KILLING JOKE = Time for a Change [1981]

Text by David G. / FFanzeen, 1981 / 2021
Images from the Internet

KILLNG JOKE = Time for a Change [1981 Interview]

This interview with Killing Joke was written by Anglophile and electronica fan David G. (Rosenberg), and was originally printed in FFanzeen Number 8 (Volume 2, Number 5), dated 1981. Note that, despite some personnel changes over the years, currently all the original members of the band as listed below are still in the group and touring.– RBF, 2021.

 

Youth Martin (Martin Glover) loves reggae, his “Young locks” – a matted mess of tiny braids and tangles that approximates the dread locks he can never have – reflect this. Youth also loves electronic Space Invaders-type video games. He’s mastered them all over the world. Youth plays these games with the sense of wonder and concentration you’d associate with a child, until he deadpans that the games teach him to “think militarily.” Youth plays bass for Killing Joke.

Killing Joke are a new breed of band. They play with as much passion and energy as any “punk” band, but with a focus rarely realized in the past. There’s no denying that these guys know exactly what they’re doing, which is what makes their music so compelling. Sure they’re nihilistic message can get a bit heavy-handed, and the music occasionally repetitious, but they’re sincere about what they do, have no illusions about who they are, and actually care about their audience.

The following interview with Youth and KJ guitarist Geordie (Walker) took place after the soundcheck for their Ritz show. Jaz (Coleman), the vocalist, was originally slated for a chat, but a sore throat that threatened to cancel the gig, prevented this from occurring. Paul (Ferguson; drums) was just missing.

Youth and Georgie proved to be quite amusing conversationalists (especially Youth, who was heard to utter, “Got a quarter?” to anyone who would listen, to play a video game. The whole thing lasted about six minutes.

 

* * *

FFanzeen: Youth, in Jamming, an English fanzine, you were quoted as saying that, in your opinion, only about two percent of Americans can think for themselves. That was after a single gig here (last New Year’s Eve at the Rock Lounge). Now that you’ve spent some more days in the U.S., do you still agree with your statement?
Youth Martin: Yeah, I’d say the same thing now. Their minds are used in the wrong way. I’d say the same thing about England, but not as severely as America. America is a truly unique place, you might say.

FF: What is the philosophy behind the Killing Joke?
Geordie: It isn’t a philosophy, it’s a frame of mind; an attitude. That’s it, really.

FF: Your lyrics strive to make a statement, but since you don’t include a lyric sheet, and most Americans were probably exposed to your music from a dance point of view rather than listening point of view, do you think much of the point is lost on American ears?
Geordie: Well, the whole tone of the music’s important. They can hear that. It’s not exactly a nice set of times, is it?

FF: In England, Dave “The Wizard,” a fire eater, opened some gigs for you. How did you meet him, and will he be used again?
Geordie: We used to live in the same sort of slum as him. We still used him a couple of months back in England. It depends. We couldn’t afford to bring him over here anyway.
Youth: That’s the original idea, and it still is; it’s five years.

FF: Well, you have about three to go; do you think you’ll make it?
Georgie: Oh, we’ll make the five years; in what form, we don’t know.

FF: A lot of bands, particularly the other “Malicious Damage” bands (Red Beat and Ski Patrol), sound very similar to Killing Joke.
Geordie: Most of them just copy us, basically. They’re the worst offenders; not so much Ski Patrol, but Red Beat, they just rip us off: a certain period off the first album, they were obsessed with it. There are a few bands we did gigs with – A Certain Ratio – and we did another tour with them and they started playing disco. Things like that, complete rip-offs of our songs. No one believes us, that Adam Ant was at one of our early gigs, you know, and we did “Wardance,” you know, and all that, and that’s where he got his idea from. He used to come around to all our gigs. No one believes us, though.

 

FF: The English press, which probably chose to ignore you at the beginning, has no choice due to your popularity, but to cover you now.
Geordie: It’s just the fact that we haven’t gone away and it proves that their original reviews were wrong. They still don’t like us; they slag us off, but they can’t put their finger on what we do. It’s just beyond them.

FF: How does most of your material come about?
Geordie: We just know about ideas, and they play ‘em to death.

FF: Do you think that people, in a broad sense, ever learn by their mistakes?
Geordie: Well, they will.
Youth: Not always.

WALTER STEDING: Sound Style Change [1983 interview/article]

Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen, 1983
Intro by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015
Images from the Internet
www.waltersteding.com

This article was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #10, dated 1983. It was written by Julia Masi.

Currently, Walter Steding is a painter and actor who writes film scores and is in the group Crazy Mary, based in New York City where he resides. – RBF, 2015

On the cover of his new album, Dancing in Heaven, on Animal Records, Walter Steding, in an oversized pair of rolled-up bluejeans with his violin in hand, is suspended in an extracted hop, like the Pied Piper ready to dance off a cliff, or Peter Pan flying back to Never Never Land. A confusing change of image for those of us who think of him as the black-clad figure of the concert stage.

Dancing in Heaven is light-years away from the Walter we once knew “wheezing and wailing” to home-made bio feedback machines. He’s still inviting us to experience his different reveries, but now with 11 simple, lighthearted, commercial songs, his daydreams have become danceable.

“To me, the cover would have been this hat,” he points to his large, black felt fedora that looks like it was designed for a Pilgrim, “the darkest glasses you could find, and just skulls and daggers all over the place. He holds up the cover for careful inspection. “At first I didn’t like it; but now I do, now that everybody is telling me that they like it. The back is the history,” he flips over the cover. ”I never have to talk about my past again. It’s done. It’s documented,” he says of the black and white montage that traces his career. Although he’s only been performing since he came to new York in 1976, the photos on the back of the album read like a Who’s Who of rock‘n’roll. He points to the center picture of himself and his manager, artist Andy Warhol. “Andy was posing, and I said to him, ‘Well, we have to do something. Why don’t you put your hands by your ears?’ Did he go for that in a hurry! It looks derogatory, like, ‘Why is he doing that to Walter?’, but it was my idea. He rests to skip over the pictures of himself in his early days as a one-man-band, wearing electronic gadgets around his waist that looked like Batman’s utility belt, but his past is too interesting to ignore. Even as a kid growing up in Harmony, Pennsylvania, his background was always art. “Remember the kid in high school who always went around and painted the twelve days of Christmas on his windows? Well, that was me.” He temporarily put down his paint brushes in the late ‘70s to try his hand at performance art. “Just ‘cause I saw something happening.

“It was an era when new technologies were being introduced to the masses, and it was a time when bio-feedback and Rolfing, and any kind of New Age idea was really out there. But I just didn’t see any aesthetic in it. I saw that the more that we define existence by finite terms, the less we really see it. You can use any kind of formula you want to start defining existence, but all you’re doing is making it real; making it physical. Unless you put those physical symbols in some sort of aesthetic means, you’re not really describing what’s there.”

At this time, Walter had been working with the Mankind Research Center in Washington, D.C., and was in close contact with the Menninger Foundation, so he knew a lot about bio-feedback. “As people were going on and really thinking they were discovering something new, it just was the phoniness, the unreality of it. It was new at the time as far as the masses were concerned. I was using it as a means of expression. So instead of working with bio-feedback as though it were something real and tangible, I needed something to play against, so I took the bio-feedback and made it into sound, and then used the violin on top of that.

“Working with color and working with animal sounds, I learned a lot about how the sound would affect your brainwave output. Not only brainwaves, but EKG, too. And Galvanic skin response. Any kind of monitored bodily functions. I took a generator to a lake in Pennsylvania where these spring peepers were coming up, and played a concert along with them. That’s another reason why the violin was a good instrument, because it didn’t have frets or finite points. So I could really deal with sounds and sound like the noises that animals make; wolves and whales. You’ve head those whale records and things? So I was playing along with those, but I knew what kind of range those kinds of sound existed in. They’re all over the place. They’re not necessarily concerned with stops and finite points. But it does develop into patterns from that.

“And then, from that, I kind of go into – holistic is the word – where you don’t have the stops. I could transfer that into music because I knew a certain pattern that I’d be playing that would follow along with the noises that the whales would make. And then I knew instead of sliding my finger and going from one step to the other step, I could break that into steps, so I could play a song very similar to the noises a whale would make without actually trying to make it sound like a whale.

“You have different reveries in your different states of consciousness. Like, if you go into the deep Delta region, in this Delta it reverts to neuronal bursts per second. It’s actually (that) you send out these signals, and they can really be monitored. You’re sort of in-between Alpha and Beta, and you’re conscience and think about things, like your motor actions, like moving your hands. That is more in the Alpha region, and those (signals) are amplified. It’s a real minute signal. I built little amplifiers so that I could convert the signals into sound. I did that by taking the electrical impulse and putting it through an LED. The LED would charge a photo-transistor, and that photo-transistor would change the rate and the pitch of the synthesizer.

“I used a homemade synthesizer just built for that.” He learned to make his musical equipment from scratch, “just by reading schematics and things.” And by “working with chips,” he says nonchalantly.

“The tools and things are out there. You can go to an electronics store and just buy all these parts. You could buy a clock – it’s called a clock (but) it’s not really a clock; it’s a little chip, a timer. And they use it for everything. Not necessarily for music. Once you understand the basic principles of how a chip works, you can apply it to anything.” Walter chose to apply it to the violin because he felt that the “violin epitomizes music.”

His first concerts were very short and very avant-garde. “I thought it was art! I mean, I was doing it at art galleries.” And even though he describes those performances as “wheezing and wailing,” he did gain a certain respect for music, and command of his instrument. “That’s how I started getting more and more musical, learning about notation; different stops and points, with Western scales broken down into all those finite points. The more I learned about that, the more I learned how I could use it.

“I’m definitely trying to create a mood with the notation. Certain things do create a mood. The sounds that whales make do have an effect on the human body, even though it might not be aware of how that sound is. Even without hearing whales, a person is still affected by their sound. There is communication between all living things.

“I use the 4/4 beat. With the 4/4 beat, I try to find a more universal kind of sound, even though it’s relative to the 4/4 timing. It’s kind of scaleless.

“I like to think of the violin without any frets, and how it can transform that mood into a sound. And then I like to transfer that into a progression. A real progression in the 4/4 format, starting with the root note, and then going to the 4th and 5th – you know, real traditional progressions. So it comes from a thought and I just keep working it out until it becomes a tune.

“Right now, today, I got this line that goes,” he sings, “Do, do, do, cha, cha. I’ll take that line and I know how I want it to go, but I know that I have to put it in a format where the bass can play along with it and the keyboard player can play along with it. So, I’ll take the rhythm machine and set it to a counter, where it counts off 4s. Then I’ll rearrange the idea that I had in my head to fit that format. Then I’ll arrange it so that the bass can play his full measures, do a turnaround, and come back in again. So it starts with just an abstract idea, but then you keep going over it and over it, until it becomes a song.

“The songs I write anyone can play. I keep them simple. And I can make tapes where everything is separated. I don’t even have to rehearse. I can give someone a tape of what it’s supposed to sound like, and give them a tape of what their part is so they can listen to these tapes and learn the part exactly. And never come to a rehearsal and (still) play with the rest of the group. And then show up for a concert and know all their lines. Like the bass player. I’ll give him a tape of the song, how it should sound with everyone together, and then a separate tape of just his part. And the same with the keyboard player and guitar. So there is no question then of what they should do.”

Lenny Ferraro, drums; Paul Dugan, bass; Karen Geniece, vocals and guitar; Mark Garvin, lead guitar; and Robert Arron, sax, keyboard, vibratone and guitar, accompanied Walter on the album, which he produced himself. “I wanted help. Really. I would have liked to have a producer,” he says modestly as his big dark eyes widen. “At the time, Chris (Stein, of Blondie) wasn’t feeling very well. I learned; I’m glad for the experience. I learned ‘cause I had to. I really would have liked to have someone professional come in and say, ‘This and that has to be done.’ It’s just like, there are rules that you have to follow. The bass beat is on the one, and the snare is on the two. Until I learned that, I didn’t write songs that way. I put the snare wherever I felt like it. Someone could always tell something was wrong with it. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. So it would be good to have a producer who could say, ‘Why don’t we write a harmonic part that goes with the 4?’

“I don’t want to do something deliberately wrong when I know it shouldn’t be that way, just because it’s been done by so many other pioneers of electronic music and avant-garde musicians, like Cage and Stockhausen; people who have designed instruments, like Bookla and Moog, and all. That’s been done before.”

Right now, he can’t see himself returning to the avant-garde, using music as an art form. “It doesn’t make much sense for me to stay at one level and just deal with the emotion.

“The last concert I did, people liked it. I’ll keep going in that direction.”

 

 

A Brand New Bag for JAMES BROWN

Text by Tom Bingham
Images from the Internet
© 1981, 2011 FFanzeen

The following profile was written by Tom Bingham for FFanzeen No. 7 in 1981.

James Brown, who passed away on Christmas day of 2006, had many nicknames, such as the Godfather of Disco and the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. He brought an excitement to the stage that had few rivals. For example, the story of how the Rolling Stones regretting following him (at their insistence) on the T.A.M.I. Show is legendary.

Like nearly all musicians that have performed as many decades as Brown had, there were periods of feast and famine. Below, rock historian extraordinaire Tom Bingham looks at one of the points where the diminutive powerhouse was teetering between fortunes and floundering. – RBF, 2011.


As I write this (mid-February 1981), James Brown is slipping down the R&B charts after scoring a modest (at best) hit with “Rapp Payback.” This latest in a nearly decade-long series of miscalculations of the cultural mood of black America, signals the beginning of James’ new affiliation with erstwhile disco giant T.K. Records, after ten years of frustration and declining fame with Polydor. T.K. has similarly been struggling through a period of diminished sales. No doubt both James and T.K.’s Henry Stone are banking on whatever reputation each has left to bolster the other’s sagging profile on the recording scene.

Given that scenario of near-desperation, it would seem almost contradictory to claim that James Brown is making a comeback. But such the case, if conceivably in a somewhat limited sense. Perhaps “rediscovery” would be a more accurate description than “comeback,” since James has never stopped touring and recording during these lean years. If his comeback is occurring largely through concert performances, his rediscovery has been taking place on three entirely different levels, none of which carries a guarantee that will restore him to his former supremacy as Soul Brother No. 1. Rather, having regressed from superstar to has-been, he has now progressed to cult figure status. In the past year, he as been a) lionized by certain segments of the New York New Wave scene, b) honored by the music press on the occasion of the reissue of the so-called Greatest Live Show Ever Recorded, and c) praised by many film critics for his parodistic portrayal of a black preacher in The Blues Brothers movie. Though he’s never actually been away, James Brown is back, even if most of his original audience isn’t.

This year, 1981, marks James Brown’s 25th anniversary as a recording artist, a quarter century since “Please, Please, Please” broke through the R&B Top Ten. Then, 1956 was also the year of “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Long Tall Sally.” But James Brown has never been accorded the pioneer status of Presley, Perkins, Vincent, Domino, Berry, or Richard. It may be because James’ early hits were too steeped in Blues, gospel, and hardcore vocal group R&B to appeal to young whites in the way that Fats Domino or Chuck Berry did. True, Little Richard had obvious gospel roots, but his white-hot fire appealed to the body, whereas James’ intensity was of the mournful, pleading variety which appealed to one’s capacity to deal with heartbreak and pain. James Brown wasn’t a rock’n’roller, but a ballad singer; yet he was by no means a pop balladeer. His music was undiluted R&B raunch, far too raw for the ‘50s rock’n’roll mainstream.

By 1962, the atmosphere for acceptance had changed. R&B was giving way to “soul,” though the term had not yet come into common usage outside jazz circles where it meant something else altogether (i.e., the gospel-chords of pianists such as Less McCann and Bobby Timmons). Ray Charles made gospel phrasing and intonation acceptable to white audiences by applying it to the pop orchestral / choral treatments of country ballads. The Falcons were screaming “I Found Love,” as if they were shouting for salvation in a ramshackle ghetto storefront church; the group’s lead singer, Wilson Pickett, would soon go on to bigger, if not always better things. Motown was experimenting with new black dance rhythms on hits by the Marvelettes and Mary Wells. And James Brown was on the pop charts, hoarsely reciting a list of cities while his band pumped its way through a shuffle-rhythm end remake of Jimmy Forrest’s instrumental smash, “Night Train.” Forrest's was released in 1952 (recorded in '51); James Brown's version was in 1962.
It was in this setting that James, fighting with King Records (whose idea of an LP was a collection of singles) all the way, investing his own money into the production, recorded a live album at Harlem’s Apollo Theater on October 24, 1962. Released the next year, this proved to be the record which established James Brown as a household name among young white Americans, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard pop LP charts in an era in which the best-selling albums came form Broadway, Hollywood, hootenannies, and twist clubs. Reissued last year by Solid Smoke (San Francisco) as Live and Lowdown at the Apollo, Vol. 1, the album captures the first phase of James Brown’s career at its emotional peak. James brays, begs, and moans; the Famous Flames harmonize in a modified doo-wop fashion; the band goes through its paces with precision and style; the audience shrieks, cheers, shrieks, applauds, shrieks, yells, and shrieks. You cannot, of course, see the famous cape routine or the dance steps or the down-on-his-knees sobbing, but you can hear the audience react to these visual aspects, as loud shrieks punctuate the normal shrieks. The songs are almost all slow in tempo, aside from an almost casual “Night Train” and a rousingly brief “Think” (originally a Five Royales tune), but every one is an essay in horse-voiced intensity with the exception of Bullmoose Jackson’s “I Love You, Yes I Do.” Some songs are fragmented, some reappear in fragmentary form, most obviously with “Please, Please, Please,” which always signaled the cape routine. James would fall down on his knees, grieving to the point of mental and physical collapse, when one of his flunkies (in James’ routine, even the Famous Flames and band members served as on- and off-stage flunkies) would put a garish cape around his shoulders and start to lead him offstage, whereupon James “miraculously” revived to sing some more; this would continue, using several capes of different colors. But all are memorable examples of early James Brown at his most emotional and spontaneous. Of course, the whole show was both visually and musically calculated with split-second precision, but James knew the secret of how to make fake spontaneity look and sound 100% genuine. It was show business, but it had the ring of real life.

It should be made clear that the James Brown heard on the Sold Smoke reissue is not the James Brown who has become an unlikely New Wave hero. Don’t expect to fear the famous James Brown Sound, which has influenced the likes of Fela and Afrika ’70, James Chance, and the Talking Heads. That James Brown began to germinate in the mid-‘60s with such hits as “Papa Got a Brand New Bag,” “I Got You,” and “Cold Sweat.” By this time, the shuffle beat of “Night Train” was transformed into something looser, freer, with more space for the rhythm instruments to move around in.

Through 1966-67, one could sense that James was on the verge of a breakthrough. 1968 proved to be the turning point, the year of “There Was a Time,” “I Got the Feelin’,” “Licking Stick, Licking Stick,” and “Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” James Brown was now officially important, musically and socially. The sound was complete – the madly syncopated one-chord guitar riffs, popping and dancing lines, intricately rhythmic drumming, punching horn riffs, and above it all, James’ more-talked / shouted / grunted / screeched-than-sung hortatory, delivering lines which generally made little sense on paper, but whose message was nonetheless instantly understood when heard. Once and for all, the meaning of the word “funk,” another jazz-derived term which, like “soul,” originally had a different meaning, was redefined (at the time, “funk” referred to barroom organ-combo jazz).

James Brown was a prophet with honor. He was a musical innovator in terms of both rhythm and the free structure of his arrangements. Unlike most innovators, however, he was also a media superstar. His music blared from every radio, and could be seen grinning form every newspaper and magazine cover, and doing his bizarre, speed-stepping choreography, grabbing the mic and letting out a dog-whistle-pitched yelp, and groaning “Good God” on television screens from coast to coast.

And the hits just kept on coming for another four or five years – “Give It Up or Turn It Loose,” “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine,” “Hot Pants,” “I’m a Greedy Man,” “Good Foot,” “I Got Ants in My Pants” – all sounding pretty much the same, yet with enough variations on the basic pattern to make each one a classic. And with the hits came the self-imposed titles: “Soul Brother No. 1,” “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” (he was already using that way back in ’62), “The Godfather of Soul,” “The Minister of New Super-Heavy Funk,” ad nauseam.

But around 1973, things began to sour. According to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), whose job it is to keep track of things, James’ 1973 double album, The Payback, was his only gold album. Major hit or not, that album was symptomatic of what was happening to the James Brown Sound. The one-chord rhythm jams were slowing down, cooling off, and definitely losing their excitement. The horn voicing was fancier, more jazz-flavored harmonically (no doubt influenced by the successes Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, et al., were having with more sophisticated soul styles), without the tight, attention-grabbing ingenuity one was used to from the James Brown band. Worse yet, most of the tracks were in the 8-10 minute range, virtually encouraging monotony and energy dissipation; what worked for 3-1/2 minutes on a 45 but became tiresome in this expanded album length (something Fela has learned to overcome).

To make things worse for James, along came disco. Regardless of one’s personal opinion of disco music, it doesn’t take much effort to notice a distinct relationship between James’ proto-funk and disco. The latter’s bass drum thump was more regular, its orchestration more expansive, and its attitude slanted more toward the studio than live performance, but the syncopation of the rhythm tracks was clearly derived from James Brown’s original concepts. So one might have thought that it would have been easy, even natural for James Brown to adapt to disco. Instead, he attempted, in vain, to keep his shouting funk sound alive, alternating with often dire string-laden ballads. As a result, his record sales plummeted.

If his records of the mid-to-late ‘70s had been stronger, they might have had a chance in the marketplace, fashionable or not. But as it was, not only could “Papa” no longer come up with any “new bags,” he had very little left in the old ones. It was almost painful to see him release an album in 1978 called Jam/1980s, which supposedly introduced his “new disco sound,” but that was, in fact, a rehash of the same music he’d been doing ten years earlier. The fact that it was the best album he’d released in some time helped him regain some credibility among hardcore fans, but it did little for his sales figures, or his status as a creative contributor. In 1979, “It’s Too Funky in Here” turned into his first Top 10 R&B hit in over half a decade, but it was, alas, an isolated incident on which he was unable to further capitalize.

But James kept touring, occasionally presenting what seemed to be a parody of himself, at other times manifesting as a hoarse voice screeching in the wilderness. A 1980 Canadian television special in the Live at the Forum series found him executing his cape routine, which used to be his climax, a mere ten minutes after appearing onstage. Singing “It’s Too Funky in Here,” no less than three times, James sought to get as much mileage as possible out of his lone glimmer of sunlight.

Here it is, 1981, and James Brown is alive and increasingly well. The one element missing form his comeback is a hit single supported by a strong album, from which he could once again head straight to the top. His T.K. debut, Soul Syndrome, may be just the answer. It is, in part, a back-to-the-roots album. “Rapp Payback” may not have a solid enough narrative line or a rhythmic enough delivery to work as a contemporary rap record of the Sugarhill / Kurtis Blow / Grandmaster Flash variety, but it’s a sold reminder of what made James’ late-‘60s / early-‘70s style so vital. True, 14 minutes may be too much of a good thing, but it’s funky, energetic and, above all, alive. “Mashed Potatoes” (which he first did in 1962) and “Honky Tonk” (which is closer to Bill Doggett’s original than to James’ unduly frantic 1972 version) are throwbacks to his band’s pure R&B instrumental sound of the early ‘60s (before James’ largely forgotten organ-and-big-band jazz albums of the mid-‘60s). The first two cuts on side two update the classic James Brown funk approach to 1981 funk standards by making only slight adjustments. Side two, track three, “Stay with Me,” has all the earmarks of that elusive hit single; it’s light, comparatively tuneful, and unavoidably catchy. With any luck, by the time you read this, T.K. will have taken the intelligent action of releasing it as a well-promoted single, which hopefully will be hitting the upper reaches of the charts.

Or maybe Soul Syndrome will simply disappear, another commercial disaster. Chart analysts tell us black music is turning away from funk back to soft harmonies. What’s more, New Wave dance-funk has yet to make an impact outside New York, thus delaying any opportunity James might have to reach the national New Wave audience. It could be that at age 47 to 53 (depending on the source), with a few more pounds and deeper creases in his face, the career of James Brown is doomed. Should that be the case, we’ll still have a great many classic records such as the Solid Smoke LP and the string of mid-‘50s to early-‘70s hits to remind us of those long-past glory days when James Brown was a giant among mere mortal musicians.

[Brown’s biggest hit after this article was his cover of a “Living in America,” which he performed in the film Rocky IV. – RBF, 2011]





RBF’s Favorite James Brown Songs:

(No embedding for “Open Up the Door I’ll Get it Myself):
youtube.com/watch?v=lYNJK5sHHeo

Bonus video:
youtube.com/watch?v=HjM8Qn5XmAE