James Brown killing it for your Sunday (one 19 minute take of Escape-Ism)

The Original Funky Drummers On Life With James Brown

from NPR:



All this week, Morning Edition on NPR is talking about drums and drummers. For the first installment in "Beat Week," David Greene spoke with a duo who shared drumming duties for the hardest working man in show business.

From the mid-1960s through the early '70s, Clyde Stubblefield and John "Jabo" Starks created the grooves on many of James Brown's biggest hits, and laid the foundation for modern funk drumming in the process.

The two first met in 1965, at James Brown gig in Augusta, Ga. Stubblefield was there to audition, even though Starks had just been hired two weeks earlier – and was already one of a handful of drummers on the band's roster.

"I went on stage and there was five drum sets up there," Stubblefield recalls. "And I'm going, 'Wow, what do you need me for?'"

Starks says the overstuffed lineup was a strategy Brown had adopted after an earlier conflict with his band had led to a standoff.

"The saying was, when Clayton Fillyau was the drummer with James, he had just one drummer, one guitar player, one bass player," Starks says. "They was about to not play; they were rebelling against James for something ... so he had to agree with them. And they said he made a statement after then: 'I'll never be caught without two of everything.' So I guess that's where it started. But when Clyde and I joined the group, we jelled together. And then he started letting the other drummers go."

Essentially competitors for the same seat, Stubblefield and Starks could easily have ended up as rivals. Starks says one reason they didn't was that their skills weren't redundant: Each brought something unique to the group.

"You have to understand this: We're two different drummers," he says. "Clyde plays the way that Clyde plays, which, nobody's gonna play like Clyde. I play like I play. We can play the same tune, but different ways. You never played together on James' shows, but when he wanted to hear something different from Clyde, he'd point to me."

Both drummers say working with Brown could be tough. Musicians were pretty much at his beck and call — and he would even fine them when he felt they'd made a mistake.

"Sometimes you don't have to make a mistake," says Stubblefield, who says he had to pay Brown more than once. "You just do a little something different and he'd call that a fine, he'd fine you."

Remarkably, neither Stubblefield nor Starks ever took drum lessons. Stubblefield says he got his sense of rhythm by listening to the clatter of machinery emanating from the factories in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn. Starks grew up in the church in Mobile, Ala., and says he couldn't help but move to the music he'd hear at services.

"You couldn't even sit down. You couldn't stop. You had to get up to do something with it," he says.

The grooves the two drummers created have inspired generations of artists — not just in funk, but in hip-hop, where their steady but intricate patterns make natural material for sampling. Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," the bracing theme music from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, is based around a snippet of Stubblefield's playing on "Funky Drummer" (to which rapper Chuck D makes a sly reference in his opening lines).

But more often than not, the artists who have used Stubblefield and Starks' beats in their own music have failed to give them credit. That, on top of the bad times with James Brown, would leave anyone a little bitter. But when they speak to each other, the love and respect are unmistakable.

"We're brothers," Starks says. "That's the way that I look at it. It's a brotherly love."

Stubblefield concurs. "Actually," he says, "we've never had an argument."

'I Feel Good ’ James Brown's Amazing, CNN Interview,1988

from Dangerous Minds

When former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was running around before his trial appearing on The Daily Show assuring Jon Stewart that he never, ever did anything wrong, he should have considered adopting the post-arrest media strategy of James Brown, as seen in this incredible interview. Considering that both Blagojevich and Brown ended up going to prison, it couldn’t have hurt! And James Brown is a hell of a lot more popular than Rod Blagojevich.

This interview on CNN’s Sonya Live! in LA occurred in May 1988, after Brown was arrested in Aiken County, South Carolina, on charges of drug possession and fleeing from the police after his wife Adrienne called 911 because he was threatening her safety. Brown was released after paying $24,000 in bail and then went to Atlanta to do this interview.

In the interview, Brown seems only dimly aware of Sonya Friedman’s questions, preferring to shout the lyrics to his songs and talk about how he “smells good ... and makes love good.” (The juxtaposition of Sonya’s “How did all this trouble begin?” and Brown’s non-sequitur answer—“Livin’ in America!”—is resonant in ways that utterly outstrip the meanings Brown may have had in mind.) If you want to see someone on TV being interviewed while high, you can hardly do better than James Brown. As in so many other things. Rod Blagojevich just wouldn’t be in the same league.

Brown’s incredible vitality is such that you’ll be excused for wondering whether this isn’t a concert appearance in addition to an interview. YouTube commenters and the like are given to identifying cocaine as the source of this live-wire act, but it was almost certainly PCP. His arrest was for possession of PCP, a substance Brown was allegedly using a lot at the time.

Just four months later, Brown was arrested again, this time on Interstate 20 (near the Georgia-South Carolina border) for carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer. He was sentenced to six years in prison and ended up serving three years.

To judge by R.J. Smith’s The One, Brown’s erratic conduct in the 1980s was going to land him in prison one way or another. Between 1984 and his September 1988 arrest, Adrienne Brown had to call 911 to report domestic violence a whopping twelve times.

As the undisputed father of funk, James Brown was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century, and nobody was more electrifying live. This interview manages to be both highly amusing and a harbinger of the troubles that were just around the corner.

James Brown's FUTURE SHOCK

from Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds

It’s a little-known fact that James Brown hosted his own television dance show in the mid-70s. Future Shock was kind of a semi-local Atlanta/semi-syndicated imitation of Soul Train with the Godfather of Soul in the Don Cornelius role.

Future Shock was videotaped at WTCG TV studios in Atlanta before Ted Turner turned it into TBS. Most of the programs are thought to be lost now, but a few have survived. Much of what I’ve seen features the “hardest working man in show business” sweating profusely, sporting a mustache that did not suit him, rambling, slurring his words and looking like he was the hardest snorting man in show business.

“Future Shock cannot be stopped!”