One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (49 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

THE DANCER

J
ames Brown got his start when he was waist-high and egging on soldiers, daring them to throw coins while he did buck and wing steps. “I started dancing as a necessity back in 1941. I was living in Augusta, Georgia,” he once said. There was a modest concrete-and-brick bridge over the third level of the Augusta canal, next to the gasworks. That’s where he got maybe the biggest idea of his life. There were plenty of soldiers lingering, not far from the train depot. He danced, and seeing all the nickels, dimes, and quarters tossed at his feet made his mind up for him: “I realized dancing was gonna be a way of life for me.”

In a flash there by the bridge, dancing was no longer a mere necessity. Move your body the right way and people threw the most coins at you, and what made it the right way was moving to an appreciated rhythm—sung or clapped as you danced, or one you carried in your head. You figured out that the more ways you punctuated the rhythm and played with it, the more it delighted the faces surrounding you. And the more they spent. From an early age—he would have been eight in 1941—Brown was teaching himself that rhythm meant attention; it meant lulling hostile adults into a reverie, bringing them over to your side. It meant nourishment, in every sense of the word. Born dead: Now came rebirth.

The buck dance was done flat-footed and low to the ground. So much of Brown’s dance was performed with his feet. He was a shoeshine, a boxer who studied at the feet of Beau Jack who danced across the ring, a man who tended to hold his upper body in check—not frozen, but coolly reserved, letting a little sway or shoulder dip telegraph a wealth of insinuation. He lived down low.

The men who watched him were the same ones he directed to Aunt Honey’s for the sex and the bootleg whiskey. He was an escort to the illicit; obvious enough in terms of the brothel, but to what unauthorized place was he escorting folks when he danced on the banks of the Third Canal? To a place more captivating and powerful than Aunt Honey’s pussy and scrap iron. Leading them there on the banks—the bamboozled so foolishly certain that they were directing
him
—Brown must have felt enormous, connected to something outside himself, a force that made him feel more powerful than anything did the rest of the day.

So, he watched the older boys and copied some of their steps. Watched the soldiers, too. Funny thing is, when people are giving you their charity, their patronage, they believe themselves free to inspect and scrutinize you. The little roughneck was the object, they were the actors. But Brown was the most watchful of all: He studied and learned what made the money rain, what choked it off. He was good at it, he could
feel
it, sense when hands were going into pockets even before the GIs knew what they were reaching for. He learned another step.

James Brown had many guises, many names: Crip, Music Box, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Mr. Please Please Please, Butane James, Soul Brother Number One, Skates, the Godfather of Soul—Johnny Carson once introduced him as “The Godfather of Soil.” He was His Own Bad Self, the Sex Machine, Black Elvis, the Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk, the Original Disco Man, Universal James. But before any of them, he was, simply, a dancer, doing the James Brown.

You couldn’t tell him anything, not directly. But if he heard you
say it to somebody else, or if he could
watch
you do it, then he learned the thing better than you knew it yourself. He watched the showmen on the stage at the Lenox. He watched the minstrel hoofers get off the train and set up a cigar box in front of the Douglass Theatre in Macon. He learned another step.

It is 1959, and the band is getting louder as they work their way through the first part of the show. J. C. Davis’s crew is playing arrangements of songs by Thin Man Watts and Bill Doggett, stomping shuffle blues with the horns scrapping for attention, everybody eyeing the dancers on the floor. If the dancers like it, they play it some more. The Davis band was establishing that this was no sit-down concert, and everything that happened for the rest of the night was meant to keep you moving. Moving with the audience was Brown, in the guise of reveler. As they made their way through the South—where they mostly played, and all the best dances came from—Brown made mental note of the steps they were doing in one town that they weren’t doing in the last one. When he finally jumped on stage, he would show how well he’d assumed the local moves, putting on a proud demonstration and bonding with the crowd.

James Brown was a Johnny Appleseed of dance. “He was taking the steps right out of the audience, going town to town,” said Davis. “By going around that circuit every six months or a year, we would take stuff from one city to the next—people in Washington didn’t know what a mashed potato was and we were doing it for them, when maybe
we
didn’t know it six months before that. It would kill the house is why.”

The steps inspired the music—you wanted to inspire the people on the floor so you played music meant to feed the flux. Contrarily, when you got back to the hotel room you might knock out a song meant to coin the motion you’d observed in the house just an hour before. A song inspired by an action, a way to put your little thing over on what they did. But first came the dance.

“The mashed potato was popular in Florida, that’s where it was.
But like in Washington they might be doing the horse, or the watusi, a different dance. So we’d learn how to do the watusi, the watermelon man, the horse, the mashed potato, the chicken scratch, and actually his dancing became a part of the horse, the chicken scratch, the watermelon man,” said Davis. “When you go from town to town doing those things every day, what we learn in Washington is brand-new to the people in Miami, and what we took to New Jersey or New York is brand-new, different, to them there. You do it from day to day and you are perfecting it. Mix ’em all together and now we’re doing some of everybody’s dance together.”

It is 1959, and late at night en route to the next show, a red light pulls the bus over and everybody gets out along the deserted highway. One of the sheriffs asks who’s in charge, and Brown steps forward to be asked, just who does he think he is and what does he think he is doing in Yazoo City? Brown says he’s a showman, he works in front of these musicians every night. They were just playing at the Pythian Hall and are heading now to Jackson.

“Is that a fact? You a hambone? Let’s see what you can do.” Right there over the gravel the sheriffs have him working, keeping it simple with a flat-footed shuffle suited for the grit beneath him. They provide their own rhythm on the oiled road, five pistol cracks sending sparks that light up Brown’s face. It’s the kind of intimate performance he used to give at the Augusta canal. These two sheriffs, though, they didn’t throw any money. They start out looking excited, and end with bored expressions and telling everybody to get the hell in the bus and get on down the road.

Dancing was a declaration of who he was. He went from town to town.

T
he five minutes are surrealism’s finest hour. A skinny young man staggers out onto a stage like a spasmodic robot—a robot with a sports bag on his head. He falls, twitching, then rolls around
trying to pull the satchel off his head, all the while moving to a James Brown song. He gets up, frees himself, and…possibly…is…dancing or wrenching his body in and out of tempo. Or something. One minute he is Don Knotts, and the next, one of the greatest street dancers you’ve ever seen. He dives on his belly across the floor, sliding completely out of view as the fixed camera shows nothing but white floor for a long time. When we find him again he’s running around the stage, almost knocking a dancer off his stand, then striking a bizarre GQ pose, all the while throwing crazy-cool moves in every direction.

In 1976, Brown produced, directed, and hosted
Future Shock
, a dance show shot in Atlanta, airing on a UHF TV station owned by the young Ted Turner. It was Brown’s idea, but the stars of
Future Shock
are the amazing roster of dancers, culled from Atlanta-area colleges, high schools, and parties, that perform in an astonishing spectrum of styles.

Never mind that: Let’s get back to our spastic robot. Brown calls him “Bojangles,” and awards him first prize in the contest that Bojangles just destroyed. The award inspires him to throw himself on the floor again, wriggle over and kiss Brown’s foot, then pop up, do splits, jump up, and throw out a whole lost language of hand signals. The scene is as unfathomable as any five minutes of
Un Chien Andalou
or a film by David Lynch.
Future Shock
was the best dance show on TV, ever. It ruled because though Brown was constantly a presence, he had the wisdom to pull back and give it up to the dancers. He lets the astonishing mix of popping, locking, early break dancing, and vintage disco carry the program. He calls the shots, and dance is in all of them.

Brown’s idea was to syndicate
Future Shock
to American and then African markets; he saw it as a show where black people could be themselves, instead of performing for white TV audiences. He saw it as building on
Soul Train
, which it sort of did, in the way that John Wilkes Booth built on Abraham Lincoln.
Future Shock
was a short-lived, riotous, no-retake spectacle.

The program’s dancers don’t
ride the beat, they express a new rhythm on top of the one we hear. “When you are dancing against the grain, it makes it more dynamic. But if you float, then you’re not doing anything,” Brown once said. Looking at the old clips of
Future Shock
floating around the Internet is like peering through a bathysphere window at an unseen world at play. Who are these amazing dancers, and what are they doing today? Pumping gas? Hydroponic gardening on Eurydome? Anything is possible.

E
verything starts with the dancer. The music came out of him.

Toni Basil was a dancer and choreographer on
The T.A.M.I. Show
, the movie that let America see Brown move. “Nowadays, we have to choreograph to a record or a song,” said Basil. She means professional choreographers get handed a piece of music and are paid to design a routine around it. “Whereas, what he did is what Astaire and all the old stars did. They created a dance, with a drummer and a pianist, and then they scored it musically.” The dance was what the music was
about
.

Brown had a capacity for expressing different rhythms through his form. “Every part of his body had a beat, had a rhythm going on—his feet, his head, his neck, his chest, his ass,” said Lola Love, a dancer in the show. “And all those beats were different and were what made him funky.”

He was not a virtuoso. What we respond to is not what he does, but what he promises. The man was a master at holding himself in reserve, and in making a display of his work—he is gesturing in everything he does, a gesture that needs us to complete it.

He is more than good enough, an embodiment of what Zora Neale Hurston called “dynamic suggestion,” a quality she considered the essence of black dance. However explosively or fiercely he moved, Brown telegraphs that there’s more we
don’t
get to see—his actions exert maximum impact with a minimum of exertion (coolness), a withholding that compels the viewer to follow the gesture
through in the imagination. His dance wasn’t supposed to be appreciated with detachment. It was meant to pull you over to where he was, to engage you in the act. You can’t sit still.

Asked to demonstrate the boogaloo by a TV show host, Brown danced around a Hollywood soundstage in a way that looked exactly like a boxer throwing punches and owning the ring. To Brown, dancing was competition—“Can
you
jerk? Watch
me
work/Can
you
do the slide? Then watch
me
glide…” His idea of dancing against the grain a way of imposing himself on the rhythm—a way of fighting his way into the flow, of fighting his way into existence. “Rhythm is everything in boxing,” said Sugar Ray Robinson, who liked to train to Brown’s music. “Every move you make starts with your heart, and that’s in rhythm or you’re in trouble.”

Dancer…drummer…fighter. Here is the spirit of the Stono Rebellion, where musicians, dancers, and warriors marched off the South Carolina plantation.

Chapter Twenty-five

HIT IT AND QUIT IT

T
omi Rae Hynie was working the Vegas lounges in 1998, throwing her long hair around, singing a tribute to Janis Joplin in the “Dead Legends Live Revue.” When they met, after one of her shows, here is what Brown saw: a stunning redhead, shapely, her face almost as carefully put together as his. He invited her to join his show. They soon were a couple, and young James II was six months old when in 2001, the two were married at Beech Island. He was sixty-eight, she was thirty-two. At their wedding reception, the newlyweds teamed up to sing Brook Benton and Dinah Washington’s “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes).” As the couple danced, one of his daughters was heard to say of her new stepmother: “I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.” Everyone was still getting to know one another.

They lived together at Beech Island. She saw him in a complicated light: both as employer and husband, mentor and lover. “He had no one to take care of him. Nobody wanted to be around him because he was so ornery, but I loved him and understood him and devoted myself to him,” she said. “The things he could teach me I could never learn on my own. At first I felt it could benefit me so much if I could just listen—and then I ended up falling in love with him.”

Tomi Rae was capable of theatricality herself, and her presence was greeted with suspicion by some of those around Brown. With difficulty she sought to fit into the entourage and establish a home life. She made him dinner and massaged his legs five times a day with oil, to abate the pain of his diabetes. “I cooked liver and onions for him, that was what he craved. And he liked collard and turnip greens and sweet potato pie and ice cream, but with the diabetes, I had to start making him sugar-free pies. And every Sunday we went to visit his mother in Bamberg and I would brush her hair. Then we would go to church and after that to the best chicken place in the South, this little convenience place called Quick Stop that served catfish and chicken. Every Sunday we looked forward to that. We’d drive out in a limousine to his church and then we’d go out for chicken.”