Up in Harlem at the Apollo, laid out in an open casket, he was wearing a spangly purple suit with silver shoes, and he looked pretty good for a corpse. His hair was looking a little wild, the tight, shellacked process he was famous for just slightly unhinged in the front, sort of the way it would get about mid-set during a typical show.

I saw James Brown at the Apollo in 1991, and it was not his finest moment. This was one of his first shows after being sprung from doing a two-year stretch for assault with a deadly weapon and possession of PCP, a comeback of sorts, and he was having a rough time of it. Prison and a taste for bad drugs had dealt a brutal one-two punch. Thankfully, for the occasion, his ace-in-the-hole sax man Maceo Parker was making a rare return to the bandstand, and he was blowing inside-out and sideways to cover for James, who was whipping it as hard as he could but was clearly a shadow of his former self. Years later it would get worse: reports of him smoking crack between songs at JazzFest, and—no shit—sharing the stage with a magician at B.B. King’s in New York made one wonder just what the fuck the Godfather was thinking about.

Whatever it was, he fought through it. The last time I saw him was on his 70th birthday, 13 years after his sadly mediocre return to the Apollo, at a free concert in Battery Park in New York City, and he was Doin’ the Popcorn Like a Man. It was a triumph from any point of view, a spectacular two-hour show that turned the light summer rain into steam. Over the years the band had gotten a little slicker—there were people on stage who looked like they had never been beaten up, had never been to prison, had never laid up in bed with a bottle of suicide brandy and a cheap whore—but they were sharp as tacks, making hairpin turns through the high-speed medleys and hitting the famous bridges like smart bombs, and they pumped out as good a version of the James Brown show as you were ever going to see in the 21st century, even if it was a bit spongy compared to the ’60s and ’70s models.

For James’ part, the nonstop twirling had aged into a few come-shots of shimmy and shake, and the splits and slow rises were long gone, but he still knew how to chew on the scenery, making the band stop and start at will, howling, screeching, and hollering his way through his hits. “Cold Sweat”… Hit me! “I Feel Good”… Hit me! “Hot Pants”… Hit me!

No, you never could tell with JB. After campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1972, he hit with “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” not exactly an ode to Republican politics. Received wisdom is that his last significant record was 1985’s “Unity” with Afrika Bambaataa (let’s face it, it was about the dumbest record either of them had ever made, which is saying a lot), but his Gravity lp from the next year, the one that featured the perfectly idiotic “Livin’ in America,” his last radio hit (featured in Rocky IV), offered “Turn Me Loose, I’m Dr. Feelgood,” his most scorching track since “Superbad.” Go find it, and play it loud and tell me I’m wrong.

By the time he got to Battery Park to celebrate his 70th birthday in the rain, no one could have possibly expected James to blow minds over the course of a two-hour show, but he did. The night before the birthday gig, I had gone to see the Cramps, a psycho punk freak show of a band also legendary for their frenzied live shows. Cramps frontman Lux Interior spit and snorted and climbed the PA stacks, but at the end of the day, when all the score cards were tallied, James Brown had made a mockery of the competition. He made those punks look like dog shit.

James Brown was, always, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, but at this late date it was not purely out of passion, a legacy, or some pumped-up world view, like Bob Dylan’s, that makes a senior citizen feel like he has to work every night. It was out of sheer economic necessity. He was no longer double-parking his Lear Jet outside arenas and big theatres; he was doing club dates to pay the rent. This was a guy who once upon a time owned the world—he was empowering Black America and running his own media empire. He was the greatest entertainer on the planet. And then he was doing time for shooting off guns and beating up wives and doing shitty drugs.

The Godfather made a lot of bad decisions. Or, possibly, he made the right ones, and no one understood him. Even in the best of times—except while singing—his speech could be a challenge to decipher. It is amazing that he was able to communicate to his band as well as he did.

But he did so in spectacular, earth-moving ways. He got the message over and somehow he got the fellows to all come down together, stompin’ that beat, the big hits from the horn section now coming down hard on the “one” and the snare drum sliding all over the goddamn place. Listen to “I Got the Feeling”—I’ve heard one overeducated musicologist ponder if James had put his whole band through “back beat aversion therapy” before twirling that joint. It’s a phenomenal achievement. Nothing since has been the same.

It’s not easy music to play, so deceptive it is subversive. Most of his songs have barely any chord changes before the bridge, just scratchy little riffs punctuated by the changa-chang of ninth chords. They are hypnotic, pure African voodoo, and their success is not rooted in virtuoso technique (although this stuff is brutal on drummers), but in an impenetrable groove and an aggressive approach. It’s all a shining testament to James Brown being a towering figure not only among singers, but among band leaders, up there with Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Captain Beefheart. Somehow James got his vision across in colossal fashion. A system of fines certainly didn’t hurt. Shoes not shined? Bam! Fifty bucks. Drop a beat? Bam! Fifty bucks.

All of the news reports of James Brown’s Harlem wake, logically enough, focused on the Apollo Theater and its “new, hi-tech” marquee that flashed the legend “Rest in Peace Apollo Legend, The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, 1933-2006.” What none of the news reports bothered to say is that the new Apollo Marquee is about as hi-tech as your Aunt Mabel’s Christmas tree lights—just a cheap-looking billboard—and it didn’t help that the James Brown legend wasn’t the only thing they were flashing that day. Between spurts of James’ cheap electric epitaph, there were ads for Amateur Night, the Apollo website, and something called “The Wisdom Temple,” which was presenting “Astrologer Gale Armstead.” The tacky jackasses who run the Apollo just couldn’t help themselves from advertising schlock on what should have been a Holy Day. Shame on them.

The better testament, totally ignored by the armies of media who waited patiently for the astrologer and the website ads to pass so they could get footage of the Apollo Marquee showing something relevant, was down the street, on the marquee of the old Victoria movie theater, which looks like it hasn’t projected a film since the golden era of Fred Williamson. A hand-lettered marquee said “Welcome to Harlem USA, James Brown Godfather of Soul, RIP.” This was the real shit. Someone had to find the letters and get a ladder and put it up. It took some thought. It had soul.

Back in Augusta two days later, after another all-nighter in the back of a hearse, James was now sporting a spectacular red, diamond-studded combination—and his hair had been combed back into a ferocious pompadour.

After a heartfelt and earthy eulogy from James’ manager Charles Bobbitt, and a mercifully short statement from Michael Jackson, James’ band the Soul Generals played. Bobby Byrd, one of the original Famous Flames sang a song. James’ wife, Tomi Rae, now downgraded to “companion” by James’ probate lawyer, also sang and danced, probably not the best move since she had been trying so hard to play the role of grieving widow. Someone shouted “get off the stage.” The vultures were already circling.

After the funeral was over, Danny Ray, the MC of James’ show for the last thirty years—the fellow whose job it was to ask the greatest rhetorical of all time, “Are you ready for some super dynamite soul?”—draped a sequined cape over James for the last time. That was also his job, playing the straight man in the famous big finale, covering James as he dropped to his knees, only to see him rise up again, singing. Even in death, I really expected James to give it up and turn it loose, throw that cape off, and scream one more time.

This is cache, read story here