The Payback

In this song, Brown vows revenge on the man who stole his money and his girl, insisting that the "big payback" is on the way. He's not very specific in his threats, but it's clear that he means business.

James Brown wrote this song for the 1973 movie Hell Up In Harlem, which was directed by Larry Cohen. Brown had soundtracked Cohen's film Black Caesar earlier that year, scoring a hit with "Down and Out in New York City." Brown's musical director Fred Wesley and drummer John Starks came up with a song after watching a rough cut of the movie, which had the working title Black Caesar's Revenge. According to Wesley and Starks, when they recorded the song, Brown came into the Augusta, Georgia session and literally tore up the sheet music. He reworked the song, incorporating lyrics that describe exactly what was going on in the first scene from the film. They recorded the song and overdubbed background vocals and horns a month later. Wesley then flew the tapes to Los Angeles and delivered them to Larry Cohen, who rejected the song (Wesley says Cohen told him it wasn't funky enough; Brown said Cohen told him it was "too black"). An irate Brown ordered Wesley back to Augusta, and the song was used as the title track to his 1974 album. The song proved more than funky enough, going to #1 on the R&B charts and earning Gold status for selling over a million copies. Edwin Starr ended up doing the music for the Hell Up In Harlem film, which went nowhere.

The full version of this song runs 7:35. For the single, the song was divided into two parts, with "The Payback - Part I" (3:30) on the A-side and "The Payback - Part II" (4:07) on the flip. Part I was what most radio stations played.