Episode 137: “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown

A history of folk music and 500 songs

by Andrew.

Episode 137.

Bubba's Got a Brand New Bag by James Brown.

It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time, national and international known, as the hardest working man in show business.

Man to sing, I'll go crazy.

Try me.

you've got the power

think

if you want me

I don't mind

be woolled there

million dollar seller lost someone

The very latest release Night Train

Let's everybody shout and shimmy

Mr.

Dynamite, the amazing Mr.

Please Please Himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the famous Flame.

In 1951, the composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University.

An anechoic chamber is a room that's been completely soundproofed, so no sound can get in from the outside world, and in which the walls, floor, and ceiling are designed to absorb any sounds that are made.

It's as close as a human being can get to experiencing total silence.

When Cage entered it, he expected that to be what he heard, just total silence.

Instead, he heard two noises, a high-pitched one and a low one.

Cage was confused by this.

Why hadn't he heard the silence?

The engineer in charge of the chamber explained to him that what he was hearing was himself.

The high-pitched noise was Cage's nervous system, and the low-pitched one was his circulatory system.

Cage later said about this, Until I die there will be sounds, and they will continue following my death.

One need not fear about the future of music.

The experience inspired him to write his most famous piece, Four Minutes Thirty-Three, in which a performer attempts not to make any sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

The piece is usually described as being four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but it actually isn't.

The whole point is that there is no silence, and that the audience is meant to listen to the ambient noise and appreciate that noise as music.

Here is where I would normally accept the piece, but of course, for 4 minutes 33 to have its full effect, one has to listen to the whole thing.

But I can accept another piece Cage wrote, because on October 24th, 1962, he wrote a sequel to 4 Minutes 33, a piece he titled Zero Minutes Minutes Zero, but which is sometimes credited as Four Minutes Thirty Three, Number Two.

He later reworked the piece, but the original score, which is dedicated to two avant-garde Japanese composers, Toshi Ichianagi and his estranged wife Yoko Ono, reads as follows In a situation provided with maximum amplification, no feedback, perform a disciplined action.

Now, as it happens, we have a recording of someone else performing Cage's piece, as written, written, on the day it was written, though neither performer nor composer were aware that that was what was happening.

But I'm sure everyone can agree that this recording from October the 24th, 1962, is a disciplined action, performed with maximum amplification and no feedback.

When we left James Brown, almost a hundred episodes ago, he had just had his first RB number one, with Try Me, and had performed for the first time at the venue with which he would become most associated, the Harlem Apollo, and had reconnected with the mother he hadn't seen since he was a small child.

But at that point, in 1958, he was still just the lead singer of a doo-wop group, one of many, and there was nothing in his shows or his records to indicate that he was going to become anything more than that.

Nothing to distinguish him from King Records labelmates like Hank Ballard, who made great records, put on a great live show, and are still remembered more than 60 years later, but mostly as a footnote.

Today, we're going to look at the process that led James Brown from being a peer of Ballard or Little Willie John to being arguably the single most influential musician of the second half of the 20th century.

Much of that influence is outside rock music, narrowly defined, but the records we're going to look at this time and in the next episode on Brown are records without which the entire sonic landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries would be unimaginably different.

And that process started in 1958, shortly after the release of Try Me in October that year, with two big changes to Brown's organization.

The first was that this was, at least according to Brown, when he first started working with Universal Attractions, a booking agency run by a man named Ben Bart, who before starting his own company, had spent much of the 1940s working for Mo Gale, the owner of the Savoy Ballroom, a manager of the Inkspots, Louis Jordan, and many of the other acts we looked at in the very first episodes of this podcast.

Bart had started his own agency in 1945 and had taken the Inkspots with him, though they'd returned to Gale a few years later, and he'd been responsible for managing the career of the Ravens, one of the first bird groups.

yes, you knew.

Oh, yes, you knew that it would hurt me so.

I'm all alone.

I have nobody to call my own.

And so I need somebody to run me all night long.

In the 50s, Bart had become closely associated with King Records, the label to which Brown and the famous Flames were signed.

A quick aside here.

Brown's Brown's early records were released on Federal Records, and later they switched to being released on King.

But Federal was a subsidiary label for King, and in the same way that I don't distinguish between Checker and Chess, Tamler and Motown, or Phillips and Son, I'll just refer to King throughout.

Bart and Universal Attractions handled bookings for almost every big R ⁇ B act signed by King, including Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John, The Five Royales, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.

According to some sources, the famous Flames signed with Universal Attractions at the same time they signed with King Records, and Bart's family even say it was Bart who discovered them and got them signed to King in the first place.

Other sources say they didn't sign with Universal until after they'd proved themselves on the charts, but everyone seems agreed that 1958 was when Bart started making Brown a priority.

and taking an active interest in his career.

Within a few years, Bart would have left Universal, handing the company over to his son and a business partner to devote himself full time to managing Brown, with whom he developed an almost father-son relationship.

With Bart behind them, the Famous Flames started getting better gigs, and a much higher profile on the Chitlin circuit, but around this time, there was another change that would have an even more profound effect.

Up to this point, The Famous Flames had been like almost every other vocal group playing the Chitlin Circuit, in that they hadn't had their own backing musicians.

There were exceptions, but in general, vocal groups would perform with the same backing band as every other actor on a bill, either a single backing band playing for a whole package tour, or a house band at the venue they were playing at, who would perform with every act that played that venue.

There would often be a single instrumentalist with the group, usually a guitarist or piano player, who would act as musical director to make sure that the random assortment of musicians they were going to perform with knew the material.

This was, for the most part, how the famous Flames had always performed, though they had on occasion also performed their own backing in the early days.

But now they got their own backing band, centred on J.C.

Davis as sax player and bandleader, Bobby Roach on guitar, Nat Kendrick on drums, and Bernard Odom on bass.

Musicians would come and go, but this was the core original line-up of what became the James Brown Band.

Other musicians who played with them in the late 50s were horn players Alfred Corley and Roscoe Patrick, guitarist Les Bowie, and bass player Hubert Perry, while keyboard duties would be taken on by Fat Sconder, although James Brown and Bobby Bird would both sometimes play keyboards on stage.

At this point as well, the line-up of the Famous Flames became more or less stable.

As we discussed in the previous episode on Brown, the original line-up of the Famous Flames left en masse when it became clear that they were going to be promoted as James Brown and the Famous Flames, with Brown getting more money, rather than as a group.

Brown had taken on another vocal group, who had previously been Little Richard's backing vocalists, but shortly after Tri-Me had come out, but before they'd seen any money from it, that group had got into an argument with Brown over money he owed them.

He dropped them, and they went off to record unsuccessfully as the Fabulous Flames on a tiny label, though the records they made, like Do You Remember, are quite good examples of their type.

Do you remember

it hasn't been so long

the light you told me

by

so long?

Well, you love that or hurt me.

Yes,

that or hurt me

deep down.

Brown pulled together a new lineup of famous Flames, featuring two of the originals.

Johnny Terry had already returned to the group earlier, and stayed when Brown sacked the rest of the second line-up of Flames, and they added Lloyd Bennett and Bobby Stallworth.

And making his second return to the group was Bobby Bird, who had left with the other original members, joined again briefly, and then left again.

Oddly, the first commercial success that Brown had after these line-up changes was not with the Famous Flames, or even under his own name.

Rather, it was under the name of his drummer, Nat Kendrick.

Brown had always seen himself, not primarily as a singer, but as a bandleader and arranger.

He was always a jazz fan first and foremost, and he'd grown up in the era of the big bands, and musicians he'd admired growing up, like Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan, had always recorded instrumentals as well as vocal selections, and Brown saw himself very much in that tradition.

Even though he couldn't read music, he could play several instruments, and he could communicate his arrangement ideas, and he wanted to show off the fact that he was one of the few RMB musicians with his own tight band.

The story goes that Sid Nathan, the owner of King Records, didn't like the idea, because he thought that the RMB audience at this point only wanted vocal tracks, and also because Brown's band had previously released an instrumental which hadn't sold.

Now, this is a definite pattern in the story of James Brown.

It seems that at every point in Brown's career career for the first decade, Brown would come up with an idea that would have immense commercial value, Nathan would say it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, Brown would do it anyway, and Nathan would later admit that he was wrong.

This is such a pattern, it apparently happened with Please, Please, Please, Brown's first hit, and Try Me, Brown's first R ⁇ B number one, and we'll see it happen again later this episode.

that one tends to suspect that maybe these stories were sometimes made up after the fact, especially since Sid Nathan somehow managed to run a successful record label for over 20 years, putting out some of the best RB and country records from everyone from Moonbullican to Wyoni Harris, the Stanley Brothers to Little Willie John, while if these stories are to be believed, he was consistently making the most bone-headed, egregious, uncommercial decisions imaginable.

But in this case, it seems to be at least mostly true, as rather than being released on King Records as by James Brown, Do the Mashed Potatoes was released on Dade Records, as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, with the DJ Carlton Coleman shouting vocals over Brown so it wouldn't be obvious Brown was breaking his contract.

That made the RB top 10, and I've seen reports that Frown and his band even toured briefly as Nat Kendrick and the Swans, before Sid Nathan realised his mistake and started allowing instrumentals to be released under the name James Brown Presents His Band, starting with the cover of Bill Doggett's Hold It.

After the Nat Kendrick record gave Brown's band an instrumental success, the Famous Flames also came back for another mini dry spell for hits, with the first top 20 RB hit for the new line-up, I'll Go Crazy, which was followed shortly afterwards by their first pop top 40 hit.

Think.

The success of Think is at least in part down to Bobby Bird, who would from this point on be Brown's major collaborator and, often uncredited, co-writer and co-producer until the mid-70s.

After leaving the Flames and before rejoining them, Bird had toured for a while with his own group, but had then gone to work for King Records at the request of Brown.

King Records pressing plant had equipment that sometimes produced less than ideal pressings of records, and Brown had asked Bird to take a job there performing quality control, making sure that Brown's records didn't skip.

While working there, Bird also worked as a song doctor.

His job was to take songs that had been sent in as demos and rework them in the style of some of the label's popular artists to make them more suitable, changing a song so it might fit the style of the Five Royales or Little Woolly John or whoever.

And Bird had done this for Think, which had originally been recorded by the Five Royales, whose leader, Loman Pauling, had written it.

for which I was the blame

God?

I can't remember

which was my fault.

I tried so hard to please you.

At least that's what I thought.

So come on, Sugar.

Bird had reworked the song to fit Brown's style and persona.

It's notable, for example, that the Royale sing, How much of all your happiness have I really claimed?

How many tears have you cried for which I was to blame?

Darling, I can't remember which was my fault.

I tried so hard to please you, at least that's what I thought.

But in Brown's version, this becomes: How much of your happiness can I really claim?

How many tears have you shed for which you was to blame?

Darling, I can't remember just what is wrong.

I tried so hard to please you, at least that's what I thought.

Can I really claim

I made it feel useless?

I wish you weren't blame.

Now I can't remember

just what it's wrong.

I've tried so hard to please you,

at least that's what I thought.

I'm unsugar and

I'm about to run

the wrong In Brown's version, nothing is his fault.

He's trying to persuade an unreasonable woman who has some problem he doesn't even understand.

But she needs to think about it and she'll see that he is right.

While in the Royale's version, they're acknowledging that they're at fault, that they've done wrong, but they didn't only do wrong, and maybe she should think about that too.

It's only a couple of words different, but it changes the whole tenor of the song.

Think would become the famous Flame's first top 40 hit on the pop charts, reaching number 33.

It went top 10 on the R ⁇ B charts, and between 1959 and 1963, Brown and the Flames would have 15 top 30 RB hits, going from being a minor doo-wop group that had had a few big hits, to being consistent hit makers, who were not yet household names, but who had a consistent sound that could be guaranteed to make the R ⁇ B charts.

and who put on what was regarded as the best live show of any R ⁇ B band in the world.

This was partly down to the type of discipline that Brown imposed on his band.

Many band leaders in the RB world would impose fines on their band members, and Johnny Terry suggested that Brown do the same thing.

As Bobby Bird put it, many band leaders do it, but it was Johnny's idea to start it with us, and we were all for it because we didn't want to miss nothing.

We wanted to be immaculate, clothes-wise, routine-wise, and everything.

Originally, the fines was only between James and us, the famous Flames, but then James carried it over into the whole troupe.

It was still a good idea because anybody joining the James Brown Review had to know that they couldn't be messing up, and anyway, all the fines went into a pot for the parties we had.

But Brown went much further with these fines than any other band leader, and would also impose them arbitrarily, and it became part of his reputation that he was the strictest disciplinarian in rhythm and blues music.

One thing that became legendary among musicians was the way that he would impose fines while on stage.

If a band band member missed a note, or a dance step, or missed a cue, or had improperly polished shoes, Brown would, while looking at them, briefly make a flashing gesture with his hand, spreading his fingers out for a fraction of a second.

To the audience, it looked like just part of Brown's dance routine, but the musician knew he had just been fined $5.

Multiple flashes meant multiples of $5 fined.

Brown also developed a whole series of other signals to the band, which they had to learn.

To quote Bobby Bird Bird again, James didn't want anybody else to know what we were doing, so he had numbers and certain screams and spins.

There was a certain spin he'd do, and if he didn't do the complete spin, you'd know it was time to go over here.

Certain screams would instigate chord changes, but mostly it was numbers.

James would call out football numbers, that's where we got that from.

39, 16, 14, 2, 5, 3, 9,

that kind of thing.

Number 39 was always the change into please, please, please, please.

16 is into a scream and an immediate change.

Not bam-bam, but straight into something else.

If he spins around and calls 36, that means we're going back to the top again.

And the 42, okay, we're going to do this first and then bow out, we're leaving now.

It was amazing.

This, or something like this, is a fairly standard technique among more autocratic band leaders.

a way of allowing the band as a whole to become a live compositional or improvisational tool for their leader.

And Frank Zappa, for example, had a similar system.

It requires the players to subordinate themselves utterly to the whim of the bandleader, but also requires a bandleader who knows the precise strengths and weaknesses of every band member and how they are likely to respond to a cue.

When it works well, it can be devastatingly effective, and it was for Brown's live show.

The Famous Flames show soon became a full-on review, with other artists joining the bill and performing with Brown's band.

From the late 1950s on, Brown would always include a female singer.

The first of these was Sugar Pie DeSanto, a blues singer who had been discovered, and given her stage name, by Johnny Otis.

But DeSanto soon left Brown's band and went on to solo success on chess records with hits like Soulful Dress.

Lord, I'm going to the party.

Gonna have some fun.

Gonna shake and shout until the morning call.

If you wanna keep your main, you better get sharp as you can.

I'll be at my best when I put on my soul for rest.

After DeSanto left, she was replaced by Bia Ford, the former wife of the soul singer Joe Tex, with whom Brown had an an aggressive rivalry and mutual loathing.

Ford and Brown recorded together, cutting tracks like You Got the Power.

We

belong

together

and we

love

each other.

We

belong

to you.

And darling, darling, you know I don't have to look no further, cause

you got the ball.

However, Brown and Ford soon fell out, and Brown actually wrote to Tex asking if he wanted his wife back.

Tex's response was to record this.

James, I got your letter.

It came to me today.

You said I could have my baby back,

but I don't want her that way.

So you keep her,

you keep her, because man,

she belongs to me.

Ford's replacement was Yvonne Fair, who had briefly replaced Jackie Landry in the Chantels for touring purposes, when Landry had quit touring to have a baby.

Fair would stay with Brown for a couple of years, and would release a number of singles written and produced for her by Brown, including one which Brown would later re-record himself with some success.

When I hold you in my arms, my love won't do me no harm.

I'll feel good,

like I knew

Fair would eventually leave the band after getting pregnant with a child by Brown, who tended to sleep with the female singers in his band.

The last shows she played with him were the shows that would catapult Brown into the next level of stardom.

Brown had been convinced for a long time that his live shows had an energy that his records didn't, and that people would buy a record of one of them.

Sid Nathan, as usual, disagreed.

In his view, the market for R ⁇ B albums was small, and only consisted of people who wanted collections of hit singles they could play in one place.

Nobody would buy a James Brown Live album.

So Brown decided to take matters into his own hands.

He decided to book a run of shows at the Apollo Theatre and record them, paying for the recordings with his own money.

This was a week-long engagement with shows running all day every day.

Brown and his band would play five shows a day, and Brown would wear a different suit for every show.

This was in October 1962, the month that we've already established as the month the 60s started, the month the Beatles released their first single, The Beach Boys released their first record outside the US, and the first Bond film came out, all on the same day at the beginning of the month.

By the end of October, when Brown appeared at the Apollo, the Cuban missile crisis was at its height, and there were several points during the run when it looked like the world itself might not last until November 62.

Douglas Walk has written an entire book on the live album that resulted, which claims to be a recording of the midnight performance from October 24th, though it seems like it was actually compiled from multiple performances.

The album only records the headline performance, but Walk describes what a full show by the James Brown review at the Apollo was like in October 1962, and the following description is indebted to his book, which I'll link in the show notes.

The show would start with the James Brown Orchestra, the Becking Band.

They would play a set of instrumentals, and a group of dancers called the Brownies would join them.

At various points during the set, Vrown himself would join the band for a song or two, playing keyboards or drums.

After the band's instrumental set, the Valentinos would take the stage for a few songs.

This was before they'd been taken on by Sam Cooke, who would take them under his wing very soon after these shows.

But the Valentinos were already recording artists in their own right, and had recently released Looking for a Love.

I'm searching everywhere.

And I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking.

Oh, look before I love,

I'm looking for a love,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, now, oh, I'm looking here and there.

Next up would be Yvonne Fair, now visibly pregnant with her boss's child, to sing her few numbers.

I said you can make it if you try.

I'm telling you, you can make it if you

try.

You can make it if you try.

You can make it if you try.

Freddie King was on next, another artist for the King family of labels, who'd had a run of RB hits the previous year, promoting his new single, I'm On My Way to Atlanta.

I am my happy,

oh yeah,

oh yeah,

I am my happy,

I am my happy

I'm on my way to Atlanta where the girls are really fine

I'm on my way to Atlanta where the girls After King came Solomon Burke, who had been signed to Atlantic earlier that year and just started having hits, and was the new hot thing on the scene, but not yet the massive star he became.

And there's nothing

but the smell of pepper blue.

Don't you feel like I'm crying?

Don't you feel like I'm crying?

Or don't you feel like I'm crying?

After Burke came a change of pace.

The Vaudeville comedian Pigmeat Markham would take the stage and perform a couple of comedy sketches.

We actually know exactly how these went, as Brown wasn't the only one recording a live album there that week.

And Markham's album, The World's Greatest Clown, was a result of these shows, and released on chess records.

down his leg like you did.

I don't, huh?

You don't go right you didn't do it.

Well, we are citizens of this town.

That's right.

And you ain't nothing but a public servant.

Yeah.

Well, go get me a glass of water.

All right.

Hey, who are you telling to go get water?

Well, I didn't like this.

I'm the officer on this beat.

All right, then.

And after Markham would come the main event.

Fat Skonda, the band's organist, would give the introduction we heard at the beginning of the episode.

And backstage, Danny Ray, who had been taken on as James Brown's valet that very week, according to Walk, I've seen other sources saying he'd joined Brown's organisation in 1960, was listening closely.

He would soon go on to take over the role of MC, and would introduce Brown in much the same way as Gonda had, at every show until Brown's death 44 years later.

The live album is an astonishing tour de force.

showing Brown and his band generating a level of excitement that few bands then or now could hope to equal.

It's even more astonishing when you realise two things.

The first is that this was before any of the hits that most people now associate with the name James Brown.

Before Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, or Sex Machine, or It's a Man's Man's Man's World, or Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud, or Funky Drummer, or Get Up Off of That Thing.

It's still an unformed James Brown.

only six years into a 50-year career, and still without most of what made him famous.

The other thing is, as Walk notes, if you listen to any live bootleg recordings from this time, the microphone distorts all the time, because Brown is singing so loud.

Here, the vocal tone is clean, because Brown knew he was being recorded.

This is the sound of James Brown restraining himself.

The album was released a few months later and proved Sid Nathan's judgment utterly, utterly wrong.

It became the 32nd biggest selling album of 1963, an amazing achievement given that it was released on a small, independent label that dealt almost exclusively in singles, and which had no real presence in the pop market.

The album spent 66 weeks on the album charts, making number two on the charts.

The pop album charts, not RB charts.

There wasn't an RB albums chart until 1965, and Live at the Apollo basically forced Billboard to create one, and more or less single-handedly created the RB albums market.

It was such a popular album in 1963 that DJs took to playing the whole album, breaking for commercials as they turned the side over, but otherwise not interrupting it.

It turned Brown from merely a relatively big RB star into a megastar.

But oddly, given this astonishing level of success, Brown's singles in 1963 were slightly less successful than they had been in the previous few years, possibly partly because he decided to record a few versions of old standards, changing direction as he had for much of his career.

Johnny Terry quit the Famous Flames to join the Drifters, becoming part of the line-up that recorded Under the Boardwalk and Saturday Night at the Movies.

Brown also recorded a second live album, Pure Dynamite, which is generally considered a little lackluster in comparison to the Apollo album.

There were other changes to the line-up as well as Terry leaving.

Brown wanted to hire a new drummer, Melvin Parker, who agreed to join the band, but only if Brown took on his sax-playing brother Macio along with him.

Macio soon became one of the most prominent musicians in Brown's band, and his distinctive saxophone playing is all over many of Brown's biggest hits.

The first big hit that the Parkers played on was released as by James Brown and his orchestra, rather than James Brown and the Famous Flames, and was a landmark in Brown's evolution as a musician.

You're Slipping you

You've got your highest eagles on

And you're slipping new

You're more than alright

You know you're out of sight

You've got a shapely figure mama

Let's keep me up tight The famous Flames did sing on the B-side of that, a song called Maybe the the Last Time, which was ripped off from the same Pop Staples song that the Rolling Stones later ripped off for their own hit single.

But that would be the last time Brown would use them in the studio.

From that point on, the Famous Flames were purely a live-act, although Bobby Bird, but not the other members, would continue to sing on the records.

The reason it was credited to James Brown, rather than to James Brown and the Famous Flames, is that Out of Sight was released on Smash Records, to which Brown, but not the Flames, had signed a little while earlier.

Brown had become sick of what he saw as King Records incompetence, and had found what he and his advisors thought was a loophole in his contract.

Brown had been signed to King Records under a personal services contract as a singer, not under a musician contract as a musician, and so they believed that he could sign to Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury, as a musician.

He did, and he made what he thought of as a fresh start on his new label by recording Caldonia, a cover of a song by his idol, Louis Jordan.

Understandably, King Records sued on the reasonable grounds that Brown was signed to them as a singer, and they got an injunction to stop him recording for Smash.

But by the time the injunction came through, Brown had already released two albums and three singles for the label.

The injunction prevented Brown from recording any new material for the rest of 1964, though both labels continued to release stockpiled material during that time.

While he was unable to record new material, October 1964 saw Brown's biggest opportunity to cross over to a white audience, the Tammy Show.

We've mentioned the Tammy Show a couple of times in previous episodes, but didn't go into it in much detail.

It was a film concert which featured Jan and Dean, the Barbarians, Leslie Gore, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Jerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J.

Kramer and the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, The Miracles, The Supremes, and, as the top two acts, James Brown and the Rolling Stones.

Rather oddly, the point of the Tammy Show wasn't the music as such.

Rather, it was intended as a demonstration of a technical process.

Before videotape became cheap and a standard, it was difficult to record TV shows for later broadcast, for distribution to other countries, or for archive.

The way they used to be recorded was a process known as telerecording in the UK and kinescoping in the US, and that was about as crude as it was possible to get.

You'd get a film camera, point it at a TV showing the programme you wanted to record, and film the TV screen.

There was specialist equipment to do this, but that was all it actually did.

Almost all surviving TV from the 50s and 60s, and even some from the 70s, was preserved by this method rather than by videotape.

Even after videotape started being used to make the programmes, there were differing standards and tapes were expensive, so if you were making a programme in the UK and wanted a copy for US broadcast, or vice versa, you'd make a telerecording.

But what if you wanted to make a TV show that you could also show on cinema screens?

If you're filming a TV screen, and then you project that film onto a big screen, you get a blurry low-resolution mess.

or at least you did with the 525 line TV screens that were used in the US at the time.

So a company named Electronovision came into the picture, for those rare times when you wanted to do something using video cameras that would be shown at the cinema.

Rather than shooting 525 line resolution, their cameras shot in 819 line resolution, super high definition for the time, but capable of being recorded onto standard videotape, with appropriate modifications for the equipment.

But that meant that when you kinescope the production, it was nearly twice the resolution that a standard US TV broadcast would be, and so it didn't look terrible when shown in a cinema.

The owner of the Electronovision process had had a hit with a cinema release of a performance by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and he needed a follow-up, and decided that another filmed live performance would be the best way to make use of his process.

TV cameras were much more useful for capturing live performances than film cameras, for a variety of dull technical reasons, and so this was one of the few areas where Electronovision might actually be useful.

And so Bill Roden, one of the heads of Electronovision, turned to a TV director named Steve Binder, who was working at the time on the Steve Allen Show, one of the big variety shows second only to Ed Sullivan, and who would soon go on to direct Hullabaloo.

Roden asked Binder to make a concert film, shot on video, which would be released on the big screen by American International Pictures, the same organisation with which David Crosby's father worked so often.

Binder had contacts with West Coast record record labels, and particularly with Lou Adler's organisation, which managed Jan and Dean.

He also had been in touch with a promoter who was putting on a package tour of British musicians, so they decided that their next demonstration of the capabilities of the equipment would be a show featuring performers from all over the world, as the theme song put it.

by which they meant all over the continental United States plus two major British cities.

For those acts who didn't have their own bands, or whose bands needed augmenting, there was an orchestra centred around members of the Wrecking Crew, conducted by Jack Nitchie, and the Blossoms were on hand to provide backing vocals where required.

Jan and Dean would host the show and sing the theme song.

James Brown had had less pop success than any of the other artists on the show, except for the Barbarians, who are now best known for their appearances on the Nuggets collection of relatively obscure Garage Rock singles, and whose biggest hit, Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?, only went to number 55 on the charts.

You're either a girl, or you come from the riverboard.

You can talk like a female monkey, but you swear on your stone.

Maybe a boy.

The barbarians were being touted as the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones, but the general cultural moment of the time can be summed up by that line, you're either a girl or you come from Liverpool, which was where the Rolling Stones came from, or at least it was where Americans seemed to think they came from, given both that song, and the theme song of the Tammy Show, written by P.F.

Sloan and Steve Barry, which sang about the Rolling Stones from Liverpool, and also referred to Brown as the King of the Blues.

Don't forget the Mortar City sounds of today, the baby loves the dreams and market kings.

The king of the blue soul changed Brown, the big boy singing now.

I know they are

But other than the barbarians, the Tammy Show was one of the few places in which all the major pop music movements of the late 50s and early 60s could be found in one place.

There was the Mersey beat of Jerry and the Pacemakers and the Dakotas, already past their commercial peak but not yet realising it.

The 50s rock of Chuck Berry, who actually ended up performing one song with Jerry and the Pacemakers.

And there was the brill-building pop of Leslie Gore, the British RB of the Rolling Stones right at the point of their breakthrough, the vocal surf music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and three of the most important Motan acts, with Brown the other representative of Seoul on the bill.

But the billing was a sore point.

James Brown's manager insisted that he should be the headliner of the show, and indeed by some accounts the Rolling Stones also thought that they should probably not try to follow him, though other accounts say that the Stones were equally insistent that they must be the headliners.

It was a difficult decision because Brown was much less well known, but it was eventually decided that the Rolling Stones would go on last.

Most people talking about the event, including most of those involved with the production, have since stated that this was a mistake, because nobody could follow James Brown, though in interviews Mick Jagger has always insisted that the Stones didn't have to follow Brown.

as there was a recording break between acts and they weren't even playing to the same audience, though others have disputed that quite vigorously.

But what absolutely everyone has agreed is that Brown gave the performance of a lifetime, and that it was miraculously captured by the cameras.

I say its capture was miraculous, because every other act had done a full rehearsal for the TV cameras, and had had a full shot-by-shot plan worked out by Binder beforehand.

But according to Steve Binder, though all the accounts of the show are contradictory, Brown refused to do a rehearsal.

So, even though he had by far the most complex and choreographed performance of the event, Binder and his camera crew had to make decisions by pure instinct, rather than by having an actual plan they'd worked out in advance of what shots to use.

This is one of the rare times when I wish this was a video series rather than a podcast, because the visuals are a huge part of this performance.

Brown is a whirlwind of activity, moving all over the stage in a similar way to Jackie Wilson.

one of his big influencers, and doing an astonishing gliding dance step in which he stands on one leg and moves sideways almost as if on wheels.

The full performance is easily findable online and is well worth seeking out, but still just hearing the music and the audience's reaction can give some insight.

The Rolling Stones apparently watched the show in horror, unable to imagine following that.

But when they did, the audience response was fine.

See, the joy was a lot.

One round and wild.

Gave me the Nanawaka.

What a crazy sound.

But the never stopped prompt.

Then the moon went down.

It didn't sound so sweet.

And it gave me a chance.

I rose out of my seat.

Just had to dance.

Incidentally, Chuck Berry must have been quite pleased with this payday from the Tammy Show, given that as well as his own performance, the Stones did one of his songs, as did Jerry and the Pacemakers, as we heard earlier, and the Beach Boys did surf in USA, for which he had won sole songwriting credit.

After the Tammy Show, Mick Jagger would completely change his attitude to performing, and would spend the rest of his career trying to imitate Brown's performing style.

He was unsuccessful in this, but still came close enough that he's still regarded as one of the great frontmen, nearly 60 years later.

Brown kept performing, and his labels kept releasing material, but he was still not allowed to record, until in early 1965 a court reached a ruling.

Yes, Brown wasn't signed as a musician to King Records, so he was perfectly within his rights to record with Smash Records, as an instrumentalist.

But Brown was signed to King Records as a singer, so he was obliged to record vocal tracks for them, and only for them.

So until his contract with Smash lapsed, he had to record twice as much material.

He had to keep recording instrumentals, playing piano or organ, for Smash, while recording vocal tracks for King Records.

His first new record, released as by James Brown, rather than the earlier billings of James Brown and his orchestra, or James Brown and the Famous Flames, was for King, and was almost a remake of Out of Sight, his hit for Smash Records.

But even so, Popper's Got a Brand New Bag was a major step forward.

and is often cited as the first true funk record.

This is largely because of the presence of a new guitarist in Brown's band.

Jimmy Nolan had started out as a violin player, but like many musicians in the 1950s, he had been massively influenced by T-Bone Walker and had switched to playing guitar.

He was discovered as a guitarist by the blues band Jimmy Wilson, who had had a minor hit with Tin Pan Ali.

as soon as the sun goes down.

Wilson had brought Nolan to LA, where he'd soon parted from Wilson and started working with a whole variety variety of band leaders.

His first recording came with Monty Easter on Aladdin Records.

After working with Easter, he started recording with Chuck Higgins, and also started recording by himself.

At this point, Nolan was just one of many West Coast Blues guitarists with a similar style, influenced by T-Bone Walker.

He was competing with Pete Guitar Lewis, Johnny Guitar Watson and Guitar Slim, and wasn't yet quite as good as any of them.

But he was still making some some influential records.

His version of After Hours, for example, released under his own name on Federal Records, was a big influence on Roy Buchanan, who would record several versions of the standard based on Nolan's arrangement.

Nolan had released records on many labels, but his most important early association came from records he made but didn't release.

In the mid-50s, Johnny Otis produced a couple of tracks by Nolan for Otis' Dig Records label, but but they weren't released until decades later.

But when Otis had a falling out with his longtime guitar player, Pete Guitar Lewis, who was one of the best players in LA, but who was increasingly becoming unreliable due to his alcoholism, Otis hired Nolan to replace him.

It's Nolan who's playing on most of the best-known recordings Otis made in the late 50s, like Casting My Spell.

I took a black cat, a cave bat, and threw them in a pot, pot, pot, pot, pot, pot.

I took a blue snake, a green snake, and tied them in a knot, knot, knot, knot, knot, knot.

I took a hawk jaw, a dog's ball, and hung them on the line.

Line, line, line, line, line.

I took a horse hair, a green pear, and made a crazy sign.

Sign, sign, sign, sign, sign.

I'm casting my spell on you.

I'm casting my spell on you.

I'm casting my spell.

And of course, Otis's biggest hit, William the Hand Jave.

I know a cat named Way Heart Willie.

He got a cool little chick named Rockin' Billy.

He can walk and stroll it through the queue

and do that crazy handjive too.

Papa told Willie, I'll run my

Nolan left Otis after a few years, and spent the early sixties mostly playing in scratch bands backing blues singers, and not recording.

It was during this time that Nolan developed the style that would revolutionise music.

The style he developed was unique in several different ways.

The first was in Nolan's choice of chords.

We talked last week about how Pete Townsend's guitar playing became based on simplifying chords and only playing power chords.

Nolan went the other way.

While his voicings often only included two or three notes, he was also often using very complex chords with more notes than a standard chord.

As we discussed last week, in most popular music, the chords are based around either major or minor triads, the first, third, and fifth notes of a scale.

So you have an E major chord, which is the notes E, G sharp, and B.

It's also fairly common common to have what are called seventh chords, which are actually a triad with an added flattened seventh.

So an E7 chord would be the notes E, G sharp, B and D.

But Nolan built his style around dominant ninth chords, often just called ninth chords.

Dominant ninth chords are mostly thought of as jazz chords because they're mildly dissonant.

They consist of the first, third, fifth, flattened seventh, and ninth of a scale.

So an E9 would be the notes E, G sharp, B, D, and F sharp.

Another way of looking at that is that you're playing both a major chord and at the same time a minor chord that starts on the fifth note.

So an E major and a B minor chord at the same time.

E major,

B minor,

E9th.

It's not completely unknown for pop songs to use ninth chords, but it's very rare.

Probably the most prominent example came from a couple of years after the period we're talking about, when in mid-1967, Bobby Gentry basically built the whole song Ode to Billy Joe around the D9 chord, barely ever moving off it.

And at dinner time, we stopped and walked back

That shows the kind of thing that ninth chords are useful for, because they have so many notes in them, you can just keep hammering on the same chord for a long time, and the melody can go wherever it wants and will fit over it.

The record we're looking at, Popper's Got a Brand New Bag, actually has three chords in it.

It's basically a 12-bar blues, like Out of Sight was, just with these ninth chords sometimes used instead of more conventional chords.

But as Brown's style got more experimental in future years, he would often build songs with no chord changes at all, just with Nolan playing a single ninth chord throughout.

There's a possibly apocryphal story, told in a few different ways, but the gist of which is that when auditioning Nolan's replacement many years later, Brown asked, can you play an E9th chord?

Yes, of course, came the reply.

But can you play an E ninth chord all night?

The reason Braun asked this, if he did, is that playing like Nolan is extremely physically demanding.

Because the other thing about Nolan's style is that he was an extremely percussive player.

In his years backing blues musicians, he'd had to play with many different drummers and knew they weren't always reliable timekeepers.

So he'd started playing like a drummer himself, developing a technique called chicken scratching, based on the bow diddley style he'd played with Otis, where he'd often play rapid, consistent semi quaver chords, keeping the time himself so the drummer didn't have to.

Other times he'd just play single, jagged sounding chords to accentuate the beat.

He used guitars with single coil pick ups and turned the treble up and got rid of all the mid range, so the sound would cut through no matter what.

As well as playing full voiced chords, he'd also sometimes mute all the strings while he strummed, giving a percussive scratching sound rather than letting the strings ring.

In short, the sound he got was this.

And that is the sound that became funk guitar.

If you listen to Jimmy Nolan's playing on Poppa's Got a Brand New Bag, that guitar sound, Chicken Scratched Ninth Chords, is what every funk guitarist after him based their style on.

It's not Nolan's guitar playing in its actual final form.

That wouldn't come until he started using wah-wah wa-wa pedals, which weren't mass-produced until early 1967.

But it's very clear when listening to the track that this is the birth of funk.

The original studio recording of Poppa's Got a Brand New Bag actually sounds odd if you listen to it now.

It's slower than the single and lasts almost seven minutes.

ain't new hip

but that new breeze thing

He ain't no drag

Poppa's got a brand new band

But for release as a single it was sped up a semitone a ton of reverb was added and it was edited down to just a few seconds over two minutes the result was an obvious hit single

Or at least, it was an obvious hit single to everyone except Sid Nathan, who as you'll have already predicted by now, didn't like the song.

Indeed, according to Brown, he was so disgusted with the record that he threw his acetate copy of it onto the floor.

But Brown got his way, and the single came out, and it became the biggest hit of Brown's career up to that point.

Not only giving him his first RB number one since Try Me seven years earlier, but also crossing over to the pop charts in a way he hadn't before.

He'd had the odd top thirty or even top twenty pop single in the past, but now he was in the top ten, and getting noticed by the music business establishment in a way he hadn't earlier.

Brown's audience went from being medium-sized crowds of almost exclusively black people, with the occasional white face, to a much larger, more integrated audience.

Indeed, at the Grammys the next year, while the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector, and the whole Motown stable were overlooked.

In favour of the big winners for that year, Roger Miller, Herb Alpert, and the Anita Kerr singers, even an organisation with its finger so notoriously off the pulse of the music industry as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Grammys, couldn't fail to find the pulse of Popper's Got a Brand New Bag and gave Brown the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues record, beating out the other nominees in the Midnight Hour, My Girl, Shotgun by Junior Walker, and Shake by Sam Cook.

From this point on, Sid Nathan would no longer argue with James Brown as to which of his records would be released.

After nine years of being the hardest-working man in show business, James Brown had now become the godfather of Soul, and his real career had just begun.

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