One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (44 page)

“I don’t know that Mr. Brown ever paid any money on that station,” sniped Percy Sutton, head of New York–based Inner City Broadcasting. Brown’s problem, he said, was “not his failure to get advertising, but to manage the money he got.”

A
district court in Baltimore ordered Brown to turn over WEBB’s records. Brown failed to do so, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Thus it was that on the night of July 16, 1978, Brown was arrested in the most humiliating way: during a performance at the Apollo Theater. A U.S. Marshal permitted him to perform his show and then transported the singer to Baltimore. When he arrived, Brown was put in shackles and spent two nights in jail. Charged with contempt of court, he had to surrender his passport before being released on bail.

The litigation over the sale of WEBB continued into the fall. Brown added to his troubles by playing a show in Zambia with-out the okay of the court. Apologizing to the judge, he sought to explain his overall predicament: “When I was a kid, I never had any education. I was put into a juvenile institution which was more like a prison. After I made it big, I employed people who do know about things. I put myself in my lawyer’s hand. I’m just a dumb nigger.”

At that, the judge interrupted, saying, “Now Mr. Brown, dumb you’re not.”

The Knoxville radio station was quietly sold in early 1979. Brown focused on salvaging his Augusta anchor, WRDW, and to do so he teamed up with high-profile New York lawyer William Kunstler. A celebrated champion of civil rights causes, the lawyer for Angela Davis, Harry Belafonte, and others, Kunstler held a press conference with Brown in New York in November 1979, where he slammed Polydor for not giving him a new contract, and attacked the IRS and the FBI for persecuting the singer. “They cannot permit a black messiah to arise,” Kunstler thundered.

The lawyer said he had taken on Brown’s case after meeting him in Augusta and discovering that the singer was interested in lending his name to Kunstler’s political battles. Brown, he announced, would soon visit the St. Regis Indian Reservation in upstate New York, where Mohawk Indians were barricaded against law enforcement agencies from both the United States and Canada. There was
talk as well of a joint political action involving Brown and Native American activist Russell Means, as well as JoAnne Chesimard, a Black Liberation Army member who was currently on the lam.

It suddenly seemed like Brown was getting back into politics, and this time for the far left. After the press conference, Sharpton, Brown, and a few of the guys had dinner with the lawyer in Greenwich Village.

“Mr. Brown says, ‘Mr. Kunstler, you’ve done a lot of famous cases. Tell us about them,’” recalled Sharpton. “He told us about the Chicago Seven, and about this and that one.

“‘Chicago Seven?’ said Mr. Brown. ‘I remember that one.’

“Then he said, ‘How many of them did you win?’

“‘None of them,’” Kunstler said.

“He looked at me and said—‘Mister Sharpton, this man wants a martyr, not a client. I don’t need to be nobody’s cause, brother.’ And that’s why pretty fast he dropped Kunstler.”

The Augusta station was sold at public auction, after owners defaulted on a $268,000 loan. The Baltimore situation dragged on until early 1980, when Brown was forced to sell WEBB to pay debts. “I haven’t seen no money in a lot of years,” he told the judge. “Sometimes I just work to pay the band, because I hope that one day it will all come back.”

Even on the stand, he gave until it hurt, a delivery that seemed highly theatrical. Having transcended a boyhood where literally nobody cared what he felt, communicating basic emotional information to human beings was something he only learned later, after he found a way to make people care. The one place he
did
get emotionally heard, and fed, was on stage. That lesson led him to think that emotion should be expressed as a performance. It could make him seem false—when he sobbed at Goree Island, Fred Wesley thought he was pretending—and he certainly had depths of falseness in him. But the way he communicated fear, love,
anything
, was like he was onstage at the Apollo, trying to get those in the balcony to see what he saw. So when he told the judge presiding over
the fate of his radio station he hoped one day his empire would all come back, Brown was being shameless, but it didn’t mean he was lying.

Deedee had left him. She wanted domestic bliss; he wanted the road and was emotionally unavailable when he was home. She packed Deanna and Yamma into her 500 Mercedes Coupe in front of the Walton Way home and tried to say good-bye. He came running out, reaching into the car and pulling her hair.

Deedee hit the button to the window. Up it went on his hand. According to Daviss she drove away about one hundred yards with Brown’s hand caught in the window, dragging him down the driveway. “Tore his knees
up
!” said Daviss.

Troubles with the IRS, Polydor, a divorce on the way. During a visit with his boyhood buddy Leon Austin, Brown said he was ready to give it all up. “He said, ‘I can’t keep fighting this thing. I can’t make any money, everybody’s against me…I can’t do it.’

“No, you’re not going to quit now, you are
not
gonna quit,” Austin told him. “What you talking about now?

“You
have
to go to work. You the one that can
make
some money. Got too many people depending on you.” They argued back and forth, and Austin, raising his voice, reaffirmed that Brown needed to get himself to the airport, get onto a plane, and take care of his business. Austin hopped in his car to follow his friend and make sure he got to the Augusta airport.

“People gave me a chance to live three or four times, to their once not-living. I owe that to the people,” Brown said. “Especially I owe it to the poor people. I owe it to the ghetto. And I even owe it to the rich, ignorant people that don’t know truth…. If I had gotten everything I should have gotten, I’d be an old man and I’d be throwin’
down
. But I’m still trying to get the recognition that you’re fighting for each and every day; that the poor people, the farmers, and everybody are trying to get across. And that keeps me going.”

B
y decade’s end, Brown had been to Africa many times and played Europe more than that. Now it was time to try to win over a truly remote ethnic enclave, a culturally isolated island-state where strangers were easy to spot. The Godfather was heading to Nashville.

Even in a place as set in its ways as Music City, the 1970s had showed the necessity of change. A once-vaunted tourist attraction, country singer Webb Pierce’s iconic guitar-shaped swimming pool was closing down in the face of mass indifference. That was bad enough, but then, in February 1979, Porter Wagoner sang disco. Though the country and western hitmaker wore a reassuring purple rhinestone suit with wagon wheels on the legs as he did the hustle in a local club, his new direction appalled the country music hierarchy. “A John Travolta he ain’t,” tutted the
Nashville Banner
.

Wagoner was just getting started. A month later, he announced he was bringing James Brown to the Grand Ole Opry, where country music elites performed each week on a nationally broadcast radio program. Disco was bad enough, the Opry having only recently accepted
drums
; they had showcased a few black country acts before, but sweating, screaming negroes had yet to breach their perimeter.

Wagoner’s keyboardist knew Hollie Farris from Brown’s band, and through him sent Brown an invite. “He asked me what did I think of the idea,” said the trumpeter. “I said it sounds crazy. James would sure go for it!”

When the booking was announced, esteemed singer Jean Shepard complained on the air. “It’s a slap in the face. The Grand Ole Opry is supposed to be a mainstay in country music and it’s fighting for its life. We are fighting to keep what identity we’ve got left,” she declared. In case anybody thought the critics were fighting to preserve racial purity or something, pianist Del Wood clarified. “It’s not an anti-black issue…. But I’m against James Brown’s music on
the stage of the Opry because I love the Opry and what it stands for. I could throw up. The next thing you know we’ll be doing the strip out there.”

The bill Brown played on featured an array of country star power: Hank Snow, Roy Acuff, Skeeter Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. By the March date, the scorn was rising high. “What’s he going to do, sing ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’? I don’t understand it, none of us do,” complained songwriter Justin Tubb. “If it was Ray Charles, I’d be standing in the wings waiting to hug him when he came off the stage. But it’s not.”

That was certainly true—James Brown was no Ray Charles. When he released
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
in 1962, Charles bent over backward to include white listeners, adding blindingly white chorus singers and orchestrations as toothache inducing as Georgia sweet tea. He hid the drums. He made a bold declaration that country music was
his
music, too, and he made his point by meeting the listener at least half way. Charles was a genius at disarming an audience and sneaking his way into their hearts.

James Brown craved America’s love even more than Charles, but he needed it to be on his terms. He reached out to America—and then yanked America over to where he was standing. When asked who his favorite musicians were, he’d give out names like Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, or Jimmy Durante along with more obvious names. He didn’t want their act; he wanted their audience. Brown did not believe black music had to be confined to the chitlin cir-cuit, and he knew that there wasn’t an audience in the world he couldn’t bag if he stood before them and worked.

Everywhere he went, Brown made sure
he
was at home. That’s why he could sit down with presidents and capos and crackers and cons and always own the room. State dinner or war zone mess hall, he settled in and got comfortable, turning every inch of it into his space.

How he handled the Grand Ole Opry says much about who he
was. Damn right he did “Papa’s.” And he did the cape routine.
Twice
. He sang two country tunes—three if you consider “Georgia” country, which it was when Ray Charles did it but wasn’t after Brown turned it into gospel step aerobics.

It didn’t matter how big you were, you could be Conway Twitty with a hot new record: When you did the Opry, you got three songs. That was chiseled in stone from the days of the Pharaohs, and nobody challenged it. James Brown did four. And then he wouldn’t leave. He was up there for half an hour, making sure everybody knew who they had just seen.

The Nashville
Tennessean
, which a week before had lavished attention on Senator Robert Byrd’s fiddle playing at the Opry, neglected to cover Brown’s historic appearance. The
Banner
headlined their story “Brown Fails to Stir Audience,” and said ticket holders “sat and watched somberly” while Brown was “receiving only smatterings of polite applause and raising a few eyebrows of Opry regulars.”

Afterward, Wagoner threw a cocktail party at the Opryland Hotel. Clearly having heard the words uttered backstage by a glowering Roy Acuff—the superstar muttered, “I wish I could go out there and speak my mind, but I won’t”—Wagoner gave Brown a soul handshake and declared, “He is to soul music what Roy Acuff is to country music.” Together they hadn’t just brought funk to the Opry; they’d peed in Webb Pierce’s pool.

Brown always said he was grateful for the treatment Opry listeners had given him. “This is my miracle night,” he said. “It’s a miracle I’m here. I haven’t slept good in two weeks knowing I was going to play the Opry.”

After being pushed to the periphery of the pop marketplace, after struggling to simply talk to his audience, it must have felt great to come into Nashville. At the Opry he could meet the gaze of the whites who filled up the seats, and do his best to put on a show for them. They didn’t love him, but they watched him work. He let them know he was at home.

Chapter Twenty-two

I CAN SEE THE LIGHT!

A
ugusta was home. How much he loved it there was clear to those around him. Or maybe it wasn’t so much love, as it was that Augusta was a place where he felt anchored. Deidre had pushed him to leave New York, but with her and the kids gone, he had no plans to leave. When he lost the Walton Way house in September 1979, in a dispute over unpaid property taxes, even then he wouldn’t leave. He found a new home nearby, a house across the Savannah River in Beech Island, South Carolina, about ten miles from downtown Augusta.

It was a Southern ranch house that Brown would build up over the years. The property covered forty acres, and where Walton Way was tied to the ebb and flow of Augusta life, the new address suggested Brown was pulling back. The area, said one writer, was “a quiet rural community full of mobile homes and curvy roads where people sell hay and antiques.”

To get to his home in Beech Island (not really an island), you drove down a dirt road, stopping at a wrought-iron gate modeled on one from Buckingham Palace, and then headed through pine woods, past a pond. Nobody would be bopping by to view the Christmas decorations, and few would even get past the gate. “You had a certain status to get inside the gate,” said Sharpton. “But then you
had to have superstatus to get from the road to the front of the house—or inside.”