Review: James Brown - Think! (1960)

Tracks: 1) Think; 2) Good Good Lovin’; 3) Wonder When You’re Coming Home; 4) I’ll Go Crazy; 5) This Old Heart; 6) I Know It’s True; 7) Bewildered; 8) I’ll Never Let You Go; 9) You’ve Got The Power; 10) If You Want Me; 11) Baby, You’re All Right; 12) So Long.

REVIEW

While the symbolic significance of the unusually serious baby on the front cover somewhat eludes me (motionless babies lost in deep thought are probably the last thing anybody would want to associate with James Brown’s music), the front sleeve should by no way detract from the fact that the measly thirty minutes of Think! are, in fact, quite a monumental achievement for the man. For one thing, Think! is the first James Brown album to have been released as an album — mainly recorded over just two sessions (November 1959 in Cincinnati and February 1960 in Hollywood, to be precise) and featuring quite a few LP-only tracks or, at least, tracks that came out on an LP before appearing as singles. For another thing, its actual singles, such as the title track and ‘I’ll Go Crazy’, firmly and decidedly returned Brown to the charts, proving that he was not going to be remembered as just a two-hit fluke wonder — indeed, while he would still go on to have occasional flops from time to time, the commercial wit that he showed in 1960 would never leave him again until the end of his life (for better or worse).

And most importantly (if also most subjectively), Think! is also the first James Brown album which I am able to appreciate in toto, from top to bottom. The rocking numbers, the poppy ditties, the ballads, the doo-wop, even the oldies — each and every song has something to offer, something at least mildly interesting and attention-grabbing to stand out in memory. The contrast with Please, Please, Please and Try Me!, both of them so much longer and so studded with filler, is so sharp, in fact, that I made several attempts to understand what it was exactly that might have caused such a difference around late 1959 / early 1960, and still came up empty-handed. Most likely, there was no single specific cathalyzer here, but rather just a process of gradual ripening. For four years, James Brown and the Famous Flames were trying to find and define their own sound, that special vibe which could put them on top of, or at least aside from, everybody else while also holding enough commercial potential. With Think!, they finally found it.

Perhaps that one truly fateful day could be determined as June 27, 1959, when down at Beltone Studios in New York Andy Gibson produced the first single to be included on this LP — ‘Good Good Lovin’. The song is an odd mix of influences: Bobby Roach’s seductive opening guitar licks sound like a nod to surf-rock, the main melody is a sort of sped-up Chicago blues, and the groovy tempo and lively sax break give it a bit of a Coasters feel, with a touch of the «comic R&B» vibe. But the overall feel of the song, with Brown’s hysterical vocal driving his players on and on, is exclusively James’ — a mix of rock energy, pop playfulness, and soul passion completely unmatched by any other artist at the time. It’s catchy, it’s danceable, it’s fun, and it’s got the spirit. (For a long time, I also thought it got great lyrics – "good lovin’, good lovin’ made me feel so bad" – before finding out that he really sings ‘glad’, not ‘bad’, which makes things far more boring). The song, heralding a new, self-assured sound for the Flames, should have been a big hit — but, for some mysterious reason, ended up as yet another flop. Fortunately, it did not dissuade Brown that they had something really good going on here, and by the time the band reconvened in Cincinnati for their November recording sessions, he had quite a few ideas in his head on how to properly follow up the vibe of ‘Good Good Lovin’ and really make it happen.

‘I’ll Go Crazy’, the first single to be released from those sessions, also opens with a seductive guitar lick (this time, more of an opening — and, later, closing — fanfare than a surf-rock chuckle), but the mutations to the blues idiom that they injected on ‘Good Good Lovin’ are even stronger this time. The way the song’s memorable bluesy riff gets capped off by the pompous guitar/brass one-chord fanfare could be something from the textbook of B. B. King (although he would probably play it slower and with more of that Vegasy pomp), but once the vocals enter the picture, it’s 100% James Brown rule all along. Most importantly, listen to the wonderful shadowing of James’ vocals by the Flames — "if you leave me...", smoothly flowing right into "leave me-e-e-e-e...", then "I’ll go crazy", echoed by "oh yeah!", and then "’cause I love you..." – ("love you!") — "love you..." ("love you!"), and James’ final flourish of "I love you too mu-u-u-a-a-a-i-i-ich".

That is the kind of vocal richness that ensures this song, as popular as it eventually became, would never ever be performed better by anybody else. (Just relistened to the Moody Blues cover from 1965 and, with all love and respect for Denny Laine, it’s a total joke next to the original). However, here as in many other places, I would not emphasize the «soul» aspects of the performance — it is, in my opinion, more of a «touch of soul» which gets converted into a gripping pop hook. Listening to the song never really makes me believe in Mr. James Brown as somebody capable of going crazy if somebody whom he loves too much ends up leaving him. Rather, it makes me believe in Mr. James Brown as somebody capable of going crazy... period. But that’s alright, works for me too. "You got to live for yourself, yourself and nobody else" is the real message of the song; I’ve never been able to buy the message of James Brown as a heartbroken, vulnerable guy whose life could have been made miserable by a member of the opposite sex — but the image of James Brown as a self-obsessed, maniacal guy whose life could be dominated by violent emotional flares is totally believable (even if that image, too, had been quite meticulously constructed and calculated for maximum public appeal).

‘I’ll Go Crazy’ did what ‘Good Good Lovin’ failed to do and restored Brown to the R&B charts, going all the way up to #15, but the ultimate comeback was achieved with ‘Think!’ — which, as a single, was released already a couple months after it had appeared as the opening title track on the same-titled LP. Now this is an interesting case because the song was not an original James Brown composition: it was written by Lowman Pauling, the guitar player for The "5" Royales, and originally released by his band in 1957 (the same year which also produced ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’, arguably their most famous song because of the later Mamas & Papas cover). The original is a nice enough blues-pop ditty with inventive stop-and-start elements and some impressive (for the time) guitar work from Lowman — but really, it mainly makes sense to listen to it just to be able to better appreciate the tectonic changes brought on by the James Brown treatment. In Pauling’s hands, the song is merely a tepid, passable dance-hall number, a piece of friendly background entertainment, whose occasional interruptions by that shrill, sharp blues guitar come across as a novelty moment. In comparison, Brown reinvents the song to the point of making it barely recognizable — I’m actually impressed that he gallantly did not add his name to the credits, since from a moral, if maybe not legal, standpoint at least, he had every damn right to do so.

I mean, ‘Think!’ just kills — and I even like this studio version more than the one on Live At The Apollo, where it would be sped up to a ridiculous, «Ramonesque» tempo that probably worked like a charm for the audience but does not do the song proper justice on record. Here, the tempo is just right — still quite fast, but enough to let you soak in and digest all the crazy stuff going on, starting with Nat Kendrick’s complex and metronomic drumming pattern and ending with the equally tight and metronomic brass riff, something the likes of which simply did not exist before the song — count it as a natural precursor to all the funk and jazz-rock patterns from the mid-Sixties and onward. Together, the percussion and brass whip up an atmosphere of perfectly controlled hystrionic frenzy, giving James the ideal backing for his own vocal hysteria. Taking the punctuated breaks of "think!.., think!.., think!" from the "5" Royales original, he evolves them further into veritable boxing punches: "THINK! – About the good things!" ... "THINK! – About the wrong things!" ... "THINK! – About the right things!" — before that lady leaves him, she’ll probably be all bruised up, if not physically, then at least emotionally. Nothing in the entire R&B scene of 1959–60 rocked quite as hard as this song — nobody on the scene even dared to kick that much ass, let alone having the musical chops to back the aggressive, frenetic energy with tight-as-hell musicianship.

And while the singles, naturally, attract the lion’s share of attention, the rest of the album hardly strikes me as just filler, either. The same frenzy that permeates the dance numbers can also be seen in (at least some of) the ballads: thus, ‘Wonder When You’re Coming Home’ builds up a really dark mood with its combination of deep bass, somber, echoey backing vocals, and Brown’s own tragic-hero delivery which, for two and a half minutes, turns him into sort of an R&B Tristan, waiting for his Isolde on his dying bed. The Isolde in question might be identified as Bea Ford, who briefly worked with Brown as a supporting vocalist — before retiring after Mr. Dynamite knocked her up — and is given a chance to shine on another colorful blues ballad, ‘You’ve Got The Power’, where her smart-and-smokey voice forms a great counterpart to James’ own. Lyrically and musically, it seems to be a fairly straightforward declaration of mutual love, but with all those weird overtones and modulations, you always get the feeling that there is something deeper and darker going on here, and that there may be quite a few circumstances in their love life those two are keeping from each other...

Even something as superficially flat-footed and simplistic as ‘I Know It’s True’ with its lyrical minimalism (each verse consists of four repetitions of a single line such as "do you need someone to love you?") is made exciting — this time, by Nat Kendrick, who adds a deliciously fussy (but metronomically precise, as always) hi-hat pattern on top of the regular beat; but also by James, whose soaring delivery of each third line really makes the difference. And even when Brown chooses to cover an oldie from the American Songbook (‘Bewildered’), he adapts it to the Flames’ new style so well, you’d never guess the song’s origins — lots of artists had their day with ‘Bewildered’ before, but nobody got the idea to sing it like an actually bewildered person: listen to the Ink Spots deliver those first lines like a bunch of angels, then revert back to James Brown to have them delivered from the mouth of a madman.

Without going into details on the other songs, let me just generalize: Think! is where the James Brown machine really starts hitting on all the cylinders all the time, rather than some of the cylinders some of the time. The backing band here becomes more than a backing band — you can hear and appreciate all the individual talent and all the initiative, from Nat Kendrick’s highly inventive and unpredictable drumming patterns to the brass section’s combination of almost military discipline with catchy riffing. And Mr. Brown himself realizes that his power lies not in the source material, but in the creative touch applied during the recording session — and, of course, in taking every song’s vocal portrait to the highest level of expression (which is not just about screaming his head off: when necessary, he can sink to the lowest depths of soul just as fine as he can rise to the utmost heights of it). The result is a thirty-minute long blast of non-stop energy which, one might argue, would never be topped again — musically, Brown’s albums would of course get more complex, innovative, and interesting over time, but in terms of sheer enthusiasm, ecstasy, and professionalism, Think! really gets the goat; I like to imagine it as Brown’s equivalent of the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night — lightweight, naïve, and utterly perfect as far as pure, fresh, untapped musical genius is concerned.

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