One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (31 page)

Brown: “I don’t want a Negro or a colored man, I want a black man.”

Susskind, indignantly: “What’s the difference?”

Brown breaks down a fascinating distinction. “A colored man is a man afraid to stand up and face his own convictions. Can’t stand up like a man. He sends his wife to the door to pay his bills because he’s afraid, he’ll do anything somebody tells him. A Negro is a man that wants to be white and don’t want to no longer identify with the ghetto. If he identify with the ghetto, then he would know the truth! But, no, he gonna get a job with
you
and try and become white.
A black man tells you the truth but he never gets there because a Negro is standing in between….”

Susskind, rolling his eyes: “Jimmy, there’s a new survey…”

Brown: “We don’t want the survey! The survey’s out there in the street!”

Susskind can’t believe the lack of gratitude for a guy speaking out in favor of integration. How can anybody—a Black Panther or a black capitalist—not want to come to his swingin’ party?

After a commercial, they are right back at it.

Brown: “You have a black America and a white America, right?” he asks, poking Susskind’s knee.

Susskind: “No—we have an
America
.”

But what we’ve got right now, says Brown, is
two
Americas.

Susskind: “We’re trying to integrate it and make it a better…”

Brown, with a hell naw look on his face: “Don’t integrate it! Seek equal opportunity! Do what the Constitution says.”

Susskind rubs his eyes in a theatrical, oh brother way, then says: “Well,
that
would mean integration.”

Brown: “No it won’t! It would mean America like it’s supposed to be! United States, that’s what it means! Don’t integrate, don’t give me that, I don’t want that, I want communication! Together. I want to be with you but I want you to give me respect as a man!”

Susskind, excitedly: “You’ve GOT IT!”

Brown: “The problem is, you can’t get [whites] to fight your fight.” He’s wildly gesturing, bent over, intent on being understood. “You have a fight, you have an obligation to yourself as a man. You see, I don’t WANT you to do it for me, I got to do it for myself.”

Susskind: “You
can’t
do it yourself.”

Brown: “I’ve
got to
do it myself…look, for a long time I haven’t been a man! And I still don’t have the classification as a man. You
say
, ‘He’s a man’—he’s a
colored
man. He’s a
Negro
man. Why can’t he be just a man?”

This was a great racial debate played out before America’s housewives and the unemployed. Brown looks tormented at certain moments, at others he’s a gifted actor on his feet, milking the crowd. By the end he appears agitated, unsteady, ready to take Susskind out and then polish his shoes.

A few weeks later, by declaration of the mayor of Los Angeles, it was James Brown Day. Mayor Sam Yorty had signed his proclamation ahead of time, and there was a photo op scheduled in the mayor’s office where Brown and Yorty would shake hands. But when Brown arrived at ten
A.M.
, the mayor was nowhere to be found. An aide said he wasn’t usually at work that early, and a deputy mayor was enlisted to make the presentation. Brown righteously stormed out and gave an earful to the media.

Dismissing the deputy mayor as “some underling,” he said, “I believe in the dignity of man. I’m a busy man. I was here at the appointed time. The mayor has a job to do. So have I. If I can take time to be here, I would assume he could, too.”

He
was
a busy man. In 1969, his political adviser in Oakland, Donald Warden, helped him launch a trading-stamp company, Black & Brown. The firm was started with $60,000 invested by the singer, former Oakland Raider football player Art Powell, and a third backer. The idea was straightforward: Black & Brown would make deals with grocery stores and gas stations in black communities. Stores would give customers a stamp each time they spent a set amount of money in the establishment. Black & Brown was bucking several giant national trading-stamp concerns; their ace in the hole was that you didn’t have to take your stamps to a redemption center to trade them for prizes, you could bring your filled booklets back to the store that gave them to you and get back three dollars’ worth of goods. Each stamp had a picture of Brown on it.

Calling the firm an example of enlightened black capitalism, Warden said Black & Brown was “committed to the struggle and concern of black people.”

At the same time, Brown formed a chain of fast-food restaurants,
Gold Platter, specializing in soul food. The firm was based in Macon and drew on a number of Georgia backers, including the car dealer who sold Brown his first auto after he moved to town.

“If you don’t like Gold Platter, you ain’t got no soul,” Brown joked at a press conference. Asked by a reporter about fast-food chains he was competing against, he fired back: “There aren’t any. This is pioneer, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. And it’s so big that you as an American can’t be out of it. You’ve got to be in.”

Sitting before TV cameras at the Beverly Comstock Hotel in Beverly Hills, Brown explained the structure of the Gold Platter operation. A training center in Macon would teach employees skills necessary to work in his restaurants, and franchisees would gain expertise in a business that would reach coast to coast. To buy into a franchise, you needed $25,000. Loans from the Small Business Administration, Brown said hopefully, should make that sum accessible to prospective entrepreneurs.

He also explained his newfound passion for business.

“It’s a little like the black capitalism Mr. Nixon is stressing. So we’re putting it up to him. We have what he wants, now we’d like his help with some government self-help financing for people who want to go into the business.”

Nixon’s ideas, Brown said more than once, inspired his nascent entrepreneurialism. Over the next few years, a connection between Brown and the Administration would deepen.

Some observers have noticed an interesting fact about the president’s program for black entrepreneurs. Nixon won the White House using what his strategists called the “Southern Strategy”; employing racially coded language and policy to lock up the segregationist vote and steer white Southerners out of the Democratic bloc. It seems a contradiction, therefore, to have a president who is exploiting white fears to be encouraging black empowerment.

Except that Nixon staked black capitalism to black communities; his vision reinvigorated the system that existed North and South in segregated cities where black-owned concerns had a lock
on black consumers. This was the capitalism of the chitlin circuit, and it thrived only so long as white-owned businesses weren’t forcing out black mom-and-pop concerns. It was dubious economics in the age of multinational corporations, but savvy politics.

On a morning talk show, Brown explained that, “My understanding of black power is of a man owning his own.” The interviewer asked, “Are you saying that black people should work just for black people and white people work for white people?” Said Brown, “I didn’t say just for black people, but it would be better because a black person will understand me better than you do, and you can understand a white person better than I do.” This wasn’t segregation, and it wasn’t separatism, but it was a philosophy that took the separation of the races as a given. This was Black Power that a Strom Thurmond could support.

He wasn’t the only celebrity venturing into economic development; in the fast-food field, Muhammad Ali had invested in a hamburger chain and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson lent her name to a franchise selling “glori-fried” chicken. A letter to a black-owned newspaper, the
Philadelphia Tribune
, struck a note of caution: “Once upon a time if a Negro got out of line, they either put him in jail or made him a Judge. Either way, it shut him up fast.

“The new trick is to lend the guy a million bucks and set him up in business. The president of a corporation doesn’t have time to start riots…. Will he lose his Soul? Will he desert the Cause? This would indeed be a tragedy.”

The writer implied Nixon’s black capitalism was co-opting voices of protest, but entrepreneurialism came to Brown long before Nixon did. The idea that accumulating wealth was the best way to improve the community is something Brown learned growing up in the Terry, watching Daddy Grace and the United House of Prayer. To Grace, capitalism
was
Americanism, and he wrapped himself in the flag right down to his red, white, and blue fingernails. He sold food in his houses of prayer, and if fast food had existed then, you could have gotten that there, too.

Grace dangled the prospect of spending yourself into the mainstream. Brown raised the same possibility, while making black business seem vaguely radical. At his shows Brown had taken to giving out color TVs
and
dashikis as prizes, covering several bases at once. Brown made entrepreneurialism groovy, and surely that was noted when the members of the National Business League voted him their Businessman of the Year for 1969. Brown was given the honor in Memphis, at their sixty-ninth annual convention. The venerable organization, founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington to foster economic development, was older than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In 1969, Brown found new ways to matter to his fans, and to America. He was thirty-six, and when he spoke these days of retiring, the talk was tinged with a desire to settle into the life of a shot-caller. He didn’t really mean it, and when he said it, what one took away was that he liked the
image
of a businessman. He didn’t look tired, and he didn’t seem worried.

He didn’t even look weary in photos, taken in the fall of 1969, outside a courthouse in Sacramento. There he was being sued for paternity by Mary Florence Brown, the former president of Brown’s Sacramento fan club. The Sacramento trial was widely covered, and Brown was called to testify. But on the stand and outside the courtroom, he projected an air of blessed confidence and hurt that the charge that he had fathered her child had been hurled. When a check he’d written Mary Brown for $2,500 was entered into the record, the singer explained it by saying, “This is what I live for—helping young people.” And when he fired his lawyers practically from the witness stand, still he didn’t seem worried. In the end Brown settled out of court, wrote her another check, all while insisting “that the agreement include a statement denying that he fathered the child.”

He believed in himself, understanding that millions believed in him, too. And when a California Superior Court judge ordered Black & Brown Stamps to stop doing business in the state, and
issued an injunction against the company for “failing to file financial reports and letting their business license lapse,” barely did he shrug. When, a year after opening its first restaurant, a spokesman for Gold Platter said they were shutting down after taking a “substantial loss” in 1969, Brown lost none of his zeal for business. When there was a wall before him, he knew where to find a door.

Nobody had ever given him anything for free. He had amassed a fortune by running faster than everybody else, and never leaving money on the table. Late one night in Philadelphia, he looked out the window of his car and he saw an image of himself in one of his fans.

Ticketholders had filed out of the huge concrete arena, clutching the programs Brown published and sold at every show. Backstage the local DJs and politicians and the record company folks had come through and gotten a drink and had their pictures taken with the star. Brown’s party left through the “secret” exit where as usual a huge cluster of kids waited patiently in the middle of the night for the singer to shake their hand, autograph their ticket stub. He greeted some of them, then climbed into his limo.

They drove off as a huge cloud of fans chased his car, surrounding it at the first red light, tapping on the window. A few more lights and the group dwindled down to three or four, and then it was one or two.

Finally, Brown turned to his driver, pointed to a skinny kid in sneakers and a T-shirt, still racing through the city streets in pursuit of the star. “If that kid is there at the next light, let’s pick him up and take him to the airport with us.”

At the next light, one of Brown’s people opened the car door for a very surprised kid who was expecting to keep on running until he fell. In the car, Brown gave the gasping fan an inspirational talk about how he had made it, and if you stayed in school, you could make it, too. Don’t be a dropout. They talked all the way to the airport, and then Brown slipped him a few bills and got into his jet.

Chapter Sixteen

THE OTHER FURTHER

T
he buildings housing King Records looked pretty ramshackle from the street by the end of the 1960s, and inside, a funk (from the Flemish
fonck
, “disturbance or agitation”) hung over the place. Time, and people, moved on. Bud Hobgood, Brown’s eyes and ears in Cincinnati, died in July 1970, at the age of thirty-four. His death fed more rumors, some claiming he met foul play, though medical records indicate a naturally caused cerebral hemorrhage.

Syd, too, was gone, though the smell of his cigars hovered in corners of the building. Now Brown was the biggest presence on the block, even when he wasn’t around. He had a wall knocked down to give himself a suitable office, and took Nathan’s desk as his own: a sizeable semicircle designed to look like half of a 45-rpm record, with the mogul sitting at the center. Its one shortcoming was that, because the desk wrapped around his chair, its drawers banged his legs when they were opened.

Meanwhile, the label was furiously cashing in on its glory days. In October 1968, five months after Nathan’s death, King was sold to Starday Records, a small, mostly country and western label based in Nashville. A moment later, King’s family jewels, its rich catalog of recordings, was sold to LIN Broadcasting, based in Nashville.
The master tapes of Hank Ballard’s “The Twist,” Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk,” Little Willie John’s “Fever,” and the “5” Royales “Dedicated to the One I Love” now no longer belonged to the label that made them.