One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (42 page)

They saw holding pens where slaves were stacked atop one another, the holes where the sick and feeble were thrown into the Atlantic. According to Wesley, “Mr. Brown was so affected by these stories that he broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.” Then a tour guide whispered to him that one should never cry in front of Africans because they will take it as a sign of weakness. Brown immediately straightened up.

After Senegal they were booked to play a birthday party for Omar Bongo, president of Gabon. But something went awry as the band left Senegal; a scheduling problem, or maybe the money from Gabon had not arrived. In any case, Brown decided to skip the party and fly back to the United States.

While his plane was en route, the pilot received a message that President Bongo was in a jet now following Brown’s jet, and was pleading for Brown to fly back to Gabon. They landed briefly in the States, transferred luggage from one plane to another. The money was all taken care of.

Omar Bongo was a
fan
. “He loved James Brown,” said Lola Love, a dancer with the show. “He and James had the same body type. I think he was probably a pygmy. He wanted to do everything James did. He wanted his barber to shave him and make his hair look like James’s.” Bongo spent $160,000 to bring Brown to Libreville, where Brown serenaded him on his thirty-ninth birthday. Gabon’s president was quoted in the
News-Review
, a black newspaper in Augusta, saying that he identified “with every aspect of [Brown’s] career,” and that he wanted Brown to come back to Gabon to work with him on business ventures. For his part, the singer hinted an interest in Gabon’s considerable oil reserves. When Brown left, Bongo presented him with numerous gifts, including African robes and an ivory elephant tusk.

A few months later, Ali and Brown both took a victory lap. They were in Cleveland: the boxer to defend his title against Chuck Wepner; the singer to offer an extended, off-the-rails invention on the theme of the national anthem from the boxing ring. When he got to “the land of the free…” Brown took a detour, singing “I wanna be free! We gotta be free! Come on, all of you, free! Free! Free!” Out so far beyond a limb he didn’t dare look down, Brown sang the words like they had meaning.

H
e knew of the Senegalese villagers who walked miles into town to stand in a line of hundreds, everybody carrying their copy of “Say It Loud” to play on a hand-cranked record player. Rulers wanted to
be
him. Loved in Africa, at home Brown found times were getting considerably tougher.

In 1975, Maceo Parker, Wesley, and trumpeter Kush Griffin all left to play with George Clinton. They’d had it. After years of discipline and fines, of drinking that James Brown Kool-Aid and making sure the bells of their horns hit the same compass point when the boss was watching, now they were getting paid to play funky
music for a much looser boss. You drank Clinton’s Kool-Aid, and you didn’t remember the next forty-eight hours.

George Clinton was a creative genius whose greatest talents were manifest outside the spotlight. He was a conceptualist and a ringmaster who was no slouch at keeping bedlam rolling down the road. Like Brown, he had a gift for giving space to quirky talent. With roots in gospel and doo-wop, he had knocked around the lower rungs of the black circuit that Brown ruled in the 1960s. Clinton once believed, like Brown, in the importance of “hair and teeth”; his first group, the Parliaments, had formed in a barbershop he operated in New Jersey. Eventually, though, Clinton’s hair came down.

Born less than a decade after Brown, he nonetheless seemed to germinate in some remote pod of history. Clinton loved the Beatles, and then, by the late 1960s, was in Detroit and holding his own among the feedback freaks in rock bands like the Stooges and MC5. His vision was broader than Brown’s, or perhaps it was that his attention span was narrower. Whatever the distinction, by the mid-’70s Clinton had assembled—amassed might be the better word—an underground empire of sound. There was Parliament, a soulful harmony act with a swinging horn section. There was Funkadelic, acid washed, unclean-thought-smooching vanguardists who wanted to be the black Beatles. There was Bootsy’s Rubber Band, a get-out-of-jail-free card for the bass player who had felt constricted in the JBs. Operating under the collective title of P-Funk, Clinton had illustrators and girl groups and theorists and a string of badass guitar players, all of whom could be plugged into last night’s great idea.

Going from the James Brown band to P-Funk was like running away from the army to join the submarine races. Bootsy was in, and now that Brown’s horn section and institutional memory had gone, too, Clinton had many steady hands to balance the crazies. Early in 1976, Parliament released
Mothership Connection
, Clinton’s
first gold record. Then he went on tour with a $250,000 set that included a flying saucer and singers launched over the crowd shooting “bop guns.” Ties, no; diapers, yes. P-Funk was obnoxious and indefinable, a new language, a sect, a sensation. It scared folks.

America had known Brown for two decades. He was a Great Man, and his every record was the latest end of a historical process. P-Funk was counterculture, it was a conspiracy unleashed in the marketplace. Which is another way of saying that Brown seemed old and Clinton did not. He was not above rubbing it in. Grab-bing his nuts in a 1976 interview, Clinton said, “We call him the Grandfather of Soul—only as a joke but it holds him back, just the fact that we even say it as a joke. He really should go just a little contemporary.”

A listener arrived at Brown’s funk through work, by manning up and accepting his challenge. One got to Clinton’s funk through play. It was not all that much of a contest.

There’s that word again.
Funk
had meant a stench, the smell of sex in a room, and in the mid-’70s it still had a bouquet—you could not even say its name on some radio stations. That was the only place you couldn’t say it, though, and by the time Clinton emerged
funk
was in flower, and to say it was to evoke overpowering sense memory: the brine dripping off a pickled peach, the curve of Pam Grier’s nose. It is something that you can’t get rid of once you are in it; funk was environmental, and funk was an emulsion. Wayward, sticky, a slather: all describe the music Clinton made.

In one of history’s biggest cases of industrial espionage, Bootsy had brought Brown’s prime directive, the One, with him to the P-Funk camp, and Clinton delighted in the secrets it unlocked. The One became for him less of a way to structure rhythm and more like the Masonic secret of how everything worked. It was the deal he presented to the audience. If you accepted the One into your life, you were one of us.

Describing what he liked most about Brown, Clinton told an interviewer, “
His music has primal rhythm, the basic One. You can get sophisticated, but you have to come back to that primal rhythm. If you can do that, it’s next to fucking. If a James Brown record comes on, whether you like him or not, you’ll be on your feet…”

It came from New Orleans, from the slaves’ quarters and from marching and dancing to drums playing in parades. It came through the drummers in James Brown’s band, and through the mind of the man who put himself at their service and made damn sure they were at
his
. He brought it out of the dirt and gave it to America. And now, in the mid-1970s, America was taking it away from him.

That is how it worked. You could not copyright a beat, a smell, the One. You made it and then a younger man in an ass-length blond wig marked it up and made it new.

From the mid-’70s until the mid-’80s, funk hovered over the American mainstream. It was a subculture that emulsified mass culture, through acts like Earth, Wind & Fire, the Meters, the Ohio Players, Kool & the Gang, Zapp, Rick James, Mandrill, Slave, the Gap Band, the Junk Yard Band, the Fatback Band, Cameo…Brown was the signal, Clinton was the amplifier, and these acts were the noise coming out of the speaker. When he heard them, Brown could have felt gratified for having disciples in so many places, proud to see ideas he tossed off influence so many lives. But, naw: It probably just made him mad.

Brown crossed paths with the P-Funk menagerie one night, some place on the road in the ’70s. He cornered the bass player who got away, now with a whole group Clinton had named after him—Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Brown began talking, and as he did, time seemed to flow backward. “Son, how you gonna call it a Rubber
Band
when you don’t wear uniforms?” he lectured. “You don’t even look like a band!”

Chapter Twenty-one

THE HUSTLE

T
here was, however, one cultural force capable of uniting Brown and P-Funk. From the mid-1970s until the end of the decade, disco pushed aside funk, punk, polka, and anything else that stood in the path of the rolling mirror ball. As a force, disco was broad. It changed the music industry and reached out to marginalized audiences. As music, disco flowed from Brown’s body of work and then moved far, far away from anything he had known.

In his own story, Brown found a durable explanation of how the world worked, and in his music, he saw an expression of raw, uncut reality. In summary, then, he was the light and the truth. Disco was something other than that. Disco basked in fragmented light, embracing artifice and unreality. If this was a “Man’s World,” then where was his place in a pop movement that empowered gays, lesbians, and straight women? After years of pushing deeper and deeper into a music that signified “blackness,” and carrying blackness as a banner around the world, now came a wave that seemed, to many coming out of soul music, capable of washing blackness away.

Disco was a rhythm-based music that made people want to dance, and it’s impossible to string those words together without evoking James Brown. He was a parental figure. He used grit and noise,
tension and release, to build to a transportive state of repetition. Meanwhile, disco, with its less syncopated, simpler, 4/4 underpinning, established repetition from the jump, and by doing so threw the doors wide open to everyone who cared to join the party.

Having fought his way to the top, having proved that he could turn a segregated system into a meritocracy through the force of his personality, he wasn’t going to accept the slide from funk’s meritocracy to disco’s faceless egalitarianism. Life had taught him, and many in his generation, that the only way to get credit and reward from white America was to work twice as hard, and be twice as good, as the white man. You did that and you lifted yourself up from the masses. You got noticed, you got your due, and you ate.

In a jarring comment, Brown once said he looked at all the disco dancers and saw “a cottonfield”; here was all the anonymity he worked to escape, “all the things I got tired of doing,” being embraced by America. It wasn’t the toil he minded, it was the repetition, and most of all the reward: losing yourself in the crowd. A long time ago he had escaped invisibility, and if he had anything to say about it, he wasn’t ever going to be lost again in the fields.

In the summer of 1975, under a headline asking “Is James Brown Obsolete?” writer Vernon Gibbs lamented that “in the middle of the biggest dance explosion in recent history, James Brown is being left out and he feels it.” Gibbs tracked Brown’s decline to 1973, when a dance called “the Hustle” was sweeping New York’s dance clubs. If the Twist had taken dancers out of each other’s arms and opened the door to Brown’s revolution—movement as a solo, a bravura display of one’s essence—what was Brown going to do now that a new movement had dancers working together again? What could he do when dance became a social movement, not an expression of individual identity?

Take credit for all of it, was one answer. His 1975 album
Sex Machine Today
was marketed as “the world’s hottest disco album.” The song “(It’s Not the Express) It’s the J.B.’s Monaurail” rewrote B.T. Express’s disco hit “Express” while lobbing snark at the group. Soon he’d
be billing himself, desperately, as “The Original Disco Man.”

Another possibility was to enter the studio and match disco’s chart success with your own. Hollie Farris was a white trumpet player from Nashville who had just joined the band in 1975. He was at Criteria Studios in Miami, doing his first session with Brown, “Get Up Offa That Thing.” The band set up together in the room: horns, drums, everything. Brown entered, huddling with different musicians, telling the drummer to play the part from one hit, the guitar to trace the riff from another one, the bass to tweak the line from still another of his songs, humming the part he wanted the horns to play. It seemed strange to Farris; by the mid-1970s, the standard approach to recording a mainstream release was to tape the different instruments separately over many takes, and then piece together the cleanest performances, layer by layer. Recording live in the studio was way out of favor.

The musicians were standing there with their orders, having never yet played the song, and then Brown said, “Okay, roll the tape.”

“I just looked at everybody like, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’”

The engineer at Criteria later told Farris this was
his
first big recording session, too, and he was sweating out how to set proper sound levels on his mixing board when the band hadn’t yet attempted the song. He was fiddling with the knobs, guessing where the levels should be, and then Brown stepped up to the microphone and shrieked one of his classic screams, a wail that knocked every needle into red and had him resetting the knobs for the rest of the session. They played it twice; Brown liked the first version better. That became the hit.

“He didn’t care if it had ‘mistakes.’ All he cared about was the feel,” said Farris. “If the song felt good, that was his song. That really taught me a lot. If you don’t have the feel you got nothing.”

He had something, no question. “Get Up Offa That Thing” reached number four on the R&B charts. He took shots at Barry White on the song, and comes out in favor of dancing. Still, Brown’s
approach felt anachronistic alongside contemporary music by Earth, Wind & Fire, Isaac Hayes, the O’Jays, and Stevie Wonder, whose hits stressed multitracks and sonic precision. Trying to recreate a live sound on his singles, Brown palpably did not fit in with what was being played on the radio.