The things that my eyes, my heart, my soul have seen while walking this planet.”īy the time Bradley was hugging his audience, pleading from his knees onstage, and wailing in the key of James Brown, he was in the midst of a meteoric rise to fame - which only took most of his life to achieve.
I want to let the world know me as a person and an artist. “Yes, I want to sing and make money, but I want to give something too, and thank them for the opportunities that I’m given. “A lot of artists is out there, but when they get out in the lamp lights they just want to sing and make money,” Bradley said from a hotel where he was taking a brief break during a 2016 European tour, his voice raspy but soft.
Cymbals and bongos flew as thunder and lightning crashed Victor Axelrod grabbed his organ before it was blown away and ran for cover yet Charles Bradley, dubbed the “Screaming Eagle Of Soul” by his adoring band, remained onstage, drenched and lamenting, “How can we stop the changes going on in America today?” The New York Times, long respectful of Daptone and clearly enraptured by Bradley’s intensity, noted that, “having shed too many tears for one man, he made the sky cry.” He suggestively wound his hips, dead-dropped onto the stage, and shed true tears of heartache and joy, before running out into the audience to give hugs to dozens of fans, all of whom seemed genuinely moved by his performance.Īs the singer and his musicians - Brenneck’s Menahan Street Band - came back for an encore of “Golden Rule,” the late-July storm that had been looming all evening broke wide open. Bradley shared with the audience at Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park his most painful memories of losing his brother to gun violence, stretching into the distressed cry of a man consistently put down by life and taking a knee through powerful declarations of love. At age sixty-two, he had completely done away with pretense (though it’s unlikely he ever had much) and laid bare the depths of his soul to a hundred strangers. In July 2011, Charles Bradley stood center stage, his bright red matador jacket with long, sequined lapels dripping with sweat, and let out a guttural howl.
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