A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 137: “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown, and at how Brown went from a minor doo-wop artist to the pioneer of funk. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “I’m a Fool” by Dino, Desi, and Billy. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music and 500 songs by Andrew Hockey. Episode 1. Winderle in 37, Pop has Got a Brand New Bag by James Brown. It is indeed a great place to present to you at this particular time. National and international known as their hardest working man in show business. Men just saying I'll go crazy. Try me! You've got the power. Think.

If you want me, I don't mind. Will there! Million dollar seller lost someone. The very latest release, Night Train. Let everybody shout and shimmy! Mr. Dany Mike, the amazing Mr. Please Please Himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the famous flame. In 1951, the composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University.

An anechoic chamber is a room that's been completely sound-proofed, so no sound can get in from the outside world, and in which the walls, floor and ceiling are designed to absorb any sounds that are made. It's as close as a human being can get to experiencing total silence. When Cage entered it, he expected that to be what he heard, just total silence. Instead he heard two noises, a high-pitched one and a low one. Cage was confused by this. Why hadn't he heard the silence? The engineer in charge of the chamber explained to him that what he was hearing was himself.

The high-pitched noise was Cage's nervous system, and the low-pitched one was his circulatory system. Cage later said about this Until I die there will be sounds and they will continue following my death One need not fear about the future of music The experience inspired him to write his most famous piece Four Minutes 33 In which a performer attempts not to make any sound

for four minutes and 33 seconds The piece is usually described as being Four minutes and 33 seconds of silence But it actually isn't The whole point is that there is no silence, and that the audience is meant to listen to the ambient noise and appreciate that noise as music. Here is where I would normally accept the piece, but of course for 4 Minutes 33 to have its full effect, one has to listen to the whole thing. But I can accept another piece, Cage wrote,

because on October the 24th, 1962, he wrote a sequel to 4 Minutes 33, a piece he titled Zero Minute Zero, but which is sometimes credited as 4 Minutes 33, not. He later reworked the piece, but the original score, which is dedicated to two avant-garde Japanese composers, Toshi Ichianagi, and his estranged wife Yukoono, reads as follows. In a situation provided with maximum amplification, no feedback, perform a disciplined action. Now, as it happens, we have a recording of someone else performing Cage's piece, as written, on the day it was written, though neither performer nor composer were aware that that was what was happening.

But I'm sure everyone can agree that this recording from October the 24th, 1962, is a disciplined action, performed with maximum amplification and no feedback. When we left James Brown, almost 100 episodes ago, he had just had his first R&B number one, with Try Me,

and had performed for the first time at the venue with which he would become most associated, to Harlem Apollo, and had reconnected with the mother he hadn't seen since he was a small child. But at that point, in 1958, he was still just the lead singer of a Dewak group, one of many, and there was nothing in his shows or his records to indicate that he was going to become anything more than that, nothing to distinguish him from King Records labelmates like Hank Ballard, who made great records, put on a great live show, and I still remembered more than 60 years later,

but mostly as a footnote. Today we're going to look at the process that led James Brown from being a peer of Ballard or Little Willie John to being arguably the single most influential musician of the second half of the 20th century. Much of that influence is outside rock music, narrowly defined, but the records we're going to look at this time, and in the next episode on Brown,

are records without which the entire sonic landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries would be unimaginably different. And that process started in 1958, shortly after the release of Try Me in October that year, with two big changes to Brown's organisation. The first was that this was, at least according to Brown, when he first started working with Universal Attractions, a booking agency won by a man named Ben Bart,

who before starting his own company, had spent much of the 1940s working for Mo Gale, the owner of the Savoy Ballroom and manager of the Inksbots, Louis Jordan, and many of the other acts we looked at in the very first episodes of this podcast. Bart had started his own agency in 1945, and had taken the ink spots with him, though they'd returned to Gale a few years later, and he'd been responsible for managing the career of the Ravens,

one of the first bird groups. In the 50s, Barthes, Bart had become closely associated with King records, the label to which Brown and the famous flames were signed. A quick aside here, Brown's early records were released on Federal records, and later they switched to being released on King. But Federal was a subsidiary label for King,

and in the same way that they don't distinguish between Checker and Chess, Tamler and Motown, or Phillips and Son, I'll just refer to King throughout. Bart and Universal Attractions handled bookings for almost every big R&B act signed by King, including Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John, the Five Royals, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. According to some sources,

the famous flames signed with universal attractions at the same time they signed with King Records, and Bart's family even say it was Bart who discovered them and got them signed to King in the first place. Other sources say they didn't sign with Universal until after they proved themselves on the charts. But everyone seems agreed that 1958 was when Bart started making Brown a priority and taking an active interest in his career.

Within a few years, Bart would have left Universal, handing the company over to his son and a business partner to devote himself full-time to managing Brown, with whom he developed an almost farther son relationship. With Bart behind them, the famous flame started getting better gigs and a much higher profile on the Chitlin circuit. But around this time, there was another change. that would have an even more profound effect.

Up to this point, the famous flames have been like almost every other vocal group playing the Chitlin circuit, in that they hadn't had their own backing musicians. There were exceptions, but in general, vocal groups would perform with the same backing band as every other act on a bill, either a single backing band playing for a whole package tour

or a house band at the venue they were playing at, who would perform with every act that played that venue. There would often be a single instrumentalist with the group, usually a guitarist or piano player, who would act as musical director to make sure that the random assortment of musicians they were going to perform with knew the material. This was, for the most part, how the famous flames had always performed, though they had on occasion also performed their own backing in the early days. But now they got their own backing band, centered on J.C. Davis' sax player and bandleader, Bobby Roach on guitar, Nat Kendrick on drums, and Bernard Odom on bass. musicians would come and go, but this was the core original line-up

of what became the James Brown band. Other musicians who played with them in the late 50s were horn players Alfred Corley and Rosco Patrick, guitarist Les Bowie, and bass player Hubert Perry. While keyboard duties would be taken on by Fats Gonda, although James

Brown and Bobby Bird would both sometimes play keyboards on stage. At this point as well, the lineup of the famous flames became more or less stable. As we did, discussed in the previous episode on Brown, the original line-up of the famous flames left en masse when it became

clear that they were going to be promoted as James Brown and the famous flames, with Brown getting more money, rather than as a group. Brown had taken on another vocal group, who had previously been Little Richard's backing vocalists, but shortly after Try Me had come out, but before

they'd seen any money from it, that group had got into an argument with Brown over money he owed them. He dropped them, and they went off to record unsuccessfully as the fabulous flames on a tiny label, though the records they made, like Do You Remember, are quite good examples of their type. Brown pulled together a new lineup of famous flames,

Johnny Terry had already returned to the group earlier and stayed when Brown sat the rest of the second lineup of flames, and they added Lloyd Bennett and Bobby Stalworth. And making his second return to the group was Bobby Bird, who had left with the other original members, joined again briefly, and then left again. Oddly, the first commercial success that Brown had after these line-up changes,

was not with the famous flames, or even under his own name. Rather, it was under the name of his drummer, Nat Kendrick. Brown had always seen himself, not primarily as a singer, but as a band leader and arranger. He was always a jazz fan first and foremost, and he'd grown up in the era of the big bands,

and musicians he'd admired growing up, like Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan, had always recorded instrumentals as well as vocal selections, and Brown saw himself very much in that tradition. Even though he couldn't read music, he could play several instruments, and he could communicate his arrangement ideas, and he wanted to show off the fact

that he was one of the few R&B music, with his own tight band. The story goes that Sid Nathan, the owner of King Records, didn't like the idea, because he thought that the R&B audience at this point only wanted vocal tracks, and also because Brown's band

had previously released an instrumental which hadn't sold. Now, this is a definite pattern in the story of James Brown. It seems that at every point in Brown's career for the first decade, Brown would come up with an idea that would have immense commercial value,

Nathan would say it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, Brown would do it anyway, and Nathan would later admit that he was wrong. This is such a pattern. It apparently happened with, please, please, please, Brown's first hit, and try me, Brown's first R&B number one, and we'll see it happen again later this episode, that one tends to suspect that maybe these stories were sometimes made up after the fact, especially since Sid Nathan somehow managed to run a successful record label for over 20 years, putting out some of the best R&B and country records from everyone from Moon Mulligan to Wynoni Harris, the Stanley Brothers to Little Willie John, while if these stories are to be believed,

he was consistently making the most bone-headed, egregious, uncommercial decisions imaginable. But in this case, it seems to be at least mostly true, as rather than being released on King Records as by James Brown, Do the Mashed Potatoes was released on Dade Records, as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, with the DJ Carlton Coleman shouting vocals over Brown so it wouldn't be obvious Brown was breaking his contract. That made the R&B top ten, and I've seen reports that Brown and his band

even toured briefly as Nat Kendrick and the Swans before Sid Nathan realized his mistake and started allowing instrumentals to be released under the name James Brown presents his band, starting with the cover of Bill Doggett's Hold It. After the Nat Kendrick record gave Brown's band an instrumental success, the famous flames also came back from another many dry spell for hits, with the first top 20 R&B hit for the new lineup,

I'll Go Crazy, which was followed shortly afterwards by their first pop top 40 hit. Think. The success of Think is at least in part down to Bobby Bird, who would from this point on be Brown's major collaborator and, often uncredited, co-writer and co-producer until the mid-70s. After leaving the flames and before rejoining them, Bird had toured for a while with his own group,

but had then gone to work for King Records at the request of Brown. King Records' pressing plant had equipment that sometimes produced less than ideal pressings of records, and Brown had asked Bird to take a job there performing quality control, making sure that Brown's records didn't skip. While working there, Bird also worked as a song doctor. His job was to take songs that had been sent in as demos and rework them in the style of some of the label's popular artists,

make them more suitable, changing a song so it might fit the style of the Five Royals or Little Willie John or whoever, and Bird had done this for Think, which had originally been recorded by the Five Royals, whose leader Loman Pauling had written it. Bird had reworked the song to fit Brown's style and persona. It's notable, for example, that the Royals sing. How much of all your happiness have I really claimed? How many tears have you cried for which I was to blame? Darling, I can't remember which was my fault. I tried so hard to please you, at least that's what I thought. But in Brown's version, this becomes,

How much of your happiness can I rarely claim? How many tears have you shed for which you was to blame? Darling, I can't remember just what is wrong. I tried so hard to please you, at least that's what I thought. In Brown's version, nothing is his fault. He's trying to persuade an unreasonable woman who has some problem he doesn't even understand. but she needs to think about it and she'll see that he is right. While in the Royale's version, they're acknowledging that they're at fault,

that they've done wrong, but they didn't only do wrong, and maybe she should think about that too. It's only a couple of words different, but it changes the whole tenor of the song. Think would become the famous Flames' first top 40 hit on the pop chart, reaching number 33. It went top ten on the R&B charts, and between 1959 and 1963, Brown and the Flames would have 15 top 30 R&B hits,

going from being a minor doo-wop group that had had a few big hits, to being consistent hit-makers, who were not yet household names, but who had a consistent sound that could be guaranteed to make the R&B chart, and who put on what was regarded as the best live show of any R&B band in the world. This was partly down to the type of discipline that Brown imposed on his band. many band leaders in the R&B world would impose fines on their band members, and Johnny Terry suggested that Brown do the same thing.

As Bobby Bird put it, many band leaders do it, but it was Johnny's idea to start it with us, and we were all for it because we didn't want to miss nothing. We wanted to be immaculate, clothes-wise, routine-wise, and everything. Originally, the fines was only between James and us, the famous flames, but then James carried it over into the whole troop. It was still a good idea because anybody joining the James Brown Review had to know that they couldn't be messing up

and anyway, all the fines went into a pot for the parties we had. But Brown went much further with these finds than any other band leader and would also impose them arbitrarily and it became part of his reputation that he was the strictest disciplinarian in rhythm and blues music. One thing that became legendary among musicians was the way that he would impose fines while on stage if a band member missed a note or a dance step

or Mr. Kew, or had improperly polished shoes, Brown would, while looking at them, briefly make a flashing gesture with his hand, spreading his fingers out for a fraction of a second. So the audience, it looked like just part of Brown's dance routine, but the musician knew he had just been fined $5. Multiple flashes meant multiples of $5 find. Brown also developed a whole series of other signals to the band,

which they had to learn. To quote Bobby Bird again, James didn't want anybody else to know what we was doing, so he had numbers and certain screams and spins. There was a certain spin he'd do, and if he didn't do the complete spin, you'd know it was time to go over here. Certain screams would instigate chord changes,

but mostly it was numbers. James would call out football numbers. That's where we got that from. 39, 16, 14, 2, 5, 3, 98, that kind of thing. Number 39 was always the change in to please, please, please, please. 16 is into a scream and an immediate change. Not bam-bam, but straight into something else. If he spins around and calls 36, that means we're going back to the top again. And the 42,

okay, we're going to do this first and then bow out, we're leaving now. It was amazing. This or something like this is a fairly standard technique among more autocratic band leaders, a way of allowing the band as a whole to become a live compositional or improvisational tool for their leader, and Frank Zappa, for example, had a similar system. It requires the players to subordinate themselves or to lead to the whim of the band leader, but also requires a band leader who knows the precise strengths and weaknesses of every band member, and how they are likely to respond to a cue. When it works well, it can be devastatingly effective, and it was for Brown's live show. The famous Flames show soon became a full-on review, with other artists joining the

and performing with Brown's band. From the late 1950s on, Brown would always include a female singer. The first of these was Sugar Pie De Santo, a blues singer who had been discovered and given her stage name by Johnny Otis. But De Santo soon left Brown's band and went on to solo success on chess records

with hits like Soulful Dress. After De Santo left, she was replaced by B.F. Ford, the former wife of the soul singer Joe Tex, with whom Brown had an aggressive rivalry and mutual loathing. Ford and Brown recorded together, cutting tracks like You Got the Power. However, Brown and Ford soon fell out, and Brown actually wrote to Tex asking if he wanted his wife back.

Tex's response was to record this. Ford's response was to record this. placement was Yvonne Fair, who had briefly replaced Jackie Landry and the Chantels for touring purposes, when Landry had quit touring to have a baby. Fair would stay with Brown for a couple of years, and would release a number of singles written and produced for her by Brown, including one which Brown would later re-record himself with some success. Fair would eventually leave the band after getting pregnant with a child by Brown, who tended to sleep with the female singers in his band. The last show she played with him were the shows that would catapult Brown,

into the next level of stardom. Brown had been convinced for a long time that his live shows had an energy that his records didn't, and that people would buy a record of one of them. Sid Nathan, as usual, disagreed. In his view, the market for R&B albums was small, and only consisted of people who wanted collections of hit singles

they could play in one place. Nobody would buy a James Brown Live album. So Brown decided to take matters into his own hands. he decided to book a run of shows at the Apollo Theatre and record them, paying for the recordings with his own money. This was a week-long engagement with shows running all day every day. Brown and his band would play five shows a day, and Brown would wear a different suit for every show.

This was in October 1962, the month that we've already established as the month the 60s started. The month the Beatles released their first single, the Beach Boys released their first record outside the US, and the first Bond film came out, all on the same day at the beginning of the month. By the end of October, when Brown appeared at the Apollo, the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, and there were several points during the run when it looked like the world itself might not last until November 62. Douglas Walk has written an entire book on the live album that resulted,

which claims to be a recording of the midnight performance from October the 24th, though it seems like it was actually compiled from multiple performances. The album only records the headline performance, but Walt describes what a full show by the James Brown Review at the Apollo was like in October 1962, and the following description is indebted to his book, which I'll link in the show notes. The show would start with the James Brown Orchestra, the backing band. They would play a set of instrumentals, and a group of dancers called the Brownies would join them. At various points during the set, Brown himself would join the band for a song or two, playing keyboards or drums. After the band's instrumental set, the Valentinos would take the stage for a few songs. This was before they'd been taken on by Sam Cuck, who would take them under his wing very soon after these shows.

But the Valentinos were already recording artists in their own right, and had recently released Looking for a Love. Next up would be Yvonne Fair, now visibly pregnant with her boss's child, to sing her few numbers. Freddie King was on next, another artist for the King family of labels, who'd had a run of R&B hits the previous year, promoting his new single, I'm on my way to Atlanta. After King came Solomon Burke, who had been signed to Atlantic earlier that year

and just started having hits, and was the new hot thing on the scene, but not yet the massive star he became. After Burke came a change of pace. The vaudeville comedian Pigmeet Markham would take the stage and perform a couple of comedy sketches. We actually know exactly how these went, as Brown wasn't the only one recording a live album there that week,

and Markham's album, The World's Greatest Clown, was a result of these shows, and released on chess records. You think so? You ain't supposed to walk out and bust people, we are the public. We are tight-stails, that's who we and that boy is. That's right. You ain't got the right popping that ball down the leg like you did.

I don't, I? You don't go right, you didn't do it. We are citizens of this house. That's right. And you ain't up but a public servant. Yeah. Well, go get me a glass of water. All right.

Hey, who are you telling her go get water? Well, now, I didn't like to... I'm the officer on this beat. All right, then. Well, what do you think you're playing? And after Markham would come the main event. Fats Gonda, the band's organist, would give the introduction we heard at the beginning of the episode.

And backstage, Danny Ray, who had been taken on as James Brown's valet that very week. According to Wolk, I've seen other sources saying he'd joined Brown. was listening closely. He would soon go on to take over the role of MC and would introduce Brown in much the same way as Gonda had at every show until Brown's death 44 years later. The live album was an astonishing tour de force, showing Brown and his band generating a level of excitement that few bands then or now could hope to equal. It's even more astonishing when you

realize two things. The first is that this was before any of the hits that most people now associate with the name James Brown. Before Popper's got a brand new bag, or sex machine, or it's a man's man's world, or say it loud I'm black and I'm proud, or funky drummer, or get up off of that thing. It's still an unformed James Brown, only six years into a 50-year career, and still without most of what made him famous. The other thing is, as Walk notes, if you listen to any live bootleg recordings from

this time, the microphone distorts all the time. time, because Brown is singing so loud. Here, the vocal tone is clean, because Brown knew he was being recorded. This is the sound of James Brown restraining himself. The album was released a few months later and proved Sid Nathan's judgment utterly, utterly wrong. It became the 32nd biggest selling album of 1963, an amazing achievement given that it was released on a small, independent label that dealt almost exclusively in singles, and which had no real presence in the pop market. The album spent 66 weeks on the album charts, making number two on the charts. The pop album charts, not R&B charts. There wasn't an R&B album's chart until 1965, and live at the

Apollo basically forced Billboard to create one, and more or less single-handedly created the R&B albums market. It was such a popular album in 1963, that DJs took to playing the whole album, breaking for commercials as they turned the side over, but otherwise not interrupting it. It turned Brown from merely a relatively big R&B star into a megastar. But oddly, given this astonishing level of success, Brown's singles in 1963 were slightly less successful

than they had been in the previous few years, possibly partly because he decided to record a few versions of old standards, changing direction as he had for much of his career. Johnny Terry quit the famous flames to join the drifters, becoming part of the line-up that recorded Under the Boardwalk and Saturday Night at the Movies. Brown also recorded a second live album, Pure Dynamite,

which is generally considered a little lackluster in comparison to the Apollo album. There were other changes to the lineup, as well as Terry leaving. Brown wanted to hire a new drummer, Melvin Parker, who agreed to join the band but only if Brown took on his sax-playing brother Macyo along with him. Macyo soon became one of the most prominent musicians in Brown's band,

and his distinctive saxophone playing is all over many of Brown's biggest hits. The first big hit that the park is played on was released as by James Brown and his orchestra, rather than James Brown and the Famous Flames, and was a landmark in Brown's evolution as a musician. The famous Flames did sing on the B side of that, a song called Maybe the Last Time, which was ripped off from the same Pop-Staple's song

that the Rolling Stones later ripped off for their own hit single. But that would be the last time Brown would use them in the studio. From that point on, the famous flames were purely a live act, although Bobby Bird, but not the other members, would continue to sing on the records. The reason it was credited to James Brown, rather than to James Brown and the Famous Flames, is that out-of-sight was released on smash records,

to which Brown, but not the Flames, had signed a little while earlier. Brown had become sick of what he saw as King Records incompetence, and had found what he in his advisers thought was a loophole in his contract. Brown had been signed to King Records under a personal services contract as a singer, not under a musician contract as a musician, and so they believed that he could sign to smash a subsidiary of Mercury as a musician. He did, and he made what he thought of as a fresh start on his, new label by recording Caldonia, a cover of a song by his idol Louis Jordan.

Understandably, King Records sued on the reasonable grounds that Brown was signed to them as a singer, and they got an injunction to stop him recording for Smash. But by the time the injunction came through, Brown had already released two albums and three singles for the label. The injunction prevented Brown from recording any new material for the rest of 1964, though both labels continued to release stockpiled material during that time. While he was unable to record new material, October 1964 saw Brown's biggest opportunity to cross over to a white audience,

The Tammy Show. We've mentioned the Tammy show a couple of times in previous episodes, but didn't go into it in much detail. It was a film concert which featured Jan and Dean, the Barbarians, Leslie Gore, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Jerry and the Pacemakers,

Billy J. Kramer and the Dakoters, Marvin Gay, The Miracles, The Supremes, and As the Top Two Acts, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. Rather, oddly, the point of the Tammy show wasn't the music as such. Rather, it was intended as a demonstration of a technical process. Before videotape became cheap and a standard, it was difficult to record TV shows for later broadcast, for distribution to other countries, or for archive.

The way they used to be recorded was a process. known as tele-recording in the UK and kinescoping in the US and that was about as crude as it was possible to get you'd get a film camera pointed to the TV showing the program you wanted to record and film the TV screen there was specialist equipment to do this but that was all it actually did almost all surviving TV from the 50s and 60s and even some from the 70s was preserved by this method rather than by videotape even after video tapes started being used to make the programs. There were different standards, and tapes were expensive, so if you were making a program in the UK and wanted a copy for US broadcast, or vice versa, you'd make a tele-recording. But what if you wanted to make a TV show that you could also show on cinema screens? If you're filming a TV screen, and then you project that film onto a big screen,

you get a blurry, low-resolution mess. Or at least you did with the 525-line TV screens that were used in the US. at the time. So a company named Electronovision came into the picture for those rare times when you wanted to do something using video cameras that would be shown at the cinema. Rather than shooting 525 line resolution, their cameras shot in 819 line resolution, super high definition for the time, but capable of being recorded onto standard videotape, with appropriate modifications for the equipment. But that meant that when you kinescope the production, it was nearly twice the resolution, that a standard US TV broadcast would be,

and so it didn't look terrible when shown in a cinema. The owner of the Electronovision process had had a hit with a cinema release of a performance by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and he needed a follow-up, and decided that another filmed live performance would be the best way to make use of his process. TV cameras were much more useful

for capturing live performances than film cameras, for a variety of dull technical reasons, and so this was one of the few areas where Electronovision might actually be useful. And so Bill Rodin, one of the heads of Electronovision, turned to a TV director named Steve Binder, who was working at the time on the Steve Allen show, one of the big variety shows second only to Ed Sullivan,

and who would soon go on to direct Huller Ballou. Roden asked Binder to make a concert film shot on video, which would be released on the big screen by American International Pictures, the same organisation with which David Crosby's father worked so often. Binder had contacts with West Coast record labels and particularly with Lou Adler's organisation which managed Jan and Dean. He also had been in touch with a promoter

who was putting on a package store of British musicians so they decided that their next demonstration of the capabilities of the equipment would be a show featuring performers from all over the world, as the theme song put it, by which they meant all over the continental United States plus two major British cities. For those acts who didn't have their own band,

or whose bands needed augmenting, there was an orchestra, centred around members of the wrecking crew, conducted by Jack Nitchie, and the blossoms were on hand to provide backing vocals where required. Jan and Dean would host the show and sing the theme song.

James Brown had had less pop success than any of the other artists on the show except for the Barbarians, who are now best known for their appearances on the Nuggets Collection of relatively obscure garage rock singles and whose biggest hit, Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl,

only went to number 55 on the charts. The barbarians were being touted as the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones, but the general cultural moment of the time can be summed up by that line, you're either a girl or you come from Liverpool, which was where the Rolling Stones came from, or at least it was where Americans seemed to think they came from, given both that song, and the theme song of the Tammy Show,

written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barry, which sang about the Rolling Stones from Liverpool, and also referred to Brown as the King of the Blues. But other than the Barbarians, the Tammy Show was one of the few places in which all the major pop music movements of the late 50s and early 60s could be found in one place.

There was the Mersey Beat of Jerry and the Pacemakers and the Dakoters, already past their commercial peak but not yet realising it, the 50s rock of Chuck Berry, who actually ended up performing one song with Jerry and the Pacemakers, and there was the Brill building

pop of Lesley Gore, the British R&B of the Rolling Stones right at the point of their breakthrough, the vocal surf music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and three of the most important Motown Act, with Brown the other representative of Sol on the bill. But the billing was a sore point. James Brown's manager insisted that he should be the headliner of the show, and indeed, by some accounts the Rolling Stones also thought that they should probably not try to follow him, though other accounts say that the stones were equally insistent that they must be their headliners. It was a difficult decision because Brown was much less well known, but it was eventually decided that the Rolling Stones would go on last. Most people talking about the event, including

most of those involved with the production, have since stated that this was a mistake, because nobody could follow James Brown, though in interviews Mick Jagger has always insisted that the stones didn't have to follow Brown, as there was a recording break between acts, and they weren't even playing to the same audience, though others have disputed that quite vigorously. But what absolutely everyone has agreed is that Brown gave the performance of a lifetime, and that it was miraculously captured by the cameras. I say its capture was miraculous, because every other act had done a full rehearsal for the TV cameras, and had had a full shot-by-shot plan worked out by Binder beforehand.

But according to Steve Binder, though all the accounts of the show are contradictory, Brown refused to do a rehearsal, so even though he had by far the most complex and choreographed performance of the event, Binder and his camera crew had to make decisions by pure instinct, rather than by having an actual plan they'd worked out in advance of what shots to use. This is one of the rare times when I wish this was a video series rather than a podcast, because the visuals are a huge part of this performance. Brown is a whirlwind of activity moving all over the stage in a similar way to Jackie Wilson,

one of his big influences, and doing an astonishing gliding dance step in which he stands on one leg and moves sideways almost as if on wheels. The full performance is easily findable online and is well worth seeking out, but still, just hearing the music and the audience's reaction can give some insight.

The Rolling Stones apparently watched the show in horror, one able to imagine following that, Though when they did, the audience response was fine. Incidentally, Chuck Berry must have been quite pleased with this payday from the Tammy show, given as well as his own performance, the Stones did one of his songs, as did Jerry and the Pacemakers, as we heard earlier. and the Beach Boys did surf in USA, for which he had won sole songwriting credit. After the Tammy show, Mick Jagger would completely change his attitude to performing,

and would spend the rest of his career trying to imitate Brown's performing style. He was unsuccessful in this, but still came close enough that he's still regarded as one of the great frontmen, nearly 60 years later. Brown kept performing, and his labels kept releasing material, but he was still not allowed to record, until in the first. early 1965 a court reached a ruling. Yes, Brown wasn't signed as a musician to King Records, so he was perfectly within his rights to record with Smash Records, as an instrumentalist. But Brown was signed to King Records as a singer, so he was obliged to record vocal tracks for

them, and only for them. So until his contract with Smash lapsed, he had to record twice as much material. He had to keep recording instrumentals, playing piano or organ, for Smash, while recording vocal tracks for King Records. His first new record, released as by James Brown, rather than the earlier billings of James Brown and his orchestra, or James Brown and the Famous Flames, was for King, and was almost a remake of out-of-sight, his hit for smash records.

But even so, Poppers got a brand-new bag was a major step forward, and is often cited as the first true funk record. This is largely because of the presence of a new guitarist in Brown's band. Jimmy Nolan had started out as a violin player, but like many musicians in the 1950s, he had been massively influenced by T-Bone Walker, and had switched to playing guitar. He was discovered as a guitarist by the blues band Jimmy Wilson, who had had a minor hit with Tin Pan Alley. Wilson had brought Nolan to L.A., where he'd soon parted from Wilson and started working with a whole variety.

of band leaders. His first recording came with Monty Easter on Aladdin Records. After working with Easter, he started recording with Chuck Higgins, and also started recording by himself. At this point, Nolan was just one of many West Coast Blues guitarists with a similar style, influenced by Teabone Walker. He was competing with Pete Guitar Lewis, Johnny Guitar Watson and Guitar Slim, and wasn't yet quite as good as any of them, but he was still making some influential records. His version of After Hours, for example, released under his own name on federal records, was a big influence on Roy Buchanan, who would record several versions of the standard based on Nolan's arrangement.

Nolan had released records on many labels, but his most important early association came from records he made but didn't release. In the mid-50s, Johnny Otis produced a couple of tracks by Nolan for Otis' Dig Records label, but they weren't released until decades later. But when Otis had a falling out with his long-time guitar player Pete Guitar Lewis, who was one of the best players in LA, but who was increasingly becoming unreliable due to his alcoholism, Otis hired Nolan to replace him. It's Nolan who's playing on most of the best-known recordings Otis made in the late 50s, like casting my spell. And of line, line, line, line, line.

I took a horse hair, a green tear and made a crazy sign, sign, sign, sign, sign, sign. I'm casting my spell on you. I'm casting my spell on you. And of course, Otis's biggest hit, William the hand jive. Nolan left Otis after a few years and spent the early 60s mostly playing

in scratch bands backing blues singers and not recording. It was during this time that Nolan developed the style that would revolutionise music. The style he developed was unique in several different ways. The first was in Nolan's choice of chords. We talked last week about how Pete Townsend's guitar playing

became based on simplifying chords and only playing power chords. Nolan went the other way. While his voicing's often only included two or three notes, he was also often using very complex chords with more notes than a standard chord. As we discussed last week, In most popular music, the chords are based around either major or minor triads, the first, third and fifth notes of a scale.

So you have an E major chord, which is the notes E, G, sharp and B. It's also fairly common to have what are called seventh chords, which are actually a triad with an added flattened seventh. So an E7 chord would be the notes E, G sharp, B and D. But Nolan built his style around dominant ninth chords, often just called ninth chords. Dominant ninth chords are mostly thought of as jazz chords because they're mildly dissonant.

They consist of the first, third, fifth, flat and seventh, and ninth of a scale. So an E9 would be the notes E, G sharp, B, D and F sharp. Another way of looking at that is that you're playing both a major chord, and at the same time a minor chord that starts on the fifth note. So an E major and a B minor chord at the same time. E major, B minor, E ninth.

It's not completely unknown for pop songs to use ninth chords, but it's very rare. Probably the most prominent example came from a couple of years after the period we're talking about, when in mid-1967 Bobby Gentry basically built the whole song, song owed to Billy Joe around the D-9 chord, barely ever moving off it. That shows the kind of thing that my brother was bailing hay.

And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat. And Mama hollered at the back door you all remember to wipe your feet. That shows the kind of thing that ninth chords are useful for, because they have so many notes in them, you can just keep hammering on the same chord for a long time, and the melody can go wherever it wants and will fit over it. The record we're looking at, Popper's got a brand new bag, actually has three chords in it. It's basically a 12-bar blues, like out-of-sight was, just with these ninth chords sometimes used instead of more conventional chords. But as Brown's style got more experimental in future years, he would often build songs

with no chord changes at all, just with Nolan playing a single ninth chord throughout. There's a possibly apocryphal story told in a few different ways, but the gist of which is that when auditioning Nolan's replacement many years later, Vowne asked, can you play an E9th chord? Yes, of course, in the reply. But can you play an E9th chord all night? The reason Brown asked this, if he did,

is that playing like Nolan is extremely physically demanding, because the other thing about Nolan's style is that he was an extremely percussive player. In his years backing blues musicians he'd had to play with many different drummers and knew they weren't always reliable timekeepers. So he'd started playing like a drummer himself, developing a technique called chicken scratching

based on the Bo Diddley style he'd played with Otis, where he'd often play rapid, consistent semi-quaver chords, keeping the time himself so the drummer didn't have to. Other times he'd just play single jagged sounding chords to accentuate the beat. He used guitars with single coil pickups and turned the treble up and got rid of all the mid-range, so the sound would cut through no matter what. As well as playing full-voiced chords, he'd also sometimes mute all the strings while he strummed,

giving up a percussive scratching sound rather than letting the strings ring. In short, the sound he got was this. And that is the sound that became a sound. funk guitar. If you listen to Jimmy Nolan's playing on Popper's got a brand new bag, that guitar sound, chicken scratched ninth chords, is what every funk guitarist after him based their style on. It's not Nolan's guitar playing in its actual final form. That wouldn't come until he started using wah-wah-wad pedals, which weren't mass-produced until early 1967. But it's very clear when listening to the track that this is the birth of funk. The original

studio recording of Popper's Got a Brand New Bag actually sounds odd if you listen to it now. It's slower than the single and lasts almost seven minutes. But for release as a single, it was sped up a semi-tone, a ton of reverb was added, and it was edited down to just a few seconds over two minutes. The result was an obvious hit single.

Or at least, it was an obvious hit single to everyone except Sid Nathan, who, as you'll have already predicted by now, didn't like the song. Indeed, according to Brown, he was so disgusted with the record that he threw his acetate copy of it onto the floor, but Brown got his way, and the single came out, and it became the biggest hit of Brown's career up to that point, not only giving him his first R&B number one since Try Me seven years earlier, but also crossing over to the pop charts in a way he hadn't before. He'd had the odd top 30 or even top 20 pop single in the past, but now he was in the top 10, and getting noticed by the music business establishment in a way he hadn't earlier. Brown's audience went from being medium-sized

crowds of almost exclusively black people, with the occasional white face, to a much larger, more integrated audience. Indeed, at the Grammys the next year, while the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector, and the whole Motown stable were over the over looked in favour of the big winners for that year, Roger Miller, Herb Alpert, and the Anita Curs singers, even an organisation with its finger so notoriously off the pulse of the music industry as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Grammys, couldn't fail to find the pulse of Popper's Got a Brand New Bag and gave Brown the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues record, beating out the other nominees in the Midnight Hour, My Girl, Shotgun by Junior Walker,

shake by Sam Cuck. From this point on, Sid Nathan would no longer argue with James Brown as to which of his records would be released. After nine years of being the hardest working man in show business, James Brown had now become the godfather of soul, and his real career had just begun. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on I'm a fool by Dean O'Dessie and Billy.

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This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-the-numbersongs.com to read transcript and liner notes and get links to hear. the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion,

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