One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (10 page)

The group settled on a name: The Upsetters. “Our band was like a threat,” Connor explained. “We went to your town and upset
everybody
.”

Richard wanted them to dress and fix their hair the way he did—sly, parodic outfits, donut curls piled high, a makeup called Pancake #31 on their faces. The guys came around. Partly it was meant to baffle white Southerners who feared black men mixing with their women. Partly it was tradition. Richard was the ultimate product of a little known, extravagant, underground scene. Like a number of other acts, he got his start playing the role of the “tent show queen”: cross-dressing song-and-dance acts that played to black audiences. As a teenager Richard performed in drag, billed as “Princess LaVonne,” a chair balanced on his chin, in Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam’s minstrel show.

Before Richard, there was an even more unhinged figure named SQ Reeder, or Eskew Reeder, or Esquerita, who also performed on
the drag circuit. Esquerita and Richard met in the bathroom of the bus station in Greenville, South Carolina, and struck up a friendship. Esquerita taught Richard his hard-driving piano style. That he wore his hair in a tall frizzy pompadour did not go unnoticed by Richard.

Another influence, acknowledged repeatedly by Richard, was the great blues singer Billy Wright. Born in 1932, Wright went on the road with circuses across the South and Midwest, singing and dancing in a cross-dressing chorus line. Richard saw his act at The Royal Peacock in Atlanta, and studied everything about him—how he dressed, how he walked. Richard even got the Pancake #31 from Wright. He called Wright “my idol,” and his earliest recordings bear a marked resemblance to his role model’s hits.

The tent show culture must have been an amazing thing to behold, and it needs a lot more study. While it was in full frolic, James Brown gave it all the study he could. For while Brown always presented himself as a man’s man, he was smart enough to learn a lot about hair and a lot about wild stage personas from the queens of the tent shows.

After hanging out in Macon with Richard, Brown got himself a brand-new hairdo. “I’d sit up in the beauty shop with James Brown, getting our hair curled,” remembered Charles Connor. “I’m sitting there with a cigar and there’s James. They knew we weren’t gay, we were just tired of getting a process—keep that lye in your hair too long and you would burn your scalp.” Brown wanted what Wright and Richard had: the ability to command all eyes when they walked into a room. Big hair also added a few inches to a short frame: He did it, he said many times, “so people don’t say
where
he is, but
there
he is.” Brown took a coif that communicated one thing in the gay carnival shows, and made it a symbol of who he was.

In 1955, however, both of Clint Brantley’s acts were strictly local. Richard had made records for RCA Victor and Peacock that flopped. Out of desperation, he speeded up his sound, employing a freight-train rumble and a lurid swagger that he dared not put on vinyl. He urged his drummer to get in front of the band, to push the
beat. The band hadn’t picked up a bass player yet, and Richard made Connor pound the bass drum on the beat to create a bass line—“almost in a disco style,” he said.

Connor was subdividing the good old four-four, turning the whole group into a New Orleans choo-choo. “I had to create a much more powerful,
soulful
, down-home, drivin’ beat. Richard wanted 16 and 32nd notes on the sock cymbal or the ride cymbal, and not just a plain backbeat on your rim but 16 and 32nd notes on your snare drum.” On the cymbal he was playing a lilting style he says he got from New Orleans and Professor Longhair, a celebrated pianist with whom he had played before Richard. The drumming in those second lines, the complex, shifting beats that flowed out of bodies moving down streets, had long bled into New Orleans music. Now, through Connor, it was changing the sound of Macon.

Richard guaranteed the band gigs four nights a week, Thursday through Sunday, and on other nights Connor and Wilbert Smith, who could play keyboards and saxophones and could sing, would be in a scrap band with Brown at an American Legion club or in some roadhouse. Connor remembers: “One day we were doing this moonlighting thing with James Brown and I’m doing a second line, and James be singing, and James looked around at me and started smiling. What the hell he smiling at me for? He said, ‘That sounded good man, do that again!’ I was doing a syncopation on my bass drum, a New Orleans second line. I think it was Roy Brown’s ‘Good Rocking Tonight’ we was playing.”

The train rumble was getting louder: Late in 1955, a record Little Richard had made, “Tutti Frutti,” was rising on the charts. Summoned to Los Angeles for more recording, Richard left his Macon manager holding the bag on several weeks’ worth of commitments. Brantley still had the Upsetters around—Richard mostly recorded with studio musicians. He had the venues booked. Now he just needed a front man, and he happened to have somebody under contract who knew Richard’s act inside out.

For the next several weeks’ worth of Southern shows, Fats
Gonder snatched the microphone and called out in his chesty announcer’s voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the hardest working man in show business: LITTLE RICHARD!” And out jumped James Brown, hair way up high, doing his very best imitation of the wild one.

It could work. It
did
work, often. Richard was on the verge of stardom, but not that many people knew what he looked like. Those who did just became a bigger challenge for Brown to win over, and he liked challenges. Standing before a mix of his Flames and Connor and the Upsetters, he all but asked the audience, “You want Little Richard? I’ll give you a show that will make you forget all about that mama’s boy.” “I’ve never seen a man work so hard in my life. He would do extra,” recalled Byrd. “He just drove himself, driving, driving, driving. We’d say, ‘What’s wrong with you? By the time it’s time for us to try and make a record, you’ll be done killed yourself.’”

Sometimes, people whispered, “that don’t look like Little Richard, he’s too dark.” In Alabama, they figured out the ruse and chanted “we want Richard, we want Richard.” That did it. Brown held nothing back as he raved through the set, doing backflips, leaps, climbing on top of the piano and landing in splits. By the time he was done, the crowd was cheering the imposter.

The shows taught Brown what it felt like to play with a great band and an ass-kicking drummer. For if Connor wasn’t in the league of Earl Palmer, the drummer Richard recorded with, he was mighty fine all the same. (And Connor did play the indelible drum part on Richard’s “Keep A Knockin’.”) He had turned Brown’s head around, and years later Brown would say it was Connor who first “put the funk in the music.”

A strange word:
funk
. It meant the smell of sex to New Orleans musicians. It was the stench of something filthy—a bum rolling in the gutter, Earl Palmer said. Whatever else it meant, in the music it was a repository for unclean feelings, for stuff proper folks kept locked in their subconscious. Connor had his definition, one that he got from watching dancers. “Funk is imagination. You can see a
big fat woman walking down the way, she’s got a big booty sliding side to side, doing the jellyroll.

“You look at their behinds, that’s where I got my rhythm style. I would look at the dance floor, at some woman shaking her butt, and I would
boom
—do three or four measures of my stuff—then I’d watch her body language.” A very old practice, wrenched into the new era. Drummers and dancers passing it back and forth. Conversatin’.

S
ome time in 1955, Brown and a couple of the Flames went to the radio station WIBB, which was devoting a few afternoon hours to “race music,” as it was called. They came to make a demo of a song, something to use as a calling card in hopes of getting a recording contract. The studio was so small that two or three Flames stood out in the waiting area, while Brown sang from the DJ’s booth. Recording the song was a WIBB regular named Charles “Big Saul” Green. Noticing how short Brown was, Big Saul pulled the microphone hanging from the ceiling down as low as it would go, then set up a Coke crate for him to stand on—it was the only way Brown could reach the mic.

The song was “Please, Please, Please,” a tune they’d been singing since their Toccoa days. All roads to “Please, Please, Please” run through a song called “Baby Please Don’t Go,” a lament which Delta blues singer Big Joe Williams had a hit with in 1935, but which surely reaches further back than him.
That
song had no discernible impact on the Flames, but it sure shook up Sonny Til and the Orioles, one of the founding R&B vocal groups. They had success with “Baby Please Don’t Go” in 1953; the Flames loved the Orioles and knew their version. But a bigger inspiration for “Please, Please, Please” was far closer to home. In 1951, blues belting, former tent show queen Billy Wright recast “Baby Please Don’t Go” as “Turn Your Lamp Down Low,” a hypnotic moan. The Flames threw out everything but the instrumental hook, which becomes the melody of “Please.” They responded to Wright’s tune, but what really moved them was
a version of the song they encountered on a road trip to Augusta. Visiting there risked a parole violation, but Brown and the Flames went, and heard the hottest local group, Bill Johnson and the Four Steps of Rhythm. The Four Steps of Rhythm were contemporaries of the Flames, and Johnson was from the Terry; they were a singing, dancing, harmony act whose version of “Baby” pointed away from the pretty airs of the Orioles toward something nastier.

This was a tune worth going to jail for. “When we first heard [the Four Steps’ version], we said ‘Oh man! That’s more like it.’ I mean,
that’s
a song,” said Bobby Byrd. “I mean, the song was easy, everybody could sing it.” It was almost like that trip to Augusta settled something in all of their minds. The Flames were never going to be a mystique act like the Orioles, they weren’t going to win people over with beauty, dignity, and decency. They were a working band, a crawling-on-the-floor, grease-dripping, picking-up-spit live act like the Four Steps of Rhythm. Sometimes it’s good to get clarity.

They wrote new words to Johnson’s song, which they renamed “Please, Please, Please.” This tune was a standalone
emotional
workout, a feature number for Brown that allowed him to evoke the church (in the submission of that
please
) while communicating an abandonment that anybody could understand. Every verse had a different rhythmic delivery, which kept this very simple song interesting while it also communicated a soul in turmoil, trying this, trying that, tramping down every avenue to bring love back. The Flames’ tight harmonies glowed in stained-glass hues, while the lead voice started out like a bird accepting capture and ended damned near smashing his head against the bars. “Please, Please, Please” was a straight-up slow burner that sounded old before anybody heard it, built from found parts going back decades and animated by a working band trying to win a crowd, earn another night, get further along the road. A very old cage…a strange, new bird.

They recorded it fast at WIBB, in one take. They took it over to WBML, where Hamp Swain, the first black DJ in Macon, spun. Swain had been a bandleader, and Little Richard even sang with his Hamp-tones for a bit, but the mellow-
voiced Swain found greater success at WBML. He started playing “Please, Please, Please” late in 1955, and the response was immediate. “To tell the truth, I didn’t think all that much of the song at first,” said Swain. “But right away we started getting requests for it, we’d have to play it two or three times in an hour. We were not taking phone requests back then, but the phones would light up and we’d sort of bend the rules and go ahead and play it again.” The mail brought more demands for the song.

The first time he heard his song on WBML, Brown said, “I felt I’d been saved.” Not saved in the survival sense; he had some money in his pocket, the worst was behind him. He meant
saved
more in the religious sense. He had had a profound experience back at Rome, when he sang gospel to tuberculosis patients and discovered how powerfully he could reach them—their tears gave
him
tears. Seeing himself projected onto others excited Brown, animated him like nothing else in life. Hearing his voice coming out of the radio reignited that chance encounter in Rome, the acceptance of the crowd, projected it across the big city of Macon. It made him feel special, different, and hungry for more. W.E.B. Du Bois: “…a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world…”

Brantley took Brown under his wing and tried to school him. He got the group to add “Famous” to their name. It stood out more. On days off at the Two Spot, he’d lecture the singer on the importance of punctuality, and how to read a contract. “I’m gonna tell you something important, you better pay attention,” Brantley would say. “When a club owner pays you, count along with him. Put out your hand,” he’d order, counting fifty single bills into it. “Now, how many dollars you got?” “I done counted it, Mr. Brantley, fifty,” Brown would say. And then Brantley would tally them again, slowly this time. It was 49; he showed how he had palmed one bill. “
When you get on the road, you got to watch the hands
.”

Brantley had Brown’s
back. Driving like a maniac between his family in Toccoa and Macon, Brown ran smack into a tractor one night, driven by a white farmer. Irate, the singer jumped out and slugged the farmer. That landed him in jail for a night, a parole violation that could have put him back in prison. But Brantley knew how to smooth things out. He got on the phone to the jail and pretended to be a white boss who angrily needed “my niggers” back for a big job. Thanks to Brantley, Brown got out of many a fix.

The Famous Flames were waiting for something to happen; James was trying to
make
something happen. He knew a conjure woman named Catherine Thornton who lived outside of Macon. Before a show at the Two Spot, he told Byrd and Johnny Terry that this woman was giving them a chance to have success in music. He was supposed to meet her at a rural clearing on a given night. Brown invited his bandmates to go with him. “Do you want to come with me? They’re taking me back tomorrow night.” He did not specify who
they
were. “We didn’t want to go,” Terry remembered with a laugh. Brown drove out of Macon alone with the hoodoo woman, into the woods outside the city, and was gone, Byrd said, for several days. He must have walked back, because when they next saw him, a day or two later, he was sweating profusely, almost hyperventilating and disheveled. “I don’t know
what
he met,” Terry shrugged, but after his return, Byrd said Brown had a new attitude, a placid new conviction: “Just climb on my back and ride to success.” Terry, too, sensed something new. “In a lot of ways,” he said. “See, he said he would do anything he could to make us successful. And we were very much successful.”