The Possessed: James Brown in Eighteen Minutes
BY DAVID REMNICK
“Get On Up” is the second-best film ever made about James Brown.
This is not a trifling achievement. For at least the first hour of an overlong bio-pic, it’s fun to see Chadwick Boseman, who recently played Jackie Robinson, in “42,” inhabit the Godfather of Soul’s ineffable soul. It’s fun to watch Boseman in the same way that it was to see Jamie Foxx do Ray Charles, Joaquin Phoenix do Johnny Cash, Cate Blanchett do Bob Dylan, Sissy Spacek do Loretta Lynn, Forest Whitaker do Charlie Parker, and Jimmy Stewart do Glenn Miller.
These are good impersonations, even good performances, but what puts them in the shade is the real thing. And when it comes to James Brown, the real thing, in its most thrilling, compressed, erotic, explosive form, just eighteen minutes long, is also arguably the most electrifying performance in the history of postwar American music. First, watch:
This was fifty years ago, in October, 1964, a few months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Emceed—adorably, cornily—by the rock-and-roll duo Jan and Dean at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the T.A.M.I. show (the Teenage Awards Music International) was a departure from the “Shindig”-style pop programming of the time. The lineup was long and included white acts like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, and, as headliners, the Rolling Stones, but it was heavily weighted with black acts of all sorts: Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and James Brown and the Famous Flames.
The Stones had come to the States from England determined to play black R. & B. for a mainly white audience that did not know its Son House from its Howlin’ Wolf. They were already stars, and the T.A.M.I. producers had them scheduled to close the show. James Brown did not approve. “Nobody follows James Brown!” he kept telling the show’s director, Steve Binder. Mick Jagger himself was hesitant. He and Keith Richards were boys from Kent with an unusual obsession with American blues. They knew what Brown could do. In Santa Monica, they watched him from the wings, just twenty feet away, and, as they did, they grew sick with anxiety.
Brown, who had played the Chitlin Circuit for years, was genuinely incensed that the producers would put him on before pallid amateurs (in his mind) like the Stones. His performance, he later admitted, was a cutting contest that he refused to lose. As Brown puts it in his memoir, “James Brown: The Godfather of Soul,” “We did a bunch of songs, nonstop, like always. . . . I don’t think I ever danced so hard in my life, and I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast.” It was a four-song set: the staccato blues number “Out of Sight”; an astonishing inside-out revival of “Prisoner of Love,” which had been recorded by smoothies like Billy Eckstine and Perry Como; the dramatic centerpiece “Please, Please, Please”; and the closer, “Night Train,” which the boxer Sonny Liston would play to get himself going in the gym.
What is there to say? If Astaire’s dancing was the graceful line of black-tie seduction, Brown’s was a paroxysm of sexual frenzy, a blend of Pentecostal possession and erotic release. RJ Smith’s “The One” is the book to read on James Brown. (The Profile to read is Philip Gourevitch’s brilliant “Mr. Brown,” published in 2002, four years before Brown’s death. Two veteran critics, Alan Light and Edna Gundersen, have written interesting pieces on the T.A.M.I. performance.) Smith quotes Brown as saying that the T.A.M.I. performance was the “highest energy” moment of his career: “I danced so hard my manager cried. But I really had to. What I was up against was pop artists—I was R. & B. I had to show ’em the difference, and believe me, it was hard.”
This was the first time that Brown, while singing “Please, Please, Please,” pulled out his “cape act,” in which, in the midst of his own self-induced hysteria, his fit of longing and desire, he drops to his knees, seemingly unable to go on any longer, at the point of collapse, or worse. His backup singers, the Flames, move near, tenderly, as if to revive him, and an offstage aide, Danny Ray, comes on, draping a cape over the great man’s shoulders. Over and over again, Brown recovers, throws off the cape, defies his near-death collapse, goes back into the song, back into the dance, this absolute abandonment to passion.
“It’s a Holiness feeling—like a Baptist thing,” Brown said of the act. “It’s a spiritual-background thing. You’re involved and you don’t want to quit. That’s the definition of soul, you know. Being involved and they try to stop you and you just don’t want to stop. The idea of changing capes came later, ’cause it’s good for show business.” As Smith writes,
That falling-to-the-knees-overcome-with-emotion dramaturgy is straight out of the Holiness Church, out of a belief system holding, in the charnel heat of the moment, that a person could be overpowered by a sudden tap from the Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost jumpers were what they called those filled with the spirit in the earliest days of Pentecostalism. It was a form of possession, of yielding with glory to a higher force. Many figures in the black Pentecostal tradition wore the cape. There was King Louis Narcisse, a preacher who modeled himself on Daddy Grace. . . . There was Brother Joe May, one of the major gospel voices of the ’50s and ’60s . . .
Watching the film, it’s easy to see why Jagger was tempted to stay in his dressing room. This was 1964, and the Stones were not yet fully formed. They still played a mix of originals and covers (Berry’s “Around and Around,” Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now”). Jagger had not quite worked out his peculiar blend of frugging and Satanic posturing. He is hardly Perry Como, but, compared with Brown, he is an anemic thing, a pretender. Nelson George, a sharp writer on race and music and much else, calls out Jagger at the T.A.M.I. show for his “lame funky chicken,” in contrast to Brown’s “proto-moon-walking, athletically daring performance.” Taking the stage after Brown, the Stones are Unitarians making nice:
Richards would eventually say that the very idea of following James Brown was the biggest mistake of the Stones’ careers. “Just go out there and do your best,” Marvin Gaye had told Jagger. And he did. Jagger was never anything but admiring and respectful of James Brown—and he is one of the producers of “Get On Up.”
By all means, see the bio-pic. If nothing else, you’ll glimpse a movie star in Chadwick Boseman and at least the suggestion of an immortal. You’ll see that Brown was an abused and abusive man, as well as a source of radiance onstage. But start with T.A.M.I. (and listen to the “Live at the Apollo” recordings, too). An outfit called Shout! Factory issued a good cleaned-up DVD of the complete T.A.M.I. concert four years ago, and, to hype it, Steve Van Zandt rightly called it “the best rock movie you’ve never seen.” But the somewhat grainy eighteen minutes on YouTube will do you just fine. You’ll feel good. You’ll feel nice.
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