I saw James Brown live once. It was in early 1994, at Radio City Music Hall. My father took my wife and me. This was a surprise, because my father was not a big live-music guy (he took me to see Dio at Madison Square Garden in 1986, and hated every second of it) and not a particularly big James Brown fan, as far as I knew. But there we all were: me, him, my girlfriend, his wife, and James Brown.

He had released an album the previous year: Universal James, his 56th studio album, according to Wikipedia. (I’ve never heard it.) I don’t remember if he played anything from it or not; 31 years later, my memories of the show itself are very vague. But James Brown wasn’t someone you went to see thinking, I hope he plays “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)” or “I’m a Greedy Man” or whatever. He was someone you went to see purely to bear witness. To be in the presence.

I’ve seen other performers who existed in that realm: Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Junior Kimbrough. It didn’t matter what they played. You were there to see them be themselves, live, in front of you, because when they were doing their thing it was almost impossible to believe that you were sharing the earth with beings such as this.

I’ve been thinking about James Brown lately because I’ve been reading two books about him: RJ Smith’s The One: The Life and Music of James Brown and James McBride’s Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. They are very different books, to say the least.

The One, published in 2012, is a fairly straightforward biography. As many biographers do, Smith goes backward first, telling us the story of Brown’s parents and the region — between Georgia and South Carolina — where he was born and raised. Brown grew up fighting, literally and figuratively. He was short, dark-skinned and ugly, and poor, and he got to hear about all these things from those around him until they sunk in and defined him until the end of his days. This was a man who always, always had something to prove, to himself and to you.

Kill ’Em and Leave, from 2016, is not a biography. It’s more like a book-length version of Gay Talese’s famous 1966 Esquire magazine profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Denied direct access to his subject, Talese hung around for three months, interviewing anyone within Sinatra’s circle who would talk to him; the result is an extraordinary portrait of the man and his milieu, much more vivid and revealing than any direct quotes would have been. McBride traveled to Georgia and South Carolina and interviewed people who had worked for Brown at the end of his life; relatives, both close and distant; former bandmembers; friends; and others, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, who owes his entire career to Brown’s early support.

A musician himself, McBride throws in personal anecdotes and insider analysis of the entertainment industry and how songs are formed. Smith, not a musician as far as I know, goes deeper into analysis of the music, describing it using poetic/critical language. He’s very good on the evolution of funk out of soul and R&B, which is after all Brown’s ultimate legacy. The One — literally meaning a rhythm that hits on the downbeat, the one of “one, two, three, four” but more figuratively meaning funk itself — was his creation, and it’s no exaggeration to say that American music exists in two eras: before James Brown, and after.

American music has given the world many titans. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Jimi Hendrix. Each broke new ground in their own way, and each inspired excellence in others. But James Brown’s achievements might be the greatest of all.

The sheer radicalism of his music is what stays with me. Not just the rhythmic innovations, or the way he turned every instrument in the ensemble — guitar, bass, piano, horns, vocals — into rhythmic elements, but the way he reshaped what pop recordings could be. Think about “Get Up I Feel Like Being A Sex Machine.” First of all, there’s the title. Then there’s the way he starts the song, exhorting the band into life: “Fellas, I’m ready to get up and do my thing!” The band cheers, and they’re off.

But the real surprise here is the way he seems to be conducting the band through the song as it’s being recorded. Two minutes into the 2:49 single (split into two parts), he calls out, “Bobby! Should I take ’em to the bridge?” “Go ahead!” replies his onstage foil, Bobby Byrd. The question is repeated three more times, then he shouts, “Hit me now!” and the band swerves on a dime into the bridge. Halfway through the full version of the track, he issues further instructions: “I wanna count it off one more time. You wanna hit it like you did on the top, fellas?” The band cheers. “Hit it now!” The horns play the riff that opened the track. This was not how pop records sounded — a call-and-response between leader and band, the feeling that the song was being created on the spot, as you listened to it. This was not how pop music worked. Until James Brown did it.

“Sex Machine” isn’t even the most extreme example of this. Songs like “Super Bad” and “Soul Power” and “Escape-Ism” and “Hot Pants (She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants)” (yes, that’s the full title) and “Make It Funky” are full of this kind of thing. Of course, it was all artifice. What both books make clear is that Brown was an absolute taskmaster, rehearsing his bands to death until they were a perfectly drilled machine. There was no chance he was going to catch them out during a performance, or release a song where they weren’t 100% in the groove and hitting every note with the precision of snipers. But through force of personality, he makes a song like “Hot Pants” sound like a free-associated monologue with the band locked into its own thing behind him.

Focusing on just the funk misses the whole picture, though. James Brown wanted to be an all-around entertainer, and if you went to one of his shows hoping for a solid hour of hard jams, you’d be disappointed, because he liked to sing gooey ballads, he liked to let the band play soul-jazz for a little while, he’d bring comedians out mid-show… he wanted to have a little something for everyone, live and on record. (Read this description, by bassist Christian McBride, of Brown’s appearance at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival.)

Brown’s legacy is the funk, but if you go chronologically through his career — and the series of compilations simply titled The Singles takes you all the way from 1956 to 1979, in 10 volumes — you’ll see that all the way through, he was still doing shit like releasing “Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)” with a string-swaddled disco version of the standard “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” as the B-side. And in 1970, when he was fronting the hardest, hottest band he’d ever lead, he released an instrumental, organ-centric cover of Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “Spinning Wheel” as a single. I’m sorry to say it’s wack as fuck.

Ultimately, I think McBride’s book is more interesting than Smith’s, because McBride’s dwells extensively on the fact that Brown did not want to be known. He gave interviews, and certainly had strong opinions (and Smith shows that he was frequently far more open when talking to black papers than white ones), but a full-length biography would likely have enraged him. He didn’t glad-hand; he arrived on the scene, played a show that burned the theater down, then vanished, even if there was a party being held in his honor. “Arrive important, leave important” was one of his mottos, a variation on the showbiz adage “Always leave them wanting more.”

A life and an image shaped by that kind of iron will can only be diminished by the laying out of “the facts.” And while McBride spends possibly too much time delving into the familial infighting and legal chaos in the wake of Brown’s death, and Smith tells us everything we could ever want to know about Brown’s time in jail (in the 1950s, pre-fame, and again, more infamously, in the late ’80s), none of this information feels important at all when stacked up against the records and the live performances. I mean, this performance of “Brother Rapp/Ain’t It Funky Now” from 1971 will snap your head right off your neck. I’ve been listening to it for 30 years and that switch is one of the hardest things I’ve ever heard any band do, period.

James Brown was James Brown. No one else has ever been anything close to James Brown, and there’ll never be another like him. I’m glad I read The One and Kill ’Em and Leave (and I’m about to read Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry), but in a key sense I knew all I needed to know the first time I heard “Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine.”

— Phil Freeman