The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About The Godfather of Soul

fishmongerfunk

i just picked up this anthology which is edited by nelson george and alan leeds and have been enjoying it. i thought i might share one of the saucier/funnier/more disturbing entries (includes james haranguing bill withers: "You ain't shit, you can't sing, you ain't nothing motherfucker!!") so i scanned it.

not sure if this is going to be readable, but here goes nothing:





edit: yeah that didn't quite work. if you want me to email you the full 20 page article, just pm me. alternatively, if you can read it somehow and want me to post the rest on this page, let me know.

holmes

you can read the excerpt if you magnify your browser to 150% so not a total fail. The comments about Bill Withers always crack me up, you can just totally imagine JB off on a tirade lol

fishmongerfunk

cool, so here is the rest then...

bobtheorange

if you open the images in a new tab they become much bigger and easier to read.

pickwick33

Great article! I actually have the 1975 issue of Crawdaddy in which it ran. Definite lack of ass kissing in that piece, particularly when the author mentions JB slyly, and sleazily, trying to put the moves on her.

As far as the Bill Withers tale...that was from the big Zaire tour (as seen in the documentary Soul Power). I heard from somebody (not that it's true, mind you) that Withers pulled a knife on JB on that tour and they were cool with each other from then on?

LaserWolf

Liked the book and wanted to start a thread.

"Food stamps!"

It's interesting how similar some of the articles are ("he now owns the radio station he used to shine shoes in front of"). Also how the press went from adulation to jeers simultaneously.

There are very helpful record reviews at the end.

He was a very strange man.
A musical genius who was one step ahead of an industry he was always just outside of.
His preacher like monologues show a lack of smarts, yet his success shows an abundance of smarts.
It seems like he stayed off drugs in the 50s, 60s and 70s, when everyone was doing them, only to become addict and crazed at the end of the 80s.
A royal asshole who rewarded loyalty and lapped up praise.

I think when I got done reading I had different things I wanted to talk about, but from a distance this is what I remember.

I guess the final takeaway is he didn't have an ounce of humility.

fishmongerfunk

laser: cosign everything you wrote. the only thing i would add is that james comes off as having unstoppable energy, even in his later years.

there are many wtf moments in this book. while "food stamps" is sort of a jaw dropper, the one that i thought the oddest was james at graceland for elvis' funeral, crying on the corpse and saying, "elvis, you rat. you rat! i'm not no. 2 no more!".

has anyone here read the fred wesley book and is it any good?

motown67

yes, read the wesley book. it's excellent. it shows how much of a control freak brown was, and a perfectionist as well.

Hollafame

One of the things that stuck with me from the Fred Wesley book (which is quite good) was the stories of how the JBs and the other musicians surrounding Brown would constantly mock him (not to his face, of course) for his lack of musical ability.

This kind of goes to Laser's point, which is how much of an enigma Brown really was. Wesley tells stories about how Brown would come into the studio when the band was rehearsing/recording and pound out senseless riffs on the keyboard, hum some tunes and say, "thats what I want", then leave. From there, the band would just kinda do their own thing.

This doc really shows that aspect of Brown...truly a mad genius in my mind.

the_average_man

Thanks for this. I've been meaning to get this book for a while, and although I read Fred Wesley's book many years ago, I think I need to re-read it as I've become more well informed about JB's output since.