One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (20 page)

Brown’s treatment of Tammi Terrell fit a pattern in his relationships with women, and the abuse stemmed from his possessiveness and the dread of being left. Bobby Bennett said he saw Brown hit her three times with a hammer outside of a hotel in Washington, D.C. According to singer Gene Chandler, at her last show with Brown, Terrell made the mistake of not standing in the wings watching everything he did. According to Chandler, interviewed for a syndicated TV show, Brown danced off the stage and beat her all the way down the stairs to the dressing room. Chandler called her mother. The next morning her mother picked her up and took Terrell home.

Her family unpacked her bags. From one they pulled out a blue silk kimono, spattered with blood.

Chapter Ten

THE CAPE ACT

F
irst, she thought she could fly. Then she hoped the fat guy would break her fall.

The woman had come to Rockland Palace in Harlem, to see James Brown in 1961. As the group tore into “Please, Please, Please,” something overpowering entered her, a feeling that the world was unreal, and that what she was about to do would connect her with something more infinite. She rose up, planted her feet on the edge of the upper deck, swaying back and forth to the beat, and then… she leaped off the planet. Or tried to. She landed on the floor below, and was lucky to survive.

“I saw her body sweep away like she was going up in smoke,” Brown told a writer from
Sepia
. “The next thing we knew she had swept and swooned herself to the balcony… and leaped over. We didn’t dig that action at all.”

James Brown put audiences into a trance. On another night in the early 1960s, when the band played a Southern dance, a large woman climbed onto the balcony’s lip and flickered there. “No one made a remark—no one approached her, and she never had a moment of unbalance,” said a witness. “The whole public was swaying. It was a dance, but no one was dancing. It was like a standing ovation to the singer.”

What was happening in the shows of the early 1960s to possess fans to float off like that? The answer is there in the performance of “Please, Please, Please,” in a bit of stagecraft Brown had only recently introduced into the show. But to understand this turning point, we have to step back to another era, another dance, and do the mashed potato all the way back to the 1890s.

We are in the area along the Ob River in northwest Siberia, east of the Ural Mountains. It is windy, unspeakably cold, though spring is coming. The people who live here dwell in birch bark tents and hunt with bows and arrows the wolves that stalk the frozen evergreen forest. These people were called the Ostyak or the Ostiak. The eleventh edition of
Encyclopedia Britannica
, 1911: “The Ostiaks are middle-sized, or of low stature, mostly meagre, and not ill made, however clumsy their appearance in winter in their thick fur-clothes. The extremities are fine, and the feet are usually small.”

They are one tough crowd, too. Running out of food, they stare at a leader, a hero, who stands before them. They are hungry and wondering if they must again move to a new spot. They are fanatic, obsessed with the hero and demanding answers. They have put him on a platform, and now they surround him, waiting for a sign. They are pleading for a show of prowess, of stamina, of his control over the forces that are ravaging their lives.

They are expecting a performance. Drums play for a long time, then the hero screams in an inhuman tongue, a torrent of words and emotions that touch his followers but which they cannot understand. Eventually he is overcome, inhabited by a spirit that contorts his face, his voice, the movements of his body. He dances.

He sings. The spirit that is in him pours out as he voices a message from the spirit world. He has climbed to heaven and fallen to the underworld, and now he is here, tired on every level. A circle of helpers drop a cloak, like a cape, around him, they attempt to give his body and soul the comfort of mortal hands on his back. A pat, a word, is proffered, but soothing him is beyond them, for only he has the answer to his condition.

After that, the way some folks told it back then, the hero entered his iron hut and fell asleep on a bed of purple clouds. That last part might have been the work of a really good press agent. But the basic, undeniable points are these: Some of the greatest performances originated centuries ago, and sometimes it’s the cape that makes the man.

Before we can connect the Ostyak and James Brown, we must make use of a word, an abused word, a cliché, which over the years has become as misrepresented and misunderstood as
funk
. The word is
shaman
. The Ostyak were into shamanism before shamanism was cool. The word was first used to describe people like the communal hero the Ostyak huddled around, coined by Russian anthropologists studying the tribal peoples of Siberia and Central Asia.

But one reason the term shaman has come to seem downright corny is that, even before Joseph Campbell went platinum and men’s groups, drum circles, and wind-up ravers ripped the stuffing out of the word, shamanism was a global phenomenon. The anthropologists who brought the concept to the masses determined that these people (call them medicine men, call them healers, call them shaman) existed in cultures all over the planet. Their very universality has led us today to spout universal banalities about them.

Crucial to the shaman’s shtick wherever he is found is that he must die in front of the community, in a symbolic act that is followed by a back-from-beyond rebirth. The symbolic death and rebirth is repeated over and over, and through this performance he is reborn before all, in a miraculous manner that consolidates his power and prominence.

Shaman, conjurer, bruja… American idol. In a charming and thoughtful book published in 1983, the British writer Rogan Taylor argues that our most global performers, the ones who matter most to modern audiences, are working in our own shamanic tradition. In
The Death and Resurrection Show
, Taylor describes a phase in which the hero withdraws from his community and gets his “act”
together, and suggests that when a shaman demonstrates his powers to the people, by nature he is putting on a show. A big moment in the shamanic ritual, says Taylor, is when the performer is wracked by the agonies of the underworld as we watch. Taylor calls this a “pantomime of moments in hell.” From the banks of the Ob to the buffet at Grossinger’s, what ties us to the most powerful entertainers is the same elemental bond humans once had with the shaman.

Taylor calls James Brown “perhaps the most outlandishly shamanistic performer of all.” The pinnacle of his show, the event unfolding when the bodies were poised on the edge of the upper balcony, came during “Please, Please, Please,” in a bit that quickly was dubbed “the cape act.”

The cape act had been a part of his show since 1961. Previously Brown had used a suitcase as a prop during “Please,” and into the mid-’60s he sometimes appeared onstage wearing a crown studded with fake baubles. Those were gimmicks, but the cape was in a whole different category. From the first time he used it, the cape altered his show; it made him seem bizarrely and grandly reli-gious. It made him a victim and a champion, running on currents that alternated weakness with raw power. He
said
he gave ushis all: The cape act showed it, and showed that his all was bottomless.

Brown had his story of how he first put on the cloak. He was watching wrestling on TV and caught the act of Gorgeous George, another primal performer. George was one of the very first TV stars, and the only wrestler to this day who can fairly be called profound. Maintainer of a flamboyant and demanding hairdo himself, George upped his fame when he began wearing luxuriously beaded, padded, quilted, and studded robes of a feminine nature. Guys who used to scream at him screamed louder when George preened in his dazzling robes. Violently transgressive, he found his gimmick and used it to control events in the ring, define his meaning, and master the audience. He knew exactly what he was doing. “I owe it
to my fans to wear nothing but the most costly and resplendent outfits money can buy,” he expounded. “Mink is so mediocre. I will wear nothing less than ermine on my ring robes.” He was a sissified brute, and he exerted some influence on Brown.

The cape act, Brown would say, started as an improvised tribute to George, but Brown changed everything about what it meant. On George the robe was a raiment signifying pomp, it oozed preposterous self-regard. It feminized him and thereby inspired contempt; George’s job was to pummel that hatred into respect.

But for Brown the cape signifies… what? Nobody hated him when he was draped in it. George
wore
his robes. They established his image. But the cape covers, and conceals, Brown, and keeps us from understanding him. The cape presents us with confusion, and we pull closer to understand.

So, pull closer. Of all the musicians, hairdressers, bodyguards, and aides-de-camp in Brown’s traveling party over the years, none lasted longer than Danny Ray. No one could have predicted this back in 1961. Ray was an impeccably dressed drifter and backstage regular at the Apollo looking for a break. “People got to see you around, get to know your face and let your name be Mr. Friendly,” he explained. Ray almost got a job with Johnny Mathis before Brown came back to the Apollo.

He started in 1961 as a valet for the Flames, and after Brown saw how sharp they looked, he promoted Ray to his valet. Ray had left Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 to join the army: “My military training made me be punctual. I guess Brown couldn’t find anybody to shine the shoes and clean the five outfit changes he had.

“I used to go up to the very top of the Apollo, to the place they call ‘the crow’s nest,’ and watch the show. To myself I’d say, if I could just get down there… I had no ideas how it would come. Then one night…” Making himself indispensable kept Ray out of Birmingham and landed him a slot as Brown’s announcer. But what gave him fame was the accident of the cape.

Listen to Ray and the talk of Gorgeous George starts to sound
concocted, crafted to give meaning to what was actually a fluke. He saw what he saw; he was there when it happened. “Back in the chitlin circuit days, there wasn’t no dressing room, there was an outside and an inside, and when you wanted to go off the stage, you went out the door and you were standing outside,” said Ray. “I used to catch him coming off singing ‘Please’ and he’d just be drenched in sweat, and one thing I was supposed to do was hand him a towel. That’s all it was. I put the Turkish towel on him. Places were so small, you had to go outside before you come back on the stage. It was, like, our little joke, at first. I put the Turkish towel on him; he’d kick it off and run back in and sing it some more. Folks could see it from their seats. People started noticing and it just became a thing.”

The audience saw it, literally out of the corner of their eyes, and it mattered to them. They wanted the bit brought in from outside.

There are three guys who have got the cape, Brown would say: Superman, Batman, and Danny Ray. “You had to be watching him at all times. He would tell me the color of the suits, the color of the capes, only a little before the shows,” said the valet. “I kept them safe with me and never let them out of my sight, because I knew what they represented.”

T
he initial James Brown albums released by King conspicuously hid an essential detail: what Brown looked like. His first album featured a gray-suited guy and a skirted lady photographed from the torso. The second non sequitur: a femme fatale holding a pistol. The next, a white baby crying. Brown conveyed his resentment of Nathan’s efforts to hide his face. When
Live at the Apollo
did well, Nathan stuck it to him by noting how his most successful album also didn’t have a picture of Brown on its cover.

This became a matter of ego, and a matter of conviction, for Brown was sure that if America witnessed him and his act, America would love him. When Brown debuted on national TV
on
American Bandstand
in 1963, his movements were confined, and the camera shot him from the waist up, his physicality kept in check. That, too, fed his determination.

But in 1964, the America beyond the chitlin circuit was able to see, as well as hear, a James Brown performance. He did eighteen minutes in a movie called
The T.A.M.I. Show
, and it was more than enough time for whole civilizations to leap off the upper deck. The cape act made its national debut on
The T.A.M.I. Show
, and nobody who saw it forgot the moment.

T.A.M.I. stood for Teenage Music International, or maybe it was Teenage Awards Music International, as is sometimes said. Either way, it was an effort to raise scholarship money through a videotaped concert that featured Brown, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, the Rolling Stones, and more live onstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. It would be hard to overhype this lineup, but the producers tried: The ads hyperventilated that it was shot in Electronovision, a legit technology that transferred high-resolution videotape to film for movie theaters.

Much has been made of how Brown upstaged the Rolling Stones, the show closers. How Mick Jagger was petrified as he watched Brown work and needed backstage consoling from Marvin Gaye— “Just go out there and do your best,” Gaye told him. He had to tell him something. Decades later, Keith Richards told an interviewer the biggest mistake of his life was going on The T.A.M.I. Show after Brown.

“I can’t even tell you now why I wanted the order that way,” said Steve Binder, who directed the film. “But then, I didn’t hear any first-person resistance to the idea, other than from James.

“I think how it came down was, he said ‘I
am
the final act on the bill, right?’ And I said no. And he said, ‘
Nobody
follows me.’

“‘Actually,’ I said, ‘we’ve got the Rolling Stones.’ He didn’t care—he was so confident in himself.”

They had four days of rehearsals before the shoot, which was done over two days. Brown was adamant that he did not want to run
through what he was going to do. This was for one simple reason: He knew what he had, and he didn’t want to tip his hand. On the road, after four days the opening act was liable to be doing your show. When he
did
rehearse for a TV appearance, he practiced something different than what he actually was going to play on the show.