One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (18 page)

Shoes off, house slippers on to make the journey upstairs, passing a trio of large white B’s decorating the black upholstered walls. The plastic-covered rug, the slippers, everything, Arbus described, created the impression that this was a place to be seen, not inhabited. “It is as if the whole house were being preserved against the hazards of being lived in, as if it were being prepared for a great future as a museum.”

Underground was where it came alive. “It had a beautiful large basement that we used to go down and have our drinks in,” said Bobby Roach. “They used to keep white lightning from Toccoa down there. We’d mix in this grape drink called Delaware Punch, that was his drink. Tasted good with that white lightning.”

Aboveground he declared who he was: a man of riches who had arrived. Below the surface, if you got there, he was still a Southerner, sipping on Delaware Punch.

T
he actor Marlon Brando was raised by two alcoholic parents; his father was a mean drunk who beat his mother on many occasions. In a memoir,
Songs My Mother Taught Me
, the actor described how the neglect and abuse he felt as a child fed the emotional intensity of his work.

“When you are a child who is unwanted or unwelcome, and the essence of what you are seems to be unacceptable, you look for an identity that will be acceptable,” Brando wrote. “You make a habit of studying people, finding out the way they talk, the answers that they give and their points of view; then, in a form of self-defense, you reflect what’s on their faces and how they act because most people like to see reflections of themselves.”

Nobody studied the reactions of people around him with more hunger and intelligence than James Brown. He observed the faces in the seats, made instant decisions on how to structure a
performance from what he saw. As an aide put it, even when he was onstage singing “please, please, please” with his eyes closed and tears streaming down his cheeks, even
then
Brown was watching everything.

“If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies,” Brando said. “It’s the ultimate hustle.” Brown wanted plenty from his audience, and he set about figuring how to feed their fever. In the wake of
Live at the Apollo’
s success, he devoted himself to building a bigger, cross-racial audience, methodically making personal choices based on the effect they had on his audience. The clothes and look that had signified flash on the chitlin circuit would get an overhaul. Brown favored cheap suits in gaudy colors, wide shoes, and stretched his money to buy as many things as he could afford. As he played to urban, Northern audiences and identified what worked and what didn’t, he began buying suits that complemented his short boxer’s build, going for a look that drew attention up high, to his collar and tie and face. He began favoring quality over quantity. He wasn’t going to ask associates for advice or help, but when he saw something he liked, he took it. One day he saw his old friend Allyn Lee wearing a new green jacket, and he started asking Lee where he got it and suggesting he take it back, throw it away, the thing was no damn good. Next time Lee ran into Brown, he was wearing the very same jacket.

If he wanted folks to keep their attention tight on him, more changes were necessary. Avid fans might have noticed how little the singer smiled, the reason being he had a gap in his front teeth that all but proclaimed Georgialina. His hair, too, was a problem. He was devoted to a look that had terraced waves and curls on top, a version of the popular “Tony Curtis” style, but a few songs in, when he started sweating, everything drooped, and he looked stringy, soggy.

Together these formed a theme to his life, a subject he returned to throughout his career. “Hair and teeth,” he rasped, “a man got
those two things he got it all.” It sounds so simple, but in African American history, the simplest seeming subjects are often the most elaborate. Booker T. Washington was a fanatic on the subject of the toothbrush. Good grooming was how you first sold yourself to the world, and bad teeth, he felt, reflected lack of self-respect. Richard Carroll was a Barnwell-born black reverend who is often called the Booker T. Washington of South Carolina. Carroll went deep on the subject, declaring, “There is a close relation between bad teeth and dyspepsia, between dyspepsia and religious temperament, and between religious temperament and true spirituality of life.” Without good teeth, a man had nothing.

Knowing how tough he could look, and how conventionally un-handsome, Brown set about to invert the effect. In 1961, Brown and assistant Frank McRae stopped on a Los Angeles trip long enough to visit the leading black dentist in Southern California, and have the gap fixed and serious dental work done. For the rest of his life, Brown saw good teeth as a secret of his success. “My mouth,” he proclaimed, “is probably the best attribute for me that I’ve ever had in my business, because with this I can smile.”

Soon after the two met in 1961, McRae became something like Brown’s personal shopper and all-around fashion consultant. The dapper McRae was a “gentleman’s gentleman” who worked in a barbershop behind the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. McRae saw Brown slide into his chair one day and was so bold as to suggest he could do something about that hair. Bluntly laying out how Brown had a hard face, McRae said that a bouffant style with some croquignole curls would significantly soften his aspect. Soon McRae was on the road with Brown, even sitting on the stage with the band, to be ready when he was needed. From his chair by the horns, said McRae, “I was watching his hair. I loved seeing how it shined in the light, and how people would be screaming.”

Expoobident
, he proclaimed: hipster lingo that meant tight, neat,
glorious
. McRae made Brown’s hair expoobident, and the boss was appreciative. From the early ’60s on, Brown would have
his hair done in the morning, again before a show, and then again after. And the singer loved to conduct interviews while his hair was being done. Before he left his dressing room and took the stage, Brown would stare in the mirror, examine the man before him. If the hair was right,
he
was right. “James Brown loved his hair better than he loved his women,” said McRae.

Further refinements followed. An executive order went out: He was to be called “Mr. Brown,” and he addressed others as “Mister” or “Miss.” It was a courtly decorum, and a pointed inversion of the disrespectful way white Southerners had always addressed blacks. By making it a rule everyone was expected to follow, he put one straightaway onto his turf.

There were rules at home and rules on the road. The schedule was crushing, and his many rules were meant to make it possible to play five shows a day, five days a week. But there was also an element of imperiousness to it, which came out in the open over time. An element of whimsy, too; some rules might be eccentric, but he was the boss and you were not.

Prison had ordered his life, and he was passing on his need for order to those around him. No tuning up onstage, no getting your chops ready—one arrived set to play. You wore a suit and tie on the bus and getting off it; women wore high heels, stockings, and a dress. Your uniform had better be clean. When Brown spun around two, three times, chances are he was inspecting the troops. When he was being led off the stage at the end of the show by the Flames, in mock exhaustion, Brown took the opportunity to scrutinize the shoes of every musician, looking for Vaseline on leather to fake a good shine. That was a hundred dollars right there.

After a time early on when the band packed up and left, and a stranded Brown was beaten and robbed, a new rule was established: Nobody could leave the venue until Brown left. Everybody was on call. “You got to be like an act, so therefore you cannot mingle, so you have to stay in the dressing room,” said Byrd. “The only time you see whoever you need to see is on your way home, after the
show is over, but you can’t come out of the dressing room…. You are an act now, so you have to be in here.”

The system of fines has become a part of Brown’s image as a tough general. He flashed hand signals to musicians, for missing a cue, for gravy on their collar. Fines were theoretically taken out of one’s pay on payday, and put into a pot for parties. But the system was not written in stone. It was according to Brown’s whim, and some strong individuals claimed they never paid a single fine. The point, ultimately, was to know that he was watching.

A cordon of helpers flocked to Brown. There was Gertrude Sanders, the only behind-the-scenes female force, who became the uniform mistress. She cut an unforgettable figure, limping down a backstage corridor with an iron in her hand. There were valets for Brown and for the Flames, and valets in waiting who traveled on their own dime hoping for a chance to make themselves indispensable.

A set of knuckleheads was also vying for attention. They helped when it was time to collect the night’s receipts. They got stuff for Brown, rustling women and keeping other women away. Chief among them in the early 1960s was a New York hoodlum named Baby James.

“He was a different kind of person, extraordinarily rough. We had to keep him straight,” recalled Brown’s boyhood friend Henry Stallings, who became one of Brown’s hairdressers. “See, you got to give a little and take a little, but Baby was the type of person to take it all. James would give him some money and say, ‘Take the man to the door,’ but Baby would beat him all the way to the door.” When James asked him to do stuff, Baby would be doing it to death, until James had to pay him to stop. Some guys just know how to make themselves useful.

The new security team had the boss’s back, though it wasn’t, strictly speaking, like the boss was vulnerable. As Reverend Al Sharpton put it, “You notice how many pictures of James Brown, he’s got a coat over his arm? Could be 95-degree weather in Miami, you’d see him with an overcoat over his arm. That’s because he had his gun under it.”

Those who had known Brown awhile were surprised by the new style. Seymour Stein first met him when he worked at King in the 1950s, and had gone on the road with him. In the mid-’60s Stein took the bubblegum act the McCoys up to see Brown at the Apollo. They met Nathan backstage, during a time when he and the singer were particularly at loggerheads. When Brown saw Syd and his party, he pulled a gun on them all and told them to leave.

Live at the Apollo
validated notions Brown harbored about his own correctness. Hadn’t he just made the bestselling album in the history of King Records—and been forced to pay for it himself? He had just won the biggest argument in his life. The lesson of
Live at the Apollo
was to keep on fighting, to swing like Beau Jack until some stronger force shut you down.

The loudest fight with Nathan was over the new, improved contract Brown wanted and felt he’d earned. That was the tip of it, but then there was other stuff. There was the matter of pride. When Brown went into the studio to record “Oh Baby Don’t You Weep,” that part of the quarrel came all the way out into the open. “Baby” was a long, blue moan, that took the spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep” out of the church and put it on the cover of a dime novel: “You scream and you holler, your back is soaking wet,” he tells a woman who can’t forget the man that forgot her. The song is
about
the sweat, its words don’t hold together neatly, yet as a performance it is deeply felt. It works.

During the recording, Gene Redd, the tart producer who made some of King’s best R&B, stopped the session to tell Brown his piano playing was “musically incorrect.” Brown’s response couldn’t have been clearer: “Does it sound good to me? Then it’s not incorrect.” Further words were exchanged and Redd stalked out of the booth to complain to Nathan. To his credit, he told Redd to stow it and do it Brown’s way, but the damage was already done. Brown was a decent player on a number of instruments, but not by the standards of a professional like Redd. Brown was something rarer than a great musician: He knew when the bad note was the
right one, when the noise landed in the right spot. At crucial moments
feel
guided him, and Brown was brave enough to trust it even when the musicians in the room were shaking their heads.

Feel had always been a presence, feel not just in trusting a bad note, but in terms of subtleties, like the way his late ’50s and early ’60s ballads have a wayward, chambered darkness in the horn parts. Sometimes feel is a superb performance, a scream that pushes out at you inappropriately, a delivery style that overwhelms ordinary material and remakes it. Over time his confidence only grew. It wasn’t a passion for rawness, exactly—how could it be, given how hard he rehearsed the band? It was an absolute openness, though, to what was alive in the moment.

“He couldn’t read music, but he knew exactly what he wanted,” said Fillyau. Taking a seat at the organ, Brown would play a song that Fillyau felt was full of wrong notes, sounds he’d been taught would never work. Then Brown would break down the thing he’d played note by note and tell the band to perform it that way.

It had nothing to do with preconceived ideas or principles. “You don’t know why one day you want steak, the next day you want fatback,” Brown explained. “People who plan what they are gonna do, they don’t look good.”

Brown knew he looked good. Convinced that he was right and mad at Redd for insulting him in front of the band and mad at Syd for being Syd, after “Oh Baby” he stopped making records for King.

While continuing to press for a new contract with King, he formed the Fair Deal Record Corporation in early 1964. Its very name suggests a message to Nathan. Its officers were Brown, his father Joe Brown, and Ben Bart. Together they concluded that, since the current contract was for “James Brown and the Famous Flames,” Brown was free to record without the Famous Flames wherever he wanted. Mercury Records had made Fair Deal an offer through subsidiary label Smash, and Brown took the deal. He would produce other acts and record his own music on Smash.

That was just the declaration of war. In the opening skirmish, Fair Deal leased singles by Bobby Byrd and the new female singer in his show, Anna King, to Smash. This was war by proxy. From King: silence. Or at least, the lawyers were silent. Nathan flooded the market with a torrent of inferior Brown product. He re-released “Please, Please, Please” with crowd noises tacked on, hoping to fool the gullible into thinking that it was a new live recording. He put out stuff he had refused to put out before. Back at you, nothing more.