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James Brown, RIP
As a teen aged whiteboy when James' career started, I was just knocked out. Saw (on film) his performance of "Please, Please, Please" at the Apollo. The little rock band where I played horn did its best to capture the energy and musical tightness of the Famous Flames. Unsucessfully, I'm sure.
Brown's singing and stage work tends to overshadow the band, and that's too bad, because as a band leader, he was tops. Watch any of the performance videos on YouTube, especially the Boston performance on the day after MLK was killed, to appreciate this. Audience members are mobbing the stage, and Boston cops are literally heaving them off. James dismisses the cops, and dozens crowd him, almost out of sight. He pleads with them to let him continue the show, and eventually succeeds. But before he continues, he lectures the audience that this was not the way for black people to behave, if they wanted any respect. With almost no visible cue, he starts singing again, and the band is right on top of the first beat. Regardless of the chaos unfolding in front of them, these musicians were on high alert for their musical cue. That takes incredible leadership, courage and trust on the part of the band. When you're a musician and the crowd gets unruly, every instinct tells you to grab your ax and get the hell out of there, before you get hurt. Not these guys.
Nobody, but NOBODY brought that kind of energy to the stage in those days, and he did it (then) without fancy lights, fog machines, or stack upon stack of Marshall amps. No disrespect to Hendrix in that remark, BTW. But I don't think Jimi would have been successful if James had not paved the way for audiences of all races to dig a black artist with grit and individuality. Both these guys had incredible courage, to do any crazy-assed thing possible to entertain their audience.
My one regret was never seeing James Brown live. I'd seen many of the other top black acts, not least of which was Otis Redding, in the early days of his too-short career. But my parents thought a James Brown audience would be too inflamed to tolerate an 18 year old skinny white guy and his blonde girlfriend. I knew otherwise, having been in the Baltimore Civic Center when the place was packed for Otis or one of the others, and the two of us were tiny white dots in a sea of brown and black. It was not that we were ignored by the others, but that we were just part of that great wave of energy, and color truly did not matter.