One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (28 page)

In the States, Brown rarely socialized with his band. If he came on the bus, it was to inspect it. Otherwise, he kept a distance. He would stay at one hotel, the band would stay at another. But in Vietnam, everyone stayed together, and they were all stuck there after the sun went down and it wasn’t safe to move around. Drummond had befriended a veteran, the kind of guy who can get you anything if you have the money, and one night he’d rustled up fried chicken for everybody at the hotel. There was nothing to do after eight o’clock except sit in your room with the lights off, so the band were all hanging out, when suddenly there was a knock on the door.

It was Brown, looking for somebody to talk to. And so he and his band ate chicken and drank and talked. He even did what he almost never did again. He opened up and shared his feelings about the war, and talked to the band about what the soldiers were telling him before shows, about how tough it was for guys over there. They really were in a different country.

The final shows were at Bearcat Base, a large encampment of the 9th Infantry Division built on defoliated rubber and mangrove
forests where racial tensions were high. The day after King was shot in Memphis, word had reached this base, and while many black soldiers and a number of whites grieved, a group of white senior noncommissioned officers threw a party in celebration. Racial fighting erupted all around the facility.

At Bearcat they played in an area gulped out of a hillside, which reminded some of the Hollywood Bowl. Brown would claim later that the Vietcong called a ceasefire while he played: “They said, ‘Let’s get some of this funk for
us
.’” In the States, he had taken to giving the Black Power clenched fist salute from the stage, but Brown wouldn’t do it here. “That would have been causing a problem,” he said. Thousands of soldiers came to the shows, wearing full field gear in 110-degree heat. At the top of the hillside, tanks were lined up for the performance. “Black and white, they just went wild,” said Drummond.

At the end of a song, from behind the stage, the musicians suddenly heard the unmistakable ack-ack-ack of American guns firing on VC to their rear. Everybody was watching the band, and now they were
really
watching, as confusion and then anxiety played across the musicians’ faces. Finally, one of the guys sitting cross-legged at the front of the stage spoke to the band: “Aw don’t worry. We won’t let Charlie get ya!” And then Brown took the microphone and continued the show. “Hit me!”

They taped a program for Armed Forces radio and then stopped in Okinawa, and finally the band returned to the States. Five chartered buses filled with fans from the New York area greeted Brown at Kennedy Airport on June 19. His father was there, too. When he walked down the Pan Am stairs to the tarmac, Brown wore an army field hat and a camouflage jacket.

At an airport press conference, his immediate reaction was to vent indignation: at the “hillbilly” music mostly played over there and at his treatment. He declared that he had drawn more than Bob Hope ever had, and that he should have been able to bring his full
band. And another thing: It was an insult that he hadn’t been allowed to take his own guns with him to Vietnam.

He came back gruff and reaching for more, though he didn’t seem to know exactly what he wanted next. In later days, he would talk about why he had pushed so hard to play Vietnam. He would suggest Muhammad Ali and other conscientious objectors had been afraid, unlike him. And he would say: “A lot of blacks thought they didn’t have a real reason to go there because they wasn’t getting their rights here. They had mixed emotions on the war. My dad didn’t agree ’cause he went into the service. He thought that by going to fight he had more to complain about. That’s what I felt. I went in ’68 because if you want to demand a hundred percent of your rights you got to give your country a hundred percent of your support.” His beliefs were built out of ego, a concern for civil rights, and his Southern-steeped Americanism. Nothing could ever untangle all the strands.

First in Boston and now in the middle of a global conflict, Brown had put himself on the line. He returned home different from the man he had been a few weeks before. As the
Village Voice
put it: “With Dr. King and Senator Kennedy gone…James Brown, as spokesman, singer and soul brother had new and heavy duties at the age of thirty-five.”

Waiting for Brown when he got to his Queens home was a Western Union Telegram: “WELCOME BACK FROM VIETNAM LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU AGAIN.” It was signed Kevin White, the Boston mayor. It might have been a patrician reflex for politeness. It might have been insurance against the fire next time.

Chapter Fourteen

HOW YOU GONNA GET RESPECT?

D
on’t muffle your message. If you’re going to tell it, tell it on the mountain. Hubert H. Humphrey stood before the five thousand delegates gathered for the 38th Quadrennial Session of the AME Church, and he told it: “I am a soul brother.” Lucky for him there was applause, enough so that he could smile and finish his thought:

“All of us are soul brothers—in the brotherhood of man.”

It was early May 1968, just a week after the vice president had announced his candidacy for president, and he was tearing into the campaign trail. Key to this election would be an important demographic Humphrey saw within his reach, the African American vote. And so he came to Philadelphia wearing a green sharkskin suit and a blue shirt.

On the surface, being a middle-aged, snow-complected political insider might preclude membership in the soul brotherhood. But Humphrey had long staked a claim. Back in 1948, when he was a new senator from Minnesota, he led a drive to keep strong civil rights language in the Democratic party platform. His efforts lead a group of Southern Democrats, clinging to segregation and organized by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, to form a breakaway party, the Dixiecrats. Long known as a liberal on race issues, in 1968
Humphrey was banking on black support to lead him to the White House.

In January, he addressed the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa and toured Africa with Thurgood Marshall. In the summer he called for a “Marshall Plan” to “get rid of the ghettos,” and demonstrated support of the Poor People’s Campaign, an economic justice effort King had begun and which was coming to fruition since his death. Humphrey had basketball star Elgin Baylor’s endorsement, he was trying to reel in Aretha Franklin, and Motown’s Berry Gordy was dangling the possibility of a Diana Ross support.

The veep inspired confidence and obligation from old folks who remembered what he’d done for blacks in the past, but unluckily for Humphrey, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was also running, and he inspired love among young black voters. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Kennedy broke it to an Indianapolis audience by saying it felt like a death in the family. Some blacks called him “the blue-eyed soul brother,” and unlike with Humphrey, nobody laughed when they said it. Earlier in the summer, Brown was pondering giving Kennedy his endorsement, and had sent his aide, Bob Patton, to Los Angeles to discuss it with Kennedy’s people. They met at the Ambassador Hotel just a few hours before Kennedy was shot and killed in the hotel kitchen on June 5.

Brown played Yankee Stadium two weeks later. Outside the ballpark, vendors sold commemorative pics of Kennedy and King together. A dollar for one, $2.50 for three.

In the weeks that followed, Humphrey sought to tap RFK’s black support. “What about our negro entertainers such as James Brown, and many others?” he asked in a July 16 memo to his staffer Ofield Dukes. “Can’t we get them lined up with us?”

About a week later, as it happened, Brown was calling Dukes. He had troubles of his own. A credit problem had delayed the transfer of ownership of the Augusta radio station to him, so Brown phoned Washington asking for help. During the call, Dukes
casually mentioned that Humphrey was going to be in Los Angeles soon, and floated the idea of an endorsement. Brown agreed to a joint appearance in Watts.

Brown had known Humphrey since the Stay in School events of 1966, and the black press had been flooded with pictures of Brown and Humphrey shaking hands. Humphrey had played a part in getting Brown to Vietnam, and the two liked each other on a personal level.

In New Jersey, Dukes says he was approached by LA-based nationalist Ron Karenga, poet-activist Amiri Baraka, and a representative of an urban street gang, who at the time were working to get Kenneth Gibson elected as the first black mayor of Newark. Dukes says the activists suggested that they knew about Humphrey’s upcoming appearance in Watts, and that a donation of $25,000 to the Gibson campaign would help ensure its success. Through a complicated route, Dukes said a “contribution” was de-livered that April.

The vice president arrived in Los Angeles at the end of the month for several scheduled appearances. At the Elks Auditorium on Central Avenue, he was to speak at a voter registration rally set up by Black Democrats for Humphrey. Before about 500 listeners, Humphrey attempted to discuss his jobs policy, barely getting started before an organized group of hecklers shouted, “Honky go home!” The din drowned him out, and after several tries, Humphrey stepped down. He was quickly smothered by a cloud of Secret Service agents—after Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles, security wasn’t taking any chances. They rushed Humphrey from the auditorium.

This racial static lent additional drama to the meeting of the soul singer and the “soul brother” scheduled for the following day. Humphrey’s rally was held on a lot where a grocery store had burned during the Watts Riot in 1966. On the dais that day in Watts were Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty and labor leader Walter Reuther. Dukes said he saw Amiri Baraka in the crowd, and they nodded meaningfully at each other.

Humphrey was speaking to the crowd when shrieks from several hundred youths suddenly erupted, and all eyes turned to James Brown emerging from the crowd. He popped up next to the veep and opened his mouth. Perhaps Humphrey was expecting a standard “I endorse this man” moment. It went a different way.

“So many times different candidates been elected to different offices, and we haven’t got…we’d like to know sometimes what’s gonna be done for black people.” A woman in the crowd shouted: “Right on!”

“I’ve not come here because I’m a black man…. No one could buy me to come out here. I’m here because I have something to say and if at the end of my statement the distinguished gentleman to my right concurs, then I have no choice but to endorse him.”

Humphrey suddenly looks wary. He stiffens; his eyes dart.

James Brown was telling it. “First, I’d like to say, the black man wants
ownership
. He wants to be able to own his own things and make up his own mind. Number one in the black community, in the low income areas, we need housing. So we don’t have to stay in the dark like I did when I was a kid. Number two, we need hospitals so we don’t have to stand around bleeding to death while some other cat gets worked on. I believe in telling it like it is. I don’t want no pretty words, I’m gonna tell you just how I feel.” Humphrey nods his head, agreeing. Ohh-kay. Let’s ride.

“Number three, we need our own banks, so we can get our own money to do things for ourself. We want banks available in the black community…. I don’t endorse the party, I endorse the
man
.”

Brown had come with a more ambitious agenda than Humphrey, and he was aiming to get some political promises on record. He wanted his endorsement to mean something. When he was done, Humphrey looked relieved. That wasn’t so bad, his eyes say. I can work with this.

“Let me just say, in the presence of a man that I have grown to respect and admire and a gentleman that I look to as a friend, that what he has said to this audience here today is what I have tried to
say but not so well.” This was turning out to be a mutual endorsement.

Brown: “I am for Humphrey because he is the better man.” This was not the “I love this guy” the pol requested, but something from the heart, unexpectedly real.

The event ended as the band played “I Got You (I Feel Good),” with Humphrey almost losing the endorsement by boogalooing beside Brown.

Brown’s name was money. No wonder so many wanted its magic. Black power denizens wanted him on their team, and they tried various methods to get it. There was outright flattery, as when Stokely Carmichael explained “James Brown will be black power” in the
Baltimore Afro-American
that summer. “Muhammad Ali will be black power. All the creative skills of colored individual persons working for the benefit of the masses of ‘our people’—that is what I mean by ‘black power.’” There was a little quid quo pro, as Brown was clearly hoping for from Humphrey.

In a moment when people across the political spectrum were lobbying him for an audience, in the summer of 1968 he finally released “America is My Home.” Musically it wasn’t bad, and interestingly, Brown doesn’t sing, he speaks the lyrics. And the
way
he speaks them gives them an electric charge. It’s not a recitation, it’s a guy trying to engage you in conversation, and some have even called it an early rap record. This song was a challenge, with Brown in your face, daring you to criticize the USA. As America was bombing Vietnam and Cambodia and was a magnet for international condemnation, this was an immense argument to pick with his listeners. He knew that.

“America,” a press release boasted, was mailed to “every governor and mayor.” According to Brown’s spokesman Bud Hobgood, “We
hope this record, if handled right, will provide a public service and stop any problems that may arise this summer.”

Here was the redneck in the man: Even when he was expressing his love, it came out like he was picking a fight. You can hear in “America is My Home” what it must have been like to disagree with Brown.

“He was the most competitive person I ever met—when ordering a meal in a restaurant he was judgmental and competitive and he had to comment on everything,” said Alan Leeds.