Happy 50th Anniversary to James Brown’s thirty-seventh studio album The Payback, originally released in December 1973.
James Brown recorded and released The Payback 50 years ago, in the midst of his “Soul Brother #1” period, known as of one of the most creatively fertile eras of his lengthy career. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not unusual for the Hardest Working Man in Show Business to release three or four projects a year. This is also the time when Brown fully embraced creating funky soul music, generating recordings that would reverberate throughout modern music history.
So it stands to reason that James Brown and his JBs backing band would put their whole feet in this project, a formidable funk juggernaut. The Payback is a contender for the best long player in Brown’s discography and one of the greatest funk albums of all time.
The Payback was originally conceived of as the soundtrack to Hell Up In Harlem (1973). The film was a sequel to Black Caesar (1973), for which Brown and company had recorded one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. This album was to be the third soundtrack Brown would release that year; along with Black Caesar, the Godfather of Soul recorded the score for the Jim Brown vehicle Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (1973).
For reasons that aren’t quite clear, the producers of Hell Up In Harlem rejected what Brown submitted to them. The legend goes that the producers thought it was “the same old James Brown stuff.” Some, including Brown, asserted that the film’s director Larry Cohen told him that the album wasn’t funky enough. Cohen has since vehemently denied that this happened.
Regardless, the producers opted to go with Motown’s Edwin Starr instead. Starr’s take is perfectly respectable, featuring a couple of legitimately great songs. But it’s very polished, lacking the grit and downright nasty funk of The Payback.
In the liner notes of its 1992 reissue, Brown’s famed manager Alan Leeds outlined the tumultuous year that led up to the release of The Payback. It was marked by a literally exhaustive amount of touring and personal tragedy: Brown’s eldest son Teddy died in a car crash in June of that year. It also chronicles the studio sessions that would produce the album. Leeds describes that even as the Hell Up In Harlem deal fell through, Brown “defiantly” decided to release the material intended for the film on his own terms.
Listen to the Album:
Truthfully, The Payback works better as a stand-alone album than as a film soundtrack. Its themes of struggling to overcome adversity are better suited for a James Brown project than a middling sequel to a middling Blaxploitation flick. The Payback is also a lengthier endeavor than most soundtracks from the time. Both Black Caesar and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off come in around 36 and 39 minutes respectively; what would become The Payback is a hulking eight-track double album. Each undertaking is an epic, with the shortest song clocking in at nearly six minutes, while the longest comes in a little under thirteen. Nearly every song could serve as an album centerpiece or title track.
The Payback is a groove heavy exercise that highlights the best arrangements the Godfather’s band ever released. Much of the album’s distinct sound is owed to the horn section, including trombonist/bandleader/orchestrator Fred Wesley and saxophonist Maceo Parker, the latter of whom had returned to the JBs’ fold earlier in the year. While this pair have received much of the musical glory, it should be noted that guitarists Jimmy Nolen and Hearlon “Cheese” Martin do a good deal of unheralded work on guitar, as do John Morgan and Johnny Griggs on percussion. They all help establish the tone on many of these tracks.
The Payback is best known for its title track, also considered one of James Brown’s finest recordings. It’s the song that is most directly related to Hell Up In Harlem, as Brown proclaims his intentions to seek revenge against those who wronged him. It features some of his most memorably quotable moments of his career, such as “Sold me out for chicken change!” and “I don’t’ know karate, but I know ka-raze-zeee!!!!” An underrated aspect of the recording is Brown’s irreplicable ability to simultaneously belt out lyrics and bark directions to his band. The band flawlessly complies, perfectly supplying horn “hits” and executing one of the great beat changes of all time.
James Brown sticks with his groove-based approach throughout The Payback, but he and his band simply operate at the highest levels possible, demonstrating why everyone involved are among the best at what they do. “Take Some, Leave Some” sports a devious feel, bolstered by the full-throated horn section. JB muses on how to make sure that he gets his fair share out of life, which consists of “good food, warm bed… shoes and clothes.”
The eight-minute “Shoot Your Shot” sounds like an extended version of something that appeared on the Black Caesar soundtrack. It moves at a breakneck pace, with the percussion subtly and perfectly complementing the towering horn section. The even lengthier “Stone To The Bone” is led by Nolen and Martin’s performances on guitar, making the track the album’s peppiest entry. Brown pulls effective double duty here, crooning about the “mighty good thang” in his life and giving a quirky performance on the electric organ.
“Time Is Running Out Fast,” the longest song on The Payback, blends funk and jazz sensibilities. The song is pretty short on coherent lyrics, as Brown and the JBs communicate with each other through what seems like their own language. On Brown’s end, it includes shouts of “Yeah!”, “Oh!”, “Here!”, and other guttural grunts. Brown’s first and only coherent phrase arrives ten-and-a-half minutes into the song, as he commands Wesley, “Man, blow your damn horn!” Wesley complies with a virtuoso track-ending solo, as the rest of the band chants, “Blow your big, fat horn!”
The Payback presents a pair of “softer” songs as well. “Forever Suffering” is a solid blues tune, with Brown weaving a tale of abandonment, lament, and regret. As his wife and kids have left him, he’s left to ponder “How long do I have to suffer for just one mistake?” “Doing the Best I Can” is the album’s sole subpar entry. JB had mixed success with crafting ballads throughout his career, and this isn’t one of his better compositions. It’s maudlin, treacly, and pretty much an early drag on the album.
The Payback ends with “Mind Power,” another one of James Brown’s best recordings. It’s a titanic, twelve-minute-plus masterclass in musicianship by the JBs. For his part, the Godfather begins the song with a lengthy soliloquy about the meaning of the song’s title, which basically entails using the power of positive thinking to overcome the crippling effects of poverty. He relates his own experiences of eating fish-head stew and “being nine years old before I got my first pair of underwear out of a store.”
About four-and-a-half minutes into the song, the JBs execute another of the all-time great beat transitions, slowing down the tempo, but still letting the funk flow. Notably, Parker switches from saxophone to flute as his weapon of choice for the back half of the song and sounds just as adept while doing so. The song’s session went on even longer than what appears on this album. The Make It Funky – The Big Payback 1971-75 compilation (1996) features “Mind Power Pt. 3,” which includes an additional four minutes of jamming by the band.
The Payback represents the man who invented so much of modern soul and his band at the peak of their respective powers. Brown used the album’s success and pushed forward to record even more ambitious projects. He followed up the album with Hell (1974), another sprawling and eclectic double album. As for Hell Up In Harlem and its soundtrack, both are footnotes of the era. The Payback still towers over all.
Listen: