One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (51 page)

In downtown Augusta, there is a statue commemorating Georgia’s colonial founder, a confederate memorial, and the so-called “cursed pillar,” an obelisk that legend claims was a whipping post for slaves. As Brown was turning seventy, mayor Bob Young tried to get the city to agree to a privately funded statue on Broad Street that would place Brown among these monuments. Young was a pop DJ in the mid-’60s, and had flown helicopters in Vietnam with “Mother Popcorn” stenciled on his helmet. Now he was arguing with segments of the citizenry about whether Brown was worthy of the honor.

The singer sat for a sculptor, and the piece had been sent down
in Florida to be cast, when his mug shot got in all the papers. “I just about had a stroke. I thought, who’s going to give money for a statue to somebody who just got arrested,” remembered Young. He waited for Brown’s case to work its way through court—Brown did not go to jail—before discussing a date to dedicate the statue. Meanwhile, he discovered that he needed $18,000 more to finish the work, and the mayor felt a need to raise it soon, before anything else bad happened.

Finally, in May 2005, three days after Brown’s seventy-second birthday, Reverend Sharpton made a benediction not far from where Brown had shined shoes six decades before. After they unwrapped the statue, invited guests went around the corner to the Old Governor’s Mansion for a reception. “We got out and walked together,” remembered Sharpton. “He said, ‘Reverend, I appreciate that you came.’ I said, ‘You
know
I was coming. Man, it’s a huge debt they repaid.’

“‘Yeah.’

“‘I never thought they’d have a statue of you in Augusta—and facing a confederate marker!’”

He touched Sharpton on the arm. “And don’t forget what I told you—I did it on my own terms,” he said. “I never conformed to Augusta; they had to conform to me.”

In his last years, Brown had a new management team, an actively involved group of people controlling his money and booking him on the road. In 2000, he formed a trust to protect his assets, and then, in signed documents, he turned over management of his assets to the group. The three trustees were attorney Buddy Dallas, business manager and accountant David Cannon, and Alford “Judge” Bradley, who first met Brown in 1990 as his designated legal “sponsor” upon release from South Carolina prison. The trust worked in tandem with “SuperFrank” Copsidas, a New York agent, and Joel Katz, Atlanta entertainment lawyer, when it came to booking shows and making certain business decisions.

In 2006, Brown had a remarkably draining schedule for a man in
his seventies. According to one account of his tour schedule posted on a fan site, the singer did eighty-one shows that year. He performed eighteen in July alone, did four dates in four days on a trip through Europe in November, and played Morocco, Tokyo, Estonia, Turkey, and all over the United States.

The longtime fans in the audience for the 2006 shows said they were as good as they’d seen in the past two decades. “I’m telling you, they were some of the best shows I have ever done with him,” declared trumpeter Hollie Farris. “He was already sick at this point, we could tell, he was losing weight, but they were great shows. They would actually roll him out sometimes to the edge of the stage in a wheelchair, and he’d get up and do the show.

“One time we were in South America, maybe Argentina, he was so sick and had just flown in from the States and the doctor had to come to his hotel room to give him some shots and put a catheter up in him. He got up off the bed, took the catheter out and did the show, came back and put the catheter back in. They said he was really close to death, but then he did a full hour and a half show. It was incredible what that guy could do…but he was way sicker than we knew, obviously.”

Some say the only one overworking Brown was himself. According to Dallas, nobody could make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Roosevelt Johnson, a valet and assistant, said, “If he wanted a break they booked it that way. He wasn’t gonna let anybody overwork him.”

He had picked up a rattling, cavernous cough, one that did not go away. “The last tour was completely ridiculous,” said Amy Christian, a singer with the show. “We were in Europe for twelve days and did ten shows in nine different countries—we went from Scotland to Moscow to London to Thessalonica to Helsinki to Latvia.

“It wasn’t just bebopping around. The last show we were playing in Croatia, and staying in Prague, just traveling to it by private jet then flying back, it was hot in this club and it was packed, and I
remember by the end Mr. Brown, he just handed me the mic and said, ‘Here.’ He was shaking his head, like, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’

“It was obvious. I’m half his age and
I
was exhausted. But my god, there was so much money to be made. And they just kept adding on more and more shows…”

In Tbilisi, Georgia, in the former Soviet Union, they played an Olympic-style swimming facility. A twelve-foot-high stage had been built on the edge of the pool. The audience sat across the pool on the far side.

The band called this night “Georgia out of my mind.” At sound check, Brown kept walking up to the edge of the stage and looking down at the water. He laughed that cackle, and would ask, “Who’s going in? Who’s going in with me?”

They played their show, a good one, finishing with “Sex Machine,” and just as the song was reaching a climax, Brown took a running leap and jumped into the deep end of the pool. “Now, he’s fully clothed, he’s got his cowboy boots on, and he sunk like a rock. Some of us just about had a heart attack,” remembered Keith Jenkins. Hollie Farris was the first to get to him. “He starts trying to swim, but he doesn’t make it ten feet before he sinks,” said Farris. “I leapt in and dragged him back to the edge of the pool—I almost made it back until…then
I
sank. But I tossed him off to somebody else and they got him and drug him out of the pool.

“He had a look of terror on his face. Two of the dancers, me and the saxophone player, five or six of us all jumped in. He was a sinking man, on his way down.”

He came back onstage, soaking wet with his hair totally flat. The rhythm section was still playing, and Brown finished the song.

Everybody who jumped in got a two hundred dollar bonus.

R
eturning home in the latter part of November 2006, Brown had little time to relax. There was his annual Thanksgiving turkey
giveaway to plan, and a toy giveaway in December. He had meetings with local promoters of a charity benefit.

As was standard procedure in his down time, Brown was going to doctors, getting things taken care of. “He was having some difficulties. He was just so sick,” recalled Leon Austin. “He said, ‘I’m tired. I’d like to retire, but I can’t. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to retire, because I’m making money, and people are needing me to work.’ He said to me, ‘My knees hurt…my knees hurt. I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to do.’” That was on the day before the toy giveaway, December 22.

Hair and teeth, the man said: If you had those you had it all. He had an appointment to see his dentist in Atlanta. But when he went, after the toy giveaway, the dentist took one look at the woozy, semi-coherent patient, and summoned a doctor. After a brief examination, Brown was sent to Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, where by Saturday he had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and pneumonia.

That night Sharpton called Brown from New York, not knowing he was in a hospital. He could instantly tell he was sick by the tone of his voice. Still, Brown wanted to talk and was in an expansive mood. He was all but berating Sharpton on the topic of profanity in rap music.

A little later, while Sharpton prepared for an imminent South African trip with Oprah Winfrey, an associate said, “Sorry about your pops, Reverend.”

“What do you mean?” Sharpton asked. The aide explained he’d just seen on the CNN news ticker that Brown had been hospitalized.

Sharpton called the singer’s daughter Deanna, and asked about the report. She knew nothing of it.

Later that night, after he’d fallen asleep, Sharpton’s cell phone started ringing. He thought it was a family member wishing him a merry Christmas, and let it ring. But it kept up, and when he answered, it was Bobbit:

“He’s
gone. Your pops is gone.”

“What?”

“James Brown is dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Reverend, James Brown is dead.”

Sharpton lay down like he was having a bad dream.

Somebody who had embodied invincibility, who he knew to be fixing to play New York City on New Year’s Eve…it didn’t make sense.

Calling Bobbit back, Sharpton asked him again: “What did you say?”

Tomi Rae had spoken to him on the phone that Saturday from the Southern California treatment center where she was fighting an addiction to painkillers. Bobbit calmly did what he’d been doing for decades: He managed the situation. He called band members, current and former wives, members of the trust. In New York, Sharpton got on a plane to Atlanta, and headed to the house of Brown’s daughter Yamma, where ex-wife Deidre and Deanna were waiting. It was a sorrowful time, but the reverend brought up the need to plan a service.

One thing Sharpton grasped immediately: They had to take him to the Apollo. Deanna agreed, but she felt there needed to be a private service in Augusta, and somebody else spoke up that a public service was needed there, too, for all the years he had lived in Augusta and sung about the place. Thus, an improbable, exhausting plan was hatched for three services in three places to send off the Godfather of Soul.

The daughters, Sharpton, and longtime family friend and funeral director Charles Reid Jr. viewed the man, laid out peacefully. “He looked in a strange way like he had just done a show and hadn’t done his hair yet,” Sharpton recalled. Only now was it sinking in that the man was really gone.

The Apollo was contacted and arrangements made for an event on the stage he had dominated for decades. At some point, Reid
called the reverend, saying the family had changed their mind about the choice of casket, wanting a solid gold one. Fine, he said, they had the money for it. But there was a problem, explained Reid—the 500-pound box was too heavy for the Learjet Sharpton had ready to fly to New York. Sharpton called Donald Trump, but his jet was being repaired. Attorney Willie E. Gary’s jet was in Los Angeles, and Delta’s last flight out of Atlanta had left for the evening.

Reid, however, was placid. The daughters had picked out three changes of clothes for him to take with Brown’s body. The funeral director loaded the gold casket and the man into one of his vans, picked up Sharpton and two others, and started a drive from Georgia to Harlem. There really was no other way. James Brown had a commitment to keep.

“The feeling was, you can’t miss a date at the Apollo,” said Reid.

“The ride was, it was long. It wasn’t tiring, though,” he said. “We rode all night.”

As they went up I-95, the signs and markers flashed before them. Sharpton read them off silently, many with special meaning. There was Greenville, South Carolina, where Brown produced Sharpton’s single; and Raleigh, Charlottesville, and Baltimore, where Brown owned the radio station Sharpton had been on; Washington, D.C., and the Howard Theatre—each place its own sense memory. Night train.

“I had my hand on him most of the time,” said Sharpton. “I didn’t want to leave him.”

They stopped for coffee and gas, and folks would recognize the reverend, but before they grasped what was going on, the men were back in the van, on the highway. They chatted in the car, and Reid started messing with the reverend, saying, “Shh, I think James has something he’s trying to tell you.” They joked about what Brown would say to them then if he could. But most of all, they slurped down coffee and looked at their watches.

When they approached New York City the party turned on the
radio and heard a newscaster say crowds were lining up all night at the Apollo Theater to say good-bye.

In November, Sharpton had taken on the case of Sean Bell, a black man from Queens who was shot fifty times by New York police officers. Calling the funeral home he’d used for Bell, Sharpton explained he needed a hearse and a horse-drawn carriage
now
. The carriage reflected the gravity of the event; the hearse was to get Brown to the carriage, because if Brown
could
have spoken to them he would have said no way was he going to be sent off in public from the back of this old drafty van.

The hearse drove to Sharpton’s home on 145th Street, and the carriage, pulled by two plumed Percheron horses, steered the body down Malcolm X Boulevard to 125th Street. Friends, fans, and musicians all made their way past the singer on the Apollo stage. The service was held that evening, but with so many lined up to see Brown, the Apollo stayed open until eleven that night.

After the event was finished, they loaded Brown back into the van and Reid did a return drive all the way to Augusta, getting in around 11:30 the next morning. They brought him in, changed his clothes, and then headed to the service in North Augusta for family and immediate friends.

The private family service was at the tiny, red-brick Carpentersville Baptist Church, just across the border into South Carolina. Sharpton delivered the eulogy, telling the gathered, “When he started singing, we were sitting in the back of the bus. When he stopped singing, we were flying Learjets.” Squabbling over money and decades of hurt feelings had spilled over in the days after Brown’s heart stopped beating, with wives and children and trustees all taking shots at one another in the media. From the pulpit at Carpentersville Baptist, Sharpton made a statement ostensibly directed to all who were waging battles before the cameras, but he fixed his gaze on Tomi Rae as he spoke.

“If you really are all that you say you are, you don’t place
yourself in the story, the story puts you in your place,” said Sharpton. “We don’t want to hear your story or your mess; we’re here because of James Brown.”

The man everybody at Carpentersville was remembering had an old, unswerving practice: Wherever he was, before he went on the stage, he made a point of getting paid. His head peeking out of his dressing room, Brown would find whoever was designated the carrier of the cash, and ask, “You got my money?” Meaning, are we ready to proceed? At the end of the service, Sharpton slowly made his way down the center of the church, the casket pushed along behind him. Spotting Fred Daviss sitting in the back of the church, Sharpton leaned over as he passed, and whispered into his ear his best Brown imitation: “Fred, you got my money?”