The singer Sammy Hagar says is out of everybody’s league: “The greatest performer in history”
No singer will win the public’s favour by just winging it during a performance. The only way to truly touch people’s hearts is to make them believe in your song, and the vocal performances that endure are the ones where listeners can feel the force behind every word. While Sammy Hagar prided himself on giving it his all every time he sang, he believed that no one could hold a candle to what James Brown could do.
Then again, if there was ever a song where Brown did give 200%, it certainly hasn’t seen the light of day yet. Throughout his career, Brown didn’t leave any performance until he knew that he gave everything, including the single ounce of sweat that he had, to the crowd, especially when he tried to squeeze energy out of his band as well.
All you need to do is listen to the live album Live at the Apollo to see what Brown is about. This is someone who knows that the art of show business is about trying to get as much out of the audience as you can, and if there was such a thing as using the crowd as an instrument, Brown mastered it in the way he pulled off call-and-response trade-offs with that crowd.
Live at the Apollo has become one of those records that musicians return to whenever they want to understand what separates a good singer from a magnetic performer. Brown never sounded as though he was simply working through a setlist.
Every scream, pause and improvised aside felt like part of a conversation with the audience, with the atmosphere inside the theatre shaping the performance as much as the songs themselves. It is little wonder that so many aspiring frontmen treated the album as essential listening. It captured something that couldn’t be taught in a rehearsal room.
Although Brown claimed to be on the R&B side of the musical spectrum, there were just as many rock and rollers who stole a lot from him. From the way that he shuffled his feet onstage to the raw power that he had behind his vocals, someone like Hagar saw him as the blueprint for what being a star should be.
When talking about his stage persona, Hagar singled out ‘Try Me’ as an example of Brown’s amazing stage persona, telling Spin, “The song ‘Try Me’ is the most passionate f-ing vocal performance ever. James Brown was, without a doubt, the greatest performer in the history of this business. Live at the Apollo, you can hear him performing, not just vocally, you can see and feel his performance. He was a monster.”
Aside from Hagar’s view of Brown, it’s easy to see half of the R&B legend’s moves every time David Lee Roth got onstage as well. All of that soul had to come out of somewhere, and as much as people like Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas claimed to teach Roth everything he knew, you can’t look at those kinds of stage acrobatics and not say that Brown at least had a little bit of influence on him.
Hagar never tried to become a second James Brown, and that was never really the point. Every great frontman finds their own way of commanding a room, whether through showmanship, humour or sheer vocal power. What Brown demonstrated better than almost anyone was the value of complete commitment. Audiences can tell when a performer is holding something back, and they can also tell when someone is willing to leave everything on the stage
Whereas Brown focused on the timbre of his scratchy voice, though, Hagar had a more melodic tone in the way he constructed melodies. The emphasis was still on the rhythm, but it didn’t matter as long as you could sing along to tracks like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Right Now’ whenever they came on the radio.
More than anything, Hagar learned a valuable lesson about what being a frontman is like from Brown. Regardless of how much musical intuition you have, it’s as much about being an entertainer as it is about being a good singer.
