Brown, who had played the Chitlin Circuit for years, was genuinely incensed that the producers would put him on before pallid amateurs (in his mind) like the Stones. His performance, he later admitted, was a cutting contest that he refused to lose. As Brown puts it in his memoir, “James Brown: The Godfather of Soul,” “We did a bunch of songs, nonstop, like always. . . . I don’t think I ever danced so hard in my life, and I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast.” It was a four-song set: the staccato blues number “Out of Sight”; an astonishing inside-out revival of “Prisoner of Love,” which had been recorded by smoothies like Billy Eckstine and Perry Como; the dramatic centerpiece “Please, Please, Please”; and the closer, “Night Train,” which the boxer Sonny Liston would play to get himself going in the gym.
What is there to say? If Astaire’s dancing was the graceful line of black-tie seduction, Brown’s was a paroxysm of sexual frenzy, a blend of Pentecostal possession and erotic release. RJ Smith’s “The One” is the book to read on James Brown. (The Profile to read is Philip Gourevitch’s brilliant “Mr. Brown,” published in 2002, four years before Brown’s death. Two veteran critics, Alan Light and Edna Gundersen, have written interesting pieces on the T.A.M.I. performance.) Smith quotes Brown as saying that the T.A.M.I. performance was the “highest energy” moment of his career: “I danced so hard my manager cried. But I really had to. What I was up against was pop artists—I was R. & B. I had to show ’em the difference, and believe me, it was hard.”
This was the first time that Brown, while singing “Please, Please, Please,” pulled out his “cape act,” in which, in the midst of his own self-induced hysteria, his fit of longing and desire, he drops to his knees, seemingly unable to go on any longer, at the point of collapse, or worse. His backup singers, the Flames, move near, tenderly, as if to revive him, and an offstage aide, Danny Ray, comes on, draping a cape over the great man’s shoulders. Over and over again, Brown recovers, throws off the cape, defies his near-death collapse, goes back into the song, back into the dance, this absolute abandonment to passion.
“It’s a Holiness feeling—like a Baptist thing,” Brown said of the act. “It’s a spiritual-background thing. You’re involved and you don’t want to quit. That’s the definition of soul, you know. Being involved and they try to stop you and you just don’t want to stop. The idea of changing capes came later, ’cause it’s good for show business.” As Smith writes,
“That falling-to-the-knees-overcome-with-emotion dramaturgy is straight out of the Holiness Church, out of a belief system holding, in the charnel heat of the moment, that a person could be overpowered by a sudden tap from the Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost jumpers were what they called those filled with the spirit in the earliest days of Pentecostalism. It was a form of possession, of yielding with glory to a higher force. Many figures in the black Pentecostal tradition wore the cape. There was King Louis Narcisse, a preacher who modeled himself on Daddy Grace. . . . There was Brother Joe May, one of the major gospel voices of the ’50s and ’60s...”
Watching the film, it’s easy to see why Jagger was tempted to stay in his dressing room. This was 1964, and the Stones were not yet fully formed. They still played a mix of originals and covers (Berry’s “Around and Around,” Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now”). Jagger had not quite worked out his peculiar blend of frugging and Satanic posturing. He is hardly Perry Como, but, compared with Brown, he is an anemic thing, a pretender. Nelson George, a sharp writer on race and music and much else, calls out Jagger at the T.A.M.I. show for his “lame funky chicken,” in contrast to Brown’s “proto-moon-walking, athletically daring performance.” Taking the stage after Brown, the Stones are Unitarians making nice:
Around and Around / Off the Hook / Time Is on My Side / It's All Over Now / I'm Alright / Let's Get Together
Richards would eventually say that the very idea of following James Brown was the biggest mistake of the Stones’ careers. “Just go out there and do your best,” Marvin Gaye had told Jagger. And he did. Jagger was never anything but admiring and respectful of James Brown—and he is one of the producers of “Get On Up.”
