Contributed By: Dan Schwartz
Created On: Tuesday, 08 April 2008
Hits: 108
 The Singles, Vol. 5: 1967-1969 Some of the other hits, though, you may not have heard of, perhaps with good reason: the undistinguished ballads "I Guess I'll Have to Cry, Cry, Cry" and "Goodbye My Love", and especially "America Is My Home", a patriotic recitation that got him in as much trouble with the Left as his July 1968 tour of Vietnam to entertain troops. (He promptly won radicals back with "Say It Loud," the hottest anthem of the Black Power movement-- which he stopped playing live a few months later.)
The great side of Brown-- aphoristic, emphatic, so rhythmically sharp he could slice diamonds with a grunt-- had two insanely awesome bands in the period documented here. One was his touring group, led by Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis; the other was a white funk band from Cincinnati, the Dapps, who dropkicked "I Can't Stand Myself" out of the stadium. Their bassist Tim Drummond subsequently joined the Ellis ensemble for a while (and went on to play with Bob Dylan during his born-again period), and Brown noted that "Tim's not a white bass player, he's my bass player." Both the Dapps and the James Brown Band cranked out instrumental singles during this period, sometimes identified by each other's names, and usually working variations on J.B.'s hits: "Bringing Up the Guitar" revives a groove from "Cold Sweat" (and would later turn into "The Popcorn"), "Gittin' a Little Hipper" does the same for "Get It Together", the two-part "Shades of Brown" recalls "Ain't That a Groove", "Believers Shall Enjoy (Non Believers Shall Suffer)" is a vamp from "Maybe the Last Time". This set also includes a pair of killer two-part instrumentals, "Soul Pride" and "In the Middle", on which Soul Brother #1 doesn't actually play.
And then there's the embarrassing side of James Brown: the megalomaniac who thought he was a great keyboard player... or a good keyboard player. A lot of his singles at the time featured instrumental B-sides with piano or organ overdubs by Brown, and he had a habit of mixing his part to be twice as loud as the rest of the band. That might be acceptable if he didn't play more clams than a barrel of chowder: the two-part "Maybe Good, Maybe Bad" is far too optimistically titled, and he seems to keep forgetting what key "Here I Go" is in.
 
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