Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  “You gotta remember, me growing up in the sixties and seventies, he was more than just a hot artist to me,” Sharpton explains. “He was black history. He was so in control of himself. I never met anybody that had that kind of controlling presence. This sounds crazy, but James Brown had such a presence and charisma, you could almost feel him coming in the building. He dominated every room he walked in, and I’m one of the few people who’s been in the room with him in the White House with Reagan and Bush, and in his jail cell. It didn’t matter. It was his self-confidence. It was his spirit. It was a gift he had. He dominated.”

  One of the first events that Brown took Sharpton to was a gig at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on a bill that featured Aretha Franklin, Barry White, and several other top black artists. The two arrived in Vegas at two A.M. in Brown’s private jet, only to find that the Presidential Suite was occupied. Brown kicked up a fuss until the hotel moved whoever was in that suite out. Sharpton, who had never seen anything like the Presidential Suite and the first-class treatment that Brown received, was aching to stay on the casino floor and have some fun with the stars, who were eating and fraternizing over the slots and card game, but instead Brown summoned Sharpton to his suite.

  Brown asked Sharpton, “You been downstairs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You see any of the artists when you were downstairs?”

  “Yeah, a few are down there gambling and all,” Sharpton said, itching to go back down there himself.

  “You know what we’re gonna do, Reverend?”

  “What?”

  “What time is the gig tonight?”

  “I think you go on about ten.”

  “Good. We’re gonna sit right here. Ain’t nobody going to see James Brown till it’s time to hit. Everybody else down there, they’re being common. Don’t be common, Rev. They’ll be gambling with people all day. We stay here. Let’s call some more disc jockeys.”

  They worked all day and into the night, “calling disc jockeys,” Sharpton recalls. “To make sure they were playing his records. I was miserable.”

  At eight P.M., Sharpton recalls, “Brown went downstairs and talked to the promoter. The guy said, ‘We’re honored to have you, Mr. Brown, blah blah—’ Mr. Brown cut him off. ‘What’s the rundown?’ he asked. ‘Who’s first?’

  “The guy told Brown that he appeared in the middle of the show.

  “ ‘Oh, you can’t put me in the middle. You’ll put me last. ’Cause when I finish, that’s the end of the show.’ ” The guy agreed.

  Brown turned to Sharpton. “Rev, I’m gonna eat ’em alive.”

  When the music began, Sharpton stood in the wings and watched the other artists perform their shows. “When they introduced James Brown, the band hit, and I’ll never forget it,” Sharpton says. “He grabbed the mic and threw it, and I’m waiting for him to catch it on his shoulder when he jumps back and grabs it with his hand, and jumps into the audience, in between two tables, and does a perfect split. Comes up and pulls the mic down. It was over.”

  After turning the place on its ear, Brown went through his ritual of having his hair done backstage under the hair dryer, then rose to head back to his suite while the other stars attended an after-party. “It gets worse,” Sharpton says. “When we got to his suite—people congratulating him the whole way—he says to Mr. Bobbit, ‘Get the plane ready. We’re leaving.’ ”

  “Tonight?” Sharpton said. “We just got here.”

  “Lemme tell you something, Rev. When you kill ’em, Rev, you leave. You kill ’em and leave. You understand that, son? Kill ’em and leave.”

  They hopped on the private plane and flew to Los Angeles. And they proceeded that way for the next fifteen years.

  “Normal life to him didn’t exist,” says Sharpton. “Jesse [Jackson] and them’s status was to get on the A-list. James Brown’s status was there wasn’t no A-list. He was the list. He said, ‘Reverend, if I got to compromise to make it, I’m not rising. I’m somebody else rising. I got to be me. I rise on my own terms. That’s how I made it the first time. That’s how I’ll make it back, or I don’t have to get back.’ And that’s what he ingrained in me—success was you making it as you were, not changing who you were to make it.”

  For a good part of Brown’s greatest years, 1971 to 1975, Sharpton rode shotgun with Brown. And then in his career-declining years, from 1975 to 1984 and on, the Rev hung on as well. In the good years, the band traveled by bus while Brown flew in a private plane. The band dreaded flying with Brown, because it was a one-way conversation: he talked, you listened. You ate what he ate. You went where he went. Trombonist and film scorer Fred Wesley, Brown’s great musical director and co-composer, laughs aloud when he recalls having to travel in Brown’s plane to work on a score or work out ideas with Brown. “Just dreadful,” he says. “I’d be crying to get back on the bus.” But Sharpton loved traveling with Brown.

  “The band would be plotting to get away from him,” Sharpton says. “Literally. And I would think something was wrong with them. I wanted to drink all that he was willing to give me.”

  Sharpton changed his hairstyle to emulate Brown’s. “I’ve had big arguments with people about ‘Why did you always defer to him?’ Let me tell you something. He was not only a father. People that grow up like I did—a father that was a businessman, then abandoned us, going from middle class, which for the black you were what they call “negro rich,” to nothing—you develop, even unknowingly, complexes on ‘Why did my father leave me even if he didn’t get along with my mother?’ I was named after my father, all that. James Brown validated and affirmed my worth, so he could never do no wrong to me. That was part of our relationship. We validated each other. He made me feel self-worth and self-esteem, knowing that a man that enormous wanted me to reflect him—because my own father didn’t. And I think for him, I validated what he wanted to be seen as: a big historical person. I believed that about him. So when I said there are four B’s in music: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Brown, he knew I really meant it.”

  Here was a man who could, and did, blow off meeting the Rolling Stones, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and, if he wasn’t in a mood to meet them, dignitaries of all stripes, high and low. According to Sharpton, Brown met President Richard Nixon with his trusty .38 in his coat pocket. When Brown played Zaire in Africa as part of the gala preceding the great Ali–George Foreman fight, with the world watching and the cream of black entertainment in tow, Brown knocked the socks off eighty thousand roaring and screaming fans. He told Sharpton after the performance, “Pack up. We’re leaving.”

  Sharpton didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay with the other entertainers who had come to revel in the pending fight, which was postponed because of an injury Foreman sustained. Besides, President Mobutu of Zaire, a country rich in diamonds, had made it known that he wanted to impart certain gifts to the performers. Brown had no interest.

  “But Mr. Brown,” Sharpton protested, “we just got here.”

  “Kill ’em and leave, Rev. Kill ’em and leave.”

  And kill ’em and leave he did, knocking ’em dead from one city to the next, as the Rev watched, for thirty-five years. What was the point, Brown said, trying to play big. Just be big. When disco chased Brown off the radar and his popularity slipped, his great band departed, but Sharpton stayed. He watched Brown fall from superstar playing Madison Square Garden to an oldies act, playing blues clubs for $5,000 per night, working without a record deal, with a new band, the Soul Generals, playing his old hits at high speed, with white background dancers dressed in red, white, and blue pirouetting across the stage like pom-pom girls at a Dallas Cowboys football game. Promoters abandoned him; the IRS cleaned him out. He lost his private plane, his radio stations; the women he had used and in some cases abused terribly began to fight back with lawsuits. His drug problems, which he’d always hidden from the Rev, led him to jail. Yet the Rev stayed, traveling by car two or three times a month from New York to South Carolina to see Bro
wn, drumming up public support to get him out of his jail. Sharpton loved Brown, not only as a father, but as a man who could stand up and take it and not knuckle or beg. When Brown, in the nineties, had no record deal, he sought record-deal financing from promoter Don King. King declined, saying he didn’t know the record business, but he offered Brown $10,000 as a gift. Brown refused it. “I ain’t asking for charity,” he said.

  He had lost his juice, really. He’d spent his entire career compartmentalizing everyone: Band members here. Payoff guy there. Women there. White managers here. Black managers there. Black friends here. White friends there. Wives. Girlfriends. It all collapsed around him. And when he looked up one day, most of them were gone. The only ones left were the old-timers: Charles Bobbit, Leon Austin, and, of course, the Rev.

  In May 2005, when the city of Augusta constructed a bronze James Brown statue on its downtown Broad Street, Brown invited Sharpton, who by then had become a national figure, to come to speak. After the event, when the two were walking to Brown’s car, Brown grabbed Sharpton by the elbow.

  “You know what I love about you, Rev?”

  “What’s that, Mr. Brown?”

  “You were the only one who didn’t leave me. All the others left. But you stayed. You stayed, Rev.”

  I remember the Sharpton of those years and beyond. I first laid eyes on him in 1984, when I attended my first-ever LA press conference in Encino, California, when Michael Jackson announced his 1984 Victory Tour. I had never been to LA before, had never seen the glitz and glamour, the cheapness and wildness of the place. The press conference was held in Jackson’s driveway, as I recall, and among the cadre of promoters who stood before the press—Chuck Sullivan, then owner of the New England Patriots; Don King; Michael’s manager Frank DiLeo—stood the then-infamous Al Sharpton, with his trademark sweat suit and wild hair in the James Brown pompadour. He traveled as part of the six-month tour, but I don’t remember much of what he said. I rarely spoke to him during the tour. I was a reporter back then, and I couldn’t socialize with sources, especially one as controversial as Sharpton. But I do distinctly remember one thing he said during the course of the Victory Tour, and he said it often: “I’m here because of James Brown.” He said, “I’m here to look after Michael Jackson’s interests because James Brown sent me.” I was pretty naïve in those days, but not naïve enough to say what I really thought, which was, “This guy is full of it.”

  Turns out what he said was true. He had been sent there by Brown to help Michael out. Long after that tour ended, Sharpton was one of the few in politics or entertainment who stood with Jackson when Michael—as kind a person as I’ve ever met in the entertainment business—was accused, and later acquitted, of child-molestation charges. Jackson never forgot James Brown’s kindness for sending his right-hand man to stand with him in his troubled times. And he would repay the kindness to Brown many years later.

  He steps inside the tattered screen door of Brooker’s soul food restaurant in Barnwell, South Carolina, like he owns it. And in a way, he does. He’s an old-timer. Miss Iola, working behind the counter, looks up and waves. She runs the joint with her sister, and she called him the night before at home and told him the deal:

  “Liver tomorrow,” she said. “Come before it gets gone.”

  That’s all he needed to hear. “I come every time,” he jokes. “She doesn’t have to call twice.”

  Miss Iola smiles as he approaches the counter. He’s a heavyset man, in a collar shirt, with thick glasses. He looks like a lawyer, or an accountant, or a salesman, and he’s the only white guy in a room of black folks. Not a safe place to be. That’s what a lawyer told him just before he went to prison: “The blacks in prison will kill you.” But they didn’t kill him. In fact, many of the men respected him. Some even asked for his advice. A couple asked for his autograph, which had never happened to him before. He moved among those black folks like he moves among them in this diner today, with ease and comfort, because he’s home. He knows these people. Some are his neighbors. He goes to church with a few. His name is David Cannon. He’s James Brown’s accountant. James Brown’s Money Man.

  Cannon takes his tray from the counter and moves to a simple picnic table in the crowded room. The normal buzz of eating goes right on. He places his tray on the table and checks its contents: Collards. Yams. Mac and cheese. A bit of chicken. Sweet lemonade. And, of course, that delicious liver. “Best liver in Barnwell,” he says, unfolding his paper napkin.

  “When did you come here last?” I ask. I’d met Cannon many times before, but this is the first time I’ve seen him in public. He has to wear an ankle monitor that prevents him from leaving home at certain hours.

  But he’s gone. I’m sitting right across the table from him, but he’s not listening. His eyes are closed. His head is bowed in prayer.

  Cannon prays aloud, thanking God for his food, his health, for his wife, Maggie, and his freedom. And while he’s praying, I’m peeking out of one eye and worrying about my own skin. Because I’ve spent quite a bit of time with this guy, and I like him. He’s a straight talker, a Christian, a good old boy, a dues-paying member of the Republican Party, the only guy James Brown trusted with his money—and that says a lot, because Brown trusted practically no one with his chips. But Brown died with millions in assets and left most of his money not to his offspring, or their families, but to poor children. And some of those family members didn’t like it. They rallied, smelling big cheese. They needed a flunky. Somebody to blame. There, big as day, sat David Cannon, the perfect villain. A southern white man, a Republican, the guy who handled Mr. Brown’s money. Cannon was blindsided. After forty years of building a career as a respected accountant, he found his name and picture plastered across the Internet under headlines full of half-truths—then was committed to jail for a crime that has never been proven in anyone’s court.

  I stare at him as he fervently prays, eyes closed. And I wonder. This guy’s life has been effectively destroyed by the plethora of lawsuits following Brown’s death. His wife tried to commit suicide twice. His son was murdered four days before he was sentenced. His ex-wife died the same day in a motor vehicle accident rushing to her son’s side. Most of his life savings were spent on legal fees.

  Yet the guy is thanking God from the bottom of his heart.

  I snap from my reverie and find Cannon staring at me. From the fog of my own head, I hear him say, “How come you’re not having liver?”

  “I’m not big on liver.”

  “Then you’re missing out,” he says, munching heartily. “If you taste this, you won’t find a thing to complain about it, I’ll guarantee you that.”

  He eats, lustily, as if it’s the last meal he’ll ever eat, while I sit there thinking, Only God can stand a man up this way.

  And I’m grateful to see it.

  —

  By 1984, Brown’s career was in the tank. Disco had swallowed him. His once-great band—made up of Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis, Sweet Charles Sherrell, Jimmy Nolen, Richard “Kush” Griffith, Joe Davis, St. Clair Pinckney, Clyde Stubblefield, and Jabo Starks, among others—was history. Michael Jackson was King of Pop. Every business idea Brown had come up with was going kaplooey or had already gone splat. The great James Brown organization, with offices in New York and Augusta, was gone. His three radio stations were sold by creditors. His soul food restaurant chain, Gold Platter, was kaput. His green-stamps idea had tanked. His plane had been repossessed. A nightclub he’d built with an old friend, Third World, was mysteriously burned to the ground and the arsonists never caught. And most critically, he owed $15 million to the IRS, which had a chokehold on his affairs and had seized his assets. They took his thirty cars and his art. They put his house up for auction. And that was just on the business side. On the personal side, his life was a similar wreck. His union with his live-in girlfriend, the former Adrienne Rodriguez, whom he married in 1985, was a public mess. She’d had him arrested four times. And Brown, who had never bee
n seen even smoking a cigarette in public, had secretly become hooked on PCP, angel dust, a source of great shame to him. His star had vanished. He’d outrun his revolution. He was an oldies act with a terrible reputation.

  “Professionally, he was a scourge,” says Buddy Dallas, a Thomson, Georgia, attorney whom Brown had approached to help him out of his mess. “He had crashed from prominence. He didn’t pay his debts. He didn’t even have a home telephone. His bills were unpaid. It was not popular to be close to James Brown.” Brown’s performance fee, Dallas says, was $7,500 a night. But it cost Brown $9,000 to put performers onstage. “He owed utilities bills. He owed his band. If he owed a guy $500, he’d give them $250 and promise the other $250. That was the James Brown method of paying bills.”

  Dallas, the son of a Lincolnton, Georgia, sawmill worker, has the keen intelligence and sharp wit of an old country lawyer. Says Dallas, “My daddy would always say, ‘Son, you can tell a lie a thousand ways. But there’s only one way that you can tell the truth.’ ” He met Brown at a function, and Brown, who always had an eye for talent and for a man with a sense of humor, played with Dallas’s three-year-old daughter while sizing up Dallas. Shortly after that, Brown called Dallas, the two met, and Brown said, “Mr. Dallas, I been checking on you, and I understand you can be trusted. I want you to represent me.”

  Dallas, a white man, had never worked for a black boss before. He’d grown up in the segregated South, but went through the University of Georgia School of Law in the 1960s dancing to Brown’s music and howling to Brown’s “Night Train.” The two discovered they had much in common. They liked to quote Bible verses. They liked to hunt squirrels. They loved fried chicken. And most important, they were both southerners, country boys who understood the meaning of virtue, honesty, and pride.