Songfacts®:

• In 1971 we learned that Shaft was one "bad mother" in the #1 hit "Theme From Shaft." A year earlier, James Brown staked his claim to being "super bad," which he defines in this song. He's got the moves, the soul, and so much confidence, he wants to kiss himself.
• Brown was breaking in a new set of musicians when he recorded "Super Bad." He was known for being very tough on his backing band, which he used in the studio and on the road. When they had the temerity to ask for better pay and working conditions in March 1970, Brown responded by firing most of them and bringing in musicians from a Cincinnati band called The Pacemakers. Among them was the teenage bass player Bootsy Collins, who later entered the P-Funk fold and built a legend as one of the most entertaining and influential bass players of his time.
  
  Brown called his band "The New Breed," but later changed that to "J.B.'s." The first song he recorded with them was "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" on April 25, 1970 in Nashville right after a show. It a while, put the band figured out what Brown was looking for and the result was a soul classic. Brown went back to the same studio on June 30, 1970 to record "Super Bad" with these guys, and he got similar results. The song went to #1 on the R&B chart and became one of Brown's best-known tunes.
• "Super Bad" is broken into three parts, which when combined (as on the album version) run 9:16. The radio edit contains the first two parts and goes 4:10. On the single, those two parts are the A-side and Part 3 is the B-side.
• It wasn't uncommon for Brown to shout encouragement or instructions to his musicians while they were recording. At the end of the song, he starts with the shout-outs:
  
  "Robert, blow me some 'Trane, brother" - sax player Robert McCollough
  
  "Come on, Phelps" - guitar player Phelps "Catfish" Collins (Bootsy's brother)
  
  "Jabo, good God" - drummer Jabo Starks
  
  "Bootsy, let me hear ya" - Bootsy Collins
• The expression "bad" found new life in the '80s, particularly when Michael Jackson used it as the title (and title track) of his 1987 album. His group The Jackson 5 got "super bad" in the lyric to their 1973 hit "Dancing Machine" ("She knows what she's doin', she's super bad now"), but that phrase faded from the zeitgeist until the 2007 movie Superbad, a teen comedy classic starring Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen, Bill Hader and Emma Stone.
• Bootsy Collins says he was "one of those snobby, cocky kids" when he recorded this song with James Brown, but he was thrilled with the opportunity and it shaped him into the person and musician he became.
  
  "I learned so much from James Brown and the whole organization," he said on the Songfacts Podcast. "Kids don't get that kind of chance to actually be in the room recording 'Sex Machine,' 'Super Bad.' These songs, you don't get those kind of opportunities. I really learned that after I got away from it, but while I was with it, I was growing into, like, I'm supposed to be here, which I was. I was meant to be there. But I don't feel like I had too much to do with it. It was always destiny that I was supposed to be there."