Consumer Guide Album

James Brown: There It Is [Polydor, 1972]
A generous four r&b hits here, three of them--"There It Is," "I'm a Greedy Man," and "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing"--ace JB grooves. (Who's on congas, James?) The fourth is the "King Heroin" sermon, which together with its ten-minute offshoot "Public Enemy #1" is stuck cunningly--Brown has been reading his Alexander Pope--in the middle of the dance stuff on both sides. Plus an actual song, the first new one he's recorded in years, and a JB composition called "Never Can Say Goodbye" that asks the musical question, "What's going on?" For junkies, this is an A plus; for the rest of us, it's somewhat more marginal. A−