1970 · Behind the Songs
Three parts, one word flipped on its head — the 1970 single that taught pop a new vocabulary.
In 1970 James Brown did something only he could do: he took an insult and turned it into a crown. “Super Bad” — originally titled “Call Me Super Bad” — was released as a three-part single, a sprawling funk workout that refused to fit on one side of a 45. It reached No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, but its real achievement was linguistic. The refrain, “I’ve got soul and I’m super bad,” completed a piece of wordplay Brown had started two years earlier with “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud”: the positive reappropriation of “bad,” flipped from insult to boast. After this record, a generation of musicians would call their best work bad and mean it as the highest praise.
The sound of the record is the sound of a brand-new band hitting its stride. Brown’s previous group had walked out in 1969, and the replacements — soon to be legendary as the J.B.’s — were young, hungry, and impossibly tight. The “Super Bad” personnel reads like a funk hall of fame ballot: Brown himself on lead vocal; Clayton “Chicken” Gunnells and Darryl “Hasaan” Jamison on trumpets; Robert McCollough on tenor saxophone; Bobby Byrd on Hammond organ; Phelps “Catfish” Collins on guitar; a teenage William “Bootsy” Collins on bass; John “Jabo” Starks on drums; and Johnny Griggs on congas. Bootsy’s bass in particular — rubbery, melodic, utterly unlike anything on pop radio in 1970 — announced the arrival of funk’s next vocabulary.
The record’s most famous moment belongs to McCollough. Midway through the jam, his tenor saxophone takes a solo that Brown punctuates with one of the great shouts in recorded music: “Blow me some Trane, brother!” — an invocation of John Coltrane, the “Trane,” called down into the middle of a dance record. It is Brown the bandleader at his most theatrical and most generous, handing the spotlight to his sideman and daring him to fill it. McCollough does. The exchange captures everything about how Brown ran a session: part drill sergeant, part preacher, part proud father, conducting the funk with his voice as much as with his hands.
The single’s three-part structure was itself a statement. In an era when singles were supposed to be three minutes long, Brown simply refused — the groove needed all three parts, so all three parts went out. A reverb-heavy version with overdubbed audience applause later appeared on a 1971 album of the same name, and Brown performed the song on Soul Train on 10 February 1973, bringing the J.B.’s firepower to television. The message was consistent: this music could not be contained, edited, or hurried.
Musically, “Super Bad” sits at the hinge of Brown’s career. The late-sixties innovations — “Cold Sweat,” “Say It Loud,” “Mother Popcorn” — had invented funk; the 1970 records, with the new J.B.’s, hardened it into its modern form. The one-chord vamp, the interlocking guitars, the horns used as percussion, the bass as lead instrument: the entire grammar of seventies funk is here, played by the band that wrote the grammar book. Within a year, Bootsy and Catfish Collins would leave for George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, taking the lessons with them — but on “Super Bad” they are still Brown’s, and the groove is the tightest in the world.
The song’s afterlife is a map of American pop culture. It was sampled by Mystikal for “The New Guy,” the theme of the 2002 film of the same name; a dance remix appeared in the video game Gran Turismo 4; it turned up in Robots (2005), White Men Can’t Jump, The Nutty Professor (1996, as Dave Chappelle’s theme), and Bowfinger (1999); Human Resource interpolated it for their 1991 track “I wanna kiss myself”; it soundtracked a 2011 Gatorade commercial, Ken Burns’s Baseball: The Tenth Inning, NASCAR on Fox promos in 2001, and even an ABC network ident in the 1990s. It became downloadable content for Rock Band 3 on 2 August 2011. Ben Greenman titled a novel Superbad after it, and Judd Apatow’s film of the same name borrowed the swagger. In one beloved Boondocks strip, Michael Caesar interrupts his elementary school class to recite the song’s lyrics — the surest sign that a record has entered the culture’s bloodstream.
What to listen for: the way the groove never resolves — it just deepens, part after part; Bootsy’s bass dancing around Starks’s drums; the horn stabs landing like punctuation marks; and Brown himself, grunting, shouting, and testifying over the top, the hardest-working man in show business treating a three-part single like a three-round fight. And of course the “Trane” shout — the moment a funk record tips its hat to jazz, and the whole history of Black American music flashes by in four words.
The 1971 album Super Bad gave the single a second life in a revealing form: a reverb-heavy version with overdubbed audience applause, as if the studio jam had been a concert all along. The effect is a small fiction that tells a larger truth — this was music built for rooms full of moving people, and the applause just made the room official. Brown performed the song on Soul Train on 10 February 1973, bringing the three-part workout to national television, and the staging proved the point: “Super Bad” was never really a single at all. It was a show, compressed onto vinyl, waiting for a stage.
“Super Bad” never gets named among Brown’s very biggest hits, and that is exactly why it belongs here. The anthems — “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” — are monuments. This is the workshop where the monuments were built: a three-part single too long for radio, too funky for pop, and too confident to care. Brown called himself super bad, and then spent the next decade proving it, one impossibly tight groove at a time.