One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (16 page)

“Didn’t nobody believe in us—none of the company executives believed in us,” said Byrd. “But see, we were out there. We saw the response as we run our show down.” Brown took the money they had saved for an upcoming Southern swing ($5,700) and gambled it on one night. Usually Brown fined his band five or ten dollars for making a mistake, but this time, he put out the word that if you flubbed a note at the Apollo, it would be fifty to a hundred.

By now, he and Syd had a comfortably contentious relationship. Brown would visit Nathan’s house to talk business, slipping a mezuzah around his neck in hopes of charming the man into submission, while Syd sat there in his underwear, ready for war. They needed each other. Radio wasn’t playing as much of King’s raw adult R&B as they used to, and while rock and roll was on the rise, King was painfully lacking in acts that appealed to
American Bandstand
viewers. Syd needed his hitmakers. For Brown, Nathan was an obstacle worth working around, because he provided things Brown wanted: the chance to make the singles that kept him on the road, and money, sometimes from the hits, and sometimes from loans from the boss. Maybe just as importantly, Syd gave Brown a father figure to oppose.

Steve Halper, Nathan’s nephew, saw the two argue many times about money. As Syd would point out, he always had James under contract, and one of the terms of their contract was that the contract didn’t
end as long as Brown owed Nathan money. Brown always owed Nathan twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars.

Chuck Seitz was the lead engineer at King in the early ’60s. “I remember James came in one day and he was evidently up against it, needed money. He wanted Syd to give him five thousand dollars,” recalled Seitz. “Syd said, ‘I’ll give you five thousand dollars if you’ll sign with me five more years.’ And James must have been up against it so he signed for five more years. And in that five-year period, the Apollo thing came around.”

For the past year, Brown’s shows had featured Yvonne Fair, a singer he first heard with girl group the Chantels. In Brown’s show she would come out and sing a few songs with the band, make the audience feel like they were really getting an abundance. A small item in
Jet
magazine in July hinted that Brown was working on something big. “People are talking about…James Brown’s ‘secret’ project, which is his writing a full-length rhythm and blues musical production, starring himself and pretty Yvonne Fair, and with plans for presenting it in several of the larger cities next spring.” That “full-length rhythm and blues musical” is what Brown unveiled, as the tape rolled, at the Apollo in October 1962. The weeklong stand, in which the group played five shows each day, was to upend rhythm and blues music.

So now ladies and gentlemen it is star time. Are you ready for star time?

When Fats Gonder came to the microphone to get the show rolling, the band had already been playing a while. The ushers stood ready, the crowd was greased.

Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present for you at this particular time, nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in show business, the man who sang “I’ll Go Crazy”—

Gonder’s palaver radiates from his sternum, it’s down-home ballyhoo. The band hits a brassy chord, the crowd goes wild.

“Try Me”!

“You’ve Got the Power”!

Every line he shouts is accompanied by a blaring chord and then silence. It’s like someone is dangling a jewel before you, then snatching it away, over and over.

“Think!”

“If You Want Me”!

“I Don’t Mind”!

“BeWILdered”!

“Million-dollar seller ‘Lost Someone’!”

“The very latest release, ‘Night Train’!”

“Let’s everybody ‘Shout and Shimmy’!”

“Mister Dynamite, the amazing Mister ‘Please, Please, Please’ himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames”—

Suddenly the horns count off the beat—wah-wah-wah-wah—and Les Buie’s gutbucket guitar yanks us off the curb we’ve been parked on and into traffic.

Brown: “You know I feel all right.” Pause. “I feel all right children, I feel allll riiiiiiight!” He is screaming with a vibrato. That’s not easy. The first four songs explore the distance from “don’t go” to “please come back.”

“I’ll Go Crazy”: An order—if you leave I will go insane.

“Try Me”: A plea—I am so in need.

“Think”: A prescription—are you insane? I am the solution to your problems.

“I Don’t Mind”: The truth—you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.

The first four songs establish a mood. Memories of relationships, or maybe just
that one
, lie shattered into a hundred fragments—a broken mirror across the floor, the singer seeing his solitude wherever he looks. And before his reflection, he poses.

Don’t he look good?

The set piece is “Lost Someone,” a ballad whose chords rise like a half-
filled balloon, they fall almost to the ground, lift a little higher, fall again…It is a courtship, with his audience, conducted entirely in screams. “I’ll looove you tomorrow,” he screams, putting a shimmy on the words. It is an amazing thing to hear a scream vibrate like that, and it shows the control Brown has over a technique most often used to signify a loss of control.

The scream was a transfer from the black church; for the previous one hundred years, where else in public could a black man yell like he could at church? Where else would he not have been whipped, or institutionalized, or shoved to the margins for making the sounds that Brown is luxuriating in making right now at the Apollo? It is a scream activated by the church but not of it, a scream that is an agent of change.

The scream: It is an ugly sound, always has been. Brown was throwing ugly all over the Apollo, and by setting it to the rising and falling spiral of “Lost Someone,” and by stretching it across ten minutes, he makes the song a journey in which screams mark our progress. He builds a universe of screams, and it’s not his alone: “I’m not singing a song for myself, now/I’m singing it for you, too!” It is an ugliness that he throws out to the crowd and that he wants thrown back. “When I sing that little part that might sting you in your heart, I want to hear you scream,” he sings, as he and the audience exchange oowwws that are at the same time calm and shattering. This was evidence of the soul, in the old context, and evidence of soul music in the present one, feeling its force at the Apollo: a soul that was not something for poor folks or Southern folks but for anyone in pain, a soul to acknowledge and find room for in your life. At this moment the Apollo Theater was like a jukebox, an Ark, engulfing the country in its light.

Brown was steeped in gospel; he just didn’t go to church much. As a boy he studied preachers and aspired to be like them; he just didn’t want to be them. The fine line in talking about Brown and gospel is that he was of the music, but not quite of the faith. In his own words, he did not regularly attend services, and when he did,
he went to various churches, none winning his affiliation. More than Tom Dorsey or Ray Charles, or anyone but Aretha Franklin, Brown was a musician who inserted the sound and feeling of black faith into the popular arena, showing us that there is no such thing as a simple churchgoing man. He heard gospel and God the way he heard, say, Louis Jordan or Billy Wright, or for that matter, the way he learned about knife fighting and dice—they were vital aspects of life lived on the streets.

Men of the cloth—most of all Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., but many more who stood behind him—were showing the claims black church could make on all of American society. Black artists of the time were doing the same thing. You could identify it most easily in the singers, which is why Brown and Franklin and so many more behind them were rightfully seen to be bringing gospel into the marketplace—even white folks who had never been inside a black church could not avoid the obvious truth of this. They were called “soul” singers. The vocalists got the attention, but in fact a whole performance style was flowing from the pulpit to the Apollo in sanctified rhythms that the best drummers played, in the body moves that signified the presence of greater forces, in the belief that artifice must be lost and that the way ahead was lighted by a direct truth that came from within but did not originate there.

“How do you define soul, James?” talk show host David Frost asked his guest.

Brown: “The truth.”

Frost: “The truth?”

Brown: “The truth. The down-to-earth truth. It’s from the ghetto, it’s a definition of hard knocks, it’s a way of explaining yourself. When
other
people don’t understand what you’re saying, you try to get it across in a song. It’s a kind of a frightful thing to avail, so you had to go through a song. Soul explains that, it explains the hard knocks, it explains everyday life, telling it like it is. The truth.”

Everybody in exquisite congress, attuned to the moment. Many a
writer looking back on the age of soul music would celebrate it as a great expression of blacks and whites working together, a music that would not have lived without the two races overcoming American history to create in tandem. But across this song, and across this landscape, all the faces on stage and virtually all those in the audience are black. This isn’t a historic moment for liberalism, but a historic one for African Americanism.

Then, somewhere in the middle of “Lost Someone,” bassist Hubert Perry lost his footing and started drifting away from the chords of the song, wandering off. He was not going to slip
that
past the boss. Brown weighed in as the song rolled on, so sweetly the audience could hardly have known what he was talking about; like Adam Clayton Powell Jr., ordering iced tea in the middle of a sermon, he said, “You know we all make mistakes sometimes/And the only way we can correct our mistakes/We got to try one more time.” (That and a fine after the show should square the ledger.)

In ways great and fractional, “Lost Someone” is about everybody—the band, Brown, and the audience—in communion with one another, feeling totally open for a moment, for as long as they could forget the clock.

Eventually they played their latest hit, “Night Train,” completely unlike the single, released in March 1962. On record it rumbles, you can hear the milk train moving through the night. At the Apollo, drummer Clayton Fillyau’s foot kicks a hole in the song, his bass drum reorganizing the beat, horns chitter-chattering around his foot. There’s nothing late-night tired about it now, this song roars, “New York City take me home.”

I
n a band fronted by a loud, charismatic singer, it was easy to fade in the background. Indeed, becoming one with the wallpaper was a good way to survive in this band. One of the most important, least-known instrumentalists, and quite possibly the most valuable player of
Live at the Apollo
, was Lewis Hamlin, a trumpet man and the group’s
musical director. Nobody had as much influence on the sound at this defining moment. “Lewis is the forgotten man in setting the musical course for the band,” said Brown’s longtime saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney.

Hamlin was raised in Macon’s Tindall Heights housing projects (Otis Redding also lived there). Already improvising on the trumpet as a teenager, he took a slot in the jump band led by piano player Gladys Williams. She remains an unsung hero in her own hometown; Otis Redding, Little Richard, and many more passed through her band.

After bandleader J. C. Davis left, Brown was back in Macon, assembling a new group. According to Reppard Stone, who grew up with Hamlin, Brown asked Hamlin to join him as a horn player, and, knowing Hamlin had extensive contacts on the Macon scene, he also asked his help in assembling the new group.

Brown was building more dance into his show, and doing it in the moment; it meant the band had to keep vamping, or had to change the tempo, or follow him in whatever direction he was suddenly taking things. The band of the early 1960s was filling up with musicians able to turn on a heartbeat and thrive in an improvisational moment—a different, more sophisticated cast compared to J. C. Davis’s rabble-rousers. Brown did not read music, he could not always talk music to his musicians, but he
knew
music. He quickly grasped the skills new instrumentalists brought to the show. He reacted to them, and used them to challenge himself.

Hamlin was perhaps the first to understand how Brown was weaving songs into a flow that he intended to shape, and reshape, according to his reading of the crowd. As his music director, Hamlin watched Brown’s movements, and instructed the band to follow what he was doing. “Lewis, in time, grew to understand his body language,” said Stone. “While James was singing, let’s say he would do three steps and then stop. Lewis would point out to the other musicians, when he stopped,
you
got to stop, and let him sing his
baby-baby-baby
, and then don’t come back in until he says
huh
!
They never wrote anything down, they just learned from each other.”

Hamlin was an interpreter fluent in James Brown. “He was a communicator. He could communicate with musicians when James couldn’t. James didn’t know how to
greet
them. James could tell them something and it would sound like a criticism. Lewis could do it and they’d go,
yeah
, and get right on board.”

T
he Apollo show was one of the first times drummer Clayton Fillyau had recorded with the band. (He is the main drummer on the recording, if not the only one; it’s possible a second drummer is also heard on the recording.) A place of combustion like the Apollo was perfect for him. “He was the kind of guy who just liked that atmosphere—if it was jamming and hot in there and you had some good musicians in there, oh, get out of his way. ’Cause he wanted to grab some sticks and get up on stage,” said his son, Clayton Fillyau Jr. Fillyau
worked
.

A rugged baller who Brown called Biggun, Fillyau was known to pack a gun under his jacket, which, when things got rockin’, sometimes was known to fall out on the stage. Which was not the worst thing that could happen on the chitlin circuit, where letting the guys with guns in the audience know that the drummer was packing, too, could squelch all sorts of stuff.