One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (14 page)

A legend has prevailed that Brown’s first appearance at the Apollo happened earlier, sometime in the mid-1950s, when he supposedly won a talent night competition. Brown, however, always denied it, and so do those who have access to Brown’s tour records. There’s nothing about it in the Apollo files at the Smithsonian; repeated inquiries made to the Apollo publicity staff have produced no new information.

Davis’s band was creating a new matrix for the show, a muscular, rough-edged rocking blues that sounded like Southern country boys roaring through the big city. Coming together on the road
and in hastily scheduled recording sessions, it had little to do with doo-wop and vocal groups pitching woo from under the street lamps. “Good Good Lovin’” set the tone, a choogling stop-and-go number with a good-time saxophone solo by Davis. Two other songs underscored this new direction. One the bandleader had brought with him from his Greensboro days, a side-to-side-shuddering arrangement of “Night Train.” The band got so good with that they could toy with the groove, dropping stuff like Hal Singer’s “Corn Bread” and “Hold It” by Bill Doggett into the song. Brown liked “Night Train” so much, sometimes he’d jump up on stage and shout out, “Hey man, hit that ‘Night Train’ again for me,” and then rap over it as Davis blew a solo.

The other band showpiece was stumbled upon at the Palms of Hallandale, the drive-in that kept laying gifts on the group. During a visit, the group noticed how everybody in the audience was dancing the same step; it was called “the mashed potatoes,” they were told, and Miami was crazy for it. Davis created some music to play while the kids danced, and Brown, who was dancing in the crowd, too, jumped onstage shouting “Mashed potatoes, yeah, yeah, yeah” and whatever else kept the moment flowing. They started doing it other places, and Brown got really good at replicating this pigeon-toed stomp.

The time for mashing was now. Nathan said he didn’t like the number—oh,
Syd
—and so Brown turned to Henry Stone, the Miami-based record maker who had gotten to Macon almost in time to sign him. They had kept in touch, and now Brown was offering him a record perfectly in synch with the moment. They made it on the sly, with a Miami DJ overdubbed shouting out the nonsense Brown was freestyling live. “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes” came out on Stone’s Dade label, under the name of Nat Kendrick and the Swans (to hide how Brown was playing hooky from King). It hit where the dance was popular, while carrying the dance to new towns. The success of “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes” was validation that Brown knew better than Nathan, and it was a concern, too, for if the band was starting
to drive the show (Brown’s voice was barely on the thing), it might drive over Brown, too—he couldn’t play an instrument that well and he didn’t read music. He couldn’t really
give
musical directions in a way that musicians give to one another. This was a success that he had to stay on top of, and one way he did it was to separate Nat Kendrick from the group. Suddenly he was traveling with his drummer in his car and talking to him alone before or after a show, having Kendrick practice with him rather than with Davis’s band. If the band was becoming the engine of the show, Brown was making sure the engine of the band was firmly under his control.

At the end of 1959, control was just about his. Brown had fought his way to the top of the billing, and then he fought to dominate the show. Respect from his band was tolerable. That band was surging in power, and Brown was figuring out how to stay ahead of its power. He had reached the pinnacle of the African American show circuit, with more dates at the Apollo, but he paid his bills in the circuit’s trenches. At the onset of a new decade, he was doing the mashed potatoes across the country for another West Coast tour, playing the bigger black venues in California.

They were all riding in cars, passing through Arizona, and it was four o’clock in the morning. “Man, these bright lights come out of nowhere,” recalled Bobby Bennett. “There was nothing in the sky and then all of a sudden these lights come out of the air. All around us, and it followed us all the way across the desert.”

They were alone on the highway, and the band found itself getting run off the road by the light. “It was scary, everybody ducking and diving all across the desert—you cut the headlights off and it was
still
so bright you could still see. Followed us all night long.”

You could drive yourself crazy trying to understand it. To a leader ever more obsessed with his authority, it was a reminder of things beyond anyone’s control.

Chapter Seven

THE TRAVELER

T
he show was passing through Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1961. Brown wanted something to eat and, knowing he would be served in a bus station, in the “colored” section, he and some of the guys headed to the Trailways depot. They ordered and started eating.

Everybody heard the commotion coming from the white side. A short partition separated the races at the cafe, and Brown stood up to peek over it. “All these black people were standing around the door waiting to get a seat on the ‘white only’ side. Most of ’em looked like they might be college kids, and there were a few whites with them,” Brown wrote in his 1986 autobiography, James Brown:
The Godfather of Soul
. He was describing May 14, Mother’s Day, when the first “Freedom Ride” pulled into Birmingham. The Supreme Court had decided in 1946 that segregated seating and facilities on interstate bus lines violated federal law. The South had not complied with this ruling, and now civil rights organizations were testing the legality of their refusal by doing what had been unheard-of in the past—sitting down next to whites and requesting service.

A black man settled at the Birmingham lunch counter. The white patron next to him said, “What’re you doing sitting here, nigger? You can’t sit by me,”
and punched him to the ground. Another African American took his seat. “Then all hell broke loose,” Brown recalled. “People started beating up the kids, throwing things, tearing up the place.”

It’s a striking description, in part because so little is made of the scene, beyond its momentary oddness. Brown doesn’t put any larger meaning in it, which there was: Birmingham was an historic confrontation, and news reports of the violence showed Americans the face of Bull Connor, Birmingham’s Public Safety Commissioner and the very image of staunch segregation. Those trying to integrate the station were beaten with bicycle chains, baseball bats, and lead pipes. Connor had given the Klan fifteen minutes to do what they wanted before he sent in his police. “We didn’t know what a Freedom Rider was,” said Brown. And, understandably, he wasn’t going to learn right there in the bus station. The musicians jumped in their car and drove off fast, and so did the demonstrators who could get away from their attackers. Their bus passed Brown’s car on the road, and suddenly, Brown found himself sandwiched between the activists in front and racists behind, an approaching convoy of white supremacists in trucks and cars, waving bats and axe handles at the closest blacks they could find. At that moment, he said later, what he felt was something different from any solidarity with the activists. He felt dread that his pursuers would mistake him and his band for Freedom Riders.

Every great autobiography contains passages that work on more than one level, stories that require a reader to step out of the flow of events and ponder what the writer is revealing about himself. In the description of his accidental run-in with civil rights activists and white supremacists in the Birmingham depot, perhaps Brown is showing two aspects of the same thing—how he saw himself and how others saw him. First, he wants us to view him as an individual apart from social forces and categories. He was his own man, and as he once put it, “I do what I want to do and not what anybody—white or black—tells me.” That’s the guy watching over the divider, and then
edging for the door. But the white folks in the room had a different picture: To them he was indistinguishable from a civil rights worker, one more somebody to be chased, and if caught, beaten bloody.

“When we first heard about it,” Bobby Roach said of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, “well, we didn’t get a chance to be getting too involved in it. We was traveling, doing forty-five up to seven-hundred-mile jumps a night.” They had a job to do, and a protest, let alone a bloody melee, was an obstacle to fulfilling a contract.

It was getting harder to just hunker down and drive to the next Southern bill. Northern-based agencies were reporting a huge downturn in show bookings, as white parents kept their children away from package tours that featured black and white artists sharing the stage. Black acts were also becoming more reluctant to play the South. After she was insulted by a police officer in Knoxville, Tennessee, singer Ruth Brown vowed to never perform there again. Clyde McPhatter and Sam Cooke had to flee one Southern city when whites saw the out-of-state plates on their tour bus and mistook them for outside agitators. At least they could get on their bus and head North to home.

An age-old system was suddenly being openly contested. Brown, and many of his generation, had resigned themselves to it, and come to a kind of understanding that now was rapidly unraveling. The understanding was that if the Jim Crow system kept blacks apart from whites, there would be a black marketplace
and
a white one, and sometimes an industrious African American could eke out a living by connecting with black consumers. That was how the chitlin circuit worked. Only now there were whites cracking down on it, and there were blacks calling for integration.

Brown was a black Southerner who did not accept his “place” in society, but by temperament he was no joiner, not a candidate for marching in a picket line. He had an individualistic, and fatalistic, streak about what was worth fighting for—any change that he couldn’t personally affect, with his powers of persuasion or his fists, he figured probably wasn’t worth messing with.

Life had taught him that he could only rely on himself, and he had contempt for the very idea of leaning on others. Others let you down. But after Birmingham, his view of things started to change. Whoever
he
thought he was—apart, independent—he’d gotten a vivid lesson that observers thought otherwise. To them he was just another Negro to chase out of town. Uneasily stuck between Bull Connor and the activists, perhaps he felt he needed to choose up before others chose for him.

“I
Don’t Mind” was the song Brown was promoting when he left Birmingham, and pushing a hot single meant visiting radio stations and talking up the tune. When he got to Montgomery, Alabama, Brown knew he could count on his childhood friend, Allyn Lee, who was now a DJ in Montgomery, playing records on WAPX.

Lee was a comer on the Southern circuit. Mister Lee, as he called himself on the air, was a businessman through and through, angling to make a profit when a situation presented itself. Wherever he worked, Lee said, he made the same deal with the people who employed him: “Always radio station owners would say, ‘I can’t pay you but so much…’ My philosophy was—you can’t pay me what I’m
worth
. But I’ll work a deal with you. I guarantee you I’ll make my time on the air number one if you let me do my thing. ‘What is your thing?’ Just let me advertise my interest—my record hops, my restaurants.”

Disc jockeys, performers, and show promoters all depended on one another, and exploited one another, in an attempt to make a living. For broadcasters like Lee, who were often not paid at all or earned a pittance from station owners, survival meant finding new revenue streams. The largest sources of income were payola and business deals built on the access to black listeners that Lee provided. In Montgomery, Lee drove customers to a restaurant he opened, Mr. Lee’s Chickadees, by talking about it on the air. He promoted local appearances of the artists he played. From his
access to record companies that supplied him with new product, Lee opened a record store. His friendship with Brown put food on the table, too, as Lee acknowledged.

“Whenever James Brown appeared,” he explained, “disc jockeys from within a two-hundred-mile radius came out. And they would never leave until the manager came out and greeted them. Because James Brown always gave out an envelope of money.
Always
. My chauffeur—they once gave
him
an envelope of money. I said, ‘James, but he’s not a disc jockey.’ And he said, ‘He might be one next week.’ Back then you had fifteen to twenty disc jockeys in the area, and depending on your position there might be fifty to five hundred dollars in the envelope. He would always be appreciating you for you playing his records. ‘Play my records man, keep me heard!’”

Brown was exceptionally suited for a life based on money moving around and around. The more he toured, the more folks he met, and the more contacts he maintained. He inherently understood that even when you fell out with someone, it was a mistake to let that disagreement get in the way of putting money through its paces. Brown kept in touch with people from every stage of his life, for many reasons, including his openness to business.

Hit records put bodies in the rooms, and that meant jocks had to be persuaded to play the records. Independent labels had fine-tuned—some say invented—the practice of paying disc jockeys to play a record. When he was called before a senate subcommittee investigating payola, Syd Nathan not only proudly admitted he did it, but even boasted that he kept receipts of his payoffs so he could write off the payments as business expenses on his taxes. To white record people like Nathan, this was just making a profit. To black entrepreneurs it was that and more—if Jim Crow was a conspiracy of whites, it created conspirators on the other side, too.

A black broadcaster in a place like Montgomery was a power broker among people whose power was limited. Lee the promoter would reserve a venue in Montgomery, and pay a deposit of half a
guaranteed fee to Brown’s booking agency, Universal Attractions. They deducted 10 percent for themselves, and the rest belonged to the performer. After the show was done, the other half would be paid to Brown at the venue by the promoter. Bringing DJs in as promoter was good business—now they had an interest in spinning James Brown’s new record, since that would attract more people to the show they had a financial interest in.