One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (25 page)

Then he performs the James Brown. All the steps of the past telescope into this dance with the ultimate name. What
is
the James Brown? He explained it once this way: “Combine the applejack, the dolo, which is a slide, almost like the skate, and the scallyhop, which is a takeoff on the lindy hop, add a nerve control technique that makes the whole body tremble, and you got the James Brown.” Got it? He preferred to not give away his secrets.

Poet Larry Neal has said that “There Was a Time” does nothing less than “trace…the history of a people through their dances.” Two drummers pulling at the beat from both ends, unraveling time…The history of a people nesting in an ongoing dance called the James Brown…Through these means does the performance shake off history and dance us all into a timeless haven.

But the song is not done. Now it’s time for
us
to join the dance. Brown talks to the crowd. “Do you feel all right? I feel pretty good myself.” The beat comes down to a rustle. He asks the band if they
are ready, then the dancers, then the audience. The guitar on top is clacking out an expansive pattern that sounds like a mountain musician playing two bones.

“Building, is you ready? Because we gonna tear you down. I hope the building can stand all this soul ’cause it’s sure got a lot coming on…” And with that Brown instructs the audience to do what he is doing, to fold in behind him and his steps—he is showing us all how to do the James Brown.

He is taking us back to Augusta in our minds, to a haven as real as any place on Earth. That’s a pretty powerful nerve control technique.

A
high school student from Sturgis, Michigan, interviewing Brown in the black press in the mid-1960s wanted to know: “Have you ever been embarrassed because of prejudice?” Brown thought quietly, then said, “I better not answer that one.” But questions like that kept coming up, and he knew he better have answers. People wanted to know what he thought about the news of the day.

In the fall of 1967,
Jet
covered Brown’s return from a tour of Europe. The piece featured a well-crafted quote: “In 12 hours after leaving the US for Europe, I became a man, while I’m still a boy, still growing here where I was born,” he said. “I truly felt like a man, not like colored or Negro but like a man—period.” In the past Brown had used
Jet
to issue formal statements, and this item has the feel of one. And while he starts by criticizing America’s racial shortcomings, his true message follows that setup. “Although we still have problems and regardless of the fact that I was treated so well there, this is still home,” he said. “I’m still an American above anything else. It may sound foolish to some people, but I’d rather be a broke man here than a rich man over there.”

It was a response to the calls for Black Power, which had only gotten louder since the Mississippi march. Home was home, and for all its flaws America was worth fixing. For Brown, black
education would lead to black empowerment, and empowerment to equality; that was his touchstone.

By 1966, Brown was talking about politics with various people, including an independent thinker from the Bay Area named Donald Warden (who later changed his name to Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour). Warden became a sounding board for the singer and perhaps the biggest influence on his thinking.

Raised in Pittsburgh, Warden studied at Howard University under John Hope Franklin and E. Franklin Frazier, two revered scholars. He did community organizing in Detroit, and then lived in India in the late ’50s, where he met Prime Minister Nehru. By the early ’60s he was studying at Berkeley, where he joined an African American reading group that included Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Ron Dellums, and which was an early intellectual influence on the Black Panthers. Warden hosted a black news radio program that stressed a message of self-help and the need for education.

A quirky local show promoter named Ray Dobard suggested to Warden that putting black performers on his radio program would help publicize his message. Visiting musicians could promote their upcoming appearance, and in return they would endorse his program of “no drop outs, no flunk outs.” Aretha Franklin, Joe Tex, and Ike Turner were among Warden’s guests.

Dobard told Warden he could interest Brown in publicizing Warden’s ideas. They set up a meeting at Dobard’s Berkeley office. Brown asked how he could help.

“It was clear to me, of all the entertainers, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, any of them…James had the capacity to make a commitment,” said Warden. “And when he made a commitment, he was
serious
.”

Warden told Brown, “One or two words from you to stay in school, get honor grades, will make a difference.”

And when he simply heard it, James said, “Brother—it’s me and you. What do you want me to do?”

They went around Richmond and Oakland, visiting liquor stores, barbershops, walking the streets and chatting with folks. “He was talking to people there and he started telling them, ‘You know young man, you ought to stay in school.’ He’d say, ‘I want you to do this for
me
. We need some doctors and scientists.’ I could see it—they’d say ‘yes
sir
, Mr. Brown!’

“And I could see him become addicted to this connection. ‘Did you see that kid? He
promised
me.’ He liked that.”

They talked about writing a song to carry the message. “I said ‘Mr. Brown, we don’t have any musical talent, but we have some people who think they can write some words. We’d like to submit them to you to see if they can be commercialized.’

“Don’t get your feelings hurt if I reject them,” Brown said. “Because I
will
be in charge.”

That’s how “Don’t Be a Dropout” came to be, as a message and song. Brown debuted it in Washington in 1966 at a National Urban League event, then visited with Hubert Humphrey and got the support of the vice president, who was working on a “Stay in School” program of his own. In Warden, Brown perhaps saw a bit of himself—he was another black man who stubbornly formed his own ideas about progress. A 1963
New York Times
article described Warden’s opposition to integration, based on quirky, nuanced reasoning. Over the next few years the two had regular conversations about politics and black empowerment.

Brown firmly defended America, and had meant “Dropout” to be, besides pro-education, an alternative to black radicalism’s standing critique. Don’t tear it down, go to school and you can help mend America, he said.

Nobody expected Diana Ross and the Supremes to comment on urban rioting, but people wanted to know what Brown thought. Artists are allowed, even expected, to be ambiguous, contradictory. But spokespeople need a sharply defined message if they seek to be understood. The challenge for Brown over the next few years would be to hold on to his creative freedom—the right to try out and
play with ideas and exchange them for new ones—while building his case as an agent of change. He wanted to be both things, at the same time.

W
hen King began closing down its regional offices in the early 1960s, the label lost much of its presence in the hinterlands. Already interested in radio, Brown witnessed the label’s waning outreach and become even more interested in using the power of radio. He was still Music Box, and he still depended on the radio to hear what America was listening to. More than before, he pondered what it would be like to present his own programs to listeners.

He yearned to broadcast and already had syndicated a short-lived fifteen-minute show produced by Arthur Smith. On a swing through Texas, he paid an exploratory visit to one of the most powerful independent stations in the world, XERF in Ciudad Acuña, just across the border from Del Rio, Texas. Operating beyond the reach of the Federal Communications Commission, XERF was a so-called border blaster, a renegade signal capable of transmitting at up to a million watts. At peak power, XERF could be heard in distant parts of the planet; it spontaneously turned on lights near the border, and its music was picked up by bedsprings and barbed-wire fences. The programming, too, was powerful, a freewheeling mix of rock and roll, rambunctious preaching, and patent medicine hucksters.

On the day Brown took a cab across the Rio Grande and dropped in on XERF, one of the station’s signature voices, an up-and-coming jock calling himself Wolfman Jack, was on duty. A worker had just climbed down from the 300-foot tower when Brown arrived, having replaced a red light that kept aircraft from flying into it. “Would you like to have a job like that?” Jack joked, and quick as that, Brown, in a collarless gray suit and red patent-leather shoes, jumped onto the tower and climbed all the way to the top. When he finished his ascent, he hooked a leg around the last rung
of a ladder, leaned out over the Mexican landscape, and waved down at the terrified staff.

Statements to the press indicated he would soon be spinning records on XERF; there’s no telling what his fertile mind and a million watts of power might have achieved. But these turned out to be the final days of the border blasters, with the U.S. and Mexican governments jointly cracking down on their signals.

Instead of border blasters, Brown began purchasing regular radio stations, first Knoxville’s WJBE in January 1968 for $75,000, and then Augusta’s WRDW for $377,000 a month later. Instantly the Augusta station became a symbol of Brown’s rise from a ragged boy shining shoes in front of WRDW’s building, to the station owner. He changed its Top 40 format to R&B and pledged service to black Augusta. Brown “planned to remedy the problem of one-sided news coverage in Augusta, by complete and objective news reporting.” New programming would include “Profiles in Black,” segments meant to build racial pride.

Around this time, Brown was separating from manager Ben Bart. Interested in developing business opportunities, he moved his business office out of Universal Attractions’ building and hired his own business staff. Bart was getting older, and the protégé felt that he had learned all he could. The elder was a chitlin circuit man, and Brown had outgrown that, too.

His new business office was run by Greg Moses and David McCarthy, African Americans who came on serious and suave and did not look like music industry types. Both wore suits and ties, and both could talk the talk with the TV and movie people Brown was interested in meeting. They oversaw his radio stations; besides movie parts for the boss, they were looking into restaurants, real estate, sports agencies, and more.

W
hile waiting for FCC approval of his stations to come through, Brown relied on older methods of getting out the word. An article planted in the
Amsterdam News
inserted one startling statement into Brown’s biography. “His mother died when he was four years old,” said the story. “James’ missing a mother’s love and encouragement are the important factors that resulted in his having so much love and concern for children…”

What was noteworthy about the detail was that within the readership area of the
News
, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Brown’s mom was very much alive. She had in fact visited him during an Apollo stand around 1959, knocking on his door at the Hotel Theresa. “She had lost all her teeth. I saw her and talked to her. I was just glad to see her,” he later recalled. He got her address and kept in touch. For whatever reason, Brown wanted his abandonment and his mother’s “death” as part of his biography.

On other occasions, his own health and survival inspired stories he had no trouble planting in the press. When he passed out from dehydration at the Apollo, the news went into heavy rotation, and for months Brown played up the idea that he might not be around long.
Jet
declared the “reports” claiming Brown had a weak heart were false, explaining he just fainted onstage because of exhaustion. A post-concert interview in Los Angeles was conducted with an IV drip in his arm. In New Orleans, Brown an-nounced he was retiring soon. He even declared he was taking a job with the government and that from then on all his shows would be a federally backed public service.

Bart had showed him how spreading rumors that you were sick or retiring was a good way to stir up interest. Now Brown was taking the rumors to a higher level, and they seemed to feed a personal need. He had entered diva territory, evoking Sara Bernhardt morbidly lugging her casket with her from town to town. “Love me now,” he was saying, “I might not be around tomorrow.”

While he
was
around, he came up with a radical idea for an album cover: a comely bunch of white women casting a hungry look in his direction. The photo was shot, a sleeve made of it, and Brown mailed his cover for the next release down to Syd Nathan in Miami.
Henry Glover was with Nathan when he got the package at the post office and walked with Nathan back to his apartment. “I had to help him sit down when he saw this cover,” Glover recalled with a laugh. The boss did not look well.

“What’s wrong, Syd?”

“How on earth am I going to sell this to redneck distributors in the South? I don’t know what I’m going to do about him, Henry.”

“I think they changed the cover,” recalled Glover. “But that was the thing that made him really sick.”

Nathan was the kind of guy whose tombstone should read “I told you I was ill.” He was a hypochondriac with reason for concern, and heart disease and pneumonia felled him on the morning of March 5, 1968, while Nathan was at his Miami condominium. His death came a few months before what would have been the twenty-fifth anniversary of King’s first release.

Whether he and Brown liked or just tolerated each other, they formed a marriage that kept a great label afloat. His body came back to Cincinnati for the funeral, where many King employees paid their respects. Glover, Seymour Stein, and Brown were pallbearers. Nathan was buried at Judah Memorial Cemetery in Cincinnati.

“It was a pretty long schlep out there to the cemetery,” recalled Stein. “We all ran to the men’s room afterward, and I remember Henry Glover was in the stall next to Ben Bart, who was taking a long time to piss. Henry said, ‘You know, that’s a very bad sign.’ I was a kid, what did I know about prostates? But a few months after that, Ben Bart was dead.”