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By 1991, the CD box set—full of unissued and rare tracks offering a definitive overview of an artist—had become a record-business staple. Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings box, from 1990, went gold within months—the first time the bluesman’s sales measured up to his legend. In early 1991, the first edition of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series sold enough to guarantee countless volumes well into the future. “It was a seller’s market: ‘OK, we can sell this music all over again, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than making records,’” recalls Alan Leeds, the co-producer of the CD era’s most important—and, not to mince words, greatest—box set, James Brown’s Star Time.
Released May 7, 1991, Star Time spans five hours across four CDs and covers Brown’s career from 1956 (his debut single “Please, Please, Please”) to 1984 (his Afrika Bambaataa collaboration “Unity Pt. 1”). Upon release, it handily summarized one of the most daunting catalogs in pop—and set a standard for pop-music historicization, thanks to deep-dive liner notes, accurate session information, and a thrilling track sequence that emphasized the heft of Brown’s work.
Though rarity-stuffed box sets preceded the CD era proper, the one that defined the market was Eric Clapton’s Crossroads, from 1988. “With Crossroads, you’re fleshing out the story with unreleased material or extended versions of things,” says Star Time’s supervising producer, Harry Weinger. The James Brown catalog, especially, was ripe for that kind of tinkering. “The challenge for me was that James Brown never really had a good album, with the live albums excepted,” Weinger continues. “You can’t say It’s a Man’s World is a great album—it’s just filler. I wanted to make a record that I would be able to sit down and listen to. I wanted his philosophy and his commercialism all wrapped into one.”
Weinger had help—not only from co-producers Alan Leeds and the late Cliff White, but also from a half-decade’s worth of hip-hop, dance music, and pop producers sampling Brown’s grooves. Brown was often bemused by this latter-day recognition; at a 1991 press conference, when asked if any future albums might feature guest appearances from rappers, Brown said, “I’ve been on their records, so there’s no need for us to go back and forth.” But as Leeds, who had known Brown since 1965 and worked as his road manager, puts it, “The cachet for James Brown was at its peak, because of this sampling and because of how hip-hop had so publicly embraced James Brown as the fulcrum of hip-hop.”
The expansiveness of Star Time cemented Brown’s critical reputation for good, and the rarities were more than just collector bait—they enlarged the singer’s vision. “For a DJ or producer, it was like, ‘Wow, there’s more?’” says R&B historian Nelson George, who contributed to the box’s liner notes. “There was a certain method to how he heard music. The alternate takes give you a variety of different visions of how he grew.”
Most important was the revelatory original take of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” played at a relatively poky tempo, which Brown sharply sped up for single release. Given that record’s importance—modern rhythmic pop, from funk to hip-hop to house music and beyond, begins here—hearing it was akin to discovering that Orson Welles had originally shot Citizen Kane in color.
Weinger found the original take by accident, when he put on an old reel featuring what he took to be the “jazz version” of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” from Brown’s 1970 LP Soul on Top. Nope: “I asked [jazz archivist] Phil Schaap what he thought, because it was the jazz version, and he said, ‘No, that’s not it.’ And we realized what it was. It wasn’t Louis Bellson’s big band—it was Brown’s own band. You’re playing it and going, ‘Wait, what?’ Then you go: ‘Hang on. What did he say?’ Then you let it play and you get to the four-minute mark, and you go, ‘Oh my God, it’s gonna keep going.’”
Another highlight of Star Time was the complete original take of “Get It Together,” where Brown improvises a new arrangement of the song on the spot, then ends it by telling the engineer, “Fade it out, I’m gone” (he had an appointment to make). Leeds had been in the studio with Brown’s band during the recording of early-’70s classics like “Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,” and “Soul Power,” but he’d encountered the full take of “Get It Together,” from 1967, years earlier. “I would see [James] four or five times a year,” says Leeds. “Frequently backstage, he would play acetates—advance copies of songs that weren’t out yet. ‘Get It Together’ was one of them—he had recorded that in Atlanta, and the next night, I happened to see a show in Richmond, Virginia. He played it for me and several other people who were in the dressing room at the time—the complete take, a good month or two before it came out. I flipped out.”
Leeds moonlighted on Star Time while holding down a day job in Minneapolis. “I was actually running Prince’s Paisley Park label,” he says. “I would stay late and work on this stuff after-hours, so I didn’t feel like I was cheating Prince.” One night, his boss—whose outtakes had been bootlegged for years—paid Leeds a surprise visit while he was playing the session reel for the funky 1969 hit “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.”
“Prince walked in and, of course, he was familiar with the record. But what he was hearing was an unissued portion. He just looked at me funny and said, ‘What is that?’ And he started dancing around the office. He was just grooving to this thing: ‘Oh, my god, that is so dope, that is so dope.’ And suddenly, he caught himself. It was like a light switch was turned. He stopped dancing and looked at me, and he said, ‘Does James Brown know you have this?’ I said, ‘Yes, he knows we’re working on this. We have his blessings.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t think you should have that.’” As Prince turned to leave, he offered a parting shot: “I can guarantee you nobody’s going to be doing this with my catalog after I’m gone.”
At the time, Brown was in the midst of a prison stint for aggravated assault while Star Time was being prepared (he served two years and two months of a six-and-a-half-year sentence). “He knew it was happening,” says Weinger. “I remember him being very grateful. He and I were able to speak by telephone, because he was on a work release program. I had to dial into this number, they would put him on the phone, and I would give him updates. One of them was that I wanted his voice in the project, so he dictated the liner notes.”
Star Time took a year and a half to make. “Taking so long to do it turned out to be serendipity, because not only was James out in the public when it came out, it was also the 35th anniversary of ‘Please, Please, Please,’ which I hadn’t planned,” says Weinger. “Nowadays, it’s something you would absolutely plan and hit a target.”
The notices were lavish—a five-star Rolling Stone review, a lengthy Village Voice essay comparing Brown to Charles Dickens. In early 1992, Star Time won the Grammy for Best Album Notes; George views the award as a testament to hip-hop, and an industry victory lap for Brown. “It was definitely an example of how hip-hop’s influence made people reevaluate certain aspects of the culture that had not been, officially, industry-wide, really given its due,” he says. “Brown sold a lot of records and was obviously a star. But it wasn’t Motown. It wasn’t very accessible for certain people who were looking for melody in their songs. What hip-hop did was make the beat—rhythm—the star, and that played right into Brown’s wheelhouse. No one had used rhythm like he had used rhythm.”
Star Time has endured not only as a piece of history but as the single best introduction to a 20th-century icon. “Chuck D showed up at my office one day [because of it],” says Weinger. “You’ll get that occasionally. Sometimes you meet somebody, you don’t really know what to talk about, and I’ll say, ‘I produced Star Time.’ I’ve gotten a lot of handshakes and fist-bumps out of that.”
Leeds, for his part, has had his Star Time booklet signed by every member of Brown’s troupe, old and new, he could hand it to: “Like a college yearbook,” he says. “I got everybody from Bootsy [Collins] to Bobby Byrd, the original Famous Flames, Maceo [Parker]—wherever I thought there’d be a James Brown person, I took it.” Brown himself signed the title page: “Thanks for helping on our Grammy,” with the “our” underlined. “I’ve often said that if my house ever catches fire, once my family’s safe,” says Leeds, “that’s the first thing I’m grabbing.”
