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Kira Cochrane on James Brown:
still toting a brand new bag
He's always been an original. A
true one-off. Still, despite this reputation, no one could have
predicted James Brown's alleged inventiveness when it comes to
chat-up lines. While some men opt for the romantic come on, and
others are more direct: 'Get your coat. You've pulled,' Brown
seems to have created his very own approach. He claims that he
has bull testicles. This allegation comes from Lisa Ross
Agbalaya, a former employee of the self-proclaimed 'sex
machine'. On May 19 of this year she brought a $1m lawsuit
against Brown for unfair dismissal and sexual harassment. She
claims that he backed up his bull's testicle story, which does,
after all, need some justification, by stating that the
government had given him the appendages so that he could
ejaculate "harder and stronger than ever". Apparently
he also told her that she was "built like a stallion, just
right for riding," before offering her some zebra-print
underwear. If the allegations are true, then Brown should
rethink his approach to women. His animal metaphors are getting
a bit dated.
Of course, this isn't the first
time that Brown has found himself in court. Besides lawsuits,
he's been arrested a number of times, with each allegation
creating a new dent in his reputation. That's a pity, given his
credentials as a strong African-American role model. Coming to
prominence in the late Sixties, an optimistic period in American
racial politics, he was a key proponent of Black Pride. While
his peers at the Motown factory were churning out
assimilationist soul, Brown took to the floor with hits like Say
it Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud - electing himself Soul
Brother Number One in the process. He backed his musical
statements up with action: financing black education, supporting
Martin Luther King and encouraging strict moral standards. Brown
strove hard to establish himself as an unflinching symbol of
black power.
He was also hugely successful
commercially. Brown has never geared his music to the mass
market yet has racked up 98 chart hits over a 39-year period,
second only to Elvis's total. Like Elvis, his success has always
been in jeopardy from his personal problems. Brown faces an
ongoing challenge to protect his hard-won position as a role
model from the slings and arrows of his own outrageous behaviour.
His story began in the poor
Southern town of Augusta, Georgia. Sent there from his family's
backwoods home aged five, it was hoped that Brown's relatively
affluent aunt could provide a better start for the young boy.
This turned out to be partly true. It was in her brothel, after
all, that he discovered the power of his voice. Singing and
dancing, he used these early performances to entice soldiers
from a nearby army camp to his aunt's establishment. He also
mastered other forms of entertainment, playing the piano, drums
and guitar.
While still a teenager in the
late Forties, Brown faced his first conviction for an armed
robbery charge. Given the poverty around him, and the scant
opportunity for a poorly educated black man, for he himself had
left school in the seventh grade, this could have spelt the end
of Brown's ambitions as a performer. But with the help of his
friend, singer Bobby Byrd, Brown was granted parole. The pair
went on to start a gospel group together, The Flames, which soon
became known as James Brown and the Famous Flames. It was with
this group that Brown had his first major R'n'B hit, Please,
Please, Please in the mid-Fifties.
A few more songs appeared in the
charts at irregular intervals until in 1963 Brown and his band
hit it big with the album Live at the Apollo. This was the first
recording to capture the essential James Brown. Singing to a
live audience his energy was palpable, his screaming, hollering
brilliance electrifying the theatre. The album achieved an
incredible feat, making it to number two in the mainstream
charts, despite being a hardcore R'n'B recording that made no
concessions for a white audience. Brown and his music had broken
through.
With this success the group, now
called the James Brown Revue set off down the path of
innovation. They'd already started to explore jazz and
Latin-influenced rhythms on Live at the Apollo, and as their
music progressed Brown experimented with his singing. Lyrics
were increasingly replaced by grunts, screams, foot stamping and
yelling, as the music became more and more elemental. He was
already at the forefront of the soul revolution that had
sprouted from R'n'B, and his musicians were well on the way to
creating a new form: funk. By 1965 and the release of hit single
Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, they'd cracked the code completely.
The original meaning of the word
funk or funky is 'a rank, fetid smell'. In changing the meaning
of the term, and using it to describe music that was in the
words of The Soul of Black Folk Thesaurus: deeply raw and
soulful; with a relentless groove, Brown and his peers typified
the African-American ability to turn a negative label into
something positive. It was this cultural alchemy that defined
Brown's image from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies, his
most notable period of social activism. In this era, for
example, his televised pleas for peace helped stop the riots
that erupted after Dr King's assassination. As he would say
years later, he always wanted: "to be the one who took the
low side and made it the high side."
The strength of Brown's charisma
and appeal as a performer sears through the accounts of
musicians who worked with him at the Revue's peak, when the band
were pumping out hits like I Got You (I Feel Good) and Cold
Sweat. Sax player Maceo Parker, for instance, comments in
Cynthia Rose's 1990 biography of Brown: "James already had
just some little extra something. And it wasn't necessarily
singing. It had more to do with performing itself. I could sit
and watch his show and see him take the level of excitement, and
just keep it at a point. Keep it at a point and then bring it up
a little bit, then bring it back down, then move it right back
up. He had real control, real rapport with people's
emotions." Brown's former trombone and keyboard player,
Fred Wesley, agrees. "I've got to give James credit because
he allowed me to be creative - he made it possible for me to be
ultra-creative. Take a tune like Doin' It To Death (1973). I
would never, ever, in my wildest imagination have thought of
doin' something like that. It's my creation, but it's what he
gave me to create with. He would give you these little,
unrelated elements, sometimes not even musical, and say 'make
something out of it'."
While the group gelled musically,
everyday life with the James Brown Revue became chaotic and
emotionally messy. As Brown's fame grew, so did his arrogance
prompting a stream of walkouts that saw the band's line-up
mutate regularly. Speaking about this upheaval decades later in
an interview with Cynthia Rose, childhood friend Bobby Byrd
summed up the musicians' feelings about Brown the man, as
opposed to Brown the performer. "As the money got bigger
the attitudes changed. James didn't remember that we were all
there for each other. He forgot who first went to bat for him,
who got him out of prison, who took him into their home. He
forgot who helped create his thing; he started to think it was
all him. I think it's one of his failings - you get too big and
you forget the bridge that bring you over," says Byrd. Fred
Wesley concurs: "After the show you had to deal with
James's personality... where he liked to rehearse and
rehearse... and needle and needle, complain and complain. Just
generally make life miserable for his bands."
Perhaps it was this move from
pride to arrogance that sent Brown into the musical hinterland
in the mid-Seventies. Perhaps it was just disco. Whatever the
cause, Brown was to spend the next ten years in the critical
desert, his act wilting and the hits drying up. When he emerged
from the cultural wilderness it was to greet a new youth
audience, who'd encountered his gutteral growl through samples
on rap standards such as Eric B and Rakim's Paid in Full.
Building on this new popularity, Brown seemed to be on the verge
of a serious comeback in 1986 with the soundtrack hit Living in
America. Before he could cement his following though, Brown was
pulled under by his most serious, and legendary, arrest.
Like Brown's recent visit to the
courts to argue over his testicles, his 1988 arrest was
perfectly suited to a National Enquirer double-page spread,
being both bizarre and funny. On the page the events read like a
Tarantino script doctored by John Waters. The offence took place
in Augusta, during an insurance salesman seminar. Allegedly
under the influence of the drug PCP, Brown burst into the
conference room, pointed a pistol at the assembled salesmen and
demanded, "Who used the bathroom without my
permission?" He continued his vaudevillian performance by
speeding away, starting a police chase, upending his car and
emerging from the wreck singing Georgia. He was convicted on
assault and weapons charges and sentenced to six years
imprisonment.
It was this disgrace that brought
the black community out in sympathy with the singer. For faced
with Brown's very public downfall people were reminded of the
social commitment he'd shown in the Sixties and Seventies, as a
cultural leader at the forefront of change. A wave of peaceful
but powerful 'Free James Brown' sentiment alerted a new
generation to his influence. A negative had once again been
turned into a positive. Brown served almost three years, before
emerging from prison to a new audience and renewed fame.
Brown might have been expected to
treat his post-prison period as well-deserved retirement, he
could have retreated to Augusta, Florida or New England and
spent time growing tomatoes in the sun, but the hardest working
man in show business is loath to slow down. Brown just might be
unstoppable. In the decade since his release he's been
performing 150 shows a year and getting in as much trouble as
ever. In January 1998 he was hospitalised by his daughter,
Deana, who reported to the Police that he was acting strangely.
On arriving at his Beech Island residence in South Carolina,
deputies found two rifles, shell casings and a small stash of
marijuana. After Brown's short hospital stay they arrested him.
For charges of marijuana possession and unlawful use of a
firearm he was ordered into a 90-day rehab programme. In a
statement to the press he denied any drug problem. "I have
bad eyes," he said, explaining his use of the weed.
Brown's still seems determined to
seal his status as a role model. Speaking to Rolling Stone on
the release of his 1998 album I'm Back, he commented: "I'm
the same man who said, 'Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud'.
I'm the same man who told kids to stay in school, don't be a
dropout. I'm the man who stopped the race riots after Dr King.
I'm the man who helps out with 36 different colleges for
underprivileged kids. I'm going to bring all those principles,
all those morals back. Also you need to set goals for young
people that make sense. We need to think of not degrading
women."
His last statement may ring
hollow for Lisa Agbalaya. It's worth remembering that the jury's
still out on her lawsuit. For now, despite his many arrests,
James Brown doesn't really seem to have hurt anyone badly.
Shocked a few insurance salesmen into reconsidering their lives,
maybe. Used a few illegal substances, maybe. But nothing that
you wouldn't expect from your average rock star. On balance, he
does seem to deserve the position of a strong African-American
role model. At the age of 67 he's still doing the splits and
he's still committed to the struggle for racial equality. Maybe
I'm just being lenient, though. It's hard to resist a man who's
still got the funk. Even if his chat-up lines are past their
prime.
James Brown is billed to appear
at the Chichester Jazz Festival, July 12 and Essential Festival,
Brighton, July 15.
copyright New Insight 2000
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