2 posts tagged “james brown”
No, not the kickoff show, but the pre-game show? I am *positive* that I heard Katie Couric call James Brown "Al", but I haven't seen footage of it yet. Hook me up! Given all the half-assed, heavy-handed references to how the presence of two black coaches is apparently in honor of Black History Month, it'd be a nice little "oh? that's not your name?" moment.
I don't think I've blogged about it on Vox before, but I'm a big fan of Alan Leeds and Eric Leeds... they've both been huge parts of my appreciation of music. Alan because of his helping run the business affairs of James Brown, Prince, George Clinton, Maxwell, D'Angelo, ?uestlove and others, and Eric because he was the sax player on my favorite records at a time when I had just been learning to play the saxophone.
Amazingly, Alan Leeds does not (yet) have a wikipedia profile, and Eric only has a stub of one. Because one of my older posts about him is one of the first results for Alan's name, I thought I'd collect some links in case maybe I get time later to write a post or even a (my first!) wikipedia article.
- An interview with Alan about Miles Davis and Prince for the book "The Last Miles". It covers the end of Miles Davis' musical career, with a whole chapter on the various, largely fruitless, flirtations Prince and Miles had with working together.
- Eric Leeds interviews part one and part two, also for "The Last Miles"
- Alan Leed's blog at alanleeds.com, which seems to have been largely superceded by his MySpace profile, which is surprisingly active. Both show off what a great writer he is.
- A truly phenomenal community interview with Alan about his time with Prince on prince.org. Aside from Per Nilsen's books, it's one of the single best discussions about Prince's career from a serious artistic and cultural standpoint that anybody's done.
- An incredibly moving tribute to James Brown, all the more striking because it was written with a day of James' passing. Alan had met James Brown as a teenager, and that's a lot of history to wrap up into so few words.
- Somewhere in my archives or backups, I have an extended version of the liner notes Alan wrote for Prince's The Hits/The B-Sides mini-box-set. On one of Prince's first websites (he had one 11 years ago, and even had a blog 6 years ago), they had put up a longer version of the notes with some interesting additions -- especially interesting because Alan has won a Grammy for his liner notes for the James Brown "Star Time" set.
