One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (19 page)

Brown followed the Smash singles he produced with a new album of him singing rhythm and blues classics with a classy big band.
Showtime
was a bizarre sidestep, redoing Mom and Dad’s music while the Apollo kids’ shouts still hung in the air. One explanation is that
Showtime
was a threat—I
will
record for another label—as much as it was a serious release. Like the singles,
Showtime
tanked, and yet again, Nathan—who knew “it’s just business” the way Brown knew “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens”—maintained radio silence. What happened next seemed scripted to get Nathan’s attention.

Brown was playing one-nighters, he was stockpiling new recordings that were nothing like the showbiz of
Showtime
. In July 1964, with King still keeping its cool, Brown released one of the new songs he had cut for Smash. “Out of Sight” was really good, and when it started up the R&B charts, and then made it to twenty-four on the pop charts, Nathan finally played his hand. He filed suit, declaring that the Smash releases violated Brown’s contract with King.

This was happening at a critical moment for King. Nathan’s health was faltering; he’d had two heart attacks and was not around the office much. Two of his hillbilly stars had died in a plane crash, along with singer Patsy Cline, in 1963. Beyond that, King just didn’t understand albums, and they didn’t understand teenagers—this was the label that slept on “The Twist.” They were paying last month’s bills with this month’s hits, and inferior James Brown product from the vaults was not going to keep the lights on.

In October, a
New York appellate judge ordered Brown to stop recording for Smash, while the court puzzled out his arrangement with King. Meanwhile, another loophole had been revealed: The contract was for Brown the singer, not Brown the organ player or producer or anything else. He appealed and the loophole widened. The court said he could not sing for Smash, but otherwise was a free agent.

To Brown, all of this was extremely personal, and Nathan’s refusal to give him a new contract was a display, now public, of disrespect. He framed his complaint in terms of an overwhelming force seeking to destroy an individual. As he said while giving a deposition, “I don’t think a man should be treated this way in the United States.”

There were records coming out that King had no business releasing, and then there were songs like “I Got You (I Feel Good)” that Brown couldn’t put on record due to the legal battle. He sang it in a “zany” 1965 American International movie titled
Ski Party
, starring Dwayne Hickman, Frankie Avalon, and a yodeling polar bear. Skiing into a cozy chalet, Brown almost torpedoes any hopes of a film career right there as he struggles to get the words “abominable snow girl” out of his mouth, before he and the Famous Flames, in matching knit sweaters, slam out “I Got You.”

In March of 1965,
Billboard
reported that Nathan had decided to sell his label and his publishing company to Mercury. Maybe the story was legit, but this was a guy whose idea of fun was hustling pawnbrokers. If he was truly thinking of selling out, he reversed himself in short order. By June he told Brown he would agree to reconsider a new contract, and that was enough to bring the singer back to Cincinnati.

Who won this brawl depends on which corner you watched it from. But in a fundamental sense, here is what Brown walked away with: Fresh off the biggest victory of his life,
Live at the Apollo
, he was willing to put his momentum, and perhaps his future, at stake for a principle—not even for a principle, for a
fight
. The worst part
of his life was the part when he was too small, young, and inexperienced to fight back. Things got better when he battled, and not once had losing really hurt him. If there was ever a plan, it was cryptic; break a contract, shoot up a nightclub. It had gotten him this far, and it was too late to turn back now.

Dizzy from his clashes, Brown was in the market for advice. He called the white owner of a recording studio in Charlotte, and got into a conversation about his problems with King, and about money and music. The man who owned the studio was a musician himself, Arthur Smith, who made the 1948 country hit “Guitar Boogie.” Smith was a sympathetic listener, and at the end of the conversation Brown said he didn’t exactly know how his troubles would be resolved, but if in a few months he was near Charlotte again, he asked if he could record at Smith’s studio. This was the segregated South, and a black man, even one with money, had to ask permission. “You have my number,” Smith said. “Love to have you.”

In February 1965, as King and Mercury continued their fight, Brown and his band came down to the Charlotte studio. The room was a glorified barn, with a large space for the band, and the control booth up where a hayloft would be.

It was time to record a tricky piece of rhythm Brown had been thinking about for a while. The musicians set up, playing this and that while waiting for the boss to arrive. Finally, Brown’s customized white Cadillac with the tinted windows appeared, and the singer swaggered in. “He stopped the place. You just knew that somebody of significance was present,” said Clay Smith, Arthur’s boy. Constantly in motion and talking so fast he could have used a translator, Brown was not one of the guys. “James was in charge,” Arthur Smith remembered later. “I knew I owned the studio, but I knew he was going to do what he wanted to there.”

A big chunk of this group had been plucked out of the small town of Kinston, North Carolina: trumpeter Levi Rasbury, saxophonist Maceo Parker and his brother Melvin on drums, and Nat Jones, a saxophonist and music director. For Rasbury, “It was
unreal. It was my first time being in a studio, first time I saw how they got records made. How Brown did it was, he would hum the melody of the tune to Nat, pound out the drum rhythm he wanted—‘you got it?’ hum a bass line to the bass player—‘you got that?’ So he says, ‘Nat, you add a riff to it for the horns…’”

Nat’s riff had to nest just so with a takeout guitar part, and lining them up was proving difficult. Brown watched a trumpeter struggle for a while, and then exploded.

“Who is this trumpet player?” he said, turning to Jones. “He ain’t gonna work out. I want you to fire that nigger.”

A moment later, the deed done, Brown again turned to Jones.

“You done fired him. Who you got to replace him?”

“Where am I going to get a trumpeter in Charlotte in the middle of the night?” asked the dumbfounded Jones.

Pointing to the ousted musician, Brown said, “Hire that nigger!”

They ran through the tune with the tape rolling. Brown read lyrics off a sheet of paper. And when they were done, they had “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Knowing what he had, and knowing he couldn’t put it out on Smash, and knowing that Syd had declared that he would at least
consider
a new contract, Brown announced that he’d made his point to King, and sent the tape to Cincinnati.

When it came out in the summer, “Papa’s” seemed to gather together all the implications of “Out of Sight,” released the previous July. “Out of Sight” was the scenario—“Papa’s” is the whole movie.

Not a bad scenario, though. Brown’s voice carries the melody as he colors himself impressed by a femme, and Maceo Parker on baritone sax responds with a sagacious head-bobbing uh-huh you right. “Out of Sight” gets loud for kicks then goes hush. The song stops cold at one point and Brown’s voice teasingly kick-starts the music again. He was having fun showing how in control and in the groove he was.

Both these records seemed to pull apart the elements of the
band and scatter them around, making their relationships visible, like an exploded-view diagram. The bass was doing things it hadn’t done before in pop music, and was perhaps the most active part of either song. It was mobile and so low you had to move in to hear it—a sound carrying information you could only partly absorb. Drummer Melvin Parker knew how hot Fillyau burned. He was smart to go in the other direction, accenting the high end far from the bass—the cymbal, tic-tic on the rim. “I was just trying to be different,” Parker said. “Clean, funky, and different.”

Coursing through both songs was the playing of Maceo Parker, who had joined in 1964 and was launched into orbit the moment Brown called out his name in the second half of the nearly eight-minute “Papa’s,” after which Parker and the world simultaneously discovered what a rapport he had with Brown. They sounded like each other, and fed off each other, so much so that Brown later said, “You know, when Maceo plays, it’s almost like an extension of me.”

These songs were
hip
, and so was Brown. He was taking to New York just fine. He had been the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, the sweatiest guy on Earth, sacrificing himself for your love. When he performed live there was so much moisture on the floor that the band was sliding around in it, so much so that he had to hook up to an intravenous rig after a hot show to restore his fluids. As he put it, “There is nothing so personal as the sweat from your eyebrow,” and nightly Brown left his essence on the floor. But with “Out of Sight,” hard work became but half of the story. The other part was control, the mastery of a guy who imploded the air around him with a nod, as dominant at rest as he was with his marathon exertions. He wasn’t saying “please” here. He was snapping his fingers and making things happen.

“It was the beginning of a new world,” Brown said of “Papa’s.” They stayed on the road as the song came out, and the band could feel the change come over them. Levi Rasbury did bookkeeping for the shows, and he watched the numbers jump. “‘Papa’s’ had just been released, so we go to Georgia, Alabama—Birmingham, Mobile—
and touched around Pensacola, come up through Lake Charles, Louisiana. By the time we got to New Orleans, James had moved up from $1,750 to about $2,500 or $3,000 a night on dates that had already been booked. We played Shreveport, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and he’s at $4,500.”

The audience, too, was changing. “On my first West Coast trip with James, the audience was basically black,” said Rasbury. “We had a few whites, but seventy-five or eighty percent was black.” Then “Papa’s” drops. “
This
time around, the crowd is changing to like 60/40 black/white in the South, and as you go to Texas, Arizona, it’s beginning to go 50/50.” It was a new bag, all right, but amazingly, Brown was crossing over more by the day, and he wasn’t doing it with ballads or strings, the usual route to white fans. These were feel records, risky business that didn’t sound like anything else on the radio.

At the end of 1965,
New York Amsterdam News
reported a raid on a dope den in the Bronx. “Police said when they entered the apartment, there was dancing, gambling, and drinking while James Brown was shouting ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ on the record player. Police said knives fell to the floor, a loaded gun, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and policy slips were also allegedly found in the apartment.”

Stark and cinematic, the music created a new kind of space. It was survival rhapsodized as style—and as style it took off. The music floated up from the A train and the diner where they sold cuchifritos, from the Bronx dens and that St. Albans basement where they passed around grape drink and Toccoa moonshine. But Brown belonged to white listeners now, too, and he was taking off—he was becoming a pop star.

B
rown’s crossover success set its own course, impossible to reproduce by following instructions. In 1965, the great factory for creating black pop music according to plan was Motown. And in that
year, the president of Motown signed somebody Brown knew well, Tammy Montgomery. Motown founder Berry Gordy changed her name to Tammi Terrell and began his systematic process of grooming her for stardom, putting her through the Motown finishing school. Meanwhile, Brown had already put her through another kind of school.

Terrell lasted only about a year with Brown, from 1963 to 1964, and in that time, she fell into the rhythm of endless one-nighters, living on the bus and racing to the next stage. She also fell into the natural path of a James Brown featured female singer. Like most of the rest, she was sleeping with him, wearing the wigs he liked his women to have, and being showered with gifts. They played the Apollo, and Brown had her attended by hair stylists, manicurists, and pedicurists. He paid for facials and hair weaves and furs. A little later, they played Grossinger’s, the Catskill Mountains resort that had been part of the Borscht Belt but now was struggling to find relevance. The temporary solution was a bill teaming James Brown with comedian Bob Hope.

There had probably been trouble between Brown and Terrell before, but what happened at Grossinger’s marked a turning point in their relationship. Backstage, Hope took a liking to her, and invited Terrell to travel with him on a USO tour of Vietnam. Terrell told him she had contractual commitments with Brown she had to fulfill. More important than professional commitments, though, was that Brown could not bear the idea of a woman leaving him. The possibility of anyone—let alone the headliner—“stealing” his woman would not have sat well with him.

His violence went unhidden. “I saw James Brown beat her butt in Atlanta, Georgia, until she was too weak to fall,” said Allyn Lee.

David Butts, a dancer with the show, remembered Terrell going onstage after a pummeling from Brown. “She had a tune called ‘If You See Bill.’ She’d be singing it up there with a black eye.”

Butts also recalled doing a show in Virginia, then everybody being told to check out of the hotel and get on the bus. “We were
going along on the highway, heading south, when maybe an hour into the ride the bus pulls over. James is driving his car, and James gets out, snatched Tammi out of the car, and commences to smack her. I’d never seen anything like that before. Everybody wondering what it was all about.

“What it was, as they were rushing out of the hotel—see, James likes hot sauce on his chicken wings, and she snatched the bottle up and put it in her mink coat pocket as they left. Later, when he asked for the hot sauce, she pulled it out of the mink and that set him off—‘why you put that in your mink coat pocket?’”