One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (39 page)

“The world is a ghetto,” the funk band War proclaimed, and if it was true, then James Brown was a transnational potentate representing favelas, ashwaiyyat, migrant zones, and arrival cities all over the planet. A borderless Creole culture, the lump sum of funk and soul and fringe cinema—blaxploitation, Kung Fu, Italian spaghetti westerns, and Indian musicals—forged a sense of identity among peripheral people.

Bob Marley called reggae “the music of the ghetto.” In Kingston, Jamaica, the young singer asked record producer Lee “Scratch” Perry to help make him sound like Brown, and on an early song by Marley and the Wailers, “Black Progress,” you can hear him shout out, “I’m black and I’m proud.” Brown’s influence on reggae music would be a lengthy essay indeed; let a seed be planted by noting that after King Records was sold to Nashville interests, the label’s record presses were disassembled in Cincinnati and shipped off to Jamaican buyers. Poetic justice: The very hardware that stamped out James Brown’s music was now pressing hits by Toots and the Maytals, the Wailers, or Culture, all of them knowing their James Brown records by heart.

In the working-class precincts of São Paulo and Rio, black Brazilians were coming together in the early ’70s to dance to the music of Brown and other soul stars. Brazil was a polyglot nation that officially squelched racial pride in order to hold together a complicated national unity, but the Black Soul movement fed a hunger for identity among the poor. In the Liberdade district, soul devotees built their houses with small bedrooms and large living rooms so that they had the space to fully work out their James Brown steps. In Bahia, a new term came into currency to categorize the working-class youth who were expressing themselves through soul:
brau
, derived from Brown. According to one writer,
brau
meant “modern, sensual, and black.”

Wherever African people and traditions scattered was where
Brown mattered most. Unsurprisingly, his impact on the African continent was substantial.

A few indications: In the music bars of Addis Ababa, Alemayehu Eshete vied with Tlahoun Gèssèssè for the title of “the James Brown of Ethiopia.” In Benin, the great jam band Orchestre Poly-Rythmo drew heavily from Brown’s drummers. “He had more influence on our music than Fela,” said singer Vincent Ahehehinnou. “Back in the days, there was no band from Benin who didn’t have something in their repertoire influenced by James Brown.”

All over the continent, rock and roll and soul music connected with independence movements in a generational call for new possibilities. When student leaders heard “Say It Loud,” Brown became the focus of all such hope. In Tanzania, “‘Sex machine’ was scribbled on high school walls, motor bikes, and necklaces,” said writer May Joseph; in Bamako, Mali, young hipsters copied the swagger of his album covers and the clothes he wore.

One more example of this international township culture flourished in the South Bronx, where a subculture was organized in the summer of 1972 by the sound of “Get on the Good Foot.” Dancers created a step called the Good Foot, pedal action à la Brown, and participants calling themselves b-boys assembled in crews to practice and, if need be, wage war with opponents through dancing. The very way Brown started his song—“Que pasa, people, que pasa, hit me!”—was an evocation of black and brown sympatico, and in the South Bronx, African Americans and Puerto Rican kids
were
uneasily coming together to the sounds of records that neighborhood DJs played at block parties. Spinning records on the Bronx’s Sedgwick Avenue, Kool Herc was among the first to seize on Brown’s latest music as a harbinger of something new. He chopped it up, switching from one turntable to another the choice part of the jam, extending it as long as the crowd responded. Brown drew the moment out one way, Herc in another. The DJ calls Brown “the king, the A-1 b-boy.” In the Bronx and elsewhere, music and dance were laying the groundwork for the hip-hop revolution.

“
James was the ultimate god of the funk,” said Afrika Bambaataa, DJ and leader of the Zulu Kings, a pioneering b-boying crew in the Bronx. When fights broke out at dances where Bam was spinning, he would throw on “Good Foot.” “Certain songs make people get their vibe on. You still have to talk and calm them down, but certain James Brown music just seems to chill the mess out.”

It was uncanny, like an ear in your spaghetti. All over the world, Brown was being embraced as a symbol of identity for young people who identified with very little. He was the coming thing.

B
ut far from places where “Good Foot” held sway, an extended drama was unfolding, one in which Brown had a less-exalted role. The lead in this tragicomedy was a powerful wheeler-dealer from California, pulling so many strings he forgot what they all connected to. Richard Nixon was still in power, and Brown was still catching hell for it.

At what was billed as the “
Black Caesar
Show” at the Apollo Theater, picketers carried signs decrying “James Brown Nixon’s Clown.” One demonstrator said Brown was doing more for the president than “for the black folks who made him a millionaire.” It was worrisome enough that Brown quickly met with demonstrators inside the Apollo, and stood on the corners around the theater to get his own message out. His became “a desperate effort…to persuade his Brothers and Sisters that it is quite possible for him to operate in both the Nixon and the black bag without his being adversely affected by either,” the
Baltimore Afro-American
reported. “He affirmed his innocence of any kind of sellout and reassured them of his blackness.”

It was as if even incidental contact with Nixon could suck the pigmentation right out of you. Those around Brown had to wonder what he was getting from his connection to the president. Nixon had channeled aid to his other major black supporters; what did he do for the Godfather of Soul? Brown still owned three radio
stations, and they were causing him problems with the Federal Communications Commission. Fred Daviss said he spoke directly to Nixon about the FCC scrutiny of the stations. According to Daviss, Nixon offered to fix the problems, “And he did, too, he called them off of us for a while.” Around this same time, the Internal Revenue Service was stepping up an investigation of Brown’s tax returns. On this matter the president was less helpful, said Daviss, though the president was involved in getting the IRS’s legal proceedings against Brown transferred from criminal to civil court.

According to Alan Leeds, Nixon “might have helped” with the FCC. However, “James thought he was going to get help on his tax stuff, and he didn’t get any help.”

Brown had several channels to the White House. There was his friend Bob Brown, the Nixon aide, and his friendship with some legislators. There was, as well, the odd matter of James Palmer, a federal marshal who logged serious time traveling with Brown and his band in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Nobody seems to know exactly what Palmer was doing on the road with the singer, or whom he was working for. But he sure made himself a presence.

Martha High, a singer with the show, said that Palmer was sent by the feds to oversee Brown’s cash flow and insure he kept up payments to the IRS. But Palmer did more than just observe; he worked as a security official for the singer, and was delivering other services, too. “I saw him every now and then, a U.S. Marshal would come around the show and would do things for James. I don’t know exactly who he was, but he was a big cat,” said Fred Wesley.

Alan Leeds describes the marshal as a handsome, light-skinned man who always wore a suit, tie, and trench coat. He also said that Palmer was able to work his governmental connections to keep Clyde Stubblefield, Frankie Waddy, and Leeds himself out of the army when they got their induction notices. Keeping Stubblefield seated in the Brown band counts as one of the great unsung patriotic acts of the era.

“[He]
was, in fact, at least officially, simply a U.S. Marshal. Somewhere along the line, circa 1967–68, he befriended James Brown,” said Leeds. “His relationship with JB, fostered during those volatile times, was hardly a coincidence—I’m convinced he was ‘assigned’ by somebody to keep an eye and ear on good old JB. Brown certainly seemed to accept him into the entourage, rather openly—whatever skepticism JB may have had about Palmer’s motives, he kept to himself.”

That fall of 1973, Brown released “You Can Have Watergate Just Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll Be Straight.” By the time it came out, the breadth of the Watergate scandal was coming to light, and the televised Senate hearings had just finished. The lyrics match the song title, a cold dismissal of the affair chanted by Brown and the band. It would have stood as his kiss-off to the whole Nixon ride, if he hadn’t followed it up with a revelatory interview in the
Augusta News-Review
, early in 1974.

In this interview he is more forthcoming on race than usual, comfortable at home talking to a black Augusta newspaper. The reporter asks him if the Watergate disclosures made him wish he rethink his support for the president.

Absolutely not, Brown said. “If I turn against the President then I may as well turn against everybody walking the streets. Because we’re sure everybody’s got skeletons in their closets…. Black people got to remember, the positions that were handed out by this president in four years hadn’t been handed out by all of the presidents since Reconstruction.

“It’s bad that I know these things and would be skeptical whether I should say them. But, you see, I’m not going to be skeptical. Whether I sell a record tomorrow or not, whether I have a person come to my shows or not. That’s not important. It’s important that I tell them the truth. Maybe Nixon did take the money out of the street. But what he did was make the white man come down to his size, to the same size as the Black man. You see, before, with all the other administrations, the white man was in the air and the Black
man was on the ground. But now, the Black and the white man is scuffling like hell.”

You had to give it up to Watergate, he said, for finally bringing the white man down to the level of the black man.

He continued. “I want to remind the Blacks, I’m not Democrat or Republican. But it was under a Republican administration that Black people were freed. I’m not Democrat or Republican. But the Republican states in slavery were never enslaved. It was always the Democratic states that were in slavery. You see, I know they don’t know that. See, these are things they need to know. It was under Republicans, a simple thing as a water fountain was integrated under the republicans. The Democrats put two water fountains there…. Black people can’t vote Democrat or Republican. They got to vote for the man who will do something for them. Who would’ve thought that [Lester] Maddox would’ve done more for us than anybody else?”

The interview might have hurt him as much as did endorsing Nixon, if anyone beyond Augusta city limits had ever found out about it.

A year after Nixon left the White House in 1974, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that the Administration had misused IRS files between 1969 and 1973, passing to the FBI and other government agencies copies of tax returns and information gathered on people and organizations as varied as the John Birch Society; Sammy Davis Jr.; the NAACP; the Conservative Book Club; and James Brown. Later the singer and others would point to this finding as proof that the government was out to get him any way it could.

It certainly showed they took him seriously enough to spy on. But few around Brown accept the depiction of unalloyed victimhood. According to Fred Daviss, the singer was not filing tax returns until 1967, when he opened his business office in New York. About a year later, the IRS notified Brown that he owed substantial sums to the government.

“He couldn’t
understand why other people were getting money back from their return,” said Daviss. “He’d say, ‘With all this money I put in, they should be sending
me
money back.’ I’d have to say, ‘Mr. Brown you didn’t do no withholding…this is not your money you’re paying in.’ He got it, but he didn’t want to admit it. I told him no, you’re deducting that money from your employee’s paycheck, and though you are matching it, that’s part of doing business.”

The IRS investigation came to a head in the early 1970s, and the government had him on the hook for millions—for the tax pe-riod ending on the last day of 1974 alone, he was told he owed$2,231,817.77. He didn’t trust the people who worked for him to make important decisions, and he often hired layers of employees with similar job descriptions so that exactly who was responsible for what remained unclear. By the mid-1970s, the hash he’d made of his books was finally catching up with him as the IRS confiscated a truck full of records covering Brown’s taxes, his publishing companies, businesses, the road show, and more.

O
f all Brown’s children, Teddy was the one who looked the most like his dad. He was born in Toccoa, and stayed with Velma, his mother, after Brown moved to Macon. Like his dad, Teddy was a terrific dancer, and he wanted to pursue a music career, with his band Teddy Brown and the Torches.

One day in June 1973, Teddy and his dad got into a fight while he was staying at the house on Walton Way. It was probably over money. “James told me, ‘Mr. Daviss, he’s gonna have to learn,’” said Daviss.

“Teddy was just an average teenager. Teddy was always smiling. He always had a smile on his face.”

After they quarreled, Teddy angrily grabbed some money and flew to New York. The nineteen-year-old was hanging out there in Brown’s office with Alan Leeds and his brother Eric, Bob Patton, and aide Buddy Nolan. They talked about going to a Harold Melvin
show at the Copa, Teddy took some pictures, kibbitzed, and suggested Eric drive with him to Montreal, where he was going to see some girls he knew. “He loved his dad,” said Leeds. “He groveled for acceptance and approval from his dad, and his dad loved him. That was clear. His dad was so strict—getting out of the house successfully was a real emancipation for him.”

From New York, he jumped into a car with two pals and headed North.

“He was protective of his dad, but the same way a lot of us employees were—when dad was out of sight, he got it, he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. Teddy understood the effect his dad had not just on audiences but on the employees. He watched how we got by while getting fired two times a day. He watched and developed some of the same tactics. We all looked at him and thought, with what we go through, we can only imagine what
he
goes through.”