Still, as with postage stamps, statues of the living seem somehow disconcerting. And very few statues are located at quite such weighty symbolic crossroads as this one. The statue’s back is to what was in 1991 renamed James Brown Boulevard, which cuts from Broad Street for a mile, deep into the neighborhood where James Brown was raised from age six, by his aunts, in a Twiggs Street house that was a den of what James Brown himself calls “gambling, moonshine liquor, and prostitution.” The neighborhood around Twiggs is still devastatingly sunk in poverty’s ruin. The shocking depths of deprivation from which James Brown excavated himself are still intact, frozen in time, almost like a statue. A photographer would be hard-pressed to snap a view in this neighborhood that couldn’t, apart from the make of the cars, slip neatly into Walker Evans’s portfolio of Appalachian scenes from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Except, of course, that everyone in Augusta’s Appalachia is black.
So the James Brown Statue may seem to have walked on its flat bronze feet the mile from Twiggs to Broad, to which it keeps its back, reserving its grin for the gentle folk on and across Broad Street, the side that gives way to the river—the white neighborhoods to which James Brown, as a shoeshine boy, hustler, juvenile delinquent, possibly even as a teenage pimp, directed his ambition and guile. Policemen regularly chased James Brown the length of that mile, back toward Twiggs—he tells stories of diving into a watery gutter, barely more than a trench, and hiding underwater with an upraised reed for breathing while the policemen rumbled past—and once the chase was over, he’d creep again toward Broad, where the lights and music were, where the action was, where Augusta’s stationed soldiers with their monthly-paycheck binges were to be found. Eventually the city of Augusta jailed the teenager, sentenced him to eight-to-sixteen for four counts of breaking and entering. When he attained an early release, with the support of the family of his friend and future bandmate Bobby Byrd, it was on the condition that he never return to Augusta. Deep into the ’60s, years past “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” James Brown had to apply for special permits to bring his band to perform in Augusta; he essentially had been exiled from the city for having the audacity to transverse that mile from Twiggs to Broad. Now his statue stands at the end of the mile, facing away. Grinning. Resolving nothing. James Brown, you see, may in fact be less a statue than any human being who ever lived. James Brown is kinetic; an idea, a problem, a genre, a concept, a method—anything, really, but a statue.
2. The James Brown Show
This we know: The James Brown Show begins without James Brown. James Brown, a man who is also an idea, a problem, a method, etc., will have to be invoked or conjured, summoned from some other place. The rendezvous between James Brown and his audience—you—is not a simple thing. When the opening acts are done and the waiting is over, you will first be in the hands of James Brown’s band. It is the band that begins the show. The band is there to help, to negotiate a space for you to encounter James Brown; they are there to, if you will, take you to the bridge. The band is itself the medium within which James Brown will be summoned, the terms under which he might be enticed into view. And this interval, before James Brown appears, is one in which it will be made certain you have no regrets or doubts, to measure your readiness and commitment.
The James Brown band takes the form, onstage, of an animated frieze or hieroglyphic, timeless in a very slightly seedy showbiz way, but happily so, rows of men in red tuxedos, jitterbugging in lockstep even as they miraculously conjure from instruments a perfect hurricane of music: a rumbling, undulating-insinuating (underneath), shimmery-peppery (up on top) braided-waveform of groove. The players seem jolly and astonished witnesses to their own virtuosity. They resemble humble, gracious ushers or porters, welcoming you to the enthrallingly physical, jubilant, encompassing noise that pours out of their instruments. It’s as if they’re merely widening for you a portal offering entry into some new world, a world as much kinetic, visual, and emotional as aural—for, in truth, a first encounter with the James Brown Show can feel like a bodily passage, a deal your mind wasn’t sure it was ready for your body to strike with these men and their instruments and the ludicrous, almost cruelly anticipatory drama of their attempt to beckon the star of the show into view. Yes, it’s made unmistakable, in case you forgot, that this is merely a prelude, a throat-clearing, though the band has already rollicked through three or four recognizable numbers in succession; we’re waiting for something. The name of the something is James Brown. You wish desperately for this man to appear, even if it is only to disappoint you (how could he live up to what you’ve yearned for; how could he live up to his own hype or hits; how could he live up to his own band, which just sounds so great?). You indeed fear, despite all sense, that something is somehow wrong: Perhaps he’s sick or reluctant, perhaps there’s been a mistake. There is no James Brown, it was merely a rumor. Thankfully, someone has told you what to do: You chant, gladly, “James Brown! James Brown!” A natty little man with a pompadour comes onstage and with a booming, familiar voice asks you if you Are Ready for Star Time, and you find yourself confessing that you Are.
How did you get here? Perhaps, like Nelson George, it was on the A train, heading to the Apollo Theater in the company of your mother, in 1967. Perhaps, like David Gates, it was in Boston, in 1968, the day after Martin Luther King was shot, for a concert broadcast live on television on an emergency basis, in order to quell the expected riots, a now-signal moment in the James Brown Legend. Possibly, like Peter Guralnick, you visited the Providence Arena in 1965, a wondering fan. Or maybe you’re Fred Wesley, in 1967, seeing the James Brown Show for the first time at the Orlando Sports Arena in Florida, because Pee Wee Ellis, James Brown’s then-arranger, has called you on the telephone and persuaded you to consider taking a gig playing in this band, a gig you’re considering, despite your background in jazz and your impression that James Brown’s music is silly pop, because you need the dough. Or perhaps you’re me, which would mean that with your childhood friend Luke you’ve taken a Greyhound bus out of Boston in 1986, the summer of the first shuttle disaster, halfway up Cape Cod, to see the James Brown Show at the Hyannis Port Melody Tent.
In any event, you were there when He was summoned. You were there when He answered the call. To be in the audience when James Brown commences the James Brown Show is to have felt oneself engulfed in a feast of adoration and astonishment, a ritual invocation, one comparable, I’d imagine, to certain ceremonies known to the Mayan peoples, wherein a human person is radiantly costumed and then beheld in lieu of the appearance of a Sun God upon the earth. For to see James Brown dance and sing, to see him lead his mighty band with the merest glances and tiny flickers of signal from his hands; to see him offer himself to his audience to be adored and enraptured and ravished; to watch him tremble and suffer as he tears his screams and moans of lust, glory, and regret from his sweat-drenched body—and is, thereupon, in an act of seeming mercy, draped in the cape of his infirmity; to then see him recover and thrive—shrugging free of the cape—as he basks in the healing regard of an audience now melded into a single passionate body by the stroking and thrumming of his ceaseless cavalcade of impossibly danceable smash number-one hits, is not to see: It is to behold.
Myself, I count it as a life marker: I first beheld the James Brown Show at the age of twenty-two. Again at twenty-eight, in San Francisco. And again this year, my forty-first.
Some testimony: “For moments he seemed motionless at center stage. Then Brown was moving. He cruised along the Apollo stage on a cushion of air, his black shoes skating rapidly. When he fell to his knees, microphone cradled in his hands, I was frightened. Was he sick? Did he have a headache? I turned to ask my mother what was bothering James Brown, but she was too busy smiling and bopping to the music to notice me” (Nelson George). “Because of King’s assassination I was apprehensive about going, fearing trouble. For better or worse, though, all of what had happened was just blown away and forgotten the moment he hit the stage. Everything got swallo
wed” (David Gates). “This was the greatest theater I had ever seen, or most likely ever would see. This was what all the ‘happenings’ and ‘be-ins’ that we attended looking for a new form of participatory drama could only grope for, this was a kind of magic that no theory or academic study could envision, let alone conjure up … James Brown was a figure whose legend only suggested his reality” (Guralnick). “The audience was completely fucked up, responding to any and everything that James or the band did. The encore was like a climax on top of an already all-consuming climax. I felt guilty for not having bought a ticket” (Fred Wesley, realizing he’s not going to be able to devote his life, and his trombone, to bebop). “The rather seemly midsummer Hyannis Port audience, though surely also completely fucked up in their way, remained in their chairs, allowing Luke and me to make our way unimpeded down to the lip of the Melody Tent’s stage, where James Brown soon crawled and begged and squirmed to within a few feet of us” (Lethem).
The James Brown Show is both an enactment—an unlikely and astonishing conjuration in the present moment of an alternate reality, one that dissipates into the air and can never be recovered—and at the same time a reenactment: the ritual celebration of an enshrined historical victory, a battle won long ago, against forces difficult to name (funklessness?) yet whose vanquishing seems to have been so utterly crucial that it requires incessant restaging in a triumphalist ceremony. You think: This has happened before, I just wasn’t there. The show exists on a continuum, the link between ebullient big-band “clown” jazz showmen like Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan and the pornographic parade of a full-bore Prince concert. It is a glimpse of another world, even if only one being routinely dwells there, and his name is James Brown. To have glimpsed him there, dwelling in his world, is a privilege. James Brown is not a statue, no. But the James Brown Show is a monument, one unveiled at selected intervals.
3. In the Studio with James Brown, Day One
James Brown lives in the suburbs of Augusta, so while he is recording an album he sleeps at home. He frequently exhorts his band to buy homes in Augusta, which they mostly refuse to do. Instead, they stay at the Ramada Inn. James Brown, when he is at home, routinely stays up all night watching the news and watching old Westerns—nothing but Westerns. He gets up late. For this reason a day in the recording studio with James Brown, like the James Brown Show, begins without James Brown.
Instead I find myself in the company of James Brown’s longtime personal manager, Charles Bobbit, and his band, approximately fourteen people who I will soon in varying degrees get to know quite well, but who for now treat me genially, skeptically, shyly, but mostly obliviously. They’ve got work to do. They’re working on the new James Brown record. At the moment they’re laying down a track without him, because James Brown asked them to and because since they’re waiting around they might as well do something—though they do this with a degree of helpless certainty that they are wasting their time. It is nearly always a useless occupation, if you are James Brown’s band, to lay down a track while he is not present. Yet the band does it a lot, wasting time in this way, because their time is not their own. So they record. Today’s effort is a version of “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” the classic Sam and Dave song.
The setting is a pleasant modern recording studio in a bland corner of Augusta’s suburbs, far from where the statue resides. The band occupies a large room, high-ceilinged, padded in black, with a windowed soundproof booth for the drummer’s kit and folding chairs in a loose circle for the band, plus innumerable microphones and cables and amplifiers and pickups running across the floor. On the other side of a large window from this large chamber is a room full of control panels, operated by an incredibly patient man named Howard. It is into this room that James Brown and the band will intermittently retreat in order to listen to playback, to consider what they’ve recorded. Down the hall from these two rooms is a tiny suite with a kitchen (unused) and dining room with a table that seats seven or eight at a time (used constantly, for eating takeout).
The band is three guitarists and one bassist and three horn players and two percussionists—a drummer in the soundproof booth, and a conga player in the central room. They’re led by Hollie Farris, a trim, fiftyish, white trumpeter with a blond mustache and the gentle, acutely midwestern demeanor of an accountant or middle manager, yet with the enduring humor of a lifelong sideman—a hipster’s tolerance. Hollie now pushes the younger guitarists as they hone the changes in “Hold On, I’m Comin’.” Howard is recording the whole band simultaneously; this method of recording “live in the studio” is no longer how things are generally done. Hollie also sings to mark the vocal line, in a faint but endearing voice.
One of the young guitarists, cheating slightly on the live-in-the-studio ethos, asks to be allowed to punch in his guitar solo. This is Damon Wood: thirtysomething, also blond, with long hair and a neat goatee. Damon, explaining why he screwed up the solo, teases Hollie for his singing: “I can’t hear myself with Engelbert Humperdinck over there.” Howard rewinds the tape and Damon reworks the solo, then endears himself to me with a fannish quiz for the other guitarists—Keith, another white guy, but younger, and clean-cut, and Daryl Brown, a light-skinned, roly-poly black man who turns out to be James Brown’s son. “What classic funk song am I quoting in this solo?” Damon asks. Nobody can name it, not that they seem to be trying too hard. “Lady Marmalade,” Damon says.
“Well,” says Hollie, speaking of the track, “we got one for him to come in and say, ‘That’s terrible.’ ”
Keith, with a trace of disobedience in his eyes, asks if they’re going to put the horns in the track. Hollie shakes his head. “He might be less inclined to throw it out,” Keith suggests. “Give it that big sound. If all he hears are those guitars he’ll start picking it apart.”
Hollie offers a wry smile. He doesn’t want to. Hollie, I’ll learn, has been James Brown’s bandleader and arranger on and off since the mid-’70s.
It is at that moment that everything changes. Mr. Bobbit explains: “Mr. Brown is here.”
When James Brown enters the recording studio, the recording studio becomes a stage. It is not merely that attention quickens in any room this human being inhabits. The phenomenon is more akin to a grade-school physics experiment involving iron filings and a magnet: Lines of force are now visible in the air, rearranged. The band, the hangers-on, the very oxygen, every trace particle is charged in its relation to the gravitational field of James Brown. We’re all waiting for something to happen, and that waiting is itself a story, an emotional dynamic: We need something from this man, and he is likely to demand something of us, something we’re uncertain we can fully deliver. The drama here is not, as in the James Brown Show, enacted in musical terms. Now it is a psychodrama, a theater of human behavior, one full of Beckett or Pinter pauses.
James Brown is dressed as if for a show, in a purple three-piece suit and red shirt with cuff links, highly polished shoes, and his impeccably coiffed helmet of hair. When we’re introduced I spend a long moment trying to conjugate the reality of James Brown’s face, one I’ve contemplated as an album-cover totem since I was thirteen or fourteen: that impossible slant of jaw and cheekbone, that pop-art slash of teeth, the unmistakable rage of impatience lurking in the eyes. It’s a face drawn by Jack Kirby or Milton Caniff, that’s for sure, a visage engineered for maximum impact at great distances, from back rows of auditoriums. I find it, truthfully, terrifying to have that face examining mine in return, though fear is alleviated by the rapidity of the process: James Brown seems to have finished devouring the whole prospect of me by the time our brief handshake is concluded.
I’m also struck by the almost extraterrestrial quality of otherness incarnated in this human being. James Brown is, by his own count, seventy-two years old. Biographers have suggested that three or four years ought to be added to that total. It’s also possible that given the circumstances of his birth, in a shack in the woods outside Barnwell, South Carolina, in an environment
of poverty and exile so profound as to be almost unimaginable, James Brown has no idea how old he is. No matter: He’s in his mid-seventies, yet encountering him now in person, it occurs to me that James Brown is kept under wraps for so long at the outset of his own show, and is viewed primarily at a distance, or mediated through recordings or films, in order to buffer the unprepared spectator from the awesome strangeness and intensity of his person. He simply has more energy than and is vibrating at a different rate from anyone I’ve ever met, young or old. With every preparation I’ve made, he’s still terrifying.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 29