Prime Cuts #4: “Love Power Peace” (Polydor, 1992), James Brown
This series of essays, that explore the ideas of sequencing and montage between two pieces of recorded music or two film scenes, continues with another one of my favorite albums: the document of James Brown’s performance with the JB’s at the Olympia Theatre in Paris on March 8th, 1971, “Love Power Peace”. The material was originally to be released as a triple LP in 1972, but this idea was scrapped when key members of the JB’s left the band for financial reasons after the group toured in Europe in March of 1971. Ironically, the JB’s were formed in 1970 when most of Brown’s previous working band walked out on him and he hired members of the Pacemakers from Cincinnati, including Bootsy and Catfish Collins. During the few months that the initial JB’s were together they helped change music, recording one classic after another in the studio, most famous perhaps being “Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine”.
When, “Love Power Peace”, finally saw the light of day in 1992 I had already been deep diving into funk and soul music, motivated by Waste Kings and Crown Royals bandmate, Mark Blade, after he saw me listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ “Mothers Milk” in the autumn of 1989, right after I moved to Chicago from Boston. Shaking his head he said, “You’ve got to listen to this my friend,” as he passed me the masterpiece, “Maggot Brain”, by Funkadelic. Things haven’t been the same since, and a large aspect of my research into that history of music was of course based around the work of James Brown.
Though Brown’s severity as a disciplinarian is legendary (for example, calling out fines onstage anytime a musician made a mistake), I think that “Love Power Peace” documents the only time that one of Brown’s groups overtook him on the bandstand. After the ensemble’s intro and calm groove sets the stage, James Brown tears everything apart with the vocal break at the start of “Brother Rapp”, repeatedly shouting “The Brother’s Got To Rap” until he cues the JB’s with “Hit Me!” The band cuts in with up tempo 177 BPM ferocity as Brown is heard yelling, “Hang On!” over the top of them. Those words were probably meant for the Paris audience but they could as well have been for the leader, with the rhythm section of Catfish and Bootsy Collins, Cheese Martin, Jabo Starks, and Tiger Martin taking charge (I remember reading an article on James Brown from, I believe, Wax Poetics #21 which stated that when he tried fine the new JB’s for mistakes during a performance they just laughed at him).
At minute 1:34 of “Brother Rapp” Catfish Collins starts a two-part guitar solo that feels like the application of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics at their best- elliptical rhythm and sliding melodic tonality separated by snare bursts and another verse before continuing to one of the most astounding shifts between compositions I’ve ever heard a band make during a live performance; transforming tempo and feel simultaneously by the entire group as they move from “Brother Rapp” to “Ain’t It Funky Now”.
In the middle of the second part Catfish’s solo on “Brother Rapp” and while the horn section is riffing hard behind him, Brown lets out two shouts over three bars (for a music usually built around 4 beats per bar and sections based on cells of two, four, and eight, a cue organized around three bars is quite unusual, but then so was James Brown and his genius). Brown then drops the one HARD on “Ain’t It Funky Now”. The rhythm section is in from the initial beat at a tempo of 122 BPM and a completely different groove. There is no metric modulation or rhythmic subdivision that indicates the change up. Even later, when I was able to watch a video of the concert before there was YouTube, I could see that there was no count and hardly a cue aside from the vocal- twelve beats blow by, James Brown drops his fist at concert minute 4:03, and the ensemble and audience are transported to another time continuum.
When the horns enter, Brown sings out “Ain’t It Funky Now” in a call/response with them, and then Catfish Collins pushes the harmolodic envelope even further with another guitar improvisation that’s so blistering Brown stops him midway through. Yeah, it’s the “James Brown show” but even he knows the band he’s assembled from unknowns (outside of Cincinnati anyway) are enroute to a big takeover. After Catfish is cut off, he takes a bow in pantomime of those Brown took at the end of “Brother Rapp”. Soon he and his brother Bootsy will change the nature of funk again, this time in 1972, alongside George Clinton and the rest of the Funkadelic crew.