One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (11 page)

The local success of “Please, Please, Please” and Little Richard’s move to Los Angeles made them the biggest act in town. Brantley sent out tapes of the song to some of the biggest independent labels in the country: Specialty in Los Angeles, Chess in Chicago, Peacock in Houston, and Cincinnati’s King Records. Other than Specialty, all were interested. Leonard Chess, co-owner of Chess Records, mailed Brantley a contract and said he was flying down to
Macon. King Records knew about the Flames before “Please, Please, Please”: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters recorded for King, and Ballard had been telling label owner Syd Nathan that he should sign the Macon boys he’d heard out on the road.

Nathan called the head of King subsidiary DeLuxe, a record man in Miami named Henry Stone. “Henry, you have got to get into your Buick and drive up to Macon—there’s a record that’s kicking some noise up there and I want you to get it for your label,” he told Stone. Unbeknownst to Stone, a King talent scout named Ralph Bass heard the song in King’s Atlanta office and decided on the spot he wanted the act for the King subsidiary that
he
ran, Federal. “Please, Please, Please” sounded weird—
different
—to Bass, and that was enough. Talent was cool, but being different—that was what made a hit. The fact that King had two representatives stalking Brown for rival subsidiaries testified to Nathan’s huge appetite: When he wanted something, he
really
wanted it, and wasn’t going to lose out because somebody couldn’t find the road to Macon.

A race was on—none of the contenders knew exactly who was in it, but they had all been aced out of hits countless times, and knew they better jump. Leonard Chess was en route to Macon when a wicked storm grounded his plane. Stone was on the road, but Atlanta is only about eighty miles from Macon, and Bass got there first.

Bass was a tall redheaded hepcat who loved black culture. When he went on the road he stayed in Negro hotels, and when he signed an act it was because
he
liked them—“I didn’t give a damn if whites bought it.” Once he got to Macon, he knew he had to step lightly, because “an out-of-town white cat could be in trouble in those days,” Bass explained. He drove to Macon with a black radio DJ from Atlanta who knew the racial landscape. A meeting with Brantley was quickly arranged. Whites watched for so-called outside agitators talking to “their” Negroes, and Brantley knew all too well that Bass couldn’t just walk in and shake hands. He gave the record man instructions: Park in front of the barbershop and wait for the signal. If everything seemed copasetic, at eight o’clock you
will see the lights go on and the blinds come down. That was the sign that Bass could enter. Turning to the DJ in his car, Bass said, “Hey man, if I don’t come out, if something happens to me, come and get me.” Brantley held a strong hand; he waved the contract from Chess, and asked Bass what he was offering. Bass peeled off two hundred dollars and said, “Clint, this is for you. But I want to sign them now.” “Deal,” Brantley said.

Bass wanted assurance he was signing the group he heard on the tape, and Brantley told him they were singing nearby that night. The show Bass saw might have been good or bad, but what stuck in the talent scout’s mind was simply the way the main singer scuttled and crept as he kept shouting the word “please.” This cat was way
different
.

A week after that, the Flames were driving to Cincinnati for their first Federal recording session at King’s studio. On the morning of February 4, 1956, an engineer for King, Hal Neely, was arriving at work at around eight on a very cold morning. He saw an old Ford station wagon with a bull fiddle tied to the top parked beside the building, and inside six or seven guys asleep. When they woke up, they told Neely they’d driven all night from Macon for their recording date.

Neely gave them a few bills and explained that Syd Nathan, the owner, wouldn’t be in until noon. He sent the band to the Manse Hotel, where black acts stayed, and told them to return in the afternoon.

By then, the house rhythm section was in the studio working on something, so the Flames stood in the hallway, waiting to make their record. The seasoned musicians took a break, sticking around to scope out the new act. “I think there was, like, three guys with James when they were singing ‘Please, Please, Please,’” said Philip Paul, drummer for King. In the control booth, through thick glass, Nathan stared at the scene. “They were on the floor, and James was hollering, and then I heard Syd Nathan shout, ‘What is that piece of shit out there? Oh man, that’s terrible.’” He cut them off before they even got through their first song, turning to Bass and cursing
his judgment. Nathan was famous for letting you know what he really thought, but the Flames had just now met the guy, and they thought things were over before they finished their big song.

Those who knew Nathan understood his need to vent, but on this occasion many in the room shared his opinion. “Myself and the other musicians said, ‘What is
that
?’” recalled Paul. “One of the studio guys said, ‘If that’s the music to come…’ We all cracked up. These guys were really good musicians, and when they heard all the hollering and screaming, we all said, ‘What is this garbage?’”

It’s hard, today, to pinpoint in “Please, Please, Please” the oddness that attracted Bass and which appalled professional musicians like Paul and pianist Sonny Thompson. King, which put out Federal Records, sat on the song for about a month. The way Bass told it, he was back on the road looking for new acts to sign, staying in a Negro hotel in St. Louis, when a regional King salesman told him he had better give Nathan a call. Bass found a payphone and reached the office. Nathan’s voice came on the line, no introduction: “You’re fired!” (Syd’s way of saying hello.) “He’s just singing one word!” (Brown repeats
please
twenty-six times.) “It sounds like he’s stuttering!” (Popping his P’s in the studio, Brown seems to be singing “peas, peas, peas.”) At least now Bass knew which record he was talking about. Nathan had just heard the pressing of “Please, Please, Please.” Bass started to speak, but Nathan said it all: “You’re fired.”

Test the record out, Bass urged, just release it in a Southern town like Atlanta and see how it performs. Right about then, Nathan’s “I’ll show you” bluster asserted itself. Raising Bass’s bet, he said, “Fuck it. I’m putting it out cross-country just to prove what a piece of shit it is.”

The Flames had recorded three other songs while they were in Cincinnati, and they drove back to Macon wondering if any would ever see the light of day. According to Byrd, some made plans to return to Toccoa. “It took so long for it to finally come out, we were all getting ready to go back to our regular jobs. We said, ‘Well, maybe they ain’t gonna put the record out. The man didn’t like it no way.’”

But they hovered in Macon for a month, and then Nathan issued “Please, Please, Please,” on March 3, 1956. Southern radio was slow to pick it up, and two DJs from WLAC in Gallatin, Tennessee, John R. and Hoss Allen, took credit for first playing it.

A response slowly emerged, but really, the guys were just glad
somebody
was playing the thing. There was something funny, though, about the record’s label. When the rest of the Famous Flames got a shipment, they held up the disc and noticed the words printed on it: “James Brown with the Famous Flames.” They thought it had been a democracy, everyone a Flame. This was news.

A slow-burner, “Please, Please, Please” was listed as a “Buy of the Week” in
Billboard
the first week of April. By the end of the month it was rolling up the R&B charts, peaking at #5. It didn’t touch the pop charts, but many a white kid who could hear a powerful station like WLAC would drive out to the country, turn on the car radio, and wait for the song to play. “Please, Please, Please” fell off some charts in September, but two months later it was still riding high in St. Louis.

“Please, Please, Please” became the set piece closer of Brown’s show, and he turned it
out
, pantomiming depraved acts of groveling. So much so that when tough blues singer Howlin’ Wolf saw the Flames do it, he advised Brown that if he wanted to keep on living in these clubs, he better stop crawling around looking up women’s dresses while he sang his song.

Publicly, Nathan began telling people
he
was responsible for “Please, Please, Please.” Privately, he admitted he had changed his opinion of the Flames. As Nathan explained to Bass, there were only two kinds of music: the kind that makes the blood rise in your arm, and the kind that doesn’t. These guys got the corpuscles running hot.

Another recording session was hastily scheduled, and James Brown with the Famous Flames drove back to Cincinnati.

Chapter Six

TOP BANANA

W
hen King Records moved into its building on Cincinnati’s Brewster Avenue, those who worked for the fledgling label immediately found themselves slipping into the funk. It made their feet give out from under them, it stuck to their hands, knees, and hair. The time was the mid 1940s, and they were remodeling a building that had formerly housed Fries & Fries, a Cincinnati manufacturer of edible flavored extracts. When the record people started knocking down walls and drilling holes for plumbing, they uncovered pools and puddles of sticky extracts: banana, cherry, strawberry, brandy, nuts, and Fries & Fries’ biggest seller, vanilla.

All the old smells had to go, so that fresh aromas could bubble up. King Records grew on a nondescript strip of industrial and commercial buildings. The owners moved in record stampers and printing presses and built a recording studio that was gloriously good at capturing live sounds. It was a small room with a twenty-five-foot high ceiling that musicians liked. The engineer, the talent scouts, and visitors all sat in a room over the studio, looking down on it like fans seated above a ball field. A bucket of beer and cold cuts were set up on a side table to keep the talent from straying too far.

Presiding over all of it, swiping at the root beer syrup besmudging his thick spectacles, was the man who built King, Syd Nathan. Syd was a wonder, and Syd was a real piece of work. Others who had been where Brown first stood in 1956 instantly formed an image of the man. When Alton Delmore of the country duo the Delmore Brothers came to King, he thought Nathan resembled “a groundhog, just emerging from his hole.” To drummer Nelson Burton, he was “a short, chubby Jewish fella, with unshined shoes and chili stains on his tie.” Though he was asthmatic he loved his cigars, and even posed with them in his publicity shots. All but blind, Nathan wore glasses as thick and circular as submarine portholes. He was round in the middle and round on top; when smiling, he looked mildly unhinged, and when his mood was otherwise, there was nothing mild about him.

On Brewster Avenue he was building a brand-new model of an independent label, assembled according to his own sense of the right way to do things. King and its affiliates—Queen, Federal, DeLuxe—were self-sustaining under one roof, which no indie had done before. They recorded music, they ran the tape to the room where they pressed the plastic. The art department designed and printed covers, and then the records were boxed and shipped from the loading dock. A King artist could cut a tune in the morning and walk out that night with a stack of singles under his arm. “This was the indie of all indies,” said Seymour Stein, who worked at King in the 1950s and went on to form his own record label, Sire. “We all like to think we are independent, but Sydney was the most independent.”

He called himself the Big Chief. Throughout the King facility Nathan installed loudspeakers, the better to spread his mandate to the farthest reaches of the plant. One fundamental message: Don’t get too comfortable.

He messed with you. The leader of a local rock and roll quartet being courted by King once came in to discuss a contract.

“What do you want to call yourselves?”

The kid thought and said, “Them.”

“Eh, that ain’t gonna work. How many of you are there?”

“Four, sir.”

“Four? Why don’t you call yourself the Four Fuckers.” That day the young man got a valuable lesson in human relations.

A working-class Jew who had been doing business with Negroes and hillbillies for years, Nathan was an outsider who had no patience for racism. King was probably the only firm hiring blacks and whites together in Cincinnati in the late 1940s; it had integrated Christmas parties and integrated picnics. During World War II, they hired Japanese Americans to run machinery, thereby keeping them out of internment camps. Nathan had hired Henry Glover as an executive, and gave this African American real power in making creative and business decisions. King artists were put up in Nathan’s guest room; while Hank Ballard was staying with him, somebody threw a rock through his front window. “He thought it was funny,” remembered Stein. “Syd was no racist.”

His wasn’t an ideological sort of integration, it was a gut thing. Nathan signed hillbilly and R&B acts and scheduled them one after the other in the studio. He had black studio musicians playing with white country stars, and R&B singers covering country songs. “I’m not a genius, and I don’t have any geniuses working for me,” Nathan said. “We work at it as if it was the coffin business, the machinery business, or any other business. It has to pay for itself.” His racial vision, his American vision, was grounded in the ability to make a dollar, and this made Nathan a creative genius and a civil rights trailblazer. With chili stains on his tie.

In the two years after “Please, Please, Please” was made, Brown recorded four more times at King Records, eagerly attempting to repeat the success of that first session. Through his many visits to town, he became extremely familiar with Cincinnati, making it, and the Manse Hotel, his second home.

When Brown wasn’t in Cincinnati he was on the road, making as much as he could out of one hit and songs that either sounded like other people’s
hits or were covers of their hits. He and the Famous Flames were playing the connected assortment of small Southern black venues collectively called the “chitlin circuit.” The name came about because, as was true of pig tripe, pleasure was squeezed from hardship. In a segregated land, the chitlin circuit was where the musicians from the black side were able to get paid and gas up for the next town. The chitlin circuit has nothing to do with the big black theaters like the Regal in Chicago or the Apollo in New York. Those were filet mignon. These were roadhouses and chicken shacks, tobacco barns and Quonset huts. Clint Brantley knew a lot of these places from Macon down to Florida, and that was where he sent the Famous Flames in search of a justification for the “Famous” he’d laid on them.