One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (41 page)

Beyond the band there was the circle of protectors on the periphery of the show, controlling access to Brown, carrying the gun or the curling iron. Henry Stallings, Brown’s boyhood friend, was back in the mix. A short guy whom Brown labeled “’
Do
,” as in “hairdo,” Stallings sometimes styled Brown’s coif and all the time watched his back. In Los Angeles, Fred Daviss saw a roadie named Kenny Hull get into a tussle with ’Do. Hull busted a Budweiser bottle on a coffee table and moved in on him. “Do you think you are gonna cut me with that?” Stallings asked. “Put the bottle down…”

Hull did set it down. While his hand was flat on the table, Stallings pulled out a stiletto and plunged it through his palm and three inches into the table. “Then he kicked his ass all around the table,” said Daviss. “Oh, Kenny was about to cry.”

Probably the hardest, and definitely the most devoted, of this group was Charles Bobbit. He looked like a Secret Service man, blank and alert, his eyes expressing a mission, his fingers gripping an attaché case. He
did
know karate. A guy got in his face in a crowded concession area, bothering him about some trifling
matter. Bobbit told him he didn’t have time for it and kept gliding, but the fellow blocked his motion. Two slashes of his briefcase, two piston pumps of an elbow, and “it looked like somebody stuck a damn 220-volt plug up his ass,” recalled Daviss. “Looked like a bolt of lightning hit him.” The guy slunk away, everyone in the crowd looking every which way trying to figure out what had happened, and Bobbit, well, he continued on his mission.

Also in this circle was Clayton Fillyau, the drummer. He worked on and off stage and sold cans of beans and meat to the musicians on the side. Playing drums was cool, but to Fillyau, making shit happen was the most fun. He was gifted at mapping a route to take the money from the box office to the backstage at places like the Howard Theatre, where you had to be crafty and change your path every show or be robbed. They were playing a gig at a baseball park in Florence, South Carolina, and afterward Brown directed Fillyau, whose son was with him, to pick up the money and bring it back to the hotel. Then he left.
Everyone
had left, except Fillyau and his son, sitting with the four white guys in the baseball clubhouse counting receipts.

The Fillyaus tallied twelve thousand tickets sold. The white guys counted only six thousand. “Oh no, look—” Fillyau commenced, and one of the promoters slammed a pistol down on the table in front of him. “Goddamit, I
said
it was six thousand.”

“I was so scared, I couldn’t move,” said Clayton Jr. “But my dad was so cool, he just said, ‘You know what? You are right, my mistake,’ and swept the money into the bag.

“We walked away, across this baseball field with the lights turned off. I said, ‘Dad, I am so scared right now.’ He said, ‘You know what, Clay, don’t look back, don’t say nothing, just let us get to the car.’ It was the longest walk of my life.”

That was hardly the end of the night, however. They had to give Brown the bad news. “Mmmm,” Brown said meaningfully. “Well, you got to go back to that field and get the other six thousand.”

After that, everybody was mad at everybody else. The bringers didn’t bring the money, Brown didn’t get his, nobody was going to get paid.

Recriminations flew back and forth. “You ain’t nothing but a thug in a fine suit,” Bobbit said, which might have had some truth to it but still wasn’t very nice. Fillyau responded, “All
you
got is that suitcase, and I know what’s in that suitcase. Just a peanut butter sandwich and a pair of drawers.” It was a fight over who had more usefulness to the singer, just the kind of internecine jujitsu Brown loved to stir up.

On a night soon after, Brown, Fillyau and son, Bobbit, and Stallings were all shooting the shit, and talk turned to how Fillyau was due some money from Brown and he felt very much that he wanted it now. That’s when the three adults started teaming up against him. “You better leave now,” he told his son. “It’s about to get ugly.” Stallings said something to raise the heat, and nobody moved.

“Talk like that again, and I’ll throw you through the window,” he told Stallings. “I’d like to see you try,” was the answer.

Fillyau moved toward Stallings, and Brown jumped on his back. Brown might have been a boxer, but Fillyau stood nearly a foot taller, and within seconds he had the singer in a headlock. Stallings pulled out a pistol and aimed it at Fillyau. He didn’t act too concerned: “Now, talk to me like that
again
,” Fillyau said, “and I will pop this little nigger’s head off.” It took a little time to get sorted out, but Fillyau didn’t just end up with his money, according to his son, he got a $2,000 bonus.

Note it: Brown rewarded initiative. When the band Mandrill was opening and played five minutes over their contracted half hour, Fillyau walked out on the stage while they were mid-song and pulled all their plugs out. Then he moved Brown’s equipment onstage, while Mandrill was still standing there. “That’s what James liked about him,” Anthony Fillyau said. “He was bold.”

Boldness was good; boldness turned against boldness was even
better. Brown competed with everyone, and as the decade rolled on, it might be that his maneuvers and plots were becoming ever more preposterous.

He had a gift for simultaneously extracting your loyalty and making you feel like a jackass for handing it over. He once described to the guys how he had seen government spy submarines in the Savannah River, their nuclear reactors emitting an eerie green light. He must be kidding, but he wasn’t smiling. Turning to the one guy in the room not nodding and laughing at his story, he said: “
You
believe me, don’t you?” That’s when things would get so quiet you could hear a rat piss on an electric car.

On a drive to see big band jazzman Woody Herman play in Milwaukee, Brown rode in the limo with Danny Ray, a bodyguard, a hairdresser, and Daviss, the only white guy. “He didn’t want anybody ganging up on him, so he had a way of keeping folks from being too tight with one another,” said Daviss. They were riding up the road and Brown looked over at Daviss, who was half asleep. “Fellas,” Brown began, in a good mood, “I’m going to tell you about Mr. Daviss. Mr. Daviss is not a lover of niggers…” And he laughed his raspy
heh heh heh heh heh
. “Do you
hear
me, fellas?”he said again, laughing louder, his hands gesturing intensely.

“Everybody is laughing with him. Finally he leans back and says, ‘Mr. Daviss’—I crack one eye open—‘You don’t like niggers, do you?’ How the hell I’m gonna answer that? I’m not gonna say, ‘No I sure don’t.’ Not gonna say, ‘Hell yes I do!’”

Leaning on his suitcase, Daviss made a reference to a notorious neighborhood in Atlanta, saying “Naw, I don’t like those Ninth Street niggers. But y’all…y’all are regular guys to me.” Everybody got real quiet, waiting to hear how Brown would respond. He stayed in Daviss’s face. About thirty seconds passed, then it was
heh heh heh heh
…

That cut the tension. “Guys, here’s what I want to tell you,” Brown said. “You all
think
Mr. Daviss is your friend and he’s real tight with you and he holds your money and all…but look at this. He’s a Southern white guy. He’s
never
gonna be tight with
you
. But, see, here’s what I’m trying to tell you right now.
I
can pull out my wallet”—and right then he did—“and here’s pictures of his two little daughters right here. And I can guarantee you in
his
wallet, he has my daughters’ pictures, too. What I’m trying to tell you guys is, you can’t ever get tight with Mr. Daviss like I can…” And then he leaned over and stared them all down as it became totally quiet. “
Because I’m a different kind of nigger!
Heh heh heh heh…”

It was a master rap, creating more fissures than there were people in the car on a leisurely trip to Milwaukee to hear some progressive jazz.

B
rown again visited Africa in 1972, when the band played Zaire that June. The continent meant many things to him: It was a chromosomal connection, though he continued to keep his personal feelings about it to himself. Africa was a lucrative market, and a place where he really felt the love. “Everywhere I went there were thousands of people just waiting to see and touch me, it was frightening, their respect was like reverence, it was like they were looking up to me like a god,” he told
Black Stars
magazine after the ’72 Zaire trip. Despite a case of food poisoning, he took a victory lap around a soccer stadium while thousands screamed.

Two years later, in 1974, came the big one. A heavyweight championship boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman was coming to Kinshasa, Zaire, through the joint ambition of promoter Don King and Zaire’s president Mobutu Sese Seko, who posted $10 million to bring the boxers to his country. Knowing the “Rumble in the Jungle” would direct the eyes of the world to his nation, the dictator aimed to keep festivities going in the capital for as long as possible. Thus, a music festival was scheduled for the week before the fight. Then, due to circumstances still debated today, the match was postponed for a month, and the carnival
atmosphere extended, with reporters and tourists all celebrating an extended party in the capital.

The three-day festival was a jam-up of music with African roots. There was blues guitarist B. B. King, songwriter Bill Withers, and
salseros
Celia Cruz, Johnny Pacheco, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All Stars. A roster of African artists was present, including Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Franco & T.P. O.K. Jazz. The festival might have been even bigger: Promoter Masekela wanted Miles Davis’s free-jazz funk band, but alas, Don King did not. Stevie Wonder flat turned them down. Even so, with Brown as the headliner, the festival was a once-in-a-lifetime event.

It was a conference of international icons, of athletes and pan-Africanists and soul brothers and sisters, with Brown fixed to declare his position in the order. In the chartered jet carrying the musicians and boxers to Kinshasa, he insisted on first-class seating for himself. His demand that the plane be loaded with his huge volume of equipment almost kept them from being able to take off. The pilot asked him to move back to coach to balance the aircraft, but Brown demurred. According to Masekela, during a stopover in Madrid, Bill Withers bought a dagger and held it to Brown’s throat, suggesting he sit in economy with the rest of the folks.

When they landed in the capital they were greeted by drummers and dancers, a forest pygmy ensemble, and a women’s traditional healing group all lining the tarmac. “I looked out the window and saw scores of natives dressed in their skins and feathers, waving their spears, and shouting those guttural chants—‘hunga! hunga! hunga!’,” said singer Etta James. Don King had control of a microphone, and when the door opened, he delivered a tried-and-true announcement: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for…the hardest working man in show business…Mr. James Brown.” First out of the aircraft, Brown hit the ground with beauty-pageant winners Miss Ali and Miss Foreman on either arm.

Mobutu’s
prowess was at its peak in the fall of 1974. The Zairean soccer team had won the African Cup of Nations and qualified for the World Cup finals, the first sub-Saharan team to do so. The international copper market had crested, and the mineral-rich nation was flush with cash. The Rumble in the Jungle put the dictator on a world stage, and together with its festival, showed off Mobutu as a visionary able to gather the scattered forces of the diaspora.

In Zaire, Brown wore a blue denim jumpsuit with studs that spelled out GFOS—God Father of Soul—on a cummerbund-like piece that wrapped a spreading mid-section. He had a thick mustache and flowing, shiny waves of hair: Strength and the good life were on display for Africa to see. Stripped to the waist and sweat rolling off him, he shouted, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud” to tens of thousands of fans.

Brown and Ali were twin brothers in the motherland, the two most famous black people on Earth, basking in the shared glow. They were more than acquaintances, less than buddies, and the only people, perhaps, who understood what it was like to be them. From time to time the understanding they shared led them to seek one another out. “James was always boasting and Ali was always boasting, they kind of just boasted in each other’s face,” said Fred Wesley. “‘I’m the king of the world,’ ‘I’m the best entertainer’—they never got together and just
talked
to each other.”

They had people who talked, though, and back in 1967 they had settled on a multimillion-dollar deal—Brown would play a show, followed by a championship bout. But then came Ali’s Vietnam protest, and the idea was shelved. Later they competed in Times Square, seeing who could stop the most traffic by stepping out of a limo. Neither could put away the other, and that led to a mutual fascination. Ali once presented a gift to Brown, a lengthy poem he had written in tribute. The first letter of each line, when read down, spelled KING JAMES BROWN.

Ali, of course, whipped Foreman in Zaire and regained his title.
He used a strategy that acknowledged his ebbing physical powers and the greater size and strength of his opponent. To compensate, Ali emphasized craft and motion, his body giving and flowing with the action, courageously absorbing punches without falling. It was the wisdom of a guy who had peaked, finding new skills and fresh ways to thrive.

From Zaire, Brown returned to the States, but then flew to Senegal in January 1975. A British documentary of his Senegal visit hints at how open he really was to the continent. As he freestyles on “Man’s World,” Brown breaks into an extended melismatic invention, chanting “Senegal soul” and then building to a passage that sounds uncannily like a muezzin’s call to prayer. Brown went to Goree Island, once a dispatch point for the slave trade in Dakar. As he and the crew took wooden boats from the mainland to Goree, local boys swam out in murky water to greet him. They reached up out of the ocean to shake his hand, and with each encounter neither said anything: Their eyes simply took each other in.