James Brown's Live at the Apollo by Wolk Douglas

Author:Wolk, Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2004-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

LOST SOMEONE

The introduction to “Lost Someone” is a remarkable bit of rhetoric. JB starts by echoing Fats Gonder’s catalogue of his hits, running off the titles of seven songs in a row. This time, though, it’s transformed from a list to a narrative—a speech in his chief mode of argument, the don’t-leave-me line he’s been working since “Please, Please, Please.” Gonder got rising blasts of excitement with each new title he announced: for James Brown himself, the horns don’t climb. They stay in the same place, and slap him down, bam bam!, every time he cries out. He is wounded but impossible to stop. His songs are the articulation of his need, the elaboration of his great theme, the definition of a man on the verge of abandonment. His declaration of abjection will not be denied. He is bewildered, crushed, half-wrecked by thinking you might leave.

It winds up with an ecstatically agonized refrain—he doesn’t just repeat the words, he puts the same spin of tone and melisma on them every time: “And if you leave me/If you leave me/There’s only one thing I can do now/There’s only one thing I can say/There’s only one thing I can do now/There’s only one thing I can say/There’s only one thing I can say ...”

By now he’s fully desperate, bracing himself and us for an explosion. But starting the song by crowing “I lost someone” would make it sound exultant, and instead he slips down a key and lowers his voice nearly to a murmur, clipping off his words and purring like Nat “King” Cole. The girls in the crowd do his screaming for him as soon as he hits the first two words. He can’t keep it to himself for long, though, and after seven words of his bottled-up sensitive act, he’s howling again. For the rest of the verse, his two natures fight word-by-word for territory—he rips open “heart” and tears at it for a few seconds, then spins the end of it into a genteel lead-in for the buttoned-up “bleed.”

As soon as the second verse starts and the horns blurt in like peeping toms falling through a trap door, JB casts off the Mr. Collected routine and starts pleading rawly. If he hasn’t actually fallen to his knees by this point, he might as well have.

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