The Payback

iTunes Review

Ultimately rejected by the film producers for whom Brown spent much of 1973 recording this music — including the title track, possibly his most emblematic ’70s track — The Payback instead arrived as a double LP whose cohesion helped make for something of a landmark. By this stage in the Godfather’s career, his funk was often sleeker than gutbucket masterworks such as “Cold Sweat,” but hardly less daunting. For instance, “Mind Power” keeps the JBs on the good foot for 12 minutes (a 90-second expansion of the original vinyl track) while Brown turns the Biblical trope of “two little fishes, five loaves of bread” into an on-the-one hook, pays lip service to ESP, tips his cap to the Funky Robot and delivers the exhortation “Gimme some flute!” Maceo Parker’s sax and Fred Wesley’s trombone do the business there, as well as on “Shoot Your Shot,” one of several cuts that boast organ solos that go uncredited, but which bear the mark of the leader’s own idiosyncratic keyboard style.