One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (50 page)

At Beech Island he stayed up watching Westerns and the Playboy Channel, or sitting out back of the house at night, where he could fire off a shotgun and not bother anybody. Popping Viagra, Brown had no problem gathering women to keep up all night and the next day. He did not want to be alone.

“What did he do at home?” declared Gloria Daniel, a mistress since 1968. “
Nothing
. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. He operated the remote—only cowboys. And you ate what he wanted you to eat.”

The PCP use did not slacken. Always paranoid, Brown became intensely so in his last years. “If we passed some trees while traveling in the car, he’d say ‘See those trees? Watch them move, that’s the government watching me,’” said Daniel. He told interviewers that the TV was watching him, and that government satellites monitored his thoughts. For that matter, Tomi Rae believes that unnamed people put cameras in the Beech Island estate and spied on her and her husband.

In older times, Brown called himself Santa Claus, a bringer of joy to the masses. Now he was identifying intensely with Moses, telling visitors that God spoke to him, and that he was chosen to lead the people of the world.

The drug was isolating out aspects of his character and making them immense and wrenching. According to Tomi Rae, he used to sit on his bed and talk about being a slave all his life. Then he would weep that he would never escape it.

When the writer of a book on Tiger Woods asked Brown what advice he would give the golfer, the singer gave him more than he expected. “Get him to understand how vicious this world is,” Brown advised. “Everything in this world disappears and vacates.”

He was also turning increasingly spiritual, reading the Bible at home, quoting scripture, and discussing it with a reverend in Augusta. His faith, said Buddy Dallas, “was not feigned, it was not lip service. Mr. Brown was a sincere, deep believer in God the father. He failed to have an understanding of the trinity, because, as Mr. Brown would often say, ‘I got to go to the head man, Mr. Dallas. The son is
not
the head man. The student can never be greater than the teacher.’ That’s just the way he was.”

But while students he could at least acknowledge, Brown recognized exceedingly few peers on the scene. When one of the rare voices that could give him pause asked Brown to sing with him in 2002, it must have seemed like an irresistible opportunity. Luciano Pavarotti was sixty-seven, two years younger than Brown. The tenor had lost both his parents earlier that year, so when it was time to produce his annual Pavarotti & Friends summer concert in his hometown of Modena, perhaps the chance to sing for friends and family was a special balm.

Sting, Lou Reed, and the classical crossover musician Andrea Bocelli were all on the bill, performing duets with their host. For his song with Pavarotti, Brown selected “Man’s World.” The moment was rich, the music huge. A large orchestra provided backing, singers interpolating “Ave Maria” with the pop song.

The day of the concert, Brown was told that the arrangement of the song for the massed strings and voices was based on the hit version from three and a half decades before. With age, however, Brown’s vocal range had moved down a bit, and he’d moved his
arrangement down a half step to keep it easy to sing. The festival planners played their arrangement for Brown, and he said, “That’s fantastic, but we got a whole new arrangement now that’s really hip,” and proceeded to insist the orchestra use his version, as if new music could be written up on the spot. It was about to become a confrontation, but Brown’s young music director, guitar player Keith Jenkins, very gently suggested to Brown that it would be a lot easier for the band to adapt to the orchestra than the other way around.

In the duet, Pavarotti does more than simply sing the original words, he presents meditative new verses, sung in Italian, suggesting that a man who reaches for power all his life will ultimately be lost. Sitting on a stool, Pavarotti looks out with sorrowful eyes that seem to burn through the thousands before him. The stars’ voices don’t mesh, nor are they supposed to. These are grand pillars side by side holding up the sky. The song’s over-the-top mannishness is more over than ever here, recast by old guys who have seen too much to treat it as a boast. Now, it’s a tribute to the dead.

“The horns weren’t playing on that one, we stepped off the stage,” said Hollie Farris. “I stood out in front and I actually cried. Man, what he sang, the level that Pavarotti pushed him to…. They went to a whole other level.”

Backstage, Brown ran into Lou Reed, who he had met years before. Treating Reed as a fellow veteran, Brown said pointedly, “You know, Lou…” The New York rocker responded, “Yes, Mr. Brown?”

“Well, Lou, you know what the difference is?”

Interested and a bit baffled, Reed said, “No, I don’t, Mr. Brown, what is the difference?”

“The difference is, now we know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

T
he man was seventy. A crew of Southern California digital effects geniuses watched him dance in their studio, scanned and animated him, using 3-D
modeling and motion capture technology to synthesize his mobile essence for a museum installation. When finished, his image would jump off a billboard at the Experience Music Project in Seattle and teach kids the meaning of funk.

A James Brown doll was new on the market. It maniacally shook and shouted “I Feel Good” over and over. His cape and a crown were preserved in the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas. As a personality, Brown was larger than life, a force that deserved preservation. As an entertainer, he had been handed that most horrible of designations:
legacy act
. A Jell-O salad from olden times, which it was the duty of every person at the party to sample. The specific irony for Brown was that he could never coast and feel the love the way a legacy act is supposed to. He was still convinced that he had to win people over with an exhibition that exhausted him. He could see no laurels to rest on.

The tour continued, a looped groove unto itself. He did it because it was what he did. He’d done this most of his life, and if he stopped now his life would, too. “He was a very lonely person,” said Emma Austin, who had grown up in the Terry. “And, in his loneliness, there was only one thing that relieved him. And that was, when he got on stage before a big crowd.”

Asked when he was going to stop, Brown was flatly defiant: “I’m gonna stop when George Burns comes back and be born again. I’m gonna stop when Bob Hope starts buck-dancin’. I’m gonna stop when Sinatra bring the Rat Pack back, and all of them gone. I’m not gonna stop.”

The man was seventy, and people wanted to pay tribute. At the Black Entertainment Television awards in 2003, Brown was presented a lifetime achievement prize. Just as he was wrapping up “Sex Machine,” a figure came over to drape the cape on him as he expectantly bent over, and when Brown looked up he saw Michael Jackson as a surprise guest-star valet. He smiled broadly and the two danced a bit. Jackson, the King of Pop, shimmying on the tips of his toes across the stage; Brown—when was the last time he
needed a new nickname?—earthbound by comparison. If it had stopped there the caption would have read: “Young icon upstages old guy on his special day.” But Brown signaled to Danny Ray, who took Brown’s cape as Brown ordered, “Put it on him!” and now Michael had the cape. The meaning of the moment changed; it became Brown benevolently bestowing his gift onto a kid. Now
he
owned the moment.

Though by that time Jackson had developed his own innate style, to get there, he had studied and absorbed Brown’s moves: the splits, the one-legged glide, the essence of the moonwalk. In a 1970 interview, Jackson described Brown taking him aside and demonstrating tricks with the microphone. At the Jackson 5’s audition for Motown Records, the first song they did was Brown’s “I Got the Feelin’,” and young Michael performed his very best tribute for the talent scouts.

They knew each other well, and in later days, when Jackson was down or in trouble, he would call Brown in search of advice or reassurance. For all that, they were superstars, competitive and alone, and after Jackson was an adult, the two hovered around each other with anxious unease. Fred Wesley: “I saw them together one time, it was the most amazing thing you ever saw. Michael was looking at James as if he was looking at God, and James was talking fast ’cause he was nervous because Michael Jackson was in the room with him. I couldn’t believe it! I thought, here are two of the greatest entertainers in the world and they affect each other this way. But I think insecurity is inherent in all stars…”

A full-page ad appeared in
Variety
in June 2003, announcing that, “Due to Mr. James Brown and Mrs. Tomi Rae Brown’s heavy demanding tour schedule, they have decided to go their separate ways. There are no hard feelings…” One thing that made it strange was that the couple was touring together, so conflicting work schedules shouldn’t have been a problem.

Whatever the matter, they were together again by the end of the year when Brown received a Kennedy Center Award in Washington, D.C. It
was an auspicious evening: the fellow awardees (Carol Burnett, Loretta Lynn, Mike Nichols, and Itzhak Perlman) and dignitaries working their way through a ceremonial Washington reception line. When Brown made his way to General Colin Powell, the two slapped palms.

A month after that career-capping moment, another. James and Tomi Rae were arguing in the bedroom. There was a struggle and she called the police. She had scratches and bruises on her right arm and hip and told officers that he had threatened to hit her with an iron chair. There was a scuffle with the police, in which Brown’s green terrycloth robe was ripped. The mug shot that the police passed out to the public that January 2004 day showed a disoriented-looking man with thickly matted hair, unshaven, the pallor of exhaustion across his face. The image was picked up by countless newspapers and magazines around the world.

Every day of his life since 1956, before Brown stepped out of his house, he asked himself a single question: Do I look like someone people would pay money to see? His hair had been so lovingly tended over the years, soaked in relaxer, that he invited people to touch it, bragging that it felt “just like hospital cotton.” When he stepped out his teeth gleamed, his face was imperial. He was expoobident. The infamous mug shot brought mocking laughter, as well as frank amazement that a seventy-year-old man was living the wild life. Eight days later, he and Tomi Rae were on the stage at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York, and he serenaded her with “You Send Me.”

Still a rigid disciplinarian, Brown kept his band, now called the Soul Generals, tight and alert. When you did something he didn’t like, his judgment was swift. “Sometimes for punishment he would make you sit on the side of the stage in full uniform. He’d tell you to just sit there and the whole audience would know,” said Tomi Rae. “Then he’d say, ‘You learned your lesson?’ And we would say we had.”

Musical director for the band was Keith Jenkins, a redheaded
Georgian whose feet were solidly on the ground. “My attitude was, we were the last James Brown band, so we ought to be the most comprehensive,” said Jenkins. “We’re probably not going to have any hits of our own, not going to be known for ourselves, so we ought to be the most thorough.” Jenkins and the band learned dozens and dozens of less-played Brown tunes, and sought to get them back into the show. Brown would listen to them play, but if this was tribute he wasn’t much feeling it.

He would bark, “What are you playing on such and such a number?” and Jenkins would offer a guitar part. “Naw,” Brown would say dismissively.

“I’m playing the way they cut it, Mr. Brown.”

“Well they
cut
it wrong.”

One day Brown came in as they were rehearsing “Cold Sweat,” and he had a lemon-sucking look on his face, yelling out, “What key are you playing it in?” “D, Mr. Brown,” came the answer. “No wonder you playing it wrong,” he said triumphantly. “‘Cold Sweat’ is in G.”

“But Mr. Brown, the record is in D.”

“They cut it wrong!”

So the band spent a whole rehearsal re-voicing “Cold Sweat” into a new key. “Do you know how hard that is, especially for the horns?” said Jenkins. In the dressing room before a show they nervously held a meeting, because the transposed “Cold Sweat” still wasn’t quite working. Throwing caution to the wind, they played it that night the old way, in the regular key.

Halfway through the song, a smiling Brown turned around and gave the band the thumbs-up, and kept right on singing.

H
e had just finished a two-week tour through Canada in fall of 2004 when a visit to the doctor revealed a growth on his prostate. He had surgery in December, which he declared a success. After three weeks at home, he was back on the road. At a press
conference for the Live 8 concert in Edinburgh, Scotland, the following summer, Brown was asked how the cancer had affected him. He acted liked this was another hypothetical. “When I’m ripping and running, I don’t have time to worry about the situation,” he barked back. “A lot of people have the same thing and I pray for them.” Next question.

T
he Augusta airport is not such a big place, and he was easy to spot whenever he passed through. A kid was waiting for his mother’s plane to arrive when he saw Brown. He began talking to the singer, and then talking some more, and, when his mother finally walked off her plane, there was Brown, holding up a sign reading, “Welcome Home Mom.” He told her Augusta had survived all right in her absence, but was even better now that she was home.

He acted like that in other places. But Augusta was a city full of such stories, and they can’t all be attributed to public relations—Augusta
mattered
to him. He wanted the respect of his neighbors, and wanted to be loved when he went out in the streets. But it was complicated. Brown had a reputation around town for not paying his bills, for promising things he forgot to deliver. And there were plenty of folks who were never going to like him because he was the most famous black man in town.