One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (24 page)

The totality of that experience was what Brown’s band would sound like, a few years down the road, after Stubblefield arrived: the wedding of a pinball machine and the blues, of a gifted shuffle playing against an unpredictable clamor. It sounded damned nice.

After passing a harrowing audition for Brown before a live audience, Stubblefield joined the band. He was told to stand in the wings and watch, for about a month. When Brown finally shot him a signal in the middle of a show, and Stubblefield walked out to where a drum kit was set up next to Starks, he had formally entered the ring.

The records on that Chattanooga jukebox, Bobby Bland and the rest, was music made for adults, African American men and women who dressed up when work was done, held their partners on the dance floor, and grinded out their blues. From the late 1950s on, however, a new music was available under the canopy of
rock and roll
: It skewed to teenagers and to dancers who weren’t touching one another. The beat was pushing out the old shuffle in favor of more regular eighth-note patterns, “straight eight,” as this rewrite has long been known. Think of Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard pounding the piano—they were wailing the straight eight.

Along with the great straight eight, another big thing happened in the late 1950s: New Orleans annexed the United States of America. More or less. New Orleans musicians were in high demand as rock and roll took hold, and the city’s numerous studios were cutting numberless hits targeting the children of those who dug Bland. In the Crescent City, drummers were bringing African rhythms, Latin beats, and the street flavors they heard all around them into their recording sessions. Straight eight was a strong, broad back for New Orleans drummers to climb on and take their music beyond city limits. They kept doubling it up, too, playing sixteenth and thirty-second notes—the pulse broken into microns of time, shot through with holes, syncopated so that playing and not playing spun around each other like subatomic particles.

That old swing vibe, the hip knowingness that came from laying a 3/4 feeling over 4/4 time, was challenged by this
new
way of feeling, which allowed more influences into the music, and which, once dancers were educated, spoke more eloquently to the body. Hips don’t lie: This was the way ahead.

Meanwhile, the drum section of the James Brown band was starting to look like a midway shooting gallery. The band had
five
drummers when Stubblefield joined, and Clyde made six. He and Starks were restive about getting more playing time and together concocted a plan. They knew they played better than the others, and they found ways to play together and show the boss. One of the others was fired, and then there were five, then four. Brown was listening and liked what he heard enough to keep firing guys until it was down to Clyde and Jabo. “Every time a drummer got knock-ed off we’d just look at each other and go, ‘All right!’,” said Stubblefield.

For the next five years, and again later in the 1970s, Starks and Stubblefield played side by side. “We don’t get in each other’s way, we just groove with it,” explained Starks. “And we’ve got a certain way that we can look at each other, and I know exactly what he wants to do.”

You always have to wonder with James Brown, if what happened was really as accidental as it seemed. Did he mean to put one drummer who was the summation of the past several decades together with a guy ready to play the sound of things to come? Or did it just turn out that way? “It’s amazing how Jabo and me work,” Stubblefield has said. “He plays one type of beat and I come along and play a different groove against what he’s playing. And it works.”

T
he band pulled into Cincinnati one May day in 1967, and got off the bus for a scheduled session. They set up in a semicircle at King, with only a single microphone for the lot of them. Brown carried ideas around with him for weeks, months even, until he felt the time was right. This time a bass line had been circulating in his head, one he had already shared with his music director, a good-natured jazzbo named Pee Wee Ellis. Ellis fleshed out the fragment and wrote out charts;
now
the time was right. After the band had worked up something good in the studio, Brown walked in and added lyrics, something about breaking into a cold sweat.

In the middle of the song, for the first time, he says it: “Let’s give the drummer some.”

Brown was
always
saying guff like that, off-the-top mumbo jumbo, mash notes from the id. Stubblefield didn’t know Brown was going to say it, and his response was to keep on doing what he had been doing, as the band dropped out and Stubblefield takes his indelible, unshow-offy solo—a progression of hummingbird dips and sips.

The drummer’s sixteenth and soft thirty-second notes drive it. He isn’t giving you the time, he doesn’t whomp the backbeat, it’s there in negative relief as he plays around it, hanging a big wreath around it so you know where it is and can shoot a cannonball clear through it. The two-bar pattern he plays is a constant throughout the song, and when Stubblefield gets to the last beat of the second measure, that final four, he holds off on it…hold it…hold it…When he hits it, it’s like the cannonball has landed.

The song they were recording was “Cold Sweat,” and the drumming wasn’t the only thing that made “Cold Sweat” indelible. Maybe it was also that one-chord-change structure, as visionary and protean as Frida Kahlo’s one eyebrow. It was so brutal it made hipsters—the Blue Note records–playing tastemakers Ellis dug—grunt and declare the thing was not music. For sure, it wasn’t another pop song.

Instead it was a straight-ahead ride. And here is the deal with that single chord change: If your ride doesn’t come to a station, you never have to get off. You are already home. There is a reason why music teachers call the succession of harmonies in a song a
chord progression
. They have a lot invested in the word
progress
nestled in the phrase. Like their assumption that “growth” or history’s forward march is tied to a series of chord changes, and the assumption that a proper sequence of chords builds an arc, or a storyline, or somehow creates a sense of getting somewhere. “Cold Sweat” jumps off that train. It moves all right, but it does not travel a route. “Cold Sweat” is about an enduring, dominant present.

Or maybe what made “Cold Sweat” was the smell the title gave off. Nobody ever wrote a hit song about perspiration before. Nobody had ever thought to sing about an uncomfortable ferment of the body caused by the nearness of other-flesh. And when somebody
did
think to sing about this morbid, anxious, and itchy condition, Brown did it in such a way that it did not feel odd. It felt
just
. When the horns go up the scale and Brown exclaims the clamminess is breaking out everywhere, everything stops: You are deep into a clamor of the body and the wanting soul. And then Stubblefield takes a solo.

W
hen he returned to the Apollo to record a new live album in the summer of 1967, Brown had nothing to prove. This was one of his greatest bands, with Maceo Parker back from an army stint and Pee Wee Ellis a new recruit. Perhaps he just felt a need to document the awesomeness he had and could never fully capture on a three-minute 45 rpm recording. He also just liked the Apollo. Who wouldn’t?

“
Every vice imaginable was on trade at some point each day by that stage door,” said Alan Leeds, Brown’s onetime road manager. “While you were at the Apollo, backstage was your home—it’s small and tight, three or four levels of small rooms, roaches in all of them, and if you’re doing six shows a day it was your whole life.

“There was nothing to do but sit back there and observe. If you were booked for a week, after the first or second day you were done with the crossword puzzles. Dope dealers, people selling hot jewelry, prostitutes working the stairwell—you could get a blowjob, hot rings, and heroin all on the stairwell of the Apollo. There were also weird guys waiting around, guys with names like Sparky and Trees, guys who cut hair in case you need a haircut, or who provided security in the wings—you needed security in the wings? But Trees was there. These guys from Georgia weren’t gonna pick much cotton in the Apollo, so maybe they’d get into a card game where they could make a few dollars and get over.”

You paced yourself when you played there, and you didn’t see much of New York, except for the line around the block. “The Apollo was the work place,” said Stubblefield. “We’d sometimes do ten shows a day on Saturday. People would be standing in line, waiting on them to get out, so they could get in. Back-to-back shows, some of them. And each show would probably last an hour and forty minutes. I mean, that’s a lot of work.”

The show Brown recorded as
Live at the Apollo, Volume II
is front-loaded with ballads, and slowly builds to a second-half medley that is among his finest recorded work. Thick in all of it are Clyde and Jabo, Jabo and Clyde.

They challenged each other. Stubblefield was a master of “ghost notes,” between-the-beat fractional left-hand flicks on the snare that gave the whole sound a bubbling cauldron feel. Ghost notes were so quiet you might not hear them, and that was when they had their maximum effect—they worked on the listener subconsciously. Starks matched him with what he called “Holy Ghost notes.”

They complemented each other. Jabo handled the blues, the
standards, the set tunes, while Clyde tended to play on the jams. But what’s great about
Volume II
is that they are side by side in the second half of the record, two approaches to rhythm overlaying a suite of songs, one drummer working a little before the beat, the other a shade behind, and the effect is of time becoming unglued.

Several later tunes on Volume II form the piece that’s come to be known collectively as “There Was a Time,” which is also the name of a song in the medley. Arranger Pee Wee Ellis said of it, “We knew we were putting it down hard and heavy and we knew it was good, but we had no idea that forty years later it would still be important.”

This piece begins with “Let Yourself Go,” which establishes the choppy midtempo for all that follows. “Let Yourself Go” is meat tenderizer, a way of loosening everybody up, its title as much an order as a suggestion. Follow or be forsaken.

As the rhythm unhitches a few minutes in, the guitar line of “Let Yourself Go” keeps repeating while a new horn riff, the one underlining the song “There Was a Time,” insinuates itself. For a tantalizing few moments two songs are grinding against each other, and this is no accident, for it establishes an important idea: The past and the present are colliding, they are exploding together. All becomes now.

Key to it is guitarist Jimmy Nolen—Jimmy Nolen! If having two drummers seemed like extravagance, Nolen was the inverse—he could only play a rarified little bit all over the place, because if Nolen ever played half of what he knew, the knowledge might kill you. He plays from the edges: here a trace of some ancient backwoods dance, there a blues that sounds like rusted iron. His playing is a tincture that gets into everything. His is a really, really old voice, steadying all and pointing the way forward; a guide not strict or harsh, just irresistible and correct.

His approach was overwhelmingly that of a drummer. Nolen said he learned to play his precise sixteenth notes before he joined Brown’s band, after doing too many shows with so-so drummers who didn’t carry the beat. “I
used to just try to play and keep my rhythm going as much like a drum as I possibly could,” he said. “So many times I had to just play guitar and drums all at the same time. You know what I mean? By keeping that rhythm going, it kind of keeps the drummer straight.”

It was a prolific amount of rhythm for one show, so much that all this talent could easily have pushed the music toward jazz or the avant-garde. (Miles Davis was listening hard; before long, he
was
pushing this music into the jazz avant-garde.) Brown wasn’t interested in a dazzling display of technique, he wanted a mass of people dancing. And for this he increasingly made use of the One. For all the genius and dexterity of the drummers, for all the head-spinning polyrhythms that sometimes lock tight and other times subtly pull ahead of and behind the beat, for all of that, Brown made sure that the One was the biggest beat going. Hit that, and the audience could stay with him. The One was many things, and on this record we hear how it is the cash upfront he pays for all the rhythm it buys. Hold on to the One, and then let Clyde and Jabo do their thing. In the studio, he would hear a beat they were working on and, over and over, repeat one unchanging thing: I love it, but you got to put it on the One. You give the audience some, and then you give the drummers some.

Brown had his own special dance number, the ultimate dance number, in “There Was a Time.” Jabo Starks struggled to explain what made it special. “‘There Was a Time’ was…let me see how to use the word, uh, the tune reminded me of what we call hoofers. Dancers, tap dancers and things, you know.” The song takes time as its subject. The singer says, “There was a time when I used to dance,” striking an elegiac mood and then transporting it to the present, because he’s doing all those old steps in front of us. We are not in the past—“Dig me now, don’t worry ’bout later,” he commands. Then he calls out his move, the Mashed Potato.

“In my hometown, where I used to stay/the name of the place is Augusta G-A,” Brown announces. “Down there we have a good time, we don’t talk/we
all get together in any type of weather and we do the Camel Walk.” Augusta isn’t invoked as part of his or anyone’s literal past. Augusta here is the place we all come from and to which we wish to get back, standing in for Home, or the valley, or wherever our mind goes when we think of sanctuary. And in that place the Camel Walk—like all the other dances conjured—is a shared set of moves through time that bring that place into existence.
We don’t talk
because words can be misunderstood, they divide us, and these dances bring us together.

“There Was a Time” is a history of black dance Brown illustrates in sequence. This is the past evoked in the present, every one of the moves a sense memory meant to summon a different set of rooms, moments, lights, and smells. In the middle of the song, Fred Wesley’s trombone has peeled off from the rest of the brass, it’s offering a salty commentary or parody of the horn riff, a doppler-effect call and response, a theme and variation chasing each other to a beat. It is one more way that the past and the present are in collision.