, from the 1964 TAMI Show, where the cape routine is worked almost to death.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vruy2GRUsV8&w=550&h=309]
Surprisingly, even the London Review of Books took notice:
Danny Ray, who died last week, spent forty-odd years as James Brown’s valet and body man. Off stage, he was in charge of the band’s uniforms. On stage, he was Brown’s master of ceremonies and ‘cape man’. It was a job that didn’t exist until Ray joined Brown’s entourage, in 1960 or 1961. When they recorded Live at the Apollo in 1962, Ray’s work with the cape may or may not have been a centrepiece of Brown’s act. By the time they appeared on the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, it most certainly was.
The T.A.M.I. Show was directed by Steve Binder, who went on to make Elvis Presley’s 1968 ‘comeback special’. Shot at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and released in cinemas, the concert featured, among others, Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, the Beach Boys, the Supremes, and a few British Invasion acts. Brown had just scratched the Top Twenty, and then only once, a year earlier, with a cover of the old Russ Colombo song ‘Prisoner of Love’. Still, he expected to close the show. ‘Nobody follows me,’ he said. ‘Actually,’ Binder said, ‘we’ve got the Rolling Stones.’
Keith Richards said it was the biggest mistake of their career, coming on after James Brown.
On the T.A.M.I. Show, the frenzy and drive…coalesce near the seven-minute mark [that's the seven-minute mark of the whole 18 minute TAMI Show set – MH]. Back on his feet, Brown sings ‘Please, Please, Please’ – the title of the Flames’ first single, released nine years earlier. A minute later, he’s on his knees again. The backing singer Bobby Bennett walks over and pats Brown’s back, as you would a baby’s. Dressed in a dark, immaculate suit, Ray walks out of the wings and drapes a long cape over Brown’s shoulders. ‘You’ve done enough,’ the gesture says. ‘You’ve done more than enough.’
This is high drama: Brown takes nine or ten steps away from the microphone – and throws the cape off. The show must go on! Bennett leads him back to the mic, where he sings a few bars and collapses again. They repeat the process time and again. In the background, the audience loses its mind.
Is this an indication of how things will be now at the LRB, after editor Mary-Kay Wilmers has finally stepped down? That would be very welcome. Wilmers had a strong animus against Israel, publishing stuff about the Israel lobby, and under her the LRB became a mouthpiece for that kind of smug academic British anti-American sentiment exemplified by Mary Beard's letter after 9/11 suggesting that the Americans pretty much had it coming.
But I digress. RIP Danny Ray.
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