tars of yesteryear weren’t really about playing ballads, anyway.
Sure, Elvis Presley earned some of his biggest hits from touching songs like ‘Love Me Tender’, but if you look at Springsteen’s other heroes, they put everything they had into whatever song they were working on. The Rolling Stones were a great launching pad for rock and rollers, but if you go back to the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, there wasn’t a single song in their catalogue that didn’t sound like it was on the verge of chaos at every single section of the track.
Then again, R&B has never been that far away from old-school rock and roll, and the biggest names in the soul genre were practically rock stars as well. The Beatles would have gladly said that they were influenced by everyone from The Miracles to Ray Charles, but when you look at what James Brown was doing by comparison, he felt like a true wild man who was being allowed to let loose for a few hours onstage.
No one had seen someone sweat that much onstage whenever they played, but Brown didn’t even seem that exhausted whenever he played. When listening to Live at the Apollo, all those moves seemed to be like second nature to him, and even if it was a little bit too showy with someone bringing out a coat to drape him in when he fell to the floor, Springsteen knew that everyone needed to be measured to that standard from then on.
So when Springsteen headed out on the roads to turn rock fans into believers, he wanted to do as much as he could to live up to what Brown had taught him, saying, “When we finally went out on the road, we scorched the Earth. Because that was what I was taught to do by Sam Moore and James Brown. There’s no greater performance than James Brown BURNING ASS on the Rolling Stones at The Tami Show. I’m sorry, my friends. I love The Stones, but [next to] James Brown, it’s like boys and men.”
And to his credit, Brown seemed to keep up that same kind of showmanship all the way up to his final performances. There was bound to be some wildness along the way, but even at a festival that was pure chaos like Woodstock 1999, the fact that Brown was able to get the crowd moving and shaking after decades in the business was a feat in and of itself when he opened up the festival.
Because as much as the new kids might try to find other ways to shock people and engage the crowd like no one else, James Brown is still the benchmark for what all great artists should aspire to be. You can think that you’re one of the greatest performers ever, but all you need to do is take one look at Brown performing in his prime and realise that you might need to go back to the drawing board.
