Jagger had not quite worked out his peculiar blend of frugging and Satanic posturing. They still played a mix of originals and covers (Berry’s “Around and Around,” Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now”). This was 1964, and the Stones were not yet fully formed. Watching the film, it’s easy to see why Jagger was tempted to stay in his dressing room. Over and over again, Brown recovers, throws off the cape, defies his near-death collapse, goes back into the song, back into the dance, this absolute abandonment to passion. His backup singers, the Flames, move near, tenderly, as if to revive him, and an offstage aide, Danny Ray, comes on, draping a cape over the great man’s shoulders. This was the first time that Brown, while singing “Please, Please, Please,” pulled out his “cape act,” in which, in the midst of his own self-induced hysteria, his fit of longing and desire, he drops to his knees, seemingly unable to go on any longer, at the point of collapse, or worse. I had to show ’em the difference, and believe me, it was hard.” What I was up against was pop artists-I was R. performance was the “highest energy” moment of his career: “I danced so hard my manager cried. performance.) Smith quotes Brown as saying that the T.A.M.I. Two veteran critics, Alan Light and Edna Gundersen, have written interesting pieces on the T.A.M.I. Brown,” published in 2002, four years before Brown’s death. (The Profile to read is Philip Gourevitch’s brilliant “Mr. RJ Smith’s “The One” is the book to read on James Brown. What is there to say? If Astaire’s dancing was the graceful line of black-tie seduction, Brown’s was a paroxysm of sexual frenzy, a blend of Pentecostal possession and erotic release. I don’t think I ever danced so hard in my life, and I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast.” It was a four-song set: the staccato blues number “Out of Sight” an astonishing inside-out revival of “Prisoner of Love,” which had been recorded by smoothies like Billy Eckstine and Perry Como the dramatic centerpiece “Please, Please, Please” and the closer, “Night Train,” which the boxer Sonny Liston would play to get himself going in the gym. As Brown puts it in his memoir, “James Brown: The Godfather of Soul,” “We did a bunch of songs, nonstop, like always. His performance, he later admitted, was a cutting contest that he refused to lose. In Santa Monica, they watched him from the wings, just twenty feet away, and, as they did, they grew sick with anxiety.īrown, who had played the Chitlin Circuit for years, was genuinely incensed that the producers would put him on before pallid amateurs (in his mind) like the Stones. He and Keith Richards were boys from Kent with an unusual obsession with American blues. “Nobody follows James Brown!” he kept telling the show’s director, Steve Binder. producers had them scheduled to close the show. They were already stars, and the T.A.M.I. for a mainly white audience that did not know its Son House from its Howlin’ Wolf. The Stones had come to the States from England determined to play black R. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, and, as headliners, the Rolling Stones, but it was heavily weighted with black acts of all sorts: Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and James Brown and the Famous Flames. The lineup was long and included white acts like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. show (the Teenage Awards Music International) was a departure from the “Shindig”-style pop programming of the time. Emceed-adorably, cornily-by the rock-and-roll duo Jan and Dean at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the T.A.M.I. This was fifty years ago, in October, 1964, a few months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And when it comes to James Brown, the real thing, in its most thrilling, compressed, erotic, explosive form, just eighteen minutes long, is also arguably the most electrifying performance in the history of postwar American music. These are good impersonations, even good performances, but what puts them in the shade is the real thing.
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