Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  He didn’t want that. Besides, he was hearing something different after his 1964 hit “Out of Sight.” He was hearing a downbeat. The downbeat—laying fat snare to the two and four of every bar—had expanded in Brown’s mind to a big hit on the one-beat of every other bar. He heard a new groove. And he needed the best players he could find to translate that groove, his “la-de-da” grunts and commands, into hits.

  It was not easy. For one thing, a band—any band—is hard to handle. And the 1964–65 version of the James Brown band that Pee Wee joined was not just any band. The players who would eventually fill out Brown’s outfit from roughly 1964 to 1969 would set the tone of American popular music for decades to come. The band was big, made up of male players and female singers, most from the South. Some were country boys, like drummer Clyde Stubblefield, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who grew up outside a railroad yard and emulated the “chug-a-chug” of the Southern Railway train that he heard passing his mother’s kitchen window every day when he was a boy. Others were all-stars in their cities, like trumpeter Richard “Kush” Griffith, from Louisville, Kentucky, who had perfect pitch and had played in his local symphonic youth orchestra. Violinist Richard Jones of Philadelphia was a jazz pioneer and one of the first blacks to attend what would later become the University of the Arts. Trumpeter Waymon Reed would leave Brown to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and later Count Basie. Bassist Bernard Odum was later replaced by bassist/pianist/vocalist Sweet Charles Sherrell, a music whiz from Nashville, and later the deep-grooving Fred Thompson of Brooklyn. Odum also brought to the band two fantastic young musicians from his Mobile, Alabama, home: drummer Jabo Starks and trombonist Fred Wesley, who would later take over Pee Wee’s job. Saxophonist Maceo Parker of Kinston, North Carolina, who contributed mightily to Brown’s sound as a soloist, later became a unique R&B star in his own right. Augusta-born reed man St. Clair Pinckney, with his trademark shock of white hair, was an underrated performer who, according to the inside joke, had been in the band longer than James Brown had. Jimmy Nolen, Hearlon “Cheese” Martin, and Alphonso “Country” Kellum’s guitar picking—Kellum also played bass—created what they called “that washing machine thing,” which would set the tone for pop guitarists for the next few decades.

  The records say it all. These men had grown up under segregation listening to the blues, jazz, and country. Some were hard men like Odum, a light-skinned, rough fellow who grew up in the tough “Down the Bay” section of Mobile and was known to carry a knife that he was not afraid to use. Drummer Stubblefield, though shy and quiet, was stubborn as a mule if you hit his button. Ditto about his more outgoing fellow drummer Jabo, who refused to accept fines when Brown levied them. These musicians were young, talented, and at times wild and unruly. Several were drinkers. A few smoked pot. Some read music with ease, while others couldn’t read music at all. Individually, with the exception of Ellis, Wesley, and Reed, they were not pure jazz soloists. But as a band, they were an unstoppable force. And the one who shaped them, and often stood between them and the taskmaster, was Pee Wee.

  Says trumpeter Joe Davis: “Pee Wee was the one who put the sound together, in terms of locking it in, translating what James wanted. That was Pee Wee.” The arrangements? “Mostly Pee Wee,” he says. Adds violinist Richard Jones, an exceptionally skilled reader and technician, “Pee Wee was the opposite of Mr. Brown. His gift was that he made even the guys who couldn’t read music musical. He guided them to their strengths. He was very patient.”

  The result of Pee Wee’s work is most evident in “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which Pee Wee wrote on the spot at three in the morning in a Los Angeles studio and recorded with thirty kids that Charles Bobbit had miraculously dug up from Los Angeles somewhere to sing the chorus. That song is drooping with jazz—the movement from the I chord to the IV chord, tightly voiced horns on a sharp nine chord, very unusual in pop music, even then, band hits accented by the snare of Clyde Stubblefield. Even today there is nothing like it. Pee Wee’s other works, “Mother Popcorn,” “Licking Stick,” and the instrumental “Chicken,” are long-standing favorites. “Chicken” is a jazz classic, generally assumed to have been written by the fretless-bass genius Jaco Pastorius. Another Ellis hit, “Cold Sweat,” is drawn straight from Miles Davis’s “So What.”

  “Miles affected everybody,” Ellis says. “He grew till the end of his life.” Even a novice can listen to Miles’s lead horn line on “So What” and the horn hits on “Cold Sweat” and hear it: they’re in the same key, but the difference is the groove. “So What” swings. “Cold Sweat” grooves.

  Let me take a moment to mention groove here. And funk. When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn’t stand funk. Their reasoning: it was technically simple. Unlike jazz, there was no harmonic or technical challenge, no furious chord changes that required mathematical efficiency in your head to figure out where the thing was going and how to make your knowledge of theory and harmony fit. Jazz requires a blend of split-second timing, skill, and training. It’s like playing basketball. You need a lot of skills to play basketball: running, jumping, shooting, defense, conditioning. On the pro level, you have to put all these things to use and shoot the ball with a guy your size or bigger sticking a finger in your eye with one hand, pulling your shorts down with the other, and calling your mother names. Jazz soloing is akin to that. Funk soloing, on the other hand, is more akin to playing baseball. Baseball requires athletic talent but specific learned skills that have to be exercised flawlessly. Hitting a curveball can only be learned through years of practice. No matter how gifted you are athletically, you cannot step up to home plate and hit an eighty-mile-per-hour major-league curve or splitter without learning how to do it. And you cannot swing at every pitch. You only get three strikes. So you have to recognize the pitch in a split second, decide where it’s going to break, adjust to it, and know when to swing. And you must do this flawlessly. Enough to stay on the team, anyway.

  That’s why funk is as challenging as jazz. You must know when to enter the groove, and what to play. Funk—any good music, really—requires space. Knowledge of when to throw in your small contribution and when to lay out. Musical silence is one reason trumpeter Miles Davis was such an extraordinary musician. He epitomized the use of space. There are gorgeous silences in Miles’s music. Many jazz players, especially horn players, can’t adapt to the demands of space that funk requires. They find funk frustrating and blow right past it. That’s why Brown’s longtime saxophone soloist Maceo Parker is so revered. There are dozens of horn players more skilled than Maceo. They have more chops. They play better, faster, more. But Maceo, like Miles Davis, knew when to play and when not to play. He knew how to groove. He played with simplicity, which is difficult. He played so rhythmically that he basically played drums on the sax. That’s the difference between him and most of today’s young players who try to ape his sound. Those who try to cop his sound are schooled on patterns, learned licks, various approaches to specific chord changes, things they learned out of books—things that were new when Charlie Parker played them in 1941, but sound old now. To play funk, you have to be less methodical, feel it, lay out, use space, understand that your moment might come on, say, beat three of bar seven. And put your thing there. Consistently. Every time. Consistency is often a key to great music. Consistency on the inside can make the outer part beautiful, if that’s what the composer wants. If you pull the second violin part out of a Beethoven or Brahms concerto, it will still sound beautiful. Pull out the guitar part of a James Brown song, it might not sound beautiful. But though the language is different, rhythmically and aesthetically it will make sense to the human ear.

  It’s like driving a race car. Anyone can drive the straightaway, but who can drive the curves? That’s what made Pee Wee Ellis, and later Fred Wesley, stand out among the great musicians that worked under Brown. They were co-originators. Brown wrote the lyrics, handed them the recipe, and they were the cooks; they translated Brown’s
grunts into musical language, which in turn set up his onstage dances, creating a backdrop of musicality that was original and, to this day, infinitely interesting.

  “Pee Wee was studied,” says Fred Wesley. “He had mastered a lot of things. A lot of what I learned about music, I learned from him.”

  But the demands of those four years working with Brown ground Pee Wee down. Brown was insecure around studied musicians—he certainly wasn’t alone in that—but in that regard, his musicians complain he could be simply unbearable. Pee Wee doesn’t like to talk about those years. You can bend him this way and that, joke with him until he gets loose as a ball of cotton candy, and still he will not tell it. Sitting in his parlor, in his room full of instruments and awards and drums, you ask him about those years again and again and watch his friendly smile and happy grunts descend into silence. He backs into that silent corner and stays there. There’s pain in that corner. He doesn’t have to tell the stories. I’ve heard them. The fines, the cruelty, rehearsing for hours after a gig for a tiny mistake made by one person. My band. My show. My gig. I know that feeling, when you work for a lousy musical boss. You sift through your own memories and feel the painful push against your gut, thinking of the humiliation, the lack of dough, the we’re-all-in-this-together bit the star sells you until it’s time to get paid. Then, as you look at that twenty-dollar bill in your hand, you realize there’s no democracy. It’s a horrible feeling when the whole gig, the life-as-a-musician thing, backs up in your throat, like cheap whiskey that you can smell on your breath from one room to the next. A musician knows that smell. It’s the smell of the game. Show business. You practice all your life, for days, months, years, waiting for the Big Gig, your moment in the sun, and suddenly the gig of a lifetime comes along and it ain’t what they said it would be. You find that the gig is just a soap commercial, or the guy holding the strings is a graceless, selfish, narcissistic, self-hating jerk who plays humble and smiles for the audience while holding his foot on your neck at the same time, knowing you can’t complain since you need the dough, running his hand through your pocket to make sure you’re broke while sleeping with your girlfriend, and you wake up to the whole thing feeling like a worm living inside a peach who pops his head out one day and sees a bunch of white chompers and suddenly realizes what the whole deal is.

  Brown’s behavior toward his musicians is one of his saddest legacies. In two years of gathering the data, I found that the answers were pretty much the same: “He didn’t pay enough.” “He was mean.” “Outright cruel.” He fined musicians for small infractions onstage—missing a cue, shoes not shined, missing a tie. He was divisive. He slept with his female singers. He was a master of manipulation. He tried to get his musicians to buy big houses and cars, only to fire them and watch them suffer under heavy debt, then hire them back at a lower salary. He ran senseless, endless, punishing rehearsals for hours, sometimes right after the gig, sometimes till daylight, for no reason other than to show who was boss. The band traveled by bus. Brown traveled by private plane. He demanded instant acquiescence. His temper was frightening and seemingly anything could touch it off. He slapped this guy. He pulled a gun on that guy. He made this one buy a Cadillac from him. Fred Wesley, in his clairvoyant autobiography Hit Me, Fred, describes how Brown once went around the room at a rehearsal and forced each of the band members to say the order of songs in his sets at fast speed, timing each of them, which was a problem, because musicians remember their part or the chord changes, but they don’t necessarily recall the title to every song, let alone the song order of a show. He kept spies on his buses, bodyguards or hairdressers or plebe-entourage members, who ratted out any musician who spoke poorly of him. In short, Brown dehumanized them. Most of them, while respecting his musicality and utter showmanship, disliked him intensely.

  But that card flips the other way too. In a band, democracy does not work. Somebody has to be the boss, collect the money, deal with the promoters, the agency, the record company; someone has to order the sets, dream up the thing. Musicians are hard to work with. This one drinks. That one hates the other one. This one needs more money. That one can’t cut the part but is a nice guy. This one is a hell of a player but a troublemaker. Quincy Jones told me he nearly went mad the first time he ran his first big band around Europe in 1960. Taking care of so many people is a big job. And Brown did not know how to be a friend. He needed his men, but he did not need them. He vacillated between being one of the boys onstage and the boss man off of it. But when faced with a choice, he had to be the boss. Only in his later years did he realize what he’d had in his great bands of the sixties and seventies. The last of his great musicians that remained, bassist Sweet Charles Sherrell, sax man Maceo Parker, and St. Clair Pinckney, often had to help him keep his show together in those later years—Sherrell recalls rousing Brown out of a PCP-induced slumber by pouring milk down his throat to get him out of his hotel room and onstage. By then most of his great singers and musicians had been replaced by younger musicians who did the old hits at ridiculously fast tempos, with showgirls shaking and baking behind Brown in cheerleader getups. By then his two greatest bandleaders, Pee Wee and Wesley, had long since departed. Pee Wee walked off the gig in 1969.

  “He deserves credit,” Ellis says quietly. “I learned a lot. But it ran its course. He felt he was a king. You have to raise an army for the king.”

  He peers out of his parlor window, and I watch him. I’m dying to ask the question, the answer to which I already know.

  What happens to the king when the king’s men leave?

  I start to ask it, but then what’s the point? In another year this guy will receive an honorary doctorate in literature from Bath Spa University. Dr. Alfred Ellis. He’s a legend, more recognizable in Europe than he is at home. And I’m sitting with him. So instead I say, “You wanna eat? I’m buying.”

  His face crinkles into a smile. The old jazzman reaches for his cap. “My man…”

  As early as 1987, James Brown began to think about his death. He would formalize his will and trust thirteen years later, but by then his life had unraveled. His second marriage, to Deidre (Dee Dee) Jenkins, had ended in divorce. His father, whom he’d held dear, had died. His third wife, Adrienne, was lifted into God’s kingdom tragically two years later, after liposuction surgery in California, a crushing blow for Brown. His fourth marriage, a December 2001 union to Tomi Rae Hynie, a backup singer he met in Las Vegas, would unravel into a marital disaster that would spill into court for years after his 2006 death. He was sixty-eight when they married. She was thirty-two. She bore a son, James, Jr., that same year. But Hynie had not divorced her previous husband, a Pakistani national named Javed Ahmed, before she married Brown, which broke Brown’s heart when he discovered it, according to Emma Austin. (Hynie’s marriage to Ahmed was annulled three years after her marriage to Brown.) Brown’s children—six claimed, one adopted, and at least four others unclaimed—were a mishmash of grace, tragedy, or greed, depending on whom you ask. They had to make appointments to see him. Brown, by 1998, had become an increasingly isolated old man.

  He was still a force, though, irascible, unbearable, opinionated, impulsive, and even successful, having made a remarkable comeback after leaving jail in 1991 with a Kennedy Center Honor, an HBO concert, a couple of movie cameos, and a new management team of Buddy Dallas and David Cannon, who brought him back to solvency. But the glory days were gone. The record business had a new king, rap music, and Brown’s body was breaking down. The years of dancing had created chronic pain in his knees and toes. He fought off pancreatic cancer. His teeth constantly bothered him. They were implants, those of a man with tight teeth who had lived a life full of loose ends and deep disappointments. Even the city Brown loved, Augusta, had deteriorated to urban blight, with white flight, drugs, the emergence of violent hip-hop, and the usual array of complicated difficulties that helped destroy black families. Brown, though generous to the poor himself, was no fan of welfare. He disliked anything that took aw
ay a man or woman’s incentive to work. Cannon recalls Brown visiting a New York City men’s shelter, where his appearance caused so many men to crowd him that he had to stand on a stepladder to address them. He looked around the room full of men, many of them seemingly able-bodied, and said, “Y’all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You ought to be out working instead of being here.”

  “There ain’t no jobs out here,” a man said. “We’re poor.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Brown retorted. “You take my clothes and I’ll put on your clothes. Come tonight, I’ll have me some kind of job. I won’t be the boss. I won’t be wearing the boss’s uniform. But I’ll have me something.”

  The world had become complicated, and there he stood atop it once again after years of being down, a mass of contradictions himself, a man with miles of scorched earth behind him. He’d spent most of his entertainment life preaching the gospel of education and hard work, and now he was seen as a kind of clown. James Brown the convict. James Brown the troublemaker. James Brown, who fell down on his face like so many of them eventually do. He knew it. And it hurt him. He sought to make amends. Brown decided to give back.