One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (46 page)

It was at this moment, when his finances were in shambles and his ability to make money severely disabled, that Brown began using the synthetic drug PCP regularly. Also called angel dust, it had once been used as an animal tranquilizer and was tested as a human anesthetic decades earlier, though it was discarded because of the psychotic effects it triggered. Brown broke up chartreuse crumbs of the drug and sprinkled them over marijuana. For years he talked about it as if it was only marijuana he was smoking, and he almost seemed to believe it himself. Bob Patton, a booker and aide to Brown, accidentally shared a joint dosed with PCP in the mid-1970s and hallucinated for hours. Vicki Anderson, a singer with the show, told writer Barney Hoskyns that Brown was smoking PCP before 1982. His usage became well known in Brown’s inner circle by the mid-1980s, and it affected how business was done.

“One time we was in Augusta and we got to get paid,” recalled Clayton Fillyau Jr. “My dad was under a tree drinking his liquor. He calls Danny Ray, asking if James Brown was home; ‘Man he’s home, but I don’t know if you wanna go, he’s on that stuff,’ Danny told Dad.

“Dad thought we got to go get paid before he gets too crazy. We were driving fast when all of a sudden this black Seville comes passing us going the other way at 130 miles per hour. It was James Brown. My dad turns around and pulls him over, but before we can get to him he hops around the car, does some little dance or something, then just jumps in and is flying back into South Carolina. We couldn’t keep up with him.”

Angel dust makes the legs wobbly, triggers nausea and dizziness; mental effects include a sense of disassociation from one’s body. It is sometimes grouped with anesthetics, but unlike most anesthetics PCP isn’t a depressant—it
speeds up the heart and can foster great physical feats. The singer had scorned intoxicants his whole career, rarely going so far as to have two drinks before bed. What led him, in his fifties, to pursue PCP? Perhaps Brown was drawn to it because, after a lifetime of exerting rigorous discipline over every aspect of his life, abandoning himself to its loss of control had a strong attraction.

Maybe it was all the things that he used to do but wouldn’t anymore. Levi Rasbury thinks Brown struggled with the diminishment of his gifts. “You are a perfectionist and you honed your ability to the point that you became uniquely successful. And then, through no fault of your own, it’s not there anymore. [The drug use] was a result, I think, of not being able to handle the outcome of what happened.

“Falling from grace is one thing. But to be a perfectionist who has to face failure? That’s an ordeal. Those are suicidal situations, there.”

O
n Groundhog Day in 1982, he was taping an appearance on the syndicated TV show
Solid Gold
. Brown would sing “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and perform a comedy routine with ventriloquist Wayland Flowers and his puppet, Madame. Walking down a hallway before the taping, Brown saw the show’s hairstylist through an open door. “Good God,” he said, “look at the
spank
on that woman.” He told Sharpton to get her number and ask her out for him.

The two began spending a lot of time together. Adrienne Lois Rodriguez, thirty-two, was an exotic-looking woman who had once dated Elvis Presley. She was Italian, black, Jewish, and Latina, and in some pictures she looked like a modern-day Cleopatra with heavy eye shadow and straight black hair. She was raised in South Central Los Angeles, living in foster homes and then with a grandmother who made Adrienne and her two siblings pay for the food she fed them.

They married in 1984. Brown felt their special bond from the beginning, believing they shared a connection with a land far away—that they were both outsiders, genetically distant from where they called home. “Our souls met a long time ago. We met visually on
Solid Gold
. But we was already really together because we’re Third World people. Nothing in this country is like us,” he said. “All of our likenesses is in the Mideast and the Far East and then some drifted to South America. We got that other look…”

That was how Brown and Adrienne viewed it: As far as many white Augustans were concerned, he was black and she was the opposite. “He got a lot of flack,” remembered Sharpton. “He told me people would say things to her—they’d call her ‘nigger lover.’”

Deidre savored a house full of kids and the good life of Walton Way. Adrienne—Alfie, as she was called—loved show business, and wanted to go on the road, maybe as a backup singer—just
something
that put her in the lights, too. Brown’s life had driven more than one wife to distraction, but Alfie was equipped to share it with him.

The Blues Brothers
had handed Brown a new audience, and he also appeared as himself in the 1983 Dan Aykroyd movie
Doctor Detroit
. Money in, money out. The IRS continued to shadow him, auctioning off three of his cars, including his beloved Dodge van, in 1983. That same year, he left the band stranded in Sacramento at Thanksgiving, stuck without gas money to get home.

There was a ruckus of clean breaks. In this climate of unexpected change, fate handed him one more distraction. Jimmy Nolen’s heart wore out.

Nolen had auditioned for Brown’s band on the West Coast in 1965, and he laid down the “chanka-chanka,” or chicken scratch, as it was called, that motivated countless Brown records. Nolen was skinny and quiet and survived in the band longer than anybody but the even quieter St. Clair Pinckney. Over the years he got to know Brown’s ways so well that he could tell when the boss was about to forget a lyric and would rustle up a wave of chicken scratch to fill the gap. Brown would take him aside and rehearse with him
for hours. He wasn’t a rhythm guitarist, he was
rhythm
, nearly as much as the drummers.

Knowing what he had, Brown insisted that Nolen move with him when he went from New York to Augusta, and Nolen found a place in Atlanta. Being near Brown made it easier to rehearse; being where Brown could keep an eye on him kept Nolen from accepting other offers. Though his contribution was immense, Nolen quietly complained about how Brown left his name off the album covers. In Macon, Brown pulled a gun on him and slapped him. He would fine him for broken guitar strings. Nolen was the most famous secret guitar star in the world: When Eric Clapton came through Atlanta, he would call Jimmy to get together. Nolen might even do it, though he’d beg Clapton to keep it quiet, or else Brown would think somebody was trying to steal him.

A couple heart attacks on the road; Brown and the band kept the news from his wife, though she found out when she discovered his blood pressure pills.

He loved children, and sometimes when he was home, he’d round up neighborhood kids and head to Adams Park. They’d cross a bridge, stop near a huge boulder that looked like it had rolled off a mountain. Nolen would climb on the rock, carefully set down his thermos of Manischewitz white. Then he’d get out his guitar and play “Popcorn with a Feeling.”

He died at home, having skipped a trip to Canada because he wasn’t feeling up to it. Lunetha, his wife, told the band it was a heart attack; then she had to find somebody to tell Brown. This would not be easy. Danny Ray gave him the news after his show that night, and Brown called Lunetha. The first thing he wanted to know: Was there anybody else in the room when he died? Brown thought maybe somebody had killed his guitarist, but Lunetha told him no, nobody murdered her husband.

Just before he died, Nolen took Ron Laster aside and taught him the secrets, saying, “Now
you’ve
got to lead the band.” He asked Lunetha to deliver a message once he was in the ground. As they say, it
was like he knew what was coming. He watched a TV show about rock and roll greats and noticed how many had died before they were fifty. The life just ground them down.

She carried her husband’s words to Brown. “You had to be strong and look James right in his eyes—you had to let him know, ‘James, I do not fear you…. You need to hear this,’” Lunetha recalled. “He was curious—he wanted to hear this and he
didn’t
want to hear this.”

St. Clair Pinckney knew what was coming and did not want Lunetha to meet with Brown. But what could she do? Jimmy had made it his last request. “‘You tell James,’ Jimmy said to me, ‘the next person you get to work for you, I hope you treat them better than you did us.’ I said, ‘I don’t hold it against you, that’s what Jimmy said.’”

When she told Brown, he put his arm around her and apologized. “I’m sorry I hurt him like that,” Brown said. “He hugged me and said he was sorry, that he was afraid someone was gonna take Jimmy away from him.”

C
aught between a “can’t change me” rebelliousness and a desire for a hit, Brown displayed a new interest in taking creative risks, in making records in fresh ways. The Polydor deal was history, and he had signed an agreement with Island Records, home of Bob Marley. In 1982, he went down to Nassau to record with the brilliant Jamaican producers Sly and Robbie. They cut some material, but not enough to make an album before Brown had wandered off. More fruitful was a 1984 single with Afrika Bambaataa, “Unity,” on Tommy Boy. Bambaataa was a South Bronx medicine ball of a man who, as a DJ, producer, and dispute settler, had played an important role in the birth of hip-hop. By linking with Brown, this hot artist popular with indie rockers was publicly paying tribute. His futuristic electro-funk, and the call for “peace, unity, love, and having fun!” in “Unity” built bridges across generations and subcultures. Punk rockers and new wavers were getting into hip-hop through Bambaataa’s
records, and they were also identifying with Brown’s rawness and immediacy. “Unity” symbolized a moment when, at the edges of marginal communities and at the places where neighborhoods touched, folks were crossing borders.

L
ike Aykroyd and Belushi before him, Sylvester Stallone had a vision in the desert. The actor and director had a scene in mind for his upcoming
Rocky IV
, a demented, patriotic scene, a production number set in the heart of Las Vegas. In his wildest dreams, Stallone imagined James Brown singing a new song, and his black boxer Apollo Creed dancing to it in an Uncle Sam costume. There’d be Vegas showgirls and flags flapping, a chorus line, and dancers in top hats and tails. Stallone saw it all quite vividly, and now he needed others to see it.

Rocky III
had set the bar high for heart-pounding, artery-clogging anthems, with its scene built around Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” The hit song sold the hit movie, and the hit movie sold the hit song. Stallone took his notion for a new song to Dan Hartman, a studio veteran who could make good records in hard rock, metal, disco, or mainstream pop, and who had specialized in planting bombast in big-budget Hollywood movies.

Stallone’s pitch couldn’t have been more direct: He wanted a top-ten hit, sung by James Brown, with a strong patriotic undercurrent.
Rocky IV
pitted Stallone’s fighter against a heartless, cheating Moscow mule named Ivan Drago. President Reagan had ramped up the Cold War and made it a patriotic touchstone; Stallone aimed to make a hit movie that would sell the conflict that would sell the hit movie. Hartman balked at the patriotic part, probably not because of his politics but because his hits typically created a sense of “us,” and a flag-waver would divide the potential market. He wondered, too, about Brown’s ability to deliver a million-seller. “I think James Brown has made a lot of good records, but it was that purist James Brown thing that he was doing in the
beginning, and people won’t let him do that anymore because time marches on. That stuff is classic to me, but other people get bored with it,” Hartman told the
Los Angeles Times
.

“I said that if I write something for James Brown, it would be too organic ever to be in the top ten. I had too much respect for him to water down his style.” There the vision paused, until Hartman and songwriting partner Charlie Midnight came up with a notion for a song that would have elements of Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend” and Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”: the patriotism came across in a whoop for American pop culture, while noting “everybody’s working overtime” trying to “make the prime.” With Brown as the image of American toil, the song in effect said, “We’re all in this together, now get to work.”

Brown was game, so much so that he asked Hartman to sit beside him in the studio, telling him, “When I do it, I’m going to do it like James Brown, but you must have had something in mind when you wrote it and I want to know what it was.” Together they came up with just enough grunts and asides to make it James and more than enough of Hartman’s marching band melodies to make “Living in America” the top-ten hit Brown, no less than Stallone, craved. The song was on the pop charts for eleven weeks in the winter of 1986 and made it to number four; it was his first pop hit in ten years. “Living” earned Brown his first appearance on the British top ten. It received the tribute of a “Weird Al” Yankovic parody, “Living With a Hernia,” and won a Grammy in 1987 for Best Male R&B vocal performance. Most of all, the song replanted Brown in the American mainstream.

He wore his cowboy boots in his
Rocky IV
scene: He symbolized America, its Reagan-era celebration of the survivor. It was an astounding transformation for a figure that many in the country had never before viewed as
American
.

With
The Blues Brothers
and now
Rocky IV
, whites celebrated him as an icon. During the subsequent tour,
Rocky IV
’s mechanical robot Sico introduced the Godfather of Soul to the crowd. As for
the hit, with no emphasis on the One and no rhythmic tension, it was a challenge for the band to weave it into his show. “We used to open up with it every night because, whether he liked it or not, it is what brought the crowd out,” said Laster. “We tried like twelve different versions of it to put some kind of funky groove on it. We got some versions that were more James Brownish—you’d say, ‘Damn, is that “Living in America”?’ But he needed his face back in the public and
Rocky IV
did it.”