James Brown... I did have a lot of key music influences growing up, but maybe none bigger than... JAMES BROWN. In the late 60's & early 70's, whenever I went to a house party, (a party at someone’s house) they didn't have a DJ, they just had someone in charge of the music. Usually that was one automatic turntable with a tall spindle that you could stack 4 or 5 albums at once, no singles, just long playing albums. Typically, most albums had only one or two popular songs & the rest... party killers. So most albums you would hear were greatest hits or variety hit's, like Motown 64 greatest hits & Sly & The Family Stone's greatest hits. But the better party's for me seem to use a lot of James Brown, which really made people dance non stop.
I was already a huge James Brown fan & had even went to see him live at a Madison Square Garden show in 1969. In 1971 I visited my neighbor’s office, he just happened to be vice president of Polydor records & introduced me to his top artist James Brown. I had just started DJing at my fathers club The Ninth Circle, so he mentioned to James that I was a DJ & James said “you gotta give him my latest jams” & gave me white label promo albums of “Get On The Good Foot” & Lynn Collins “Think (About It)”. These had just come in & wouldn’t actually be released until later that year. I thought I was a James Brown fan before… but now it was really on a different level.
Around the same time everyone I knew seemed to have a boom box... including me. By today's standards it wasn’t so big, but at the time coming from miniaturized transistor radios... it seemed appropriately gigantic! “James Brown Revolution Of The Mind” was just out & that cassette seemed like the only thing on my box for a good year. A few years later as I was DJing more, & James Brown wasn’t still turning out the relevant releases the way he had in the early 70’s, & with all the great new music coming out, I wasn’t even playing many of his previous hits… but one track from the Sex Machine album particularly stood out… “Give It Up Or Turn It Loose”. It was said to be recorded live, but really only half of the album was live, the other half was recorded in a studio with a live crowd dubbed over it afterwards, including “Give It Up Or Turn It Loose”. At the time, me & my friends didn’t know, not sure if we really would have cared, it just sounded so good.
Years later I had the opportunity to remix this song without the crowd overdubs, the track is great either way, but I still prefer the live overdubbed version. For the 10 + years I went to the Paradise garage, it was safe to say this live overdubbed version of “Give It Up Or Turn It Loose” was certainly one of Larry Levan’s top ten records… it sounded incredible there. In my 5 decades of DJing this is probably the only record that actually never leave my crate. Danny :)