One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (23 page)

Disenchanted, Nathan had come close to selling King when “Papa’s” became a huge hit. He was spending more and more time in hospitals and in Miami. Meanwhile, independent record companies everywhere were having a hard time competing with major labels in an increasingly international market. King was a dinosaur, Brown could plainly see that. He could sign with a major label, and be a member of a team, or stay at King and be the only game in town, with complete control. And control, more than money, was always the most important thing to Brown.

In September 1966, Nathan offered him a contract that put in writing the freedom he’d already informally given the singer. King’s new contract gave Brown creative control of his music, and the ability to sign and record artists for the label. He was given an office and staff, and King covered a portion of his expenses. It also provided Brown with some 25,000 gratis copies of each single and album he produced.

From this point on, though King might cut a few good songs by other artists, James Brown carried their load. They basically now existed to make James Brown records. In time, many around the label would even believe that Brown
owned
King, though that was never the case. As Henry Glover would put it, “James had his way then. He was selling a few records for [Nathan], and he could do whatever he wanted to.”

Brown built a staff of employees who planned his tours, marketing, and publicity. He was a tough boss: One staffer recalled him punching an employee for turning in an expense form without receipts attached. But he was not an insincere boss. Brown ran the office the same way he ran his band, and it was clear going in that hard work and loyalty were necessities. But even with them, a certain randomness kept everybody on their toes.

Watching the store when Brown was out of town was a devoted aide, Bud Hobgood. A tall, skinny redhead from Kentucky who spoke with a backwoods drawl, Hobgood had managed a few local
bands before catching on with Brown. Nobody seems to remember him working his way up any ladder. One day he was just
there
, hanging out with the singer in nightclubs, listening as he whispered into his ear. Hobgood did plenty of things for Brown—setting up recording sessions, wrangling new material—but everybody wondered on a more fundamental level exactly why Brown kept him around. He was a man without musical gifts, yet over the next few years Brown gave Hobgood songwriting credits on some of his biggest hits. Hobgood even held the briefcase full of cash for Brown.

“Anything that James had to do with King, Hobgood was in charge of,” said David Matthews, a composer and keyboardist.

Rumors flourished—did he know something about Brown? Did Brown feel he owed Hobgood, because he had an eye for his wife? “Nobody could ever figure out what James saw in him,” said Matthews. “People were wondering, did James do something illegal that Hobgood knew about? There was never any good answer to this question.”

The moneymaker could record what and when he wanted, and his employees had better be ready. Engineer Jim Deak remembered the routine. “Two or three days before they were going to do it, somebody’d come down and say ‘James is coming.’ And then there’d be a mad scramble to clean the place up…

“You didn’t have a chance to put up mics, it wasn’t like you scheduled a session and knew what was coming. They just walked in and started playing. And while they were playing, you’d walk around and set up the mics in front of them, fiddle with the board.”

He could show up and stay in a studio for twenty hours making a single, then pull somebody else’s record off the conveyer belt so his new one could be rushed out. Control. Some at King thought Brown was too powerful, and Nathan became one of them. He sought to put Brown’s power in check by bringing into the office
Charles Spurling, a talented Cincinnati musician who had also been a teenage gang member and self-professed “knockout artist.” Spurling was hired both as black muscle to push back at Brown, and as an A&R man who would draw Bootsy Collins, Marva Wright, and others into the King fold.

The way Spurling explained it, early on he and Brown had a confrontation that clarified many things for both of them. It began one day when Spurling was staring ominously at Brown—“I wanted to eat his ass up” is how he put it—and making his presence felt.

Brown told his bodyguards to watch Spurling, got on the office-wide intercom, and ordered everybody from Nathan on down to a conference in his office. Gesturing to Spurling, Brown said, “I got a man here with death in his eyes. That man right there gonna hurt somebody.” Very quickly he had seen the big picture, and deduced why Spurling was hired. He went on a long monologue describing his worth to the company, how Nathan had placated him with Cadillacs and promises; it went on for a long while, a tirade and lecture making the point that he started unappreciated by King and here he was, the man at the top—with King still trying to undermine him. Then he said he wanted Spurling to work for
him
.

It was a brilliant day’s work, putting the boss, the hired fist, and everybody in between in their place, and letting them all know he knew what was going on.

“I was going to hurt James Brown,” said Spurling. “But see, this is when I started respecting him.”

The posse working for him—Hobgood, Alan Leeds, Bob Patton, Charles Bobbit—called themselves the El Dorados, after the pimp car you better drive if you wanted to be a member. They’d go out for dinner together, then maybe over to the Hustler Club or across the river to hear the Dee Felice Trio. They never went together—the idea was a flotilla of El Dorados, all driving in force from spot to spot. They made a gangster-style entrance, beginning with Brown and moving down through the chain of command. The posse settled in and waited for the boss to make the first move. If you saw a
girl you felt like chatting up, you didn’t do it unless the boss was already chatting somebody up. You weren’t supposed to peel off from the pack.

T
wo concerts in the fall of 1966 suggested the range, and limits, of Brown’s gathering power. In November in Kansas City, Missouri, a bottle-throwing melee led to the arrest of thirty concertgoers. Three policemen were hospitalized with injuries. The specifics were murky, though it appeared that the show featured a dance contest in which a local couple did a lurid version of the popular dance called “the Dog,” one that the crowd favored. The judges, however, gave the prize to a more dignified dance team, and the house erupted. The show was shut down, and devotees of the Dog went on a window-breaking downtown rampage. Brown at least could note he wasn’t even on the stage when that happened.

But a few weeks later, at the Apollo, he was doing his show when he spied several unexpected visitors in the wings, signaling they were about to come onstage. There was jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton, one of the few black Republicans the public knew of, standing beside New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican who just happened to be up for reelection in a few days, and Republican Senator Jacob Javits. Suddenly they were smiling and walking to him, Brown deftly greeted them, the governor saying hello, there were handshakes, pictures of the handshakes, and the visitors were gone. It might have looked like Brown had brought some buddies out onto the stage to bestow a celebrity endorsement to the Republicans. Later the singer made clear the appearance had not been his idea, and that he had been caught off guard. “The Apollo Theater is non-political. And so is James Brown, the pied piper of the New Breed,” helpfully declared the
New York Amsterdam News
in the wake of the bum rush.

People who had never done the Dog wanted a piece of him and wanted to define him for their ends. He may have been polite in
letting them commandeer his stage, but the hero of Tougaloo, the rising symbol of the new black manhood, probably walked off the Apollo stage with a fresh awareness of how important it was to control events, and how hard it was, too, the higher you rose above the crowd.

Chapter Twelve

GHOST NOTES

I
n a show built on rhythm, the drummer was the prime mover. By the mid-’60s, Brown was traveling with several drummers at a time. It made for a fine display of excess, and besides, relying on a single person made him reliant, which was intolerable. Plus, each performance—the band playing a set out front, then the featured female vocalist of the moment, then Bobby Byrd or whoever it was singing
their
new single, then Brown’s set—wore down any drummer trying to play all four hours night after night. Brown was deep with drummers in 1965, but he still felt the need to restock.

John “Jabo” Starks was an already established player in 1965, a sturdy stoker of old fires when he joined the James Brown band. Starks was in his early twenties and had been backing Bobby Blue Bland, a profound singer and maybe the last great rhythm and blues performer to thrive in the age of soul. He came in ready to play the
hell
out of the drums, but the men with Bland taught him that the greatest thing he could do was also the humblest—keep the time. Solos and breaks, acrobatics and cowbells,
nothing
was more important than steadiness, because everybody from the singer on down was lost without it. Starks took that lesson to heart, providing something hip and clean that his bandmates could lean on. He became a young man who thought like an old guy.

It would have almost been a crime against nature if Starks had not become a drummer, given the specifics of his Southern upbringing. Like Clayton Fillyau, who had been schooled by a New Orleans master, Starks, too, had his Crescent City mentor. He said the drummer Cornelius “Tenoo” Coleman taught him important lessons when Starks was a young man in Mobile. There was also the influence of the Holiness Church, with its disruptive, soul-fire experience of sanctification. Many African American musicians have credited the influence of sanctification. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie said that as a boy, the Methodists did nothing for him, but in the sanctified church he “learned the meaning of rhythm.” Bo Diddley said his drummer played “the sanctified rhythm.”

Sanctified church music has been praised, but what defines it remains rather unclear. Looking back on his childhood, Starks offered this useful definition: “In the holiness churches they didn’t have sets of drums, maybe just a snare drum or a bass drum, but they had tambourines, and they clapped. And the way they clapped, I just loved that feel. It’s just a floating feel. They’d clap their rhythm against the songs they were doing—kind of a polyrhythm. One section of folk would be clapping one way, and the other section would be clapping another way, and then the tambourine would be going. I used to go to the ‘holiness’ church when I was up in the country with my grandmother. I went almost every Sunday because I loved to hear the rhythms they were using. That’s basically where a lot of it comes from for me. That sanctified rhythm influenced my playing…”

Outside the church, Starks was schooled by marching bands. Mobile, Alabama, his hometown, is a city with a beat of its own, the original capital of French Louisiana, and the first place in America where Carnival was celebrated. “Mardi Gras started in Mobile,” Starks told an interviewer. “I used to watch the marching bands. There was a high school drum corps that really just blew my mind and I wanted to play after that.”

He took what Tenoo taught him, paired with his sanctified rhythms and his marching band cadences, and burned them down
to essences. Light shined through his playing. Drumming for Bland, he became a master of the seemingly simple rhythmic approach called the shuffle. Once you start listening for shuffle rhythms, you can hear them throughout American music. Think of the way triplets—a beat broken into equal thirds—drives “Please, Please, Please.” That’s a classic shuffle, as is, say, Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill.” Then there’s the half-time shuffle, the boom-chica boom-chica that motivates Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” or Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” or about a billion other tunes. Then there’s the more basic triplet
feeling
nesting in a 4/4 beat and giving jazz its swing feeling. The shuffle is to blues, jazz, and R&B what a
roux
is to New Orleans cooking: a stock that you add to, misleadingly simple and so easy to mess up. In talented hands, the shuffle feels good going on and on and on. And when Brown snatched Starks from Bland in 1965, that’s most of all what he brought: a rock-steady foundation tethered to the past, a guy with all the wits to nail it down in the now. He must have given Brown’s show comfort and stability.

But first, Starks had to
learn
the show. It was exhausting and long, and once you memorized the song list, you had to be ready to reconfigure it nightly—you had to react to the subtle cues of Brown’s hands, his feet, his voice, his eyes. Announce songs? Hah. A-one-two-three-four? Brown’s between-song swagger across the stage was his way of counting off the beat, and when he did the splits,
that
was your One. Clayton Fillyau carried the book of James Brown drumming in his head, and though he wasn’t playing much by the mid-’60s, he was driving the bus, and he was teaching.

Fillyau took new drummers aside, sat them down after hours in hotel cocktail lounges, and
sang
them the entire show, while beating out the rhythms on the top of the bar. Every once in a while he’d start beating on your arm, hard, and that was part of the education, too—you wanted to learn it right quick before an icepack was required.

Later in 1965, just when Starks was settling in with his new band, Brown hired another drummer, a different type of cat. Clyde
Stubblefield grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his influences were less specific than Starks’s. He, too, talked about marching bands, but Stubblefield described hearing the sounds of Chattanooga—the urban thrum of the foundries and TVA power plants of the “Dynamo of Dixie”—and aimed to convey all that sound on the drums. As a young man he delivered newspapers, and between deliveries he could be found in a club on Chattanooga’s east side, playing pinball to pass the time. His hangout was not a large place, and the jukebox was hard beside the pinball machine. From that jukebox, Stubblefield first heard Jabo Starks’s playing. As he dropped nickels in and let the balls ring the bells, Stubblefield heard the luminous sound of Bland’s perfect hit, “Turn on Your Love Light,” and the crazy shuffle beat Starks puts up high on his cymbal.