Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  Dallas, considering Brown’s offer, confessed to Brown, “Mr. Brown, I don’t know anything about the entertainment business.”

  “I’ll teach you the entertainment business,” Brown said. “I need a man I can trust.”

  Dallas agreed, a decision that would cost him $300,000 in legal fees and years of headaches after Brown died. He came up with a plan to stop Brown’s slide. Brown had no cash, but just days after agreeing to represent Brown, on a handshake, Dallas walked into his hometown bank, the Bank of Thomson, Georgia, and borrowed $32,000 in his own name. He bought Brown’s house at auction, deeded it back to Brown for a dollar, and then used the rest of the money to put out several financial fires. Brown then sought a tax expert to address his $15-million debt to the IRS. He wanted a man who was completely honest and fastidious, one who had the experience to fight off the IRS. He approached Cannon, who worked as a senior accountant and administrator at a Barnwell, South Carolina, law firm, and who had a sterling reputation in a four-decade-long career. Brown sat in Cannon’s office, detailed his problem, and asked Cannon to work for him.

  Cannon, a careful and deliberate man, listened until Brown was finished, then said, “Mr. Brown, I’m flattered. But I’m about to retire.”

  “Please don’t retire,” Brown said. “I need you to clean this up for me.”

  Like Dallas, Cannon, a native of Columbia, South Carolina, had never worked for a black boss before. Like Dallas, he had grown up in a South where blacks and whites lived as a kind of dysfunctional family, with a familiarity that is hard for outsiders to understand. Cannon’s son, for example, was buddies with a black boy named Eric whom he regularly brought over to Cannon’s mother’s house to play. The black child and Cannon’s mother grew close—Eric called her Grandma, and she referred to Eric as her “grandson.” She cooked for Eric, looked after him, and admonished him when he did wrong, but one afternoon when her black “grandson” and her white grandson were playing in front of her house, she summoned both boys inside, pulled her white grandson aside, and said, “Don’t play with Eric in front of the house. Play in the backyard. I don’t want the neighbors to see.”

  Cannon, when he learned of it, scolded his mother.

  His mother was red-faced. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I love him, but…I just don’t want the neighbors to see.”

  Such is the complexity of race relations in America’s South, where race keeps you in a kind of grid in which you never know where to step. Blacks and whites together—but not together. Living as one, but not as one. Living as family, but a dysfunctional family. Cannon recalled that when he was a boy, a hardware-store owner near his grandmother’s Turbeville, South Carolina, home had a trained parrot in his store that would chirp, “Here comes a nigger!” every time a black person opened the door and walked in. I laughed when he told me that story, but Cannon sat there grimly. “Even as a child,” Cannon said drily, “I never thought that was funny.”

  James Brown offered him 5 percent of whatever he made, plus extra earnings and percentages of any major deals they put together. It was a gentlemen’s agreement. James Brown did not like to pay big salaries. He was afraid of contracts. He worked with Buddy Dallas the same way. “I won’t end up owing you money,” Brown promised. Cannon sized up Dallas. Dallas was a Georgian—and South Carolinians and Georgians have a historical mutual mistrust—but he saw Dallas as a straight talker and a man of achievement. And like Dallas, Cannon saw that he and Brown had a lot in common. They were honorable men, southerners, who believed in God, respect, a handshake, and hard work. Cannon, near retirement and financially secure, quit his safe job and agreed to join Brown’s team.

  Cannon’s first order of business was to attack the IRS problem. It was a mess, partly because Brown hid his cash everywhere. Moreover, Brown’s initial rise to prominence was under King Records founder Syd Nathan and Universal Music promoter Ben Bart. Both were brilliant Jewish pioneers who, by coincidence, both died in 1968. Brown effectively became self-managed after their deaths, going through a series of full- and part-time “managers,” “promoters,” and “road managers.” Those are amorphous titles in show business, by the way—they could mean anything. When I was playing tenor in a famous jazz singer’s band, a woman who did a short stint with us as a “photographer”—I never saw one picture she took—evolved into “road manager,” then later became “manager,” paying our salaries. Then she vanished completely—fired or quit, who knows. You don’t ask if you want to keep your job. Such was Brown’s organization. The few manager types he did trust over the years burned him. Some whom he should have trusted he did not. The upshot was that the boy who had grown up going to sandlot baseball games in Augusta with a ball and bat he’d bought with his shoe-shine money—and who would depart with his ball and bat if there was some disagreement—wouldn’t allow anyone to count, collect, or keep his money.

  Brown’s penchant for hiding cash is legendary among friends and associates. He was of that Depression generation who grew up when the banks closed their doors and left millions of people high and dry. That generation hid their money in mattresses, stuffed it into cookie jars and under floorboards. My mother was that way. She hid quarters and five-dollar bills. Brown, on the other hand, hid thousands of dollars in cash—in vases, safes, buried under trees and in gardens, hidden in the floorboards of a car, under rugs in far-distant hotels that he’d visit every year while touring. For the last twenty years of his life, he walked around with a pocket full of $3,000 in cashier’s checks, $3,000 being the number that kept you beneath the IRS’s radar. Trumpeter Joe Davis, an ex–band member, recalls Brown telling his band, “If you want to keep your money, bury it in your yard.” Brown liked to keep money in every conceivable kind of place, apparently, except for the one place where it would have been safe. “Mr. Brown did not trust banks,” Cannon says. “Period. You could not make him.” Buddy Dallas concurs.

  Brown was just as fussy about money when it came to getting paid on his gigs. I’ve seen the brown-paper-bag routine myself—where the money passes from the promoter of the gig to the star in a little brown paper sandwich bag. Some bags even have stains on them to make it look like it’s loaded with a ham-and-cheese sandwich, except that the thing’s got enough cash in it to buy the pig and the farm. That was standard procedure for a lot of old entertainers, who had been burned by labels, recording executives, and those DJs who would collect their illegal payoffs to play their records and still wouldn’t play them. Some of those stars, including Brown, had gone through the routine of managers buying them a brand-new Thunderbird or the like, instead of royalties or payment, or who would supply them with dope or pay a few dollars for songs or recordings, some of which became classics that would sell forever. John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley were each paid about $150 per session to record Kind of Blue, an immortal jazz classic and one of the bestselling jazz records of all time. Among musicians, the stories abound: there’s a legend of one singer being hung by his heels from a tenth-story hotel window for not honoring a contract; there’s Sam Cooke’s mysterious murder. There’s another story I heard from a musician buddy, about a famous female soul singer who came to his city to record a car commercial. Before she sang a note, she made it clear that she didn’t want any residuals or royalties. All that fancy figuring, she said, never worked out. She wanted—and got—straight cash, $75,000 in American chips. She sang the sixty-second jingle and out the door she went. Those old stars had been burned so often, they didn’t fool around.

  The upshot of Brown’s money paranoia was that his finances were a disaster. By 1984, he resorted to the 1950s method of doing gigs, collecting the gig money in a suitcase or box—sometimes handing that box to Al Sharpton or Charles Bobbit or, later, another trusted road manager named Albert “Judge” Bradley—and playing ignorant about paying taxes. In 1972, he met Richard Nixon, who was running for president on the Republican ticket. Nixon called him a “national treasure.” Brown, who was bombed by the black press and fans
for associating with Nixon, ran with that “national treasure” bit when the IRS chased him down. He claimed he didn’t have to pay taxes because he was told by the president that he was a “national treasure.” Later, as part of an attempt to argue against IRS claims against him, he announced that he was part Indian and claimed, with a seemingly straight face, to be related to Geronimo.

  The IRS was not amused, and by the 1980s they came after him with both fists. “He had a show in Texas,” Cannon says. “The IRS came and took the money off the date. He couldn’t pay the band. They were stuck.” That was the financial state of affairs when Cannon was given marching orders to fix Brown’s financial life in 1992.

  “He didn’t even have a tax attorney,” Cannon says. “I went to his office to look at his records. They showed me a few files. I said, ‘This is all?’

  “They said, ‘The IRS took eight or ten boxes.’ ”

  Cannon tried to track the boxes down. “The IRS had them all over the place.” He flew to Atlanta, called Tennessee. “I never found all of them. I said to the IRS, ‘You’ve got to prove you have his records.’ ”

  “They said, ‘No, we don’t.’

  “I said, ‘You’ve got to show me.’ ”

  They could not produce them. The testy negotiations between Cannon and the IRS took two years. The IRS wanted $15 million and not a penny less. They threatened to toss Brown in the clink. Cannon, with James Brown’s shoddy records as ammo, found himself backed into a corner. He had no numbers to work with. The IRS, on the other hand, knew what Brown earned. But Cannon noted that the IRS negotiators seemed worried that Brown would go bankrupt, leaving the government empty-handed or able to collect only the maximum that bankruptcy would allow, which was then $1 million. Privately, Cannon knew that Brown would never declare bankruptcy. Brown had his pride. And Cannon understood that notion of “proper,” the southern mentality in which both were raised. Cannon understood that a man like James Brown, who insisted on being called “Mr. Brown” and who addressed everyone, even the lowliest worker, as “Mister” or “Miss,” a man who spent three hours after every exhausting gig sitting under a hair dryer so that people wouldn’t see him with his hair undone, looking ragged and improper, would never want the world to see him on his knees broke.

  Cannon knew that Brown would go to jail before he allowed himself to go bankrupt, but he packed that bullet in his gun anyway, and at the negotiating table, when it appeared that the IRS had him cornered, he discharged it.

  “We’re filing bankruptcy,” he said. It was a bluff.

  The bluff worked. The IRS backed down and asked to meet again in a week.

  A week later, the IRS agreed to settle the $15 million debt at $1.3 million—with two provisions. The first was that in the future, when dealing with Brown, they would deal with Cannon only, not the plethora of other Brown employees they had seen before. And secondly, “You’ll have to do Mrs. Brown’s taxes too,” they told him.

  That nearly killed the thing, because Cannon refused. Cannon and Dallas, the two men who revived James Brown’s career, distrusted Brown’s third wife, Adrienne, a makeup artist whom Brown had met on the set of a TV music show called Solid Gold. Both Cannon and Dallas can fill the room with stories of Adrienne’s wild behavior—stealing Brown’s money, stuffing his cash into closets and into ceilings, stealing silverware and bread from the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, reportedly stabbing one of Brown’s girlfriends in the rear end with a pair of scissors in a New York hotel suite. They can list her drug problems and expensive plastic surgeries—one of which killed her. She had Brown arrested four times between 1987 and 1995 for assault. Dallas calls her a “kleptomaniac” and “a committed drug addict.” But Brown loved Adrienne. He called her “my rat.” She was an intelligent, pretty woman of mixed-race heritage, a loyal wife who helped him in his comeback and stayed committed to him when he was imprisoned from 1988 to 1991 after the PCP-filled episode in Augusta that ended in a police chase. She tried to give him some semblance of family, inviting his various children to the house for the holidays to eat and commingle. Living with Brown was not easy. She told Brown’s friend Emma Austin, “Emma, I have to get high just to put up with his shit.”

  But Cannon did not trust Adrienne. He was on the receiving end when Brown would seek a few hours’ peace from her by driving his Lincoln to Cannon’s modest Barnwell house to tinker with Cannon’s collection of antique swords and lie on Cannon’s living room couch and complain about his wife’s spending. Cannon listened, powerless. That was a marriage issue, he thought. He knew that Adrienne was helping herself to too much of Brown’s cash, which created all kinds of tax and accounting headaches, but “You did not tell Mr. Brown what to do,” he says. “You simply did not.” And you did not tell Mrs. Brown what to do either. To make matters more complicated, Brown floated Cannon out as a shield against personal leeches. If someone asked Brown for a loan, he’d say, “See Mr. Cannon.” Then he would tell Cannon, “Tell ’em no.” If someone needed firing, Brown would say, “See Mr. Cannon,” and Cannon would do the firing. It created personal enemies within Brown’s family, his entourage, and among his old professional acquaintances, who would turn on Cannon viciously after Brown died. It also created a huge personal problem in Cannon’s house, because Brown, trusting no one, insisted on stashing a disturbingly high pile of cash in Cannon’s safe. Cannon rarely challenged his boss, but in the matter of storing Brown’s money, he resisted.

  “I told him all the time, ‘Mr. Brown, I am not a bank.’

  “ ‘Just hold it for me, Mr. Cannon. Hold it for me.’ ”

  Cannon reluctantly agreed.

  “Had I known what was going to happen, I would have never done it,” he says. “But who knew he was going to die suddenly?”

  The first time the villagers heard it was back in 2000. It was early afternoon on a gorgeous spring day in Frome, a town in Great Britain just thirteen miles from Bath. The shops were open. The workers had already gone off to the nearby Whatley and Merehead limestone quarries, and the streets were quiet—the commuters had long since hopped the trains to nearby Bristol and Warminster. Afternoon had settled into its familiar calm. Suddenly, echoing from the town cemetery, came a sound never before heard in the town’s twelve-hundred-year history.

  It was the sound of a man with a horn.

  A lone black man sat on the wall of the cemetery, right in front of Christ Church, playing a tenor saxophone. He was an American, it was rumored, though no one in the town was sure, because no one wanted to disturb him. Whatever he did, whatever he was doing on that horn, by God, it was gorgeous, so they said to one another, Leave him be. He’d been seen around town in the shops. He was said to be quiet and mild mannered, but nothing more was known about him. The Frome villagers, ever polite, did not ask. They understand artists in Frome—pronounced froom, as in broom. They know what it feels like to be different. That understanding goes back four hundred years to the Reformation, when the nonconformist Anglicans of Frome were killed for parting with the Protestants and Catholics and building their churches within a stone’s throw of the ancient cemetery where the black man sat. Don’t disturb him, they said to one another. Let him play.

  And so he played. He played that day and the next and in the days following, seated on the wall of the graveyard, working the horn, the harmonies, the scales and arpeggios, the songs he knew so well, the songs of his history, dressing the cemetery in the gorgeous melody and drifting beauty of jazz. That cemetery was full of the dead, but the horn man gave their memories bone and substance and sustenance. And when he was done with those in the graveyard, he turned the bell of his horn toward the town square. His thick tenor wail covered the walls of the village and the surrounding hills with melody, the supple notes echoing into the ears of the lorry drivers as they made deliveries on the narrow highway leading to Nunney.

  Fifteen years later, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, seventy-two, saxophonist and composer, student of the legendary tenor saxophone grea
t Sonny Rollins, the principal architect of James Brown’s sound and one of the most important figures in American musical history, walks down the streets of Frome like just another local guy. It’s a cool afternoon in 2012. He and his lovely British wife, Charlotte, are headed to a local ice cream parlor on Frome’s famed Cheap Street, a medieval stone avenue split by a tiny stream curved into its middle, a stream that has run along this stone street for at least a thousand years.

  As Pee Wee passes the shops, the merchants—manicurists, booksellers, antiques-shop owners, tea sellers—wave through their windows. Some come to their doors to greet him. Every hello is cheerful, every smile is warm. He’s the Legend Next Door.

  “Morning, Pee Wee!”

  “Aye, Pee Wee!”

  “Pee Wee!”

  “Pee Wee! How goes it?”

  Pee Wee moves along the street slowly, his wife at his side. “Going good,” he grunts, “Going good.”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, the village madman appears. This guy genuinely looks like a madman. Maybe he lives in the Blue House just up the road, the ancient stone building that once housed the poor. Or maybe he sleeps on one of the benches in front of the library, where the townsfolk like to gather to chat and read. Wherever he lives, he looks like his bubble has burst. He holds his head to the side a bit, as if it’s screwed too tight onto his neck; his cap is perched on his head like a loose bottle cap. He approaches Pee Wee, who is sporting a neat tweed Irish cap and a short jacket.

  “Pee Wee, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I got my clarinet back. I’m ready for another lesson.”

  “Okay. Later on.”