The Opinionated Diner

I feel like I’m slowly com­ing out of a dark hole. Of my own mak­ing of course.

I blog mostly because I enjoy it  - and because it pro­vides a place where I can harm­lessly vent and enthuse to my heart’s (and head’s) con­tent. I like it and it’s an escape to a place that is mine, even if that mine is rather pub­lic. But it’s a pub­lic me that I can con­trol and limit as I see fit.

I’ll never write as well as my friend David Herkt has for many, many years, mostly recently on this heart­warm­ing — if con­flict­ing — essay ¹, and make no claim to do so, but nei­ther am I ashamed of what I write now. I wish I could say that about then, but I’m not tempted to quick-edit to hide that messy past either.

Three or so years back I started obses­sively push­ing for the thing that has grown into Audio­Cul­ture. Why? Well mostly because I was increas­ingly aware that there was a hole, and it was a gap­ing and grow­ing hole, in the way we (New Zealand — no mat­ter where I live I am every­day a New Zealan­der) as a nation have cap­tured our musi­cal past.

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A guest post from Mur­ray Cam­mick. Mo’ says:

This is the ver­sion of the James Brown story (that was pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary 2007 Rip­ItUp mag­a­zine) before I axed 300 or so words and a bit of the colour from the story.

Bryan Staff inter­views JB, Auck­land 1978

The God­fa­ther Of Funk 

We will need a new card for Christ­mas 2007, one that recog­nises the birth of Jesus Christ and the death of James Brown on Decem­ber 25.

When you read Brown’s biog­ra­phy you won­der how he sur­vived his child­hood in a house of ill-repute and his impris­on­ment as a teenager. With no edu­ca­tion, how did this wild and crazy guy become the biggest soul star in the USA and then rev­o­lu­tionise that style to invent funk?

I get pissed off  when music writ­ers choose the 1962 Live  At The Apollo as Brown’s best live album. They are ignor­ing the piv­otal achieve­ment of his life, the fact that in 1965 he invented a new sound with the sin­gle ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’. This sin­gle was No.1 on the Bill­board R&B charts for eight weeks. He should be called the God­fa­ther of Funk not the God­fa­ther of Soul.

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I need to excise stuff.

Firstly I need to excise the the fact I’ve not posted here for 5 months.

A block? I guess so, mostly cre­ated and dri­ven by the fact that my life since mid-2012 has been one of con­stant eval­u­a­tion of other’s writ­ten words, pres­sure to deliver these words and an increas­ingly over­whelm­ing panoply of extra­or­di­nary images, archival materiel and just stuff that Mur­ray Cam­mick and I are try­ing to give some order to — with vary­ing but increas­ingly pleas­ing degrees of suc­cess. All done under the canopy of an enforced and unhappy phys­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion from Brigid (no we have not split — cir­cum­stance has put me in a dif­fer­ent bed to the girl with whom I’m hap­pily co-dependent, for much of the last six months and it’s bloody hard).

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