In the Watergate era and its aftermath, James Brown was like a heavyweight champion fighting blindfolded. When he hit, he hit hard enough to shatter bone: this volume in Hip-O's mail-order series includes three consecutive #1 R&B hits (the murderously heavy, slow funk grooves of "The Payback", "My Thang", and "Papa Don't Take No Mess"), and a few other spectacular jams. But when Brown missed, he flailed just as hard.
Sometimes he realized it in time. Volume Nine begins with three scheduled-and-canceled singles, including several awkward duets with Lyn Collins (one of them a bizarre Latin version of "Let It Be Me"). "I Got a Good Thing (And I Ain't Gonna Let It Go)" is a pro forma jam with Brown double-tracked-- playing his own Bobby Byrd, effectively, since Byrd had left his revue. The canceled single was replaced by a new recording less than two weeks later: "Stoned to the Bone", more casual but distinctly superior, and a solid hit.
This period also saw Brown developing a bizarre weakness for scattering his records with overdubbed sound effects and drop-ins. Adding bits of Jesse Jackson's "I am somebody" speech to the Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s single "Same Beat Pt. 1" was a great idea. Adding a disc jockey announcing "This is for Atlanta!" and "This record is too much!" all over "The Payback" was not-- the familiar mix, without Hank Spann's interjections, was actually a promotional version demanded by radio. Lyn Collins' smoking "Rock Me Again & Again & Again & Again & Again & Again" is not so much a duet with Brown as the boss staring over her shoulder and butting in on almost every line, then dumping in some extra sound effects and grafting the first minute of the track on again at the end. It's pretty amazing anyway. Brown was an aging, eccentric king, but he was still the king: "Funky President (People It's Bad)" was easily the hottest pop response to the American politics of the 1970s.
And then, all of a sudden, disco was king. For the first time in years, R&B was dominated by rhythms way outside Brown's own idiom, and the last four singles here are the sound of Brown hitting the wall. First, there's a sloppy remake of his 1970 breakthrough "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine". That's followed by a halfway-there J.B.'s instrumental that Brown decided to grace with the title (and chant) "Thank You For Lettin' Me Be Myself, and You Be Yours"-- was he claiming that Sly Stone had ripped him off, or just ripping off Sly Stone?
"Dead On It" is one of the strangest records Brown ever released: it opens with two beatless minutes of belching synth noises and occasional sour guitar chords, over which the Godfather rambles about how he's not as good as he used to be but demands respect anyway, before finally breaking into a cautious combination of some riffs he'd been flogging for years. Brown almost immediately withdrew it and replaced it with the similar-only-in-name "Hustle!!! (Dead On It)"-- a carbon copy of Cameroonian musician André-Marie Tala's 1973 record "Hot Koki", and a bald-faced attempt to cash in on the success of Van McCoy's "The Hustle". It's not a bad piece of music, but it was a thoroughly embarrassing gesture. Over the course of 1975, drummer Jabo Starks, trombonist/arranger Fred Wesley and saxophonist Maceo Parker all quit working with Brown, effectively dissolving his last classic band. He still had dozens of major and minor hits ahead of him, but he'd never again rule R&B the way he had for a decade.
