Sex Machine? Not so much.

So, the show. The James Brown show. Wooh.

It was good. It wasn't great, but it was good. BET comedian Leon Rogers opened for the Godfather of Soul, and he knew his audience. The 80 percent white crowd laughed their heads off as he described enjoying karaoke because it meant he could sing his favorite songs -- '80s pop hits -- without getting thrown out of the 'hood. He wasn't good enough to distract us from the fact that the Godfather still wasn't on, but he did all right.

When James Brown finally walked onstage, after a solo instrumental from his backing band (at about 10:15), things finally got going. He jumped into his frenetic routine with expected fervor, screaming out to the crowd "Do you feeeel good?!" The band was excellent, and you could tell these were all consumate professionals. Every moment seemed choreographed.

He kept up a strong pace for about 20 minutes, at which point he seemed to run out of energy a little. He appeared to forget a song, opting instead to go jam on one of the three drumsets onstage. Very odd instrumentation: three drummers, three guitarists, a bassist, two saxes and a trumpet, plus a keyboard for James to doodle on occasionally. Shortly thereafter James introduced "Tanya Rae" (I think that was her name, it was a little hard to hear), whom he apparently met in Vegas. She sang a medley of crappy love songs, which were sort of duets without much actual dueting on Brown's part, and generally failed to impress. She finally got off stage and the Godfather sang a series of truncated versions of his bigger hits before launching into "Please, Please, Please" He lumbered to his knees twice during "Please" and the announcer came out and draped him with a green and then a red sequined cape, and of course he came launching back to the microphone, but it was a perfunctory act, done with precision and not a bit of feeling. A sprawling version of "Sex Machine," which lacked the spark of the original but had the crowd up and running nonetheless, served as the finale, and the Godfather left some of the lyrics to one of his underlings for a time.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the show. It was about how I expected, and I was satisfied. Overall, though, I feel my prediction is accurate: James Brown has the energy to do one, maybe two more tours, and that's it. There's a good chance he'll do more than that, but I don't think you'll want to see it. By then he'll have delegated all his singing duties to others and will just stand around, yelping "Hit meh!" and "D'you feel good?!" It'll be sad.