Pop Singers: The Biggest Cat

He came on like the aurora borealis. Red, white and blue spotlights played across the stage. The 18-piece orchestra, strung out like a chorus line in electric-purple tuxedos, swayed and screeched bloody murder. Girls in pink leotards gyrated madly on a pyramid of fluorescent yellow platforms. The Famous Flames danced and cried, "Hup, hup"; the Fabulous Jewels chanted, "He's so groovy, he's so groovy." And there, right in the middle of it all, was "Mr. Dynamite" himself, James Brown.

"Do you love me, baaby?" he wailed, and from the 15,000 faithful in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden last week came the soulful chorus, "Yeah, baby, yeah." For one frenetic hour, Brown commanded the stage like a one-man riot. Stocky as a fireplug, hair teased into a luxuriant pompadour, he danced, preached, niugged, strutted and sang with a mounting intensity carefully calculated to inflame. Finishing one song, he turned his back and then suddenly spun around, grasped the microphone by the neck and fell to the floor moaning, "Please, please, please!"

On cue, girl stooges in the first rows led an assault on the stage that was followed by hundreds of screaming fans. Brown flung off his coat, magnanimously tossed his cuff links to the crowd, and was led off draped in a purple cape—only to rush back for another number.

Gutsy Wail. Brown reasons that "to get people to listen to you, you first have to get their attention." He should know. Like other rhythm-and-blues singers, he has been largely unknown in the U.S. outside the Negro community. In Britain, however, Brown and other blues merchants such as Joe Turner, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker are the idols after which the big-beat groups from the Beatles on down have fashioned their music. That the U.S. pop-music market so readily adopted the synthetic British translation of a purely American idiom made Brown see red. To promulgate "the real thing," he organized the James Brown Show, a barnstorming caravan of 40 singers, dancers and musicians. The message got through. On the road 340 days last year, he grossed more than $1,000,000, played to audiences of 11,000 in Los Angeles, 15,000 in Annapolis, Md., 27,000 in Atlanta.

For all his outrageous ways onstage, Brown is a singer in the best blues tradition. Vented in pulsating rhythms, his raspy voice is fired with gospel fervor and a gutsy, lowdown wail. It is "soul music," sung in a Deep South argot and tinged with a melancholy that no" white singer can imitate.

Daily Coiffure. Raised in Augusta, Ga., Brown trained to be a boxer before he went on the road to sing gospel-derived songs. Now 34, he has assumed all the trappings of his self-proclaimed role as "the biggest Negro cat in show business right now." He is attended by two hairdressers who give him a daily coiffure, sleeps in a round bed, owns a fire-engine-red Sting Ray and a brace of Cadillacs. For his show, he writes his own songs, does all the arranging, choreography and costume designing (including his own wardrobe of 150 suits and 80 pairs of shoes).