One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (15 page)

Brown didn’t invent the practice, he just elevated the game. Whereas a lot of artists played it tawdry, sliding a jock a hundred or two and whispering in his ear, Brown turned it into a legitimate business opportunity. Bob Patton, an ex-DJ who worked for Brown in the mid-1960s, explained: “That’s why James Brown became more of a legend than the guy who slipped you something in a handshake. He made you out to be a businessman, not a whore.”

His booker, Ben Bart, aided Brown greatly in his understanding of the wants and needs of the gatekeepers. Bart was famous for a black book, compiled and compounded over decades, that he wielded like a Methodist circuit rider’s Bible. In it were the names, addresses, and phone numbers of jocks, record distributors, theater owners, and musicians in every city and town. It listed the personal tastes and peccadilloes of such folks, and contained the names of friends on both sides of the law all along the chitlin circuit who, with the proper lubrication, could help one out of a jam.

When James Brown came his way, Bart was among the top bookers of black entertainment in the country. The grandchild of Polish Jews, he grew up in Brooklyn, where he ran a bar called Baloney Ben’s in the 1930s, managed boxers, and booked jazz bands for the Gale Agency, one of the biggest theatrical booking concerns. In 1937, he took bandleader Tiny Bradshaw on his first tour of the South, and also represented civil rights cause célèbre the Scottsboro Boys on a series of appearances in the North. A year later, Bart went on what the
Pittsburgh Courier
called a 10,000-mile journey across Dixie, “for the purpose of getting first-hand information about the dance situation in towns throughout the country.”

Tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb gave him his nickname: “The Traveler.” Bart formed his own agency, Universal Attractions, in 1945, signing Dinah Washington, Bill Doggett, Wynonie Harris, Foxx and White, and many more. “My dad always said, ‘You’ve got to learn the road,’” said son Jack Bart, who would later run Universal. “So that when you got back into the office and picked up a phone, you knew who you were talking to. When they say, ‘I can’t pay that much because my hall holds only 300 people,’ you could say, politely, ‘you mean it holds
1,300
people. And if you want this man you need to pay him the price.’”

The man who managed Elvis Presley, Colonel Tom Parker, was a master of ballyhoo who triumphantly applied his circus background to the higher realms of show business. Ben Bart was the black man’s Colonel Tom. He had a knack for getting free press and had absorbed into his bones the credo that there was no such thing as bad publicity. One day in 1947, calls flooded the New York police and newspapers; hundreds of reports of flying saucers were coming in, all of them pegging the source as a bridge near Washington Heights. Squad cars were sent to the scene, where police found four members of the vocal group the Ravens, a recent addition to Bart’s roster, hurling copies of their latest release, “Old Man River,” into the Harlem River. “They and their press agent”—Bart—“almost landed in jail, via the nut house,” reported the
Pittsburgh Courier
.

By the time he signed Brown in 1956, Bart was a formidable figure whom singer Etta James described as “an older white guy who, with a big.45 on his hip, would stomp through Harlem like he wasn’t scared of anybody. Ben was a legend among agents and managers, Jewish to the bone.” Rhythm and blues was crossing over to white audiences, and promoters were booking package tours of artists, a practice some say he invented in the late ’40s. He brought Brown to the North for appearances in December 1956, and had stuck with him through the hungry years after “Please, Please, Please.” Building on what Brantley had already taught Brown, Bart gave him a graduate course in reading, and writing, contracts.

What Bart did for his artists was ultimately simple: He kept them on the road, and he made sure they got paid. “He was James’s
man
,” said Steve Alaimo, a performer and producer. Over time Bart cut back on his other acts and stayed out with Brown. “He was big, gruff—I don’t know how honest he was, but he was a guy that James respected highly.” The records kept your name out there, they might fill a hall, but you didn’t see real money from them. Bart got Brown the money, big boxes of it that Brown carried with him on the road. “It was all about Ben Bart filling the boxes with cash,” said Alaimo. “That’s how he made a living.”

If Brown was in a diner getting loud, Bart was the only guy who could draw the reins in and calm him down. His “Now Jimmie…” would be enough to quiet the singer. Introducing himself to others as Brown’s father, Bart kept him out of trouble, recognizing what a roughneck he could be.

Bart would have been involved when Brown signed a new five-year deal with Nathan on July 1, 1960, a contract that got Brown off the Federal subsidiary and put him at the top of King Records’ roster. King was something Brown and Bart had in common. Nathan had a pit bull lawyer named Jack Pearl, and Pearl just happened to be married to Bart’s sister. Along with his legal work for King, Pearl had helped run an independent label, Hub Records, with Bart in the late 1940s. Pearl had his own music publishing company, and did legal work for Universal Attractions as well as King. By the time Brown was making good money for them both, Bart owned a houseboat in Miami, where both he and Nathan spent a chunk of every year. In Miami, Bart was “a real racetrack junkie,” remembers Henry Stone, who frequented Gulfstream Park and Hialeah Park Race Track with Bart.

Twice in about a decade Bart had circulated the rumor that bandleader Tiny Bradshaw was dead, the better to get press that in fact Bradshaw was still alive, and coming to a town near you. That proven technique was revived for Brown. “Jimmie is dying!” was the cry
Jet
reported was shouted at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theater,
where Brown supposedly passed out onstage. He wasn’t dying; the story said he was just fatigued and would be back on the road by the time you read this.

The hits flowed: “Bewildered,” “I Don’t Mind,” and “Baby, You’re Right” all getting significant airplay in 1961. Success bred publicity; you could plant an item about anything, or almost nothing, with a hit. After a love-struck fan attacked singer Jackie Wilson backstage, the black press reported Brown was picking up extra security to protect him from “another Jackie Wilson incident.”

Brown made a major step forward on October 19, 1961, when he got his first national TV exposure, appearing on
American Bandstand
. Airing five times a week from four to five
P.M
.,
Bandstand
had a national teenage audience and offered the possibility of connecting with a white audience. The show introduced viewers to new artists, new dance steps, and its commercials offered teens grooming tips.
Bandstand
was a step-by-step tutorial in how to be cool, and the featured artist was sure to be a topic of conversation the next day in school. In that way, this was a major step forward for Brown. He was taking the music to his largest audience yet, but the moment was tightly governed.
Bandstand
barely had black dancers on camera, and black singers weren’t allowed to move the way they did onstage. Given
Bandstand
’s strict policy of lip-synching, Brown wasn’t really performing, anyway.

When he looked out at the camera and through the TV screen, what did Brown see? A white audience still beyond his reach. His records were played on pop radio, but few Northern whites had seen his show. In the South, when whites were in the audience, it was at segregated performances. Most of the time, he was still playing for black crowds on a circuit where he felt most at home, yet wanted to transcend. Looking across the divide between his group and the millions of Clearasil kids, this self-confident performer saw an audience he
knew
he could reach, if only he could make his case directly rather than ventriloquizing his latest song. They needed to see the show.

Around this time, Brown was in a Miami studio, watching white singer Steve Alaimo cut a record. The two had known each other for a few years. “He said, ‘Steve, I love you like a brother. But I hate you, because you are white. Because you can do the things I can’t do. I can’t love you because you are white and I’m black.’” The white citizens of Birmingham were still on his tail. As fast as he was going, whatever he did, when they looked at him he was still a black man. He made a gift of anger to his friend.

In early 1961, the band had just played in the Bahamas, and was hanging out in Miami when they heard a familiar song on the radio. It was “Night Train,” the instrumental J. C. Davis brought to the group and made into a showstopper. Lots of groups played this staple in the 1950s, and it was probably recorded as an afterthought to fill out the end of a session. Davis said he was told the song would be released under his name. When Davis found it was coming out as a James Brown record, he went berserk. To Davis, it was a repeat of his “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes” experience, where he’d arranged and refined a song only to see it come out under somebody else’s name. This time he got his brother, and his brother’s gun, and confronted Brown in Tampa. After that, Davis was gone from the group.

Davis went on to play with Etta James and record at Chess Records. Soon after he left, drummer Nat Kendrick also was gone. Brown struggled while he looked for a new band director, eventually picking up St. Clair Pinckney, a tenor saxophonist from Augusta that he knew from Floyd School.

It was the kind of untidiness that Brown felt comfortable with. When they went back to California in the summer of 1962, an event occurred that put Birmingham in vivid relief. They were booked into the 5-4 Ballroom in Los Angeles, one of the key venues along black L.A.’s Central Avenue corridor.

On the same April night that the Famous Flames opened their stand at the 5-4 Ballroom, just a few blocks away, the Los Angeles Police had invaded a Nation of Islam mosque and, after a
confrontation, killed one member and wounded six others, all unarmed. Brown seems to have encountered the scene, because two decades later he evoked the experience out of the blue in an interview. “They killed nine Muslims,” he said, misremembering the number. “About 50 feet from the 5-4 Ballroom, and they weren’t bothering nobody but were lying there dead. I knew then that we must be counted….”

“I knew then that we must be counted”: It was something he wouldn’t have said a mere year before.

Chapter Eight

STAR TIME

T
he Apollo Theater was worth fighting for. The first time Brown appeared at the Apollo, April 24, 1959, he argued with owner Frank Schiffman that he and not Little Willie John should be at the top of the bill. The second time he played there, at the end of 1959, Brown refused to go on stage if Reuben Phillips’s orchestra played behind him. Using the house band, he knew, would blend him into the overall Apollo experience, the opposite of what he wanted—to stand out from everybody else. The Apollo was where he deserved to be, he understood, needing now to make others understand.

His Apollo debut had been chaotic, rudderless, and it was hard to tell who was in charge. Step by step in repeated visits over the next two years, Brown began to put borders around the anarchy. Over this time a torrent of amusements (singing, dancing, musicians, comedy) was mastered and brought into the mix, chicken shack by chicken shack. Ben Bart probably knew as much about black vaudeville as any Caucasian in the country, and he worked with Brown to tailor tradition for young, more sophisticated audiences. Brown’s show was rooted in the old black theatrical circuit, but he streamlined it, took out all the dead spots, and massaged the set pieces and oddball novelties into a flowing, continuous
expression of rhythm. The Apollo Theater was the place where all the traditions of black vaudeville came to rest, and with Bart’s guidance he would take some of the tradition’s anachronistic icons—the rubber-faced clown Pigmeat Markham, the voluminous blues belter TV Mama—on the road with him. He
liked
them. To take his new show to the Apollo was to bring something home.

But if the Apollo was a cradle of tradition, it was equally a destroyer of the past, its pitiless audiences annihilating legacy and lore, putting a flame to anything that hinted of cliché. You had to earn their admiration; you could not sit back and wait for it to roll to you. When Brown first played there, he did the old shtick of tossing his cufflinks and tie into the crowd. Who the hell was this cat? The Apollo crowd threw them
back
.

In 1961, he was a major act, no longer an up-and-comer. At twenty-eight, he had already come, it would seem, taking his place on a shelf just below the elite who had crossed over, like Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. They had an urbane presence that made them nationwide. What Brown had, most of all, was an unparalleled work ethic. He was billed as “the hardest working man in show business,” playing three hundred-plus shows a year, several performances a night, and he had an understanding of what fans responded to that few could match. Not just an act, now he was a show.

The Apollo was the pinnacle of one staircase, the black circuit Brown ruled. From there, the only place he could go was back to the Apollo, or to somehow cross over. Five months after his last appearance, in the fall of 1962, Brown was coming back. And this time, he wanted to record the show, to get it in front of more people than had experienced it before. Hits were hard to count on, especially when your label didn’t shell out for publicity and might let your best work die on the shelf. He knew what his show did to live audiences. If he could get it before new listeners, and make a hit of
that
, well suddenly the Apollo would be a stepping stone, not a terminus.

When he told Nathan he wanted King to record him live, Nathan declined at the top of his lungs. His objections were that live albums had rarely been tried (other than a pair of Ray Charles recordings) and had no record of success. Nathan said no hit single would come from a live recording, not when all the songs were already available, and he declared that he wasn’t that interested in albums, anyway.
That
much Brown already knew, as did anybody recording with King. To Nathan albums were an afterthought, a chance to repackage tunes you’d already released as singles. Nathan lived or died with hit singles.