The last time I saw James Brown play live, he brought his showband to the decorous concrete spaces of the Barbican — not exactly as rootsy a setting as his erstwhile spiritual home, the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. The weight of years, moreover, had taken its toll on the mercurial footwork, which meant that Brown — then in his late sixties — spent a fair amount of the show anonymously mooching around on a keyboard at the back of the stage.
At one point he even invited a magician to while away a few more minutes. As exotic handkerchiefs flew in all directions, I wondered if it was going to turn into one of those embarrassing affairs in which an ageing performer insists on one tour too many. How wrong I was.
If he lacked the energy to carry an entire show, the anthems he delivered when he stepped back into the spotlight still evoked the glory days. And when James Brown was on form, even the man from The Times was obliged to dance. So it was that I found myself doing the Bump with my equally bedazzled guest, the American cultural critic Martha Bayles, author of Hole in our Soul, an astute polemic subtitled “The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music”.
Although I had several chances to hear him again, I never went to any of his subsequent shows. That last concert had been such a perfect experience in its own eccentric way that I didn’t want to risk sullying its memory. But what I saw of Brown on later TV appearances looked reassuring enough. As far as I recall, the last time he was singing a duet with that young Aretha wannabe, Joss Stone. It must have been an odd experience for Brown, yet there he was, his hair still immaculate, his face breaking into that trademark grin-cum-grimace. As a boy in Georgia, he had earned quarters and dimes dancing in front of troop trains pulling out of an army base. That eagerness to seduce an audience carried him through the next six or seven decades.
The flurry of obituaries that greeted his death reminded us that he played a big role in championing black music among a white audience. What is just as striking about Brown’s achievement is how little he compromised his art in the process. Even the sublime Ray Charles was required to consort with choirs and country and western ballads as he moved up the commercial rankings. (The records were still quality products, yet most of his fans would agree, I think, that they don’t quite have the spark of the tracks he cut earlier on the Atlantic label.) Yet the hits that Brown made at the peak of his career are unquestionably rooted in the Afro-American tradition. While Tamla Motown found a way of giving R&B a stylish pop sheen, Brown’s funk hits were raw and raucous; even the album sleeves seemed somehow sweaty.
In the process he perfected that churning sub-school of R&B known as funk. In the wrong hands, the style can turn into mere bombast. Brown’s musicians — drilled within an inch of their life — created intricate, unrelenting dance grooves punctuated with his ecstatic gasps and moans. If Elvis could make love to the microphone, Brown subjected it to the ghetto equivalent of the Kama Sutra, and invented a few slick moves of his own for good measure.
For all his commercial success, he retained a special link with the black audience. “For much of the Sixties, James Brown owned the Apollo Theatre outright,” wrote the venue’s historian, Ted Fox. Despite his wealth and his rampant egomania (that other Sixties soul king, Solomon Burke, tells wonderful stories about the lengths to which Brown would go to up-stage him), the Godfather based his success on a workaday ethic. As one of the best writers on the music business, Peter Guralnick, put it in his indispensable book on R&B, Sweet Soul Music: “Where others were content with the easy coin of royalty (Count, Duke, Bishop, King), James Brown gloried in his very commonness.”
That link to Everyman gave Brown immense influence, as he demonstrated when he called for calm in the aftermath of the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. The man who chanted “Say it loud — I’m black and I’m proud” also recorded America is My Home. Willing to share platforms with Establishment politicians, he even endorsed Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential elections. The following year, when Brown made a return trip to the Apollo, he encountered pickets carrying signs saying “James Brown, Nixon’s Clown”. The lines of fans, however, snaked along 125th Street for the whole of the run.
As a creative force, Brown was long past his prime by the time he made those final celebratory visits to London. His influence, though, was inescapable, thanks to the rise of hip-hop. Yet while it was gratifying to see his music being sampled by so many rappers, the gap between the old man’s artistry and that of his would-be successors is depressing to contemplate. It’s ironic that at a moment when black music is more popular than ever, its superstars amassing fortunes that make Brown's look like chump-change in comparison, the content is, by and large, duller and more predictable than at any time since the disco era.
Brown was quite happy to take some of the credit for disco’s rise to dominance, but he also understood what the new dance formula lacked: “Disco is a very small part of funk. It’s the end of the song, the repetitious part, like a vamp. The difference is that in funk, you dig into a groove, you don’t stay on the surface. Disco stayed on the surface. See I taught ’em everything they know but not everything I know.”
It’s tempting to apply exactly the same words to the contenders who are fighting for the right to wear a man’s crown. Just as Mick Jagger was always a pallid copy of the Soul Brother No 1, so the hip-hoppers look like boys struggling to wear a king’s crown. To borrow the words of my friend Martha, there really is a hole in our soul. And with James Brown’s death, it just grew a little bigger.
Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records, J Records and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non performer.