One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (29 page)

They went to the Stage Deli in New York, one of Brown’s favorite places to hang in town, and he had a point to make about boiled beef. “Mr. Leeds, you’re Jewish, you don’t eat boiled beef—see, you got all that corned beef, you’re gonna get sick.
I’m
gonna get my grease boiled off,
I’m
gonna be healthy…” From there he transitioned into Jews and Ben Bart and God and pork. “There was nothing chill about him,” said Leeds.

If he could be so opinionated about boiled beef, imagine how intense he could be about the country he loved. The song celebrates a place where a poor shoeshine boy could grow up to shake hands with the president.

“America Is My Home” didn’t sound like anything else on the charts; the closest thing to it were country records, provocations like “The Fightin’ Side of Me” or “Okie From Muskogee.” If it had been a little better musically, it might have been the most dangerous record he ever made.

As it was, “America” was the beginning of a new problem. He probably thought it was an act of charity, but it was heard by many as a putdown of critics of the war, and of black power. It made it to thirteen on the R&B chart, and never landed on the pop chart. It certainly cost him more than he gained, because suddenly Brown sounded like an authority figure, not an ally. The song put cracks in his bond with black fans.

It might have been the single they were pushing, but “America” wasn’t on the set list of the Boston Garden show. “Everybody got on us about [the song],”
Bobby Byrd said. “We were singing about
America
; black folks didn’t want to hear that—we were in a protest situation.” The black response was loud and clear: “We have nothing to say to you, because you’re with the white man. We’re not listening to what you’re saying. You’re just talking about America and look what they’re doing to black folks,” recalled Byrd. At the Howard Theatre, members of the Nation of Islam
and
the Congressional Black Caucus came to grill Brown about his little tune.

H. Rap Brown, the minister of justice for the Black Panther Party, called the singer “the Roy Wilkins of the music world,” a denigrating reference to the leader of the NAACP who was dismissed by radicals as hopelessly accommodating. In July,
Muhammad Speaks
, newspaper of the Nation of Islam, reported that a James Brown boycott was underway in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The boycott’s sponsor quipped, “What record could possibly follow ‘America’? May I suggest ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ ‘America the Beautiful,’ or ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’ with that up-tight out-of-sight James Brown beat…

“If James Brown continues to record this type of material, then all I can say is: Brother Brown, I hope you still remember how to shine shoes.”

Tim Drummond was a white Midwestern kid who played bass in the band. Problem. At the Howard Theatre, Brown received a telegram backstage that said, “You got a white man playing with you, a black man needs a job.” In Chicago, word circulated that Drummond better not play. Brown didn’t get the message, though, and when a worker at the Regal Theater gestured for his bassist to get off, Brown threatened to cancel the show.

He had been a symbol of blackness, and just that quick he was taking flack for being insufficiently black. Critics honed in on one aspect of his image: the hair. “If James Brown is so soulful why does he still wear that konk in his hair?” asked a reader of the
Baltimore Afro-American
. At an Oakland meeting with the Black Panthers, where the group conveyed their judgment of Brown, his
hairdo was top of the agenda. The Afro, it had been decided, was the style truest to the race. For a while, Brown would watch his band members one by one getting off the bus with their brand-new naturals, and he would tease them about it, loudly. Then, one day, he came out of his dressing room: with an Afro.

It could not have been easy, for a man who did his hair in a way that would subvert nature, to have to submit to the natural. He did his hair in the morning, then before the show, then again after the show, all so that he would not look like anybody else. Now these guys in their leather jackets were forcing him to look like them.

He tried to sell his new look in the column he wrote for
Soul
magazine: “I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Even if somebody pointed a gun at me and said they’d shoot me if I didn’t go back to a do.” He followed that by writing a song for Hank Ballard to record that more forcefully made the case: “How You Gonna Get Respect (When You Haven’t Cut Your Process Yet).”

Still, Brown had his own way of doing things, instructing his hairdresser, Henry Stallings, to give him a
processed
Afro.

They must have been quite the sit-downs, those meetings between Brown and the Panthers. Two forces convinced of their rightness, certain they were representing millions. Both voraciously charismatic, pushing out in the world until they met a force that pushed back. All those egos talking past each other, like icebergs passing in the night. The young man who once punched out a white farmer on a rural Southern road might have identified with the guys who had marched into the California State Capitol with rifles in 1967.

They talked of hair, and presumably much besides. Perhaps money was passed to the Panthers; some say it was so. But a simple change of style wasn’t enough to ameliorate certain radicals, and once a request was answered, invariably it led to another. Tensions continued between the younger nationalists and the singer. In August the show came to Southern California, and when Brown opened his hotel room door he found a present—a fake bomb, and a letter, the contents of which he never divulged.

“
The Black Panthers were putting the heat on us for—
nothing
, really,” said Bobbit. He remembered the Southern California visit, and the heat, and watching a TV news report of black-on-black violence with Brown in the hotel, during which the singer became pensive. “Mr. Brown said, ‘Black people love each other, why do we have to do this to each other?’ I was ‘yes…yes…yes…yes.’ I was tired.” It was the middle of the night.

The aide went to his room. Twenty minutes later, Brown called him back to look at something. When Bobbit got there, Brown showed him a napkin, on which was written, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.”

The words were a reaction to a variety of elements: to the state of black life, to the pressure Brown was receiving from activists who said he wasn’t black enough.

“Say It Loud” was a record done fast. Some say it was put together in the studio; Fred Wesley, who was recording with Brown for the first time, remembered the band working out the music over the previous few weeks. They cut it on August 7, in the San Fernando Valley. Brown had the inspired idea to have a children’s chorus shout out the song title. He sent Bobbit to find some kids. Their innocent voices took some of the edge out of words that Brown knew might be incendiary. It also put the focus on the future, and made the song feel hopeful rather than critical.

The tape was flown to Cincinnati, where King was able to press anything he wanted when he wanted. For whatever reason, Brown listed his white lieutenant Bud Hobgood as co-writer of “Say It Loud.” Within two weeks, the record was in the hands of DJs.

An early pressing was delivered to KGFJ, a powerful black music station in LA, but programmers there said they wouldn’t touch it. Brown must have figured that with a song as controversial as “Say It Loud,” early resistance could trigger more, because he took out two full-page ads in the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, calling the new song “a message from James Brown to the people of America.” His ad urged a boycott of the station.

“The hierarchy of KGFJ
has taken it upon themselves to deny James Brown the right to identify himself to his people and to deny the right of his people to hear the message contained in this recording.

“If the Black People are going to stand by and let KGFJ do this then all this fighting that James Brown does for the Black People is wasted.”

It was delirious overkill, but there was just too much riding on this single. Soon, the station got on board. And the song began taking off on radio stations across the country.

Within weeks, when the band played shows on the road, Brown would sing “Say it loud” and the audience surprised him by shouting back, “I’m black and I’m proud.” It was barely out and everybody knew it by heart. The kids singing the tagline made it feel friendly, but the song also had an edge: “We’d rather die on our feet than be livin’ on our knees.” (That line seems to pick up on something Stokely Carmichael said in the wake of King’s death. He predicted “a violent struggle in which black people would stand up on our feet and die like men.”)

Introducing his new record to a Dallas audience in late August, Brown said, “You know, one way of solving a lot of problems that we’ve got in this country is lettin’ a person feel that they’re important, feel that they’re somebody. And a man can’t get himself together until he knows who he is, and be proud of who he is and where he comes from.

“Now, I’ve just recorded a tune called ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ If a man is not proud of who he is and where he comes from, he’s not a man. So I want each and everyone to understand: This tune is for the good of what it means and what it can do for a man’s self-pride.”

Thirty years before, “black” was a fighting word, not so far from the N-word. But in a surge of pride in the 1960s,
black
signified a new unity. Howard Thurman, educator, theologian, and elder statesman of the Civil Rights Movement, declared in the summer that “Now black is a word of power and dignity.”

Jet
polled its readers on what word they chose to describe themselves. For 37 percent, it was
Afro-American
; 22 percent wanted
black
. The old standard
Negro
came in third, with 18 percent. Of those who went for
black
, 80 percent were under the age of forty. Just to use “black” in a song title was, to some, a provocation.

In Detroit, Reverend C. L. Franklin delivered a sermon titled, “Say it Loud, I am Black and I am Proud.” A pastor with a huge following, and the father of Aretha Franklin, Franklin was a civil rights beacon in the city. For this churchman to pick up the phrase didn’t just further its circulation, it gave it an important blessing. In the sermon, Franklin strides from the Song of Solomon (“I am black, but comely…look not upon me, because I am swarthy, because the sun hath scorched me”) to Dr. King to James Brown, who has generated “a new sense of dignity and somebodiness.” In a nuanced discussion of separatism and self-love, Franklin wrestles with, and then champions, the song.

“Say It Loud” managed a rare feat: It was an incredibly popular tune that connected with the masses, while scaring the pants off a huge lot of others. According to Byrd, Brown had worked hard to get the racial ratio of his shows to 50/50 white and black. That peaked around “America,” and started falling the minute whites heard “Say it Loud.” Bassist Charles Sherrell saw it as it happened. “After I heard the words to it, it kind of frightened me,” he said. To Sherrell, the problem was that it drove a wedge among his fans—you couldn’t sing along if you weren’t black. “James realized it, too. Because all of a sudden his crowds started dropping off. He only did that song live maybe three or four times. Five at the most. Then he stopped doing it.”

If a Huey Newton or Angela Davis had expressed the idea, it would have been marginalized as an utterance from the black power fringe. But here was the most visible black man in America saying it. Here was the angry fringe and the smiling mainstream coming together.

What made “black power” live as an idea was that it could not be nailed down, that it meant different things to different people. It
was a work of art, not politics, and like any work of art it depended on an audience to give it meaning. But for a huge chunk of the populace, the so-called silent majority, black power was static: It meant replacing white supremacy with a different shade, and fighting racism with violence against whites. The silent majority was a bit of an artful creation as well, a demographic label for scared white voters that surfaced around the same time as black power. In the wake of the silent majority’s rise, their distortions of simple racial pride gained common currency in white America. “America” made Brown seem like an Uncle Tom to some African Americans. Weeks later, “Say It Loud” made a lot of whites confuse James Brown with H. Rap Brown.

One thing was for sure: The record was a hit, camping out on the R&B charts for three months, rising to ten on the pop charts. Comic Jan Murray presented him with a gold record on national TV.

In what seems suspiciously like a dirty trick from the Republican candidate for president, Richard M. Nixon, a flier showed up on Chicago streets just before the election. It pictured Humphrey, President Johnson, and Chicago mayor Richard Daley dressed like gangsters, holding carbines and saying “Hell naw! You white goats won’t get our votes—we are saying it loud we are black and proud.” Even Nixon’s crew knew the force of the song.

Eventually, a white-power country music version was recorded in Nashville, with a chorus that went “I’m proud and I’m white with a song to sing…I’m a white boy lookin’ for a place to do my thing.”

This was a great pop moment, in the middle of the craziest, most fraught year of James Brown’s life. It’s possible to see “Say It Loud” as a hasty correction to “America.” A righting of the scales. It’s also possible to view “Say It Loud” as a response to pressure coming from his left. Maybe it is best to look at these songs not as polar opposites, but as two sides of what would have been the greatest single of 1968, parallel lines running in James Brown’s head. This would-be 45 is the greatest, richest expression of Brown’s view of civil rights,
Americanism, and work. You can play one over the other and hear a messy, blurry atonality. But Brown would have argued that they fit together, and the sound they made was all of him.

On a basic level, both are about the same thing: loving where you came from. And Brown saw no contradiction between loving his country and loving his people. At the same time, the songs have a crucial distinction. “America” is Brown celebrating himself as a modern Horatio Alger, a guy who lifted himself from the muck to the top of the heap. “Name me any other country, where you can start out as a shoeshine boy and shake hands with the president,” he raps.