Dan Aykroyd, who plays James Brown's manager in the biopic Get On Up, says he spent an unforgettable night with friends watching the music icon perform on stage decades ago.
"1968. Montreal, Canada. The building is gone now, but it was called the Esquire Show Bar and you sat and the performers would dance along the bar," the 62-year-old actor recalled his real-life experience during a recent New York press conference.
"So, when Danny Ray came out and dropped the cape on James Brown on Please Please Please, that was a seminal moment for myself and my six friends, who squeezed into one of my friend's mother's Mustangs and all came down from Ottawa to see this show. And there was James Brown -- his bolero heels like this far from our beers, dancing up and down the Esquire Show Bar. A full band, they had to pack on this small, little stage, but the horns, the rhythm. ... So, really early on, I loved him."
Brown later appeared in Aykroyd's big-screen comedies The Blues Brothers and The Blues Brothers 2000. The funk music legend died in 2006 at the age of 73.
Directed by Tate Taylor and starring Chadwick Boseman, Nelsan Ellis, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis, Get On Up opens nationwide Friday.