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Brown, James
Before he released "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag", James Brown taped his appearance on the T.A.M.I./TNT Show, a rock-and-roll review filmed before a live audience. The show featured the most varied collection of rock-and-roll artists before or since, and it is an excellent historical document for anyone even remotely interested in rock-and-roll music in the mid ‘60s. The show opens with Chuck Berry playing without a band, surrounded by seven professional dancers (very ‘60s), followed by the Pacemakers with Gerry Marsden, who wore his guitar strapped so high it could bang him in the jaw. Sets followed by Bo Diddley, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (not a particularly good voice day for Robinson), The Ronettes, Marvin Gaye (damn, he was good, but he must have been driven to distraction by the dancers who paraded around him like oblivious morons), Leslie Gore ( is she for real?) and the insipid Jan and Dean.
Ike and Tina Turner offered a sample of things to come when they did "Please, Please, Please" with a primeval furor, but Diana Ross and the Supremes cooled things down by performing straight ahead versions of their hits, surrounded by the idiotic dance team doing something that looked like zombies playing "Simon Says".
Thankfully, the dancers had the common sense to leave the stage when the real thing, Mr. Dynamite, “the hardest working man in show business,” Mr. Jaaaaaaaaames Brown was introduced. Even if you could ignore all of the hype that Brown has generated, this single performance proves that he was the king. Two decades ahead of his time, he influenced everything that followed. "Out Of Sight" and a derailing version of "Night Train" were his allotment for the evening, but before he left the stage (it took something like six attempts) everybody knew they had witnessed something that they had never seen before and would probably never see again. Afterward, Ray Charles played his unique brand of brilliantly arranged soul, then the Rolling Stones came on with poor Mick Jagger, who probably spent the day throwing up in the men's room after watching James Brown rehearse. Still, despite the enormous pressure of following James Brown, the Rolling Stones did a very admirable job of defending their place on the bill as closing act.
The show's debut airing coincided closely with the release of James Brown's next groundbreaking single, "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". Considering the enormous effect this song had on popular music and culture, it had a quite inauspicious beginning. Brown had just resolved contractual difficulties with his first label, King Records. To show good faith, he wanted to record a follow-up to "Out Of Sight", his previous hit record on Smash Records, as soon as possible. According to Brown, he took a piece of music from his stage show, wrote a few words for it, and stretched it into a full song. He hadn’t memorized the words, so he sang the first take reading from a lyric sheet. The band stopped to hear the playback, to fine tune the mix and tighten the arrangement, but instead of going back into the studio, they were able to go home. In one take, the most innovative song of Brown's illustrious career was finished. The arrangement, which calls for Maceo Parker to play one lone note on baritone sax for each pass of the riff, was sped up for single release, and sounds as fresh and exciting today as it did in 1965.
Freddie Crocker, an influential New York disc jockey, got an acetate of "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" and although he initially hated it, he played it on the air, and the phone lines wouldn't stop ringing. Brown, who was just getting (or taking) credit for inventing soul music, suddenly took everything one step farther. In 1965, they didn't have a name for the style, but "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" defined a new rhythm-based music that eventually was called 'funk'. "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag?" No doubt about it.
 
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