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Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.

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I was driving down Snelling Avenue the other day, the cassette tape flipped over, and suddenly I was being treated to James Brown singing "Cold Sweat."

It took me back. I don't remember exactly how, but I was lucky enough to witness a James Brown concert with a buddy sometime around 1966, at a roller arena in Lorain, Ohio, where I grew up.

We knew nothing about James Brown except that he was a negro. Was he ever - not his face, but what he was. Deep south, hot sun, barefoot, unschooled, chitlin-eatin', sweat-mopping black. Bill Cosby he wasn't.

"Mama doncha come here quick," he sang, "and give me that lickin' stick." What was that?

I was intensely aware, in a hall full of dancing black teens, many wearing hankies on their heads, of standing with arms akimbo, in bleeding madras short-sleeve shirt and white Levis.

I remember not liking him, like I liked the Byrds or the Stones, but being awed by his intensity. He had zero ironic distance, no smirk, no cool. But he was achingly there. And could that little band of six cook.

Now I'm listening to him in the car 35 years later, and though I've known this song for ages it feels a like I'm taking a scalding shower right now. There are only a few words to the song, but each phrase, punctuated by countless yowls and grunts, wrenches free from him like a devil being born.

"I don't care darlin' … about your faults … huh! … I just want … to satisfy your pulse, Oh!"

You realize that this isn't just a song, he's talking about an actual relationship. The lust is so seismic it destroys his free will, destroys his dignity, leaves him a beggar so convulsive with need that a mere kiss makes him "break out in a cold sweat."

It isn't hyperbole. It isn't poetry. He really means cold sweat. Love that is sickness unto death.

It's an insane, exhausting performance, which is what I remember from the roller arena. James Brown, "the hardest working man in show business," must have an inferiority complex, or why would he work so hard?

It's a joke in a way. On stage, he dances up a storm, spinning on his tiny ankles, perspiring to beat the band. At some point he seems on the brink of fainting, and the band lowers it sound a few decibels, and lovely backup singers come to lead him offstage, broken and used-up. But then he rallies, the band surges, and he spins away from his attendants and back into his song.

But it's not a joke, because he is genuinely dying to give you everything that is in him. No line is a throwaway, no syllable is a gimmie, even when a song is insipid, like "Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn Part I." He builds no rests into his show, no breath-catching narration, no spotlight crooning from a three-legged stool.

It's not a joke to him. He's every little dog-faced man who ever needed to scream his existence. All his songs are about a need for love so powerful it trashes your sense of self. "Please …please …please!" he cries. In the end all you are is a raging motor of wanting, flaming out from your own spilt oil.

Bet this: James Brown begged his way into more beds than the Beatles winked their way into. Combined.

It reminds me, for some reason, of the effort my college friends made in the 60s to qualify Bob Dylan as a poet, because his lyrics were as good as any published poet's. As if Dylan needed the approbation of an anthology to be really real, to matter more to people.

As a writer, I feel like I'm still wearing bleeding madras and I always will, because words seem so poised and careful alongside a song wrung limp from the soul. And when I hear James Brown blink away the tears and cry out, "Please!", I'm wondering what it will take for America to realize what it has.

The year-end Lincoln Center Honors program featured Stevie Wonder this year for his lifetime achievements. And Stevie is a Wonder and deserving of the honor. But come on - how daring is it to acknowledge a gifted but blind black man promising love, love, and more love?

Whereas: if rhythm is America's greatest invention - and it is - then James Brown, and not Bing Crosby, is our greatest singer. He concocted the notion that a powerful music could be built on rhythm alone. Every instrument, including horns and guitars, contribute to the beat. And thus begat the funky thang.

James Brown won't be sitting next to President Bush at such a ceremony any time soon. With his drug, gun, and sex-crazed history, he was likelier to end up on Texas's Death Row, with an urgent phone call in to George W.

He'll never be on our postage stamps. Or where that pompadoured, pomaded head would fit best, exuding sweat at every pore from the lowly, pocket-worn, one-dollar bill.

But we can honor him in our hearts. Pop "Cold Sweat" in your car stereo this day, pull over in some parking lot somewhere, and pump it up. Feel the thunder of the soul's determination and, good God, be grateful.

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.