One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (34 page)

“Blacks in Augusta are tired of the old black leadership pussyfooting around. We gave them a chance to do their thing. Now we’re gonna do ours.”

Brown picked up Stone’s criticism of the old guard in his comments. He avoided blaming one side or the other and called for mutual respect. He hadn’t lived there in decades, but just a year before, Augustans had called Brown their “honored son,” and celebrated him with a parade down Broad Street. Now he was watching buildings on Broad Street reduced to ash.

This wasn’t the Superman of Boston, 1968. In 1970 Augusta, Brown courageously injected himself into events over which he had no control, and in the end, the results seemed ambiguous at best. His gestures were un-Herculean, his words honed. He seemed like a guy doing what he could, because he needed to help a city he considered his home.

Chapter Seventeen

MASTER OF TIME

B
y her own admission, the probate judge of Barnwell, South Carolina, did not watch much TV. When a black couple knocked on her door and asked to be married, the name James Brown did not mean a thing to her.

Early on a November 1970 evening, the judge married the couple. She didn’t invite them in. “I got a real nice front porch. I marry most of my colored couples out there unless it is raining,” she told a reporter.

His new wife, Deidre Jenkins Brown, was a red-haired beauty from a good Baltimore family. Friends called her Deedee. They had been together for some time, and were waiting for Brown’s divorce from Velma, in Toccoa, to come through, so they could get married.

At the wedding, the bride wore a cream-colored, pearl-buttoned dress; the groom, a gray knit suit with a white zipper top trimmed with gray. Bobby Byrd was the best man, and Joe Brown and Danny Ray were also present.

They were visiting Augusta in 1970, when the couple surprised everybody by announcing that they would soon be moving there. Deedee was a smart, stay-at-home sort of woman, and did not like the pace of New York City. “I simply love to keep house,” she told a writer from the
Baltimore Afro-American
. “I look forward to our own home soon and keeping my husband as happy as I am.”

They bought a $116,000
house, and with an extensive redesign turned it into a two-story modern home, with a pool, three bedrooms, and guest house. It was located in a lavish neighborhood on Walton Way Extension. That was a street on the Hill, the white enclave of old moneyed Augusta. A black family living on the Hill in the civil rights era—and nobody can remember another black family in the vicinity—was an indication of racial progress in the city. But progress was relative. When the African American novelist Frank Yerby, who had grown up in Augusta, visited the town he’d left decades before, he put it this way: “Augusta has gotten a little more civilized since when I was a child, but that’s true all over the South. But at least the people of Augusta have reached a stage of kindly hypocrisy, which is a vast improvement.”

A group of Brown’s new neighbors made a presentation to his real estate agent asking him to move elsewhere, but the singer was set on Walton Way, and there was no drama after he moved in.

In lieu of a honeymoon, weeks after the wedding Deedee accompanied her husband to Africa, where the band was playing shows in Nigeria and Zambia. Though Brown had already performed a private show for the leader of Ivory Coast on a quick visit in 1968, this was in many ways his real introduction to Africa. Black Americans were beginning to celebrate his music as a link to the motherland and celebrating Brown as an exemplar of African culture flourishing on American soil. He represented in America an urge to connect with the source; in Africa, the singer of “Say It Loud” was viewed as the voice of a pan-African spirit.

In Nigeria, a civil war had recently finished, and there was armed militia all over Lagos, first stop on the tour. When the band landed at the airport, thousands were waiting to greet them. Brown had arrived with a twenty-two-piece band, arranger David Matthews, and engineer Ron Lenhoff. At the airport, military forces used clubs to beat a path through the crowds so that the band could get off the plane. Brown saw thousands more lining the road from the airport into the capital city. Everywhere they went, the
musicians were doted on. Band members were told that more copies of “Say It Loud” were sold in Nigeria than there were turntables to play it on; fans clutched their copies like prizes. “That’s the kind of power James had in Africa,” Matthews remembered.

A ceremonial visit was paid to Oba Adeyinka Oyekan II, a sovereign who proclaimed the singer a Freeman of Lagos and made a gift of a scroll depicting Brown’s life and global influence. After that, everybody headed to the hotel, where another gift awaited: an invitation to the Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti’s club, the Shrine. Brown’s band played in Lagos for three nights, and Bootsy Collins remembers visiting the Shrine two or three times.

Fela was a rising star, speaking for the oppressed, connecting Western jazz and soul with a power source that was profoundly African. A visit by Brown to the Shrine—equal parts Playboy mansion and rebel enclave—might have generated enough enlightenment to float the pyramids.

Two protean messiahs. Fela sometimes proclaimed Brown’s influence and other times claimed that Brown had “stolen my music.” Said Fela, “James Brown has influenced me in a way, because he had some fantastic bass lines…it was like, this guy is an African.”

Musically the American was finding his way back to Africa without having
heard
African music. What he heard was the subterranean Africa, fracked by slavery and four hundred years of scrambling and erasure. He heard it through pop music and black drumming traditions in the South. He made it all up himself, his Watts Towers to the stars, and now he was on African soil.

They had offered him the key to the Shrine, but alas, Brown was disinclined to go. Brown didn’t visit a peer’s stage to pay tribute, he went to rip the mic from their hands and make their audience his. But even James Brown did not have a place called a “shrine,” and such a refuge would not have been so easily invaded by a competitor swaggering in from the West. Brown stayed away, while many of the JBs headed out.

When Collins drove to it on his first night, he said he sensed
the club long before his driver approached it. “You could be ten miles away and you could hear the drums,” he recalled with awe. Inside the perimeter, the experience was even more overpowering. “You could be carrying on a conversation and the next thing you know, your body starts movin’ and you can’t control it! And you’re like, ‘Damn, what’s wrong with me?’”

The first night at the Shrine made Collins reflect on the all-but religious worship they had received at the Lagos airport. It was nice, but now he felt a need to pay something back. “Man, I told them to take all those praises back, because they was the one that needed to be praised.” Comparing Fela’s pulse to the groove of the JBs, he said, “When I heard these cats, it was like another dimension…a dimension that I had never experienced before. And it had a deeper feeling to me. When I heard them, that was the deepest level you could get.”

Brown was disciplined with the press, careful to stick to a chosen message and avoid loose talk. But to a Nigerian journalist, he shared a thought that seemed direct and meaningful. His reflections flickered for a moment on the subject of the difference between blacks in America and Africa. “You have your pride. You possess your culture. The white man couldn’t rob you of it.”

At a show in Nigeria, a woman was overcome during Brown’s cape ritual and performance of “Please, Please, Please,” and leaped from an upper tier onto soldiers below. In Zambia, the singer was proclaimed Head of State of Music by president Kenneth Kaunda; Brown reciprocated by singing “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” to the leader.

A long time ago, African music had traveled to the West and places like Brazil, Haiti, and Cuba. It had bonded with local traditions, and then sailors and traders brought the Creole sound back to Africa. Africans liked it—they knew it, even if they hadn’t heard it before—and then came James Brown, whom they went nuts for. His music came to Africa through radio and television, and record players in villages where generators hummed and buzzed four
hours a day. For everyone involved with this amazing trip, it was a straight line curling back until it formed a circle.

The impression it left on him he didn’t feel he could share with the press waiting for him back in the States. To them he expressed appreciation for the response he had received, but his feelings about Africa would remain publicly neutral, mystifyingly bland, expressing little sense of personal connection. Maybe he needed to ponder the experience; maybe the experience was too easily misinterpreted, or too easily distorted by journalists, to simply share with strangers. Maybe “Say It Loud” said it all, as far as he was concerned. But when he returned, Brown was impressively disciplined, even for him.

T
hey played Africa, then they came back through France and played there. The scenery was not lost on the young guys who until now had barely gotten past Dayton. Still, it was hard to forget all the little stuff. The fines rankled.

After a night out in New Orleans, the JBs showed up at the venue, where wardrobe mistress Gertrude Sanders broke it to Collins: “Boss having problems, he gonna dock your pay.” Next thing they knew, twenty-five dollars was taken out.

The band balked, and eventually they cornered him. The Ohioans started woofing as they stood on the venue’s 360-degree stage before the show, asking why money had been deducted from their pay, acting like this time a message would be sent.

The Boss said nothing. The Boss
did
something. “He did this gymnastic move called a leg circle,” said a startled Waddy. “He dropped down to the ground—boom!—with a leg circling around, he spun around down there a full rotation!”

It was Curly Howard in the b-boy circle, a 360 tour de force that made all argument irrelevant. Shut ’em down. “He did that so fast and forcefully, I tell you what, he
levitated
. And whatever we was talking about, we were distracted. We forgot what the hell we
was
talking about. We just walked away.

“Never found out
why
he did it, but that was his answer, and I guess it worked for us.”

In time, though, Brown’s moves stopped working, and Waddy ejected, to be replaced by a high school buddy from Cincinnati, Don Juan “Tiger” Martin. He had no context for the fast lane he had just entered; one of Martin’s most vivid impressions of being in the JBs was the “squooosh” their shoes made when they left the stage at the end of the show, from all the sweat that soaked into their shoes.

Martin compensated for dehydration by swigging diet pills and soda pop. “You can hear it in the music,” said Martin. “The stuff would be so fast we’d be killin’ James.” The leader liked his band’s energy, and tried to do his splits and floor show at their rapid fire pace. After the show his knees would be swollen and a needle would be inserted to drain off the fluid.

When they weren’t losing bodily fluids they were recording songs like “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved” and “Soul Power.” When they weren’t recording, they lived in dread of hearing the last words any JB wanted to hear:
James wants to see you in his dressing room.
No good could come from that. It either meant you had messed up, or he wanted you to hang out with him for the evening, in which case all you
could
do was screw up between now and the end of the night.

Waddy: “He was like a father figure to us. Don’t nobody want to hang with their dad, you know? As a buddy.”

New York’s luxe Copacabana, a nightclub that all the great singers wanted on their résumé, had booked them for two weeks in March 1971. Brown quarreled with the donnish owner, Jules Podell, when he cut the stand back to a week. Brown told the band they’d have to go on half salary since their booking was now half as long. The guys sent Bootsy in to argue for more money. They’d dispatched him for a raise just weeks before, in Africa, and it worked, because Brown knew better than to let his band walk out on a football stadium full of pumped-up Nigerians. He wasn’t so worried about the Copa crowd.

That’s one explanation for what happened next. An alternate
take: the Copa had a dress policy. Bands wore jackets and ties. Bootsy and the rest of the Ohio miscreants would do a lot of stuff for Brown, but this was just too damn much. As Brown said, “To put a tie on Bootsy was like to put a bridle on a wild horse.”

Whatever the cause, the Cincinnati kids walked out—not just on the Copa, but on Brown, on the penalties, the rehearsals, the squoosh of it all. When it happened, he didn’t get upset, he just threw a mountain of dollars on the floor, told them to collect their pay and go. That was it. Almost like he’d anticipated this part of the story, too.

It felt like freedom. Later, Collins thanked Brown for pushing them so hard, saying that all the rigors and rehearsals had made him a far better musician. When he heard it, Brown looked mystified; he didn’t realize he
had
been pushing them. Just doing it the only way he knew how.

The Copa fiasco was almost twelve months to the day since Brown had fired his band and hired the mugs. They got to him, and with them he made some of the best music of his life. They changed him by stepping up the pace of songs to rivet-gun velocities. They changed him because they came to funk as adolescents and experienced it not as music but as a culture, a way to live. Their funk was a hole in the wall, and when Brown entered it he came out a different person. According to Waddy, while they were in the group, guitarist Jimi Hendrix approached the Cincinnatians, urging them to leave Brown and join forces with him in a new band. That’s one transformation we’ll forever have to imagine, because they turned him down.

All in a year: That, too, you could call the One.

I
n the months that followed, some of the old crew started coming back; St. Clair Pinckney and Clyde Stubblefield, and then Fred Wesley, who Brown made the band director. A big stand at the Apollo was coming up, and it was Wesley’s job to get a new band ready.