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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The sum­mer of 1987–1988 was like an eco­nomic “phoney war” sim­i­lar to that we just expe­ri­enced, 20 years on, with the 2007–2008 finan­cial cri­sis. In the months fol­low­ing the 1987 share-market crash, we were wait­ing for the impact to hit. One of the casu­al­ties was surely the Neon Pic­nic rock fes­ti­val, which went belly up hours before show time.

That’s Chris Bourke, across at his Dis­trac­tions blog, which, I’m thrilled to say, is back in action as he has deliv­ered to the pub­lish­ers, and I am hugely antic­i­pat­ing, his book on NZ pre-Rock’n’Roll his­tory — slowly, very slowly, we doc­u­ment, despite offi­cial ennui, our social past.

He also links to Andrew Schmitt’s fas­ci­nat­ing his­tory of Rock’n’Roll Fes­ti­vals in NZ at the NZ His­tory site.

I was one of the few who had a good story from Neon Pic­nic. My part­ner in clubs (we had The Play­ground at the time), Tom Samp­son, had been asked to work on the fes­ti­val, doing stage sound, by Ocea­nia Audio, who had the main stage con­tract. Which left me in Auck­land run­ning the club.

I was gag­ging to see James Brown again. I’d seen him in Lon­don in 1980 (and had always kicked myself for not going over the Har­bour Bridge when he played at Shore­line in Taka­puna in 1977 or 78) and wanted more.

Mo Cam­mick, one of my best mates, the edi­tor of Rip It Up and huge soul fan who had intro­duced me to vol­umes of Black and Soul music over the pre­vi­ous decade, said he was going to see James play in Aus­tralia the Mon­day and Tues­day before he was to fly to NZ.

Thus a deal was struck. Tom would take the week­end off from The Play­ground, to work side stage for Ocea­nia (which meant see­ing TGFOS from the stage!) and I would work in the club.  To com­pen­sate, I would, with Mur­ray, fly to Mel­bourne the week before, and catch James’ gigs at the Metropolis.

This would make up for miss­ing the NZ show.

I flew out, and with Mur­ray and my other mate, designer Ter­ence Hogan, who lived there, went to JB two nights run­ning. Maceo stood next to me in the crowd and played an instru­men­tal Soul Power, and I was fly­ing. Still am.…

I flew back to Auck­land on the Thurs­day and..well the rest is in Chris’ post.