One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (36 page)

The jet was his, and so was a big suite within Polydor’s office in New York. He had a lucrative five-year contract that guaranteed he would continue to produce himself. They gave him a pile of cash up front, complete artistic freedom to record what and when he wanted. Polydor would now distribute People and Brownstone, two labels Brown produced for. His last two singles, “Escape-ism” and “Hot Pants,” both of them just released by Starday-King, would be his final releases on King.

A
n early press release put out by Polygram offered an overview of who he was at the onset of the decade. “James Brown will perform 335 days this coming year, losing as much as seven pounds each performance. In an average month, he will give away 5,000 autographed photos and 1,000 pairs of James Brown cufflinks. He will wear 120 freshly laundered shirts and more than eighty pairs of shoes. He will change his performing costume 150 times and will work over eighty hours on the stage, singing, dancing and playing at least 60 songs on one of more than eight instruments.”

It could have described Brown early in the
previous
decade. That was how he had long chosen to be viewed, as a steel-driving man who owned lots of stuff. The fact was that even in a new era, with a new label, and with the certain knowledge that albums were the future, his essential image, and his essential method of making records, had become fixed. A letter written to
Jet
in October 1971 complained that he was putting out too many singles, far more than other acts. It was a very good point, if not for the fact that the singles he put out were
killing
. So why change?

In August 1971, he released “Make It Funky,” a record that starts with a question.

Ever the straight man, Bobby Byrd puts it on a tee for the Boss: “What you gon’ play now?” Brown shrugs and swings, “Bobby, I don’t know, but whatsoever I play, it’s got to be funky!” The song
starts
with an organ solo, which is the place where many of Brown’s
songs meander off to when they are winding down. “Make It Funky” was profoundly slack. The horns come in with a thrilling wooziness. They sound like a dance band playing across the Niger River. In the middle, a litany: “Neck bone! Candied yams! Turnips!” Brown shouts. He stumbles over “smothered steak,” recovers for “Grits with gravy! Cracklin’ bread!” Sometimes a man is just
hungry
.

About six months later, one of the more unlikely hits of his career, “King Heroin,” came out. This staunchly anti-drug recitation—spoken from the point of view of the drug—came to Brown one day at the Stage Deli in New York. It was there that counterman Manny Rosen approached with a poem he’d written while incarcerated at Rikers Island for not paying alimony. The ballad, with aptly sepulchral organ, creeps into the subconscious like a public service announcement you’re not listening to, until you find yourself riveted.

The hot new team of Rosen & Brown debuted their composition on The
Dick Cavett Show
and then took it to Johnny Carson. A num-ber of other raps recorded by the two remain unreleased. “King Heroin” made Brown an antidrug spokesman. He went to Sacramento to pick up a commendation from Governor Reagan, then to Atlanta, where he donated $5,000 to Georgia governor Jimmy Carter’s drug treatment program. Rosen scored, too: A character in
The Poseidon Adventure
was named for him.

In the summer of 1972, a new Jabo Starks drum part seemed tethered directly to the almighty. He showed it off in the studio, and then Fred Thomas affixed an off-kilter bass line to it that slyly sidestepped the One. Brown came into the studio and upon hearing the groove pulled an old Southernism out of the ether—
get on the good foot
, which meant get going. Everybody knew they had something, and Brown bumped his next scheduled single, “I Got Ants in My Pants,” to rush out “Get on the Good Foot.” It became the summer song of 1972, no doubt, and redirected the lives of countless kids standing within shouting distance of a spewing fire hydrant.

“Good Foot” was his biggest record that year. All told, he was off to a great start with the new label.

Chapter Eighteen

SOUL POWER

I
n the early ’70s, AM radio was losing listeners to the growing FM market, and programmers were increasingly sorting out their audiences according to musical genres as well as along racial lines. The end result was that the glory days of Top 40 radio playing black and white artists side by side were rapidly on the wane. That was just one more trend Brown had been in front of, ever since the time when jittery white station owners freaked out to “Say it Loud.”

All of which might suggest Brown’s music was black by default, when of course it was black by acclamation. Changes in personnel and musical direction saw him moving ever further away from the blues, song structures, harmony, and composed lyrics and toward a sound defined by the drum. As the 1970s progressed, his music became less “pop” than ever, pushing more deeply into texture and noise. He produced an astounding string of hits—between 1969 and 1971 Brown had some seventeen singles in the R&B top ten—that resembled little else on the radio and established him to younger listeners as a genre of sound unto himself.

Words like
ghetto
and
funk
were being redefined by the people the words were originally meant to describe. These terms had meant something unsavory, something to be swept under the
carpet of respectability. Now, though, both expressions were super bad. They were embraced, held out as mirror opposites of what some imagined them to be.

The music was getting heavier, and so was Brown’s persona. You could track his reinterpretation through the work of numerous African American writers in and around the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the black power movement. During the Black Arts heyday, a group of artists and intellectuals increasingly embraced Brown. Citing his “Ain’t It Funky Now” from 1969, Stephen E. Henderson exulted that “the obnoxious word [‘funky’] had been given a new Black meaning and public respectability.” Simultaneously, said Henderson, “another Black word, ‘soul,’…is on its way out—done in by overexposure and the Man.”

Cecil Brown, in a piece from 1971 written for
Black Review
, noted that though you could still find African Americans playing the Rolling Stones at parties, “cutting into James Brown now seems to be the test of one’s identity, of one’s blackness.” Interestingly, the author celebrates a way in which Brown’s music isn’t
about
something—by now the words are disjointed and used as rhythmic elements themselves—but rather
is
something, powerfully expressing itself as a circumstance, a condition. He focuses on Brown’s uncanny use of crudeness and ugliness to turn time into a festival, writing that the rough edges of this funk evoke the hoodoo and root conjuring one still finds in the rural South.

As Bootsy Collins put it: “Funk was like the way we lived.” That is-ness of the music, its powerful summoning of a state of existence, was picked up by Larry Neal, a poet and scholar who helped define the role of art in the black power era. In his 1968 essay “And Shine Swam On,” Neal wrote: “Listen to James Brown scream. Ask yourself, then: Have you ever heard a Negro poet sing like that? Of course not, because we have been tied to the texts, like most white poets. The text could be destroyed and no one would be hurt in the least by it.” Other artists made things, but Brown made experience—he was a verb, and his true medium was us.

In some of the most heartfelt writing about Brown ever published, Neal later declared being in awe of Brown’s power, while also wishing that his music addressed political realities. In a memoir of the Black Arts Movement written in 1987, Neal declared: “We began to listen to the music of the rhythm and blues people, soul music…the big hero for the poets was James Brown. We all thought that James Brown was a magnificent poet, and we all envied him and wished we could do what he did. If the poets could do that, we would just take over America. Suppose James Brown had consciousness. We used to have big arguments like that. It was like saying, ‘suppose James Brown read Fanon.’”

But of all the writers of the era seeking to put Brown on a pedestal, it’s Amiri Baraka who listened most deeply to the music. His poem “In the Funk World” asked “If Elvis Presley is/king/who is James Brown…/GOD?” As far back as 1966, Baraka heard the noise in Brown, and in that squall sought to locate the heart of his blackness. In “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music),” Baraka—then LeRoi Jones—wrote: “James Brown’s screams, etc., are more ‘radical’ than most jazz musicians sound, etc. Certainly his sound is ‘further out’ than Ornette’s. And that sound has been a part of Black music, even out in them backwoods churches since the year one…. The hard, driving shouting of James Brown identifies a place and image in America. A people and an energy harnessed and not harnessed by America.”

Beyond a few lines scattered across a career, Brown did not confess anything in his lyrics, he didn’t write out words to tell his story. Rather, the words fit the music and the words seemed to flow from him in a state of connection not to personal experience but to a shared moment. That made him a representative figure in the early 1970s black literary circles, where ethics and aesthetics were viewed as one. When the writers and musicians in the New York group The Last Poets recorded a poem called “James Brown” in 1970, Brown was called a “witch doctor,” channeling the distant past into the concrete present. In African American arts journal
Amistad 2
,
Mel Watkins threw all the cards down and flat said it: “James Brown is the personification of Blackness, the embodiment of the Black life style.”

For these performers and critics, to discuss Brown was to discuss race and politics and, then, life and magic. Brown represented an intersection of a great many things.

When he spoke for himself outside of the music, the starting point was extreme protectiveness. And yet Brown loved to talk; along with the privacy was that Southern love of speechifying. That, together with his Carolina accent, his frayed voice, and intermittent dental disasters that left it hard for him to articulate, could make his conversation a strange meander through sound and subject.

In interviews, Brown cut a broken field path through his thoughts, racing to one side of an argument, and then darting to the seemingly opposite position. If you were prodding him to talk about his views on a dangerous issue like racism, he might not give you much. But to a writer for
Jet
in December 1971, Brown was unusually candid.

“I’m a racist when it comes to freedom,” he declared. “I can’t rest until the Black man in America is let out of jail, until his dollar is as good as the next man’s. This country’s going to blow up in two years unless the white man wakes up. The Black man’s got to be free. He’s got to be treated like a man. This country is like a crap game. I’ll lose my money to any man as long as the game is fair. But if I find the dice are crooked, I’ll turn over the table.”

He believed that racism was a product of economic inequality, and that the solution to the nation’s most vexing problem was fiscal opportunity. He had it with the black radicals: When “Talkin’ Loud and Saying Nothin’” came out (recorded in 1970, sat on until the time was right, in 1972), it was an open criticism of self-styled arbiters of racial justice. His “Soul Power” may have been a rebuttal to those shouting for “black power,” declaring that he had something better to offer.

“
What we need are programs that are so out of sight, they’ll leave the militants with their mouths open,” Brown enthused. “A militant is just a cat that’s never been allowed to be a man.”

He looked at himself as a master of exchange, a salesman, and he felt that being one, he understood America in a way the nationalists never could. Life was about the hustle; that was America’s story, too, and why would somebody on the outside not want to buy his way in? Here was his definition of a child—someone who did not enter the game. That was his thinking, and Brown was about to express it, publicly, to a degree he never had before.

S
oul City was a real place. It existed on the map of North Carolina, in the Piedmont a bit south of Virginia. Warren County, which contained it, was a poor, rural part of the state, and Soul City was in just about the poorest part of the county. Soul City existed. But where it lived most of all was in the mind of Floyd McKissick.

On the map, it was a plot of scrub pines and a scattering of trailer homes. McKissick was developer of the municipality, but in the early 1970s, he was seeing beyond the pines, to a future for America. Soul City was meant to be the first of a great many black-led communities, attracting businesses and drawing the country’s poorest urban citizens to North Carolina.

Many were searching for the next step forward in the civil rights struggle, and black capitalism seemed a viable platform for consolidating progress. McKissick illustrated how complicated and contradictory the era’s fervor for black entrepreneurship was. In the 1960s, he had steered civil rights group the Congress of Racial Equality away from its long-standing philosophy of nonviolence and toward militance; by 1972, he was endorsing Republican president Richard Nixon for reelection.

Soul City spotlights the ambiguous position of the black businessman. As its developer he stood to gain from any success. McKissick’s endorsement of Nixon was followed in the fall of 1972
by his creation of a group dedicated to steering African Americans to the Republican Party. Like dominos falling,
that
was followed by a $14 million pledge from Nixon’s administration to help build Soul City. As is often the case with black business, the question rises: Is there a line between self-interest and helping the community?

It’s a question no one asks of white businessmen, of course. Without self-interest, lifting anyone else up was far harder. As Brown said, “I can’t throw you a rope until I save myself. It’s slippery around the edge of the bank.”

How slippery it was, McKissick quickly found out. After his relationship with Nixon became public, syndicated newspaper columnist Carl Rowan, an African American, wrote, “This black man who used to style himself a super-militant could not possibly be regarded as a Republican. But put $14 million worth of ‘black capitalism’ within his grasp and he’ll call Spiro Agnew godfather.” Georgia state representative Julian Bond angrily criticized blacks receiving money from the administration as “political prostitutes,” who were set to “deliver lambs to slaughter.”