One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (33 page)

Catfish had a couple of bottles of wine stashed in his guitar case on the bus. That was an infraction right there. As for the LSD Collins was gobbling on a recurring basis, well that wasn’t even covered in Brown’s criminal code. One night he took more than usual; he doesn’t recall how or what he played that show. What he does recall is his bass turning into a great serpent, him breaking all the strings, throwing it to the ground, and stomping off the stage.

Afterward, Brown summoned him to his dressing room for a talking to, during which Collins, still tripping, reacted in a way no sideman ever had before. He was rolling on the floor, laughing at the stern father trying to impart his wisdom. Brown gestured to one of his aides, “Get this fool out of here.” Collins was kicked out of the dressing room, and Collins said he never called him back to the dressing room again. “I guess he realized he wasn’t getting through to this fool…this fool’s just a lost case.”

Call it
continuing education
. Two veterans helped inculcate the inductees into the James Brown show and the James Brown world. Bobby Byrd, who had come in at other eras when newcomers
needed to be whipped into shape fast, rejoined the band. And drummer Starks, who knew the show better than anybody currently with Brown, was working closely with Collins. Since Clyde Stubblefield had left with the insurrectionists, Starks was playing most of the show himself. (Young Frankie Waddy, a drummer from the Cincinnati contingent, never won Brown’s approval.)

Starks was in the best position to assess how the Ohioans affected the show, saying, “James did a lot of his old material every night but when you heard Bootsy and them do it, it was
different
. They had a different type of fire going.” Collins was eased into the flow; for weeks Brown hired other bassists to play the ballads and older songs that needed a more anchored, formal approach. But soon Collins was ripping on, and ripping up, everything. On his own time Collins wasn’t listening to Brown’s records, he was listening to Black Sabbath and Miles Davis’s
Bitches Brew
, and the dark swing of such music entered his own playing. Brown heard it, and let it change him. With Collins’s arrival, as Starks put it, “He got a shot of goodness in him and he went into another thing.”

The trick for Brown was keeping the young guys busy and constructive without driving them away. Collins recalled: “After the show he would take us to the studio. If it wasn’t the studio it was rehearsal. And if wasn’t rehearsal, me and Catfish might get called to do a thing we called ‘carrying the stick.’ That meant hanging out with Mr. Brown on the plane or somewhere, and watching him do his thing. You just had to do it sometimes. All your fun is gone.”

In response, the Ohioans came up with a saying that quickly became a philosophy for coping with the boss. Say there was a two-day gap between performances. That was when the schedule got larded with practices and recording sessions. The old guys just took it, staying in the hotel or bus, following the script. Or else they quit. The new guys, though, had a fresh approach. “See ya!” Collins would shout to one and all after a gig, and quicker than Charles Bobbit could get up off of that thing, they’d all be gone, driving back to Cinci until it was next showtime.

“We’d do
that to anybody, anybody that would say something we didn’t wanna do? ‘See ya!’ Then we cut it short—it was one word, that’s the one James liked. He’d be on the plane, faking like he’s asleep, he’d have one eye open and one closed. Then he’d look at you and say ‘Seeya!’
That’s
when I knew we had him. I knew this was a two-way thing, when he started picking up the street things that we were doing.”

Brown’s affection for the new guys was demonstrated onstage. It used to work like this: He had his breakout moves, and the sidemen did their simple steps behind him. The two did not intersect. But video from the era shows him watching Bootsy and Catfish as they did their thing and then falling back to line up
with
them, dancing their moves, just one of the guys. The band joined him, and he joined the band.

“He knew this energy we had,” said Collins. “He didn’t know how to control it but at same time he wanted to grab it and make it his. And it was, for a while. But I guess he knew it wasn’t going to be for a long while, because some stuff you can’t hold back. We was just wild and crazy and we loved it.”

Killin’ it
, he’d say.
We killed ’em dead,
Brown gleefully told the guys backstage as his knees bled and he hobbled over to have his hair done. But not Collins. If Brown had something to share with the bassist after a show, most likely it was his unwavering parental disapproval. “Son, you just ain’t on it,” he would grunt, his head sadly shaking with the bad news. “You just ain’t on the One.” Collins took it for a while, but then he tuned the guy out. “As far as he was concerned, we were never on the One.”

These newbies had brought something that hadn’t existed in the world before and planted it in his show. They changed stuff. The change was bigger than letting a hot hand rewrite your arrangements, bigger than a new drummer turning the beat around. This was something outside of Brown’s experience, something beyond him, and it was making him feel young. It was a magic he labored to keep under his control—and how likely was that?

It was
motivational
.
For as Brown could hear, when Collins arrived in the band the One crawled up from the under-muck and popped its gills to breathe air for the first time. With the new band, Brown was taking his investment in the One public. The One leaped from being a way for musicians to not get lost in the flow to an expression of the flow itself. And the brothers Collins and their associates generated a flow that was never before heard, a music that was funnier, dirtier, that was more profoundly in the moment than what had come before.

As the One grew in power and mystique, it became a way for Brown to keep the upper hand with musicians, a buzz kill to apply when necessary. When he couldn’t explain what he wanted, or didn’t have anything specific to say—“Son, you just ain’t on the One.” It drove the formally trained musicians around him slightly crazy. “It’s really—it’s a joke,” scowled Fred Wesley. “He didn’t know what the One was to him. To him it’s the downbeat. But he didn’t know what it
was
. The emphasis of the one of the bar…his music kind of emulated that, but, as far as it being some kind of a concept—I don’t think so.” But it was a notion few would debate with Soul Brother Number One.

Signaling this was a new moment. Brown gave his band a new name: the JBs. He liked the way it sounded. They were playing a show in Nashville six weeks after the Ohioans joined up when Brown felt the time was ineffably right to blow out a groove he’d had in his head for months into a record. He had ambitions for a vamp the guys were playing live; there was a phrase that he and Bobby Byrd had been kicking back and forth for weeks. Byrd said he’d heard somebody use the word “sex” in a brazen way on TV, and it stuck in his head. “Machine” they’d come up with themselves;
sex
and
machine
together just seemed an apt pairing, Byrd said.

Brown called his usual engineer, King’s Ron Lenhoff, from backstage in Nashville: Come now. Lenhoff couldn’t get a flight out of Cincinnati, so he jumped in his car and drove the five hours to the Starday–King studio in Nashville.

A new funk age, a culture beyond sound, was rearing up. You could see its influence in basketball, with the old-school, hold-your-spot, ploddingly pass-the-ball-around method giving way to the improvisational, explosive style of Julius Erving. In comedy, Richard Pryor was performing jokes that were truths, truths that were fictions, fictions without punch lines. James Brown, meanwhile, was in Nashville having a party.

It
sounded
like some kind of party, anyway: “Fellas, I’m ready to get up and do
my
thang/I wanta get
into
it man, you know, like a, like a sex machine man, movin’,
doin’
it, you know?” We know.

Byrd grunts “Get on up!” like a hog hot on some truffles, and then the guys enthusiastically second the boss—yes, as a matter of fact, a sex machine sounds like an excellent thing to be in the present situation. The brothers are laying down a whole new sound: Bootsy’s bass a flickering, alive thing, Catfish evoking the metallic chank of Nolen but lighter, freer. Brown spontaneously sat and decanted a little aromatic piano. Two takes and they were outta there. Seeya.

“Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like a) Sex Machine (Parts One and Two)” went to #2 on the R&B charts and grazed the pop listings. Two months later Brown got everybody back in the same conducive studio to record “Super Bad (Part 1 & Part 2).”

“Watch me!” he screams at the top, “Watch me!” He could be talking to the band, he could be talking to
us
. No doubt, all over America, teenagers were staring at their transistor radios as he shouted it, imagining the guy right then—his physicality, doing a few steps on a street corner, looking
bad
in the mothy light. The music blowing right past song structure to vamps and monochords and “wrong” harmony; the lyrics blowing past confession and storytelling and all the other songwriters’ tricks, going straight to the id, issuing commands to the universe, free associating his love for himself. Brown’s “Sometimes I feel so nice—good god!—I jump back wanna kiss myself” is the kind of in-the-moment, off-the-street bravura that would make a legend out of some folks, if it wasn’t just a stray inspiration in a session full of them.

There’s an
exceptionally ill scream, and then an untethered saxophone solo by Robert McCullough. Not the greatest reedman (Starks said the best horn in this band would have been the worst horn in the group that had walked out), McCullough is instructed to overpower whatever shortcomings he had by playing a proudly noisy solo—“Come on Robert…blow me some Trane, brother!” Brown shouts, meaning wail like John Coltrane. It more than works. “Super Bad” must have been what Amiri Baraka meant when, in praising Brown as an icon of the era, he declared his art to be in “combining the free expression of the oldest ‘Shouts’ with some of the most advanced musical arrangements. Brown’s musicians were high tech omni-styled wailers who could drill Coltrane’s nuclear sonic colors into James’s funk…the sound of the other further!”

O
n Saturday, May 9, in a black-owned mortuary in Augusta, a woman pulled back the sheet covering a new arrival. The body was that of sixteen-year-old Charles Oatman, an African American incarcerated in the Richmond County jail.

His back was laced with deep gashes, his skull was crushed, and he was covered in what looked to be cigarette burns. Authorities suggested Oatman might have been killed by cellmates, or perhaps died by falling from his bunk.

By Sunday afternoon, it was said nearly every black person in Augusta knew of the condition of the dead boy’s body. Some knew that Oatman was mentally disabled, with an IQ of less than sixty. Still, officials had put him with the general adult population of the jail. Talk turned rapidly to police responsibility.

Monday morning, a group of 300 to 500 demonstrated outside the Municipal Building downtown, tearing down the Georgia flag and burning it in front of a line of heavily armored police. Groups formed in the streets, whites were assaulted, businesses looted, and by sunset, billowing clouds of black smoke could be seen over Augusta from miles away.

Charges of police brutality and racial prejudice had fallen on deaf ears in Augusta for years. The heat was rising. Earlier that summer, white Augusta heard rumors that demonstrators were planning to disrupt that most sacred rite, the Masters Tournament; South African golfer Gary Player was given special police protection and the golf course carefully guarded. A week before the riot, a group of blacks had tried to make a statement on police relations at a city council meeting when the mayor abruptly adjourned the session.

By May 12, the second day of the riot, six black men were dead, all shot in the back by the same kind of weapon—the shotguns police were issued to put down the uprising. At least twenty downtown buildings burned. When local officials didn’t call in the National Guard and Georgia state troopers, Governor Lester Maddox ordered them in on his own. Troopers patrolled the city with black tape over their nameplates and fixed bayonets. Tanks with mounted machine guns moved through the neighborhood where James Brown had grown up.

Brown flew in from a show in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday, and went to the radio station he owned, WRDW. The same day, Governor Maddox also arrived in Augusta and came to the station. The singer and the segregationist held a twenty-minute meeting in which Brown both pledged his help to quell the violence and pointedly criticized racism in Augusta. When Maddox said, “I don’t know of anyone who is forcing unequal rights on your people,” Brown tartly responded, “Governor, I’m from Augusta, Georgia. The black people here don’t have equality.”

“You don’t think it could happen in Augusta,” Brown said in one of his public statements. “It happens anywhere when we forget that greed is the master of all wrongdoing. And when you don’t divide it—everybody has to have a little piece of the pie. And I think a lot of things came from that kind of frustration.”

His words were broadcast on TV and radio, and they presented a message that rioters should stay off the streets—“don’t save face—save your city”—
along with criticism of the city’s oblivious white leadership.

WRDW and the news director Brown had hired, Ralph Stone, had long reported black grievances, and their coverage made them a target. During the Augusta riot, white supremacists circulated a flier calling for Stone’s death, and for WRDW—“Where Reds Dare Whites”—to be burned down. Stone responded that neither he nor the station was responsible for the violence in the streets.

“All we do is tell it like it is. The white press generally has never covered our story in Augusta. We tell black people they can do things nonviolently, and we tell both sides of the story. We have run strong editorials saying ‘sock it to the establishment’; not advocating riots but saying ‘it can happen.’