The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Readying me for this moment, over breakfast at my hotel, Mr. Bobbit had said, with a shrug, “He’ll either like you or not, right away. Nothing anyone can do about it.” At the same breakfast, characterizing James Brown’s extraordinary awareness and attentiveness, his superhuman degree of control over his environment, Mr. Bobbit used phrases like three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, and memory of an elephant, impressions I’ll find confirmed in dozens of personal accounts by band members and, soon enough, by my own experience. Mr. Bobbit also offered me a three-word summation: “Perceptive. Psychic. Paranoid.”

  I don’t get to know the verdict. James Brown sits, gesturing with his hand: It’s time for playback. James Brown and Mr. Bobbit sit in the two comfortable leather chairs, while the band is bunched around the room, either on their feet or seated in folding metal chairs.

  We listen, twice, to the take of “Hold On, I’m Comin’.” James Brown lowers his head and closes his eyes. We’re all completely silent. At last he mumbles faint praise: “Pretty good. Pretty good.” Then, into the recording room. James Brown takes his place behind the mike, facing the band. We dwell now in an atmosphere of immanence, of ceremony, so tangible it’s almost oppressive. James Brown is still contained within himself, muttering inaudibly, scratching his chin, fussing, barely coming out of himself. Abruptly he turns to me.

  “You’re very lucky, Mr. Rolling Stone. I don’t ordinarily let anyone sit in on a session.”

  “I feel lucky,” I say.

  Fussing his way into place, James Brown decides he doesn’t like the microphone. “I want one with no felt on it. Get me a cheap mike. I made all those hits on a cheap mike.” The mike is swapped. He’s still irked, turgid, turned inward. “Are we recording this?” he asks. The answer comes back: yes. “The one we throw out will be the best one,” he admonishes, vaguely.

  Now he explains to the band that they’re not going to bother with the track they recorded before he arrived. Go figure: Hollie was right. “Sounds good,” James Brown explains, “but it sounds canned. We got to get some James Brown in there.” Here it is, the crux of the matter: He wasn’t in the room, ipso facto, it isn’t James Brown music. The problem is fundamentally one of ontology: In order for James Brown to occur, you need to be James Brown.

  He begins reminiscing about a rehearsal they enjoyed the day before, in the rehearsal space at the Ramada. The Ramada’s room provided a sound James Brown liked, and he encourages his band to believe they’ll recapture it today: “Gonna bring that room in here.”

  Now that the gears are oiled, a constant stream of remarks and asides flows from James Brown’s mouth. Many of these consist of basic statements of policy in regard to the matter of being James Brown, particularly in relationship to his band: “Be mean, but be the best.” These statements mingle exhortations to excellence with justifications for his own treatment of the men he calls, alternately, “the cats” and “my family.” Though discipline is his law, strife is not only likely but essential: “Any time a cat becomes a nuisance, that’s the cat I’m gonna want.” The matter of the rejected track is still on his mind: “Don’t mean to degrade nobody. People do something they think is good. But you’re gonna hear the difference. Get that hard sound.” Frequently he dwells on the nature of the sound of which he is forever in pursuit: “Hard. Flat. Flat.” One feels James Brown is forever chasing something, a pure hard-flat-jazz-funk he heard once in his dreams, and toward which all subsequent efforts have been pointed. This in turn leads to a reminiscence about Grover Washington Jr., who, apparently, recently presented James Brown with a track James Brown didn’t wish to sing on. “He should go play smooth jazz. We got something else going. James Brown jazz. Nothing smooth about it. If it gets smooth we gonna make it not smooth.” Still musing on Grover Washington Jr.’s failings, he blurts: “Just jive.” Then corrects himself, looking at me: “Just things. Instead of people. Understand?”

  Throughout these ruminations James Brown’s band stands at readiness, their fingers on strings or mouths a few short inches from reeds and mouthpieces, in complete silence, only sometimes nodding to acknowledge a remark of particular emphasis. A given monologue may persist for an hour, no matter: At the slightest drop-of-hand signal, these players are expected to be ready. There’s nothing new in this. The Hardest Working Man in Show Business is one of the legendary hard-asses: His bands have always been the Hardest Working Men in Show Business, the longest-rehearsed, the most fiercely disciplined, the most worn-out and abused. Fuckups, I’ll learn, will be cold-shouldered, possibly punished with small monetary fines, occasionally humiliated by a tirade. James Brown’s punitive anger is not at all a certainty: It is precisely his inconsistency, his unpredictability, that keeps the organization on its toes—or rather, keeps them gripping the floor with their toenails. These men have been systematically indoctrinated into what begins to seem to me less even a military- or cult-style obedience than a purely Pavlovian situation, one of reaction and survival, of instincts groomed and curtailed. Their motives for remaining in such a situation? That, I’ll need more time to study.

  “I’m an old man,” James Brown says. “All I can do is love everybody. But I’m still going to be a tough boss. I’m still going to give them hell. I got a family here. I tried to meet everybody’s parents.” At this, he suddenly squints at Damon, the guitarist, and says, “I don’t know your people.” Permission has apparently been granted to reply, and Damon corrects him. “Yes, you met them in Las Vegas. Just briefly.” Then James Brown points to his son, saying cryptically, “I don’t know where this cat’s coming from.” Daryl dares a joke (which it dimly occurs to me was perhaps the point): “But you do know my people.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” says James Brown irritably. “Love.” He poses a question, then answers it: “You go to the blood bank, what do you want? Human blood. Not baboon.”

  Throughout the afternoon, even as the band begins to record, these ruminations will continue, as though James Brown’s mind is on permanent shuffle. Sometimes the subject is the nature of his art. “Jazz,” he states simply at one point. Or he’ll segue into a discourse on his relationship to hip-hop: “I’m the most sampled and stolen. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.” At this, the band laughs. “I got a song about that,” he tells me. “But I’m never gonna release it. Don’t want a war with the rappers. If it wasn’t good, they wouldn’t steal it.” Thinking of his influence on contemporary music, he mentions a song by Alicia Keys with a suspicious riff: “Sometimes you find yourself meeting yourself.” Yet he’s eager to make me know he’s not slagging Keys: “I don’t want to scrape nobody.” Later, in a moment of seeming insecurity, dissatisfied with something in his own performance, he blurts: “The minute they put up that statue I was in trouble.”

  Much of the afternoon’s spent working on an arrangement of a medley comprising another Sam and Dave song, “Soul Man,” and one of James Brown’s own most irresistible and enduring classics of the early ’70s, “Soul Power.” James Brown tinkers with the guitars, indicating the desired tones by wailing in imitation of a guitar, as well as by issuing what sound like expert commands: “Diminish. Raise nine. Flatten it.” Of Damon’s solo he requests: “Go psychedelic.” It seems to be the nature of the guitarists—Keith, Damon, and Daryl—that they are the center of the band’s sound, but also the source of considerable problems.

  A horn player—a large, slightly hound-doggy saxophonist named Jeff Watkins—interjects. Raising his hand like a schoolboy, he suggests: “They might have it right, sir. They just didn’t play it with conviction.” To the guitarists, Jeff says, ever so gently, “Play it like you mean it.”

  They do, and James Brown listens and is persuaded.

  “I’m wrong,” the Godfather says, marveling. “Play it like you mean it—I like that, Jeff.” James Brown’s deadpan is perfect: It is as if he’s never heard that particular phrase before.

  Now he coaches his bass player, an aging, willowy, en
igmatically silent black man named Fred Thomas, on the bass line: “Ding dong, ding dong.” Again, he emphasizes: “Flat. Flat. Hard.” Fred Thomas does his best to comply, though I can’t hear any difference. James Brown turns to me, suddenly urgent, and introduces me to Fred. “It’s all about Sex Machine,” he says. “This man’s on more hits than any other bass player in history.” I nod. Of course, it will later occur to me that one of the most celebrated partnerships in James Brown’s career was with the future Parliament-Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins—and anybody who cares at all about such things can tell you that Bootsy was the bass player on “Sex Machine.” Fred Thomas was, in fact, Bootsy’s replacement, which is to say he’s been in the band since sometime in 1971. Good enough. But in this matter we’ve at least briefly entered what I will come to call the James Brown Zone of Confusion. James Brown now puts his arm around Fred Thomas. “We’re both cancer survivors,” he tells me gravely.

  Now we come to an impasse: Howard, the engineer, stymied by the number of horn players James Brown wishes to record simultaneous with the rest of the band, protests: “I can rehearse sixteen people, but I can’t record them.” James Brown responds, with galactic irritation, “So we gotta do it canned? Can’t do it live?” Howard sheepishly admits: “I can try a two-inch tape.” James Brown: “Get it.”

  While Howard fusses with the two-inch tape, James Brown is possessed by an instant of Kabuki insecurity: “I’m recording myself out of a group.” This brings a spontaneous response from several players, a collective murmur of sympathy and allegiance, most audibly saxophonist Jeff’s “We’re not going anywhere, sir.” Reassured, James Brown paradoxically regales the band with another example of his imperious command, telling the story of a drummer, a man named Nat Kendrick, who left the room to go to the bathroom during the recording of “Night Train.” James Brown, too impatient to wait, played the drum part himself, and the recording was completed by the time Nat Kendrick returned. “Go to the bathroom, you might not have a job.” (Later, with James Brown gone from the room, Keith, stepping out for a bathroom break, makes a joke, one typical of the band’s incorporation of James Brown’s admonitory lectures into their private and ironic folklore: “I’m gonna pull a Nat Kendrick. Don’t cut nothing without me.”)

  The two-inch tape is now in place, and James Brown and his band attack “Soul Man/Soul Power” once again. “It’s about to be as good as it was yesterday,” he says, reminding them again of the Ramada rehearsal. “We’re not recording, we’re just having fun.” Indeed, everything suddenly seems to come together. “Soul Power” is an unbearably fierce groove when taken up, as it is now, by a James Brown who sings it as though he’s never heard it before, with crazy urgency and rhythmic guile, his voice hopped up on the crest of the music like a surfer riding a curl. In a vocal improvisation, James Brown shouts in Gatling-gun time with the drums: “Food stamps! Welfare!”

  This take sounds better by far than anything that’s gone before it, and James Brown, seated on his stool at the microphone, looks half a century younger now. At the finish, he rushes from his stool directly to where I sit, and slaps me on my knee. “That was deep, Mr. Rolling Stone!” he exclaims, then dashes from the room. The band exhales a burst of withheld laughter the moment he’s through the door. “Food stamps!” several of them cry out. “Never heard that before.” His son Daryl says, “Damn, I almost dropped my guitar when he said that.” They seem genuinely thrilled, and delighted now to have me here as a witness, and go rollicking out the door, into the room where James Brown, ever impatient, is already preparing to listen to playback. They’ve done it, cut a classic James Brown funk jam! Never mind that it is a classic that James Brown already cut in 1971!

  The laughter and conversation cease as Howard is commanded to roll the tape. Midway through the first time he’s heard the tape, James Brown’s head sinks in weary dissatisfaction: Something’s not right. When it ends, after a single beat of total silence, James Brown says soberly, “Let’s do it again, a little slower.” And so the band trudges back in, in dour obedient silence.

  During the playback session, guitarist Keith leans in and whispers to me, “You’ve got to tell the truth about what goes on here. Nobody has any idea.” I widen my eyes, sympathetic to his request. But what exactly does he mean?

  4. The Time Traveler

  Someday, someone will write a great biography of James Brown. It will by necessity, though, be more than a biography. It will be a history of half a century of the contradictions and tragedies embodied in the fate of African Americans in the new world; it will be a parable, even, of the contradictions of the individual in the capitalist society, portentous as that may sound. For James Brown is both a willing and conscious embodiment of his race, of its strivings toward self-respect in a racist world, and a consummate self-made man, an entrepreneur of the impossible. This is a man who, out of that shack in the woods of South Carolina and that whorehouse on Twiggs, mined for himself a career and a fortune and a legacy and a statue; who owned an airplane; who has employed hundreds; whose band begat dozens of famous and lucrative careers; whose samples provided, truly, the foundation for hip-hop; who had his photograph taken with presidents and whose endorsement was eagerly boasted of, first by Hubert Humphrey, then Richard Nixon; who was credited with keeping the city of Boston calm in the twenty-four hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; a man who owned radio stations, controlling the very means of control in his industry; and who did all of this despite the fact that no likelihood except desolation, poverty, and incarceration might have seemed to exist.

  He’s also a martyr to those contradictions. That James Brown should succeed so absolutely and fail so utterly is the mystery. For, no matter his accomplishment and the will that drove it, he has no fortune. No plane. No radio stations. The ranch home that he so proudly bought for himself in a mostly white suburb of Augusta was claimed by the IRS in lieu of back taxes. Unlike those whose fame and money insulate them from scandal, James Brown has been beset: divorces, 911 calls, high-speed road chases ending in ludicrous arrests and jail sentences. This great exponent of black pride, of never dropping out of school, of making something of yourself, found his way, relatively late in life, to the illegal drugs not of glamour and decadence but of dereliction and street life, like PCP and crack cocaine. With their help, he nearly destroyed his reputation.

  The shadow of his abuse of musicians and wives, disturbing as it may be, is covered in the larger shadow of his self-abuse, his torment and unrest, little as James Brown would ever admit to anything but the brash and single-minded confidence and pride he wishes to display. It is as though the cape act is a rehearsal onstage of the succor James Brown could never accept in his real life. It is as though, having come from being dressed in potato sacks for grade school and in the drab uniform of a prisoner to being the most spectacularly garbed individual this side of Beau Brummell or Liberace, James Brown found himself compelled also to be the Emperor with No Clothes. What his peculiar nakedness reveals is the full range of the torment of African American identity. Oblivious to racism, he was always also its utter victim; contemptuous of drugs, he was at their mercy. And the exposure of his bullying abuse of women might seem to have made squalid hypocrisy of his calls for universal love and self-respect.

  For my part as a witness, if I could convey only one thing about James Brown it would be this: James Brown is, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, a man unstuck in time. He’s a time traveler, but unlike the H. G. Wellsian variety, he lacks any control over his migrations in time, which also seem to be circumscribed to the period of his own allotted life span. Indeed, it may be the case that James Brown is often confused as to what moment in time he occupies at any given moment.

  Practically, this means two things. It means that sometime around 1958—approximately the year he began voyaging in time, if my theory is correct—James Brown began browsing through the decades ahead, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and perhaps even into t
he ’90s—and saw, or, more exactly, heard the future of music. This, if my theory is correct, explains the stubbornly revolutionary cast of his musical efforts from that time on, the way he seemed to be trying to impart an epiphany to which he alone had access, an epiphany to do with rhythm, and with the kinetic possibilities inherent but to that point barely noticed in the R&B and soul music around him. From the moment of “Night Train”—the track, oddly enough, during which Nat Kendrick went to the bathroom and James Brown had to play drums himself—onward, through one radically innovative track after another: “Out of Sight,” “I Got You,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Cold Sweat,” etc., James Brown seemed less a musician with an imperative either to entertain or to express his own emotional reality than one driven to push his musicians and listeners to the verge of a sonic idea, and then past that verge, until the moment when he became, more or less officially, the single-handed inventor of an entire genre of music called funk: “Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,” “Hot Pants,” etc. That sonic idea has never been better expressed than by critic Robert Palmer: “The rhythmic elements became the song … Brown and his musicians began to treat every instrument and voice in the group as if it were a drum. The horns played single-note bursts that were often sprung against the downbeats. The bass lines were broken into choppy two- or three-note patterns … Brown’s rhythm guitarist choked his guitar strings against the instrument’s neck so hard that his playing began to sound like a jagged tin can being scraped with a pocket knife.” Another way of thinking about this: James Brown seemed to hear in the interstices of soul and R&B—in the barked or howled vocal asides, in the brief single-chord jamming on the outros, in the drum breaks and guitar vamps—a potential for discarding the whole of the remainder of the music in favor of a radical expansion of these interstitial moments, these transitional glimpses of rhythm and fervor. James Brown was like a filmmaker who gets interested in the background scenery and fires the screenwriter and actors, except that instead of ending up with experimental films nobody wanted to watch, he forged a style of music so beguilingly futuristic that it made everything else—melody, lyrics, verse-chorus-verse—sound antique.