One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (26 page)

Chapter Thirteen

AMERICA

A
merica was the land of a thousand dances, and Brown had done them all in a thousand-and-one places. He’d been everywhere. If in the late ’60s white American youth were hitting the backroads and byways in order to reconnect with an untrammeled land, Brown knew the land better than just about anybody, because he’d stomped it from one coast to the other.

His road manager Alan Leeds remembers a typical road trip: They did thirty-seven performances and a recording session covering five cities in eleven days. Brown would get off the airplane at a tiny airport in North Carolina, hop into a rental car, and maneuver sixteen precise corkscrew turns to get to the coliseum where the band would play that night. Ask him how he knew to do that, and he’d say, “I been here before.” Brown knew where to get coffee at the airports, where to get fried chicken near the hotel, and the name of the janitor cleaning up the auditorium after the show.

In the neon blur, routine anchored everything. The boss usually went to bed at three
A.M.
and at eleven
A.M.
he was calling around, asking his team for answers to all the questions he’d raised the night before.

And when he was on the road, he was never without women. It’s all but certain, said folks who have traveled with Brown, that he
never once slept alone. There were women who wanted to get near somebody with his level of mojo. There were women who stuffed dirty pictures into your pockets as you left the stage door. There were women Brown shot a look at and signaled an aide to wrangle backstage. There were women.

Big girls: He liked them hearty. “Somebody that’s thin they can only be my sister,” he said. “When you have a real relationship with a woman, she’s supposed to knock you out. It’s supposed to drain you, see. Unless you get that kind of feeling, it’s a joke. Unless she can put you to sleep.”

He might tour with one of his long-term companions or a wife. After that, there was a tier of long-term steadies “trying to become the main woman,” said Leeds.

Included in that group was the geechee girl, the conjure woman who he’d known since the mid-’50s in Macon, appearing backstage at a show two or three times a year. “He was afraid of her. He had a relationship with her that I only assume was sexual because that’s the only kind of relationship he ever had with women,” said Leeds.

Outside that circle, there were casuals he would fly in and out. “You’d get back to the hotel at one in the morning, have a last-minute detail chat with him in his room, and suddenly out of the bedroom in his suite this woman would come out, and it would be one of these women friends he was flying around.” Several aides were tasked with picking them up at the airport and getting them to the suite without problems at the hotel desk. “And
then
, on the really bad nights there was somebody in the group. The last resort was always one of the dancers,” said Leeds. “And if there was a new dancer, she’d get her chance at first.”

All these women—more than one a night, carefully booked on different floors to avoid, you know, complications—were an air-traffic-control nightmare. On a trip to Washington, D.C., Brown discovered his old friend and protégé, Steve Alaimo, was staying at the same hotel. At 2:30 in the morning, Alaimo heard a knock on the door; it was Brown, with his stern-faced wife by his side. “Steve,
was I not with you today?” Brown barked. Alaimo sputtered “yes,” and then Brown brought his wife into the room and invited her to look. Brown made her look under the bed, in the shower, he even made her pull out the end-table’s drawers. “Look behind the drapes! See, ain’t nobody here.”

The team he moved with was big and diverse. Key to making everything work was an aide who arrived around 1964: Charles Bobbit. He had started as Danny Ray’s valet, and worked his way up to being Brown’s most trusted adviser and protector. Bobbit was tight-lipped, candid, loyal, and willing to go extra for the Boss.

A background with the Nation of Islam proved useful for working for Brown. “He was one of Elijah Muhammad’s main guards,” said guitarist Bobby Roach, who came back into the tour in the early ’70s. “Bobbit was a collecting artist; he collected money for the Nation and he was good about it. He had a black belt, James always told us. That’s how he came to be one of Muhammad’s bodyguards.”

Bobbit was a soldier, a job description he got the chance to prove time and again while in Brown’s employ. Like everybody else, the boss tested Bobbit, to see how much abuse he would absorb. Once, when they were trying to catch a plane, Brown whispered to bassist Tim Drummond, “Watch this, we’ll have a little fun.” With the rental car’s key in his pocket, Brown barked to Bobbit that they couldn’t take off until they found the key, which must be locked in the car. “Get it,” he commanded. Later Bobbit returned, without the key but with his hands bloody from breaking into the vehicle.

Brown needed his soldiers. In their way, his band members, too, were like troops, and expected to be in uniform and on call round the clock. When they had down time he wanted to know exactly where they were. Hobbies were forbidden, the notion being that the musicians might hurt themselves playing sports and drag the show down. Most of the time this was moot because the pace precluded anything like leisure. But when the group played Vegas, and had only two shows a day, some of the guys took up golf. Pretty soon they were packing golf clubs on the bus.

“
James went ballistic,” said Levi Rasbury. “Black people don’t play golf,” he heatedly explained as he threw the clubs off the bus. “Really it was because we were enjoying our lives and having fun, and he couldn’t equate with that.”

A military force needed to have faith in the general—the leader needed to project an aura of rock-solid confidence. He had that and knew how to project it. Bob Patton was sitting beside the singer in his Learjet when the aircraft lost power and started falling from the sky. “He was stronger than Jesus,” said Patton. “I’m grabbing the seat and he’s sitting cool, arms folded.” Finally the jets fired up and the plane climbed again. “He looks straight at me and says, ‘You were scared, weren’t you, Mr. Patton?’ I said ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘It’s not your time. You with me.’”

A
video clip of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Brown, standing together in front of the Miami Hilton: King on a step by the hotel entrance, Brown on the sidewalk. Wearing a suit and tie, King drapes his arm around the singer’s shoulder, his manner projecting a mellow geniality. He is drawing Brown in.

But Brown does not wish to be included. He has a leather overcoat on, he is all but scowling beside King, and he looks tough, unmoved. King says something to him and Brown pulls back. The reverend wants to keep talking, but the singer moves away quickly, stops in his tracks, then gets behind the wheel of a big car. He throws the camera a forced smile and then drives off.

They knew one another, but they came from radically different places. There were vast cultural differences, rooted in family, education, and economic background. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” King believed of all Americans. Brown was not so sure. Instinctively the singer responded to obstacles in his path with a display of money and aggression. The idea of a mass movement, of an appeal based on shared beliefs rather than on superior individuality, was not in Brown’s makeup. Folks could not be trusted.

“
He talked sometimes about King, but not obsessively,” said Reverend Al Sharpton. “He was in one world and lived in it. He respected Dr. King, and knew that King had given his life. But he did not believe in nonviolence, he always told me. And he felt that Dr. King was not the grassroots guy he was. He respected him, he just didn’t see Dr. King as
him
.”

The band had returned from their first trip to Africa, having spent two days in Abidjan, the former capital of Ivory Coast, in the beginning of April 1968. Having arrived in New York, they were getting ready to hit the road when reports came that King had been shot in Memphis. They were supposed to play a big show, their biggest yet in Boston, tomorrow. This was going to take some rethinking.

In the late 1960s, the threat of mass racial violence extended beneath the surface of daily life. “I am afraid of what lies ahead of us,” King said. “We could end up with a full-scale race war in this country.” The previous summer there were riots in Detroit, Newark, Tampa, Buffalo, and elsewhere. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, in February 1968, twenty-eight African Americans were injured and three killed by police trying to break up a demonstration to integrate a bowling alley. Now it was summer again, and the most important figure in the Civil Rights Movement had just been murdered.

The singer was chatting about his African trip on a New York talk show when the broadcast was interrupted by a bulletin that the minister had been shot. Within hours of King’s death on April 4, 1968, Brown was giving statements to black radio stations, urging listeners not to express their anger by burning down their neighborhoods. Then he pondered the Boston performance. A show had long been booked, but reports of fires and mayhem were streaming in from all around the country. The rage beneath the floorboards was out in the open, and the only question that mattered for politicians and performers alike in the days ahead was how their small gestures might shape larger ones.

Unbeknownst to Brown, the managers of Boston Garden had already planned on canceling his show, operating on the belief that canceling all public events was safer and would keep people off the streets. The event’s promoter and a black city councilman warned the mayor that this was a terrible idea, bringing thousands of young African Americans into the heart of downtown and then leaving them there disappointed and angrier than before, with nothing to do. How to handle the booking and the crowd with the looming threat of violence was a problem. But even before that was a more immediate question: Who was going to explain to the mayor of Boston who James Brown was?

That’s one marker of how segregated the city was, that one of the most famous blacks in America could fill the biggest venue in town and the leading white official, Kevin White, had no reason to know his name.

It was decided that the concert should go forward once the mayor was told how many ticketholders were likely to be downtown, and that any cancellation would be interpreted as preemptively punishing the innocent. Then it was decided at City Hall that the show should be broadcast live on local television, thus giving Bostonians a focus for their grief, and a reason to stay home.

A crisis loomed over how to pay Brown for the show. Because if the artist in him felt a responsibility to honor King and to do what he could to avoid bloodshed, the businessman felt a need to see payment for services rendered. The city had just cost him a lot of money, what with the Garden seating 14,000; that was 14,000 tickets Brown hoped to sell, and now the mayor was giving fans a way to see the show for free on TV.

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning history of Boston in the ’60s,
Common Ground
, J. Anthony Lukas cast the negotiations between Brown’s people and city leaders in the harshest light: “Martin Luther King had just been killed and here were two black guys putting the squeeze on [Mayor White] for $60,000.” That was a familiar media image of black leaders in the 1960s: extortionists
and shakedown artists. Lukas inflated the cliché, with reporting that would have been strengthened immeasurably had he spoken to even one key person in Brown’s camp, or Brown’s Boston promoter, Jimmy Byrd. He did not.

It was ignoble of Brown not to do the show for free. But it’s possible to comprehend Brown’s perspective, too. Kevin White, who kept calling him
Jim
, pressuring him, telling Brown he owed it to Boston to stick his neck out further than White was willing to. In the end, over a barrel, the city agreed to Brown’s $60,000 fee. Then, when the show was over, the city reneged on the agreement, giving him, according to Charles Bobbit, $10,000. “Where the rest of the money went, we’ll never know,” said Bobbit. Not a bad price for “saving” Boston.

Brown had bigger worries. There were some African Americans who would attack him as an Uncle Tom for urging his people to sit down instead of protesting King’s death, as Brown had figured out before the night began. Should there be violence, now that he was cast as peacemaker, he would receive some of the blame. Did he not implore enough, or did the music stir folks up? He understood how carefully he had to choose his words and gestures.

This was an unprecedented show on an uncharted night. Driving in the bus to the Garden, band member Fred Wesley said he was worried he might be shot en route or on stage. Some in the group were praying to just get through things; others were ready to run. Ultimately, they all went into the deepest show-must-go-on trance.

At the beginning of the event, Brown says the hardest words there would be to say all night. A man’s name.

“We got to pay our respects to the late, great, incomparable—somebody we love very much, and I have all the admiration in the world for—I got a chance to know him personally—the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Brown brings Mayor White out; he is blinking, groping for air. Like Fred Wesley, he, too, thought he could die this night. Brown reads the moment and rushes in, conferring on the white politico
his personal stamp, saying “Just let me say, I had the pleasure of meetin’ him and I said, ‘Honorable Mayor,’ and he said, ‘Look, man, just call me Kevin.’ And look, this is a swingin’ cat. Okay, yeah, give him a big round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. He’s a swinging cat.” The words were perfect in the moment, Brown establishing authority for himself and for the mayor at the same time.

“The man is together!” raved Brown.

This was nonviolent crowd control, and the master of moving audiences had to take things to a new level. There were perhaps only two thousand people in the Garden, but Brown spoke directly to them, and adeptly measured the folks watching at home, too. Boston was where all those nights on the chitlin circuit—learning how to feel what the house desired, how to make thousands rise up and subdue crowds buggin’ for a brawl—had brought him to.