The Godfather of Soul died today. He was 73. James Brown was one of the most influential figures in American pop culture history. Link to Wikipedia bio, and here's coverage in the NYT. Here are some links to vintage video of him in performance: Eyesight, Super Bad, I Feel Good, It's A Man's World, Please Please, Sex Machine, at the Olympia, Soul Power, Ed Sullivan, and an unusual TV interview (shorter clip here) Mr. Brown did when he was in an chemically altered state of consciousness after having been released from jail.
Reader comment: Andrew Tonkin says,
FYI James recorded a song called "Christmas in Heaven" (Amazon Link) - creepy man, it's like he KNEW.
Here's an MP3 of "Christmas in Heaven" via Loudersoft:
Link.
(tip of the hat to Boing Boing for info)
Well the hardest working man in show business finally gets to rest. Been listening to James Brown songs in between Christmas songs, interesting combo. Thanks for all the sweat drenched memories. May you be happy in the after life without all the little jabs of disrespect that were piled up on you, IRS, divorces, etc. We all loved you, gregor
December 26th Just found this BBC article:
Blogger is still not letting me up load photos, it's worth a good look at a great man
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http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42386000/jpg/_42386907_groos72ap.jpg sorry, but you have to copy and paste, no instance link, can you remember the day you got goosebumps cause you got a modem that was 28.8k instead (as we look down our noses) instead of 14.4 kbs. I ran a computer lab. Just six computers, the on a side I would type a url in one hit enter, roll in my rolling chair, got to another repeat process and by the time all six were working off a T1 line the first one would have half a page loaded. It was slow but it worked. I had the second homepage at the university of Grand Junction, Colorado back in 1993 I think. I was self taught and everyone thought that I was a computer whiz. I spent countless hours trying to figure how to do something, that today is done 10 times over in a second.
I scanned my Grand Junction School Id to get my photo. Boy those were the days of limited resources. all the books in the library did not have a length of 9 inches ans was all theory.
I learned by using forum's until the head of the Environmental asked if I wanted to work at school for $6 an hour? Let's see I was making $4.50 washing dishing at a now closed Business. Pretty hard decision, plus I had keys to the entire University. And that boys and girls is how I learned to know about computers, what I knew would not fill a match box, the small type.
I impressed the head of the Environmental Lab by tracking down some hot, stolen from the Russians, given freely, traded. who know how we got it but I located an English manual on how to run the equipment thought the Internet. Boy did they think that I was hot stuff. even when I failed Water Quality twice in a row.
There by losing my Associate in Applied Science degree, I felt that I needed to be in the field instead of doing school work, so off I left school and back to the Nevada Test Site This should be it's own thread, but thats for later, or until some asks?