Remembering the Godfather of Soul

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Template for stardom
Beyond his far-reaching musical influence, Brown led an often-tumultuous life that also became a template for what it means to be a rock star. He continued to have trouble with the law well into his senior years, including arrests for drug possession as well as domestic abuse. His 1988 arrest following a high-speed car chase in Augusta, Georgia was ripe for satire, even though he ended up serving three years of a six-year sentence for using PCP and threatening bystanders with a gun.

For an artist with a career as long as Brown’s, but with no blockbuster bio pick like contemporary Ray Charles, it’s easy to forget how important that career has been, especially when it’s someone as quirky and as easy to caricature as Brown. Comedians from Eddie Murphy to Aries Spears have well-worn impersonations of Brown’s effusive singing, smooth dance moves and often-unintelligible speech. These spot-on depictions were only upstaged by Brown himself — his frequent appearances on “The Howard Stern” show often required his wife or assistant to act as translator.

And for the younger and/or musically ignorant, it’s easy to never know. Case in point: Back in the ’80s, a James Brown concert review, seemingly written by neophyte music journalist, raved about the performer’s resistance to leave the stage. The review described how at the end of the show, an assistant repeatedly attempted to place a gold lame cape around the exhausted singer, who was drenched in sweat. Each time, it seemed, Brown was too exhausted to sing another note, and was ready to be escorted from the stage. But then he would leap to his feet, tossing the cape away and re-launching into the number as if suddenly renewed.

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Anyone lucky enough to see Mr. James Brown in concert, or attentive enough to watch him every time he came on TV, knows that this was his shtick. He’d been doing the cape act for decades. He remained, after all, “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.”

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