One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (45 page)

The life of the spirit began to concern him; for a while Brown studied the Koran with Bobbit. In the end, he went with the god he had known his whole life. The month after losing the Augusta house, Brown got in his car, drove out to Williston, South Carolina, near where he was born and where some of his mother’s people still lived, and was baptized at St. Peter’s Baptist Church. He would attend services and play a role in church affairs in the years ahead.

Otherwise, in his leisure time Brown pulled on pointy-toed cowboy boots so tight they made his toenails curl into a barrel shape, donned a straw hat, grabbed a shotgun, and hopped into his customized Dodge van. He loved that van, with its deeply upholstered swivel seats and mud flaps, shag carpeting, bar, sink, and loaded with chrome. At home, James Brown was Soul Bubba Number One.

He never slacked, but closing in on fifty, Brown was hungry to have a place to relax without feeling he had to be
on
all the time. He tried to chill, and key to that was owning a plot he could call his own. Maybe nothing marked Brown as a Southerner more than his attachment to land. It was the most important thing a man could have. Always measuring himself against his daddy, who got his hands dirty working on other people’s land, Brown
owned
his plot. It was forty acres, sans mule.

Southern pride, he would say, is a hell of a thing. Those people in New York, they’d serve you food while they were fooling you, have you thinking you’re entering their front door when you were coming through the back. All those Northerners, he sensed, talking all that mess about race, were the same people calling you “nigger” behind your back. In the South, he explained, that was beneath them. The Southern white was going to tell you to your face. “You can trust a Southern white man, you are always gonna know where he’s coming from,” Brown declared.

“There are some horrible white people there in Augusta,” said Alan Leeds, “
but they pray to the same Baptist god and eat the same grits and gravy and worship the same red clay as the blacks. They even talk with the same drawl, use some of the same colloquialisms. There is a commonality that most Northerners never get; we just never have that experience.”

To understand James Brown, Leeds explained, you have to understand that he was a Southerner, as much as he was anything. “He
was
a good old boy. We’d get off his Learjet when he went home and get into his pickup truck.”

Forces were gathering behind the Beech Island gate, and family was gathering, too. In the 1980s, Brown brought his mother down to live with him. She was an independent, somewhat irascible presence, who gave as good as she got. Susie would declare he didn’t respect his mother; he’d tell Mom to go to her room. “She looked like him,” said guitarist Ron Laster. “James gave her hell when he was raised, and now she didn’t give a damn. She used to say, ‘I don’t give no damn about no Sex Machine.’ She was not impressed by all the TV shows.”

Her behavior, however, was erratic, and Brown decided he couldn’t leave her at the house by herself. Susie muttered even when there was nobody to talk to and engaged in obsessive behavior, like making the bed three or more times in a day, plucking off invisible objects. Deanna Brown said she had water on the brain, and after undergoing surgery, “she wasn’t all the way there.” Eventually Brown sent Susie to live with her sister in Smoaks, South Carolina. Brown would send a car to pick her up for visits, but she would turn it down, preferring to take the bus.

Joe Brown was living in Augusta, but he, too, regularly came out to the house. Pops wore smudged glasses, a felt hat, and overalls. He called his son Junior, and spoke with a speech impediment. “He worked with his hands, loved his son, was not well educated,” said Sharpton. “He was the only one I ever saw Mr. Brown give some deference to. He’d argue with him but he would always end up saying, ‘That’s my dad.’ He loved his father.”

Pops fancied himself a fix-it man, and was always ready to help James at Beech Island. “He was a funny guy and he could fuck up a junkyard,” said Daviss. One time Pops was mowing the lawn with a tractor, coming down a steep hill, and the tractor started sliding, until it slipped into a pond. All the way under, bubbles coming up. James ran down and started shouting at his dad. Joe was indignant: “Now J-J-J-Junior, y’all can k-k-kiss my ass!”

A
n Albanian American and a Canuck drove from New York to Los Angeles in a vintage Oldsmobile 88. They had nothing to do but play music and talk, and by the time they got to the coast, they had sprung an idea. The two men were John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and the concept was for a skit on
Saturday Night Live
, the hit show on which they were regulars. They would play siblings, the Blues Brothers, dress like Jack Webb, and play great rhythm and blues music. Precisely where the gag
was
in the Blues Brothers act was a bit elusive, one big reason why it lasted so long. People didn’t get tired of it. The humor was in the exuberant silliness of these dark-suited stiffs bursting into black music with abandon.

The songs Belushi and Aykroyd covered were expertly selected. They were cool and humorous and not the usual oldies, pre-rock styles curated for white baby boomers. The brothers opened for Steve Martin in the summer of 1978 in Los Angeles and, having established that they were some sort of “real” act, they released
Briefcase Full of Blues
that year, an album that sold two million copies.

When the inevitable movie came out in June, 1980,
The Blues Brothers
ran over two hours, cost $30 million, and had more car chases and explosions than any twenty comedies are likely to feature. So full of gags and booms, the movie was almost formless.

The story involved brothers trying to get their old band together to make money for the orphanage they were raised in. Aykroyd and Belushi really loved the musicians they emulated, and cast some of
their heroes in the film. Cab Calloway was a cleaning man; Aretha Franklin a waitress in a hash house; and James Brown was a palpitating preacher who tears the church apart with his sermonizing and dancing. The critic Pauline Kael called such casting “somewhat patronizing,” which was somewhat understated. The script left you wondering if they understood the culture they professed to admire.

Brown played the Reverend Cleophus James, pastor of the Triple Rock Baptist Church. Aykroyd and Belushi stand in the back of his church while a service gets underway. The reverend seems to be speaking directly to them when he tells the congregation about “lost souls seeking the divine light,” and then he points at Belushi, who looks nervously at his watch. “Do you see the light?” he barks, and after resubmitting the question a few times, Belushi
does
begin to see it, finally shouting, “Yes! Yes! Jesus H. tap-dancing Christ, I have seen the light!”

Behind Brown, James Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir sing a gospel number, and the church erupts into dance. The original script makes a racial point more strongly, with the reverend referring to Belushi as “my little lost, white lamb,” but it comes through loudly all the same. Brown, and all the performers in the movie, will lead white America to the promised land.

“Praise God,” says the reverend; “And God praise the United States of America,” Aykroyd shouts back, as
he
now dances down the aisle. For all the stereotypes in this movie, the Blues Brothers tries to evoke the civil rights era’s vision—blacks and whites together, united by God and song.

The film was released in the summer of 1980, and that December, Brown was a guest on
Saturday Night Live
, where he sang his new single, “Rapp Payback,” and a medley of older hits. Both the movie and the appearance on a hip, youth-oriented TV show did much to introduce Brown to young whites who were making the leap from the Police and Talking Heads to the artists who had inspired them.

Attention was being redirected. Older black audiences hadn’t just moved on from the blues and soul the Blues Brothers messed with, by 1980 they had moved away from Brown. Which was funny, because at the same time, younger audiences were getting a huge taste of Brown through hip-hop. In the late ’70s, DJs at block parties would loop break beats—choice moments from songs like “Mother Popcorn” and “Funky President,” extracted and then extended—and by the early ’80s, as performers began making rap records, James Brown was on his way to being the most sampled artist in hip-hop history. In Washington, D.C., go-go music was flourishing, using Brown’s hardest funk numbers as a template. “When it’s got a thump to it that makes you wanna move your ass and stir around and get some exercise,
that’s
funk,” said Chuck Brown, godfather of go-go. “James Brown, that’s where I got a lot of my inspiration from.” Hip-hop, go-go: In circles beyond the mainstream, he was the light. That meant something, but it wasn’t going to pay the bills. Standing there in his bare-chested jumpsuit on
Saturday Night Live
, looking into the TV camera, he was a landmark acquainting himself with those who would sustain him through the decade: white folks, young and old.

There were more reasons for optimism. As he told a columnist for the
Los Angeles Sentinel
, he was free of Polydor and America had a new president, both giving him “a new lease on life.” Brown called Reagan “My number one cowboy.” He just
liked
Reagan, he explained. “The man looks great. He could still act if he wanted to. But he’s put his life on the line to help the country get back. Think of your grandfather coming back and running the country—you got to take your hat off to him.”

Unlike the dour Carter, Reagan responded when Brown contacted him. After Brown sent a note congratulating the new president, Reagan wrote him back, on White House stationery. With a wink he praises a God that has given us Brown, a man who knows “soul” in all its meanings. Reagan finishes by thanking Brown for his contribution to the nation.

Like the new president, Brown had a near-magical faith in the power of the individual; both had come up from nothing and believed that their success was America’s—they’d made it, so anybody could. Garry Wills has a term for Reagan which applies equally well to Brown: He had become a “rabble-soother,” an ex-insurgent now using that rhetoric to cheerlead for mass values. Brown carefully told white journalists he was through with politics, a message that could only help him connect with his new fans. Now he stressed the greatness of the nation, and let the music say the rest.

Those in the band could see the audience change before their eyes. “You noticed it. It became more white,” said Hollie Farris. “When I first started with him in 1975, it was ninety-nine percent black audiences. And then it started to change, and before you knew it, it was mostly white. They were discovering him; the blacks had already discovered him. Whites knew who he was, but then they saw him in that movie and decided they wanted to see more of him.”

Ron Laster was a guitar player who joined the group at the end of 1979, just before they got a bounce from
The Blues Brothers
. He remembered playing the Beacon Theatre in New York for forty-four people before the film’s release. Afterward, you could fill up a small venue. “It was like an advanced chitlin circuit. We would do the best little clubs in town: the Lone Star in New York, the Sugar Shack in Boston, Lupo’s in Providence, First Avenue in Minneapolis, Front Row in Cleveland, Park West in Chicago…. We would destroy these places because they were packed, and the girls so close to you. We used to love it, I said
love
it,” said Laster.

The show focused on his most recent record and the oldies, because Brown thought that’s what his white fans wanted. He mostly was right, though sometimes, when a crowd wanted the funk and he hadn’t brought any, things could get messy. “They threw shoes and sneakers at us in Switzerland—they wanted ‘Hot Pants’ and ‘Soul Power,’
and he had us doing this little Holiday Inn show.

“How big the house was, it didn’t matter to him, he was gonna keep playing,” said Laster. “If they come, they come. It took a long time for them to come back.”

It was a comedown, and Brown did what his ego needed to cushion the fall. When arriving at a hotel, he’d send Henry Stallings first, to check in at the front desk. Then he’d charge in and start barking orders at his assistant from the entrance, making sure everyone knew a player had arrived.

Women still threw themselves at him. “I was with him one night when he had about six at the hotel,” recalled Laster. “We used to run interference. He’d give us money to entertain them, tell them jokes while they were waiting for him. He’d laugh and come up to me and say, ‘Mr. Laster—tonight I did a nickel.’ That was five. Another night it was ‘I did a trey.’ ‘I’m free, single, and I like to mingle.’ That was his thing.”

These club shows were not the marathon sessions of a decade before. The stagecraft was scaled down to the venue, but it wasn’t like he avoided the moves that made him famous. “Singer James Brown has found he can no longer perform those wild athletic leaps he did as of yore,” reported the
Los Angeles Sentinel
in 1981. At New York’s Lone Star, the
Sentinel
columnist wrote, he attempted a split that “left him prone, and reputedly too injured to open a slated concert at Ripley Music Hall in Philadelphia.” Another time he did a split, lost his balance, and landed sprawling in the drum kit.

The performances were never, however, cautious or sleepy, and where some detected a slippage others saw a crafty adjustment to age and stage. Reviewing a show in the San Fernando Valley in 1982, the
Los Angeles Times’
Robert Hilburn sized up the “mostly white audience, both young fans wanting to sample their pop history and older ones wishing to relive some memories….

“Brown uses his years of stage savvy to maximize his more
limited movement, building a slow, steady tension through the show…. He really did give
more
, unleashing a series of inspired moves that made you feel for an intoxicating few minutes that you were back in the ’60s…. You only need one word to describe this performer—in 1982 or 1962—and it’s great.”