13. James BrownLive At The Apollo

It’s hard to listen to an album of James Brown music. You can’t clean your house to that – you’ll be dancing your ass off all day long! His album didn’t sell that well at first, but the Apollo theatre was the show. And album-wise, everyone got James Brown at the Apollo Theater. That was… whatever that transcendental thing was that he had, he went there then! He went there and after that – with ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’ – he didn’t ever come back. He stayed out there.

We didn’t respect his lyrics at the time, with his, "mmm, good God". We didn’t know what that meant. Not until hip-hop came along, until they started sampling it, [was it] that you realise he was saying something. So we learned to respect it. We learned that we couldn’t do nothing like him on stage. But James Brown was that godfather for real. When we mixed what he did with what Sly did, we got Mothership Connection, Chocolate City… all of that came out of the combination of all those things. That’s what the Mothership is.