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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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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A truly odd few days.

On the Thurs­day before last I get an email ask­ing if I can come to New Zealand to con­sult on a project. Sure - sur­prised - says I, when? How does Sun­day sound. Um, ok — how long for? Five days? Okay…

Ticket arrives on the Fri­day and it’s Qan­tas via Syd­ney. I re-send the email that I sent to ear­lier: Sin­ga­pore Air­lines or Thai only. I won’t fly Qan­tas, Malaysian or Air New Zealand, all for rea­sons of food, com­fort and lack of ser­vice on a very long flight (okay Air NZ are fine on the ser­vice but the food and seat­ing suck badly).

The replace­ment ticket arrives a cou­ple of hours later — Thai, but leav­ing within 48 hours.

That’s fine. I buy a few exotic Thai snacks for the par­ents and head to the air­port. At Swampy I get into an argu­ment with the Duty Free store: you can’t take liq­uids over 100ml on the plane to NZ.

Didn’t I resolve this a month ago? Yes I am — in a sealed bag.

No you can’t. I quickly work out that to staff in King Power Duty Free, New Zealand is a pair of words that sim­ply means ‘a part of Aus­tralia - we don’t know exactly where’.

I tell them I’ll take the risk — and the girl sells it to me, then a few sec­onds later chases me through the air­port in tears, plead­ing with me to go back as she’ll lose her job when Thai Air­lines throw me off. I tell her I won’t men­tion her and if there is an issue I’ll some­how get it back to her.

I leave her sob­bing, con­vinced that I’ll never make it to the city of New Zealand in Aus­tralia and that she’s unem­ployed — and with­out issue I board TG491.

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