One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (12 page)

“I knew the struggle, the pinto beans and the bologna sandwiches and the RC Colas, then the no-food period, for two or three days or something,” remembered Bobby Byrd. “That’s the stuff we all went through together.” Most hotels would not give you a room, and at first they couldn’t afford the rooms a black hotel offered. You ate what you found, going to the back door of restaurants that would serve you. You might need to buy a whole pie just because you wanted a piece. And there was the sheriff waiting to escort you to the county line.

You took the color line as a given, because that was how you survived. You were probably the only act in town for black folks to see on a given night. Some places let you play to whites if blacks were confined to the balcony, or a separate room, or if in a pinch the races were divided by a line of rope stretched across the dance floor.

Late in 1956, the Famous Flames signed a contract with Universal Attractions, a New York–based agency headed by Ben Bart. Brantley still handled shows in his region for the time being, but the white show business veteran Bart was able to get them dates out West and in the North. As a booker, Bart favored a loaded schedule; he believed in work and loved artists who shared his stamina. His schedule was exciting for Brown, exhausting for others. Not long
after he signed on, the Famous Flames were driving from a show in Pensacola to New Mexico. Somewhere in Colorado, in the middle of the night, everybody was asleep except for the driver. While they slept, everybody was coughing, then they were throwing up; carbon monoxide was filling the car at five in the morning. That was it for Nafloyd Scott. “I done been through it,” he declared, on the way back to Toccoa.

He was not alone. March of 1957 marked a year since “Please, Please, Please” launched them, and still they had no viable follow-up. They were flailing, listening to King pitch them songs, chasing after a doo-wop tune here, a rock and roll shouter there. What did they want to be?

Bart called off the bookings, summoned them to his Manhattan office. He took Brown aside and they talked for a while, and when Bart then addressed the rest of the group, his message was brutal. Brown was the star of the show.
He
was the one people were paying to see. It made no sense to continue their former arrangement, splitting money evenly and pretending all were equal. The decision was about saving money, but also about admitting the obvious: One guy was leading the way. As Brown hovered silently, Bart offered the Famous Flames a new arrangement: They would get a set rate of thirty-five dollars per show and a straight salary; Brown would take the record royalties. That was the deal, if they didn’t like it they could be replaced. Early in March the rest of the Famous Flames said they didn’t like it at all. They’d play a string of dates that would send them back to the South and then quit.

Bart shattered whatever illusion remained that the Famous Flames were an egalitarian unit, with Brown first among equals. Bart’s declaration sealed the deal, but truly the end had come back in March 1956. The rest of the Flames never recovered from picking up that first copy of “Please, Please, Please” and seeing the strange wording of the Federal label, “JAMES BROWN with the Famous Flames.”

“Oh, that was devastating,” said Byrd. “All the stuff we had gone
through, all the struggles, to
get
to ‘Please, Please, Please,’ and then to wind up with one person’s name on it. That wasn’t right, because one person didn’t do all of that. All of us did that. Yes indeed.”

Brown was not one of them. The Flames had grown up with each other, and to them this was a lark, a moonshine fishtail through the mountains, something to ride until it crashed and you had to go home to your family.

“James was different from us. He didn’t hang out with us,” Scott recalled later. “James had a mind of his own, he wanted to do something different from everybody else. He wanted to make his own way.”

To Byrd, the fun stopped when the arguments over billing and percentages began. “The best time we
ever
had was when we was the Flames and everybody was getting the same amount, whether it was a dollar and a quarter, if it was seventy-five cents. Oh you can’t imagine what kind of times it was. Hugely different times, everybody was grinning, and fun…. Wasn’t like no job to us, we was just having a ball.”

The Flames blamed the split on Brown’s greed, his sneakiness. Surely, Brown had his share of both. But what broke up the Famous Flames was that they were from Toccoa and he was not. For them it was about having a ball, about a pleasure that was innocent and free. They went home and took care of their families.

N
o record sales since his debut. No act. No proof he could write a song on his own. Nine singles in a row that nobody wanted to hear. Brown headed out again on the circuit with no wind at his back. He was a solo act in the summer of 1957, accompanied by pianist Fats Gonder on loan from Brantley. He picked up Thomas “Guitar” Gable, who played sitting down with the guitar flat across his lap, for a string of shows. Beyond that, Brown was hiring bassists and drummers as he found them, playing material that they knew, singing his one hit. Traveling light.

That fall, a small miracle happened: Little Richard found God. He had joined the Seventh-day Adventist church and was preaching abstinence and the imminent Second Coming of our Lord on street corners in Los Angeles. A religious booking agency signed him and he announced he was backing out of his secular dates in America. Yet again, Brown was called on, and with so little going for him, he eagerly toured once more with the Upsetters for several weeks. Reminded of the pleasures of playing with a great band and drummer, he itched to get a group of his own together, take them to Cincinnati for a recording session that would establish a new direction. Heck: establish
a
direction.

The problem was, Nathan stood in the doorway. When you had a hit, he would put as many records out on you as he could make, and when you were cold the inverse was true—Syd didn’t have nothing for you. After one more session in the fall of 1957, Nathan stopped returning Brown’s calls.

One thing was becoming clear, as it would have been to anyone who spent time within the brown brick King enclave. Songs are what mattered to Nathan. He understood as well as anybody in the industry that the real money was in owning the songwriting royalties. “He didn’t record anyone’s songs unless he got a rate,” said Henry Glover. “That’s why he had very few outside compositions on his labels.” It was a good way to make money, and it was the key reason why Nathan had his white acts covering his black acts and vice versa: because they were taking tunes he had a piece of to black
and
white audiences. “Give me the
song
,” Nathan all but shouted at one meeting of his staff. As for the singer that brought in that song, well…“If he sings with a harelip, we’ll take him, we’ll take the song, because goddamnit we can cover him over. If he…”—and here Nathan did his garbled interpretation of what a singer with a harelip sounded like—“that suits me, as long as the
material
is good.”

He didn’t have any particular fondness for music. Nathan liked the business, he liked hustlers cutting deals with other hustlers.
He had worked as a shooting gallery operator and a wrestling promoter, he ran a record store, and had owned a pawn shop. That last job was particularly salient; King employees recalled Nathan killing time by walking into a local pawnshop, picking out some object he had no interest in buying, and seeing how low he could get the pawnbroker to go.

Country music star Hank Penny was one of the first hillbilly acts on King, in the 1940s. On a visit to the label, he watched Nathan argue furiously with a music publisher over an eighth-of-a-cent royalty for a song. “Man, you never heard of such language over such an actual small amount,” said Penny. Afterward, everyone went out for dinner at a high-priced restaurant, and Nathan paid for everything. “I asked him how he could fight so hard over an eighth of a cent and then pick up a big tab. Syd just laughed and said, ‘This morning I was a kike, tonight I’m an elegant Jew.’

“That was Syd in a nutshell,” said Penny.

Brown had little ability to induce King to record him. What Brown
was
in control of were the shows he played, the fringe dates he was banging out through the fall and winter of 1957. After the pickup gigs with the Upsetters ended, he kept Richard’s vocal group, the Dominions, with him. They were Louis Madison, Bill Hollings, J. W. Archer, and now
they
were the Famous Flames. He had also picked up a new guitar player in Topeka, Kansas, a blues freak who played with a full-bodied sound, by the name of Bobby Roach.

This was not a situation where Brown was running the show. There wasn’t all that much of a show, and however the pay was skewed, nobody bowed to the boss. In Indiana, a couple of women at the front of the stage were making fun of his looks, and pretty soon the Famous Flames were laughing with them. In the dressing room after the show, Roach saw Brown crying. Another night, on the Carolina coast, the guys were all rolling dice. One of the Flames was winning and Brown was not. He was a bad loser. A fight erupted and the singer got thrashed. “We had to tape him up, his eyes were
bleeding bad, he had big sunglasses on. We made the show together, but he was barely able to stand,” said Roach.

This group played the West Coast in August, but they rooted in Florida, where Brown spent some nine months. A particularly supportive venue was a wonderland called the Million Dollar Palms of Hallandale, about fifteen miles outside of Miami. The Palms was a former drive-in movie theater and now it was a nightclub where you could hang out stage-side or sit in your car and listen to the likes of Roy Milton, Ray Charles, and Earl Bostic. Palms grew out of the cement, and there was an open-pit barbecue and a 106-foot bar. The white owner ran a Negro motel about a mile away, and another Palms in Jacksonville. The Palms booked you for a solid week, making it an oasis among the garland of one-night joints stretching between Atlanta and New Orleans.

One evening at the Palms, a guy whose name is lost to time sang a song he had written and thought Brown should record. The tune stuck with Brown as he drove across the South and to another West Coast trip. “Stockton, Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, places like that,” said Roach. “Didn’t draw a fly in none of those places. We drove back to Macon, Georgia, and it was quite a blow to James.”

Roach took the wheel, then Brown had a shift, and he drove for a long time, remembered Roach, “Because he was thinking about his career and his songs.” They stopped for the night in a small town in Alabama, and Brown told Roach to get his instrument; he had a song he wanted to put a guitar part on.

It was the number Brown had picked up at the Palms, and Roach heard in it a plea to his audience, his label, the world: Give me a chance.
Try
me. He called in the Famous Flames and they started working up harmonies, and the song they created was reminiscent of a hit of the time, “For Your Precious Love.” They continued on to Macon, getting in at two in the morning, and headed to WIBB to record it while it was fresh. Roach was there, along with Fats Gonder and the Flames. Brown paid for the session himself, which was looking like the only way he was going to
be
recording. He had
five records made from the tape and sent them out to Southern DJs he knew. The song was “Try Me,” a catchphrase used by young black men in Georgia, along with some specific body language, to interest young women. From several angles then, the song had some urgency to it. But if anybody was ever going to hear the thing, Brown first had to convince Nathan to let him back into the studio to record it.

Later, Brown would say Nathan had told him he was off the label for good, and declared that it was only because the demo of “Try Me” had started getting some action from Southern jocks that he relented. But when Nathan finally heard the song he had to acknowledge that he had something, and he bankrolled a session in New York City with a big-time record producer, Andy Gibson, and good studio musicians. The song quickly rose on the R&B charts as Brown and the Famous Flames went back to the West Coast, appearing at L.A.’s 5-4 Ballroom in November and again in December. By late 1958, the song topped the R&B charts, and it was also Brown’s first song to crease Billboard’s Hot 100—reaching 48 on the pop side. The song was quality, it had a patina, professional craftsmen had worked on it in the studio; it was the kind of song Nathan appreciated. Its lachrymose mood, akin to that of “Please, Please, Please,” was not however what Brown wished to sound like, nor was it the spirit of his shows.

Ever since the first time he played with Charles Connor and the Upsetters, Brown had wanted a band of his own, musicians he could take on the road and work on new material with that he could then record at King. After “Try Me” hit, he could afford something better than ramshackle, and Brown made a move. He signed up J. C. Davis, a hard-honking saxophonist who liked bebop, to be his bandleader. Davis was a North Carolinian who had been stationed at Camp Gordon in Augusta and played in the Army Signal Corps Band around 1953. On weekends, Davis would go into the Terry and sit in with local bands. That’s how he met drummer Nat Kendrick, who was a boyhood acquaintance of Brown, and bassist
Hubert Perry, who played with the Four Steps of Rhythm. When he got out of the army, Davis went back home to Greensboro, where he led the house band at the ABA club. He backed up stars when they passed through town, and after he played behind Brown, the singer asked Davis if he wanted to be his bandleader. Soon Davis had brought Perry and Kendrick, the Augusta rhythm section, into the fold. With those three, Fats Gonder playing keyboards, and Bobby Roach on guitar, and with the Famous Flames singing and dancing, Brown was back in business. They were putting “Try Me” at the center of their live show, with the Flames doing steps to show what young Georgia studs did when they asked ladies if they wanted to “try me,” and designing other steps and routines, as well.

Immediately, the most important addition was Kendrick. He was coming out of a rhythm and blues background, and did not play the full instrument, preferring to keep a simple driving beat on the snare and a heavy foundation on the bass drum. “He wasn’t a great drummer, he just had a lot of feeling, soul,” said Davis. “He didn’t try to be pretty, didn’t try to be cute, he just got on the drums and then, minutes after the show started, his shirt and his clothes was wringing wet. He had a heavy,
heavy
bass foot—he laid down the bass line with that foot and that’s what James would dance off.”