Kill 'Em and Leave (5 page)

There are other great American pop-music wonders of those years whose work will stand up to history: the extraordinary team of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan and Prince come to mind, along with several others. But there is little question that Brown stands unique among them, in part because the man nicknamed Mr. Dynamite, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Soul Brother Number One, and the Godfather of Soul stitched into his work an element that still has bone and muscle in this Internet age overflowing with flabby musical jive posing as “product,” where every high school kid with a trumpet is walking around with a self-recorded compact disc or online links to their own original music:

Content. Plain old content.

His unique blend of hollers, grunts, and squeals did little in his early years to move white critics, who saw Brown as a scream at the end of the radio dial, where most of the black radio stations lived. But it was catnip to black listeners, who understood Brown's inner struggle and loved him as a member of the family. Twice during the urban upheavals following Martin Luther King's 1968 murder he quelled riots in entire cities, first in Boston, later in Washington, DC, both at the requests of the mayors of those towns. His message to his followers at those fabled events was an intensified version of what he preached to his mostly black audiences over the years:
I'm like you. If I can succeed, so can you. Educate yourself. Be somebody.
During the 1960s, his concerts featured ninety-nine-cent tickets for kids ten and under. Howard Burchette, a radio DJ who grew up in the New York City area, remembers seeing Brown at a 1971 Apollo Christmas concert dressed as Santa Claus. “He always gave out free bicycles and prizes to kids in the audience,” Burchette recalls. “He talked about education. And bettering yourself. I'm glad I saw it all with my own eyes.” It's hard to imagine seeing many of today's major African American stars comporting themselves that way onstage, or staying so close to the communities that produced them.

In Brown's adopted hometown of Augusta, and in adjacent South Carolina, blacks remember Brown in his later years as relentlessly generous: He handed out free turkeys and Christmas gifts till just days before he died, even giving away his coat and working in the cold, shivering. He provided scholarships, furnished local football teams with uniforms, bought dozens of new computers for community centers, talked high school dropouts back into school, supported black businesses, bought cars for fellow churchgoers, and took care of old friends and acquaintances, even taking into his home for a time Clint Brantley, the manager who discovered him in the early years, paying Brantley's nursing-home costs, according to Brown's son Terry. My late sister Jack worked in a dry cleaners around the corner from the Apollo in the 1960s, and Jack said James Brown used to sometimes venture outside the Apollo when he was headlining and serve coffee, chat, and give autographs to fans who were lined up in the cold, waiting to see his show. Says Al Sharpton, who spent nearly two decades with Brown, “I remember times he would play in the South and kids would ride up to the airport just to look at his jet. I've seen kids in the middle of the night standing behind the gate while we was getting ready to take off, crying, looking at this black man with this jet. That's how inspiring he was. You gotta remember, you're talking about times when we wasn't three years, four years into voting, and this man's flying into little towns in Alabama and Georgia in a private jet, owning radio stations.” Black fans simply loved Brown.

And he loved them back. Even during his worst years, in the mid-eighties, when he was broke, his great band having fled, his personal life in shambles, his three radio stations sold or losing money, his plane repossessed, with no record deal and not enough cash to pay his band or even his utility bills at home, Brown refused to do sneaker or beer commercials. “Children need education,” he told Buddy Dallas. “They don't need sneakers and beer.”

Behind the looking glass Brown was, like many older blacks, deeply disappointed with the direction that some of black America had taken in the post–civil rights era. His accountant David Cannon tells the story of Brown being approached in an Augusta parking lot in the nineties by two kids, both dressed in hip-hop style, wearing their pants down around their butts and their baseball caps twisted backward. “Mr. Brown, we need a break,” one of them said. “It's hard out here. We can't get a job.”

“If you pull your britches up where they oughta be, and turn your cap around to the direction you're walking,” Brown said, “you'll be a lot better off.”

Yet, ironically, the same man who eschewed drugs and preached toeing the straight and narrow veered off it so badly at the end of his life that he became the subject of comedy routines. The film
Get On Up
shows a man who was once the essence of black American pride as a wild, crazy, torn-up mess, which is about right, I guess—except you could say that about a hungry three-year-old. It's a perfect storm of wrong history, offered up while the man's estate was still flung in the air for grabs, with lawyers gorging themselves on his musical carcass, which he left for the poor, not for them. The whole thing is a troubling metaphor for what the race discourse has become in America now. A troubled world, this new America, a disturbing world, where the n-word is verboten but the notion of poverty is not; a world with liars on both sides of the racial divide who will say anything and twist history any way they can in order to gain a percentage; a nation of private for-profit supermax prisons full of young men who desperately need help, guarded by other young men who once worked on farms and grew corn and raised cows in the very same places where those prisons now sit. A world of beer, cognac, guns, violence, nice cars, tennis shoes, and Super Bowl commercials. Jive. For Us. By Us. Sold to Us. By Ourselves.

The new cultural export: American Jive.

And today the lawyers argue about his estate while the guy who once gave us so much pride is buried in his daughter Deanna's front yard, his body having been deposited there while some of his children ponder the idea of his home becoming a museum someday.

By the time that “museum” opens, if it ever does, the cultural history will have shifted so much that the tundra will be unrecognizable. And there's not much more to look for in this story, really. Because the James Brown story is not about James Brown. It's about who's getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more. It's all in the hands of the executors, the lawyers, Brown's children, his ex-wives, his ex-friends. It's about how that whole pot gets passed around. It's reflective of the sad state of the American popular emporium these days, where for the last decade talent shows judged by stars whose names we'll forget five minutes past breakfast decide who has “talent” in America, while songs like “Bitch Better Have My Money” climb the charts. Maybe that's the kind of song we always wanted. Maybe it's the song we all deserve. But it wasn't the song Brown had in mind.

T
he search for understanding begins here at the margins, at a field near midnight, off Seven Pines Road, deep in the South Carolina backwoods of Barnwell County. It's a pitch-black night. A few crumpled beer cans lie in the gravel. I make out what looks like a piece of a barrel. A pail. A thick fog seems to have wrapped itself around the weeping willows. A dog barks somewhere. All around, the forest is taking back the land: weeds as high as my head, vines hanging low. South Carolina is full of weeping willows. It's a land of beauty and sorrow—and for black folks from here to the lowland Gullah country like Hilton Head Island, where clever developers paid unwitting poor blacks relative pennies for thousands of acres of waterfront property that they later sold for millions, it's also a land of a thousand ghosts.

An old jeep with one headlight appears out of the black field ahead. It jumbles forward through the high grass, the headlight jouncing and bouncing, winking through the weeds as it approaches. The jeep stops near me and the door flings open. A muscular brown arm appears. A brown head, lit from the inside of the jeep, pops out of the window. He calls out.

“Edgar?”

“Yeah.”

“What's up.”

“Nothing, man.” That's Edgar Brown talking. He's standing next to me. Edgar is a distant cousin of the late James Brown. Edgar's a tall, handsome, brown-skinned electrician in his fifties with a goatee. He's wide-shouldered and cool. The aim here is to find the true origins of the late James Brown.

Many have gone down this road and none, to my knowledge, have succeeded. The reason: James Brown didn't want you to know. Because if you did know, you wouldn't understand anyway. The house where he was born is one thing. That's easily found. It was a shack just up the road from where I'm standing. He showed the ruins of that old shack to friends all the time. I saw where it once sat myself—in a man's yard. A man with a big dog. That was close enough for me. The disappeared shack is part of the Brown mystery: keep 'em guessing. He told the Reverend Al Sharpton, whom he unofficially adopted when Sharpton was a teenager during the 1970s: “Don't let folks get too familiar, Rev. Don't stay in one place too long. Come important and leave important.” Even with his audiences, Brown had that attitude. His band would arrive onstage and blow the doors down, knock 'em dead, while Brown waited backstage, occasionally smoking a Kool cigarette, watching the audience, figuring out the exact right time to hit the stage, when the audience was primed and greased, howling for him. Only when the fans were warmed up, ready to burst with anticipation, would he stride onstage with his pigeon-toed gait and send them howling into delirium. And after he'd charged 'em up, picked 'em up, and leveraged 'em to the moon, knocked 'em out with blasts of soulful levity, he'd leave the stage. Afterward, the important folks—celebrities, other stars who hung backstage waiting to congratulate Brown—would wait for two or three hours while he sat under the hair dryer in his dressing room getting his pompadour redone, then he'd slip out without seeing anyone. “Why you leaving now?” Sharpton would say. “There's important people here! They want to see you!”

“Kill 'em and leave, Rev. Kill 'em and leave.”

He did it for almost fifty years. James Brown was not common. James Brown was not easily found or discussed or discovered—by anyone. James Brown kept his distance.

But his past he could not kill and leave.

He didn't want people to know, and standing here in this vacant lot, I can see why. There's no glory in this area here. It's not forlorn, but if you're not from here, you'd think twice about being here. It's not ugly, but it's not pretty either. It's just…funky.

Brown was always foggy about his past. When asked by reporters, he weaved and bobbed. He told a biographer this, he told a reporter that. What difference did it make? Folks think what they want anyway. He'd say he was from “the Augusta/Barnwell/Williston area,” where he lived in a “house with eighteen people” and no money. The story grew hair over the years: How his mother “ran off.” How his father left him with his aunt Honey when he was seven or eight. There's lots of versions of the story: a white version, a black version, a historical version, a record-company version. There's even an official version in his biography.

Charles Bobbit says of the biography, “A lot of that stuff is the writer. Mr. Brown didn't talk that way. He had a lot of stuff in his family, his family life, that he didn't want to come out. I'm probably the only one who knows what's real and what's not.”

So what's real?

Finding out became a question of angles, then more angles. I spun round in circles for months trying to find out what was real, only to find more angles. But one angle did check out. That was Edgar, a distant cousin of Brown's. I met Edgar through a guy through a guy through a guy. It was a stroke of good luck, or bad luck, depending, since I'm standing on the edge of a dark field in the middle of nowhere feeling chickenhearted, looking like a hippie holding a peace sign at a gun convention, and this guy in the jeep is staring at me hard.

The jeep purrs. Edgar and I squint through the headlight at the driver. Edgar motions his head toward me:

“This is the guy I was telling you about.”

As I approach the jeep, the driver, CR Gaines, a stout, brown-skinned man, looks me over suspiciously. “You bring me some cigarettes?”

“Yeah.”

I hand him the pack of Kools, the long ones. That's what he wanted. Given what most folks have been asking for every time I show up to do an interview on the Godfather, a pack of Kools is cheap. That's one of the first things you learn when you write about James Brown. Everybody's got one hand in their pocket and the other in yours. And by the way, they're all writing books. And since you're not writing theirs, they want money, favors, meals, book contracts, editorial guidance, movie deals, or just plain old cash for the bit of history they claim to know. Every two-bit hustler who ever touched Brown's hand, or played second guitar with him, or served him chicken and black beans, or promoted a concert, or sucked his vapors one way or the other thinks their story is worth something and wants to be paid for it. And those are the small-timers. The big boys, the lawyers, politicians, and accountants down in Bamberg and Aiken Counties, the guys who took Brown's last will and testament to court and some of whom munched at his estate, scavenging the bones, charging his estate huge sums in legal fees while they argued about it and dissected it, passing the carcass to their friends for further gouging—they're another matter entirely. Industrial-strength hustlers.

“You ready?” CR says. He is staring at me.

I don't know this guy from Adam. In fact I didn't know any of the craziness surrounding this story when I first got snookered into this game. Edgar said he was a distant cousin of Brown and that this guy, a direct cousin of Brown's, was “okay.” I'd only known Edgar twenty minutes and
he
seemed okay. But then again, so did the guy who stole my jalopy back in Brooklyn that time. I'm sure he was “okay”—to his momma.

CR sits there, glaring from the crappy-looking jeep with one headlight, in a barren field in the middle of nowhere, at near midnight, asking if I want to go for a ride into James Brown's history.

Nothing is okay.

But there is no choice to make. I've come a long way to get here. I've already taken my publisher's money. What else am I gonna do? I gotta go. I gotta take this ride.

I came down here on a bum steer. No need to lie or toss that in later. No need to slip that in with the old excuse, “I'm a musician too and I love the music,” or “The public needs a guy like me who can really tell it,” or whatever music critics say so that the corporate-music tastemakers can pump up the latest fifteen-year-old cuss artist while ignoring some real talent who's not good-looking or young enough. I needed the dough, plain and simple. The ex-wife dropped the hammer. Left two neat blue legal packets on the floor of the barren living room. The words said “McBride versus McBride,” which is another way of saying that whatever you thought passed for love didn't. I never cheated on her, by the way. Never did any of those nasty things that James Brown supposedly did with some of the women in his life, like punching her out or sleeping around. She got tired of benign neglect, is one reason, and hit the eject button with both fists. When that happens, you're sent flying, the explosion wrapping the whole sordid business around your nose like Saran Wrap. By the time you clear your nostrils to breathe and look for the rip cord, whatever half-truths are swirling in the air make every word you utter sound like a lie. Enemies appear. Friends are outraged. Neighbors shun you. And the lawyers charge.

I slept on a couch in a cold-water flat in Hell's Kitchen for a year and ate spaghetti and meatballs like one of those button men from
The Godfather
. When you blab that sob story to a divorce lawyer, by the way, their eyes roll to the back of their head and they look at their watch, wondering if there's an easier way to make a dollar change pockets. It's a skin game. Your skin, their game. My wife's attorney turned up for the contest wearing a crisp gray pinstripe suit and a yarmulke—which I took as an added jab, since my white, Jewish mom had closed her eyes in death just six months before. Call it what you want, but when I saw that guy walk into the room, I said to myself, “I better throw out those vacation folders.”

I had a good attorney. I'm thankful for that. But I was still cleaned out. Not long after that I got an email, and later a call, from a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. Some dude was bouncing about the Manhattan publishing scene peddling a whopper of a story. He was out of bounds, really. Nobody off the street hawks books to publishers these days except in the movies. Book agents sell books. But this guy was a kind-of guy. A kind-of record guy, kind-of filmmaker, kind-of documentary maker, kind-of agent, kind-of this and kind-of that, with flimflam written all over him. But he said the magic words:
“I got the James Brown story. The authentic one. From the family.”

Fourteen books on James Brown by some pretty good writers already on the deck, including two by Nelson George, the dean of R&B scribes, but I listened anyway. I should've faded out of the matter right then and there, or at least figured out where the mirrors were placed. But I agreed to meet him in Manhattan.

He showed up at my agent's office looking thoughtful, a middle-aged fellow in wire-rimmed glasses. When we sat down, the first thing I said to him was, “Gerri Hirshey is the writer you want. She knows James Brown better than any writer around.” I needed the money, but I still knew she was the one to do the book.

“I need a black writer to do this,” he snapped. This was a white guy talking. Right then I should have closed my raggedy notebook and headed back to my flophouse on Forty-Third Street to watch the tourists out the window and sip grape and feel sorry for myself. There was no one better for the job than Gerri. We'd walked a few miles together back at
The Washington Post
—and before that when she covered Michael Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour for
Rolling Stone
while I covered it for
People
magazine. That tour was a six-month monster, the biggest and most disorganized tour the music industry had ever seen. The entertainment press covered that thing like a presidential campaign.
Time, Life, Newsweek, Life, USA Today, US Magazine,
even my friend Steve Morse, the highly respected rock critic from
The Boston Globe,
showed up at opening night in Kansas City. We followed that circus like the White House press corps follows the president, staggering red-eyed from one city to the next, male reporters grumbling under their breath about what a jerk Michael Jackson was because he refused to do interviews, the female reporters strutting around in jeans tight enough to read the dates of the coins in their pockets.