The Opinionated Diner

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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Since we’re cel­e­brat­ing record stores and all things vinyl, I thought I’d repost this, orig­i­nally from August April last year — posted again for record store day (late) and NZ Music month (1 day early).

I’ve had a cou­ple of con­ver­sa­tions of recent with peo­ple about record stores in Auck­land — the lost sort — where was Record Ware­house? When did Taste close?

That sort of thing.

I guess its part of being some sort of aging vinyl buff, but the thought of all those places, many of which I spend end­less hours in as a kid, or older, still gives me some sort of huge nos­tal­gic buzz. I used to spend days trekking around the sec­ond hand stores and the junk joints, most long gone, look­ing for the hun­dreds of 45s that I still have in boxes in my storeroom.

Rhythm Method out­side Rock’n’Roll 1980

There have been count­less record shops in Auck­land over the years, we New Zealan­ders con­sume vast qual­i­ties of music, but I’ve only listed ones here in central-ish Auck­land (New­mar­ket, the CBD, K Rd and Pon­sonby) and shops that have closed down. The stores that are still open can tell their own sto­ries. And I’ve only men­tioned the stores I actu­ally per­son­ally remem­ber, and, yes, despite my best efforts I’ve clearly made some mis­takes (and missed a few stores).

These shops were often filed with pas­sion­ate peo­ple, both in front of and behind the counter (and more than a few snotty know noth­ing kids who looked down on almost all their cus­tomers and helped kill the stores) but despite that record retail­ing is an extra­or­di­nar­ily risky busi­ness and more than a few of these stores, most in fact, includ­ing some big oper­a­tors, went bust and dis­ap­peared from the streets of the city forever.

How­ever many of the most colour­ful and cre­ative peo­ple I’ve known over the years came out of record retail or sup­ported their cre­ative enter­prises on the rarely good wages paid in record shops.

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