1.
RJ Smith doesn’t draw an exact line marking when James Brown, the 5’6” son of a South Carolina turpentine maker, became James Brown, Sex Machine/Black Elvis/Mr. Please, Please, Please/etc. But I will.
It happens about a third of the way through Smith’s remarkable new book, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown. Brown’s smash album, Live at the Apollo, has just spent 66 weeks on the pop charts, vaulting the performer from the sweaty dives of the chitlin’ circuit into a higher, neon-lit level of exposure. Money is pouring in fast enough for Brown to buy a mansion in Queens with a moat, and, after $65,000 in renovations, an interior lined with faux leather and pictures of himself. The singer has renovated his body, too. He pays a California dentist to fix the gap between his teeth and hires a traveling hairstylist to whirl his hair into shining bouffant praised, in the slang of the time, as “expoobident.”
Meanwhile, Brown’s tour is becoming more militaristic. He hires goons to clear the way to and from shows. Onstage, he fines his musicians for missed notes or wrinkled uniforms. Offstage, he is armed and ready. “You notice how many pictures of James Brown, he’s got a coat over his arm?” the Rev. Al Sharpton asks, in the book. “That’s because he had his gun under it.”
Most importantly, Brown is leaving behind blues, rock, doo-wop, and gospel in favor of a raw sound filled with screams, popping bass, and furious counter-rhythms. He is inventing the genre we currently refer to as “funk.” Smith describes the singer’s February 1965 stop in at a converted barn in Charlotte, N.C., where a control booth sits in the old hayloft. “It was time to record a tricky piece of rhythm Brown had been thinking about for a while,” he writes:
The musicians set up, playing this and that while waiting for the boss to arrive. Finally, Brown’s customized white Cadillac with the tinted windows appeared, and the singer swaggered in. “He stopped the place. You just knew that somebody of significance was present,” said Clay Smith, Arthur’s [the owner of the studio] boy. Constantly in motion and talking so fast he could have used a translator, Brown was not one of the guys. “James was in charge,” Arthur Smith remembered later. “I knew I owned the studio, but I knew he was going to do what he wanted to there.”
What Brown wanted to do was lay down a strutting, macho anthem marked by explosions of brass and a guitar that sounds like chrome wheels spinning. He hums a melody to the sax player and a bass line to the bassist. He thumps out a beat for the drummer. He watches a trumpet player struggle, fires him, then re-hires him moments later. And when the singer is ready, he screams out a set of lyrics scratched on a sheet of paper. The song is called “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
“Keep on Fighting” is the title of the chapter in which all of this takes place. And no matter how many superhero movies you have seen, the transformation it describes is exhilarating. Like Bruce Wayne becoming Batman or Clark Kent becoming Superman, we have just watched James Brown become Soul Brother Number One.
2.
A former Los Angeles magazine editor and contributor to Blender, Spin, and The Village Voice, Smith is not the flashiest, most purely talented writer to take on the Godfather of Soul. That title, I believe, goes to Jonathan Lethem for his dazzling 2006 Rolling Stone profile, “Being James Brown.” (More on that in a minute.) In the beginning of The One, Smith struggles slightly to find the tone to tell this story. Some of his images fall flat, like when he writes that the chord structure of “Cold Sweat” was “as visionary and protean as Frida Kahlo’s one eyebrow.” At other times, his voice cracks when he reaches beyond his natural range. His description of the “lachrymose mood” of Brown’s early ballad “Try Me” feels over-academic for a performer as lusty and physical as Brown. Elsewhere, Smith sounds uncomfortably un-academic. After a street fight with estranged band members early in his career, Smith ventures inside Brown’s head. “At least them motherfuckers weren’t gonna be calling him Monk Brown to his face anymore,” he writes, in an ill-advised estimation of J.B.’s inner monologue.
As a funk nerd (an oxymoron, but still true), I have other quibbles with the book. I would have liked to learn more about the nine children Brown fathered with nearly as many mothers. We see them playing Monopoly with real money during one scene, then suing for royalties later on, and that’s about it. I would have also relished a glimpse or two more inside the marathon, early-’70s recording sessions that produced “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing,” “Mind Power,” and other predecessors of modern hip-hop.
But, it would be unfair to judge Smith’s book on a few slip-ups, especially when the majority of the book feels so good. Like his subject, Smith is man of stamina and drive. The fruits of his prodigious reporting are evident on every page: a secret tape of Richard Nixon whining “I don’t want any more blacks, and I don’t want any more Jews, between now and the election,” before a visit from Brown at the White House; a heartwrenching moment when Brown’s guitarist, Jimmy Nolen, asks his wife to pass on a message to Brown after Nolen’s death. “’The next person you get to work for you,’ the wife dutifully reports to The Godfather, ‘I hope you treat them better than you did us.’”
These facts and details provide a driving, powerful rhythm for the book, and, over time, the story seeps into your bones. In a scene that is jarringly reminiscent of the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, we learn that, as a young man in Augusta, Ga., Brown was blindfolded and thrust into a boxing ring for a “battle royal,” while wealthy white men smoked cigars and looked on. Later in Brown’s career, we learn that country musicians in Nashville recorded a white-response to “Say it Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” with the lyrics, “I’m proud and I’m white with a song to sing…” We are also there inside Brown’s Learjet when the engine stalls and the plane begins to drop precipitously. After the engines kick back in, Brown calmly turned to an acquaintance and asks if he was scared. When the man says, “Yes,” Brown responds, “It’s not your time. You with me.”
Smith’s reporting is never better than his account of the singer’s 1967 trip to perform for troops in Vietnam. From the USO press release describing “primitive and somewhat savage” beat of Brown’s music to a walkie-talkie squawking, “Get ’em out of there, there’s a mortar attack coming in” as the band traveled between shows, we are not simply reading, anymore. We are being hauled across time and space to an amphitheatre carved out of a hillside east of Saigon:
At the end of a song, from behind the stage, the musicians suddenly heard the unmistakable ack-ack-ack of American guns firing on VC to the rear. Everybody was watching the band, and now they were really watching, as confusion and then anxiety played across the musicians’ faces. Finally, one of the guys sitting cross-legged at the front of the stage spoke to the band: “Aw, don’t worry. We won’t let Charlie get ya!” And then Brown took the microphone and continued the show: “Hit me!”
Indeed, it Smith’s dogged research that leads to the book’s greatest achievement. James Brown was a man who went to extreme lengths to conceal any signs of weakness. The author includes plenty of examples of this — going back on tour the day after his son Teddy’s funeral, for example — but he also provides access to the man during rare moments of distress. We watch Brown nearly knock out his teeth as he learns the tip-the-mic-drop-to-a-split-then-bounce-back-catch-the-mic trick that would later appear effortless. As his grip on the singles charts weakens in the late 1970s, we see him tell his trombonist, Fred Wesley, to write knockoffs of other artists’ hits, like David Bowie’s “Fame.” (This was “a head-scratcher,” Smith writes, “because ‘Fame’ itself is a pale version of Brown’s 1970s sound.”) And when the IRS comes searching for millions in unpaid taxes we watch the collision of Brown’s colossal ego with one of the few forces strong enough to tame it. With the government threatening to throw a padlock on his mansion, Brown summons his accountant, Fred Daviss, to downtown Augusta one night, where they sit quietly in the singer’s van. His hair was tousled. He was sweating. “Finally, he reached under the seat and pulled out a sack of money, like he was extracting a molar,” Smith writes. “’Hold on to it as long as you can,’ he told Daviss, ‘But then pay ’em.’”
3.
“Someday, someone will write a great biography of James Brown,” Lethem wrote in Rolling Stone in 2006. “It will by necessity, though, be more than a biography. It will be the history of a half-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.”
Smith has written such a book: a clear, linear, trustworthy account of one of the most complex and influential musicians in American history. His biography upholds the mystique of a man whom characters in the book call “black messiah,” “the personification of Blackness,” “the ultimate god of funk,” a man with “more musical genius than Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart put together,” and, in the case of a disgruntled former drummer, “a black Hitler.” At the same time, it gamely steers through the cloud of myth and misinformation that Lethem identified as “The James Brown Zone of Confusion,” and returns the singer back to earth.
Toward the end of Brown’s life, the author ushers readers into a new James Brown Zone of Confusion — one based entirely in reality. The elderly Brown’s life was marked, on one hand, by laurels from the Kennedy Center and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and, on the other, ever-stranger behavior due to drug abuse. The collision of these two worlds, as Smith reports, was often surreal. At one point Brown gets a young Wall Street investment banker to secure a $30 million loan against his future music royalties. When they meet each other to finalize the deal, Brown asks the startled banker, “You ever smoke gorilla [PCP]?”
All of this is not to say that The One is the “definitive biography of James Brown,” as the book’s promotional copy reads. Such a book will never exist. Smith’s book is not a substitute for Fred Wesley’s indispensable, Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman or many of the pieces (including Lethem’s) in 2008’s The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul. “Entire forests have been decimated to build the newsprint mountain that recounts his exploits, declarations, and influence,” wrote Nelson George in the introduction to that anthology. The term “definitive” attempts to seal off a man whose music, if not his heart, still thumps on.
On vinyl, on YouTube, and in the musical DNA of countless current performers, James Brown lives for a new generation of writers like me, who want to drop to the floor in splits; to dance, scream, and sweat, in his honor. RJ Smith has perhaps gone further than any writer before in telling this man’s story, but his book is not definitive. It is merely expoobident.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
On The Sexist, Amanda Hess lists the Top 5 Pseudo-Feminist Anthems, and as an introduction to these questionable songs, she declares, “Empowerment has been a convenient posture for pop music to assume.” This is often true, but I took umbrage with a couple of the songs included on her list, and perhaps with the implicit suggestion that pop songs can and should function as purveyors of messages. (Wait–isn’t that what Christian rock is for?) Yes, girls and young women need mentors and positive role models, but might this article be taking that idea too far? I don’t want a feminist anthem if it requires aesthetic restraint and an avoidance of emotional honesty.
awesome!
Agreed – I always interpreted the message of this song as, “We could’ve had a life together, I could’ve loved you, but you lost your chance because you would not give me what you need.” The song felt similar, in message, to the other songs that Hess references (“Survivor,” “Independent Woman”) rather than disparate, because Beyonce was proclaiming that if the relationship did not fulfill her emotionally (as well as sexually) than she wouldn’t stay with the man. “If you liked it than you should’ve put a ring on it” was her way of playfully saying, “you missed your chance at something good. Because I didn’t get what I deserved from you, you have lost as a companion.”
I didn’t know that the music video was prolonged Fosse reference – that’s very interesting.
What a fine writer! Such a balancing of tones. Humorous, colloquial, and academic, often in the same paragraph. Bam!
Thank you, Stephen and Kaelan!
Catie, thanks for your comment. There used to be a full video of the original Fosse return, but I can’t find it anymore. A friend told me there’s a Beyonce-Fosse mash-up, which, when I find, I shall post. Unless my friend (hi, Doug), does it first…
Love your argument and I completely agree with you about the use of the word “it” in Beyonce’s lyrics.
The only slant that I can see where Beyonce could be seen as anti-feminist is her over-sexed image in many of her videos. The sexualized image is not just targeted to “All the Single Ladies” video but her overall image. Frankly, not just Beyonce, but other pop performers as well.
I would love to see some of these performers where a baggy sweatshirt, some loose jeans, a t-shirt…not just tight clothes all of the time.. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the video, but I would just like to see more sides of a female performer rather than just the “sexy” side.
I always thought the line was “Say I’m the one you WANT.” “Own” would certainly take it into anti-feminist territory. Bouncy is very much a Southern black woman with many of those traditional gender views on display (said as a black woman who grew up in the northeast and has lived in the south for a decade). An underlying theme of her songs is that a man should provide and pursue.
I don’t think the song is particularly feminist or anti-feminist though. Party A wanted a commitment. Party B didn’t. Party A left. Party B is upset. And Party A says “Too bad. So sad. You missed your chance. And I am angry for you for not loving me the way I love(d) you.” Swap the genders in any combination, and it’s the same story.
Oh, by the way, the Fosse video isn’t available, but a mashup of the video and “Walk It Out” (a southern hip-hop track) is readily available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmGHmU2uxDo
Tiffany, you may in fact be right about the lyrics–though “own” makes the song a wee bit messier, which is always more exciting to me! And thanks for the link–it’s great!
Tracie, you make a good point, and my friend Christine recently echoed a similar sentiment. It’s true, Beyonce could do far more. Being sexy is what she seems most comfortable with, and, beyond her obvious singing and dancing talents, perhaps that’s what she’s best at, performance-wise…? I do wish she would get a little more exciting in that regard.
Here’s a link to a mashup of “Single Ladies” with the original Bob Fosse/Gwen Verdon routine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhlbni8C3XI&feature=related, and here’s another that seems to show how much Fosse influenced Michael Jackson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvZGl1NqBRc&feature=PlayList&p=4BD80FC27B4C80FF&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=2
Wait wait wait – a song by a married female-bodied artist pronouncing heteronormative patriarchal desires and a prescription for groups outside of her current experience (“single ladies” and “men in the club”) is all about choices? Beyonce ain’t empowered here – hell of a dancer, but not an empowering role model.
In response to “What if it’s consensual?” Cultural pressure and coerced consent to patriarchy is not simply something that makes me uncomfortable, but rather it reinforces a narrow mode of thought that touches off on many other issues that I find carry towards distressing and unhealthy experiences for all parties involved. I agree with Hess: this is a portrayal of pseudo-empowerment for commercial appeal with no real radical analysis. Again, though – wish I could dance like that.
Thanks for your comment, Trevor. I think you make an excellent point about Beyonce speaking for groups she’s not a part of–I hadn’t thought of that.
I take issue with faulting her for having “heteronormative patriarchal desires”–it seems to impose a reading on a song that’s not intended to be a feminist anthem. And, again, the reading suggests that a straight woman who wants to be involved with a straight man cannot ever be a feminist. That excludes a lot of women from the movement, and it places requirements for behavior on women, which seems to defeat the purpose of feminism in the first place.
I’m not so sure Beyonce’s “consent to the patriarchy” is “coerced”, either. I guess, overall, I don’t think anyone can really duck out of this patriarchy, or that this patriarchy is a static, monolithic structure. We just can’t say, “No thank you, Mr. Patriarchy.” That shit is everywhere, and we are all participating in it, in one way or another, even if it’s in rejection of it.
On a side note, this reminds me of a line from Margaret Atwood’s wonderful novel The Robber Bride:
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? …Even pretending you aren’t catering to a male fantasy is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair, unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman”
You are completely wrong. It’s anti-feminist because she’s using her body to get back at the man. She’s handing herself out to some stranger to enact revenge. She shouldn’t even be trying to get revenge in the first place, it’s childish and immature. Still she objectifies her body, like a possession, and hands it around to see how some guy that didn’t want her feels. She is desperate for marriage. She wants to marry a guy who doesn’t even want her. She’s begging to be taken, to be domesticated. She wants to be owned. A feminist song? Give me a break.
Sorry but you did not convince me. Why didn’t SHE asked him to marry her?
thanks heaps everyone, all of your opinions have totally helped me to pass an assignment!
ps. yeah the whole intention of the song is muddled. She wants to be all strong and break away from her previous relationship? dont ‘Say I’m the one you own” or break up with a dude simply to run to someone else. Be single for awhile!!
Perhaps he ‘didnt put a ring on it’ because you kept nagging him to.
and besides, isnt beyonce married to Jay – Z? the song is completely redundant.