old.wrek.org Electric Boogaloo | WREK Atlanta, 91.1 FM - Part 15

Electric Boogaloo

The Mighty Hannibal Tonight!!

One night only at the EARL: Atlanta’s own seminal soul performer, The Mighty Hannibal w/backing band The Black Lips. And the opening act will be Gentleman Jesse & His Men, featuring WREK’s own, Craig Johnson.

Check out a legendary soul singer in one of Atlanta’s coziest venues. Doors open at 9:30. 21 and up.

And if you can’t make it, hopefully El Dogg or myself will have a review and some pictures from this show. So stay tuned to this space.

Read more about The Mighty Hannibal here and here

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.