“Sure I am!”
“You got a good life, Bra. A good wife. You got a good business. Why you wanna leave that for show business? They’ll eat you like a piece of red meat.”
“I can take care of myself,” Leon said.
“It ain’t the music, Bra. It’s the money. Money changes people.”
“It won’t change me,” Leon said.
“Money will make you change,” Brown said. “Your heart may be the same. Your head may be the same. But if people knew you had millions of dollars, you couldn’t even stay in your own house.”
“I’d put up an electric fence and keep ’em out.”
Brown laughed and quit the subject, but Leon barked on about it so much that eventually Brown gave in. He produced several of Leon’s records himself in the late sixties and into the seventies. He brought in his own band, the J.B.’s—crack players, some of the best R&B players in the history of that genre—to play the sessions. The records were good. Leon played and sang soulfully, but the records ran into distribution issues and died. Leon, who would give a stranger his last dime, didn’t have the heart to be a slickster, paying off DJs and working angles between record companies, bands, the promoters, and all the other things that it takes to be a star. But only after Leon gave up on the idea did Brown confess, “Bra, I don’t need you in my band. I need you to be my friend.”
Leon never raised the subject again. Besides, he saw for himself the headaches the parade of hangers-on, cousins, second cousins, friends of friends caused his friend. Take Brown’s cousin Willie Glen, Aunt Honey’s son. Brown had shared a bed as a child with Willie Glen while staying in Aunt Honey’s house. In 2000, Willie Glen’s son, Richard Glen, robbed Brown’s office and then set it on fire, just to hide the robbery—the guy burned the entire office down. It shamed Brown to see his cousin’s son get locked up. He loved Willie Glen. And it didn’t stop there. In the 1970s, when his daughter Deanna was six and his daughter Yamma was three, Brown gave them writing credits for a couple dozen songs. It was a tax dodge. Twenty-seven years later the two sued him in federal court for $1 million for their cut of royalties. He settled with them for a sum far less, but the suit stung him. It was, Leon saw, always about the money. Everybody needed money: This guy borrowed money and never paid it back. That guy needed a car, so Brown got him a used car and the guy griped about not getting a new one. As soon as Brown dealt with that guy, another guy popped up with his hand out. And the women? His appetite for them drew the strong and the meek, the good-hearted and the cunning, and all of them chipped away at the man’s generosity, leaving him angry and spent. It never ended. Over the years, even the line of people at Leon’s barbershop who were trying to get to Brown through him had become a growing headache for Leon. But the door to James Brown—Leon let it be known—that door was closed.
—
In the earlier years, when Brown first became the King of Soul, these kinds of annoyances were ice cream and cake. Those were the fun years. Brown was young and strong, with girlfriends and cars and his own plane and three radio stations. He and Leon traveled to New York, to the West Coast, to West Africa. But in the later years, the weight of carrying that heavy load began to hammer at Brown. He never slept. He called Leon at all hours. He worried a lot and tried to hide it. His friends kept turning on him, mostly around issues of money. By the late eighties, his great musicians were leaving or gone: his great musical directors Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley had departed; Waymon Reed had joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers; Joe Dupars split for the Isley Brothers; Richard “Kush” Griffith, a gifted musician with perfect pitch, had left too—and that was just the trumpet players. The ever loyal sax man Maceo led a revolt. The crucial rhythm players bagged it as well. Drummers Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield. Bassist Sweet Charles Sherrell, with his easygoing disposition and deep talent, Sweet Charles, who played keyboards and bass, sang, and directed the show—who did everything, and whose solid grooves laid out the thundering bass of “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” who helped James keep his band together and pulled him out of bed when he was too tired or too high to go on—Sweet Charles grew tired of him and left. Brown always paid these guys, but who was paying him? He always gave, but who was giving to him? His wives, he’d driven off. His cruelty sent his girlfriends packing. There was no one who lived at his level who understood how pained he felt. A man who carries the troubled history of an entire people on his back and a twenty-four-piece band and a record company and three radio stations to boot cannot find peace. Brown was lonely. He remembered every snub, every promoter from the 1950s who’d called him a “black monkey,” every girl in high school who’d turned him down because his pants were too short or he wasn’t light-skinned enough. The memories kicked back on him at odd moments, twisted him like a pretzel, and, at times, made him unbearable to be around, and that’s when he began to reach for the drugs, the PCP, which he smoked secretly. It was so secret that even Leon never saw it. Brown wouldn’t let any of his close associates see it. Not the Reverend Sharpton, not Leon, not Charles Bobbit. Leon knew Bra wasn’t right, he could see in the way Brown acted that he was taking something, however he took it in.
Leon waited. He learned there was a time to share opinions with James and a time to be cool. Even when James was high, he knew, eventually the James he loved, the James who would laugh and wonder at his own success, who took the whole thing with a wink, would surface.
Brown loved that about Leon, the fact that Bra, whom he sometimes affectionately called Boston because it rhymed with Austin, knew the worst parts of him and never judged him, was never put off by his antics, understood and defended him, even to his wife, Emma, who sometimes objected to what she felt could be an uneven friendship: “You forget,” he’d tell her, “I chose him to be my friend. When I take a friend, I take them through thick and thin.” It was something Brown depended on. One of Brown’s favorite things in life was to come off the road, drop his bags at his Beech Island home, hop into his Lincoln, and roll by the modest ranch at 1932 Martin Luther King Boulevard in Augusta, telling the kids who were always gathered around Leon’s house, “Go fetch Mr. Leon.”
Leon would come to the door and peer through the screen to see Brown in his Lincoln at the curb with his head out the driver’s-side window hollering, “Bra! Let’s ride!”
They rode together for more than forty years: Brown, Brown’s wife of the moment, Leon Austin, and Emma, Austin’s wife of forty-two years. Across the state line to South Carolina they’d go, to Brown’s “home country”—to Williston and Blackville and Snelling, towns near old Ellenton—to, in Leon’s words, “meet Brown’s cousins,” and gorge at his favorite chicken stand, to wolf down sardines, cheese, and crackers at some godforsaken soul food spot that only Brown knew about. The argument would always be the same. “Why we gotta eat what you eat?” Leon would ask. “Let’s eat something else, Bra. I’ll pay.”
“Why you gonna burn your little money up? What’s the matter with sardines and crackers?”
Leon would always laugh. He knew it was senseless to argue. “How can someone express love or show love if they don’t know what it feels like?” he’d tell his wife. This was Brown’s way of showing love. You couldn’t argue with him. Just like when they were kids playing baseball. If there was a dispute on the ball field, James would take his ball and bat and go elsewhere. It wasn’t about sardines and crackers; it was about friendship, about paying a debt, because Leon also owed James Brown as well—and both men knew it. Brown made him appreciate what he had: One son. One wife. One home. One car. A normal life, not four wives and thirteen children; not thirty cars and a fifteen-room house that meant nothing to him. Leon owed Brown for helping him appreciate that gift. And in return, Leon let Brown express his love in the small ways Brown knew how. And for that reason, in Brown’s later years, when his marital, career, legal, and drug troubles dragged him to earth and he became irascible and almost uncontrollable, it was always Leon who would be summoned
to the Beech Island mansion by Charles Bobbit with a phone call and the words “Mr. Brown’s having trouble.”
Leon would hang up and rush out to Brown’s house to find Brown in bed, lying on his back, his knees propped up on a pillow.
“What’s the matter, Bra?”
“I don’t wanna work no more, Bra. Don’t wanna do no more shows. I’m tired. My knees hurt.”
Leon would ask one of the silent, frightened entourage standing about to fetch Brown’s hair dryer and comb and hair tools that always lay around the house, because Brown, from the time they were kids, was always funny about his appearance. Then he’d get to work on the hair, wash it, style it, then throw James under the hair dryer, not talking much, knowing how to be silent, because James would want to talk then and did enough talking for both of them, and with the hair dryer blasting, he couldn’t hear a thing you said anyway. James didn’t want to hear you, really. He just wanted company, not to be alone. He’d shout at Leon, and after he’d shouted himself out, Leon would shout back a few things, both of them airing out, Leon stating the problems of running his barbershop, Brown on the problems of running a multimillion-dollar enterprise that wasn’t, Leon knew, so multimillion anymore. They’d talk politics, and women, and cars, and religion. And afterward the two would head to the store for some ice cream—no drinks, no booze, no drugs, just ice cream. Something they couldn’t afford as kids. They’d eat enough to start a factory. Any kind they wanted.
Only then, usually on the way home in the car, with the smell of the swampy Savannah River pushing through the windows and Brown’s hair done and James feeling good and clean, and both full of ice cream, only then would Leon break in and get to the point.
“Bra, you got to get back to work.”
By then James had softened and he’d confess to Leon the real problem. Sometimes it was work. Or money. Or a promoter. Or a lawyer. Or the problem of playing small houses after years of doing big concerts. But mostly, it revolved around love. “Bra, when you go home,” Brown said, “you got a wife. Somebody to say hello to you who cares for you and will rub your feet.”
Leon never interfered with Brown’s tumultuous love life. The fact that it never worked out, he told his wife, was not his business. He neither judged nor gave advice. Rather, he always came back to the same business: “I understand, Bra. But you got to work. That’s what we do.”
And sure enough, the next day, James Brown, even when he was well past sixty and feeling ninety, would get up on creaky knees—even with prostate cancer eating at him, his teeth hurting from numerous operations, a man allergic to penicillin who could be floored by any ailment and could not get the normal respite because he was not a normal man—and he would flail at his life again.
More than any other man on earth, Leon Austin of Augusta, Georgia, knew how far James Brown had come, because it was Leon who, that first day back in 1941 when he met James in class when they were both eight years old, took him home, and told his mother, “Momma, this here’s my friend from school, James Brown.”
Mrs. Austin took one look at the two boys, her son and his little friend—snot in his nose, hair nappy, unkempt, ragged clothes—and said, “I can’t stand y’all.” She grabbed them both by the collar and carried them to the back of her kitchen, where she filled an iron tub with hot water. She took James’s clothes off. She took Leon’s clothes off. She threw both boys in the bathtub and scrubbed them down. And when she was finished, she dressed them both in Leon’s clothes and said, “Now I can stand y’all.”
They built a park for one of the world’s strongest men in Toccoa, north Georgia, a pretty town on the side of a mountain. Paul Anderson was the 1956 Olympic weightlifting champion. He was born in Toccoa. They have his Olympic team uniform in a museum downtown; it makes you wonder how a guy that small could lift so much. He once set the world record for the heaviest weight ever lifted by a human being—6,270 pounds in the back lift. A sixteen-ton granite marker is located at his birthplace. He’s the most famous guy this town has ever produced. Meanwhile, the local library file has about seven references to James Brown, who moved here when he got out of jail and spent his formative years here. Most of the old clippings are about Bobby Byrd, Brown’s once-famous sideman.
If a man’s dream can shoot into the night sky and glisten with the brilliance of a thousand stars, then die with the sizzle of water poured onto a match, then James Brown’s story ends right here. You can find it buried in the shade of a pleasant holly bush on a winding road in the Toccoa cemetery, underneath a tombstone that reads TEDDY LEWIS BROWN, 1954–1973.
Teddy was only nineteen when he died in a car accident in upstate New York. He and two musician friends, Arthur Ricky Roseman, eighteen, and Richard Young, thirty, were riding to Canada. All three were killed when their car crashed against a bridge abutment in Elizabethtown, New York. The inside rumor was that there was some drinking involved, but it’s just rumor, and Teddy wasn’t driving anyway.
James Brown had big plans for his first two children, sons Terry and Teddy. Terry, the youngest, was the brains, the legal mind. Also, the high school star athlete. Teddy, the elder, was the sparkle. He was a dancer, a singer. The wit.
Such is the level of smoke around James Brown that it’s hard to get the real story on Teddy. Everybody you talk to claims they were there, that Teddy had bad relations with his dad, that his dad gave him a sax and said, “Learn to play this,” that Teddy said things like, “I’ll show you, Daddy! I’m my own man.” It’s the usual drama, and much of it is nonsense. But all agree on this: Teddy had a gorgeous face, a beautiful smile, and deep talent, perhaps even more talent than his father. And he was all personality. Thirty-five years after Teddy’s death, the mention of his name still draws smiles to the faces of the old-timers in Toccoa. “He had unbelievable talent,” says Drew Perry, an undertaker and classmate of Teddy’s. “Teddy never met a stranger.” He was “a real special kid,” adds David Neal, a lifetime resident of Toccoa and friend of James Brown. His brother, James Neal, former mayor of Toccoa, told me, “Teddy’s funeral was the biggest this town ever saw.”
But the mention of Teddy’s name does not bring a smile to the lips of the tall, regal woman who sits before the fireplace of her tidy home on Prather Bridge Road. At seventy-two, Velma Brown, James Brown’s first wife, is a handsome woman, stylish, tall, with smooth brown skin, a beautiful smile, and the countenance of an African princess. She’s a straight-backed woman with down-home country wisdom and a quick, sharp sensibility that belies a deep thoughtfulness. She rocks in her chair and listens to her son Terry, fifteen months younger than Teddy, talk about his brother in low tones; what her firstborn son, Teddy, could have been, should have been, might have become. A television is glaring nearby, one of those old ones, big and boxy, with speakers. She ignores it. Her eyes glaze over as she listens. She is in another time, another place.
“Teddy,” she says calmly, “was just finding himself. Like young folks do.”
She broke down after Teddy Brown died. The wheels came off. She ate nerve medicine for two years, just to see straight. Only God held her up, and for that she was ever grateful. Because she had taught her boys to be strong. To have faith in His word. To seek learning; to stand outside the small town they lived in and look to the larger world—not cruise through life being sons of a superstar. Teddy’s trip to Canada, she knew, was not some fly-by-night attempt to drink and go buck wild and show his daddy he could be a man. He could have done that in New York City, where his father had an empty house, since James was mostly on the road. Or he could have gone to Atlanta, just two hours from her house. He could have found all the wildness he wanted there. Teddy went to Canada because he wanted to see the world. He wanted to be free, to think and be clear. He wanted to be Teddy Brown, not James Brown’s son. And she approved of that.
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