Day After Day #47: Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved (1970) 

By the time 1970 rolled around, James Brown was already into his fourth act. He started out as a gospel singer in his teens, then moved into R&B in the mid-1950s. By the early '60s, he had become a star on his own and topped both the pop and R&B charts. And then by the late '60s, Brown began to perfect what came to be known as funk. 

Brown was a tight bandleader and he was backed by incredible musicians who locked into a groove and kept it going while JB was doing his funky thing up front. As we moved into the '70s, there was a lot of unrest in America: the hippie ideal of the '60s ended in the dark cloud of the Vietnam War, Altamont and the Manson murders. 

Just two years earlier, he was playing in Boston the night after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the concert was broadcast live in an attempt to prevent riots in the city. From the stage, Brown appealed for calm and it apparently worked. Racial tensions were high and Soul Brother #1 was voicing his concerns. 

Brown released "Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved" as a two-part single in December 1970, with part 1 on one side and part 2 on the other. JB and sidekick Bobby Byrd traded off vocals, exhorting listeners to get up, etc. They don't ever specify how or what listeners should get involved with, but I suppose at that time, it was fairly obvious. 

"Do it, raise your hand/Do it with the other and practice/Say you're doing something/Come on, raise your hand/Expect me to call you tonight/Do it, raise your hand/Expect you to say/There goes my man."

The groove is powered by Bootsy Collins on bass, his brother Catfish Collins on guitar and JB's horn section just rips. The full 7-minute is on the excellent Polydor compilation Funk Power 1970: A Brand New Thang, which features JB releases from that year. 

It's seriously hard funk and you can hear its influence throughout the rest of the decade and then later in hip hop, where the song has been sampled more than 400 times. Among the songs it appears in are "Eric B. is President" by Eric B. feat. Rakim, "Bring the Noise" by Public Enemy, "The Sounds of Science" by the Beastie Boys, "Welcome to the Terrordome" by Public Enemy, "Set It Off" by Big Daddy Kane and "Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)" by Pras feat. Mya and Ol' Dirty Bastard.

By the mid- to late '70s he had fallen out of favor as the more commercial sounds of disco took over and his bandmates went on to join other groups like Parliament-Funkadelic. He bounced back in the '80s with "Living in America" on the Rocky IV soundtrack, which got him a top 10 single for the first time since 1968. But the '80s also found Brown, who had been a stickler for demanding his band members and entourage remain drug and alcohol-free, using copious amounts of drugs including PCP. He ended up serving two years in prison for various drug- and assault-related charges. He died in 2006.

To me, 1970 was Brown at the peak of his powers, although pretty much anything he released from the late '50s to 1974 is top notch.