One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (38 page)

Face and pride drove him; the idea of a government or a court “giving” him his rights never sat well with Brown. “Don’t
make
me equal,” he once said. “I can’t survive on equality.” He had fought for the right to be accepted as special, and he wasn’t ready to settle for mere equality. He had earned more.

Having been born with nothing, a big part of him could never grasp the idea of “birth rights.” Blacks and everyone else had to earn rights, by working and fighting for them, his experience had taught him. “Unless you do something for yourself, it won’t get done,” he said. “How are we going to have equal opportunity until we had equal minds?”

Strangely enough, all the criticism he took over his endorsement of Nixon validated the decision, as far as he was concerned. He had fought for it, and he didn’t waver. He’d earned his right to say what he wanted.

No wonder he was tired.

Chapter Nineteen

FOLLOW THE MONEY

S
ettling into Augusta life, Brown was one day standing on a corner in a black neighborhood, talking to a friend. As he looked around, he evoked the scene in a way that encompassed his past
and
present. “There’s a lot of money here. This ain’t the ghetto; this is the
mint
. For crime and corruption.” Folks with money call it crime, he explained. Those who lived here call it survival.

Now that he was again in town, Brown sought to inspire those around him. A teen basketball team bore his name, he owned the radio station, and was looking for other business opportunities. In the summer of 1973, he opened the Third World, a roomy nightclub that booked Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and even the comedy team of Amos ‘n’ Andy. (Brown never lost his love for old-school showbiz.) It was a unique place. In the front of the club was a takeout restaurant that only sold chicken wings. There were uniformed doormen, and inside, a color scheme and decor Brown himself picked out. The bathroom fixtures were gold-plated.

The word
can’t
, Brown said, forced people into poverty and crime. Nobody said
can’t
anymore to Brown. On a whim, he might pull up at a corner, pop out of his limo, and start handing five-dollar bills to startled teens who nodded as he told them to stay in
school. He would send Danny Ray into a bank to make a mass withdrawal, and then have his valet throw handfuls of cash out his car window.

Scholars of black business history note how wealth-building points far beyond personal success. Individual accomplishment reflected the whole community and, conversely, one’s own fortune meant little unless it left a mark on the neighborhood. In his own flawed way, Brown fit into this historical dynamic.

Money was for circulating. “You never seen a Brink’s truck follow a hearse to the graveyard, have you?” he’d say with a cackle. While he owned some stock, on a basic level, he didn’t believe in investing. When you could work one night and make tens of thousands of dollars, the idea of accumulating interest lost its appeal.

With cash filling cardboard boxes every night, Brown didn’t feel a need to open a bank account until the early 1960s. One day in Atlanta, he got off a plane, entered a bank in the airport in order to cash a check. He liked to carry stacks of royalty checks and other notes on him as a cushion against crisis. The teller, Fred Daviss, suggested he open an account; it might have been his first. Brown handed a pile of greenbacks to Daviss saying, “Here’s a thousand.” Daviss counted eleven hundred-dollar bills, and after he passed the test by handing a hundred back, Brown knew here was a guy he could do business with. In the next few months, Brown flew in with suitcases full of cash to deposit. He would take off his boot, pull out a roll of dollars, and deposit that, too. The women at the bank would spend hours counting his wadded, filthy bills. In no time he had six million in his account, said Daviss.

The Southern circuit that raised him was a cash-only business, and Brown accumulated quite a lot of the stuff. “He took boxes of money out of the shows each night, we don’t know where it went,” said Fred Wesley. “He told me, ‘If they ever want to mess me up, all the government has to do is change the color of money.’”

He always carried what he called his FU Money, what he paid out to people when he wanted them to look away, or join him, or
when he wanted them to go. Cash was many things to Brown, but perhaps most of all it was a way to keep people out of his way.

Investing in black business, Brown believed, would empower his people. This was his intent, but his inability to delegate, his mistrust of even his closest aides, and his desire to pay bills only when absolutely necessary, all made reaching that goal difficult. He was a bit like Marcus Garvey, the pan-African nationalist of the early twentieth century who inspired thousands with his dream of building a black-owned global shipping line. Both men shared an amazing ability to give heart to their followers. Their weakness was in successfully following through on their business model.

In 1970, Brown purchased a two-hundred-room hotel in Baltimore for $5 million, renaming it the James Brown Motor Inn. Business was solid for months, but then there was a fire, and then, in early 1971, came an FBI raid and the arrest of several bank robbery suspects at the Inn. Soon after, Brown disassociated himself from the venue and closed it down.

His club, the Third World, had a solid launch, but within a few months checks started to bounce. Then, in October 1973, the club burned down. Arson was suspected, said the
Augusta Chronicle
, and a jar of gasoline was discovered near the front door. Arriving at the smoldering site, Brown was asked by a reporter what might have happened. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ve been kicked in the teeth, I’ve been kicked in the pants, but this I don’t know about,” he said. “Is it wrong to build the finest nightclub in Augusta so the people can have a fine place of entertainment? Is it wrong to want the best things out of life?”

Nobody was ever arrested for starting the fire, which caused an estimated $125,000 in damages. The Third World never reopened.

A
performer as riveting as Brown would seem an intriguing investment for Hollywood. For years, his name had been linked to various projects—it was said he would play the boxer Henry Armstrong.
Then that he had a part in a movie produced by Ossie Davis and directed by Senegalese filmmaker Johnny Sekka. Then he was going to be in a movie about a pool hustler, or was set to play himself in a biopic produced by Dick Clark. None of these projects came to fruition. He had an aversion to supporting roles, and Hollywood wasn’t exactly brimming with good lead parts for black actors.

Old Hollywood had little inkling of what to do with a presence like Brown. But in the early ’70s, a slew of independently made films starring black performers was achieving startling success. These dramas harmonized with the essence of Brown’s persona. The first of them was released in 1971,
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
. Whereas most movies premiered in Hollywood, this one debuted in Detroit, and then played a circuit of ghetto theaters and porn houses. Its soundtrack, rejected by A&M Records, featured a new group called Earth, Wind & Fire, and when Stax picked it up they had a hit.

Later that year came
Shaft
, with a studio budget and a likeable lead actor. A columnist in the
Amsterdam News
declared that “Nightly, as late as 11 pm lines of fans waiting at the
Shaft
boxoffice resemble those waiting for James Brown at the Apollo,” which made sense because the audiences were much the same.
Shaft
’s soundtrack was even more successful than the picture, guided by a composer who was as cool as Brown was agitated, turned inward where Brown was ready to explode. Isaac Hayes was a new breed of star, and with
Shaft
he was having a breakaway moment. His “Theme From Shaft” won three Grammies that year, and the Oscar for best original song. Its evocation of ghetto cool reached far beyond the inner city. Stax, Hayes’s label, distributed the music free of charge to marching bands around the country, and within months, Sammy Davis Jr. recorded
his
astonishing cover of the tune.

If violence was as American as cherry pie (H. Rap Brown), these movies laid out a new national zeitgeist: here was the pie,
everybody fighting for a piece, and there was the pie fight, mayhem and laughs and raw sensation hurled all over a bogus-looking set that felt a lot like America. Blaxploitation flicks, as these films were called, became an all-American cinema of sensation.

Shaft
was an outlier, a
detective
, a visitor to the underworld. But the strongest of these movies embodied the underworld, and in 1972, when
Superfly
presented a drug dealer as hero, the underworld was the place to be.
Superfly
’s soundtrack was a set of eloquent Curtis Mayfield music that was more judgmental than the images were. Observers argued about the morality of these movies, but the box office, and the audience, had settled the argument. As
Soul
magazine’s review of
Superfly
put it, “In this case where a man deals in dope and comes up a winner, morality could be argued on and on and on…ad infinitum. We shall forget morality and grade this on effort and Blackness—it passes the test in both departments.”

During a stand at the Apollo that fall, Brown admitted he had enjoyed
Blacula
, but said he had reservations about the genre; he
was
grading on morality. The genre, clearly, had no reservations about him. When it was announced that he had signed on to an upcoming blaxploitation movie, the only real question was,
Is he providing the soundtrack or the storyline
?

The movie was
Black Caesar
, and the studio first approached Stevie Wonder to compose the music. “He watched the footage, if you can believe it, and I think he felt it was too violent,” said director Larry Cohen. “I think James Brown liked the idea of doing a gangster picture.” This would be his first movie score.

When they screened it for Brown, he reportedly exclaimed that
Black Caesar
was
his
life story, and it’s easy to see why. It depicts the rise of Harlem hoodlum Tommy Gibbs, a street urchin with a chip on his shoulder, shining shoes and studying how the world works. Gibbs builds a crime empire, and he’s “top of the world” until he fatefully overreaches.
Black Caesar
’s harsh message was that anybody could make it in America, if they didn’t mind the bloodstains.

Having
signed a profitable contract with American International Pictures (AIP), Brown planned to simply recycle his old hits—“Try Me” for one scene, “I’ll Go Crazy” for another. The studio had an original score in mind, and eventually Brown asked Wesley to compose much of it. AIP also handed Brown a song that the studio insisted he sing as the first single off the soundtrack, “Down and Out in New York City.” It was a country tune, of all things, and Wesley labored mightily to smear some funk on. He did that, and he did one other very smart thing, arranging it in a key that was not the singer’s usual. Brown ended up screaming at the top of his range, and it gives the song a desperation in synch with the movie.

Deeper still was “Mama’s Dead,” a ballad with special meaning to Brown. The day he recorded the vocal he called the studio in Augusta and said he didn’t want anybody present, just him and engineer Lowell Dorn playing back the already-recorded music. “He said, ‘I want just one light on the microphone in the studio, and that’s all I want,’” Dorn said. “I went to put the tape on, and he said, ‘Just roll it.’ He started on the emotional vocal part and got choked up and that got me crying, too. It took several takes until we got the vocals down. He cried a good bit.”

There were two fine vocals, and Brown felt he was done, but the soundtrack was far from complete. When the studio started asking where the rest of the score was, it fell to Wesley to write instrumental music. Nobody wanted to tell the boss about it, though. When the movie was screened and Brown heard Wesley’s fine music for the first time, the singer scoured the room, spotted Wesley, and fired him. (Brown hired his music director back after his “point” had been made.)

“I saw James at the screening in New York of
Black Caesar
,” said Cohen. “James was always on—you never knew who he really was, he always gave you the smile and talked the talk, but you never knew what was going on in his head.”

The soundtrack did not reach the sales levels of
Shaft
or
Superfly
, but between Brown’s vocals and Wesley’s big band funk, it
was memorable work. The movie did one further thing for the star: It established a new nickname. “Hail Caesar, Godfather of Harlem,” went an advertising line for the picture. Charles Bobbit saw possibilities in that, and experimented with the slogan “Hail James Brown, godfather of music,” before he ultimately suggested Brown simply bill himself as “The Godfather of Soul.” Danny Ray began working that handle from the stage, and the appellation stuck.

Black Caesar
was followed in mid-1973 by the soundtrack to
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off
, another urban action film, this one starring former football star Jim Brown. Again much of the work was delegated to Wesley, who assembled some impressive studio musicians for the recording. Though the picture was not a hit, like most of the films in the blaxploitation genre, it was inexpensive to make, and did not require a lot of homework to understand its plot.

M
onths after
Black Caesar
came out, a kid from a Bogotá barrio is watching a badly dubbed copy of the film with his guys, projected on a sheet in a garbage-strewn park. There’s a scene where the ambitious black gangster comes down hard on a white hood, and then drops his severed ear into a plate of pasta being eaten by his Mob boss. “I thought you could use some more meat in your sauce,” he wisecracks. The kid in Bogotá smiles a wide grin.

All over the world, poor people were watching movies like this, with scenes of revenge exacted by dark-skinned people, of blacks outwitting whites, and minds were set churning. With its abundance of action and afterthought dialogue, blaxploitation traveled freely around the world. It circulated at a moment when funk, and the image of people like Pelé, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos were all spinning in the same high orbit. Black aggression was entering the pop mainstream, and doing so not via Hollywood or London so much as from barrios and shantytowns and
ghettos. Black aggression was becoming the text of a global pop culture.