Funk's Founding Father (1933-2006)

Live, like so much of the Brown concert oeuvre, was no less than public self-immolation. It could sound like a killing floor, with vocals somewhere between the screech of the A-train and a plump fryer meeting its fate. JB re-enacted his own death-by-desire every time he took the stage and barked, "Hit me!" to his dangerously sharp band. Each performance cost him seven to ten pounds, some of it sweat straight through the soles of his pointy-toed boots. And if he took the stage like a prince, he left it like a shipwreck survivor: Blood seeped from punished knees; the inflated, sculpted hair drooped like licorice as Mr. Dynamite assured his poleaxed communicants, "Ah'm tahred . . . but Ah'm clean!"

In 1965, he released his landmark single, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." It begat a polyrhythmic revolution that tilted the axis of popular music. Yet his innovation seemed deceptively simple: Mr. Dynamite sharpened his penchant for showcasing the percussive aspects of all instruments -- guitar, bass, horns -- and had them whomp the goods down on the first and third beats, rather than the two/four cadence aimed at American Bandstand record raters.

The brand-new beat proved irresistible and led him to further experimentations -- distilling the sound to its funk essence. The songs he churned out for the next decade seemed inexhaustible. He recorded anywhere, anytime, was so prolific that anyone working on JB compilations must excavate vaults of hidden treasures. Sixteen of the seventy-two tracks on JB's stupendous 1991 box set, Star Time, were newly discovered gems, including an original slower version of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" with alto saxman Maceo Parker blowing a gorgeous baritone solo.

The Godfather's testy relations with his long-suffering band are the stuff of legend, what he called a battle of "beats, grooves and egos." At the end of a white-hot performance, if you complimented their work, he would snap back with a ten-point critique. As he explained one night: "I have a lot of problems with my musicians. A lot of times they thought they were doin' it themselves. So in order to teach Maceo and them somethin', I took [bassist] Bootsy [Collins] out front. And when Bootsy thought he had somethin' goin', I took musicians that couldn't hardly play at all and cut bigger records with them. Cut 'Hot Pants.' I wanted them to know it wasn't them doin' it."

Always, he insisted they "do it to death." Some of his most intriguing sounds came from reworking the same songs over on countless live albums or in permutations of his own hits. Tin-eared detractors heard it as merely recycled material. Perhaps the world didn't need a clutch of variations on his 1969 "Popcorn." But James Brown did. Among them: "Mother Popcorn, Part 1," "Popcorn 80's" and "It's a New Day So Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn." The fact is, JB worked his series and aural triptychs with the same urge for refinement that hauled Picasso through his blue period. Bulldogged into parsing his process, he told me: "When I solo on the organ, it's like somebody's guidin' my hands. I don't have to look for it. Writin', too. It's like the tablets were written for Moses. Yes, ma'am. And everything I do hasn't been finished yet. So I can go back and keep tryin' to finish it. All those songs I put together are about ten percent of what the songs should be."

The urge was, he said, "a monster vision thang," which is nothing short of the desire to make a fragmented world whole -- and the most basic impulse for art.

Thus, it is impossible to overstate James Brown's musical legacy. For nearly fifty-five years, he made the global soundtrack pop, crackle and ooze, from Astoria to Zaire, live from the bandstand, howling from tinny dashboard radios, still calling stubbornly, slyly from the sampled rhythm tracks of latter-day rappers. But what should never be lost in the translation to postmodern funk is the galvanizing live aspect of James Brown's theatrical, testifying soul: The man could dance. In the Sixties, a decade full of careers that caught fire in live moments -- from Dylan turning electric at Newport to Hendrix at Woodstock -- JB proved it all night, every night. You had to see him to believe him.

In 1982, as he was readying Thriller, Michael Jackson told me he fell in thrall to the Godfather at age six while playing the Apollo with his brothers. Jackson was drawn instantly to that lodestar in tight, stovepipe pants: "The man gets out of himself. He's got a kind of freedom. I crave it. Every day." He asked whether I could help him get hold of a tape of the 1964 teen spectacular The T.A.M.I. Show, which contained the most mind-bending Brown footwork ever recorded. Brown told me it was the fastest he'd ever danced. Michael had heard that Elvis watched the footage over and over.

Just hours after the Godfather's death was announced, a grainy bit of T.A.M.I. footage showed up on YouTube. It shows him dancing to "Night Train," so lost in the hovercraft shuffles and spins that he forgets both the microphone and the goggle-eyed representatives of white teen America are there. Ever the canny showman, the Godfather named the dance trances that seized him: Popcorn! Mother Popcorn! New Breed Boogaloo! The crazes enslaved teen nations. But surely, it was as a dancer that James Brown was perfectly, unconditionally free.

Still, Mr. Brown would remind you, Jim Crow -- the mythic minstrel whose very name defined segregation -- was a dancer, too, but he bucked and jived for The Man. It was no accident that the first place we went on my inaugural tour of James Brown's Augusta was the ancient, overcrowded Fourth Street jail where he was held as a sixteen-year-old. He said it hadn't changed much since 1949. And certainly not by May 1970, when a black inmate, also sixteen, was beaten to death there, triggering the worst race riots in that city's history. A shaken Brown flew home from a date in Michigan at the behest of Georgia governor Lester "Pickax" Maddox. That canny old segregationist knew of JB's success cooling constituents in Boston and Washington, D.C., in the wake of the 1968 King assassination. And that boy was always coming up with his slogans: Don't be a dropout. Don't terrorize, organize. Don't burn, learn. To the native son's sorrow, things were too far gone when he got back: six more black deaths, fifty homes and businesses destroyed in the area he had inhabited as Niggertown.

JB caused a commotion during our visit, as inmates hollered greetings and pleas for help. The ruckus brought a fat guard in mirrored shades, who drawled "Now what y'all doin' rilin' these boys up?"

We beat a hasty retreat. As we drove off, JB explained: "You hearin' rage and frustration. And those are things I left behind. Where I been is not where I am, no thank you."