The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  This time-traveler theory would best explain what is hardest to explain about James Brown, especially to younger listeners who live so entirely in a sonic world of James Brown’s creation: That he made it all sound this way. That it sounded different before him. The more essential and encompassing a contribution of this kind, the more difficult to assess, in a fish-assessing-the-ocean sort of way. This time-traveler theory would explain, too, how in 1973, right at the moment when it might have seemed that the times had caught up, at last, with James Brown’s sonic idea, that the torch of funk had been taken up and his precognitive capacities therefore exhausted, James Brown recorded a song, called “The Payback,” which abruptly predicts the aural and social ambiance of late-’80s gangsta rap.

  My theory also explains the opposite phenomenon, the one I so frequently witnessed in Augusta. If the man was able to see 2005 from the distance of 1958, he’s also prone to reliving 1958—and 1967, and 1971, and 1985—now that 2005 has finally come around. We all dwell in the world James Brown saw so completely before we came along into it; James Brown, in turn, hasn’t totally joined us here in the future he made. That’s why it all remains so startlingly new to him, why, during one playback session, he turned to Mr. Bobbit and said, “Can I scream and moan? I sound so good I want to kiss myself!” He spoke the phrase as if for the first time, and that may be because for him it was essentially occurring to him for the first time, or, rather, that there is no first time: All his moments are one. James Brown, in this view, is always conceiving the idea of being James Brown, as if nobody, including himself, had thought of it until just now. At any given moment James Brown is presently reinventing funk, bringing his visionary idea home like a caveman dragging to his lair a mighty mastodon vanquished in the tundra. To record “Soul Power” in 2005, no matter how perverse a use of studio time it may seem to an outside observer, is equally as revelatory as to record it in 1971. James Brown, it turns out, is reinscribing the world.

  This theory also neatly explains the James Brown Zone of Confusion: Fred Thomas as the bass player on “Sex Machine,” and so on. It’s hard, for a man of James Brown’s helplessly visionary tendencies, to know what happened today, yesterday, or indeed, tomorrow. All accounts are, therefore, highly suspect. Nat Kendrick may in fact have gone to the bathroom during the recording of “Think” or “I’ll Go Crazy.” Nat Kendrick may not, indeed, have gone to the bathroom yet.

  5. In the Studio with James Brown, Day Two

  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. “Clyde Stubblefield gone, 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.” He tells of keeping one plane behind: “The cats is so backward they had the liquor on the plane and the instruments off. I told them to take the liquor off and put the instruments on, or we wasn’t going nowhere.” James Brown seems torn between bragging of munificence—painting himself as 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. Just as abruptly, James Brown’s reminiscences open to melancholy. “I did a commercial for the lottery and I haven’t hit since.” He muses on this, and it begins to seem, potentially, a metaphor for aging. “I lost the desire to play. I lost that.” 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 variety 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 “Georgelina,” 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 lit
tle longer.”

  Afterward, we gather in our usual places for playback. Late in the eleven-minute song James Brown issues a universal religious salute: “Saalaam-Alechem-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!” (Incredibly, the additional syllables seem to fit rhythmically, as if something had been missing in that spot all along.) Reemerging, 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.”

  He begins bragging about the new song, about its relevance. “This is for the world. And the world is going to love it.” The band, and Bobbit, and Danny Ray provide some low murmurs of approval. “The world could use it,” he goes on. “It’s out of gas. Needs filling up.” More murmurs. “What you think, Mr. Rolling Stone?”

  Unpersuaded by the song, I search for the simplest truth to tell. “I think I’m very lucky to be here, sir.”

  But today is also the day when I grow closer to the band. The musicians’ wariness falls away when I agree, at Jeff’s suggestion, to make a secret run for take-out barbecue. At the moment, James Brown is busy conducting the Bittersweets—his three female backup singers—in support vocals for Hollie’s ballad. For hours none of the other musicians have so much as struck a note. As the afternoon drags into evening, it seems everyone (apart from James Brown) has begun to suffer hunger pangs. But the band is on call—in a state of mandatory readiness to begin playing at any moment—and nobody feels safe leaving to get food, despite the fact that the barbecue joint they have in mind is directly across the highway, in sight of the studio’s doors, perhaps a two-minute drive at most.

  I’m incredulous that James Brown’s disciplinary statutes go to the extent of routine starvation, a classic brainwashing technique, though I don’t mention this to the members of the band who are now covertly slipping me balled-up five-dollar bills so that I can buy them chopped-pork sandwiches. Even Fred Thomas—side man for three decades, bass player on more hits than any other, cancer survivor, and, unlike James Brown, a man who really does appear to be in his early seventies—is subject to the boycott on slipping out for a meal. This makes me a unique ally, simply for my freedom to borrow Keith’s car keys and round up some eats. Saxophonist Jeff mentions that I shouldn’t fail to treat myself to a regional specialty, a dish called “hash and rice” which, he claims, is available only within a fifty-mile radius of Augusta. When I return with the booty, dozens of the barbecue sandwiches, and they are unwrapped across the table in the small dining room, it is during the feasting that I begin to get stories from members of the band.

  And this, in turn, leads to the unexpected confidences they’ll share with me, later that night, back at the Ramada.

  6. The Secret Life of the James Brown Band

  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 expanded 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 of the Bittersweets, 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. (“There are seven wonders of the world, you are about to witness the eighth,” etc.) Danny, from Birmingham, Alabama, joined James Brown in the ’50s, 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 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, and he receives the cape and takes it away when James Brown has shrugged free of it. (When Danny Ray was first introduced to me, it was as “the original capeman.” Then, hurriedly, with a concern both for Danny’s feelings and for an accurate historical record, the introducer whispered in my ear: “Actually, he’s the second original capeman.” Apparently, somewhere lost in time, is a first.)

  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.”

  Robert “Mousey” Thompson, James Brown’s drummer, tells me: “I thought I’d last maybe three months. It was hard at first. Then I thought I’d last three years. Been thirteen years. I’d do anything for him. Touring is hard. I worry about him. If I thought his health was in danger I’d quit that day. Of course, if he heard me say that, he’d fire me.”

  Keith and Damon, the guitarists, ask me if I’d care to join them at a bar. We arrange to meet in Jeff’s room at the Ramada. It is here that I learn Jeff’s nickname: Sizzler. Sizzler is named for how frequently he “sizzles” a joint, and, sure enough, Jeff’s room is a haze when I arrive to find Keith and Damon there, along with Mousey, and Hollie, and George “Spike” Nealy, the second percussionist. Here, safely distant from either James Brown’s or 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.” These men, it seems to me, are stymied by the impossibility of fathoming either their employer, this impossible master, or their own life choice: to remain his whim-whipped slaves. 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.”