One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (21 page)

Binder was a polished, forward-thinking director, with a deep feel for music dating back to jazz programs he had worked on in the early ’60s. The idea was to have all the T.A.M.I. acts practice all the music so he could plot camera placement and anticipate what shots to use. “The only one who said, ‘I don’t want to do a rehearsal’ was James Brown. I didn’t know James Brown from Adam, I had just gotten a bunch of his albums right before we started. He looked at me, nodded, and he just said, ‘You’ll know what to do when you see me.’”

The director was more than game. His camera seems to move in tighter on Brown the deeper he gets into his set. It’s like Binder and viewers are getting to know Brown better as we watch and beginning to think like he thinks.

The audience was gathered from teens on the Santa Monica Pier. Many surely had heard of Brown, but others were won over by what they saw that day. “Here was white America, blond, blue-eyed surfing girls screaming their brains out,” said Binder. “One of my camera guys said to me, ‘I can’t be right but I think I’m hearing “fuck me fuck me fuck me” from the audience.’ We couldn’t edit it out. Those kids were reacting with honest emotions—there were not applause lights flashing on and off, it was all too real.”

There’s a swank “Out of Sight” and a devotional “Prisoner of Love,” and if Brown’s set had ended there, he’d already have been the best thing about the movie. Then he sings “Please, Please, Please,” and experiences what at first seems to be a full-scale breakdown, his body and spirit overtaken by a shadow. He falls to his knees, and the Flames, his considerate handlers, drape a cape over him and escort Brown to the side of the stage. They are distressed for his well-being,
and though in retrospect a cape is a weird way to express your concern, at the moment it seems like the only possible thing to do.

The Flames—the Bobby Bennett, Bobby Byrd, Baby Lloyd Stallworth version—are wiggling their hips and pumping “raise the roof” hand gestures. They are good-time party boys, big pimpin’ next to Brown’s morbid corpus. The first time he falls to his knees, the crowd sounds shocked, and Danny Ray drapes a generous frock as he slumps. Bennett comes over, pats him gently on his shoulder, his face a mask of frozen regard.

The second time he falls to his knees, we get a closeup of Brown’s face as he is being guided off the stage, the guys now intent on delivering him from this unsafe place. Brown touches his cheek in an almost shocking way, and the crowd is shouting “Don’t go!” along with the Flames, but what you notice is how Brown is shaking his head and muttering something. Is he speaking in tongues? So gone he’s lost bodily control? He seems barking mad, overwhelmed by emotional forces beyond the capacity of Electronovision.

It becomes easier and easier to notice: The man is falling to the ground on the One. The first beat of the measure. He also throws off the cape each time on the One. He’s conducting the band from the depth of his paroxysm. After forces take him down for the third time, and the cape has been administered, a wide shot gives us Ray, his eyes nervously darting back and forth. He was a nervous guy, perfect for this moment—his fear reads as dread for what might be happening to the boss. Brown almost makes it to the wings this time, when he again discards the cloak, waving off his handlers—he can’t be handled, not controlled by either his aides or the power of the moment. He will master these forces, and he heads back to the microphone, when…

There is one final fall to the earth, the only one that feels mechanical, because the purpose is to break the spell and display his final mastery of spirit forces that have dragged him back and
forth across a stage, worried those poor Flames and Danny Ray half to death, and caused the audience to move from “fuck me, fuck me” to sounds more guttural and incomprehensible.

He was a dancer, bandleader, singer. But it is this scene, this bit of stagecraft out of time and culture, that places him finally on a plane of pure performer. It focuses our attention on his battle, makes us care about his life or death and cheer for his existence.

“I
t’s a Holiness feeling—like a Baptist thing. It’s a spiritual background thing,” is how Brown put it. “You’re involved and you don’t want to quit. That’s the definition of soul, you know. Being involved and they try to stop you and you just don’t want to stop. The idea of changing capes came later, ’cause it’s good for show business.”

That falling-to-the-knees-overcome-with-emotion dramaturgy is straight out of the Holiness Church, out of a belief system holding, in the charnel heat of the moment, that a person could be overpowered by a sudden tap from the Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost jumpers were what they called those filled with the spirit in the earliest days of Pentecostalism. It was a form of possession, of yielding with glory to a higher force.

Many figures in the black Pentecostal tradition wore the cape. There was King Louis Narcisse, a preacher who modeled himself on Daddy Grace. His church had branches from Oakland to Orlando. He made gospel recordings and even had a motto: “It’s So Very Nice to be Nice.” Narcisse favored ermine. There was Brother Joe May, one of the major gospel voices of the ’50s and ’60s, a barrel-chested, fire-roasted singer who had a million seller with his very first recording, “Search Me Lord.” He rocked a gold one.

Brown knew their work and that of many more behind them, and in wearing the robe he was surely connecting with their religious power, trying it on for size. He was religious in ways that connected with folks who knew the spirit, he just didn’t name his “god.” He felt no need to name
any
god, certainly not the one he
was humbled before when he fell to the ground in the act of performance.

But “Please,” of course, is a secular tune, tied to teenage things. So when Brown is on the floor communicating that he is in awe, humbled by a supreme force, what is the force ruling him? It is the love he feels for the woman who left him. “Don’t go!” he screams. It is his need. To be in awe of his feelings, though, is another way of saying he is in awe of himself. A profound and wondrous force has entered James Brown, and it is James Brownness, the intensity of being
him
. Here is religion without God, or with but one God, none other than His Expoobidence. Call it shamanism or showbiz, whatever you name it, this is some powerful secular magic.

In March 1966, Brown made his debut at Madison Square Garden in New York City. In the audience was a showman named Buster Brown. One of the great tap dancers of the century, he performed with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and danced for Ethiopia’s leader Haile Selassie, who awarded him the Lion of Judah Coin. After watching the Garden performance, Buster Brown wrote down what he felt:

“I am lost for words to speak about this man. When he hits the stage everything starts happening until he leaves. This man is the greatest entertainer. He gets his audience like a preacher—like a Father Divine. He wants to be the Idol, the God one adores….

“He is not trying to put something over. He is not there fooling around, not for a minute.

“He just wakes them up—no end; and when he goes, they cannot forget him.

“It does not have a story. It has no message. He promises himself. ‘I promise you the best of me,’ and then he gives it.

“He leaves them with the impression: ‘I belong to you.’”

The tap dancer went to the Garden at the behest of a friend, dance historian and documentary filmmaker Mura Dehn. Born in Russia, she was a ballet dancer in her youth. Then she saw Josephine Baker perform in Paris, which changed her thinking about a
great many things. Dehn moved to New York City around 1930, and began visiting the Savoy Ballroom, the home of the swing dance revolution. The jazz dance scene turned Dehn into a preserver of African American vernacular dance history.

She went with Buster Brown to the Garden, and her own impressions of the singer appeared in
Sounds & Fury
magazine in June 1966. Here is Dehn:

“His emphasis on ego breaks all bounds. He is like a new-born baby in tantrums to enforce his will.

“He leaves you astonished and awed because of the mark of genius and madness.”

She reserved special praise for Brown’s dancing, but as for the other aspects of the show, “The rest is a tremendous scream for something that he wants more and more of—and gets—and is ready to give his life in order to retain it forever.

“Soul? I don’t know what this soul is about. Nothing one could live on or remember when one goes away.

“He is a mythological personage. What he asks for is love—boundless—which can never quite fill his craving. At the end of all that inspiration, talent, sorcery.”

Dehn then steps back. Having acknowledged her mistrust of Brown’s overwhelming force, and wondering if there is anything spiritual behind the demands he makes, she suggests this plea might be rooted in the black experience.

“Maybe because it was repressed so long, it comes out in this boundless way—in strength and complaint. That may be true, but theatrically speaking, a performer has to produce what our times demand—a monster personality to be sold for ‘phantabulous’ profits. James Brown is unprecedented. A man touched by divine power. He absorbs. He stuns. And yet you don’t feel enriched. You cannot live on what he reveals. You simply experience him, and he is fabulous.”

It’s some of the most perceptive writing on James Brown. Dehn grasps the depth of Brown’s hunger, the need that is there in every great entertainer’s
act but never, until now, so nakedly the point of the celebration.

What’s amazing, finally, is that one of the great black dancers of the time and one of the form’s most vibrant scholars go to a James Brown show and they don’t even talk about his dancing. Instead they describe what Dehn calls “a completely new theater and, at the same time, an archaic mystery.” It holds them, as they struggle to understand.

“T
he T.A.M.I. Show
was the highest energy thing has ever been. I danced so hard my manager cried,” Brown later said. “But I really had to. What I was up against was pop artists—I was R&B. I had to show ’em the difference, and believe me, it was hard.” First, he had to show them what he looked like.
The T.A.M.I. Show
put a face on a performer that America knew by sound. It did one other thing, too. It suggested that this Chosen One, the one born dead but not dead, would fall and rise for us all.

Over the next forty years, Brown would signal the end of his show with his cape routine. The color of the garments changed with each fall, the physical moves and gestures might be different, but the ritual of death and resurrection, sacrifice and rebirth, remained a nightly performance he would no more think to forgo than he would forgo perfect hair.

Chapter Eleven

MAN’S WORLD

J
ames Meredith was a movement of one. When the Mississippi man set out on Highway 51 in a protest that he called a march, he was alone. Never much of a joiner, he didn’t mind marching by himself.

Meredith successfully fought to be the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi, and his ordeal, the abuse and threats he weathered, made him national news in 1962. Mississippians viewed him as a black leader as important as Martin Luther King Jr. In 1966, Meredith announced his “March Against Fear,” proceeding from Memphis to Mississippi’s state capital, Jackson, intended to demonstrate that white supremacists could not impede the registration of black voters. It began on June 5, 1966. It was halted on June 6, after Meredith was gunned down by a white man with a shotgun outside Hernando, Mississippi.

In the days that followed, Meredith lay in a Memphis hospital, recovering from his wounds. Meanwhile the various wings of the Civil Rights Movement struggled to formulate a unified response. The march resumed on the spot where Meredith fell, this time with people gathered from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As they marched Highway 51 to
Jackson, the activists camped by the roadside.

Almost as soon as he entered the town of Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael was going toe to toe with law officials. Elected chairman of SNCC a month before, he was one of the fiercest leaders of the re-formed march. White locals and law enforcement fringed the marchers, and white assailants were being identified by the crowd. Carmichael drew attention to a violent law officer on the scene. At that point he was arrested and taken to the Greenwood jail.

When he was released, a crowd of perhaps a thousand had gathered to hear Carmichael speak. “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more,” he said. At this moment, he pulled out a new slogan that he had been casually testing on those around him. Now would come the big test.

“We want
black power
.”

A few voices shout back at him: “That’s right!”

“We want black power!”

“That’s right!”

“That’s right. We want black power, and we don’t want to be ashamed of it.”

Word that James Brown was coming was passed up and down the line. Appeals had gone out to celebrities to show their support, and a man of the Southern people, a superstar whose music connoted blackness, could not help but feel the pull. Perhaps Brown felt a personal affinity with Meredith, another bull, another individualist uneasy with group affiliations. At the end of his first semester at Ole Miss, Meredith had held a press conference announcing that “the ‘Negro’ should not return.” He then added, “However, I have decided that
I
, J. H. Meredith, will register for the second semester.” Like Brown, he insisted on being seen as a person, not a category, and was a loner with a streak of grandiosity.

It had been a long, bruising procession, right up to the end. In Canton on June 24, King was addressing the marchers when state
troopers fired tear gas into the crowd, and protesters ran in every direction. Many dropped into ditches to suck the air close to the ground; there they were beaten by troopers swinging their rifle butts. The next day, they made it to the edge of Jackson, and pulled up at Tougaloo College, a black institution just outside of town. In the afternoon, King and other leaders gathered at a dean’s house to assess the final rally and plan the program marking the finish of the march.