I would like to cry out and collapse in an embrace with a microphone stand on my knees.
To scream the pain inside.
Throw out.
And do not care who is covered there by the wave.
It's so natural.
For strong men.
Before - having tumbled out of the cave, forgetting about mortal dangers, in a voice - at the stars and the moon, for the whole devilishly complex, so ill-adapted for life world.
Now...
And now and nowhere - broke with tolerance, twisted with tolerance, nailed by public morality, smeared with the opinion of the mournful and greedy for the secret joys of the majority - they never admit anything out loud.
But rock and roll is alive.
Here's a bad luck.
No matter how much it is rolled into the asphalt, it breaks through, crumbles the concrete of gray and vulgar emptiness.
Look: all the advertising in the world, all the organics of the consumer society against one and only I Feel Good James Brown.
Wow!
I feel good, I knew that I wouldn't of
I feel good, I knew that I wouldn't of
So good, so good, I got you
Wow!
I feel nice, like sugar and spice
I feel nice, like sugar and spice
So nice, so nice, I got you!
Rock and roll - like cobblestone -
The last weapon of the desperate.
Man was born, became himself, professing the oldest of the formulas: fight or flight.
Danger.
Fight.
Victory or death.
You are having dinner.
They have dinner with you.
But megatons of plaster.
Refining physiological processes, combing protruding hairs.
Soon there will be nothing to stick around.
We are being strenuously leveled, driven into the standard of thoughtless and stupid devouring of information trash.
Everything is averaging, flattening, becoming a wild, monstrous middle - when the middle and middle are no longer possible.
Sweet music, sticky books, all cotton candy.
Can you build a house out of it?
Rock-n-roll - unrefined, the first distillation is the strongest potion, banishing sickness, impotence, and apathy from the heart and muscles.
Rock'n'roll.
Pulsing there-there first erectus.
Dances before the hunt (will everyone return from it?), Rain spells (will everyone live to see the Great Water?), Seeing the dead, which is more alive than the living and, like yesterday, is here, together with all members of the tribe, only outside the body.
Only outside the body.
Rock and roll fury knows no bounds.
Bop bopa-a-lu a whop bam bam
Tutti frutti, oh Rudy
Tutti frutti, oh
Tutti frutti, oh Rudy
Tutti frutti, oh Rudy
Tutti frutti, oh Rudy
A whop bop-a-lu a whop bam bam !!!
Almost a spell.
Invented by Little Richard.
Shrieking and snarling at the piano.
Before the frenzy.
Long Tall Sally.
Ooh!
My Soul.
Also from under his pen ritual chants.
Once upon a time there was Richard Wayne Penniman.
Born in 1932.
And James Joseph Brown, Jr., born in 1933, heard him, and rejoiced, and called his idol, and elevated the ancient sound to an absolute, to a mass without rules.
No retouching.
And without makeup.
To the gallery page
Talking about Brown is pointless, because people only hear what they want.
Yes, he was brought up in his aunt's brothel, in poverty and squalor, he stole, ended up in prison at 16, he began to sing there, and there he was noticed by the producer of Famous Flames.
And how could it be overlooked - he was the only one playing on a washboard and sang, growled like a pack of wolves behind flags.
Thank the gods of rock, I didn't go seriously into boxing and baseball, and a leg injury prevented me - I became a vocalist, and then the leader of Famous Flames.
He recorded (and wrote - together with Johnny Terry) Please, Please, Please and thereby secured a place in the global collection of 500 hits of rock (he has plenty of such stuff there), and he got the nickname by the name of the song.
Bathed in glory, tearing apart the halls, imitating every time an almost real heart attack, was invariably covered by poncho stage assistants, or who knows what else - who had not seen Brown kneeling in a blanket of unthinkable shades.
Epated.
He burst into tears and sweat, squeezing them, it seems, from the very nature of sound.
From the speakers, dry.
Then he fell backstage.
Already really, from exhaustion of physical and spiritual strength, he received injections of glucose, came to his senses and kept repeating: “Give them more than they paid for!
Give them more than they expected!
Give them all more !!! "
In 1966, at the height of his power and rage devouring him from the inside, he made It's a Man's Man's Man's World together with Betty Ginny News (I don't think that such a thing can be "written" - this is the highest craft).
This is a man's world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing
without a woman or a girl
He's lost in the wilderness ...
He's lost in bitterness ...
Is this not a sermon for us, lost in lost cities, where instead of bread they eat money, instead of happiness they drink the bitterness of otherworldly rivers.
He's so unbearably rude and cocky, this Father Brown.
So arrogant, at times arrogant and cruel with his surroundings, so mad in his thirst for fame and so overtly sexy.
Like the leader of a wolf pack.
Papa's Got a Brand New Bag and Sex Machine are the best evidence of this.
An unrefined, muddy and unrefined rhythm that burns to the ground boils in his veins.
Since those times when the first of us, out of despair, joy, madness, raised the first sticks and struck the first drums, growing from an animal into a human.
But the genes of the ancient world are ineradicable - they cry out in each of Brown's "obscene things".
Presley and Orbison decorated the Rock Halls of Fame with intricate, endlessly intricate patterns and mosaics.
They ennobled, identified with art the very action of the stage, led away into the shadows the darkness and darkness of dancing and campfire.
To the gallery page
But rock and roll remained the same.
And so does James Brown.
Interestingly, his idol, his adored Little Richard, at the end of 1957, on tour in Australia, tormented by doubts and signs, throws his diamond ring into Sydney Harbor - God of God - and turns into the bosom of the church, becoming a preacher.
A true preacher, and not so that "on the occasion."
He'll go back to rock, come back.
Will go to church again.
And again will ascend the stage.
All this was long ago.
Little Richard died on May 9, 2020.
And his crazy songs, like his words, are strangely alive.
Keach and glamor - yes.
And also - the authenticity and grace of a predator on any of the days - get prey or die.
Brown saw it all.
He fought with himself all his life.
I wanted to become like ...
No matter.
James Brown Live Paris 1968. Black and white past.
Livelier, meanwhile, many other things.
Find and see.
For the first six with a dashing minutes, Brown's group (I would like to say the orchestra) warms up the audience.
Wind instruments.
Solo.
Rhythm.
As if in a steam locomotive, as if every half-minute - beeps, beeps, like coal are thrown into the furnace and the heat heats up the steel and strong insides.
And then a man in a suit comes out.
Mr. James Brown.
And sings I Wanna Be Around.
I wanna be around to pick up the pieces
When somebody breaks your heart ...
He sits on a high chair with a personal monogram, gently grabbing, bending down a submissive microphone, with almost a spinner on his head, almost in a doublet - either a movie hero from the dreams of gentle teenagers, or Tony Bennett, sunburnt to impossibility.
And it seems to us that no other James Brown exists.
That here he is - a dark prince, mysterious, honey-flowing seductive, like a southern night.
But you come across Zaire 74 - a three-day rock festival in Kinshasa (the capital of today's Congo).
And among the selected performers (there were both BB King and Bill Withers), 40-year-old Brown enters the stage, no, flies out, like from a bomb bay.
He makes a split, another one, grabs a microphone stand and turns into a real black devil, conjuring forces unknown to us and the guardians of heaven.
Rock and roll is dark.
Primitive.
Dense.
It only seems like a good rhythm with a good snack.
He will bite you on occasion, so do not gape in the comfort of nests and reliable fortresses.
With what gloomy bewilderment and reluctance he looks at what is happening in the "world of art"!
He knows only one art - getting food and prolonging life.
Everything is ashes.
And slush.
And a gray drizzle underfoot.
Everything will pass - idols and idols, champions and leaders.
Pop culture.
He will stay.
His drums will still be thundering.
Sing is his shamans.
Conjuring is his soothsayers.
You can't listen to James Brown.
This is not music for you.
Not something that suits the mood.
Because this is the mood itself.
I will never recommend his Christmas album to anyone in my life - what is it all about ...
But then old James left exactly on Christmas night, December 25, 2006.
The Omen...
And he was born now, in the spring, on May 3.
He is always born in the spring.
When the sun calls life into motionless and inanimate.
Let it be so - here, but in his homeland, South Carolina, it will probably be hotter.
But he is always born in the spring.
Do you want roots?
Do you want to see how it was before the beginning of time?
Or do you want the noble stories of the ancient world?
But there is no choice.
Live At The Apollo (October 24, 1962) - Brown?
Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden (June 10, 1972) - Presley?
It is impossible to choose.
There is no option.
Not conceived by the South.
Not invented ...
You know by whom.
Themselves.
You know.
By whom.
Got a girl named Sue,
She knows just what to do
Got a girl named Sue,
She knows just what to do
She rock to the east,
She rocks to the west
But she's the girl that I love the best.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.