Kill 'Em and Leave (17 page)

But Jones had only basic music-arranging skills. And when Brown noticed his musical director farming out the chart writing and arrangement duties to the quiet new tenor man he'd just hired from Rochester, New York, he moved Jones aside and tossed the gig into Pee Wee's lap.

“Not an easy thing,” Pee Wee says. “Back then, I didn't quite know what the gig was.”

“What was it?” I ask.

“It was a hard road.”

Pee Wee had already come on a hard road. He was born Alfred Bryant in 1941 in Bradenton, Florida, an “outside child” to Garfield Davoe Rogers, Jr., son of a prominent middle-class minister, who met Pee Wee's mother, Elizabeth, when both were college students at the prestigious black Bethune-Cookman College. Garfield gave all his boys a name with the initials “G.D.” save Pee Wee. Young Pee Wee was a shy, skinny, withdrawn child, close to his mother, and at age seven was coming to the awareness of his “outside” status, which in that tight-knit community was no badge of honor. One afternoon he opened his grandma Clyde's bureau drawer and found a saxophone. “I don't know why it was there, or whose it was,” he tells me. “I can still smell the mildew.” He removed the horn, took it down the street, sat under a tree near a gravel road, put his mouth to it, and found trust.

All his life, up to that moment, Pee Wee had never known trust. No one could explain to him why adults talked about him in hushed tones, or why he, the grandson of one of the town's most respected black ministers, had to walk to school alone, past his grandfather's house, where no one acknowledged him. No one could explain why his quiet, gentle mother had to drop out of her prestigious college to work odd jobs, washing white folks' clothing, scraping by to survive. The world was a place full of hurt. But that afternoon, when he placed his hands around that saxophone, the hurt fell away and there was earth beneath his feet. “I felt like I had something to stand on,” he says.

In 1949, when he was eight, his mother wed a kind amateur musician named Ezell Ellis, a U.S. army veteran. Ezell was a resourceful, openhearted man who took Pee Wee as his own, giving the young boy his last name, and moved the family to Lubbock, Texas. Ezell promoted gigs for a living, and Lubbock was a stop on the chitlin circuit. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of a local teacher named Roy Roberts at the all-black Dunbar Junior High, his adopted son Pee Wee became a standout clarinet player. Pee Wee was so gifted that Ezell often fetched him out of bed to play piano at the local juke joint with the bands that came through town. Pee Wee's mother protested, but Ezell calmed her fears. “Pee Wee's got a special thing,” he said. “He's got a special talent.”

“He gave me something I never had before,” Pee Wee says. “He gave me love from a father. I learned a lot from him.” Ezell opened a hamburger stand outside their house that constantly lost money. Customers would eat and pay in favors, or kindness, or not at all. Ezell didn't care. He was a happy man with a big heart. He had an ease with people that was infectious. He was never afraid to show love. “Do right by people,” he told his son. “Do right by people and the Lord will watch out for you all your days.”

But the Lord also moves the earth in ways beyond understanding, and when Pee Wee was fourteen, Ezell's kindness cost him his life.

Working as a promoter, Ezell brought a black band into a white juke joint one night. The band was full-out blasting and a white woman took to the floor with too much to drink. This was west Texas in the 1950s. A drunk white woman on a crowded dance floor was a toxic concoction in the powder keg of race and class that was the American South.

Ezell moved to gently help the reeling lady off the dance floor, and before anyone could intervene to help, a white man leaped out of the kitchen and stabbed Ezell in the stomach with a kitchen knife, then fled.

Ezell staggered outside and collapsed. He was taken to a local white hospital that refused to treat blacks and died in the hospital hallway, waiting to see a doctor. He was a U.S. army veteran. A man with a wife and family. His killer was never caught. And just like that, the earth vanished from beneath Pee Wee's feet again. “Here I am, fifty years later,” Pee Wee said, “and I still can't understand it.”

Pee Wee's mother grabbed her son and his two sisters and hopped a night train. The four didn't get off the train until they arrived in Rochester, New York, damn near Canada, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. She enrolled Pee Wee in an integrated high school. His classmates were white kids, kind, generous students, but by then he had retreated back into the solitude and comfort of the only thing outside his family he could trust: the horn.

Two years later, two students from the renowned Eastman School of Music—Ron Carter, twenty, who would go on to become a jazz legend, and trumpeter Waymon Reed, then eighteen, who should have become one—were among a group of musicians jamming on the bandstand at Rochester's Pythodd jazz club, when Pee Wee, then sixteen and skinny as a mop handle, walked in, pulled out his tenor, and burned his way into local history. “Brother, you look awful young to be in here,” Waymon said. “I bet you ain't old enough to drive.”

“I ain't come here to drive.”

The two became good friends—in time Pee Wee would serve as best man at Waymon's wedding to a lovely beauty named Greta, before his second marriage, to jazz queen Sarah Vaughan—but after that summer the two parted ways. Pee Wee drifted to New York, spent a summer studying tenor with the great saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and, after a short stint at the Manhattan School of Music, got a job playing tenor and clarinet with a traveling circus. He hawked his diamond ring in Wisconsin so he could steal away from the circus and buy a ticket to see tenor saxophonist John Coltrane in Chicago, who in those days was the talk of the jazz world. Pee Wee chatted with the jazz giant, one of two tenor giants of that era, his former teacher Sonny Rollins being the other. Coltrane blew his mind so much that Pee Wee hung around Chicago the next day and meandered over to the motel where the saxophone great was staying. He walked up to Coltrane's room and heard Coltrane, a known practice fanatic, inside the room, practicing.

“Trane was a gentle cat,” Pee Wee says, “but he let it be known that he didn't like to be disturbed when he was practicing.” Pee Wee, dying to talk to Trane, raised his hand to knock, then thought better of it.

But what he heard inspired him, and he absorbed Coltrane's penchant for practice and Sonny Rollins's originality to create his own sound. In his later years, he would become a respected producer and tenor player in jazz, working with greats Oliver Nelson, Dinah Washington, Esther Phillips, Duke Jordan, Sonny Stitt, Frank Foster, King Curtis, Lee Morgan, and legendary producer Creed Taylor. He was beginning to make his mark in jazz in 1965, and had just finished an organ-trio tour with Sonny Payne, Count Basie's fabulous drummer, when he got a call from Waymon Reed, the trumpeter he'd first met years back at the Pythodd club in Rochester. That phone call would set the course of Pee Wee's musical life for the next forty years.

Waymon said, “Hey, Pee Wee. I'm working with James Brown. Want a gig?”

“Yeah, I want a gig,” Pee Wee said. Back then, he'd barely heard of James Brown. But he needed the money.

“Come to Washington, DC. I got a job for you.”

Pee Wee packed his bags and left for James Brown's world, leaving behind a childhood that never was.

Pee Wee wasn't long on the set before Brown removed the mentally unstable Nat Jones from the music director's chair and placed Pee Wee in it. And Pee Wee almost joined Jones in the nuthouse.

Brown's approach to creating songs is funny to talk about now, decades after the fact. Trombonist Fred Wesley, the other seminal cocreator in the James Brown musical evolution, calls it the “la-de-da” method. That's a funny, inside joke to musicians:
la-de-da
. Lots of singers I've worked with use it. They say, “It goes like this,” and sing “la-de-da….” They can't read a lick of music, wouldn't know a bass clef from a bottle of milk, but they know
la-de-da
. That's no great sin, by the way. Wes Montgomery, Dave Brubeck, Buddy Rich, Irving Berlin, and pianist Erroll Garner couldn't read music, and they were all superb musicians. Quincy Jones once told me that Garner, when asked about reading music, said, “Shit. People ain't coming to see me read.” Conversely, I know tons of guys who can read fly crap off the wall, but they're not great players. I know of a powerful Broadway contractor, for example, who not only reads music but has handled hundreds of Broadway shows—and plays at the level of a high school student. And while I'm at it, I might as well state the obvious: the guy is white, and despite Herculean efforts by the great composer Stephen Schwartz and Michael Kerker of ASCAP, who have spent more than two decades developing minority composers and lyricists through the ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop, many Broadway contractors seem allergic to black players. One spectacularly talented African American musician I know—I'll call him Joe—challenged that very contractor on the issue of why he rarely hired black players to play Broadway shows. The contractor claimed that blacks didn't read music, and had intonation issues, and couldn't follow the conductor, and all sorts of jive.

Joe got mad and said, “You forget, man. I've heard
you
play.” Joe didn't work a mainstream Broadway show for years after that.

But ultimately it boils down to the music. And someone other than Brown had to help him make it.

In the early days of the Famous Flames in the fifties, Brown sat down on organ or drums with the lesser-skilled Bobby Byrd and Nafloyd Scott and hammered out blues-based hits for King Records. By 1964, the blues wasn't enough. One lesson Brown learned after his 1955 hit “Please, Please, Please” ran its course and he had to push, shove, and scream his way through the chitlin circuit, barely staying one step ahead of the gaping maw that swallowed Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Billy Eckstine, and the whole “race records” crew from the thirties and forties, was that your music had to evolve. Lack of evolution gulped down Louis Jordan and Lionel Hampton; later it would eat Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, the Cold Crush Brothers, and the creative pioneers of rap without so much as a burp. The dream-gobbling machine known as the record industry, that self-sustaining combine that gobbles African American culture with merciless efficiency and presents the chaff as African American life—with the whole thing coming to a theater near you thirty years later as a Broadway show called
Porgy and Bess, Five Guys Named Moe,
or
Dreamgirls
—demands change. Brown watched the artists who could not evolve fall away, dying on the vine or spending their declining years as oldies acts, forced to run the film of their revolution backward in supper clubs to audiences who were moving on, or aging out.

He didn't want that. Besides, he was hearing something different after his 1964 hit “Out of Sight.” He was hearing a downbeat. The downbeat—laying fat snare to the two and four of every bar—had expanded in Brown's mind to a big hit on the one-beat of every other bar. He heard a new groove. And he needed the best players he could find to translate that groove, his “la-de-da” grunts and commands, into hits.

It was not easy. For one thing, a band—any band—is hard to handle. And the 1964–65 version of the James Brown band that Pee Wee joined was not just any band. The players who would eventually fill out Brown's outfit from roughly 1964 to 1969 would set the tone of American popular music for decades to come. The band was big, made up of male players and female singers, most from the South. Some were country boys, like drummer Clyde Stubblefield, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who grew up outside a railroad yard and emulated the “chug-a-chug” of the Southern Railway train that he heard passing his mother's kitchen window every day when he was a boy. Others were all-stars in their cities, like trumpeter Richard “Kush” Griffith, from Louisville, Kentucky, who had perfect pitch and had played in his local symphonic youth orchestra. Violinist Richard Jones of Philadelphia was a jazz pioneer and one of the first blacks to attend what would later become the University of the Arts. Trumpeter Waymon Reed would leave Brown to join Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and later Count Basie. Bassist Bernard Odum was later replaced by bassist/pianist/vocalist Sweet Charles Sherrell, a music whiz from Nashville, and later the deep-grooving Fred Thompson of Brooklyn. Odum also brought to the band two fantastic young musicians from his Mobile, Alabama, home: drummer Jabo Starks and trombonist Fred Wesley, who would later take over Pee Wee's job. Saxophonist Maceo Parker of Kinston, North Carolina, who contributed mightily to Brown's sound as a soloist, later became a unique R&B star in his own right. Augusta-born reed man St. Clair Pinckney, with his trademark shock of white hair, was an underrated performer who, according to the inside joke, had been in the band longer than James Brown had. Jimmy Nolen, Hearlon “Cheese” Martin, and Alphonso “Country” Kellum's guitar picking—Kellum also played bass—created what they called “that washing machine thing,” which would set the tone for pop guitarists for the next few decades.

The records say it all. These men had grown up under segregation listening to the blues, jazz, and country. Some were hard men like Odum, a light-skinned, rough fellow who grew up in the tough “Down the Bay” section of Mobile and was known to carry a knife that he was not afraid to use. Drummer Stubblefield, though shy and quiet, was stubborn as a mule if you hit his button. Ditto about his more outgoing fellow drummer Jabo, who refused to accept fines when Brown levied them. These musicians were young, talented, and at times wild and unruly. Several were drinkers. A few smoked pot. Some read music with ease, while others couldn't read music at all. Individually, with the exception of Ellis, Wesley, and Reed, they were not pure jazz soloists. But as a band, they were an unstoppable force. And the one who shaped them, and often stood between them and the taskmaster, was Pee Wee.