I remember sitting in darkened theatres, thirteen year old white boy with glasses, watching the band file on stage in the dark while the movie finished up on the screen over their heads. Then the screen would go dark and roll up and the lights would come up and the bandleader would step up to the mike in his white tie and tails and speak those magic words, "Ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? Please welcome the hardest working man in show business, Soul Brother Number One, James Brown!" Then the magic began. First his backup singers, The Famous Flames, would come onstage, three men in matching suits with lace shirts and pompadours. Then the curtains would part upstage and The Man Himself would enter, dancing steps that seemed impossible for an ordinary man, wearing a suit of a color that existed only in fantasies and he and the band would become one in a way I've never seen before or since.
Girls screaming and flashbulbs popping while he opened with Signed, Sealed And Delivered or Poppa's Got A Brand New Bag. But the second song always brought the house down, always a ballad like Try Me. Girls in ecstacy while he always managed to bring it all together before he came to the end of the songlist.
Didn't matter where or when. Could have been the Apollo in 1962, or the Brevoort, under the el on Fulton Street, in 1964, or the Garden in 1967. To this day I've never seen any show as purely exciting as his.
The last time I saw him was in Battery Park in 2003. He did a concert on monday of Memorial Day weekend. It was my 54th birthday, his 70th, but you never could have told that from the show that night. He played more than two hours before about twenty thousand people, most of whom hadn't been born when he first played the Apollo. We'll never see his like again.
