perfectly drawn-out "I don’t miiiiind..." opening; or the way that the verse really misses a suitable resolution — each of the "you’re gonna miss me" conclusions is kind of left hanging in the air, making you wish for a proper landing that never ever comes, so the overall feeling is that of a half-great song with the writer running out of inspiration halfway through. I believe this is very much the reason why producer Gene Redd considered the song «musically wrong», but, of course, Brown always had to have his way — which is admirable, but I side with Redd on this one. Sometimes unusual chord progressions are unusual for a reason, you know. On the other hand, it’s a sure way to deflect any accusations of being uninventive — something that did plague so many of Brown’s genre-hopping ventures in the early days of his career.

I have to confess, though, that I find him to be more temptingly inventive on the B-side of the single: ‘Love Don’t Love Nobody’ used to be an entertaining, but strictly generic jump-blues hit for James’ namesake Roy Brown back in 1950 — but ten years later, here it is flashing a completely new coat of paint: sped up, peppered with minor chords, frenzied up with delirious brass duels, and, most importantly, replacing Roy’s typically late-1940s podium-style jump-blues bellowing with James’ Dionysian histrionics. Roy Brown informs you that "love don’t love nobody" with the force of a seasoned preacher; James is telling you the same thing from the point of view of a mental patient, which, one must admit, is a perfectly valid point of view for a song with lyrics like "love don’t love poor me at all, love is the cause of my downfall".

Of the other songs included on the album, the one most people are going to be familiar with is probably ‘Lost Someone’ — mainly because it would be included, in an insanely extended version, on Live At The Apollo two years later. The song itself is not particularly catchy or original (Brown himself said it was based on the chord pattern of Conway Twitty’s ‘It’s Only Make Believe’, though you’d probably never think of associating the two all by yourself since the moods are so very different), but James’ vocal dynamics, as he effortlessly goes from melancholic crooning to desperate screaming and back, is cool as heck, although this is precisely why the long-winded vocal version works better than the forcedly short original on the LP. Of note, perhaps, is the C-sharp minor transition to the bridge, which completely changes the feel of the song from «soothingly emotional» to «ominously dangerous» — more or less the same progression would later be nicked by the Stones for ‘Heart Of Stone’, whose own mood swings mirror the ones of ‘Lost Someone’ pretty well. (The big difference being that James wails about his poor broken heart, while Jagger boasts about nobody being capable of breaking his — the man may have faithfully copied all of Brown’s dance moves, but he sure as hell never copied his vulnerability.)

Most of the other short numbers are catchy little dance-oriented tunes that either shuffle along in a 4/4 bluesy manner (‘Come Over Here’, ‘Just You And Me Darling’, ‘You Don’t Have To Go’ — not the most exciting rhythmic patterns for Brown), or sound a little too New Orleanian for the likes of the Godfather of Funk (‘Dancin’ Little Thing’). One thing that did stick in my mind was the fabulous descending brass riff on ‘Tell Me What You’re Gonna Do’ — which just kept burning a hole in my brain until I realized that nine years later, it would actually form the backbone for the Kinks’ punkish-anthemic ‘Brainwashed’ on the Arthur album. Unless both artists got it from a third source or something, it’s quite fabulous evidence of the subconscious influence of James Brown on Ray Davies — certainly not the most natural or obvious type of artistic connection you could make, but there it is. You just can’t get away from the powerful voodoo of the hardest workin’ man in show-business, even when you’re writing about the decline and fall of the British Empire.

In any case, from this point and onward all of Brown’s studio albums, with maybe just an occasional exception or two, have something exciting to offer, regardless of whether they are largely following an already established formula (like this one) or represent important musical breakthroughs. Technically, you could still call James a «singles-based artist», but it has to be remembered that at this point, quite a few of the singles in question would be released after the LP, not before; and despite occasional filler (like, why did they have to include ‘So Long’ when it had already been released on Think?), every single recording is imbued with so much energy that even if you do not remember the song once it’s done, you’ll still headbang to it like crazy while it’s on. A pretty damn solid discographic run begins here, even if it can never hope to reach the legendary status of LP strings by the Beatles or the Stones — for reasons we’ll be coming back to every once in a while.

• Only Solitaire reviews: James Brown