One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (32 page)

Nathan had never been sentimental about the past. One knock on King had always been the way its product
sounded
—not how the music was recorded, but that it was pressed onto inferior vinyl that made tone arms wobble. That was because for years, instead of warehousing or selling its old record stock, King just melted down the unsold records and pressed new discs from the molten plastic. The past recycled for the latest product.

Musicians still recorded at King, and in the last years of the decade a crew of barely adolescent locals brought a crazy new energy to the place. They’d started hanging out by the loading dock, then by the front door trying to look like they belonged, maneuvering to get themselves inside the building that locals called
King’s
. Finally they got invited all the way in, to play on small-fry sessions. King wasn’t paying what it used to and bodies were in demand.

Some of the kids were playing in their own groups, like the guys in the Pacesetters, regulars on the local R&B scene. The Pacesetters were built around the Collins boys. Phelps was the big brother, and he had a nickname stuck on him by his kid brother, who thought he looked like one:
Catfish
. The younger brother, William, who was called Bootsy, also played guitar, a $29.95 puke green Silvertone model his mom had bought for him at Sears. Bootsy played the hell out of it, and even won a competition when he was eight by playing Lonnie Mack’s “Memphis,” a huge hit recorded at King.

Bootsy could play the guitar, just not as good as Catfish. Eventually he strung the Silvertone with bass strings, and turned it into a bass—it sounded fresh and surprisingly good, and it looked like hell, which probably cinched the deal for him. Bootsy played the bass.

The Pacesetters began performing in 1968, with Frankie “Kash”
Waddy on drums, Philippé Wynne singing, Robert “Chopper” McCullough on saxophone, and Clayton “Chicken” Gunnels and Darryl “Hasaan” Jamison on trumpet. They were odd-jobbing it until eventually they caught the eye of local talent scout Charles Spurling, who got them in the door.

“All the artists and all the hip people hung around King’s,” said Bootsy Collins. “I was still going to school and so
I
wanted to be hip and cool. I don’t think at that time I thought I would actually be a musician that relied on that as my livelihood; I was just looking at my brother and saw how much fun he was having. But the more I hung around King’s, I started falling in love with music. From seeing how passionate and how dedicated those musicians were, I realized if I’m going to do this, I can’t be joking. It was enough to make me serious.”

The local kids scrutinized Brown when he was present— “watched him like a hawk”—but it wasn’t like
he
knew who they were. “Forget playing with him, we never thought we could
meet
him,” Collins said. “We were just kids hanging out—‘get them mothers out of here…’ But once they heard us playing, and word started getting around, that’s when things changed.”

Henry Glover started hiring the band on sessions, including an Arthur Prysock record and Bill Doggett’s contribution to popcornography, “Honky Tonk Popcorn.” Having just vaguely caught Brown’s attention, the Pacesetters were promoted to playing on the road for Brown-produced acts Marva Whitney, Bobby Byrd, and Hank Ballard. It wasn’t work that paid, but that never mattered. They were playing with
Hank Ballard
, they reasoned, and were now musicians getting dates out of town. They even got to jam with Brown a little in the studio, when he didn’t have anything else going on. That was as good as it was likely to get.

“All we knew was music,” explained Waddy. “It was a factory, a working man’s town. We weren’t going nowhere.”

In March 1970, Brown was on the road and ass deep in alligators. The band he had painstakingly built, with Maceo Parker,
Fred Wesley, and Pee Wee Ellis at its core, that had collectively or individually shaped “Say It Loud,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Give It Up or Turnit A Loose,” “Funky Drummer,” “Ain’t It Funky Now,” not to mention “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto,” that bunch was history. Ellis had split in late July 1969, Wesley around the beginning of the new year—both tired of the slights, fines, and confrontations that were part of playing in the band. Then, by March, the rest of the painstakingly honed crew were in full mutiny. These were musicians who had established their name in his show—fans knew Clyde Stubblefield, Jimmy Nolen, Maceo Parker. The guys in the band might grumble, but Brown knew how to handle their complaints. This time, though, something more serious was brewing.

They had given him an ultimatum in Jacksonville, literally writing out their grievances and presenting them to him backstage. The stated issue was money, but it wasn’t really about that, it was about
Brown
—how he took their musical contributions without giving them credit, how he made them rehearse on their days off, how he made them live an army life they were sick of, how he had thrown their golf clubs off the bus. He knew how to play the revolt: through the old divide and conquer. “He felt that if we had a protest or some kind of grievance, it was better to individually come to him and say, ‘Hey Mr. Brown, I think it would be better if it happened this way,’” said Parker. “Not as a group, just maybe individually to solve the problems. He opposed us trying to solve the problems as a group, I suppose, because as a group we were stronger.”

They cornered him backstage in Jacksonville, but the hall was packed, and if he’d let them walk out then the crowd would have torn up the place, so Brown heard them out and said he needed time to ponder their demands. Then he sent his jet to Cincinnati.

After the show, he got on the phone to his King office. Bobby Byrd was dispatched on a grave diplomatic mission, and failure was not permissible: Find those cats in the Pacesetters immediately.
Drive them to the airport. The next show was in Columbus, Georgia. Bring them to me.

The name of the Cincinnati venue—the Wine Bar—was cruelly misleading. There was not a fern in sight, and the wine options were strictly binary. It was a nothing dive, and the Pacesetters had just finished a paying show there, for fifteen dollars. Total. They planned to do the usual, get in their Dodge Dart station wagon, head on home, take the mattress off the bed, guys sleeping on that
and
the boxspring. When Byrd found them at the Wine Bar, he didn’t even say much, just: “We are rolling.” He put them in a limo, loaded them and their equipment onto Brown’s jet, and they took off for Georgia. None of them had been inside an airport before. “We flew up out of that mug!” said Bootsy with glee. “I had never been in a jet before, let alone a Learjet, which instead of taking off and rising slowly, it felt like it was going straight up in the air. My jaw was over here, my Afro over there…”

When they touched down in Columbus, they were whisked directly to the venue, packed and surly, everybody clamoring for the show to start, “James Brown! James Brown!,” and now they see a bunch of cats with instruments walking into the place—“There’s the musicians!” Great, thought Bootsy, they think it’s
our
fault things are running late. Inside, the Pacesetters could tell immediately the vibe was not right. Much of Brown’s band was lined up backstage to their left, scowling. To their right was Brown’s dressing room. They were ushered in.

Collins: “He says, ‘Fellas, I want you. I want you to play my set tonight.’ We looked at each other and were like, uh, okay…is this mug crazy?’ We was drilled for
our
shows—how we gonna do a James Brown show without practice?”

There was no inspirational talk and no explanation. The singer just grunted out a few simple instructions. “Don’t worry ’bout it. I’ll count it off and when I drop my hand you all just hit it.’ That’s what he said and that’s what we did.”

They certainly knew the songs; they’d just never performed them with James Brown.

Before the show could begin, Brown had some unfinished business to attend to. He stomped out into the hallway and addressed the rebels: “I’m forfeiting my conversation with you all. You’re fired—everybody!” All of them, except for drummer Jabo Starks, left.

Nobody seemed to remember that first show very well once it was over. It was a nervous sweaty blur. The Pacesetters were so used to playing small stages or no stages that on the biggest platform they’d ever inhabited, they huddled close together like critters in a diorama. But, everybody got through it. They
did
it. Later everybody remembered that.

Brown gathered them all in his dressing room, told them how great they sounded.

“You know, I think I’m gonna give you $225,” he said. “Naw, think I’ma give you $275.”

Waddy: “Now we really tripping, ’cause we already got a raise!”

Starks was there, observing in the background. When Brown said $275, they all looked to him for some kind of understanding: Was this good? What did it mean?

Starks played his role, and let out a piercing “Whhoooo!” It gave them a special feeling.

“Naw—I’ma give you $350”—and this time Starks exhaled “Oh my goodness.”

The band members pulled out pencils and started writing on whatever paper they could find.

“What are y’all doing?”

“Mr. Brown, we’re trying to figure out how much $350 divided by five people is. We trying to figure out how much we are getting.”

“Naw—that’s $350 for
each
of you,” Brown said. Starks was surely smiling.

The next day they got into the Golden Eagle bus—no more Dodge Dart station wagon. There were already three uniforms ready for each member. “
He had all our sizes already, pretty much,” said Waddy. “Never did figure out how he did that.” There were three days until the next show, in Fort Wayne, three days of steady rehearsing.

Just one thing, he told Bootsy Collins as they prepared for the first leg of their tour. “Son, I love what you’re doing with that bass, but”—he cast a glance at the restrung bluish-green Sears Silvertone—“You can’t come in here with that.” A new Fender jazz bass was presented to Collins. This was not Cincinnati.

C
ollins made you sit up and listen. His playing had sap flowing through it, it
moved
. Surely it had something to do with playing the bass like a guitar at first and thus reinventing the fifth wheel, and surely it had something to do with being a skinny, tall kid whose gawky youthfulness stuck out all over the stage—he wasn’t going to hide, might as well own it all. If the standard bass player kept the beat, laid down a stout foundation for the other instruments, then Collins was playing something else, because he wanted to play against the beat, and write his name with his playing, not enable someone else’s excellence.

Basses sounded different in the early ’70s. James Jamerson at Motown was recording the same song twenty or thirty times in one sitting in the studio, striving to shape a different, better bass line with every new take. Bassist Charles Mingus was conducting a big, contentious band
through
his playing. At almost the same time that Collins was joining Brown, the song topping the pop charts was Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” a tune that was
made
by bass player Larry Graham and his prehensile thumb. Suddenly thumbs were popping and fans were remembering the names of musicians they’d barely paid attention to before. The guitar was the dominant instrument of blues-based rock, but funk brought the bass to the front.

Always planning ten steps ahead, Brown had mapped out
replacing the old band with the Pacesetters long before either side knew what hit them. Indeed, Waddy thinks Brown had been grooming his group for just this moment months before, when he started focusing his attention on them in the King studio. It was part of Brown’s genius, playing three-dimensional chess in the boxing ring. In his music, too, he could see the multiple consequences of a single act. Change a drummer and you changed
everything
. In the past, when a great new drummer entered his band, he found a way to make their gifts the foundation of a new direction. In 1970, he lost everybody
but
the drummer. So what did he do, he still changed the sound 360-degrees, in the words of Jabo Starks, as the new guy—Bootsy Collins—came to prominence. The drummers heard the news before anyone else.

When Collins arrived, said former drummer Melvin Parker, “that’s when the funk moved from the drums to the bass. The bass became the funk piece and the drums became the backbone or the stationary part.”

Brown was twice as old as Collins; to Bootsy and Catfish, he could seem like a codger from another planet. The brothers had been raised by a single mom. The relationship with their boss was powered by complicated currents, as Bootsy sometimes wanted Brown to be a father figure to him, and at other times saw him as an authority figure to rebel against.

The older musicians, family men, could be bullied and manipulated by his fines and penalties. But the guys from Cincinnati had an almost unthinkable response: They ignored him. It drove Brown nuts, yet he also tried to loosen up. “He was letting us find our way
and
I think he realized early on that we don’t have those responsibilities that the older cats had. Didn’t nobody ever pay us—it wasn’t no big deal. And we had credit at the Wine Bar! ‘Take my money, I can still get credit.’ So we had that to always fall back on, and I think he knew that.”

To Bootsy and his guys, the Wine Bar embodied funk. As much as a bass line or a grunt, to them the word signified making do
with your circumstances, turning grease into glory. It was about owning history you couldn’t leave behind, and wearing circumstances like a tangerine mohair coat. It was why Bootsy Collins could say this: “Funk was like the way we lived. All of us kids sleeping in one room, it’s 105 degrees outside, no air-conditioning. That’s funk.”

Torn, possibly, between feasting on the atmosphere and keeping the show running, Brown chose his moments for playing a fatherly role, doling out advice that sounded to the newcomers like a foreign language. He would draw near and declare, “Let me tell you something, son. If you ain’t on the heel and toe, you
got
to blow.” He said that a lot, and Bootsy and Catfish would giggle about it later, trying to puzzle out a meaning. Only eventually did they understand he was saying if you weren’t in control of events—on top of things—things would fall apart fast. It was a message of discipline they were not inclined to hear.