One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (13 page)

Kendrick’s stamina aided the band in other ways. Brown had been playing pinball in Brantley’s club, and while the musicians drove to Savannah to make a gig, Brown was still in Macon, trying to win back what he’d lost. At the club, people were beginning to smash up the tables and throw the chairs around, so the group did their opening set, which Brown wasn’t a part of anyway. When he still hadn’t arrived, the band pulled down the curtains, and all of a sudden Kendrick came out and played a drum solo, as if this was some weird new way to begin a show. He kept playing and playing, as behind the curtain the guys threw all the gear on the station wagon; he kept playing, as they started up the car; he grabbed his kit and raced to the car and drove away just about the time the audience caught on that Brown wouldn’t be there that night.

They picked up horn players here and there, and as the band expanded, so did the show. First, Davis and the musicians would do a handful of jazzy instrumentals as Brown watched and shouted from the audience. Eventually Fats Gonder came out and, with his chesty bluster, pumped up the house for the entry of the Famous Flames, who sang a few hits of the day, and then pumped up the crowd higher, as Brown hit the stage.

When the mood lagged, the group broke out one of their well-rehearsed routines. They did a baseball bit where Davis was the batter who would step up to the “plate” swinging his saxophone as Brown pitched a ball and one of the Flames called strikes or balls. Their song “The Bells” was a soap opera telling the story of a guy who hadn’t treated his woman well—she drives off angrily, and the next thing he hears is the police at the door asking for the next of kin. In
that
routine, the Flames were pallbearers pushing a baby carriage with a doll in it across the stage, and when they pass Brown, he falls to his knees and sobs, slowly working his way into “Please, Please, Please.”

“We’d be pulling the baby carriage away from him, and he would have actual tears coming out of his eyes,” said Davis. It got to where if they came through town again and
didn’t
do the bit with the baby carriage, there were those in the crowd ready to start a fight. “He was a guy determined that he was going to be noticed. He was determined that he was going to be the man, he’s going to do something to make people remember us, even if it was climb up onto the rafters and fall down and kill himself. He was going to be remembered.”

They signified flair and wealth and made a squall. It was how they wanted to be remembered, but being black and representing those qualities could get you killed on the road. It was an art form all its own: tearing it up in the Sportatorium, then slipping away to the next town.

On the road in the South, when they couldn’t get a motel room they stayed at “tea houses,” whorehouses more or less, said Davis.
All along the way, the police were a presence to avoid, nuance, or outsmart. They pulled the band over on a country road in Waycross, Georgia, telling the driver, Davis, that his rear light was out. “No, it’s not,” he said—it was his brand-new Kingswood station wagon. “You calling me a liar, boy?” he was asked, and then beaten with a flashlight. Another time, coming out of a show in tobacco country, they were driving to the next gig when flares on the road brought them to a stop. The police arrested the lot and took them to the station. There the musicians’ pockets were emptied, and everything they had was taken by the police. Blacks driving in a nice car had to be from the North and had to be taught a lesson. Moments like this showed them that you were unlikely to make it out of town if the gendarmes knew you had a lot of money and were driving a good car with out-of-town plates. From then on, they put the night’s take in another car, one that looked more appropriate for blacks to be driving in the eyes of the law.

Sometimes, the sheriffs were funny more than anything else. Alfred Corley was a teenager who had studied saxophone in Florida with Cannonball Adderley. Corley was thoroughly intoxicated the night the police pulled him out of the bus and put him on the grill.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“My name is Alfred Corley.”

“Boy don’t you talk to us like that down here—your name is
Corley
.”

Corley turned around to the guys in the band and said in all drunken innocence, “Now I don’t even know my own name!”

It defused the situation, and soon they were on their way.

That was one image of the late 1950s chitlin circuit, an important part, but other flickerings emerged on the periphery of vision. The band was playing a show in Jacksonville, at the Number Two Palms, around 1959. Roach, Davis, and the guys were in the dressing room, joking, waiting to go on, when someone sitting outside the door came in looking nervous. Four or five people really wanted to meet the band, he explained. They came in, saying they were
college kids, and then they started laughing, admitting they could have been arrested if they had been caught in this club full of black people.

With that the students pulled off the disguises they were wearing. “They had these natural wigs on and this brown pancake makeup on their faces,” said Roach.

“Me and James looked at each other and our mouths flew open. James cried, ‘Those are white people!’” They were three girls and two boys, and they said the show was the best they’d ever seen and were committed to following it around. “We played in New Orleans and they was there, then they was in Miami, South Carolina, I saw them in a lot of places, and they did the same thing everywhere we went.”

Whites and blacks mingling at venues could bring out the worst in local law officials, and white women and black men mingling was forbidden. Two years before the Freedom Rides, here were white college students who had somehow stumbled on the James Brown show and liked it so much they were willing to travel any way possible to hear him again.

It was a show of many parts, with Gonder, Davis, the Famous Flames, and Brown all getting billing on the posters. The billing on the records, and the size of the checks coming from Universal, established that Brown was the star. But that was different from having control of the entire show, or having the respect of those around you. Fats Gonder called him Monk Brown, and pretty soon the other guys did, too: “Because when he took off his makeup and his clothes, he looked like a little monkey,” said Davis. The Flames would be drinking White Satin gin and lemon juice, and they’d needle Brown about how they got more girls than him. There was a lack of esteem on both sides, coming across in fistfights and petty putdowns that showed Brown’s ego in full preen. “James started to say ‘I’m getting big and you guys ain’t gonna be nuthin’. We gonna be walking down the street and people gonna look around and say “There goes James Brown…” They ain’t even gonna
speak
to you,’” remembered Davis. “If
a girl gave you a banana, Brown’s gonna break the biggest piece off real quick. Next day if somebody gave you something, he
still
was gonna break off the biggest piece. He isn’t gonna say ‘I got it yesterday so it’s your turn.’ He’s gonna get it every day.”

Doubtless, there was ego in that, the vanity of a man who believed in himself when nobody else did. But there was more to it. If he was going to build the show he wanted and stamp himself on every aspect of the presentation, he needed to fight his way to the top of his own ticket. “All that tough guy stuff was nothing but a front,” Roach believed. “He said ‘Bobby, I
got
to act that way, because if I don’t the show will walk all over me.’” He was the star, but he wasn’t the leader—he didn’t tell Davis what to play or how long, the Flames didn’t really listen to him, Gonder was his own person. What he admitted to Roach, who roomed with him in Macon, was that, “He was trying to gain control of the leadership.”

In March 1959, the group headed again for the West Coast. They had a lot of play in the Bay Area, and there were plenty of places to perform. According to Byrd, Brown had done some last-minute show bookings of his own this trip, without Universal Attractions’ knowledge. After one of these off-the-books shows around Oakland, Brown pocketed the promoter’s deposit, and the money he was supposed to split with the venue and the band, and drove back to Macon. He left the band stranded in Northern California, without paying them the three weeks’ salary they were owed. In his wake, this version of the Flames—Louis Madison, Bill Hollings, J. W. Archer—decamped for good in Northern California. That’s one telling of events. Another is that Brown was confronted by one of the Flames on a rainy Oakland street about the money they were owed, got roughed up, and then left town. He lived in the moment, and in that moment he walked out with the money, and without his Flames. At least
them
motherfuckers weren’t gonna be calling him Monk Brown to his face any time soon.

“He was not the headliner,” said Roach. “He was just part of the
show, who was
striving
for leadership. But he wasn’t the leader then. When James really became the leader of the show is when the Flames quit and James took over.”

Brown had to get back to Macon because his girlfriend, Dessie, was getting a hysterectomy. Dessie’s last name was Brown, and between that and the fact that they were living together, folks thought they were married, when in fact James was still married to Velma in Toccoa. “She was a wild young woman, and they were like a sister and brother type deal,” recalled Roach. The first ten thousand dollars James saved he sent not to Velma and the boys but to Dessie, to buy themselves a house. Instead she spent it all while they were on the road. “She was not settled,” sighed Roach.

There was little time to waste in Georgia, however, for the Flames were scheduled for their debut at Harlem’s Apollo Theater on April 24, 1959. Brown had lost his band, which was a challenge, but by this point a pattern was asserting itself: Success came a minute or two after everything seemed to be over. Whether it was winging it on “Try Me” when Nathan wasn’t responding, or punching out a white farmer on a country road, things worked out okay. It could lead a guy to think he was invulnerable.

A new set of Famous Flames had to be baptized within days. Looking over the names he could count on, Brown reached out to Johnny Terry, who’d been around the show since the beginning. There was Bobby Bennett, a great dancer who had grown up a block from J. C. Davis in Greensboro, and “Baby” Lloyd Stallworth, a sweet kid the show had picked up at the Million Dollar Palms. “He was a real good guy, and a sensitive guy. He liked girls and he liked boys,” said Bennett. “He would mess with men. James took him on the road when he was sixteen years old. His mother sent him on the road to be with James—James said he’ll raise him.”

Brown still needed to teach these guys the show, and for this task he called up the man he trusted most to understand the needs of his act: Bobby Byrd. Back in Toccoa, Byrd swallowed hard and told Brown he’d meet him in Harlem.

He rented space in the basement of the Cecil Hotel, and Byrd put the new Famous Flames through their paces. Everybody knew what was at stake. The Apollo meant many important things to Bart and Brown: It was the top-ranking black show palace in the country, as unlike the Lenox in Augusta as Harry Belafonte was unlike Butterbeans and Susie. The place signified cosmopolitan splendor, and the lore was that through its doors passed the harshest, most opinionated audience in the country. That was arguable to somebody who played a Southern circuit where they might shoot you if you sang “The Bells” without the baby carriage, but it was true enough. New York was the North. It was where the money was, where business was done, and where Brown would stake his claim.

Coming into their biggest show yet in the big city, everybody felt pressure to look like they belonged. They stayed at a hotel they couldn’t afford, and were shocked when doormen opened their cab door, took their bag up, and expected a tip. They couldn’t even do their own laundry, because what if somebody saw them? “You had to play the part whether you could afford it or not,” recalled Davis.

They wore loud red suits that must have wowed them on the chitlin circuit. Brown and the ten guys on stage with him earned $2,250 for the week, and were listed low on a bill that included Little Willie John. The singer from Macon admired the headliner. He had soft, baby skin, was an amazing conversationalist—he could talk about carpentry, baseball, whatever—and was a “drinks for the house” sort of dude. That was if he cared to; just as likely, Little Willie John was going to fuck with you, messing up your process, undoing the top button of your shirt, trying to make you look bad as you were chatting up a lady at the bar.

John was an inch shorter than Brown’s five foot six. Like Brown, he was egotistical and easily wounded, proud and an expert fighter. Only John was handsome, and if Brown admired him, it also meant he envied him, and wanted to replace him.

He was backed by the Upsetters, Little Richard’s old band.
Drummer Charles Connor had recently been offered a chance to play with Elvis Presley, but turned it down to tour with John. Soon the Upsetters would back up Sam Cooke—but to Connor, it was all anticlimactic. “Elvis Presley was great but, come on, man. I was with Little Willie John,” said Connor. “I’d already reached the mountain.”

“Playing behind Sam Cooke was like playin’ for people in a convalescent home, for old people,” he said. “It was like playin’ up in a parade ‘second line’ band on your way
to
the graveyard, goin’ to bury the body.” The Upsetters, says Connor, would be muttering on the stage: “Yeah I’m gonna send
you
alright!” “…Looks more like a Sam Crook!”…and “I’ma
send
this drumstick up his big ugly head!”

There you have it: better than Sam Cooke
and
Elvis Presley. Little Willie John was the guy to beat.

At the Apollo, the Flames’ segment underscored how, as Roach described, Brown had to fight to get control of the stage. A
Variety
reviewer said the act “Almost blows out the walls to the obvious delight of audience.” But, “It isn’t so much a group as collection of performers—singers and musicians—who seem just to have happened onstage at the same time…the result is near-anarchy, with each man rocking in his little ‘big beat’ world.” Still, the reviewer said, “Apollo audiences probably couldn’t love them more, no matter what.”