One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (35 page)

It was strictly touch and go: Guitarist Hearlon “Cheese” Martin was in, and bassist Fred Thomas; this horn section was no improvement on the last. Starks and Pinckney were in the band, and Bobby Byrd, so there was continuity with the past, but still…

They scuffled for two weeks. “We had it shakily together,
kind of
together,” said Wesley, and then Brown came to New York and asked if the band was ready. There was only one possible answer: “Yes sir, they’re ready.”

Really, they weren’t. “But he got in front of the band, huffing and puffing and dancing and patting his foot, and something sort of happened,” Wesley recalled.

“
Any
band that played behind James Brown becomes a good band, because he will force you to be a good band. You have to do the things right. Just because of his will. He was an extraordinary person. Just because of his will, the band became a good band.”

Exerting that will was an art form Brown had honed for years. He had bullied and beaten, coaxed and courted, he had changed the subject by dropping to the floor. Confusion, mystery, and division all helped him maintain influence over his band.

The band was, of course, essential to him. It is impossible to imagine James Brown music without the musicians that played it with him. Never was it lost on him that the band was the crucial way his sound and his voice got across to the masses. He could only agree with what Duke Ellington said about his orchestra: “That’s my instrument.” The various ensembles he put together were fashioned for the strength and style of the players. For all his world historic ego, Brown was amazingly selfless when it came to giving strong players strong roles to play.

The seemingly candid admission that he was 75 percent businessman and 25 percent entertainer is, ultimately, a clever ruse.
Businessman
was a term he was more comfortable with, a higher calling, perhaps, than
showman
in his mind. There’s a term he was most certainly not comfortable with, one that needs to be applied:
artist
. What the Brown bands of the late 1960s and onward do is make a paradoxically freedom-
drenched art out of radical acts of discipline. That discipline began in Southern black notions of community building through polish and enterprise, through work that, when exerted, would uplift all. (An idea that was most often expressed in business.) It was built out of the anxiety and dread alive in the mind of the guy gripping the microphone. He
needed
rigor. Left to the misrule of the Terry’s alleys, he was transformed by the discipline of the Georgia penal system. The order he demanded from his musicians made it possible for them to play the Apollo and be good so quickly; the order he enforced on himself—the structure and precision needed to move about the country 300-plus days a year—pressed a weight down on things that he did not want to view.

Yet there is, in his late-1960s and onward music, a gift of liberation. Each member or section is playing a pattern, and when the patterns overlap and lock, they have a staggering power. This music pulls you out of your life, out of time—it destroys time—and leaves an impression of being lost in a crowd of pure action. In the way that a great drummer seems to commandeer the space around him, control events for a moment that hangs in the air, with this band full of drummers playing various instruments, there was one guy controlling them all—a drummer’s drummer, a master of time.

The big bands of the swing era had disappeared because it was too expensive to keep a large crew intact for long periods of time, and too expensive to move them from town to town. That’s what Brown was doing, however, running a big band in the age of the rock-and-roll combo. He wanted it to last as long as possible. Anybody would, but Brown had a swamp of feelings—worthlessness, loneliness—waiting for him whenever he left the stage. To make this pleasure, this salvation, survive, with so many folks coming in and out of the band, he needed to be a leader of rare powers.

Cruel powers. Everybody has a story or ten. One of them is about a young drummer called Turk, which was short for Turkey. Turk came from South Carolina, and would materialize anytime Brown
was within 200 miles of his home. He dreamed of playing drums for Brown, and would pack his kit in his car and show up at performances just in case he needed a drummer that night. It was like that for a year.

One night Turk was in the dressing room and Brown sent word for him to put his drums on the truck. What Brown didn’t tell Turk was that he would be
driving
that truck for the next two months. A while later, the boss had another message: Tell Turk to put his drums onstage. The show already had two drummers, but now they had three drums set up. Now those two drummers are on their toes, too, wondering what’s up.

Turk, whose only goal in life was to play for James Brown, stood in the wings and watched the singer. Waiting for Brown to point at him and signal his entrance. This went on for, perhaps, a month. Then one night Brown pointed at him at the exact single moment when for a second Turk was looking away. He missed the sign. After the show, Brown gave the word: “Send Turk home tonight.”

You could not look away, and everybody could be replaced. That was essential knowledge for playing with Brown. Or, as he was known to say: “I’ve got the Lord in one hand and the devil in the other. You never know where it’s going to come from.”

He pushed people around because he had to, then he pushed people around because he wanted to. He pushed people around, and in the words of drummer Ron Selico, “he was a black Hitler.” He felt he
had
to exert brute control, because if he didn’t, they would leave. Nobody abandoned James Brown; if they tried, he wanted them to regret it. But the truth about this management style is that little or none of it was a secret. He did not hide what he was about; he could not. “Control I must have, of everything, of myself. Either that or I can’t give you James Brown.” If you were with Brown for any length of time, you understood what you would get out of it, and what would never be yours. If you wanted to be a star, this was not the place to be. If you wanted to get rich, or record your own music, or see your name on an album, that was not likely
to happen. But if you wanted to see the world and play some amazing music for crowds huge and small, you could not do much better. There were two kinds of people in Brown’s band: Those who got it and made their peace, and those who didn’t. The latter would spend years cursing the man.

H
e kept everybody on edge, and he was on edge most of all. Those he shared a bill with were a source of special concern. The opening acts were usually picked by him. He selected those who needed his help, and weren’t going to show him up. That wasn’t always possible, as when he played Philadelphia, around 1970, and the local promoters insisted on putting the Dells—a very hot vocal group—in the opening slot.

The show was at the Philadelphia Spectrum, a large arena that was holding maybe 12,000 that night. The Dells, Alan Leeds recalls, “were tearing the place apart. Girls were screaming, they were
killing
.” Leeds went backstage and found Brown pacing a hole in the carpet, chain smoking, and utterly wrecked. Usually, Brown exhibited a careful mask of confidence before a show. This was a guy Brown’s road manager hadn’t seen before.

Finally, Brown looked at Leeds and blew up. “‘They’re fucking amateurs,
amateurs
; they had them in the palm of their hands and they didn’t know when to come off!’” He seemed to want badly for the Dells to exit the stage. Meanwhile, the Dells continued to sing, and the crowd continued to go nuts.

Brown to Danny Ray: “Mr. Ray, they don’t know when to come off—get out there and get them off. NOW!” Leeds followed Ray to see how he would handle it.

Brown had once pulled the curtain down himself on gospel group the Mighty Clouds of Joy when
they
were getting too much love from the crowd. God could forgive Danny Ray, but the fans and the Dells most assuredly would not.

Once they got far from Brown’s dressing room, Ray turned his
Buster Keaton mien to Leeds and announced, “This is the last time you’ll ever talk to Danny Ray, because I’m about to die.” He formulated a strategy: “Mr. Leeds, we’ve got to go up there very slowly, we’ve got to find the longest staircase there is to get up there.” Finally, as Ray made it to the stage, the Dells finished their set.

There was a pause as they changed the stage. The headliner was a frazzled mess. To get to the Spectrum’s round stage, Brown had to walk through the audience. Boy did he. “By the time he got to the stage, one shirtsleeve is torn off, his hair is askance, collar was twisted, and he hadn’t sang a note. He was on fire that night, and the crowd went berserk!” said Leeds. “If the Dells had them excited, he took it to another level—it was the best show of the year.

“That’s what he never understood. That
he
was James Brown and they were just the Dells. They were the opening act.”

A
t King, he was the biggest fish in the lake and could do pretty much whatever he wanted. When King merged with Starday, the company was basically putting out low-budget trucker music and stellar James Brown hits: “Mother Popcorn,” “Give It Up or Turnit A Loose,” and “Super Bad” all going to the top of the R&B charts. The label may have made a token effort to develop new acts, but pretty quickly the books were getting straightened for another sale, and the lake was being drained.

Having a megastar as your hitmaker was a wonderful thing. But from the Starday-King perspective, having James Brown as their hitmaker was a mixed blessing. “Here was a quarterback who threw nothing but touchdown passes,” said Colonel Jim Wilson, general manager at Starday-King. “And his demands were very demanding.” Brown was pressuring the label to make deposits to his account on top of his regular check. He even had Starday-King cover the $5,000 lease payment on his Learjet.

Executive Hal Neely, having moved from King to Starday-King, wanted to buy King back, and to do it he needed cash. Selling James Brown’s
contract got him the cash he needed. Brown didn’t have a recording contract with Starday-King; instead, with great foresight, he had negotiated a personal services deal with Neely, whom he trusted. That meant Starday-King was negotiating from weak-ness, because Brown could easily leave, and Neely, the only obstacle, would be getting paid either way.

While Brown kept the squeeze on Starday-King, he was fielding bids from other labels. Warner Bros. Records badly wanted him and were probably offering the most money of any label; but Brown was willing to take less money and maintain creative control over his music and recordings, and Warner was reluctant on that point.

Meanwhile, the European Polygram conglomerate had started up the Polydor label in America, and didn’t want to build a brand from the ground up—they were hungry for a star who would give them instant credibility. Polygram was especially hungry to enter the black music market, with an audience that was considered more loyal and dependable than white record buyers.

The era of black acts putting out albums with handmade cartoon covers was dead. Making great, all-the-way-through listenable albums had transformed Aretha Franklin’s audience. Isaac Hayes was making double-disc opuses for Stax, racking up studio bills for releases that felt like luxury items. Studio technology had left Starday-King behind. Meanwhile Brown was having great success with seven-plus minute songs that were cut up into two or three parts across a 45. His music seemingly was meant for the long form. The early 1970s, he recognized, were a good time to sign a contract with somebody who could underwrite him into the album market.

Polygram offered competitive studio budgets and healthy national distribution. The parent company wanted Brown’s back catalog, too, and they ended up paying a lot to Starday-King for the tapes that came with the singer.

Obviously Brown saw how little Starday-King had to offer. But he also knew how much he was worth and bargained hard with his suitors. “James Brown had a seventh-grade education, but there’s
no telling what his IQ was,” said Fred Daviss, who was Brown’s banker, and one of his bookkeepers at the time of the Polydor deal. “I remember times when we were sent a thirty-page contract from Polydor, he’d get worked up about something, write a little note in the margin, and everybody in the boardroom would be snickering about it. Two years later, that elementary little side note would bite them in the ass. One little side note cost Polydor four million when it caught up with them.”

The bargaining was fierce, and Brown was the kind of stubborn negotiator who would throw it all away if he felt he wasn’t getting respect. The discussions foundered, and a spirit of animosity was filling the negotiating room.

Brown called an old friend who also was close to Polydor’s Jerry Schoenbaum, and asked him to come in and help. He phoned Henry Stone, the Miami-based record man who had almost signed Brown back in 1955. “I was in New York at the time,” remembered Stone. “Got a call from James, saying, ‘You’ve got to help me out. I’m at the American Hotel with the Polydor people and I’m not happy with what’s going down.’”

Stone walked into the conference room. “It was
frigid
. James says, ‘These guys want to throw me out of the window. They want to kill me.’”

Stone and Brown broke off and talked in a side room, and in that time Brown revealed the sticking point that would make or break the whole deal: He wanted Polydor to pick up the tab on his jet.

He pulled up a chair before Schoenbaum and interpreted Brown to the label. “I said, ‘So look, he wants an airplane. You and I both know James is breaking wide open with a new generation of kids. You know that James is huge in the clubs of Europe—all over the world he is breaking out. So why are we arguing about a jet?’”

One more thing: “And look, he wants ten thousand records shipped to me free in Miami.” A guy’s got to take care of his family. “And do I have to mention what I did with them?” Stone said with a shrug. “It greases the wheel. Because, they did pretty well with him.”