Two years after James
Brown's death, the expected upswing in books about him has hit. This summer
saw the enlightening anthology The James Brown Reader, September brought Don
Rhodes' personal-reminisces collection Say It Loud!, and more biographies are
forthcoming. So The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved The Soul Of
America,
a retelling of one of the most legendary concerts of the 1960s, was probably
inevitable. What wasn't was a write-up this good: Boston Globe contributor James Sullivan
has produced one of the most vivid music books in recent memory.
The Hardest Working Man has loads
of detail about its subject, a Brown concert at Boston Garden the night after
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder; the show was broadcast several times on
local television, helping ease tensions in the area. (That show was also
explored in a documentary that Shout Factory included on the recent three-DVD
set James Brown In The '60s.) As befits a local, Sullivan digs up acres of
background on nearly every aspect of the event and the times: deep, fascinating
historical nuggets on the history of civil rights in Boston, the city's status
as King's "second home," and the local disputes leading up to and emerging from
King's death. Sullivan is a scrupulous reporter, and he's especially gifted at
choosing and placing quotes, particularly Brown's.
Sullivan comes up with
some noteworthy quotes of his own, particularly regarding Brown's work. This
book doesn't focus on Brown's music as closely as Douglas Wolk's sharp volume James
Brown's Live At The Apollo, but Sullivan's is an adept critic: Discussing Brown's 1964
single "Out Of Sight," he says it contains "brassy bursts of punctuation, like
the multiple exclamation points of an action comic book"; later, he describes
Brown's whoops and screams as "verbal projectiles… the diaphragmatic grunts of
a man throwing off a heavy burden," and he terms 1965's world-changing "Papa's
Got a Brand New Bag, Pt. 1" an "experiment in bop commercialism."
The relative peace Brown
helped achieve in Boston didn't stay long. Many of the city initiatives that
came out of the aftermath of King's assassination would unravel by the '80s,
and so would Brown, whose career plummeted in the mid-'70s, resurged in the
mid-'80s, and never recovered after Brown went to prison in 1988. Leaving no
ends loose, Sullivan conveys all of this in less than 250 pages, with an
admirable sweep.