He Could Do Wheelin’, He Could Do Dealin’: James Brown Did It All on 1973’s The Payback
Looking back on 50 years of the Godfather’s stone funk classic
It doesn’t get much better than James Brown’s monumental song “The Payback.”
The short and punchy tracks of the 1950s and 1960s were, by the era of puffy sleeves and rhinestone-studded flares, a thing of the past. At 7:40 minutes, the title track may be longer than average, except the eight-track album, originally released as a two-LP set, boasts six even longer numbers, three of which break the 10-minute mark.
Just as prog rock was stretching its wings in the 1970s, Brown took his signature funky sound, added more bottom end–to quote Boogie Nights stereo salesman Buck Swope to a customer, “Oh, you need all that bass!”–and put a hurting on these grooves. Even the shortest song breaks the five-minute mark.
Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau, for one, tended to prefer Brown’s long workouts to the radio-ready singles. As he stated in his review of 1972’s Soul Classics, “These patterns, for that’s what they really are, are meant to build, not resolve.” In a 2007 retrospective review of The Payback for Rolling Stone, he concluded, “I liked it at the time and love it now” before listing the attractions of each selection.
Notably, none of the tracks are purely instrumental, with the possible exception of “Time Is Running Out Fast” with its African polyrhythms and wordless exhortations–”Ku, da, da, ku, da, da!”–suggesting that Brown and band may have been listening to African artists, like Hugh Masekela and Fela Kuti. At the very least, they would share a stage with Miriam Makeba, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Manu Dibango at the Zaire ’74 concert When We Were Kings director Leon Gast captured in his 2008 concert film Soul Power.
VIDEO: James Brown “The Payback”
Plenty of producers, in the years to come, would extract the grooviest instrumental passages from Brown’s discography for funky tracks of their own. As for “The Payback,” it has plenty of lyrics, but Brown is so overcome by the funk, he can barely string several words together at once. Granted, he does, but the short, declarative statements–”I’m mad!,” “I want revenge!”–make the biggest impact. The backup singers don’t add sweetness and light so much as high-pitched excitement of their own as they shout, “The Big Payback!” to punctuate each exhortation. And then Brown emits that epochal, blood-curdling SCREEEAAAM.
The Hardest Working Man in Show Business had a way of alienating people, because he expected everyone to operate on his level–at the expense of food, rest, and personal relationships–but his 37th studio album features some, but not all, of his most valuable sidemen, like saxophone player Maceo Parker and trombone player Fred Wesley. For all his faults, Brown often credited his players by name, and “Fred!” and “Maceo!” get shout-outs on “The Payback,” just as “Fred!” gets a solo shout-out on “Shoot Your Shot.”
Other players of note include sax player St. Clair Pinckney, guitarist Jimmy Nolen, bassist Fred Thomas, and the great drummer John “Jabo” Starks, all of whom had been with Brown, on and off, since the 1960s (in 1970, several members walked out in anger over their compensation, but most would eventually return.) As band leader Wesley told The Get Down podcast in 2021, “Together, that was a tight-knit group–in fact, that was probably the tightest band James ever had.” (Oddly, Brown almost never shouted-out Jabo, one of the world’s most sampled drummers, with the exception of 1970’s “Ain’t It Funky – Parts 1 and 2”).
If “The Payback” sets a high bar, the rest of the album comes close to measuring up, though there isn’t a single track that can equal its majesty. Brown also follows it with the string-laden “Doing the Best I Can,” which feels anticlimactic by contrast, though some may see it as a welcome breather after “all that bass.”
Brown, who liberally quotes from Billy Paul’s 1972 hit “Me and Mrs. Jones” on the ballad, acknowledges his faults as a partner, but the title says it all: he doesn’t know how to do any better, and he has no intention of trying–even if it means pushing away the woman he loves. “I’m so lonely, but baby I’m just a man,” he laments. No need to change when his lady can just learn to be more understanding. Interestingly, he previously used the same phrase, “I’m doing the best I can,” in 1968’s “Maybe I’ll Understand – Part 1.”
Even super-fan Julian Cope, in his Head Heritage review, admits that ballads “Doing the Best I Can” and “Forever Suffering” are “extremely long and portentous” yet “pretty damned groovy” at the same time.
Much like Larry Cohen’s Black Caesar with Fred Williamson and Gordon Douglas’s Slaughter’s Big Rip-off with Jim Brown–a sequel to 1972’s Slaughter–The Payback started out as work for hire, since Cohen again turned to Brown for the 1973 soundtrack to the rapidly-produced Caesar sequel, Hell Up in Harlem.
For those who haven’t seen the original 1973 film–spoiler alert–Williamson’s Harlem kingpin stumbles about at the end before collapsing on a heap of trash. To all extents and purposes, he’s dead, but the film proved so popular Cohen brought him back to life. Edwin Starr would end up composing the score, and it’s pretty good, but not as good as Brown’s Caesar score, especially “The Boss,” another stone-cold classic.
Though Brown was rankled when the producers nixed his soundtrack, it was for the best. The shorter songs they sought might have benefited Hell Up in Harlem, but they wouldn’t have benefited The Payback.
As R.J. Smith puts it in his essential 2012 biography, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, “The Payback is a blaxploitation movie that makes its own soundtrack. Concludes Smith, after considering a few theories, “In the end, it’s pointless trying to figure out what inspired ‘Payback.’ He’s mad, deal with it, and the song is a funny, wicked, 360-degree sweep of the streets circa 1973 that sums up an era.”
Considering that Brown is a legend by any standard, it’s a shame that The Payback would become his only certified gold record. If anything, it should’ve gone platinum. The album broke into the Top 40 in 1974, but stalled at 34, though it topped the R&B charts for two weeks. It’s hard not to feel a twinge of regret that so many of the vocal and hip-hop acts who sampled tracks from the album would see greater rewards (“The Payback” is Brown’s third most sampled song after “The Funky Drummer” and “Funky President”).
Three of the most notable to sample “The Payback” include En Vogue (“My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)”), Massive Attack (“Protection”), and Kendrick Lamar (“King Kunta”). Lamar’s Grammy Award-winning album To Pimp a Butterfly would go platinum, while En Vogue’s Funky Divas would go triple platinum.
It doesn’t always happen that one of a veteran artist’s more experimental recordings hits it big commercially, but the early-1970s were a different time, and Brown was in step with the era, an impulse that would gradually desert him as disco and other styles came to the fore. On The Payback, he proved that he was every bit as vital as the funk giants who formed in his wake, like the Ohio Players and Parliament-Funkadelic featuring his one-time bass player Bootsy Collins who was part of a short-lived lineup that included his brother, Catfish Collins, on guitar. In 1975, Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker would decamp the J.B.’s, Brown’s backing band, for P-Funk, though Parker would return for a spell in the 1980s.
At a time when Black audiences felt dismayed and betrayed by Brown’s endorsement of Richard Nixon during the 1972 presidential election, he included messaging on the 1973 album that brought fans back to the fold, like the line “And I just want a piece of the pie” in “Take Some… Leave Some” and the statement emblazoned on the hat he wears in the cover illustration, “We got a right to the tree of life” (though there’s no mention of Blackness, the meaning is clear). Over the next several decades, Brown would disappoint fans repeatedly as his behavior became more erratic, but The Payback was a peak in most every way.
Between 1967 and 1973, James Brown released some of the finest funk tracks ever recorded, from “Cold Sweat” to “The Payback.” Before that, he was a fine soul man, but as a funk pioneer, he was unbeatable.
That said, he remained primarily a singles artist, and his albums tended to be padded with filler just as the long player was becoming more of an artistic statement in the 1960s. This 1973 album also excelled on that score, and it’s his best from front to back. If you add one James Brown release to your collection, make it Star Time, the fantastic box set Polydor released in 1991, but if you add one album: make it The Payback.
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