Being James Brown

The faster James Brown thinks, the more fiercely his hipster's vernacular impacts upon itself, and the faster he talks, the more his dentures slip. So, though transcribing James Brown's monologues as they occur is my goal, much of what he says is, to my ears, total gibberish. As today's session begins, James Brown is recalling members of his band who've passed. "Jimmy Nolen gone. What about the tall cat?" Hollie, apparently, knows who he means by "the tall cat," and replies, "Coleman? He's alive." This leads James Brown into the subject of health, primarily digestive health. He speaks of dysentery while on tour in third-world countries: "Doing number one and number two at the same time" and exhorts the band: "Maintain yourself." To me: "Olive oil. I always tell them, 'Bring olive oil on the road.' " I don't ask what the olive oil is for. This reminds James Brown of the dangers of the road, generally, especially of exotic locations, which he begins to reel off: "Jakarta. Cameroon. Peru." He recalls, "We were in communist Africa....At the end of the show there were baskets of money...protected by machine guns, though. Got confiscated for the government." He recalls the Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko attempting to keep him and his band from departing when George Foreman's injury delayed the Foreman-Ali boxing match: "We got out. We got paid. One hundred grand." James Brown seems torn between bragging of munificence -- painting himself an "ambassador to the world" who paid his own way to Vietnam to entertain the troops -- and bragging of his shrewdness in always getting paid in cash, even in circumstances of maximum corruption and intrigue: promoters dying mysteriously, funds shifted through Brussels.

Shrewdness wins, for the moment, as he switches to tales of his gambling prowess, though he seems initially most keen on Mr. Bobbit's confirming a time when he came within a digit of winning a million-dollar lottery. "Yes, sir, you almost hit that pot," agrees Bobbit. James Brown then tells of playing craps on the road. "I won enough from the Moonglows to buy myself a Cadillac. Them cats was so mad they stole my shoes. Wilson Pickett, all these guys, I look so clean, they don't think I can play. I was a street man even though I had a suit on." But his stake in being thought of as the luckiest man alive is compromised by an eagerness to divulge his secret: "shaved dice," which always came up the way he wanted them to. Later this day, I ask several members of the band whether James Brown is babbling for my benefit. Not at all, they explain. "He's making us ready for the road," Damon tells me, reminding me that on Monday, James Brown and his band are heading to Europe for a month of shows. "He knows it's going to be hard. He wants us to remember we're a family."

When, what seems hours later, work at last begins for the day, it will be on two different fronts. First, James Brown records a ballad that trumpeter and arranger Hollie has written and arranged in his off-hours. The ballad, it turns out, has been lurking in the background for a while, with Mr. Bobbit and several band members gently inducing James Brown to give it a chance to be heard. Today, James Brown has -- impetuously, suddenly -- decided to make use of it. Hollie, given this chance, hurriedly transposes the changes for the guitarists and hands out sheet music. The simple ballad is swiftly recorded.

James Brown then goes into a small booth, dons a pair of headphones and, in the space of about fifteen minutes, bashes his way through a vocal track on the second take. Audibly, James Brown is inventing the melody and arriving at decisions about deviations from that melody (syllables to emphasize, words to whisper or moan or shout, vowel sounds to repeat or stretch) simultaneously, as he goes along. With uncanny instincts married to outlandish impatience, he is able to produce a result not wholly unlistenable. Understand: This is a matter of genius but an utterly wasteful sort of genius, and after we listen to the playback, and James Brown is out of range of the band's talk, Hollie and Keith agree that if James Brown were to regard the track he just recorded as a beginning -- as a guide vocal to study and refine in some later vocal take -- they might really have something. But they also seem resigned to the fact that James Brown considers his work on the track complete.

Next, James Brown writes a lyric, to record over a long, rambling blues-funk track titled "Message to the World." For anyone who has ever wondered how James Brown writes a song, I have a sort of answer for you. First: He borrows Mr. Bobbit's bifocals. James Brown doesn't have glasses of his own, or left them at home, or something. Second: He borrows a pencil. Third: He sits, and writes, for about fifteen minutes. Then he puts himself behind the microphone. The result is a cascading rant not completely unlike his spoken monologues. Impossible to paraphrase, it meanders over subjects as disparate as his four marriages, Charles Barkley, Al Jarreau, a mixture of Georgia and Carolina identities he calls "Georgia-lina," the fact that he still knows Maceo Parker and that Fred Wesley doesn't live very far away, either, Mr. Bobbit's superiority to him as a checkers player, the fact that he believes himself to have both Asian and Native American ancestry, and, most crucially, his appetite for corn on the cob and its role in his health: "I like corn, that's a regular thing with me. Gonna live a long time, live a little longer."

Afterward, we gather in our usual places, for playback. Late in the eleven-minute song, James Brown issues a universal religious salute: "Salaam-aleikum-may-peace-be-unto-you, brother....Believe in the Supreme Being!" As these words resound, James Brown glances at me and then abruptly commands Howard to roll the tape back to that point: There's something he wishes to punch in on the vocal. Hustling into the booth, when the tape arrives at the brief pause between "brother" and "believe," James Brown now wedges in a brief but hearty "shalom!" Re-emerging, he points at me and winks. "Shalom, Mr. ROLLING STONE!" James Brown has pegged me as Jewish. So much for being invisible in this place. He has apparently tampered with the spontaneity of his own vocal, merely in order to appease what he imagines are my religious urgencies.

Indeed, he now fixates on me, for a short while. During this same playback session, while deeply engaged in transcribing what I've heard around me, my head ducked to the screen of my Powerbook, I notice that James Brown has begun singing, a cappella, a portion of the song "Papa Was a Rolling Stone." I continue typing, even transcribing the lyrics of the song as he sings them: "Papa was a rolling stone/Wherever he laid his hat was his home...." Odd, I think: This isn't a James Brown song. Then I hear the band's laughter and look up. James Brown is singing it directly at me, trying to gain my attention.

"Oh," I say, red-faced, as I look up at him. "Sorry. I forgot my new name."

"That's all right, Mr. ROLLING STONE," says James Brown. "I was just missing you."

Roosevelt Johnson, known always as R.J., sits with me and explains his role, a role he's occupied since he was nine, forty-two years ago: "Hold the coat." Excuse me? "Hold the coat, hold the coat." R.J. expands, then, on the basic principle of life in the James Brown entourage: You do one thing, you do it right and you do it forever. It is the nature of traveling with James Brown that everyone treats him like a god: "The people that show up in every city, they all fall back into their old jobs, like they never stopped. The doormen stand by the door, the hairdressers start dressing his hair." R.J. is being modest, since his responsibilities have grown to a performing role, as the second voice in a variety of James Brown's call-and-response numbers ("Soul Power," "Make It Funky," "Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved"), replacing the legendary founding member of the Famous Flames -- James Brown's first band -- Bobby Byrd. R.J. sounds uncannily like Byrd when he sings -- or "raps" -- Byrd's parts in the classic songs, and in concert R.J.'s ebullient turns often draw some of the mightiest cheers from the crowd, who nonetheless can have no idea who he is. Yet for him, his life is defined by his offstage work: "Someday I'm going to write a book about my life, called Holding the Coat."

(Hearing this, Cynthia Moore, one member of James Brown's backing singers, the Bitter Sweets, interrupts: "My book's gonna be called "Take Me to the Bridge, I Want to Jump Off.")

The greatest exemplar of the Entourage phenomenon is, of course, Danny Ray, the little man with the pompadour and the voice familiar from so many decades of live introductions. Danny, from Birmingham, Alabama, joined James Brown in the Fifties, when they met at the Apollo Theater. He joined as a valet. And, though he has become nearly as recognizable a voice as James Brown himself, he is still a valet; indeed, his concern for the band's clothes obsesses Danny: He is the human incarnation of James Brown's lifelong concern with being immaculately dressed. Valet, and master of ceremonies, Danny Ray is also the proprietor of "the cape routine" -- i.e., he comes onstage to settle the cape over James Brown's shoulders when he collapses onstage, and he receives the cape and takes it away when James Brown has shrugged free of it.

R.J. and Danny Ray briefly allude to another responsibility that tends to devolve to valets: wrangling James Brown's irate girlfriends. Danny Ray cites a few vivid episodes: "Candace. Lisa. Heather. The one from Las Vegas that came to his house carrying a .357. She said, 'What is your intention?' " It is R.J. who finishes the story, laughing: "Brown said, 'My intention is for you to get on the plane, go back to Las Vegas. Get out of here.' "

Keith and Damon, the guitarists, ask me if I'd care to join them at a bar. We arrange to meet in Jeff the saxophonist's room at the Ramada. It is here that I learn Jeff's nickname: Sizzler. Sizzler is named for how there's always something aromatic burning in his room -- a candle, incense or "something else." And, sure enough, Jeff's room is a haze when I arrive to find Keith and Damon there, along with Hollie, drummer Robert "Mousey" Thompson and George "Spike" Nealy, the second percussionist. Here, safely distant from either James Brown's or Mr. Bobbit's ears, I'm regaled with the affectionate and mocking grievances of a lifer in James Brown's band. I think I'm beginning to understand what story it is Keith feels has never been told: the glorious absurdity of the band's servitude.

"We're supposed to follow these hand signals," Keith explains. "We've got to watch him every minute, you never know when he's going to change something up. But his hand is like an eagle's claw -- he'll point with a curved finger, and it's like, 'Do you mean me, or him? Because you're looking at me but you're pointing at him.' "

They take turns imitating James Brown's infuriating mimed commands to them during live shows. "It's like rock-paper-scissors," jokes Damon. Each of the band members, I gradually learn, has a spot-on James Brown impression available. Each has memorized favorite James Brown non sequiturs: "Sixteen of the American presidents were black," or the time he asked an audience for thirty seconds of silence for a fallen celebrity he called "John F.K." To these men, James Brown is both their idol and their jester, their tyrannical father and ludicrous child.

Jeff tells me of going on the David Letterman show for a three-minute spot. "We didn't discuss what we were doing until we got out there. Sound-checked a totally different song. I didn't know I was doing a solo on TV until he waved me out front."

Hollie, the longest-enduring among them there, says, "I don't think there's another band on the planet that can do what we do."

Damon adds, "I like to call it Masters of the Impossible."

Yet they hurry to make me understand their vast reverence and devotion -- for you see, they're also the luckiest musicians on earth. Keith tells me, "Brown told us, 'You got it made. You cats are lucky, you're made now.' Eleven years later, I get it. The man hasn't had a hit for twenty years, but we'll work forever. We're going to the Hollywood Bowl, Buckingham Palace, the Apollo Theater, it never stops. We could work for a hundred years. You play with someone else, you might have two good years, then sit for two years, wondering if anything's ever going to happen again. With James Brown, you're always working. Because he's James Brown. It's like we're up there with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse. There's no other comparison."

"Listen," says Jeff. "There's something we want you to hear." I've been corralled into Jeff's room for a purpose: the unveiling of the secret recordings of James Brown's band. The frustration these musicians feel at having no voice in composition or arrangement has taken its toll, a certain despair about the prospects for the present recording sessions. James Brown, they complain, just won't let his band help him. Yet these frustrations have, in turn, found an outlet.

Sizzler fires up his iTunes, connected to fair pair of desktop speakers, and there, seated on a Ramada bedspread, I'm treated to an audio sample of What Could Be, if only James Brown would allow it. The songs are original funk tunes, composed variously by Damon, Mousey, Jeff and Hollie, and recorded, under cover of darkness, in hotel rooms while the band travels, or while they assemble, as now, for official sessions. The songs are tight, catchy, propulsive numbers, each with one foot in Seventies funk and another in a more contemporary style. They have the added benefit of being something new.

No one has dared tell James Brown that this music exists. He might fire them if he knew. In this, the band's wishful thinking tangles with its sense of protectiveness of the boss's feelings. For James Brown, it seems, has had so many important musicians outgrow his band -- Bootsy, Maceo, Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley -- that his passion for control has outstripped his curiosity about what his present roster might have to offer him. Anyone showing signs of a life of their own, musical or otherwise, tends to be the target of elaborate and vindictive humiliations. "It's abandonment issues," says Keith. "Has to do with being abandoned by his parents." James Brown will deliberately schedule mandatory rehearsals to clash with weddings or funerals. Keith tells me, "At the Apollo, the first time my wife was going to see me play, he sat me down offstage, didn't let me go on."

The funniest of the secret recordings is a song called "Pimp Danny," which, unlike the others, consists not only of live instruments played directly into laptop computers but of samples of old James Brown records. By pasting together various introductions to shows over the years, the band has created a track where Danny Ray takes the role of lead vocalist, saying things like, "I like to feel dynamite, I like to feel out of sight! I like to feel sexy-sexy-sexy!" "Pimp Danny" also samples the voice of Bobby Byrd and a drumbeat from Clyde Stubblefield, one of the great drummers from James Brown's Sixties band. In this way, "Pimp Danny" is not only a celebration of Danny Ray, who seems in many ways the band's talisman-in-servitude, but a kind of yearning conflation of the legendary past eras of the band with its present incarnation. And there's a plan: Fred Wesley, James Brown's trombonist and bandleader throughout the Sixties and Seventies, has promised to come to the studio tomorrow to record a few trombone solos, for old times' sake. (Everyone comes back.) The band wants to try to sneak Wesley back to the Ramada so he can add his horn to "Pimp Danny."

Many sizzles later, Keith and Damon and I have made it to the Soul Bar, where loud rap is on the soundtrack, which spurs a brief rhapsody from Keith: "You hear a Chuck Berry song, a Jerry Lee Lewis song, it's an oldie. It's got no relevance. James Brown comes on, it's got relevance. Some rapper has a hit, it's got a little piece of him in it. He hears himself everywhere. His relevance sustains him." Keith and Damon go on some more about what they'd do if only they could seize control of the sessions. "James Brown should go out like Johnny Cash did," they say. Keith says, "We're like a blade of grass trying to push up through the concrete."

Now, to note that James Brown is self-centered or egotistical or pleased with himself is hardly an insight worth troubling over. That James "I want to kiss myself" Brown dabbles in self-adulation hardly makes him unique in the history of art. James Brown's subjugation of his various bands' musical ambitions to his own ego, to his all-encompassing need to claim as entirely an extension of his own genius every riff invented by anyone within his orbit, is, needless to say, a cause of much dispute. To put it simply: The James Brown sound, its historic sequence of innovations, depends on a whole series of collaborators and contributors, none of whom have been adequately acknowledged or compensated. Yet the more I contemplated the band's odd solicitude toward James Brown's ogreish demands, the more completely I became persuaded that James Brown is re-enacting an elemental trauma: the abandonment by his parents into a world of almost feral instability and terror. One doesn't have to look far. His own 1986 autobiography, James Brown, bears the dedication "For the child deprived of being able to grow up and say 'Momma' and 'Daddy' and have both of them come put their arms around him."

This is a child who ate "salad we found in the woods" in his first years, a child who was sent home from school -- in the rural South -- for "insufficient clothes" (i.e., potato sacks). This is a teenager who was nearly electrocuted by a pair of white men who whimsically invited him to touch a car battery they were fooling with. This is a man who, during his incarceration in the 1980s, long after he'd drowned his nightmare of "insufficient clothes" in velvet and fur and leather and jeweled cuff links, was found to be hiding tens of thousands of dollars in cash in his prison cell, an expression of a certainty that society was merely a thin fiction covering a harsh jungle of desolation and violence, and if James Brown wasn't looking out for James Brown, no one was.

His, then, is a solipsism born of necessity. When it most mattered, there was nobody to jump up and kiss James Brown except himself. His "family" is therefore a trickle-down structure, practically a musical Ponzi scheme, and anyone willing to give him his best is going to be taken for as long a ride as he can take him on. Gamble with James Brown, and he will throw the shaved dice, until, like the Moonglows and Wilson Pickett, you are forced to understand that you are dealing with a street man. And much as in the cases of Duke Ellington or Orson Welles, James Brown's ability to catalyze and absorb the efforts of his collaborators is a healthy portion of his genius.

And discipline is good for the child, after all. When James Brown sings, as he does, of corporal punishment: "Mama come here quick/Bring me that lickin' stick" or "Papa didn't cuss, he didn't raise a whole lot of fuss/But when we did wrong, Papa beat the hell out of us," it is with admiration, and pride. Though his band consents to call itself his family, the structure bears at least an equal resemblance to jail -- which is where James Brown was more likely to have absorbed his definitive notions of authority. So when his musicians begin to bristle under his hand, they find themselves savaged for their "betrayals" -- for daring, that is, to risk subjecting James Brown to further experience of abandonment. This explains what I encountered in Augusta: The band James Brown has gathered in 2005 is the vanishing endpoint of his long struggle with Byrd, Maceo, Bootsy, Pee Wee, Wesley and all the others; a band more inclined to coddle his terror than to attempt to push him to some new musical accomplishment, however tempting it might be.

James Brown is in his mid-seventies, for crying out loud. What more do you want from him? What's really special about James Brown is how undisguised, how ungentrified, he remains, has always remained. Most anyone else from his point of origin would long since be living in Beverly Hills, just as his peers in the R&B and soul genre of the Fifties and Sixties smoothed down their rough edges and negotiated a truce; either went Motown, meeting the needs of a white audience for safe, approachable music, or else went jazzily uptown, like Ray Charles. Whereas James Brown, astonishingly, returned to Augusta, site of his torment, and persistently left the backwoods-shack, backwoods-church, Twiggs Street-whorehouse edges of his music raw and on view. His trauma, his confusion, his desperation; those are worn on the outside of his art, on the outside of his shivering and crawling and pleading onstage. James Brown, you see, is not only the kid from Twiggs Street who wouldn't go away. He's the one who wouldn't pretend he wasn't from Twiggs Street.