Gravity - James Brown (1986)
As with all of the artists I’m looking at this week, there’s more to the narrative than just the year on the calendar. That’s probably the most applicable out of my selections for James Brown.
There was always a lot of turmoil in Brown’s personal life. Because he always wanted to be in charge of the business end of his career, that turmoil spilled over to his professional life as well. He was just getting out of a ten year record deal he’d been unhappy with (tbf its hard to picture a record deal he would have been happy with), and had a lot of churn to navigate.
Brown wanted a producer with a modern ear and hired songwriter / performer / and Edgar Winter Group bassist Dan Hartman, who made a cottage industry of setting up modernized sounds for older artists.
What resulted was an album of all Dan Hartman songs or co-writes, produced in the slick R&B style of the era.
The songs are pretty solid. Living In America was a hit (I didn’t know until today that Stevie Ray Vaughan takes the solo on it).
In contrast to yesterday’s example of Haggard getting more detail and nuance out of a modern recording setup, the system of multitracking and mixing back together really kills the funky vibe here. Turn Me Loose is a good example: it has all the same elements of Brown’s absolute classics: the horn stabs, the funky bass, the big full-band hits for emphasis. But it all sounds like it comes from a can without any of the electric energy his bands used to produce.
More than that, the tracks are all padded out to four, five, and six minutes. Those old tracks, partly because they were so exciting, could last two and half minutes and bring the house down. Or they could last six minutes and still leave you wanting to hear more after they faded out. Each of the cuts here ends a minute or more after it’s done, if you see what I mean.
So here we have an example of a great artist who gave in to modern ideas and ended up as a passenger on a record that bears his name.
