One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (48 page)

Atwater explained the Southern Strategy in a 1981 interview, sketching the history of an idea he inherited but made his own. “You start out in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying ‘we want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing
and
a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”

A fan since he first heard the captivating squall of “Please, Please, Please,” Atwater was a rhythm and blues lover and a James Brown fanatic. In sixth grade, he sat in a segregated balcony to watch Brown perform, using binoculars to study the guitar parts. In no time Atwater would become a quality Brown imitator on the South Carolina beach and frat circuit, in a series of earnest white R&B bands.

Like Brown, Atwater looked at the South not as it might one day be but as it was—and he found a way to exploit the
wasness
of his state all the way to the capital. Atwater appreciated Brown’s art and empathized with his troubles. He may even have used his political ties to protect Brown in this period. The singer appreciated his patronage. When Atwater collapsed while giving a speech in 1990 and was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Brown sent him a telegram: “Hang in there my wife and I are pulling for you there is no one greater than God he’ll give you peace.” When the presidential aide died in 1991, Brown attended his funeral.

He was even better acquainted with Atwater’s mentor, Strom Thurmond. Brown once said, in a letter to Senator Phil Gramm, that his father had worked for the former governor and then senator from South Carolina, and Brown said of Thurmond that “He knew my father’s father and knew me before I knew myself.” The redheaded segregationist was in the audience when Brown was granted a furlough to perform two free shows in early 1991 for army troops at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He opened with “I’ve Got You (I Feel Good)” and finished with “Living in America,” and according to
Jet
, “He told the soldiers he was proud of them and proud to be in America.” Backstage at Fort Jackson, Brown and his wife were warmly greeted by Thurmond and military brass.

After serving two years and two months, he had his first parole board hearing early in 1991. Addressing the South Carolina panel, Brown’s attorney, Buddy Dallas, introduced him to the board by announcing, “It is my distinct pleasure to introduce you to James Brown; a man that is known locally, nationally, and internationally.” The inmate and his representatives spoke to the state panel, and in twenty minutes Brown was paroled, on February 27, 1991.

“I think your future, your entire future, your career, is going to overshadow your past tremendously,” enthused the parole board chairman.

“We’ll do more bonding now,” Alfie told
Jet
, “and I’m gonna just eat his face.”

Upon his release Brown held a press conference and then headed to Washington to thank a few people who had helped him. He visited the Congressional Black Caucus, whose members had signed a petition calling for his freedom. “Then he told Sharpton, “I gotta visit Senator Thurmond.”

“Why you gotta do that?” the reverend asked.

“Can’t do all black. He’s a friend of mine.”

So they went to see the senator—Sharpton, Brown, and Adrienne, and
the politician insisted they take pictures of the party standing behind his desk.

Both were defined by Georgialina, which was part of what made them friends. But their ties were tactical, too. “James had been beaten by these crackers; he had made money with these crackers. He had all kinds of relations with these crackers,” said Leeds. “And he had enough confidence in himself to pick out the good ones from the bad ones and play them like a violin. He knew he was a commodity to these guys.”

That month a summer tour was announced. Polydor released
Star Time
, a four-CD, seventy-one-track compilation spanning his entire career. It was the most comprehensive overview of his vast body of work available. Along with a wave of enthusiasm tied to his parole, and a series of vigorous performances,
Star Time
went a long way to presenting Brown’s art to many who might only have known him from recent news reports.

In the weeks and months after his release, Brown must have said “I feel good” more times than in all the years before. The song became his gleaming show-business smile, his mask. By now he was an icon and a curio, a figure Americans had grown up with and now smiled over. Late-night comics made fun of the idea of him as a “political prisoner.” Eddie Murphy played Brown as a grunting funky papa with a hot tub. A Kenneth Cole billboard on view around the country showed a photograph of the singer beside a picture of a Cole shoe: “Two great things with sole under lock and key,” read a caption. (Those Northerners: The Southern racists thought that sort of thing was beneath them.) He had reached an apogee of American show business: He had become larger than life, and less than real.

Brown celebrated his release with a June 10 pay-per-view concert, promoted by boxing impresario Butch Lewis, and featuring MC Hammer, Kool Moe Dee, En Vogue, and others testifying to Brown’s influence. “Every star you could think of was in the audience,”
said Sharpton. The reverend was in the dressing room, fielding notes passed up from those arriving in limousines. This star wanted to come back and see him: Brown shook his head no. Another, and another: no, no, no. Finally, Brown said, “Reverend, tell them I’ll see whoever came to see me in jail.”

Dan Aykroyd was getting ready to do a hellzapoppin’ intro when Brown sent Sharpton to retrieve one of the producers of the show. He asked the producer if there was a room off the side of the stage, and a camera, so that the reverend, he, and his family could be seen on the broadcast praying to God in gratitude for his freedom. The band was starting to play Brown’s first song; “No time for that now,” said the producer.

“Do you know how to sing ‘Get on the Good Foot’?” Brown asked.

The producer looked baffled.

“Do you know how to sing ‘Get on the Good Foot’? Because you’re gonna sing it tonight unless you let this man lead us in prayer.”

He got his wish. He and Alfie prayed. Then Brown put on a leather coat and took the stage. All the way back.

O
n the road that summer, many band members said Brown was more relaxed and fun to be around than he had been in a long time. He was moving better and looked healthier. But he was still married to Adrienne, and the two of them were battling for control, for revenge. They were using PCP again, too, which made it all burn hotter.

One night, after they’d brawled and Brown had thrown her out, Fred Daviss was sent to make sure Alfie found a place to stay that night, somewhere that wasn’t Beech Island. He found her walking by the roadside, and as he slowed down and opened his car door, she muttered to him through clenched teeth: “I’m gonna get back in that house. And when I do—I’m gonna bring that nigger to his knees.”

Somebody who worked in Brown’s kitchen told Daviss that Adrienne was secretly putting PCP in his coffee ice cream and his cream corn. “He loved cream corn. And I do believe Alfie did it.”

She went in for liposuction in a Beverly Hills clinic early in 1996. The eight-hour procedure exhausted her, and she spent the following two days at home recovering, helped by prescriptions of Demerol, Valium, Vicodin, and morphine. She became unconscious, and paramedics took her to a Century City hospital, where she was declared dead. A coroner’s report indicated that a heart condition, as well as the PCP found in her system, contributed to her death. Adrienne Brown was forty-five. “She probably knew him better than any women he was ever with,” said Daviss.

Little Richard, Dan Aykroyd, and Casey Kasem attended her funeral. Part of the service was in Hebrew, because Adrienne was Jewish. A message from Brown appeared in the funeral program: “Dear Adrienne, Honey my life will never be the same, wait for me. I want to be the first guest on your TV show in heaven. Yours always, James.”

After the service, Brown, Sharpton, and others went out to eat. “Ten minutes in, he was smiling and holding court with the gang,” said Leeds. “Brown was through with the morbidity of the situation and it was time to move on. Those of us who knew him knew he was hurting badly, but this was a kid who was forced at elementary school age if not kindergarten age to learn how to compartmentalize pain. His very survival as a child depended on it. He had a place to put that pain.”

In Washington, Strom Thurmond had a tribute to Alfie inserted into the congressional record.

T
wo years later, up all night smoking angel dust and thinking about his dead wife, Brown walked onto his front lawn in his underwear. He fired a.22 caliber semiautomatic handgun and a.30 caliber rifle in the general direction of heaven.

His daughter Deanna called the police, and they had him committed to a facility for observation. Brown put out a press release saying the hospitalization was due to an addiction to painkillers, while his lawyer Buddy Dallas spun it that he was simply tired from too much touring. “He’s been on the road for six years and he’s just exhausted,” declared Dallas. “He is keeping the faith and he’ll be back strong.”

Journalist Barney Hoskyns caught up with him, asking if it was hard to reach out for help. Brown took it as a hypothetical question. “Well, you reach out for help if you need it. If I needed it, I’d probably reach out for it. I can’t fight rhetoric, you know what I’m sayin’?”

The writer tried again, and Brown got mad, saying, “When you see me, look in my eyes and look at the way I act…. I’m sixty-five years old and I can do all my dances. I can even do the splits if I want. Most people
twenty-five
years old can’t do it. I’m in good shape, and anything that I do, drugs will not allow you to do it, so that’ll let you know right away whether I use drugs or not.”

Meanwhile, the IRS still wanted $9 million. On this matter, he was willing to reach out for help to at least one person: the president of the United States.

The news media was giving major play to Bill Clinton visiting Africa, where he had expressed official regret for America’s history of slavery. Whatever else he saw in the news, in March 1998, Brown saw an opening. He wrote the man at the top.

“I want to say congratulations to you. Congratulations…Congratulations. I see Dr. Martin Luther King’s story is brought back. It’s going to be an uproar all the time,” Brown declares of Clinton’s statement. The letter goes on for pages, about the teaching of music in school and the idiocy of teaching opera, about captured animals and the state of black America. He praises Clinton, mentions he’s been in Little Rock before, and that he had performed for the president. Slowly, he comes around to the subject at hand: Now that Clinton had acknowledged America’s past, he should enlarge on
his statement at home, and establish a form of reparations to African Americans. Brown provides just the sort of thing he has in mind: Clinton could declare that African Americans did not have to pay taxes. As he reminds the president, “taxation without representation” is against the law.

It’s a stunning tour de force, one more elliptical, devastating groove. There is no record that Clinton ever responded.

The president was unable to help, so Brown turned to Wall Street for assistance. A young investment banker named David Pullman had a sexy idea: to create bonds that were securitized by a musician’s future royalties. In 1997, David Bowie became Pullman’s big catch, and “Bowie Bonds” were all the rage. Two years later, Brown came knocking. He received $30 million up front in the form of a loan (untaxable earnings). The financial institution investing in his future earnings got a bond that presumably reaped more than old-fashioned bonds.

Jeff Allen, a booking agent working with the singer, accompanied him when he signed the Pullman deal. Allen said Brown asked a startled Pullman at the meeting if he would like to try PCP. “You ever smoke gorilla?” Brown asked. That was what he called angel dust: gorilla, pronounced
go
-rilla. “The president smokes gorilla. Everybody should smoke gorilla.” He signed the contract. After the meeting, Brown jumped into a white limousine with Allen and had himself a celebratory smoke.

Pullman had provided him with a sudden sense of financial stability that he had never in his life known before. He was diagnosed with diabetes. Then, late in 1999, Brown had successful surgery on his prostate.

All the while, he remained addicted to a substance that wears down men half his age. Two female employees took him to court, one claiming sexual harassment and wrongful termination and the other rape (only the wrongful termination claim prevailed). In 2002, his daughters Deanna and Yamma sued him over record royalties. He had put their names on songs when they were children, doing
it perhaps to hide money from the IRS. Still, their names were on the songs, and they insisted on getting their due.

He was not in jail, but where was he?

Appearing before the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services in May 2003, Brown was granted a pardon for the crimes dating to the 1988 car chase and for a 1998 drug charge. After the decision was announced, from his seat he sang “God Bless America.”

“I’m getting very tired, and I’d love to quit yesterday. I’ve got diabetes, I’ve almost broken my feet, did something to my tendons, hurt all in my back—but I work. I don’t tell [fans] how bad it is. I smile when I see them,” he said. Talking to a reporter about his upbringing, Brown was asked: How much did his childhood shape him?

“If I had been free, totally free, I wouldn’t have been this,” he answered.