Happy 55th Anniversary to James Brown’s Sex Machine, originally released in September 1970.
When James Brown died from pneumonia on Christmas Day in 2006, he left behind a morass of legal complications. To call it a tangled web would be to understate the messiness of the situation left by his passing—it was more a writhing pit of serpentine venom. Even the briefest investigation into the tumult reveals previously unacknowledged children emerging wielding DNA tests and legal paperwork to kingdom come. Like a black hole or the Sarlacc pit on Tatooine, the legal situation around Brown’s estate swallowed everything and spat nothing out until July 2021. Almost 15 years of to and fro, claim and counterclaim, and overwhelming heartache. A mess.
Of course, the root cause of that mess, was the mess of his personal life. Multiple wives, seemingly countless children and a decent spell using drink and drugs to self-medicate would only ever amount to a convoluted ball of confusion. Over the course of his life, he swung wildly between supporting Democrats and Republicans; both rejected and accepted his role as a leader of the Black community during the Civil Rights era of the late 1960s. And he treated the women in his life appallingly and, often, violently.
His musical legacy also remains a mess. Nineteen years after his death, his discography remains relatively untapped, with no lavish box sets or reissues of his astonishing, groundbreaking work to light the way to his extensive discography. His expansion from crooning, preening Godfather of Soul, to yelping founding father of funk, deserves a well-planned, extensive and wide-reaching program to show more than just those who already know about his place in musical history.
His 1970 album Sex Machine is also similarly mired in muddled thinking. It purports to be a live album but it is (shock!) more complicated than that, with at least half of it recorded in the studio with added reverb and recorded applause. The half of the album that was actually recorded live in Augusta, Georgia also features overdubs and (bizarrely) added applause. To further conflate the issue, the title track is a different version from the one released as a two-part single in July 1970. While these tactics were not exactly rare, they only add to the pervading sense of chaos and disorder.
But all it takes is one thing to forget all that: pressing play on Sex Machine.
Because if there was an adjective that did not apply to James Brown and his various bands, it was “messy.” This album is the antithesis of messy—it is tighter than a miser’s grip on his wallet. Tighter even than the skin stretched over a supermodel’s cheekbones. Brown’s prodigious dedication to musical excellence in his bands and his devotion to “the one” combine to create a document of some of the finest music ever created.
Listen to the Album:
And, true to the general air of turbulence around Brown, these tighter than tight recordings capture a moment of musical history in the personnel who play with Brown. In March 1970, most of his band walked out over financial dispute, leaving Brown to create the JBs from a young group from Cincinnati called The Pacemakers. This album captures both the pre-walkout band on the live recordings from various dates in 1969 and this new iteration on the studio work from 1970.
The Pacemakers included among their number a pair of brothers who would help change music both with Brown and in their future endeavors. Bootsy and Catfish Collins would stay with Brown for a brief, yet exhilarating, eleven months before eventually finding their way to that other bastion of funk, George Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic empire, where they helped create epochal grooves in a decidedly less regimented kind than they did with Brown.
The duality of the album doesn’t stop there, either. Not only does it include those slabs of pure, raw and unbridled funk like the title track, but his setlist from 1969 still included the songs that made his name earlier in his career. The archetypal begging and pleading of “Please Please Please” that highlights the recipe for “men begging for loving” that we seem to have lost and the swirling dramatic mastery of “It’s A Man’s World” showcase the soul power that fueled his career before he helped create what we now know as funk. But both are given a much funkier arrangement than their original selves—it would be impossible for it to be any other way, given the deluge of funk that surrounds them.
Given the total funkiness of the whole album, it seems impossible to pick out one moment but there is one that sticks to my mind like glue. On the incredible “Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose” around 5 minutes and 13 seconds in, an extended breakdown ends with Brown calling Clyde (Stubberfield) to join with his inimitable drums and then he tells Bootsy (Collins) to join the fray on bass. The moment that the drums and bass kick in together is enough to make an atheist believe in God. If your whole body isn’t moving and your face isn’t contorted into the nastiest, screwed-up funk face possible, then I’m afraid there’s no hope for you. It is sublime to the point of nirvana.
The dedication to “the one,” the way every instrument is percussive and rhythmic, and Brown’s underrated vocal abilities combine to make this album a testimony to the huge impact that James Brown had on music and offers an intriguing look at what many would say was his peak—it is, quite literally, the definition of funk.
Listen: