In the early 1970s, James Brown wanted more badly than ever to be important. He re-entered the political arena on the wrong foot, pissing off his fan base by endorsing Richard Nixon for president in 1972; he tried to get in on Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield's blaxploitation-soundtracking action, putting together music for Black Caesar and Slaughter's Big Rip-Off. He attempted to position himself as a crossover-minded mainstream entertainer, as a hardcore funk iconoclast, as an anti-drug humanitarian, and as a swinging party dude, all at the same time. Amazingly, he got away with most of it, and oversaw an expanding business at the same time-- People Records, a showcase for members of his revue, had recently launched. (Brown's name was plastered all over every People label's singles.)
It helped that, as usual, even some of his moves that looked terrible on their face worked out just fine. Anyone else would have thought twice about releasing a dramatic reading, with strings, of a poem about heroin written by a waiter at the Godfather's favorite deli. ("King Heroin" became a massive hit.) It also wasn't an obvious gesture to cover the "5" Royales' "Think" with a slick New York studio crew rather than his touring band in 1973-- especially since he'd already covered it as a single three times in the 60s-- or to pair it with a scenery-chewing soul version of the Beatles' "Something". (Shortly thereafter, he re-recorded his vocal for "Think", this time beginning with a little spiel about "Soul Train", and released it again as his next single; it hit the charts both times.)
And it definitely seemed like a bad idea to bring saxophonist and former bandleader Maceo Parker back into his band without telling the rest of the group before they showed up at the recording studio, to release the result under his trombonist's name rather than his own, and to give its two parts separate titles that appear nowhere in its lyrics rather than naming it after the hook. "Doing It to Death", credited to Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s and released on People, became a #1 R&B single anyway.
The one musical desire Brown still couldn't gratify was his longing for another ballad on the order of "It's a Man's Man's Man's World", which had been in his set for eight years (and would stay there for the rest of his life). "Mama's Dead" and the ghastly two-part "Woman" are both lugubrious rewrites of the real thing; "Nothing Beats a Try But a Fail" never even made it to the racks. The hard funk masterpieces, on the other hand, still flowed freely. "There It Is" is one of the hottest tracks he ever cut, a jubilant piece of cross-chatter whose fraction-of-a-second silences are like splashes of cold water. "Get on the Good Foot", "I Got a Bag of My Own", a jubilant strut through Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk", the perfectly titled "I Got Ants in My Pants (And I Want to Dance)": the man was on a roll.
Well, the man and his band, rather. Trombonist/bandleader Fred Wesley had been Brown's secret weapon for a while; by 1973, he was practically the co-star, the guy in charge of translating the boss's grunts and whims into hits. The soundtrack numbers on this set's second disc obviously bear his imprint, and even beyond "Doing It to Death", Wesley and the J.B.'s get off a bunch of great, slinky funk singles under their own name. Soul Brother #1 chants along for most of them, and even sits in on drums for a not-bad-at-all instrumental cover of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". Brown was starting to recapitulate his past hits more and more ("Sexy, Sexy, Sexy", a substantial 1973 hit, is a note-for-note reprise of 1966's "Money Won't Change You"), but for at least a few more years, his group's momentum was still pulling him into the future.
