One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (27 page)

Boston police officers formed a line along the sides of the stage. At the most emotionally charged moment of the show, the cape act, a group of young fans push past white officers onstage. Bodies rush in from both sides.

Down on one knee, he calls for “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me),” and one, three, five youths break through and jump up, grabbing the singer. The police force them back, and suddenly here was the worst possibility, white cops aggressively confronting black youths on live TV.

The band that could vamp through anything goes stone cold silent, the house lights are up. What else is up? “Let me finish the show,” Brown said. “We’re all black. Let’s respect ourselves. Are we together or are we ain’t?”

It worked. “We are,” folks yelled back. He signals the drummer—“hit the thing, man!”—and he is back in business. The show continued, and there was no violence in downtown Boston.

The Boston Garden show has become a major chapter in the telling of Brown’s life, and an even bigger chapter when Brown described it. As he put it on a TV interview not long afterward, “I was able to speak to the country during the crisis after the
assassination of Doctor King and they followed my advice, and that was one of the things that meant most to me…”

One problem with this formulation is that, in the absence of a riot, it is hard to prove that any one or one hundred events kept it from happening. In the days after the murder, some 125 cities experienced upheavals, leaving 46 dead and 2,600 injured. Boston did not, but it’s impossible to prove a negative. No riot started, but did James Brown stop one?

Indisputably, he kept thousands of angry citizens off the streets that night. News accounts in the days following gave Brown great credit for keeping the peace, and a legend was born. No doubt he recognized King’s inability to quell rioting in Watts in 1965, or to control violence during the Memphis garbage workers strike in May 1968. King could not stop a riot, but James Brown could.

He did it because, he would say later, he loved his country and didn’t want to see bad things happen. He did it because he loved his people, and thought King’s death marked a moment to push forth with his mission, not to ruin it with violence that would be crushed. Though he was hardly a believer in nonviolence, Brown performed the Boston show with King’s words in mind. He had sized King up as a sincere man, somebody who believed in what he was saying, and Brown had a Southerner’s respect for someone who went the distance for what he believed in. Brown did it out of honor, because it would be wrong to not honor an honest man’s memory.

A few days later, en route to a show in Rochester, he got a call from Washington, D.C.’s Mayor Walter Washington, who was facing his own outbreak of violence. He asked Brown to bring to the nation’s capital the peace he had delivered to Boston. Brown made appeals on local television calling on looters to stay at home. “Unfortunately the looters were carrying the color sets home and didn’t have them plugged in,” wrote a columnist in the
Pittsburgh Courier
. Twelve would die, and over a thousand structures went up in flames, in the D.C. riot.

Brown’s willingness to stick his neck out earned him notice within the White House. In May, he was invited to a Washington state
dinner for the prime minister of Thailand, Thanom Kittikachorn. When he took his seat, the singer found a note at the table: “Thanks much for what you are doing for your country, Lyndon Johnson.”

Later on, Brown would say that Vice President Humphrey took him aside and gave him a warning. You are entering deeper waters, the vice president cautioned. Brown was now going to be scrutinized by the mighty. Because anybody with the power to stop a riot also had the power to start one.

At the dinner with President Johnson and his guests, perhaps Brown found a moment to bring up a topic he’d been talking to members of Humphrey’s staff about for at least a year: an official visit to Vietnam to entertain the troops. So far this effort had gone nowhere for Brown, but after Boston, the road to Saigon suddenly opened before him.

I
n the last year of his life, King had reached beyond race and began speaking out against the Vietnam War. At Riverside Church in New York, on April 4, 1967, he delivered a major speech on the conflict, questioning its morality and calling it a burden unfairly borne by the poor. Just as King’s critique was being widely reported, other black voices were also being raised. Stokely Carmichael and Cleveland Sellers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee announced they would ignore their army induction orders. After the rejection of his request for conscientious objector status, boxer Muhammad Ali announced he would go to jail rather than join the army. Suddenly, African American criticism of the war was going pop.

Within a few weeks of King’s Riverside speech, Brown went into the studio to record a song meant to address this very moment. The song was called “America Is My Home”:

“America Is My Home” was undeniably daring, and if it had been released at that moment, it would have been understood as a denunciation of black leaders. It wasn’t released; Brown kept it under wraps, waiting for a more propitious moment.

In the context of Vietnam, soul music was becoming ever more politicized. Magazines like
Soul
and
Jet
printed letters from African American soldiers noting the absence of music by Brown, Wilson Pickett, or Aretha Franklin on military bases. Black music was played infrequently on Armed Forces Radio, and for all the shows organized for the troops by the United Service Organizations (USO) and the Department of Defense, virtually none featured black performers.

For at least a year, Brown had been expressing to government officials a desire to visit the troops. At one point he even cold-called the Pentagon and was transferred to an uncomprehending colonel who had no idea who the caller was. After that, Brown got in touch with the vice president’s office and asked how he could make this happen.

The State Department was sending the likes of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Anita Bryant, Wayne Newton, and the Golddiggers on USO tours: Whatever vision of America was described by such entertainment, it was a realm far from the Apollo Theater. In
Jet
, Brown complained, “I’ve been trying to get to Vietnam for the past 18 months. I think me and my group could take over enough soul to even give the Vietnamese some. I’m past the draft age and so are most of my band members, so we think it our patriotic duty, as Americans, to give a lift to the morale of our guys over there. I get letters saying that they are starving for soul. So far I’ve contacted all kinds of people trying to get to Vietnam but nothing has come through. I wonder if someone thinks I’ll get too much glory by taking so much soul over there.”

Ofield Dukes, an African American member of Hubert Humphrey’s staff, had spoken to Sammy Davis Jr., about going, and was now talking to Stax Records about an integrated package of the soul label’s acts going to Vietnam as part of a “Memorial Tour for Otis Redding.”
But Brown was easily the biggest black act there was, and in early 1968, Dukes was working on getting him to Southeast Asia. Humphrey was a dedicated liberal who had stuck his neck out for African Americans since the 1940s; he was also running for president in 1968 and had an elaborate plan to bring black voters on board.

Vietnam mattered to Brown for complicated reasons. He’d read his mail, and was struck by the hunger black soldiers had to hear some soul. A dedicated Huntley-Brinkley viewer, he watched the news every night. He wanted to go to Vietnam because he knew that just by being a famous black man in a war zone, he would be shining a light on brothers who were risking their lives.

Going to Vietnam would make him a designated symbol of his nation, no small thing to someone who could have disappeared in the Georgia penal system. Here was a way to get what he’d always wanted, acceptance on his own terms, projected onto a global drama.

A USO press release dated June 3 read: “JAMES BROWN—AND A SHOW OF 25—WILL SOCK IT TO ’EM ON A USO TOUR OF MILITARY BASES IN THE PACIFIC.”

The show was leaving June 5, going to Japan, Korea, Okinawa, and then Vietnam, on a sixteen-day sojourn. The star, of course, was “the one and only JAMES BROWN, dancing and singing soul music, a mixture of gospel singing and blues—with a throbbing beat that is primitive and somewhat savage.”

Nobody ever called Wayne Newton “somewhat savage.”

Behind the scenes, black antiwar activists were urging entertainers to stay home, arguing that black star power would be used by the government to sell the war at home. In a 1967
Soul
magazine article, a USO official declared that King himself was telling entertainers not to go.

But if King lobbied Brown to skip the trip, the effort backfired. Brown suggested to the press that antiwar sentiment might be simple cowardice. In any case, he said, it was his responsibility to support his countrymen. “Our black entertainers have been
attacked in the white press, giving everybody the impression that they didn’t want to go to Vietnam because they were either afraid or didn’t like our country being at war in that country,” he told
Jet
in June 1968. “Well, I don’t like the war, either, but we have soul brothers over there….

“I’m as much opposed to the war in Vietnam as anyone who loves peace. But I can’t turn my back on my own black brothers in Vietnam when they call upon me to entertain them. We’re going to Vietnam despite the criticisms and despite the risks. We are not afraid of right. We’re afraid of wrong.”

Brown left on June 5 with his full crew, stopped in Tokyo, and then landed in South Korea for several days of performing. Only when they were in Seoul was he told that taking his full crew to the war zone was too dangerous, that he had to cut his stage show down to seven members. He held a meeting and asked who was with him.

“Everybody was looking at everybody and, heh heh, the ones that didn’t go, I think they were happy,” remembered singer Marva Whitney. She
did
want to go, she said, because “the soldiers needed to see a sister who wasn’t an Oreo cookie.” The USO show featured Whitney, bassist Tim Drummond, drummer Clyde Stubblefield, guitarist Jimmy Nolen, saxophonist Maceo Parker, trumpeter Waymon Reed, and Danny Ray, the cape man. If Brown was going to war, damned right he was taking his valet with him.

The fact that Drummond was a white bass player playing in a black group made a statement on bases where racial conflicts had flared. The army appointed them all honorary lieutenant colonels. The band got their shots, were issued thick-soled boots, and given cards saying they were noncombatants, should they fall into Viet-cong hands. Then it was showtime.

There were two thousand soldiers at the first stop, Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside of Saigon. The group arrived one day after Viet-cong had launched a huge assault on the city, shooting thirty-five rounds of 122 mm rockets into the capital. Danny Ray: “A lot of the soldiers didn’t think we were coming. And some of them wondered
why
we’d come. Brown told them, ‘I
love my country, man. I love America the best, man. That’s home.’”

They brought a customized wardrobe with them, clothes suitable for the tropical humidity. “There wasn’t a dry spot on me nowhere,” Brown declared. The sound system was meager, and it was all but impossible to hear what you were playing. Didn’t matter.

“We gave the soldiers a whole new charge,” said Stubblefield. “We came over with the funk and the soul.”

Drummond: “We went with just pure music and we fucking killed them.”

At night they stayed at the Continental Hotel in Saigon, across the street from a presidential palace that was pockmarked by mortar fire. Signs posted in rooms warned guests not to open their drapes or turn on lights at night. That was because the nearby palace guards would think you were a sniper and shoot. At night, the beds shook from the five-hundred-pound bombs American jets were dropping on the countryside.

From Tan Son Nhut they went to Phan Rang Air Base. Typically they did two shows a stop, Brown hooking up to an intravenous saline drip in between. Phan Rang was the only time they flew in an airplane inside Vietnam. It was an aging propeller plane, “like in an old Tarzan movie,” said Drummond. They took off and then watched the engine drip oil and start smoking, forcing an emergency landing at the edge of the base they’d just left. Their plane had attracted Vietcong attention, and while waiting in a Quonset hut, the band suddenly heard loud explosions from just past the runway—American bombers dropping weight on the enemy that was closing in.

Time went by, and the air strike ended. Brown sucked his teeth, stuck out his chin, and made an announcement: “We’d like to have a better plane.”

As Brown described the experience: “We didn’t do like Bob Hope. We went back there where the lizards wore guns! We went back there where the
Apocalypse Now
stuff was going on.”

They traveled on converted buses between performances, with the windows wired up so nobody could toss in a grenade. Once, Drummond heard a voice on a walkie-talkie say, “Get ’em out of there, there’s a mortar attack coming in.” Moments later, they felt it.

At other times, soldiers made Brown and the band get down on the floor, standing over them while waiting for orders.

Once, they were told to jump out of a Chinook helicopter hovering over a marsh, Whitney recalled. “Being a tom girl from when I was small, that helped me because I had to jump four or five feet from the helicopter into the marshes, and I think I took it better than some of the guys did…” Another time, moving at night by helicopter, the band watched as red tracer fire chased their aircraft. Charlie, targeting Mr. Please Please Please. As fiery streaks followed the helicopter—some later said they heard pings of metal bouncing off—Whitney looked over at Brown. “He wasn’t scared like the other fellas, but he was sad. He was sad.”