The life-changing moment Tom Waits saw James Brown perform live
“My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket,” Tom Waits once said. The magnetism that James Brown flickered into existence with his electrifying performance illuminated an LED above his head when he first saw him live. The rest of Waits’ quote reads, “My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane,” Brown was also able to wander Waits’ world towards a life in the arts, as they say.
It’s worth noting at this stage that Brown was a notorious light bulb moment man. When he swept the floor with everyone on The T.A.M.I Show, a bewildered Rolling Stones took note. In fact, apparently, Mick Jagger was almost too scared to leave his dressing room. It took Marvin Gaye to go in there and say, “Just go out there and do your best,” to encourage Jagger to take the stage and bust his own moves, but thereafter he knew he had to up his game.
Waits was no different. He saw Brown two years before that fateful T.A.M.I Show performance, and he was equally shell-shocked. As the star told the Guardian: “I first saw James Brown in 1962 at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and it was indescribable… it was like putting a finger in a light socket. He did the whole thing with the cape. He did ‘Please Please Please’. It was such a spectacle.”
In typical Waits fashion, he had a colourful metaphor to accompany the experience: “It had all the pageantry of the Catholic Church. It was really like seeing mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Christmas and you couldn’t ignore the impact of it in your life. You’d been changed, your life is changed now. And everybody wanted to step down, step forward, take communion, take sacrament, they wanted to get close to the stage and be anointed with his sweat, his cold sweat.”
This proved to be an abiding biblical experience that stayed with him throughout the years. As he said in 1973, when his own career got swinging in style: “I used to go to a lot of dances. I played in a band in junior high called The Systems… I played rhythm guitar and sang. I listened to a lot of black artists, quite a few black artists. I had a real interest in that – James Brown and the Flames were real big, I went to O’Farrell Junior High School, all black junior high school, and I went out to Balboa and saw James Brown – he knocked me out, man, when I was in 7th grade. So I’ve kept up on that scene too and I listen to as many different kinds of music as I can.”
In the years that followed, Waits boldly ventured where many have feared to tread, he chose to cover the hip-shaking maestro himself. Waits’ original ways transform ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ into a smorgasbord of musical delights. However, one factor certainly remains: the fizz of musical excitement.
You can check out the 1987 performance below.
