One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (17 page)

The family name was French Creole, and he had family in New Orleans, but Fillyau grew up in Tampa, Florida. We don’t know a huge amount about him. He died in 2001. Fillyau told Jim Payne, the only person to interview him, that the most important rhythmic lesson of his life was taught by the drummer in Huey “Piano” Smith’s band The Clowns. This protean New Orleans block party of a group was traveling with Silas Green From New Orleans’s black minstrel show through Jacksonville in the late 1950s. Fillyau happened to be in Jacksonville, and he watched them play on the street there, then caught up with the drummer in his hotel room. “Back
then musicians were always in everybody’s room playing,” said Fill-yau. They started jamming, and the older man, probably Charles “Hungry” Williams, showed him a little lesson in New Orleans drumming, taking him from standard stiff beat-keeping to secrets of the second line. Then he bore down, as if to say it all comes down to this, and told Fillyau, “Now use your imagination. Only thing you got to remember is, ‘Where is one?’ I don’t care where you put it on those drums.” Meaning you can hit it on the snare, bass, or cymbal. “Remember where one is and you’ll never lose time.”

Fillyau joined Brown in 1961, and when he met his new bandmates in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he approached bassist Hubert Perry and declared straight-up, “your days of leanin’ on the drummer are over with. You’re gonna have to
play
. I’m not carrying no straight time.” What he meant—besides HI MY NAME IS CLAYTON—was to convey an ultimatum, a very old one, that the drums had first conveyed to the rest of the musicians in New Orleans parade bands decades before: Don’t expect us to hand you the beat on a paper plate, everybody’s got to internalize it—you must know where the one is—and everybody’s gotta have something to say about the beat. We’re rough equals locked in a conversation here, and we better be listening to each other or we’ll both be speaking gibberish.

Brown already had one New Orleans drummer play behind him, on those road trips when Charles Connor and the Upsetters backed him up. Now, again, the New Orleans tradition was coming into his music through Clayton Fillyau.

Every time Brown was ready to change the sound and direction of his band, he changed his drummer. Coming into the band in 1961 after Kendrick left, Fillyau played his first show the way Kendrick had played, and Brown could not have been less happy. He called out the group with one of his favorite punishments—a rehearsal immediately after a grueling performance. As they practiced, he asked Fillyau what he thought he was doing. “If I’da wanted Nat Kendrick,” he barked, “I’da kept Nat Kendrick.” After that, they were cool.

Within a few years, Fillyau wasn’t playing the drums for Brown. He was driving the bus. It seems somehow insufficient as an explanation, but the truth is, Fillyau
preferred
driving the bus. And Brown loved having him around; he just couldn’t stand having him around. Fillyau did not accept the system of fines Brown laid on the band and would tell the boss to shove it. According to his son, like others in the band, “He was abused by James. But my father would be the one to stand up and say, ‘Look here, oh you fixing to give me that money.’ See my father has the record for being fired the most.”

While he still drove the rhythm section, Fillyau recorded one of the less-known great records of Brown’s career, the 1962 B-side “I’ve Got Money.” It’s a song whose time has yet to arrive, and it’s barely a song. It’s like a blueprint of some uncanny object. It’s an assemblage of parts: a scimitar guitar chord coming down on the One, a show band horn chorus quoting Judy Garland’s “The Trolley Song,” and his stampeding drums. The parts are arranged in a line, one beside the next—an incomprehensible rebus. Some folks call this the first funk record, or Brown’s first funk track; others say this was the first time a Brown song emphasized the One. It’s a fool’s argument, because there really isn’t anything like a first funk song, anymore than there is one person who invented fried ice cream or the blues. And you don’t even need to be on the One to be funky. It should be enough to say, Clayton Fillyau brought the funk.

I
n the months after recording
Live at the Apollo
, Brown made several important decisions that would affect the show over the next few years. He recorded “Prisoner of Love” in December, with a ten-piece string section and a nine-member choir. The song was a crooner’s delight from the Depression, and a set piece at the Avons’ tea parties in Toccoa, here delivered as a saloon-singer’s lament. “Prisoner of Love” became Brown’s first single to enter the pop charts top twenty, peaking at eighteen. He embraced ballads and
featured them live even when it was the rhythm stuff that was most powerfully connecting with whites. Ballads moved
him
.

Right after the Apollo dates, singer Yvonne Fair left. She was pregnant with her and Brown’s child. Her spot in the show was filled by a young beauty who had turned Brown’s head at the Tan Playhouse in Philadelphia. Her name was Tammy Montgomery, and she had a voice every bit as sweet as her looks. Montgomery recorded songs for a label Brown had started, Try Me. They also began dating.

Meanwhile, there was more work to be done on the live album. Nathan remained convinced it was a waste, and when Brown sent the tape to King, nothing he heard changed his mind. Chuck Seitz, chief recording engineer at King, handled the project. “All I know is the tape came in to us…and we listened to the damn thing. We listened all the way through and I thought it was terrible.” For one thing, you couldn’t always tell it was
live
. The trouble was the basic recording approach, which only intermittently picked up the crowd’s reaction. If this was going to be a document of a concert, pandemonium had to be reinjected. Seitz went to a sock hop in Cincinnati and recorded throngs of avid white teens enjoying themselves, and then inserted them into the Apollo.

Another problem was editing the tape for the ear. At the Apollo, Brown danced for minutes while the band vamped; his “Please” reaches a theatrical peak that needed to be seen. Such moments would be lost on disc and required careful pruning. When Seitz finished, Nathan still did not like it. King did not have a publicity department, and if ever a record needed special attention to get it played that first time, it was this one. Nathan toyed with the idea of burying it on the DeLuxe subsidiary, and taking a tax write-off on a record he hadn’t even funded. Meanwhile Brown was circulating advance copies to key disc jockeys and pressing his case.

Jerry Blavat was a top jock in Philadelphia. Early in 1963, he was working a sock hop in Atlantic City when he saw Brown at the Atlantic City Coliseum. “I went to see James backstage, and he was
really down,” recalled Blavat. “He told me, ‘You have gotta hear this new thing, man. That fucking Syd Nathan, he don’t want to release this, he don’t have a fucking ear! I’m gonna release it myself.’” He gave Blavat a copy. “I took it home and put it on my own turntable. It was the most exciting live album; this was raw, and it captured what he was onstage, man. Forget it! I busted that fucking thing wide open, just played the hell out of it. The whole fucking thing, because you couldn’t really just play one song the way it was put together.”

Brown mailed a copy to Allyn Lee in Montgomery. “It hadn’t hit the streets yet. I was on the air on Sunday and I played it for the first time,” said Lee. “I played it all the way through, and that sort of sealed my fate in Montgomery. A million phone calls came in—see, they didn’t really know James Brown in Montgomery; they knew ‘Please,’ but they had never heard him in
that
form. Now they did.”

Nathan was hearing from broadcasters who were asking him when the LP was going to be released. Eventually, he blinked and issued
Live at the Apollo
in May 1963.

Suddenly Brown had the biggest record on the R&B charts, so staggeringly new it scarcely bore any connection to the music
called
rhythm and blues. Here was the new soul music. And, suddenly again, he comes out with a pop record that charges up the white charts. With “Prisoner of Love” pointing the way,
Live at the Apollo
soon crossed over to the pop side that summer, where it spent sixty-six weeks, reaching number two. It certainly would have gone platinum, except that Nathan didn’t like to pay the annual fee to the professional organization that certified record sales.

For Brown personally, the moment had special meaning. After you scored at the Apollo you had hit the tar paper ceiling of the chitlin circuit, and there was no venue left—in this league—to pursue. Now, thanks to Bart’s tutelage, to his Northern exposure, and to
Live
, a new field stretched before him. He viewed himself in an unaccustomed light. “I started seeing different things and my brain started to intercept new ideas,” he said. “I became a big city thinker.”

Chapter Nine

KEEP ON FIGHTING

W
hen Brown wasn’t out on the highway, chances are he was back home in Macon. And when he was in Macon, chances are Brown was shooting up the Club 15.

A squat, gray concrete box on the outskirts of town, Club 15 looked like it could take the abuse. For years, Brown had been living with his loyal but expensive “wife,” Dessie Brown, but her money-wasting ways knew no bounds and eventually James and Dessie parted. One night, James was with his latest girlfriend at the Club 15 when who should come in but Dessie and her new beau. The boyfriend confronted Brown, saying he was a dog for ditching a woman who had stuck with him when he was broke, and that he should apologize to his ex for showing off his new lady friend in public.

“Leave me alone,” James commanded, “and if you come back, come back shooting.”

“I don’t have to go away in that case,” said the gentleman, drawing down on Brown. Not unarmed, the singer pulled out
his
iron, and suddenly bullets were ricocheting around the club.

In the emergency room, a witness remembered the scene as nothin’ but, “Who shot you?” “James Brown.”

“Who shot
you
?” “James Brown.”

“
And who shot you?” “James Brown.”

One person came in who was stabbed. “Who cut you?” “James Brown.” Still on parole, Brown relied on Clint Brantley and a few thousand dollars to make the situation disappear.

Ex-girlfriends were a sensitive issue. He and soul singer Joe Tex had a shared manager in Ben Bart, and they had a woman in common, too. Her name was Bea Ford, and she was Tex’s wife in the late ’50s, until she began singing in Brown’s show and dating him.

Tex was performing in Raleigh, North Carolina, when he got a hysterical call from Ford. Brown had been hitting her, and she wanted Tex to come down and rescue her. Tex blew off a gig to arrive and tell Brown, “You don’t love her and you are going to beat her to death. I’ll take her back now if you’ll let her go.” Brown told an assistant to go get Ford’s clothes and things, all the stuff he’d bought for her, and return them to him. She left that night.

In 1963, Brown and Tex were on a bill together in Macon. It was just after
Live at the Apollo
had come out, and Brown was playing a triumphant homecoming date at the City Auditorium. Tex was a bit of a goofball and a good mimic; he’d seen Brown wearing a cape as part of his big nightly finale. So during his opening set, Tex fell down on one knee, à la Brown, and donned a ragged, dirty cape, which he proceeded to get tangled up in and roll around the stage, all the while mocking the headliner: “Please, please, please get me out of this cape!”

This aggression will not stand, Brown declared. He went looking for Tex after the show and found him at the Club 15. Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers were on the stage with their ace singer, Otis Redding. In the crowd was a young white soul fanatic named Wayne Cochran. Brown brought out several shotguns and started firing. Somebody fired back. Soon Tex charged out of the club and ducked behind some shrubs. “James ran outside, and I saw his tour bus pull out of the parking lot with him behind the wheel,” recalled Cochran.

“Seven people got shot,” said Jenkins. “They were reloading
and coming back in. Me and Otis, we were hiding behind a piano. A guy went around later, and I think he gave each one of the injured one hundred dollars apiece not to carry it no further. And that just quieted it down.”

The two had started out as friends, helping and learning from each other. It was common knowledge that Brown carefully studied his peer’s stagecraft, refining some of Tex’s dance moves and his tricks with the microphone: Tex would push over the stand, do a split to the floor, and then jump up just as the stand bounced upright again. The first time Brown attempted it, he didn’t know the secret—a specially made mic stand with a rounded bottom that rocked dependably. Brown almost knocked out his teeth when the microphone hit him in the mouth.

Now, they were enemies. And whether it was because by 1963 his parole was done and he could leave Georgia, or because of events like the shootout at the Club 15, whatever: It was time to go. Brown moved to New York, buying a house in St. Albans, Queens, the famous neighborhood that many elite African American entertainers called home. Count Basie lived there, and so did Jackie Robinson. Trumpeter Cootie Williams had once lived in Brown’s new house. “James Brown, who is grossing more than a half million this year, bought a 12 room St. Albans home and called in a crew of decorators to perform $65,000 worth of changes in it as he departed on a 21-city concert tour through the US,”
Jet
reported. The house on Linden Avenue had castle-like turrets, a guardhouse, and a moat. “It was beautiful,” said one of his girlfriends, Betty Jean Newsome. “To get to his house you had to walk over a little bridge. It was a nice house—in the bedroom you had to step up steps to get into his bed because he had it elevated off the floor.”

Establishing that he belonged in New York City, Brown entertained friends at his new home and showed it off to the press. In the
New York Herald Tribune
, writer Doon Arbus described the scene. One walked in and entered a cavernous den decorated in black leatherette, a huge bar at one end. The room was sparsely decorated,
save for an abundance of pictures of Brown that festooned the walls and shelves around the bar.