One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (30 page)

“Say It Loud” patently avoids
me
; it’s all about
us
. “We demand a chance to do things for ourselves/We’re tired of beatin’ our head against the wall/And workin’ for someone else.” One song says American history has made him free; the other says he’s still a slave. Those opposites would define Brown’s life in the days ahead.

T
hat fall, Ben Bart suffered a fatal heart attack while playing golf in New Rochelle. Coupled with Syd Nathan’s passing five months before, Brown had lost his two most important mentors. At thirty-five, he was feeling powerful and alone.

The relationship with Bart had diminished, and Brown took on more of the booking and promoting of shows himself. The whole concert industry was changing, with major management companies now signing up black acts that would have depended on the chitlin circuit not long before. In Atlanta, a group of thirty-one promoters formed an organization to keep whites from gaining a monopoly on black talent. They enlisted the help of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket. That organization was using boycotts and other economic pressure to pump money into black businesses.

In Philadelphia, the
Tribune
reported that a group called the Fair Play
Committee was threatening to “eliminate” two DJs engaged in a dispute with Brown. The New York–based committee was led by Dino “Boom Boom” Washington and producer Johnny Baylor. They said they were supporters of Brown who had complained that the jocks were not airing a commercial for his upcoming appearance because the jocks promoted competing shows of their own. Publicity, and a show of police force, calmed the situation.

The black circuit was being dismantled, and entrepreneurs, sometimes using activists with names like Boom Boom, were pushing back. It made the field more complicated in theory, but in practice, it was a lucrative time to be James Brown. According to Levi Rasbury, who did bookkeeping for Brown on the road, by employing his own promotion team, putting his own posters up, and printing his own tickets, Brown was averaging “anywhere from ten to fifteen thousand a night on regular nights. And if it’s a big promotion like Madison Square Garden or the Coliseum in Chicago, Braves Stadium in Atlanta, he was making thirty-five or forty-five thousand.”

For considerably less than that sum, Brown accepted a booking that surprised many when it was announced: the inauguration of Richard Nixon in January 1969. The appearance baffled fans. Having given his blessing to Humphrey, how could he so quickly roll over and play for the man who beat him? Brown’s stated answer was that he wanted the president to succeed in bringing people together.

Starting off the gala at the National Guard Armory was Lionel Hampton, the oldest black supporter of Nixon anyone could find—and people looked. Then came Brown, who did a set that included, somewhat improbably, a certain recent hit. “Every time the little dynamo commanded ‘Say It Loud,’ a little, black cheering section to the left of stage center in the $100 seats jumped to its feet to answer back, ‘I’m black and I’m proud,’” reported
Jet
. Eventually, even some of the white guests were singing.

Then Dinah Shore came out in a gold lamé sheath dress, singing a batch of Negro spirituals that she “heard as a child.”

Look
magazine put Brown on the cover of the February issue, with these words provocatively across the front: Is he the most important black man in America? Good question.
Look
didn’t know the answer any more than Dinah Shore knew Negro spirituals, but as 1969 began, at least it was a question worth asking.

Chapter Fifteen

COLOR TVS AND DASHIKIS

T
wo weeks into the Nixon administration and Brown was back in the studio, recording a song that stated his philosophy as clearly as could be. The sui generis celebration of an “us” in “Say It Loud” was replaced with a bracing expression of one man’s rights. If you want
your
rights, repeat after Brown: “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself).” Give him an even playing field and he can take it from there.

Nixon had campaigned on a domestic policy he called “New Federalism.” The idea was to transfer power, money, and responsibility from Washington to states and individuals. He knew how to undermine his predecessor’s Great Society and make an evisceration look like a fresh start. Heck, Nixon had enough poetry in his soul to spot the possibilities in a phrase like “black power.” There he was, giving a speech on CBS, teasing the possibilities out: “Much of the black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist ’30s—terms of pride, ownership, private enterprise, capital—the same qualities, the same characteristics, the same ideals, the same methods that for two centuries have been at the heart of American success.”

With
far more dexterity than Humphrey dancing the boogaloo, Nixon sold his urban policy. It was “oriented toward more black ownership, for from this can flow the rest: black pride, black jobs, and, yes, Black Power—in the best sense of that often misapplied term.” Dude had
skills
.

Depicting government help as patronizing, celebrating the powers of the individual, Nixon was in tune with the Hardest Working Man. In the years ahead, when Brown was pressed for a statement on his politics, he would quote from “I Don’t Want Nobody.” No welfare for him. “Don’t give me integration, I want true communication,” he sang, “don’t give me sorrow, I want equal opportunity to live tomorrow.” This was a little bit Booker T. Washington and a little bit Pat Moynihan, and the way Brown sang his song, you better get out of the way when the door opened, or else he was coming through
you
. Doing it yourself was an act of manhood. The sentiment was good enough for Cleveland’s Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a large American city, to present Brown the key to the city onstage, and then quote the song to the delight of the singer and his audience.

By 1969, Brown had taken to declaring that he was “25 percent entertainer and 75 percent businessman.” He had already established a business office in New York, and owned real estate and radio stations. Nixon had been secretly meeting with black activists Roy Innis of CORE and Floyd McKissick, enlisting their support for his black capitalism initiative. Brown already believed in the position Nixon was trying to steer these activists toward: that the power of the dollar could solve most of black America’s problems.

“I Don’t Want Nobody” was a vivid illustration of his social ideas, and of his musical ones, too, because the song captures the powers of the One. You can hardly pat your foot to “I Don’t Want Nobody” without feeling how hard the whole band leans into that first beat of the measure. The One was a factor in many of his great records of this era, but on “I Don’t Want Nobody” it isn’t just asserted, it hits like a wrecking ball.

The One might have been a necessity born of Brown’s impulsiveness. Reading a crowd perfectly, he could tell when he was losing them and abruptly toss out a just-started tune, extend a bridge for ten minutes, point to a new drummer to take over without losing the beat because the current guy was going nowhere. Brown made his changes on the One, and if the band knew where it was, and used it as their switching yard, then they could keep playing without getting thrown off by his unpredictable changes of direction.

Whatever it was that drew him to the One, he was pushing everybody in the group to respect its power. When singer Marva Whitney joined the group, he changed her vocal style in two big ways: He pushed her to sing higher than she was comfortable with, giving her a deranged, urgent style, and he taught her to sing everything on the downbeat.

“I learned to do…what Mr. Brown called ‘on the one.’ See, I didn’t sing on the one and that doesn’t come overnight. They had to teach me how to pat my foot,” Whitney said. “In church you pat your foot with your toe, but when you’re with Mr. Brown, you pat your foot from the heel, which gives you a whole new thing, which they call funk. And if you don’t do it like that you don’t do the real funk, and that took me a while.”

What did patting from your heel do that using your toe did not? It put your ass into motion. It got your body moving to the beat.

Moving asses:
That
he could control. Commercial forces, however, were beyond his powers, and in the wake of “Say It Loud,” white-owned radio stations and white programmers turned their backs on him en masse. Just as he was entering a dazzling new period of creativity, he started having trouble with the pop charts. “Say It Loud” scared the gatekeepers, and after it became a pop hit, well, the gatekeepers kept Brown from having another one for seventeen years. He was digging deep into the One, reinventing his sound again, and it came at a moment when white listeners were tuning out. The audience got blacker, and drawing on the One, the music turned to funk.

These factors shaped his life in the years ahead. They were barely visible in 1969, while more pressing matters were at hand. Around this time, Brown was doing a dance on stage called “Bringing Up the Guitar” (the name of a 1968 Brown-produced instrumental by the Dapps featuring Pee Wee Ellis). That dance morphed into a step called the Popcorn round about the time Brown rerecorded “Bringing Up the Guitar” as “The Popcorn” under his own name late in 1968. Early in 1969, Brown cut a devastating bump called “You Got to Have a Mother For Me,” in which he shared with the world his taste for booty—“a mother” was his honorific for a big butt, and a mother is what he liked. (Fred Daviss: “That man would fuck a snake if it had an ass on it.”) “Mother” was scheduled to come out in March, but then Brown decided to put out “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” instead. As Douglas Wolk has written, this “had the twin advantages of better politics and a longer title.”

Now it becomes complicated. “The Popcorn” was getting traction on the charts, it was a groove dancers loved. So Brown took the lyrics from the still unreleased “You Got to Have a Mother For Me” and retooled the music of “The Popcorn” for yet
another
single: “Mother Popcorn.” This was a brilliant piece of lust and rhythm. “Mother Popcorn” was not soul music; it spoke to the body, and it moved the body in ways soul music knew not. This was funk, possibly the moment when Brown fully moved from soul to funk—a music that didn’t even have a name yet. It was just James Brown music. It was the sound of the One.

Popcorn itself was another euphemism for booty. Popcorn was something he could not quit. Brown revisited and reinvented tunes throughout his career, and in a month he had gone back in the studio, stripped out most of the rhythm from “Mother Popcorn,” and recorded a sibling called “Lowdown Popcorn.” Not as great, but it still had enough on it to get to sixteen on the R&B charts.

By late 1969, “popcorn” might have been shorthand for “funk” itself, a magical substance, a kind of
lapis philosophorum
applied
to records in carefully calibrated amounts: Too much popcorn and the whole world might explode. He doled it out in prescribed quantities. There was “Answer to Mother Popcorn (I Got a Mother For You)” sung by Vicki Anderson; Charles Spurling cut “Popcorn Charlie”; Hank Ballard essayed “Butter Your Popcorn”; and Brown came back with “Let a Man Come in and Do the Popcorn.” This was a commercial craze fronting for an obsession—and in the end it was that obsession for a “mother,” for the One, that white radio was really not ready for.

D
avid Susskind had a popular syndicated talk show on which he had interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and so he had come to believe he knew how to bond with black people. One afternoon in the summer of 1969, he was appearing on the daytime chat program
The Mike Douglas Show
along with James Brown. Their conversation went a whole different way.

Quite clearly Susskind viewed Brown as a comparable spokesman for black America. He starts engaging the singer directly, Douglas quickly downgraded to something like a wrestling referee. Susskind saw in Brown’s call for black pride the bugaboo of separatism, and he did not approve. The singer responded forcefully that
he’s
not separating and that most African Americans won’t. But he pointed a finger at rich whites in a position to do a lot more for blacks.

“You have everything you want, you can do anything you want, and I can’t right now, and I probably got as much as you, or almost, but I got enough to
buy
anything I want,” he tells Susskind with a grimace. “Don’t tell me we’re going backwards.”

“You’re going backwards,” Susskind baits, jabbing his thumb toward Brown, “if you separate yourself.”

“We’re
not
separatin’,” shouts Brown.

As was often the case with Brown, the issue came down to manhood.

“
You call yourself a man, knowing that I pay taxes same as you, stayed right here and used my sweat and blood to help build this country, and
I
got to be a second-or third-class citizen? Do you call that a man? I want to know about my identity—when a flag go up, an American flag at a school, it should have an Afro American flag there with it. Give me an identity—a Negro can’t go back nowhere. Let me have an identity!”

Susskind, with a side of smug: “Now Jimmy, should they bring out the flag of Israel for me, or the flag of Poland for somebody else?”

Brown: “Yes.” He sees Susskind looking amused. “This is not really a joke. You’re laughing at something that’s going to be a big problem. Because you got kids out there that can’t eat, robbing and stealing, doing what they have to do to make it, and if you don’t do something about it, we gonna lose the country internally.”

Susskind: “You want to win your objectives by disassociating yourself.”

Brown: “We’re
not
disassociating. We want to be able to identify
with
something. We’ve always been asked to identify with you, and what do we get? Nothing!”

The conversation turns to Susskind’s show. Brown says black people can’t relate to it; Susskind argues that he has a black writer on his staff.