One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (22 page)

The arguments over who would speak and in what order went on until, finally, King cut things off abruptly. “I’m sorry, y’all,” he explained as he made his exit. “James Brown is on. I’m gone.”

Harry Belafonte had organized the program, which also featured Sammy Davis Jr. and Marlon Brando, but Brown was indisputably the star. He’d gathered a seven-member version of his band in Cincinnati, put them on his Learjet, and flown to Jackson. In order to take the stage, Brown was guided through the swarming crowd by bearded SNCC activist Cleveland Sellers;
Jet
said it looked like Moses parting the Red Sea. Film images from the day show Brown and the band on a platform at the crest of a hill, a forest behind them. They look small and serious, dwarfed by their surroundings.

Brown peers out at the crowd below him, scanning it for secrets. The stage is cramped; there are people sitting in folding chairs behind him, and high school students crouching on the edge of the stage. There’s a podium, too, all of which makes it hard for Brown to dance, yet he tries. Though he typically liked to control his setting and the events around him, the look on his face shows he knows he’s part of a bigger story.

The afternoon show began with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” It revitalized a crowd that was weary even before the sweltering temperatures rose above ninety degrees, and it also pointed to how Brown’s music was being repurposed by a new generation of African Americans. Months before, a group in Canton, Mississippi, many of them domestic workers who had lost their jobs after
organizing a voter registration campaign, had formed a sewing cooperative to produce leather coin purses. They named their product “Papa’s Brand New Bag.” Brown represented a new kind of black self-confidence, and his songs were being turned into expressions of hope and protest by his listeners.

A phrase like “brand new bag” effortlessly became a declaration of a new breed’s arrival. Just a few months later, speaking in Newark, New Jersey, Stokely Carmichael would say, “James Brown’s got more musical genius than Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart put together.”

Another song at Tougaloo might have said as much to the crowd that day as “Papa’s.” Brown sang his latest single, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” his plushest ballad yet; an elegy to cold comfort, a slow roll of shrieks and satin. He finished the brief set with “Please, Please, Please”—when he reached the phrase “just hang on,” he incanted it over and over as tears streamed down his cheeks. “There was no doubt that he was addressing this plea to the Freedom Marchers who had endured harassment and abuse while marching the 260 miles from Memphis to Jackson,” reported
The Philadelphia Tribune
.

At the performance’s end, an announcer thanked the crowd: “You have just witnessed the rest of this show. This here’s black power, baby.” Brown’s face looks over the crowd, giving a slight nod of agreement.

Arguments over the meaning of Black Power would divide many African Americans over the next few years. Many of the people who would find themselves at the center of the argument were present at Tougaloo. Many would follow Carmichael and lose their faith in nonviolence and their belief that whites and blacks could work together for equality. King and those behind him would make a moral appeal to America, one based on shared interests. In the space between them stood Brown. He became a cultural politician the moment he stepped off the plane in Jackson. By the time he left town, he found out his portfolio had become exceedingly more complicated.

“T
his is a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl,” Brown sings. Curiously, the song starts with a boast, and then all broadens a confession. He beats his chest as he sings the title, and from that moment on, doubt seeps into the music. By the final lyrics, the man in this man’s world is “lost in the wilderness, he’s lost in bitterness, he’s lost somewhere in this loneliness.” It’s a most peculiar ad for virility: a promise that it will make you alone, depraved, and howling like a jackal.

The song would be nothing without a specific woman, Betty Jean Newsome, who played a large part in writing it, and who then spent many years fighting for her song credit. Brown met Newsome the usual way: He was singing at the Apollo Theater in 1965, saw a pretty face in the crowd, and sent an aide out to bring her backstage. They began traveling together.

It was a tempestuous relationship. He insisted on having things a certain way, and she was no pushover. Maybe that was part of the attraction. “He wanted his women to carry little dogs in their laps,” said Newsome. “I’m not gonna carry no dog of his in my lap. No babies, neither.

“When we were going down South in the limousine, somebody had mentioned how most of his women had babies by him—‘Why you ain’t gonna have no babies?’ I said, ‘Why you ask me that—I ain’t gonna have none of his monkey-looking babies.’ They thought he was gonna knock me out of the limousine after I said that.

“The Flames covered their eyes when he looked like he was gonna hit me. I told them, ‘Don’t bother closing your eyes because
he
the one that’s gonna be getting hit.’ I said, ‘What kind of men are you that you be so afraid of him?’ They were scared stiff. He used to hit them grown men! It was crazy, it was pitiful the way that he treated them. He was something, boy.”

As they were traveling by limousine around the South, Newsome started humming a song she had come up with, and Brown
liked it a lot. He changed some of the words, added strings, and put the song out under his own name. “He added a couple more ‘mans’ on there so he could try to steal it. But it didn’t work,” said Newsome. “God don’t like ugly and he sure don’t go along with thieves! They get away with things for a little bit but he catch up with them after a while.” Eventually, a judge would grant Newsome co-authorship of the song.

The pace was picking up. A month after the Tougaloo concert, the black press was full of reports that Brown had been beaten up by his hairdresser. Brutalized so badly he might not be able to work due to his injuries, so badly that he filed a suit against the man. Some wondered how a hairdresser could have gotten the drop on an ex-boxer. Others stooped to sarcasm: “Despite his fondness for flowing Batman-type capes, patent-leather shoes, pancake makeup, artificial eyebrows and eye shadow, there is nothing in James Brown’s background to indicate he is effeminate,” wrote a columnist in
The Philadelphia Tribune
.

Brown was suing his former coiffeur, Frank McRae, for an alleged assault. The precipitating event had occurred several years before, in Los Angeles, after the two had been drinking at Tommy Tucker’s Playroom. McRae, Brown, and his girlfriend got into Brown’s purple and silver Fleetwood and drove to Dolphin’s of Hollywood, a record store off Central Avenue. The singer headed for the shop and McRae was parking the Fleetwood when a police car flagged him down. McRae had liquor on his breath.

One officer called him “nigger” and other things, while his partner kept a hand on his gun. McRae knew the drill from being in the South with Brown, so he just said
yessir
. They gave him a ticket and drove off.

When Brown got back in the car, his girlfriend told him all the things the policeman had called McRae. “You ain’t no man, Mac,” growled Brown, who proceeded to tell his concierge what
he
would have done had the policemen insulted him, all the way back to the hotel on Sunset where they were staying. In the lobby, up the
elevator to the penthouse, Brown continued to describe how McRae had disgraced himself before the police.

McRae had plenty of time to formulate an answer, which when it was delivered was along the lines of, “You wouldn’t have done a motherfucking thing.” And just like that it was two rights and a left cross from Brown, and McRae was on the floor. He awoke to find Brown “shining his shoes,” McRae would say later—kicking him as McRae lay on the ground.

The dapper stylist got up and grabbed Brown, holding him hard against the wall in the hotel hallway. Ben Bart appeared on the scene with a.25 in his hand, and McRae felt sure Bart was going to pop him, “because Ben Bart love him more than he love me.” It didn’t happen, but moments later McRae left the hotel room, and the employ, of James Brown.

The lawsuit against McRae was a shot across his bow, an effort to get the jump on the suit McRae was fixing to file. Eventually they settled out of court.

The impulse behind Brown’s behavior was simple: Make an overwhelming show of his masculine force. He told stories that fed this image, extolling his past as a brawler, his way with women. It was a man’s world, that’s just the way it was, and he was in control.

At the same time, however, there was a competing image complicating the picture. For Brown wasn’t just softening the hard features that McRae noted, he was offsetting them in ways that raised eyebrows. Putting on pancake makeup and elaborate eyeliner, doing his hair in a style popular among black women, in the mid-1960s, Brown made some wonder about his sexuality. His boyhood friend Henry Stallings ran into him on 125th Street around this time, and Stallings’s first impression, he said, was that Brown had “gone sissy.”

Street corner rumors spread in Detroit and elsewhere that he liked men. Then, in late 1965, came stories that the singer was to undergo corrective surgery. The talk started in Alabama, and then reached Texas and beyond. “‘James Brown is going to change himself to a woman’ was the rumor that was circulating as late as last
week among the teenagers, and now it has spread among the adults,” declared the
Houston Forward Times
. The story was enough of a problem for him in Houston that an emissary was sent to squash it in advance of an appearance. Brown himself would later claim that
he
had spread yet another rumor, that he was marrying Bobby Byrd after Byrd had gotten a sex change. It was all a publicity stunt, he declared. Possibly. But in the black South of 1965, that would have been pushing the “any publicity is good publicity” philosophy beyond convention, if not beyond all likelihood. It sounds like a rumor Bart and Brown were anxious to get in front of.

I
n March 1966, he made his first visit to England and France. The next month,
Time
said that his “rise in the mass market gives a sign that ‘race music’ is perhaps at last becoming interracial.” Things were happening fast now, and they would for years to come. Time was quickening, and success was like a jewel pressed into the palm of his hand, with so many decisions to be made at once, and so many events he needed to get in front of.

Always he had to assert his will and keep others in check. The competition had to be vanquished—and not just bested, but wasted, that was the idea. In the mid-’60s, no competitor meant more to Brown than Jackie Wilson. A pure singer from Detroit, Wilson had been a good boxer, too, and a fine dancer, and he also was managed by Ben Bart. So they had a lot in common, which was problem enough. But there was a lot that wasn’t the same, and maybe that was worse. Wilson was light-skinned, pretty, and had an effortless way with women, and Brown resented him on all counts.

“Being a mulatto, he didn’t have the energy or strength I had,” Brown later declared. “What got Jackie through was his complexion. During that time, if you were light complexioned, you had it. I was the one who made the dark complexioned people popular.”

When Wilson broke through by singing with the Dominoes, Brown went backstage to say hi and was regally dismissed by the star, who called him “Jimmy,”
a gesture guaranteed to wind him up. After that, it was
on
. As Brown was preparing for an appearance at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., he heard a clamor from out on the street. That’s when he saw Wilson, driving a fur-lined Cadillac convertible that just happened to pass by the kids lined up to see Brown. That Wilson didn’t even get out and greet him standing there on the sidewalk, Brown felt, stuck it to him all the more.

In retaliation, Brown went to see Wilson’s show the same week. The band was playing, getting ready for the singer’s big entrance, and here came Brown, fans pushing him up and up toward the stage. The Upsetters, Brown’s old cohorts, were Wilson’s band that night, and they knew Brown’s material—and started playing it, as he sang. The crowd felt like they’d paid for an ice cream cone and been given a double dip.

Then, to rub it in, Brown went backstage to say hi to Wilson. He found him in his dressing room, in red bikini briefs, laying on his stomach and getting a massage. Bart was urging him to get out and do his show. “Why do I need to go out there?” Wilson whined. “
That
guy just did my set.”

A
fter the knockout punch came the polishing of shoes. And after the polishing of shoes must come fresh battles. It was the progression upon which a career was built.

In 1966, his contract was finally up, and it came at a time when Nathan felt he
had
to re-sign Brown. Much had changed at King since Brown’s aborted leap to Smash. The thirty-three branch offices that had once been essential to King’s success, operating across the country and delivering product to stores and radio stations, had become too costly to maintain. In 1964, Nathan shut them down, relying on independent distributors, middlemen who might work with dozens of labels large and small, to put his records in circulation.