One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (43 page)

He sounds detached on the records of the era, the drumming less surprising. According to Fred Wesley, Brown wanted him to write knockoffs of other people’s hits. He wanted a copy of David Bowie’s “Fame,” which is a head-scratcher because “Fame” itself is a pale version of Brown’s 1970s sound. Returning from a trip to Africa, Brown dropped a bunch of African records on Wesley and told him to copy the lot. That was the last straw for Wesley, who took the job with P-Funk. The tightlipped veterans who knew how to make the most of his “feel” approach and who could apply polished nuance on the fly, statesmen like Maceo Parker and Wesley, were gone. The way Byrd saw it, “He was stumbling through the dark” in the disco era, with “no direction then. Everybody had lost interest. When all the money is going one way, then it’s easy to lose interest.”

The state of his personal affairs tended to color his outlook on the world. When he was doing well, America was a land of opportunity. Now that he was losing his footing, Brown viewed the status of black Americans as slipping backwards. Which doesn’t make him wrong, because in numerous ways, the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement had slowed to a shudder step in the disco era, and many on the right sought to roll advances back further. Just because he was egotistical didn’t make him any less prophetic.

In a freewheeling interview with a Detroit public-TV show host, Brown was asked to share thoughts on the state of black America in the late 1970s.

“Total repeat, everything’s a repeat,” said Brown. “If I had to go to work today, I would have
no
job.

“It’s worse now than it ever was. Because at one point, you were being
heard
. Today you’re not anymore…. The struggle is not over, but the success of it has ceased. And ceased because we do not
have our direction together.” James Brown, disco, the fate of black America in the post-civil rights era: He was talking about it all.

The concert business was floundering, and disco, valuing technology at the expense of live musicians, made it worse. Brown could no longer reliably fill an arena. “When I first got with him, he had a lean year there,” said Farris. “We played one time in Gary, Indiana, for fifty people. He did a two-and-a-half-hour show! I couldn’t believe it. If he did ten minutes they would have been happy, but he did two and a half hours. It’s what kept him alive.”

A propensity to not pay his bills added an extra urgency. The band played Miami Stadium, and then did several small dates at a Florida marina. The night of the last show, Brown left on the jet, stranding the musicians. When bassist “Sweet” Charles Sherrell found out, he pondered his options. From his hotel room, Sherrell spotted the tour bus and equipment truck still parked outside, and he hatched a plot.

Phoning the truck driver, Sherrell explained he needed to get a keyboard out to write a song, James wanted him to. “Sorry I woke you up, man; just loan me the key and I’ll bring it right back.” Then he tracked down the bus driver and said he needed to retrieve some, oh yeah,
books
from the bus to give to a DJ. James had asked him to do it. The bus driver delivered the key, and Sherrell urged him to go on back to bed.

Now it would be necessary to phone the boss and explain the situation. Sherrell was in possession of Brown’s bus and truck; Brown was in possession of the band’s pay. Perhaps they could work something out.

What came next was no surprise to Sherrell. Brown sent down three big guys, “goons,” to set things straight. But Sherrell had notified local law enforcement, and the ensuing standoff forced Brown’s heavies into retreat. Having hijacked Brown’s equipment and vehicles, now Sherrell hijacked his
band
, giving them a new name, the Nuclear Explosions, and booking shows for them first in Miami, and then on the island of Guadeloupe. An island in the
French Antilles, Guadeloupe is far from Augusta. “It’s a nice place. They have a Club Med,” said Sherrell.

Finally, Brown sent the money, and brought them home. “We didn’t have no argument about it at all. No bad words,” said Sherrell. “He walked up, ‘Sweets! How you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m fine, how you doing? Good to see you.’” James Brown rewarded initiative.

O
ne year into his contract with Polydor, Brown began having second thoughts. In an angry letter to label brass, he complained about their lack of success in getting his records onto the pop charts. The note was addressed “To all white people this may concern,” and declared, “Goddamit, I’m tired. It’s been a racist thing ever since I have been here.”

Someone at the label had complained about the number of Brown’s people who were coming in and out of the Polygram office in New York. He heard about that, and in response wrote: “LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE. I AM NOT A BOY BUT A MAN, TO YOU A BLACK MAN.”

In the old days, Brown could thrash it out with Nathan. It would get ugly, and when they were done he’d make another hit. But now Brown was a corporation, and Polydor even more so, with one layer of record company guys in New York reporting to another layer of sophisticated Europeans across the ocean. Later, Brown would sum up his problem by saying, “I got in a fight with the Jews and the Germans. The Jews wanted me to make it and the Germans didn’t.”

Over the next few years, an assortment of folks he owed money attempted to get it by billing Polydor. At the same time, the company became increasingly interested in recouping loans and advances they had extended him. By the end of 1976, the balance on his loans was $1,514,154, and Polydor wanted him to move on it.

Late in 1977, Brown wrote that he had a sure hit record coming and wanted $25,000 for Christmas. Polydor scotched that and soon indicated they were impounding his plane. Do that, his
lawyer seethed, and Brown would do “everything in his power to make life miserable for you.”

Polydor was pressing him for new hits. Since the King days, Brown was in the habit of holding records hostage until he got money up front, but by 1977, Polydor was unwilling to go further down that road, with their books showing him to be in debt to them. In 1978, Brown demanded a new ten-year contract, one that would wipe the slate clean of his debts. The Germans demurred. By 1979, the label was tagged for $700,000 in debts Brown owed to others. It was a hellish standoff.

For decades he’d been running ahead, from last month’s Learjet bill to the latest big concert, from the previous business opportunity to the next cardboard box of cash. From the Jews to the Germans. As long as he kept running, he had the possibility of making more, and Brown was good at outracing those he owed, mostly. Then the IRS entered the picture and screwed it all up. In 1968, they started examining his books and describing the huge sums they felt they were owed. By the early 1970s, said Daviss, the IRS claimed Brown was $4 million in arrears on back taxes. By the end of the decade, Daviss had gotten the case moved from criminal to civil court, a victory, but by then the government said he owed $17.3 million.

That, not to mention all that he owed creditors, was more than he had in the bank. It was time to tap the strategic reserves he’d stored around the house in places known only to him. Brown had hundreds of thousands of dollars buried in his backyard. When an airport refused to release his jet until he’d paid a bill, he told his Atlanta-based CPA to go to the Walton Way house and start digging near the pool. There were boxes of cash in the house, too. The kids found them and played Monopoly with real money. According to another story, Marva Whitney once witnessed a wall in the house collapse because of all the holes knocked in it to retrieve stowed cash.

Bobby Roach said Brown paid him to fly around the country in his jet in the late-1970s, taking money out of accounts one step ahead of the IRS. Roach converted much of it into cashier’s checks, and was carrying $4.5 million in cashier’s
checks for Brown on at least one occasion.

The IRS was fixing to put a padlock on the Walton Way home until he paid up $40,000. He told Daviss to meet him in downtown Augusta. Together they sat in Brown’s van for a long time before anybody said anything. “I’ve never seen him that focused for that long. He’d usually run things up to the hilt, right to the edge, even when he
had
the money in his pocket to pay you. But that night he was setting there, working up a sweat, and he didn’t look as spiffy as he usually looked, hair was roughed up…

“We sat on the street corner in the dark. I wondered why the hell did he call me here.” Finally, he reached under the seat and pulled out a sack of money, like he was extracting a molar.

“Hold on to it as long as you can,” he told Daviss, “but then pay ’em.”

There was a new man in the White House, a Georgian, no less. Brown had shaken hands with Governor Jimmy Carter, and donated to his antidrug effort. Carter had remained aloof, however, and Brown decided to see if he could make a friend. On January 24, 1977, Brown sat down and composed a lengthy epistle to Carter, in which he sought to explain himself to the new president. Brown shares with Carter his first sexual encounter and then his incarceration, very slowly meandering to the real purpose of the note: a request to refile his taxes and clear up his financial problems.

The president never responded. He did forward the singer’s plea for help to his deputy chief counsel, who somewhat alarmingly wrote Brown back suggesting that the singer start listening to the advice of his own lawyers.

Back when Carter was campaigning for president, Brown had met with him in an airplane hangar in Georgia. It was then that the ambitious governor told him, “James Brown will have a friend in the White House.” Since he had gotten elected, Carter wanted nothing to do with the singer.

Brown hated Jimmy Carter.

F
rankie Crocker was a New York landmark. He was the most important black DJ in the world, and to hear his voice on the radio was to realize that, whoever the mayor was at the time, this guy truly was running things. Frankie Crocker
knew
. He coined the phrase “urban contemporary”; he had great ears and a stash of panache. “There was a time when five guys on the radio controlled the music business,” said Al Sharpton. “Frankie Crocker was one of the five. If he went on your record, he made you a hit in the biggest market in the country. And if Frankie went on your record, the other four guys were going to get on it.”

In the mid-’70s, record bizzers were whispering rumors of a government investigation of payola in black radio. When an indictment finally came down on the biggest name on the feds, list, Crocker told the FBI he had never taken money to play records. One day the government brought a surprise witness into the courtroom who testified to personally giving Crocker money to play records: This was Charles Bobbit, Brown’s most trusted lieutenant. He had been pressured and admitted to giving Crocker $6,500 over eight years. Eventually Brown took the stand, claiming that he had no knowledge of Bobbit paying DJs to play his music, declaring it an act he did not condone.

“Mr. Bobbit took a bullet for Mr. Brown,” said Sharpton. But it was Crocker who ended up going to jail for a year on perjury charges. Brown’s relationship with Bobbit suffered, and eventually Bobbit left Brown.

That happened on a late-’70s trip to Gabon. There are several versions of what happened. The way Bob Patton told it, Brown had been given a million-dollar loan from President Bongo. Then Brown asked for another, and dispatched Bobbit to pick up the money. Bongo balked, but he liked Brown, and sent Bobbit off with a few hundred thousand for the Godfather.

But Bobbit was tired of carrying messages and cash for Brown. According to Patton, Bobbit pocketed the cash and then wrote out
a letter of resignation, climbed onto the jet, which was parked on a Libreville runway, and handed his note to Leon Austin to give to the Boss. Then he climbed off. The note told Brown he was staying in Libreville and going to work for Bongo. For the next decade, Bobbit was a chief adviser to the president of Gabon. He even applied his time with Brown to produce a 1978 funk album on which Bongo’s son Alain sang songs arranged by Fred Wesley.

Paying DJs to spin your song was one tried-and-true way to get a new record played. Brown, of course, had even better ways: his own radio stations. Here, too, the heat was on. In 1972, J. B. Broadcasting, owner of the three stations, was taken to court for failing to air thousands of commercials that had been paid for. Two years later, the IRS filed a tax lien against the stations, declaring they owed a total of $94,000 in payroll taxes from 1969 to 1973.

Running a station, let alone three of them, was a full-time job, and Brown was doing it from rotary phones on the road. In Baltimore, WEBB went into receivership after creditors charged that the station owed them more than $500,000. In a separate action, the FCC gave evidence in circuit court that WEBB had violated broadcast regulations more than one hundred times.

In 1975, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, or ASCAP, took WEBB to court for not paying fees after it played music by ASCAP artists. In court, it came out that WEBB lacked the proper license to broadcast
any
copyrighted music. By 1978, the FCC ordered the Baltimore station shut down over repeat violations, but the order was delayed because of the station’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. That probably wasn’t even the biggest crisis in Baltimore: Lawsuits filed by WEBB’s previous owners claimed Brown had not yet paid them for the station he’d bought in 1969, and that therefore they were still the owners.