One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (9 page)

The group by now could play country songs and light pop to white audiences as well as R&B. Black Toccoans like Scott had grown up with country and western, which they considered their own music. “That was what we was raised upon—Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, stuff like that was all we knew,” Scott told historian Fred Hay. The Flames had worked up a kickin’ version of Hank Williams’s “Hey Good Lookin’.” “Oh boy, we could pop that one!” Scott recalled. Their showmanship and versatility had them in demand, and they were playing gigs at white high schools in Toccoa and on the road in Northern Georgia up into the Carolinas. Trimier had booked so many gigs, in fact, that he split them into two or three different groups all billed as the Flames, with other guys Byrd and Brown knew added to the mix. Johnny Terry, Brown’s buddy from prison, was now out and added to the group—he couldn’t sing but was a terrific dancer, and he had an edge to him that Brown liked.

One more thing had them in demand. According to Byrd, Brown was so eager to decimate the competition, defined as anybody
getting gigs he wasn’t, that he told club owners the Flames would do a show for less money. It undercut his own group, but Brown figured in the long run it would make them more fans and lead to more employment.

Their zoot suits, their swagger, the way they turned the sound of church into the sound of play—in the small towns the Flames performed in, it all communicated a bigness, an extravagance that audiences appreciated. To a band increasingly featuring a guy who pushed a broom in the white high school, which his fans knew damn well was a good job to have, counting the nickels and quarters thrown at you was a way to count how much freedom you had.

Mostly, image is what the Flames had. With little money and one dicey station wagon or another, they were committed to upholding it. Rolling into town in vehicles without air-conditioning, even on hot summer days, Brown insisted they keep the windows up so that fans
thought
they were cool. They left the same town in cars that often started up with great difficulty; the driver slowly circling the back of the venue shouting to straggling members that they’d better run if they wanted a ride home, because the ignition might not work twice.

One night, on a drive home after a show, the brakes failed and they had a few life-changing moments descending through the mountains. They managed to safely pull off the road, passed a jug around and everybody urinated into it, and the band used that as brake fluid. It got them home. “At the time we didn’t really care—it was like, ‘Wow, we’re going here! We’re going there!’ To pile into that station wagon was so fun. We all just got on…” said Sarah Byrd Giglio.

They were doing great in the smaller towns, but faced a tougher tribunal when they hit Atlanta. James Shaw, a kid from the big city who would grow up to be a singer and songwriter himself, remembers a show performed in the basement of the John Eagan Homes, a large public housing facility. “They didn’t have no band, they was just patting their legs. It was fifty cents. But they just was not performers, they just had a guitar player, not even a drummer. Had on green and white suits—
green on one side and white down the other side. No band, singing a capella.” He chuckled. “Man they thought they were sharp.”

Byrd was having the time of his life, but Brown, the family man, was in need of every buck he could apprehend. One night, Byrd got a call at four in the morning. Brown was in trouble again, stripping a car in South Carolina when the owner caught him in the act. The way Byrd saw it, Brown was good at singing, but positively great at stripping a car: He could put it on blocks in twenty minutes, with wheels, fenders, trim—and the perp—all long gone.

But in Carolina that night, a guy had found his fenders, hubcaps, and part of his engine in the rumble seat of Brown’s car. Byrd and a group of his friends all drove out to South Carolina to rescue him in the middle of the night. Some combination of verbiage and cash, presumably, freed their friend and got them back to Toccoa.

The guys were familiar with the sheriffs along the Georgia–Carolina border. This knowledge was enhanced by the experience Byrd, Brown, and fellow Flame Doyle Oglesby all had running moonshine from backwoods North Carolina down to Toccoa. Skully, they called it in Toccoa, and there was an endless thirst for it in dry Stephens County. Toccoa was about seventy-five miles from Brevard, North Carolina, driving through the Appalachians. There were closer places to transport from, but the folks in Brevard didn’t demand cash up front. Byrd would bring another change of clothes on these overnight runs, and make it straight to school the next morning. They did it twice a week for fifteen months.

The bootleggers had an amazing setup, a veritable “Moonshine City,” in Byrd’s words. A hamlet was hidden behind a secret entrance, and once you got through the gate there were bars and stores and women—anything you could want. The Flames sometimes even used their shows as cover for their activities. They’d bring the skully to the venue buying it, and then play a gig that wouldn’t pay nearly as much as the bootlegging.

B
ill’s Rendezvous was a nightclub in a rough part of town that Toccoans called Little Korea. By day it was friendly enough; Whitman High School faced the back of the cafe, and at lunchtime students would climb over a tree branch, enter the back door, and dance to the jukebox. It was a simple, big room with a stage and a cafeteria. At night there was music, and the sidewalk out front got rough. There were stabbings, and Nafloyd Scott’s dad killed his second wife there in 1956.

A piano player from Macon was passing through Bill’s one night, a young wild man named Little Richard. In a short time he would be famous, but at this moment Bill’s reinforced just how far down the road fame was. So when the Flames checked him out and asked Richard from the floor if he would share his stage with them, Richard knew that letting them have his stage was unlikely to help him get to his destination. He said no, but let them play a short set while he went on break. Richard watched them and was big enough to admit he loved what he saw. He asked if they had a manager, and they mentioned Berry Trimier. “Well,” said Richard, “
my
agent in Macon is named Clint Brantley, and I think you should give him a call.”

Many of the folks they knew spent their whole life in Toccoa. But they’d been to Cornelia, Clemson, and they’d seen
Atlanta
. Screw that, they had seen Moonshine City, and virtually had a key to the place. But close your eyes and listen to Little Richard, just sniff the air around the man, and you got a sense of stimulating, raucous places even farther away from Toccoa.

Richard requested Lucas “Fats” Gonder, his road manager, to make a call. And when Gonder got the Flames on the phone with Brantley, the Macon businessman suggested they come down and audition.

They inhaled the possibility and packed for Macon.

Chapter Five

A NEW ORLEANS
CHOO-CHOO

C
lint Brantley was a light-skinned man with a foul mouth and glasses that looked old school even in 1955. Born in Sandersville, Georgia, Brantley was said to have arrived in Macon after World War I with his friend Elijah Poole, who would later change his name to Elijah Muhammad. Brantley opened a barbershop, and by the 1940s was the top black show promoter in town. Tough and practical, Brantley had two huge guys on the payroll to lean against the wall and establish the proper note of seriousness as he conducted business.

It was early in the day when the Flames came to Brantley’s club, the Two Spot, for their audition. Way too early. The night before, he had been drinking, and by morning he had no interest in hearing anybody sing a damn song. “You could tell they were country,” he snorted. It was probably late 1955. Johnny Terry did the introductions, explaining they were a vocal group looking for a manager, and Brantley sourly waved him off. Not interested. “Well, alright sir,” Terry said, all of them heading for the door. Then—aww,
shit
. A tinge of guilt, or maybe he just wanted an amusement before sending them back to Toccoa. Brantley hesitated.

“What do you all sing?” he asked. “We sing rock and roll, we sing blues, we can also sing spirituals.”

“Sing me a spiritual—I don’t feel
good this morning and it might pick me up.” Damned if they didn’t sing a
bunch
of spirituals, as pretty as they could make them. They finished with a song that had become a set piece in their shows, “Looking for My Mother,” a heart tugger with Brown acting out the story of a poor orphan boy finding his long-gone mama in heaven—Brown bawled and crawled around Brantley’s joint, under tables and chairs on his hands and knees, he wasn’t going to leave until he’d found her. When he was done, he’d found a manager. A couple weeks after that, the Flames relocated to Macon.

Macon was lower to the ground than Toccoa, more humid, and black Macon was more metropolitan and held more money. It was a railroad town, with the Southern, the Georgia Central, the Atlantic Coast, and the Macon, Dublin, and Savannah lines intersecting downtown. Macon was progressive enough to be proud of its Douglass Theatre, a landmark black-owned venue a few blocks from the railroad station. It was reactionary enough that when a black man suspected of murder was pulled off a train and lynched in 1922, whites dragged his body through the street and dumped it in the lobby of the Douglass as a message to the community.

The family owning the Douglass was married into the family that ran the largest traveling black show in the country, Silas Green from New Orleans, which had nobody named Silas Green and was not from Louisiana. Macon became the show’s home. The singers, dancers, and comics who played the minstrel circuit lingered in Macon between engagements, and those hoping to work in showbiz flocked to the city. Even the Greyhound station jumped; it was said to have the only restaurant in town where a Negro could get a smothered T-bone steak and sit in air-conditioning. Working in the kitchen, about the time the Flames arrived, was one of the most recognizable people in town. His mama wanted to name him Ricardo, but settled on Richard Penniman; to the extent folks knew his name, they called him Little Richard.

The Flames aspired to be as bold as Richard. He wore astonishing neckties,
which his loving mama tied for him, and he drenched himself in Tweed perfume. Richard and his band were wrecking house parties, roadhouses, the American Legion Hall, and even opening at the Douglass, which Brantley booked. Meanwhile Brown had a job at the Greyhound station, and hung out with the showmen in Brantley’s barbershop.

Brantley saw promise in the young ex-con. He saw a guy who would work himself to the bone to make it in this world. He was managing Little Richard, and now the Flames, and the acts would sometimes chill at the Two Spot together. On weeknights, Lucas “Fats” Gonder, a piano player whom everybody called “Big Black Luke,” threw chili parties. The Flames, Richard’s band, and anybody else would come by, eat, and play records all night long.

Commonly, musicians who weren’t working would meet up and form a “scrap band,” a pickup group playing for whatever. One musician Brown jammed with was Charles Connor, the drummer from Richard’s show. Connor was the first real drummer Brown played with. A skinny-tie-wearing, no-necked stud, Connor was born in New Orleans’s French Quarter. His father came from the Dominican Republic and had lived in Kingston, Jamaica, before arriving in Louisiana, and his mother was a Louisiana-born Creole. Their house faced Dauphine Street, and often funeral parades passed by. Going toward the funeral, the music was sad and hymnal, but on their way back, revelers fell in with the band, and a rousing festivity prevailed, powered by a battery of drummers that formed what was called a “second line.”

Second-line rhythms were loping, loose-hipped, they flowed naturally from the steps the musicians took as they paraded through the streets. And maybe because their bodies were already keeping essential time, their second-line rhythms were about playing off the beat, engaging with it rather than underlining it. Most of all, second-line rhythms turned those walkers into dancers.

“My mother, when she was six months pregnant, said ‘Every
time a parade goes by, this baby kicks my stomach! I guess he hears the music,’” said Connor.

His dad told him if he learned to play those drums, they would take him all over the world. Papa also said that if Charles kept practicing the drums, he’d have more women than he could shake a stick at. “And he was right, because I’ve slept with over 1,500 women in my life, all nationalities.”

Connor and saxophonist Wilbert Smith (also known as Lee Diamond) were in Nashville playing with Shirley & Lee when Little Richard invited them to join his new band in Macon. Maybe it was Richard’s surreal salesmanship, maybe it was the scent of Tweed, but soon they, too, were in Macon, staying in a hotel full of prostitutes while being molded and shaped by their bandleader. Richard took Connor down to the train station with his drums, and told him to listen—“I want your drumming to sound like a choo-choo train,” he said. Connor played along with the locomotives rolling into the station from a half-mile away.