One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (47 page)

He followed it up with a new label, Scotti Brothers, and an album, 1987’s
Gravity
, that had “Living in America” on it, produced by Hartman. He said his career was climbing again, telling one writer, “Coke and Pepsi are fighting over James Brown. All the car companies want me.” His finances might have been improving, but not too much. Brown lost his Beech Island house in 1987, but then his lawyer, Albert “Buddy” Dallas, bought it and gave it back to him.

It was a time of clean breaks and fresh starts, punctuated by crazy drives into the pines. His first autobiography,
The Godfather of Soul
, by Brown and Bruce Tucker, came out in 1986. With “Living in America” still booming out of the radio, Brown was in the first class of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Joining him in the Hall were Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Everly Brothers. These were his peers, some of them old acquaintances. Unlike any of them, Brown had a hit record at the time of his induction.

At the ceremony at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, he wore a crimson silk shirt, chartreuse scarf, and a black coat. After he picked up his award, with an evening and a celebrity-studded performance before them, Brown turned to Sharpton and said: “Let’s go.” Surrounded by stars and industry elites, even then he drew on a lesson he learned long ago. Never be regular. Don’t ever let them get tired of you.

They ducked out.

Chapter Twenty-three

AN UPROAR
ALL THE TIME

H
e opened car doors for her.

She did his hair better than anybody.

He explored the holy sites in Jerusalem with his Jewish wife.

She got baptized knowing it would please him.

They called each other “Suga Wooga.”

James and Adrienne had been in love with others before, but this was different. It was wilder, and it was more unpredictable. The singer was fiercely protective of his wife. He interrupted a recording session with Dan Hartman to pointedly ask why his producer was looking at Adrienne. She had a spot of jealousy, too, and quickly became a gatekeeper, exerting control over who got to see her husband. Those in the inner circle had to make sure they didn’t offend her. James had been married twice before and brought numerous women on the road with him, but this one, quite possibly, was a first: When you pushed her, she knew where to push back.

Meanwhile, Brown’s recreational PCP use was escalating into addiction, and Alfie was using, too. Many addicts have described how the drug makes time seem to speed up, and makes hours and days seem to flutter in an instant. For James and Adrienne, at any rate, events were rocketing forward, and the drugs created a whole
new kind of rhythm in their lives, oscillating between crazy rage and operatic displays of affection.

She called 911 to report domestic violence once in 1984.

Three times in 1985.

Once in 1987.

At least seven times in 1988.

Some of it was swallowed up behind Beech Island’s gates, but on the road incidents were harder to hide. When the couple were staying at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Adrienne became convinced that James had been with another woman, and she confronted that woman, stabbing her in the rear. Brown’s attorney Buddy Dallas dealt with the hotel, and said later, “I was able to settle that matter out for a small compensation to the ladyfriend who took scissors in the buttocks.”

On another occasion, Brown was playing Las Vegas, and Adrienne was with him. They arrived at the airport together with Dallas, who remembered, “Being a Southern boy, my mother always taught me to be polite to ladies, and the then-Mrs. Brown had two big, heavy bags. I reached down to pick up her bags and when I picked them up I said, ‘My God, these must weigh fifty pounds apiece.’ Mr. Brown came over and
demanded
that I put the bags down.

“‘Mr. Dallas,’ he said, ‘what you don’t know about those bags can get you arrested. She insisted on bringing those bags, so
she
can carry them.’”

They might have contained tableware—Dallas said Adrienne had an impressive, and ever-growing, silverware collection. Or it might have been a controlled substance. Whatever was in those bags, Dallas did as he was advised.

“I had to rethink my gentlemanly upbringing. From that point on, it was ‘Yes, Mrs. Brown,’ ‘No, Mrs. Brown…’ I didn’t even open a car door for her.”

PCP had come into his life before Adrienne, but it wasn’t until after he met her that his drug use hit the public record. Probably, he was smoking more than ever, and, probably, her control of who
got to be around her husband kept a few of his protectors at bay. These are unknown variables, but one thing was a certainty: Both of them liked to get high and then go for a drive. In September 1987, Brown led police on a high-speed tour around downtown Augusta, including breathtaking shortcuts through an IHOP parking lot. That same month, Adrienne was pulled over in a Lincoln Town Car at four in the morning for doing seventy in a forty-five-mile zone. When the police put Alfie in a squad car, she tried kicking the doors out. That November, Brown struck cars at two different Todd’s Shop N Go’s, then drove away. He was jailed for resisting arrest and leaving the scene of an accident. Twice.

Things seemed to take a turn for the worse the following spring. On Easter weekend, 1988, Adrienne called 911 and reported Brown had beaten and threatened to kill her. He disappeared, turning himself in the next day. She told reporters she wanted a divorce. A week later she was arrested at Augusta’s Bush Field airport after a PCP-soaked cigarette and four nasal spray bottles of the stuff were found on her and a friend. A month after that, she was arrested for setting Brown’s clothes on fire in a Bedford, New Hampshire, hotel room, and for possessing seven ounces of PCP.

In an interview with the
Augusta Chronicle
, he sounded strangely at peace: “Everybody loves the Godfather of Soul,” he said. “America is concerned about the Godfather of Soul because America
is
the Godfather of Soul.”

He also sounded lost: “My faith in God is the only thing that brings me through. Faith is the only actual thing that keeps me going.”

Most of all he sounded certain, convinced that the story of James and Adrienne Brown was a tale of two complex people who cared deeply for each other. “Love’s a funny thing,” he said.

The flutterings between rage and romance were happening so quickly now, it was hard to tell which extreme they were visiting at a given moment. In May, he spent the night in jail after she phoned the police and he fled—when he was finally arrested, it was for possession of PCP,
assault and battery, failing to stop for police, and possession of an unlicensed pistol. Now
he
said he wanted a divorce. Soon after, Alfie’s lawyer was in court trying to get a drug charge dropped with a novel defense: Augusta had once officially designated James Brown an “ambassador of soul,” ergo he had diplomatic immunity—which per the norms of statecraft should carry over to a diplomat’s spouse.

To anyone brave enough to venture the question, Brown denied he even used drugs, let alone was an addict. No way would he poison the flesh that had given him so many gifts. “My nose, my ears, my eyes, my rectum, my privates, those are parts of my body that I don’t want to fool with. And my arm.”

And then he went for a drive.

It started at his business office in Augusta on September 24, after Brown had determined somebody had used his bathroom without permission. Toting a shotgun, he walked into an insurance seminar next door. He appeared very mad. Folks chose their words carefully when he inquired who had used his toilet. Brown departed—leaving his gun (for the record, unloaded) leaning against a wall when he exited the room—and seems to have inspired confusion as much as fear among the attendees.

By the time an off-duty sheriff at the seminar called law enforcement, Brown was already in his red and white Ford pickup. When he observed officers arriving, he did a U-turn in the parking lot and raced off.

Thus began a heated pursuit along the dotted line of Georgialina, with Brown driving across the Savannah into South Carolina, and then doubling back into Georgia and ultimately grinding to a halt on rims—his front tires shot out, sparks flying, the pickup riddled with bullets—as a line of police officers finally stopped his forward motion. It was said by a Georgia Highway Patrol officer that when he came to rest, Brown sang “Georgia” and did the Good Foot dance.

He was found guilty of failing to stop for a blue light (South
Carolina parlance for running from the police, a felony) and attempting to run down two state safety officers. A weapons charge was thrown out on insufficient evidence. He was sentenced to six years in Georgia and six and a half in South Carolina, to serve concurrently.

When describing his situation to those who reached him in prison, inmate #155413 sounded baffled, indignant, bitter. “I’ve been in slavery all my life, ain’t nothing new,” he said of his prison term. “It just means I don’t have to answer a whole lot of phone calls. Ain’t nothing changed for me but the address.”

All he wanted was to go home, put on some denim, and play with his dogs. He could have been doing those things, too, if only he had pled guilty to the drug charges, he claimed. But that he would not do because that would be a lie. Over and over he declared he did not have a substance abuse problem. Alan Leeds: “In James Brown’s somewhat distorted sense of what it is to be a man, he thinks his fans would have seen it as a greater weakness to admit he has a drug problem. In his mind, to go to prison makes him a martyr; to go to a hospital makes him a weak man.”

All these complications, Brown explained, came from a very simple event. “God said, ‘Boy, go home.’ I got in my truck and tried to go home. Then the police began to chase me.”

He tried to go home, but he could not.

A
year after Brown went to prison, there was another hot pursuit: in Beverly Hills, California, Zsa Zsa Gabor drove away after a police car signaled her to pull over. When she finally stopped, she slapped an officer who leaned into her car. Gabor was driving without a license, and an open flask of Jack Daniel’s was espied in her $215,000 Rolls-Royce. The actress got three days in jail. Brown was convicted of fleeing from the police and assaulting two safety officers by attempting to run them over—he said he was driving around a roadblock to get away from a frightening situation.

Brown’s
stiff sentence fed a faith among many of his fans that his conviction amounted to a textbook case of Driving While Black. Some even called him a political prisoner. Others noted how he had avoided jail time for beating his wife and driving while high on PCP numerous times before. “We wondered what took them so long, if you want to know the truth,” said guitarist Ron Laster.

At the South Carolina facility, it must have frustrated him to be surrounded by a large number of young men with little or no interest in who he was. On the outside he couldn’t grab a bite at TBonz in Augusta without locals and older folks coming up and saying hello, pressing a paper napkin in his hand to sign. Now he was the old dude with the crazy hair who moved through the halls like a ghost ship.

He wanted to be left alone. In April 1989, a Columbia, South Carolina, judge trying to impress friends had the singer sprung from prison for a few hours so he could sign autographs in the judge’s chamber. Three months later, the world-famous marching band from the historically black school Florida A&M University received an unprecedented honor. They were selected to be the sole representative of the United States at a celebration in Paris of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. The only music they played as they marched down the Champs-Elysées and stood before the Arc de Triomphe? The works of James Brown.

That’s where he was in 1989: a global symbol of American art; a trophy to be displayed by a South Carolina judge.

A “Free James Brown Movement” was hatched, publicized on MTV and in the music press. DJs distributed buttons, and rappers spoke out against his arrest. Mike Tyson was photographed wearing a “Free James Brown” T-shirt. Maceo Parker cut a song together with Bobby Byrd and Bootsy titled “Let ’Em Out.”

Assigned to work in the kitchen, Brown cooked breakfast for several hundred inmates at a minimum security facility. That changed after $48,000 in cashier’s checks was found in his room. In punishment, he was moved to a minimum-maximum security
prison in Columbia. The IRS impounded the checks, along with seven hundred dollars in cash.

Being alone was okay, he told people, they need not feel sorry for him. When Herb Kent, a DJ from Chicago, visited, Brown flashed him a gold card, explaining that with it he could get the president on the telephone. He was lucky, was the message. Not like the rest of the guys here.

At other times, he looked at his situation with mellow rumination, a slow shake of the head for what had been done to him. “They went way back with this, before civil rights, before Martin Luther King,” he told Bruce Tucker.

“To your childhood?” Tucker asked.

“I think so,” Brown answered. “I think so.”

Alfie grieved, lamenting her situation and his. She wrote to him in jail, working on him to sever his ties with his staff, guys like Danny Ray and costume chief Gertrude Sanders, folks who had been with Brown for decades.

Love’s a funny thing. Just months before his incarceration, Adrienne had given the
National Enquirer
photographs of her bruises. Now she was calling the FBI, alleging her husband’s arrest was a racially motivated frame-up.

She visited him regularly, as did Sharpton. Little Richard called, but, according to Sharpton, not one artist who professed the influence of James Brown came to see him in prison.

Band members and everybody else mostly stayed away. “Where are his friends?” asked Bobby Byrd. “They’re as far away as they can get.”

Among the few who did visit: Republican strategist Lee Atwater. Raised in Aiken, South Carolina, just across the Savannah from Augusta, Atwater was an essential asset of the Republican party. As a youth, he trick-or-treated at a neighbor’s house and made a connection that would last his whole life. The neighbor was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond (he passed out Snickers bars). Atwater became a protégé of Thurmond, a roguish dirty
trickster and an architect of the “Southern Strategy,” which vilified African Americans in order to scare white voters into the Republican fold.