Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  The madman is happy. He disappears, and Pee Wee and Charlotte move on. At the ice cream parlor, the shop owner, a young woman, greets him by name. Pee Wee grunts his greeting, sits down, and orders an ice cream called “gin and tonic.” I sit with him. I’m amazed at how much of a local he is.

  After the shop owner takes my order and wanders off, I turn to him and ask, “Pee Wee, would you ever leave here? Maybe come back to America to live someday?”

  Pee Wee, his wonderfully cute face and playful dark eyes moving about the room, scoops up his ice cream and regards it carefully, holding the spoon before his brown face, a face still smooth and cherubic despite his years. He glances outside the window at the lovely shops, the gorgeous old brick walkway, the laughing mothers chatting as they push baby carriages, the passersby who smile and wave at him through the window.

  “If I do,” he grunts, “I’m walking there on my hands.”

  —

  There are probably two hundred musicians who went through James Brown’s band or played on one of his records over the course of his fifty-one-year career. Of that number, probably ten contributed key components to his sound. None were more important, lesser known, and less credited than trombonist Fred Wesley and the man he learned from, Pee Wee Ellis.

  It’s a complicated piece of business, to describe the originality of a music that had no previous label until these guys got to it, partly because music is a continuum. Soul music, or rhythm and blues, had pieces of life, plenty of it, before James Brown or any of his musicians got to it. For example, Brown’s bassist Bernard Odum, who arguably had as much to do with James Brown’s early sound as anyone, started with Brown as a pickup player back in the fifties, when Brown was traveling solo on the chitlin circuit. His looping Fender bass lines on dozens of James Brown’s hits, lines that floated above the beat at times and at other times thundered in concert with the kick drum, are a signature element of the James Brown sound. Yet Odum, who started out swinging the blues, is relatively unknown even within music circles. Similarly, Jimmy Nolen, Brown’s greatest guitarist, along with Hearlon “Cheese” Martin and Alphonso “Country” Kellum, is a key creator of the melodic, nitpicking guitar licks that are sampled on thousands of records and copied on millions of cheap computer keyboards sold today. He, too, is virtually unknown. The fact is, James Brown’s band, the 1965–69 version, fronted by Pee Wee, was, I would argue, the greatest group of rhythm and blues musicians ever assembled.

  Music experts can argue this point till they’re blue in the face, I suppose, but Motown, for all its dazzle and polish, did not have the grit and fire of the James Brown sound. Motown had a genius—Stevie Wonder—and the Jackson 5, and other indomitable forces, like Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, the Supremes, and extraordinary writing teams like Holland-Dozier-Holland and Ashford and Simpson. And there were others before Motown as well: great bands of the 1950s from Memphis, the underrated, killer soul groups out of Philadelphia International Records in the seventies, and unmatched soul singers like Aretha Franklin and Ruth Brown, the likes of which we will never hear again. But even Aretha, for all her soul and all her tight rhythm sections, could not match the burning fire and individuality of the James Brown sound. They were different sounds. Different musicians. Different cities. Different blacks. But James Brown’s uniqueness stood him above them all.

  The problem with the categorization of “soul” is that it’s a generic term that means nothing and everything. It’s like the term “Christian music.” It’s a label. A sales term. The label leaves out legions of heavy influences and creators whose previous contributions to the form actually made Brown great, including two grandfathers of rock ’n’ roll, Lionel Hampton and especially the deeply talented Louis Jordan. Jordan, the 1940s Arkansas-born saxophonist, singer, and composer whose stage antics and theatrical approach Brown later aped and modernized, is one of America’s secret musical treasures. Jordan had a tremendous effect on Brown and his contemporaries Little Richard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson. In terms of polish, slickness, musical dexterity, and entertainment value, Jordan and his Tympany Five were virtually unmatched at their height. They laid down a groove in dance and swing shows that drove audiences wild. That band was a well-trained, impeccably dressed musical outfit, delivering swing melody with military precision, playing behind Jordan’s laughing wisecracks and show-business guffaws and gags with the efficiency of a groove machine—one that was nearly as tight as Count Basie’s band and more fun to dance to than Duke Ellington, who, by contrast, fronted a cadre of knockout soloists playing serious compositions. Jordan’s influence on American pop music has never, to my knowledge, been given more than cursory attention. As for vibraphonist and percussionist Lionel Hampton, Quincy Jones, one of the greatest record producers in American musical history, began his career as a teenage trumpeter and arranger with Hampton’s band. Q told me that Hampton was the first to introduce electric bass into the rock ’n’ roll genre, in the early fifties, via his bassist Monk Montgomery, brother of the great guitarist Wes Montgomery. He insists that Hampton was one of the first real rock ’n’ rollers. And while I’m busy hurting people’s feelings and riling up music experts, I might as well finish the job by throwing in a nod to legendary Latino musicians like Chano Pozo, Machito, Mario Bauzá, and the great Tito Puente, who the late Jerome Richardson, the tenor player and pioneer jazz flutist, said was a far greater figure in the development of American music than he was ever given credit for. Richardson worked in Lionel Hampton’s band back in the forties, and said Hampton’s band often played opposite Puente’s at New York City dances. “Tito’s band,” Richardson said simply, “used to give us the mumps.” Puente and America’s Latino musicians are rarely even mentioned in the discussion of the evolution of soul and jazz, but even the most cursory hearing of their music shows its heavy stamp on that sound—and vice versa.

  This question of “who created the music” is, therefore, sticky business, particularly when discussing Brown. It’s complicated by the fact that Brown’s music, fully evolved, is more easily, in my mind, compared to Count Basie’s or Duke Ellington’s than to any simple rhythm and blues group, because the “James Brown sound” was an intricacy of shifting parts that moved harmonically, often in counterpoint, back and forth, up and down, patternlike, with each pattern combining to make a whole. An entire industry of samplers, sequencers, and computers, the staple of hip-hop music, is clear evidence of its complexity. That music came from someone—from many someones. Not just one. And not just Brown.

  But much of that sound harkens back to the heavyset man who now sits before me in the parlor of his home, with his horn on a stand in the corner facing a music stand that is open to page 34 of Franz Wohlfahrt’s 60 Studies, Op. 45 for the violin, a book of arpeggios and études he practices on the saxophone.

  As a fellow saxophonist, I look it over. “Man, this is hard,” I say.

  “I’m working on something,” Pee Wee replies. “I got a concert with Yusef Lateef coming up in Paris. I gotta practice.”

  Pee Wee Ellis has gotta practice. After forty-five years of being one of the most unique voices in the music world, co-composer of at least twenty-six James Brown songs, including “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Licking Stick,” and “The Chicken,” he’s still practicing. And I haven’t picked up my horn in months.

  I change the subject. “Let’s talk about James Brown,” I say.

  “Can’t we talk about something else?” he asks.

  —

  Spin back to late 1964. James Brown was at a musical crossroads. His seminal song “Out of Sight,” which took the I-IV-V chord, twelve-bar blues a giant step closer to soul, with its lesser chord movement, had, in part, been dreamed up by saxophonist Nat Jones, Brown’s principal arranger and music director. Brown was in his prime then, and a fury to work for: endless rehearsals, cheap salary, constant yelling, heavy demands, fines for small infractions like shoes not shined properly or missin
g an entry. Jones, Pee Wee remembers, was already showing signs of mental illness. He would later lose his mind completely and fall into such despair that when soul sideman Curtis Pope, who was with Wilson Pickett and the Midnight Movers, saw him at a gig in Florida, Pope was shocked. “I couldn’t stand it,” he says. “I reached in my pocket and gave him two hundred dollars.”

  But Jones had only basic music-arranging skills. And when Brown noticed his musical director farming out the chart writing and arrangement duties to the quiet new tenor man he’d just hired from Rochester, New York, he moved Jones aside and tossed the gig into Pee Wee’s lap.

  “Not an easy thing,” Pee Wee says. “Back then, I didn’t quite know what the gig was.”

  “What was it?” I ask.

  “It was a hard road.”

  Pee Wee had already come on a hard road. He was born Alfred Bryant in 1941 in Bradenton, Florida, an “outside child” to Garfield Davoe Rogers, Jr., son of a prominent middle-class minister, who met Pee Wee’s mother, Elizabeth, when both were college students at the prestigious black Bethune-Cookman College. Garfield gave all his boys a name with the initials “G.D.” save Pee Wee. Young Pee Wee was a shy, skinny, withdrawn child, close to his mother, and at age seven was coming to the awareness of his “outside” status, which in that tight-knit community was no badge of honor. One afternoon he opened his grandma Clyde’s bureau drawer and found a saxophone. “I don’t know why it was there, or whose it was,” he tells me. “I can still smell the mildew.” He removed the horn, took it down the street, sat under a tree near a gravel road, put his mouth to it, and found trust.

  All his life, up to that moment, Pee Wee had never known trust. No one could explain to him why adults talked about him in hushed tones, or why he, the grandson of one of the town’s most respected black ministers, had to walk to school alone, past his grandfather’s house, where no one acknowledged him. No one could explain why his quiet, gentle mother had to drop out of her prestigious college to work odd jobs, washing white folks’ clothing, scraping by to survive. The world was a place full of hurt. But that afternoon, when he placed his hands around that saxophone, the hurt fell away and there was earth beneath his feet. “I felt like I had something to stand on,” he says.

  In 1949, when he was eight, his mother wed a kind amateur musician named Ezell Ellis, a U.S. army veteran. Ezell was a resourceful, openhearted man who took Pee Wee as his own, giving the young boy his last name, and moved the family to Lubbock, Texas. Ezell promoted gigs for a living, and Lubbock was a stop on the chitlin circuit. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of a local teacher named Roy Roberts at the all-black Dunbar Junior High, his adopted son Pee Wee became a standout clarinet player. Pee Wee was so gifted that Ezell often fetched him out of bed to play piano at the local juke joint with the bands that came through town. Pee Wee’s mother protested, but Ezell calmed her fears. “Pee Wee’s got a special thing,” he said. “He’s got a special talent.”

  “He gave me something I never had before,” Pee Wee says. “He gave me love from a father. I learned a lot from him.” Ezell opened a hamburger stand outside their house that constantly lost money. Customers would eat and pay in favors, or kindness, or not at all. Ezell didn’t care. He was a happy man with a big heart. He had an ease with people that was infectious. He was never afraid to show love. “Do right by people,” he told his son. “Do right by people and the Lord will watch out for you all your days.”

  But the Lord also moves the earth in ways beyond understanding, and when Pee Wee was fourteen, Ezell’s kindness cost him his life.

  Working as a promoter, Ezell brought a black band into a white juke joint one night. The band was full-out blasting and a white woman took to the floor with too much to drink. This was west Texas in the 1950s. A drunk white woman on a crowded dance floor was a toxic concoction in the powder keg of race and class that was the American South.

  Ezell moved to gently help the reeling lady off the dance floor, and before anyone could intervene to help, a white man leaped out of the kitchen and stabbed Ezell in the stomach with a kitchen knife, then fled.

  Ezell staggered outside and collapsed. He was taken to a local white hospital that refused to treat blacks and died in the hospital hallway, waiting to see a doctor. He was a U.S. army veteran. A man with a wife and family. His killer was never caught. And just like that, the earth vanished from beneath Pee Wee’s feet again. “Here I am, fifty years later,” Pee Wee said, “and I still can’t understand it.”

  Pee Wee’s mother grabbed her son and his two sisters and hopped a night train. The four didn’t get off the train until they arrived in Rochester, New York, damn near Canada, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. She enrolled Pee Wee in an integrated high school. His classmates were white kids, kind, generous students, but by then he had retreated back into the solitude and comfort of the only thing outside his family he could trust: the horn.

  Two years later, two students from the renowned Eastman School of Music—Ron Carter, twenty, who would go on to become a jazz legend, and trumpeter Waymon Reed, then eighteen, who should have become one—were among a group of musicians jamming on the bandstand at Rochester’s Pythodd jazz club, when Pee Wee, then sixteen and skinny as a mop handle, walked in, pulled out his tenor, and burned his way into local history. “Brother, you look awful young to be in here,” Waymon said. “I bet you ain’t old enough to drive.”

  “I ain’t come here to drive.”

  The two became good friends—in time Pee Wee would serve as best man at Waymon’s wedding to a lovely beauty named Greta, before his second marriage, to jazz queen Sarah Vaughan—but after that summer the two parted ways. Pee Wee drifted to New York, spent a summer studying tenor with the great saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and, after a short stint at the Manhattan School of Music, got a job playing tenor and clarinet with a traveling circus. He hawked his diamond ring in Wisconsin so he could steal away from the circus and buy a ticket to see tenor saxophonist John Coltrane in Chicago, who in those days was the talk of the jazz world. Pee Wee chatted with the jazz giant, one of two tenor giants of that era, his former teacher Sonny Rollins being the other. Coltrane blew his mind so much that Pee Wee hung around Chicago the next day and meandered over to the motel where the saxophone great was staying. He walked up to Coltrane’s room and heard Coltrane, a known practice fanatic, inside the room, practicing.

  “Trane was a gentle cat,” Pee Wee says, “but he let it be known that he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was practicing.” Pee Wee, dying to talk to Trane, raised his hand to knock, then thought better of it.

  But what he heard inspired him, and he absorbed Coltrane’s penchant for practice and Sonny Rollins’s originality to create his own sound. In his later years, he would become a respected producer and tenor player in jazz, working with greats Oliver Nelson, Dinah Washington, Esther Phillips, Duke Jordan, Sonny Stitt, Frank Foster, King Curtis, Lee Morgan, and legendary producer Creed Taylor. He was beginning to make his mark in jazz in 1965, and had just finished an organ-trio tour with Sonny Payne, Count Basie’s fabulous drummer, when he got a call from Waymon Reed, the trumpeter he’d first met years back at the Pythodd club in Rochester. That phone call would set the course of Pee Wee’s musical life for the next forty years.

  Waymon said, “Hey, Pee Wee. I’m working with James Brown. Want a gig?”

  “Yeah, I want a gig,” Pee Wee said. Back then, he’d barely heard of James Brown. But he needed the money.

  “Come to Washington, DC. I got a job for you.”

  Pee Wee packed his bags and left for James Brown’s world, leaving behind a childhood that never was.

  —

  Pee Wee wasn’t long on the set before Brown removed the mentally unstable Nat Jones from the music director’s chair and placed Pee Wee in it. And Pee Wee almost joined Jones in the nuthouse.

  Brown’s approach to creating songs is funny to talk about now, decades after the fact. Trombonist Fred Wesley, the other seminal coc
reator in the James Brown musical evolution, calls it the “la-de-da” method. That’s a funny, inside joke to musicians: la-de-da. Lots of singers I’ve worked with use it. They say, “It goes like this,” and sing “la-de-da….” They can’t read a lick of music, wouldn’t know a bass clef from a bottle of milk, but they know la-de-da. That’s no great sin, by the way. Wes Montgomery, Dave Brubeck, Buddy Rich, Irving Berlin, and pianist Erroll Garner couldn’t read music, and they were all superb musicians. Quincy Jones once told me that Garner, when asked about reading music, said, “Shit. People ain’t coming to see me read.” Conversely, I know tons of guys who can read fly crap off the wall, but they’re not great players. I know of a powerful Broadway contractor, for example, who not only reads music but has handled hundreds of Broadway shows—and plays at the level of a high school student. And while I’m at it, I might as well state the obvious: the guy is white, and despite Herculean efforts by the great composer Stephen Schwartz and Michael Kerker of ASCAP, who have spent more than two decades developing minority composers and lyricists through the ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop, many Broadway contractors seem allergic to black players. One spectacularly talented African American musician I know—I’ll call him Joe—challenged that very contractor on the issue of why he rarely hired black players to play Broadway shows. The contractor claimed that blacks didn’t read music, and had intonation issues, and couldn’t follow the conductor, and all sorts of jive.

  Joe got mad and said, “You forget, man. I’ve heard you play.” Joe didn’t work a mainstream Broadway show for years after that.

  But ultimately it boils down to the music. And someone other than Brown had to help him make it.

  In the early days of the Famous Flames in the fifties, Brown sat down on organ or drums with the lesser-skilled Bobby Byrd and Nafloyd Scott and hammered out blues-based hits for King Records. By 1964, the blues wasn’t enough. One lesson Brown learned after his 1955 hit “Please, Please, Please” ran its course and he had to push, shove, and scream his way through the chitlin circuit, barely staying one step ahead of the gaping maw that swallowed Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Billy Eckstine, and the whole “race records” crew from the thirties and forties, was that your music had to evolve. Lack of evolution gulped down Louis Jordan and Lionel Hampton; later it would eat Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, the Cold Crush Brothers, and the creative pioneers of rap without so much as a burp. The dream-gobbling machine known as the record industry, that self-sustaining combine that gobbles African American culture with merciless efficiency and presents the chaff as African American life—with the whole thing coming to a theater near you thirty years later as a Broadway show called Porgy and Bess, Five Guys Named Moe, or Dreamgirls—demands change. Brown watched the artists who could not evolve fall away, dying on the vine or spending their declining years as oldies acts, forced to run the film of their revolution backward in supper clubs to audiences who were moving on, or aging out.