The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  I ask whether James Brown has been jabbering particularly for my benefit. I regret the possibility that the past two days in the studio have been made more difficult for them because of my presence. “Listen,” says Damon, “he’s always performing. He’ll chastise the band backstage for the benefit of a janitor passing by with a bucket.”

  Yet they hurry to make me understand their vast reverence and devotion—for you see, they’re also the luckiest musicians on earth. Keith says, “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.”

  Damon says, “For me, it’s just being onstage, waiting for those moments. He’s a magic man. He’s the only one who can make that party happen.” The guitarists also tell of how James Brown has “bogarted” them onto this or that record. When someone wants a James Brown cameo, they ordinarily don’t intend to hire James Brown’s band, too. But knowing extra royalties from a hit can be precious to his sidemen, Brown snuck a chunk of his band onto the Black Eyed Peas’ Monkey Business, when all the Peas were after was their boss’s voice. Keith shares a cherished memory of being summarily inserted into the Dave Matthews Band and told to rearrange their version of a James Brown song the Godfather was to sit in on. Scamming gigs with James Brown makes these players feel like outlaws, too.

  “Listen,” says Jeff. “There’s something we want you to hear.” I’ve been corralled in 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 a 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, while lamed by the absence of James Brown on vocals, are tight, catchy, propulsive numbers, each with one foot in ’70s funk and the other in a more contemporary style. They have the added benefit of being something new. In other words, they’re not “Soul Power,” but they’re also not “Soul Power.”

  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 their sense of protectiveness of the boss’s feelings. For James Brown, it seems, has had so many important musicians outgrow his band—Bootsy, Maceo, 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.” Keith explains that James Brown is most eager, above all, to undermine the family lives of his band members; he’ll deliberately schedule mandatory rehearsals to clash with weddings or funerals, forcing them to show allegiance to him instead. “He always screws with me if my wife is in the crowd,” Keith tells me. “At the Apollo, first time she was going to see me play, he sat me down offstage, didn’t let me go on.” And each and every one of these members of the James Brown family is on his own when the shit hits the fan. The only mistake worse than stepping out of line is attempting to stand up for someone else who’s being punished. Like Walmart, the one thing James Brown crushes most mercilessly is any hint of unionization.

  All eyes go to Hollie. Hollie, after all, found a way to make James Brown aware of the ballad. If that could work, why not some of the secret funk? Hollie has certain privileges, due to his long tenure and his role as bandleader, which symbolically links him to the most influential members of the bands of the ’60s and ’70s: Ellis, Maceo, and Wesley. Even better, Hollie went away, to play with Steve Winwood for a number of years in the ’80s, and then came back. Since James Brown is always bragging that everyone who leaves eventually comes back—a plain falsehood, in his band, or life, or anyone else’s life, for that matter—Hollie’s return is a vindication. Hollie, though, is a survivor perhaps precisely thanks to his lowered expectations. As the younger players urge him to attempt to mediate these secret recordings into official consideration—“You could do it, Hollie”—Hollie says little, only chuckles and rolls his eyes. The impression he gives is of someone who means to protect himself and his band during these sessions, and who believes the odds of improving the results of the sessions are not worth betting 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. The premise of “Pimp Danny” is that a certain master-slave relationship has been reversed: 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!” The track isn’t finished; the band is searching for what they are certain exists somewhere, a recording where James Brown introduces Danny Ray, which they will then clip onto the front of the track, to complete the role reversal. “Pimp Danny” also samples the voice of Bobby Byrd, and a drumbeat from Clyde Stubblefield, one of the great drummers from James Brown’s ’60s 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 yearning conflation of the legendary past eras of the band with its present incarnation. And there’s a plan: Fred Wesley 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 and have him add his horn to “Pimp Danny.”

  Many sizzles later, Keith and Damon and I have made it to the Soul Bar. They explain how this is the one establishment in all of Augusta that truly gives James Brown his props. Indeed, the bar is lined with gorgeous vintage James Brown posters and album jackets and memorabilia. (Much of this, Keith confesses, comes from his—Keith’s—own collection; the bar is owned by a friend. Keith is beginning to strike me as the world’s biggest James Brown fan.) “It’s shameful,” they explain to me. “If you’re in Memphis, you can’t get away from Elvis. Everything’s Elvis glossies, Elvis salt-and-pepper shakers, whatever. Here there’s nothing.” The Soul Bar, which is packed with revelers, is playing loud rap, which spurs a brief rhapsody from Keith: “See, the thing about Brown, is his relevance sustains him. 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.” (I’m beginning uneasily to suspect Keith should be writing this piece, not me.) Damon says more about what they’d do if only they could seize control of the sessions: “James Brown should go out like Johnny Cash did. All that stuff about how he wishes he could record in the Ramada? Hell, we could do that tomorrow, if he’d let us use the computers.” Keith says, “We’re like a blade of grass trying to push up through the concrete.”

  Later Damon walks me back to the Ramada and, very gently, takes a little wind out of the “we could fix James Brown if only he’d
let us” theory: “Look at how he got where he is. He always controlled everything himself. That’s who he is. I mean, who has hundreds of Top 40 hits? Not me. You know how many thousands of people must have come around over the years with a song, thinking, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool, he’ll hear my track and say that’s hot and lay a vocal over it and we’ll have a big hit’?”

  7. I Sing of Myself

  Now, to note that James Brown is self-centered or egotistical or pleased with himself is hardly an insight worth troubling over: It is the very first thing anyone might remark on, indeed, the only thing many people who believe they know nothing whatsoever about James Brown might respond if given his name in a word-association test:

  Analyst: James Brown. Please say the first thing that comes to mind.

  Patient: I feel good!

  Analyst: Stay with that thought.

  Patient: Uh, just like I knew that I would?

  That James “I want to kiss myself” Brown dabbles in self-adulation hardly makes him unique in the history of art, though he scores points for unwavering fixity: James Brown knows no hesitation, no whisper of ambivalence, in his delight in his own person. His subjugation of his various bands’ musical ambition 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, their protectiveness and eagerness to soothe (James Brown: “I’m recording myself out of a band.” Band: “We’re not going anywhere, sir.”), the more completely I became persuaded of Keith’s viewpoint: that James Brown is reenacting 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 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 ’80s, 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-up structure, practically a musical Ponzi scheme, and anyone willing to give him their best is going to be taken for as long a ride as he can take them 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 as 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? After all, his trauma, and its result—frantic creative striving, and fearsome, bullying ego and will—are not so terribly unique. 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 genres of the ’50s and ’60s 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.

  8. In the Studio with James Brown, Day Three

  Today is Fred Wesley day, and everyone’s excited. The studio is more populous than before: For unclear reasons, today is also family day. James Brown’s wife, Tomi Rae Brown, a singer who is a part of the band’s live act, has brought along their five-year-old son, James Brown Jr. Then appears James Brown’s thirty-one-year-old daughter, Deanna, a local radio talk-show host. Deanna has, variously, sued her father for royalties on songs she claimed to have helped write when she was six years old and attempted to commit her father into a mental institution; lately they’re on better terms. Also on the scene is another son, whose name I don’t catch, a shy man, who appears to be in his early fifties, and with two sons of his own in attendance—James Brown’s grandsons, older than James Brown Jr.

  These different versions of “family,” with all their tangible contradictions, mingle politely, deferentially with one another in the overcrowded playback room, where James Brown and Fred Wesley are seated next to each other in the leather chairs. Fred Wesley, his red T-shirt stretched over his full belly, is a figure of doughy charisma and droll warmth, teasing and joshing with the children and with the room full of musicians eager to greet him. His eyes, though, register wariness or confusion, as though he’s trying to fathom what is expected of him here, a little as though he fears he may have wandered into a trap.

  James Brown, startlingly, has abandoned his three-piece suits today for an entirely different look: black cowboy hat, black sleeveless top, snakeskin boots, and wraparound shades. What we have here is the Payback James Brown, a dangerous man to cross. I wonder whether this is for Wesley’s benefit, or whether James Brown just woke up on the Miles Davis side of bed this morning. James Brown is giving Fred Wesley a listen to “Message to the World,” plainly hoping to please him. Fred Wesley nods along. The two of them slap hands when the song comes to James Brown’s references to Maceo and to Fred Wesley. The smile James Brown shows now is by far the warmest and most genuine I’ve seen from him.

  Next James Brown commands Howard to play an instrumental track for Wesley, a shuffle that James Brown calls “Ancestors.” Fred Wesley listens closely to “Ancestors” once through and then says simply: “That makes all the sense in the world, Mr. Brown. Thank you very much.” He fetches his trombone, in order to lay a long solo over the shuffle. I gather that, once again, a track is to be unceremoniously slammed together before my ey
es.

  The entire band, as well as the many family members, linger to gaze through the sound room’s long glass window at Fred Wesley as he plays. He makes a rollicking figure there, his red T-shirt and gleaming trombone spotlit in the otherwise darkened studio. The band members I’ve come to know seem both exhilarated and tired; these long sequences of not-playing are wearing on them, but Fred Wesley is a genuine inspiration. Hollie, meanwhile, is troubling over the track’s changes, trying to anticipate the next crisis: “Ask him if he wants me to transpose that keyboard, just so he’ll be in D.”

  Wesley concludes and reenters the playback room. Next, James Brown enters the studio, in order to lay a “rap” over the top of the track. The moment the boss leaves for the soundproof chamber, the band members laugh with admiring pleasure: “Damn, Fred, you come in here and just start blowing, man!” They’re thrilled at his on-the-spot facility. “Just went with those changes, never heard them before. I told him, ‘it goes up a half octave’—bam.”

  Fred laughs back: “What could I do, damn. Shuffle in F!”

  Now we listen as James Brown begins what he calls “rapping,” a verbal improv no one seems to want to call a sheer defacement of Fred Wesley’s solo. The spontaneous lyrics go more or less like this: “Fred Wesley. Ain’t nothing but a blessing. A blessing, doggone it. Get on up. Lean back. Pick it up. Shake it up, yeah. Make your booty jump. Clap your hands. Make your booty jump. Dance. Ra-a-aise your hands. Get funky. Get dirty. Dirty dancin’. Shake your boo-tay. Shake you boo-boo-boo-boo-tay. Plenty tuchas. Plenty tuchas. Mucho. Mucho grande. Shake your big booty. Mucho grande. Big booty. Cool-a. TUCHAS!” On delivering this last exclamation, an exhilarated James Brown rushes from behind the glass and, rather horrifyingly, in a whole room full of colleagues and intimates, points directly at me and says, “Tuchas! You got that, Rolling Stone?”