The songwriter James Brown said would be remembered for centuries: “Really heavy people”
For someone who had lived and breathed music throughout their entire career, James Brown wasn’t one to give out compliments to just anyone in the music industry.
There had been plenty of times where he could pay tribute to those who helped get him onstage, but when it came time for him to play, it was all about playing the band like an instrument to give the people the best show they had ever seen. But beyond being one of the greatest showmen on the face of the Earth, Brown knew that what mattered most was having the right songs to work on behind the scenes.
A song like ‘I Don’t Mind’ or ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’ might work great as live staples, but the true test was whether they would capture that same kind of feeling whenever they landed on record. The groove might have been great, but from the moment that you hear Brown scream on one of his records, he was ready to grab every single listener by the throat and not let go until the song was over.
And it’s not like the rest of the world wasn’t listening. While not everyone is going to be able to match what Brown did onstage or in the studio, his legacy lives on as one of the greatest blueprints for sampling. ‘Funky Drummer’ is among the greatest drum loops in the history of hip-hop, but even if a few seconds of a drummer keeping time was considered classic, Brown was focused on the kind of melodic songs he worked on.
He knew that all that energy didn’t mean anything as long as there wasn’t a good message behind everything he did, and that came from listening to what the classical musicians did decades before. People like Mozart and Beethoven had that same urgency to all of the music that they played, and while none of them were going to remove their powdered wigs and do the splits when they performed, they didn’t need to when they had the right songs at their disposal.
And while there are many musicians from the jazz world that Brown felt would be on the same level as classical musicians, he had a special place in his heart for what Burt Bacharach was doing, saying, “Well, I can’t get away from the people who created different dimensions—Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mozart. But if you want the people from today, the people who were able to stay around and do good through a lot of eras, I would say Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, Maynard Ferguson. But if you’re talking about really heavy people—heavy, heavy, heavy—I’d say Burt Bacharach.”
That’s not to say that anything that those other legends did were any lesser than what Bacharach could do. Quincy Jones will forever be one of the greatest arrangers that the world had ever known, but when listening to the way that Bacharach weaved together a melody on songs like ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’, it’s impossible to think that anyone could have ever matched up with what he was doing.
Even when it wasn’t the traditional ballad, he could still find ways to switch things up a little bit. While many great singers have tried their hand at a song like ‘I Say A Little Prayer’, only someone with Bacharach’s musical mind could have managed to make one of the greatest songs of his era be based around an 11-bar phrase and sound absolutely seamless in context.
Because, despite being one of the greatest entertainers of his time, Brown could see through all the glamour and focus on what the real songwriters could do. Bacharach was already working well above what anyone else in rock and roll was doing, and it’s no surprise that some of the finest musicians in the world are still going back to figure out how the hell he created some of his pieces.
