It was low-class music, it was wild music, it was ‘dirty’ music.

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

Here again James Brown was the single glaring exception, and in his differentness lay the seeds for other performers’ resentment and his own disproportionate success. Atlanta DJ Zenas Sears remembers him jumping off that balcony in Newark just to get the audience to sit up and take notice, and Alan Walden recalls without much sympathy his working a gig in Macon early in his career and falling to his knees on a concrete stage over and over again, “just landing on his fucking kneecaps, and when he came up, you could see where he’d torn his pants. Boy, that motherfucker’s crazy. We were paying him seventy-five or a hundred dollars for the night, and I went back to see him after the show, and his kneecaps were nothing but two damn calluses. He needed that attention.” One time Brown advertised Otis Redding on a tour of Texas, Otis’s bodyguard Sylvester Huckaby swears, simply in order to be able to brand Otis as a no-show. Another time he appropriated Solomon Burke’s crown. If he happened to be spotted in the audience and was introduced from the stage by an unwary performer, he would as likely as not take the microphone and perform an entire set before giving it up again.