1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (25 page)

The band would stretch songs out to ten minutes while Brown danced.
24
After the gigs, Brown would herd the group into the studio to record the improvised jams they’d come up with onstage that night. Local musicians would come by to party and network. Increasingly, Brown began to direct his musicians to pause a number of times inside the song, sometimes bringing everything to a complete halt, leaving just his voice unaccompanied. Music journalist Nelson George said, “All these kinds of stops and breaks—’cause he would literally make a sound, ‘Uh,’ and then, you know, slip-slide over, do a spin, come back, ‘Uh’—would allow him to move around the stage, still be a vocal presence but not have to overdo the singing at a time when he’s also dancing.”
25

On February 1, Brown and his band stopped by Arthur Smith Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, en route to a show, and laid down “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” in an hour. Brown made the rhythm even more staccato. Maceo Parker led the blasting horn section. New guitarist Jimmy Nolen rang out with the funky break Prince would reference in “Kiss” twenty-one years later. Music journalist Robert Palmer wrote that Nolen “choked his guitar strings against the instrument’s neck so hard that his playing began to sound like a jagged tin can being scraped with a pocketknife.”
26
Richard J. Ripani wrote, “The rhythms played by the horns, guitar, bass, and drum are all different yet complementary.”
27

They did it in one take. It was supposed to be a run-through, but despite the fact that Brown felt he messed up some lyrics, he knew he had to leave it as is—because everyone in the studio was dancing to the playback. He writes in his memoir that even though he was a soul singer, it was on this night that he started going off in his own unique direction.

“I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums. I had found out how to make it happen. On playbacks, when I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating a certain way, I knew that was it: Deliverance … Later on they said it was the beginning of funk.”
28
He’d been around as long as Elvis Presley, but ten years into the game, still hungry at thirty-two, he burst out with the next evolution of popular music.

The song was seven minutes long, so Brown cut off the beginning, sped it up, and split it into part one on the A side and part two on the flip. He had to hold the single back for a few months until a dispute with his record label was resolved. Then he gave it to popular New York deejay Frankie Crocker, who hated it, but the phones lit up immediately with requests that the station play it again. Released in June, it went to No. 8 in pop and No. 1 in R&B for eight weeks, and was nominated for a Grammy.

Next came a redesigned version of Brown’s song “I Got You (I Feel Good).” It started as a track named “I Found You,” which he’d produced for his backup singer Yvonne Fair and then remade for himself as “I Got You” a year before. He performed it on
The T.A.M.I. Show
,
Shindig!
, and, most incongruously, the Frankie Avalon movie
Ski Party
, literally the whitest movie imaginable. But because of his court battle with his label, a judge blocked him from releasing that version. After his “Papa’s” epiphany, he cut an updated version in Miami on May 6. More saber-tooth screaming, more sax, with the most pulsating, dive-bombing bass to cut through radio to date, courtesy of Bernard Odum. Released in October, “I Got You” made it to No. 3 on the
Billboard
pop chart and was No. 1 R&B for six weeks.

Brown finally wrested complete control from his label and began buying radio stations and restaurants, cutting out the middleman and working with record stores and disc jockeys directly to promote his records and concerts.
29
At the dawn of the Black Power movement, he was the model for black self-sufficiency, flying to the White House in his own Learjet to discuss the school dropout problem with Vice President Hubert Humphrey. After Malcolm X, no other black figure had the street credibility of James Brown.

The lyrics of “New Bag” are simple—just Brown trying to get a “new breed” babe to dance with him by showing he can do the Jerk, the Fly, the Monkey, the Mashed Potato, the Twist, and the Boomerang. But the phrase “new bag” came to symbolize the new Black Power approach many activists were embracing, along with a new way to deconstruct the blues for the next generation of musicians. With the song, as music critic Dave Marsh wrote, “Brown invented the rhythmic future we live in today.”
30

The word
funk
had been around for a while. Motown’s house band was named the Funk Brothers; James Jamerson carved the word “Funk” into the neck of his bass. To be in a funk was like having the blues. But the term came to mean specifically James Brown’s new style.

First, he stripped out all the melody and harmony so that the whole song was just about the rhythm. Every instrument became just another form of drum/percussion—guitars, keyboards, horns bursting just single notes.

Then, increasingly, as the decade progressed, he changed the rhythm itself. R&B’s backbeat was “one
two
three
four
,” but Brown switched the emphasis to the first beat, “
one
two three four.”

Then he overlaid different rhythms simultaneously. The drums would be hitting the
one
, but the rhythm guitar would be playing on the
two
and
four
—syncopation.

“So l was able to hold that down on one and three, which nobody could play.… We just groove, people couldn’t even get the sticks up.”
31

For comparison, check Otis Redding’s version of “New Bag.” He doesn’t stop and start herky-jerky the way Brown does; he just plows ahead.

Funk evolved from soul and into the main black genre of the 1970s; then birthed disco and coexisted with it before being absorbed by hip-hop. The funk/disco beat was the first modern beat, the earliest one that kids today can relate to and dance to, the main strand of hip-hop’s DNA. In the early 1980s, samplers were invented, and per hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, James Brown was the most sampled artist, his tracks becoming the foundation of countless rap tunes.
32
Brown was outraged that he wasn’t being paid for all this sampling, but it made him an icon with a reach unparalleled, the godfather of soul, funk, and hip-hop.

15

In the Heat of the Summer

Black fury at the slow pace of change erupts on August 11.

“Burn, Baby, Burn!”

—L
OS
A
NGELES
DEEJAY
M
AGNIFICENT
M
ONTAGUE

There had been
a riot in Harlem the previous summer, so LBJ authorized Project Uplift, to create thousands of summer jobs for New York black youth, and the East Coast remained peaceful. No one seemed to be worried about the other side of the continent. National Guardsman Bob Hipolito later said the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles wasn’t like “the slums and ghettos of New York. Instead, the houses were all nice and tidy. It looked pretty affluent to me.”
1
It was the opposite of Harlem: one- or two-story houses on wide streets lined with palm trees.

But the Great Migration of blacks from the South had turned Watts into the most densely populated part of the country, with scant employment for young people. And of approximately five thousand Los Angeles police officers, only three hundred were black.
2
To many of the Watts residents, the LAPD was like an occupying force from another country.

On Wednesday, August 11, at 7:00 p.m., much of the neighborhood was outside, since it was ninety-four degrees and most homes in the neighborhood didn’t have air-conditioning. A black driver told thirty-one-year-old California Highway Patrol officer Lee W. Minikus that a man driving around seemed to be drunk. Minikus saw the suspect make a wide turn, and he pulled the car over. Inside were brothers Marquette (twenty-two years old) and Robert (twenty-four) Frye.

Marquette, the driver, failed the sobriety test and was arrested without resisting. The brothers lived two blocks away, but the officer would not let older brother Robert take the wheel, instead calling for a tow truck. Robert went to get his mother. “Everything was going fine with the arrest until his mama got there,” Minikus later recalled.
3
By then, a crowd of two hundred fifty had gathered.

Mrs. Frye started yelling at her son for drinking. According to the “Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots,” Marquette Frye,

who until then had been peaceful and cooperative, pushed her away and moved toward the crowd, cursing and shouting at the officers that they would have to kill him to take him to jail. The patrolman pursued Marquette, and he resisted. The watching crowd became hostile, and one of the patrolmen radioed for more help. Within minutes, three more highway patrolmen arrived. Minikus and his partner were now struggling with both Frye brothers. Mrs. Frye, now belligerent, jumped on the back of one of the officers and ripped his shirt. In an attempt to subdue Marquette, one officer swung at his shoulder with a night stick, missed, and struck him on the forehead, inflicting a minor cut.
4

A witness named Lacine Holland recalled that the police threw Marquette “in the car like a bag of laundry and kicked his feet in and slammed the door … A policeman walked by, and someone spit at him. The crowd got very upset. When the person spat, the policeman grabbed a woman so strong[ly] that her hair rollers fell out. She looked pregnant because of the smock, but I think she was actually a barber. She wasn’t the one who spit on them.”
5

By 7:23 p.m., all three Fryes were handcuffed, and by 7:30 p.m. they were all at the police substation.

Motorcycle cops rode onto the sidewalks to disperse the crowd. Tommy Jacquette, a twenty-one-year-old who had grown up with Marquette, said, “The crowd would retreat, but then when the police left, they could come back again. About the second or third time they came back, bottles and bricks began to fly. At that point, it sort of like turned into a full-fledged confrontation with the police. A police car was left at Imperial and Avalon, and it was set on fire. The rest was history … I was throwing as many bricks, bottles and rocks as anybody. My focus was not on burning buildings and looting. My focus was on the police.”
6

It was just six months since the TV news had televised the police brutality of Bloody Sunday, and now the Watts rioters yelled, “Just like Selma!”

“Long live Malcolm X!”

“This is the end for you, Whitey!”
7

By 12:20 a.m., fifty to seventy-five people, 70 percent of them kids, were throwing bricks, rocks, chunks of concrete, wood, and wine and whiskey bottles at the windshields of cars driven by whites. One man stood at an intersection and signaled which of the approaching cars should be targeted with stones. Soon, the rioters were pulling white motorists out of their cars and beating them.

Twenty-nine people were arrested that night, but the crowd continued to grow, reaching one thousand. At 2:00 a.m., the first business, a market, was looted. It took five hundred officers until 4:00 a.m. Thursday to restore order.

That day, government and police officials met with black community leaders, but the officials rejected the community leaders’ proposal that white police in Watts be replaced with black officers. Meanwhile, on the street, young men on corners called at the cops, “Wait until night, whitey, we gonna get you.”
8

Lerone Bennett Jr., in
Before the Mayflower
, writes,

When the sun went down the lid came off Watts. Old people poured out of the houses and apartment buildings and joined young people, who were determined to settle old accounts with the police. Pawnshops, hardware stores and war surplus houses were raided, stripped of guns and set on fire. The streets were barricaded with bus benches, and pitched battles were fought with policemen. Some policemen were mobbed and had to club their way to safety. Taunting rebels tried to pull other police out of their squad cars; still others were lured into traps with false reports and ambushed.
9

The family who ran Nat Diamond Empire Furniture fled just as someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail on the curb in front of their door. Stan Diamond recalled, “On television, we were seeing pictures of our store and people walking out with ranges and sofas and TVs … We called the police, and they said, ‘Well, if you value your life, you’ll stay away.’ … Years ago, my dad was one of the few people that would give credit to a lot of the black people in the area … We were appreciated in the community for so many years. We didn’t deserve what we got.”
10

Betty Pleasant was a high school journalist who saw people walking out of Nat’s with sofas before setting the place on fire with cries of “Burn, baby, burn!” The looters continued, going to a department store, where they broke the windows and heaved goods onto the street. When the place was emptied, they threw Molotov cocktails inside and burned it down. Pleasant asked a man why he’d thrown one, and he said to “get back at whitey.” Next, rioters hit a supermarket. “The problem, as far as the residents were concerned, is that they were white-owned stores selling substandard stuff for high prices … [the supermarket] was notorious for selling awful food. Several months before, I covered a demonstration there where people were trying to get them to sell better meat, better baked goods, better produce. They burned it to a fare-thee-well. Burned it down. I don’t think they even bothered to loot that sucker.”
11

Author Bennett wrote, “Eyewitnesses reported a ‘carnival gaiety’ among participants.”
12
Motown anthems like “Dancing in the Streets,” “Nowhere to Run,” and “Shotgun” blared and took on whole new meanings. For the most part, homes, schools, libraries, and churches were left alone, though one church was set aflame at 1:28 a.m. late Thursday night/early Friday morning. Rioters threw bottles and rocks at firefighters, so after 1:57 a.m., sheriff’s deputies stopped allowing firemen into the area.