One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (52 page)

“I almost expected Brown to rise from his casket and laugh,” said Daviss.

The show could now go on.

“It was like being on the road with Dad,” said Deanna Brown. “Hitting and quitting it in different cities. I tell you, when we sat down and looked at the whole thing it was really amazing. I know it was nothing but God that gave us the strength to get through it. We just needed our legs and hands to make it happen.”

The public service was booked for Saturday night in the Augusta venue just recently renamed James Brown Arena. Brown got his third costume change and was placed on the stage before more than 8,500 fans from around the country.

In the wings, in the seats, everywhere one cared to turn, there was drama at hand. Between Buddy Dallas and Deanna Brown, warring over who should control the estate; between Deanna and Tomi Rae, over who represented “the family.” Tomi Rae delivered a quizzical, emotional version of “Hold On, I’m Coming” before the cameras, and Brown’s son, Darryl, flexed his muscles in the band that would carry his legacy forward, the Soul Generals. And everybody trying to act like they were not looking at Michael Jackson as he cried.

Farris had the sobering task of writing the last ever set list for a James Brown gig, and the Soul Generals sent him off. Veterans of the band were all around: Bootsy Collins and Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry and J. C. Davis. As the Soul Generals played, Farris looked down at the body before him, and beyond Brown, he saw Jesse Jackson, Don King, Michael Jackson, and the rest in the seats. It just did not seem real.

The night Brown died, Bobbit called Marva Whitney, once a featured singer in the show, and told her that Brown wanted her to be the last singer on the last ever bill. At the funeral Whitney walked over to the casket and quietly said, “You’re
still
dictating to me,” and then she sang “Kansas City.”

AFTERWORD

J
ames Brown was obsessed with Elvis Presley. In conversation he made much of the few times they met, until it appeared the two were confidants. It was said Brown’s wife Adrienne once dated Elvis, and it might have been Brown who spread the story: It put him in the proper company. Maybe they recognized something of each in the other: dirt-poor Southerners with rural roots who moved to the big city and did not disappear.

But it wasn’t the man he liked. Not really. It was the crown. And if he’d come along a few decades later, Brown might have been spreading rumors his wife had once dated Michael Jackson. They called Elvis the King, and Brown tracked his reign from early on, for Brown planned on supremacy himself. As artists, they were only comparable to each other. Elvis alone put more singles on the
Billboard
charts than Brown during their lifetimes. It was on the black list, called the “rhythm & blues” charts, that Brown ruled in his lifetime. They were King and cape, separate and unequal.

Elvis died August 16, 1977, and the moment Brown heard the news he rolled into action. Chartering a Learjet, he took Fred Daviss and Danny Ray to Memphis, where police escorted them to Graceland. The three were brought in a side entrance for a private
viewing of Presley. “Elvis, you rat,” Brown wailed as he leaned over his body. “I’m not number two no more…”

“I went to the funeral, you know, and I touched his body,” Brown said a few weeks later. “It was hard to believe it was him. I saw him five years ago in Hawaii and he looked great. I kept saying, ‘What happened? What happened?’ They never let him alone. They never understood.” Only Brown understood, went his thinking, and now he was alone. Number One.

For the rest of his life, he would measure himself against Elvis, gauging how much the public loved each. In a spoken introduction to his cover of “Love Me Tender,” posthumously dedicated to Presley, Brown addresses his listeners like a country lawyer appealing to a jury: “I want to talk about a good friend I’ve had for a long time and a man I still love, Brother Elvis Presley. You know, if he was here right now, I’m sure he would say the same thing for me. I loved the man because he was truly the King of Rock and Roll. We’ve always had kind of a toss-up between Elvis and I, The King of Rock And Roll and I’m the King of Soul. So I want to sing this to the people, for Elvis and myself…”
The King is gone, and I am your only King. Now your love is mine.

On a prison phone in 1989, Brown told a caller that his real crime was his fame, that America tried to bring him down because he was so big. He thought back to seeing Elvis in his coffin, and said, “Well, now I’m catching
his
flack and mine.”

Touching his dead body was as close as Brown would get to something he wanted desperately. He wanted the adoration people reserved for their King, but the best he could do was reap the celebrity attention, the kind that ripens to jealousy, then to hate. He hungered for the love, but he prepped for the jury’s sentence. “If America can stand to have James Brown in prison, James Brown can stand it,” is how he put it.

“I know what madness is. It’s not knowing how another man feels,” wrote María Irene Fornés. Unable to put himself in another person’s place, Brown was desperate to connect the best way that
he could, by bringing others into his world. It made his art a total experience, the opposite of crossover pop—the
audience
crossed over, to a world that hadn’t existed until he made it so. We are still not near the bottom of his music. The songs of Elvis or Motown or most of the music of his peers, however great, tend to sound finished to our ears. It has arrived at its destination. But James Brown’s music still mystifies, and we have yet to get to the bottom of it. His music still sounds alive.

As an artist, as a conductor of American energy, as a master of a nerve-control technique that makes the whole body tremble, Brown was simply greater. He just could never make America love him like we love Elvis. He was who he was, and America was what it was.

M
oney won’t change you, but time will take you out
: He said it, and boy did he mean it. You make the most of whatever you have right now, a steak one day and fatback the next, because enjoyment is all you get. The rest of life was forces messing with you, chaos you had to meet with more chaos or be washed down the Augusta canal.

The art was one part of his legacy. The chaos was the rest. The singer had once declared to his drummer that when he died, it would take another lifetime for anybody to figure out where all the money had gone. He might have had a smile on his face when he said it. “Mr. Brown was an exceptionally slick, conniving, brilliant man. And he made sure—
made sure—
he was misunderstood,” his closest associate, Charles Bobbit, told a journalist. In death the misunderstandings started shaking loose.

In a courtroom in South Carolina lined with paintings of celebrated South Carolina judges of the past, lawyers have been gathering. They came out of the woods to speak for Brown, against him, and speak for and against the money he had left behind. They came from Savannah and Atlanta, New York and beyond. Their teeth and hair were impeccable.

In 2000, Brown wrote out a will, with the assistance of H. Dewain Herring, one of his many lawyers. Herring was later best known for murdering a strip club employee, for which he received a thirty-year sentence in 2006. Assisting Brown in this period was probate attorney Strom Thurmond Jr., best known for being Strom Thurmond Jr.

The will divided the singer’s personal effects among a small set of his children. The real wealth, however—the bank accounts, royalties, the rights to his image and songs—was controlled by two trusts, one to benefit his grandchildren and one to benefit needy children of the region. These trusts were managed by three men appointed by Brown: Aiken county magistrate Alford Bradley, attorney Buddy Dallas, and accountant David Cannon. They had managed Brown’s finances in his last years, putting him on a monthly salary of $100,000. The trio had worked in those later years with a New York–based agent calling himself “SuperFrank” Copsidas and entertainment attorney Joel Katz, to send Brown out on the road. And they had overseen his finances while he was gone.

Copsidas was responsible for one of the more colorful statements of the funereal moment. When asked what he would do now that Brown was dead, SuperFrank said that, from his perspective, nothing had changed. “We’re still managing him,” the agent said. “There’s lots to do.”

Whether it was Brown’s true wish to create these trusts rather than giving all his money to his heirs is at the heart of an ongoing battle. The trustees’ opponents suggest that Brown was not in his right mind when he created the trusts. Buddy Dallas heartily disputes the claim.

“To even make a statement like that…the obvious answer would be, obviously you did not know James Brown, the Godfather of Soul,” he said. “To quote Mr. Brown, ‘Papa don’t take no mess! Papa didn’t cuss and papa didn’t raise a fuss! But if we did wrong, papa beat the hell out of us!’ Mr. Brown was his own counsel when it came to his business. Mr. Brown made his own decisions, okay?”

Over the months and then years following his death, lawyers billed large sums trying to explain how Brown’s wealth should be spent. Much of the legal wrangling took place in the courtroom of South Carolina Judge Doyet A. Early III, a native of the same region to which Brown was born. Early yelled at the trustees, and he ultimately encouraged them to remove themselves from control of Brown’s estate, which they did. But for all his peppery tirades and vainglorious courtroom antics, Early struggled to get to the bottom of one essential question that concerned his court: Exactly how much money did Brown leave behind?

The bookkeeping Brown left behind was hard to follow. When trustee David Cannon testified to his role in the trust for six hours, he was repeatedly asked how much he had made from his association with Brown. Alas, explained the accountant, he must take the Fifth Amendment on this and other questions. Early placed Cannon in jail for six months for failing to heed his order to pay back over $300,000 to the estate.

What would Brown have thought of his longtime friend being sent to jail after misappropriating his money? It seems that Brown did not trust honest men. “James Brown liked the thieves,” said Bob Patton. Whether it was because he understood them better, or because such people were easier to control, who can say. But at least when he was not high, Brown was alert to the business, and for that reason it’s hard to believe he didn’t know, or at least expect, any and all shenanigans.

“He dealt with that his whole career,” said Hollie Farris. “I think how he rationalized it was, as long as they didn’t come up and actually take the money out of his pocket, it was okay with him. That was his mentality growing up as a thief, living any way he could. Everybody he knew was a thief—so being a thief to him was kind of all right.”

Family and friends who gathered in Early’s courtroom were focused on money, and how much might come their way, but the arguments strayed far from that bottomless topic. Lawyers
representing the state of South Carolina argued against lawyers from Georgia, and then there were the parties who felt they had been stiffed by Brown. They sent representatives to Aiken just to keep some skin in the game. On some days there were more than thirty attorneys in Early’s courtroom—so many that the judge allowed them to fill up the jury box, the only available seats in the house.

After Brown’s trustees resigned from his estate in November 2007, Early selected new trustees to make sense of his accounting and steer his estate forward. The big asset there is the licensing of his music and image, worth millions. Since then, Early has replaced that second team of court-appointed trustees with a new appointee, and proceedings have slouched toward an ending.

Children have come forth claiming Brown was their father. Velma Brown, Brown’s first wife and still living in Toccoa, filed notice with the court that Brown had never legally divorced her. That development briefly rippled the waters, until divorce papers she filed in 1969 were dug out of a Georgia file.

There is more. There will be more. In the wake of Brown’s death, it is as if all the discord and rupture he had created among those closest to him had now been liberated. These demons could finally shake themselves free, and dance around the stuffy Aiken courtroom. Perhaps, as they do the mashed potato before the painting of Strom Thurmond hanging on Judge Early’s wall, they take turns doing a quick floor-smacking split, each after the other, every ghost hitting on the One.

B
efore Early released them, his two appointed trustees succeeded in doing one big thing: emptying out a portion of Brown’s Beech Island home. They suggested a way to help cover their growing bill while paying some of the creditors waiting in line for Brown’s money. They would auction off valuable objects in Brown’s house.

So, accompanied by representatives of Christie’s auction house in Manhattan, they cherrypicked his Beech Island home. They auctioned off capes, trophies, gold records, clothing, letters, and furniture, reaping a disappointing $857,688 from the sale of over three hundred items. After the auction, Brown’s wish to have a museum dedicated to his memory seemed far less possible. (The bullet-riddled pickup truck, at least, remains parked on the grounds.)

Meanwhile, the house he left behind stays guarded and locked tight. Rumors abound: that dozens of holes have been dug up around the sixty acres, as visitors search for loot; that a compartment behind a picture on one wall yielded several hundred thousand to the child lucky enough to find it.

The record albums James Brown left behind at Beech Island:

• Wildman Steve’s
  The Six Thousand Dollar Nigger
  
• Isaac Hayes’s
  The Isaac Hayes Movement
  
• The Hollyridge Strings’
  The Nat King Cole Song Book
  
• Kermit Schafer’s
  All Time Great Bloopers
  
• Magic Moments with Johnny Mathis and Ray Conniff
  
• Jimmy Smith’s
  Back at the Chicken Shack
  
• Memphis Slim’s
  Messin’ Around With the Blues