On March 9, 1970, James Brown's band blew up, and it was arguably the best thing that ever happened to him. Hours before a show in Columbus, Georgia, they threatened to quit unless they got better pay and better treatment; Soul Brother #1 fired them and flew in the Pacemakers, a bunch of teenagers from Cincinnati who knew his songs as well as any other funk band in those days. In fact, they were the first band he'd played with who'd grown up on funk, and they included a pair of world-class musicians-- guitarist Phelps "Catfish" Collins and his bassist brother William "Bootsy" Collins. For the next year, Brown's flame burned even hotter than it ever had before or would again.
The string of classic singles that band recorded are all included here, beginning with "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine". Banged out in two takes in a late-night studio visit a mere six weeks after that Columbus gig, it's a funk firebomb that would've defined anyone else's career and was just another hit for Brown. Within the year, they also cut "Super Bad" (whose squalling, free-jazz-inspired sax solo by Robert McCullough seemed unthinkable as part of a dance record until JB pulled it off), "Soul Power", "Talking Loud and Saying Nothing" and a hurtling, screaming freakout called "Get Up, Get Into It, and Get Involved", all of them massive hits.
By this point, Brown had mostly abandoned songs-as-we-know-them, although he did release a ballad called "I Cried" that he'd written for Tammy Montgomery in the early 60s, as well as a duet with Lyn Collins on his own oldie "Just Won't Do Right". The new band's formula was single-chord riffs (and maybe a bridge on the subdominant), fantastically tricky grids of rhythms and horns, and a couple of hook phrases, sometimes traded with former Famous Flame Bobby Byrd (that's him yelling the "get on up" part of "Sex Machine"). That's all they needed.
Brown had always thrived on the spontaneity of his live show, and his new style let him fly as freely on record as he did on stage. Almost all of his early-70s hits have moments that give off the heat of creation in the instant. The loping hard-funk version of "Talking Loud and Saying Nothing" features JB yelling to engineer Ron Lenhoff to "keep the tape running" as he decides in the middle of the take to add its spectacular a cappella breakdown. "Escape-Ism" wasn't even a composition before it was a recording-- it was a warmup jam that Lenhoff thought to record (with another new lineup, which had at that point been together for barely two weeks under the direction of trombonist Fred Wesley), and it went Top 10 on the R&B charts.
The new crop of musicians who joined up in early 1971 weren't nearly as virtuosic as the Collins brothers (memorable quote from the liner notes, on "Make It Funky": "Second guitarist Robert Coleman deserves a nod for sticking with his humble three notes and staying out of the way"). Fortunately, Wesley was a brilliant bandleader who knew how to make a lot out of a little. "Hot Pants", the four-part "Make It Funky" (released as two consecutive singles), and "I'm a Greedy Man" are all juggernaut dance records that turn out, on inspection, to be constructed out of fairly simple components.
As with every volume of this mail-order-only series, Brown's lapses in taste are revealed a few times, although there aren't many on this set-- a pair of ludicrous Christmas singles and an instrumental cover of Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel". Also, Hip-O's completist approach to including every alternate mix that hit airwaves or stores, as well as Brown's habit of splitting songs over 45 sides, means that we get multiple consecutive versions of a lot of titles: the two discs' 39 tracks represent 15 songs (and a funny/sad anti-drug PSA). But it's hard to object to hearing "Soul Power" or "Sex Machine" a few times in a row.
