Archive for January, 2007
Playlist 1-11-07
| Artist | Song | Album |
| Cold Grits | It’s Your Thing | What It Is (comp.) |
| James Brown | Let Yourself Go | Foundations of Funk |
| Billy Cobham | Panhandler | Funky Thide of Sings |
| James Brown | There Was a Time | Foundations of Funk |
| Temptations | Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On | All Directions |
| The Mighty Hannibal | Somebody in the World for You | What It Is (comp.) |
| Funkadelic | Miss Lucifer’s Love | America Eats Her Young |
| The Crusaders | Spanish Harlem | At Their Best |
| Tommy Stewart | Atlanta Get Down | Tommy Stewart |
| Greyboy AllStars | Get a Job | Live |
| Fred Wesley & the Horny Horns | Four Play | What it Is (comp.) |
| The JB’s | Givin’ up Food for Funk | Anthology |
Remembering James
This week’s Creative Loafing has a nice article remembering the legend that was James Brown. Rather than eulogizing JB in a reporter’s words, author Scott Freeman let the people who knew him best tell the story. So the article is little more than a bunch of stories an quips about the hardest working man in show business.
Alan Leeds: “Cold Sweat” was one of the songs where James Brown reinvented the vocabulary of music. Jerry Wexler [vice president of Atlantic Records] told a writer that “Cold Sweat” just screwed everybody up, that it made every musician have to go back to the drawing board. Every musician in the world was saying, “Holy shit, how’d he do that?” Very few figured it out.
Check it out. It makes for some nice reading.
Also for a pretty thorough bio, including some little known facts about the man of a million monikers (including that he had his eyebrows replaced with tattoos in 1991!), check out JB’s Wikipedia entry.
Also, Apache Cafe is hosting a James Brown Tribute Show on January 20.
The Godfather is Dead
Well, I’m finding it difficult to keep this blog up to date. And of course, like two days after I create it, the Godfather of Soul up and dies. This would normally be cause for an eulogy, but since I’ve been so slack, I’ll simply make a mention of it.
I never got the chance to see JB perform live, though I’ve seen Maceo and many of the JB’s. By the time I had realized what funk was, JB was rarely performing for the public, and when he did it was a $300 dollar affair in some faraway place. I think his popularity and success bred a certain feeling of contempt for the general public which is ironic, given his meager upbringing. Who can blame him, though, as he is almost single-handedly responsible for the birth and boom of a genre (funk). Not to mention the influences that he’s had on other artists and types of music (re: hip-hop). Of course the man loved money, so maybe that was just it.
That is all I’ve got for now. Feel free to share your JB experiences in the slapbacks section.
