"Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine" (James Brown)

Back in early 1970, James Brown's original band quit just before a performance in Columbus, GA.  They were pissed off at the breakneck touring schedule and wanted more pay, so they refused to go on stage until Brown met their demands.
So what did Brown do?  
He sent singer Bobby Byrd to Cincinnati in his private Learjet to get a replacement band.
William "Bootsy" Collins and his brother, Phelps (a.k.a. "Catfish"), had their own group, The Pacemakers.  The band had recorded and hung out at Cincinnati's King Records, home of James Brown, where they'd gotten to know various producers, managers, and musicians, including the members of Brown's band.  So The Pacemakers were a known commodity.
As Bootsy tells it, they were the middle of playing a gig at a club in Cincy when they got a phone call from Byrd, saying that Brown needed them in Georgia, right away.  Within the hour, they were on Brown's jet (their first plane ride ever), not realizing that they were en route to replace their friends/idols on stage as Brown's new band, "The J.B.'s."
Ultimately, the Brothers Collins didn't even remain with The J.B.'s for a full year.  They experienced the kind of shenanigans (like not getting paid) that prompted their predecessors to walk out on Brown, and they went home to Cincinnati for a couple of months before joining a little outfit in Detroit called Parliament/Funkadelic.  But in their brief apprenticeship with Brown between 1970-71, they helped create some groundbreaking funk classics, including the single "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine" (1970).  (The title alone is epic.)
Here's the thing: if you attempt to dissect "Sex Machine" into its individual components, it doesn't sound like much.  Bootsy plays the same couple of notes on his bass throughout.  Catfish plays some chicken-scratch rhythm guitar, accenting the end of every bar with the same little two chord phrase.  Brown and Byrd do some call-and-response, with Byrd always responding Get on up! to whatever Brown intones.  And every few bars, Brown comes in with a little honky tonk piano, which sounds like it's in need of a good tuning.
It's like so many of Brown's songs from the early 70s: on paper, it shouldn't work.  In fact, it should sound like an unholy mess.  But it doesn't.  And the reason it doesn't is because the band is completely immersed in the groove.  
Brown's approach was visceral, not cerebral.  So what if the piano was out of tune or Byrd didn't always quite reach the note?  It felt right.
And what feels especially right to me on this track is John "Jabo" Starks's drumming: funky, swinging, with just a little bit of ambient squeak from his bass pedal.  It's perfect imperfection.
As Bootsy put it at the 2011 Red Bull Music Academy in Madrid, "We had no idea that we were really creating something that was going to be lasting, something that people were going to fall into, that was going to groove people like that.  I think the part of not knowing helps the experience of getting there."