The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  I say, “That’ll go right into the piece, sir.”

  James Brown then makes a shape in the air and says, “South American boo-tay.” We all laugh at the helpless insanity of it, at the electricity of his delight. “Jewish boo-tay,” he says. “Jewish boys and Latina girls get up to a lot of trouble!”

  Unfortunately, James Brown demands that we listen to “Ancestors” five times in a row—which we do, as usual, in a state of silent reverence, heads nodding at each end to the track. James Brown makes a “tuchas” joke every time the song resolves on that word, as if surprised to find it there. Then, heart-crushingly, he asks for a playback of “Message to the World”—the eleven-minute rant. A few band members have gradually crept out, but most sit in a trance through all the replays. I try not to dwell too much on the deserts of repetition these human souls have tolerated.

  Next we listen to Hollie’s ballad, recorded the day before. James Brown tells his wife the ballad’s lyric is dedicated to her (the innocuous sentiments are along the lines of “If you’re not happy, I’m not happy, either”). At this James Brown’s wife gets nervous, and in a quiet moment I overhear her asking Damon exactly what it says.

  “For me?” she asks again.

  In irritation, James Brown says, “For all wives.” This seems to put an end to the subject.

  Afterward, in front of us all, James Brown’s wife urges him to consider breaking from his work for a snack. His blood-sugar level, I learn, has been a problem. “I put a banana in the fridge for you,” she says. This information displeases James Brown intensely, and the two begin a brief, awkward verbal tussle.

  Mr. Bobbit leans in to me and whispers, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Taking the hint, I go and join Wesley and the band, most of whom have tiptoed out of the playback room and are hanging out in the kitchen.

  There, an ebullient Fred Wesley is teasing a rapt circle of admiring musicians for having the audacity to kvetch about how hard the James Brown of 2005 rehearses his band. “Y’all don’t know nothing about no eight-hour rehearsal,” he tells them. “Y’all don’t got a clue. Y’all don’t know about going to Los Angeles, nice bright sunshine, sitting there in a dark little studio for eight hours, all those beautiful women, all the things we could do, stuck rehearsing a song we’ve been playing for fifty years, going ‘Dun dun dun’ instead of ‘dun dun doo.’ ”

  Seizing their chance, the cats confide in Wesley about “Pimp Danny,” and how they hope he will contribute a solo. “So is that why I’m here?” Fred Wesley replies warily, as if sensing a conspiracy of some kind. “I’ll play trombone on anything,” he explains to me. Though he’s hoping to drive back to Atlanta tonight, he promises that if they get free of the sessions early enough he’ll drop by the Ramada and join in the fun. “You know the story about the two-hundred-dollar whore? Guy says he’s only got fifty dollars, she says that’s all right, I’ll fuck you anyway. ’cause she just likes to fuck. That’s me: I like to play.”

  The mood, in James Brown’s absence, is giddy. R.J. joins us and pokes a little fun at Wesley for showing up for a session in a T-shirt, a choice that apparently would have been regarded as an infraction, back in the day. Cynthia ribs R.J. in turn, saying: “His T-shirt don’t say ‘Ray Charles’ on it.” She explains: “R.J. got thrown out for wearing a Ray Charles T-shirt.” Fred Wesley says, “Hell, I’d have thrown you out for wearing a Ray Charles shirt around the boss.” Then, abruptly, Wesley’s expression takes on the appearance of a caged animal, as though he’s been reminded of days gladly left behind. He makes a joke of it, saying, “This ain’t some trick to get me to go to Europe, is it? I don’t care what anyone’s saying, I ain’t going. Y’all can say hello to all them madams, mademoiselles, fräuleins, and señoritas for me, ’cause I ain’t going.”

  Suddenly Mr. Bobbit has arrived with a vast delivery of take-out food: several gallon buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, assorted sides, and a few boxes of doughnuts, too. These are spread on the table, and James Brown emerges from the playback room and joins us. The blood-sugar issue, it appears, is to be addressed, and not by the banana in the fridge. Mrs. James Brown and James Brown Jr. are now nowhere to be seen.

  James Brown, still in his black hat and shades, fills a plate with chicken and plunks himself down between me and Wesley. “You gotta talk to this guy,” he says, indicating Fred Wesley. “That’s twenty percent of your story, right there.”

  Fred Wesley demurs. “People always try to tell me that, but I’m always saying, there couldn’t be nothing without the Man. It all comes through him. You need someone who thinks unbounded. I used to be contained within the diatonic scale. He’d tell me something and I’d say, ‘It can’t be written down, so it can’t be played.’ He’d say, ‘Play it, don’t write it down.’ It took me years to understand. Now I’m a teacher.”

  (Alternately, from Wesley’s memoir: “The whole James Brown show depended on having someone with musical knowledge remember the show, the individual parts, and the individual songs, then relay these verbally or in print to the other musicians. James Brown could not do it himself. He spoke in grunts, and la-di-das, and he needed musicians to translate that language into music and actual songs in order to create an actual show.” I contrast these quotes not to accuse Fred Wesley of hypocrisy but because they so beautifully capture the paradox I found everywhere in these men’s feelings for their leader, and my own: The Charlatan is a Visionary, the Visionary is a Charlatan.)

  James Brown and Keith begin reminiscing, plainly for Fred Wesley’s sake, about having to teach the Black Eyed Peas’ bass player how to play a James Brown bass line. Usher’s people, too, needed a tutorial. James Brown and Keith laugh at how slow others are to get it: the guitarist who said, “That’s the wrong chord,” and James Brown’s reply: “How can it be wrong, when it’s never been played before?”

  The next quarter hour or so, eating chicken side by side, is easily the most intimate of my moments in James Brown’s company. Whether energized by Fred Wesley’s presence or by his wife’s absence or by the chicken and corn and conversation, James Brown seems to enclose me in his sphere for a while, a sensation I’ll treasure. I can’t, however, detail what was said. Not because it’s too cherished for me to share but because, as James Brown speaks frantically and continually to me through mouthfuls of food, I simply can’t understand a word. James Brown eats quickly, as if fearful the food will be taken from him. I notice, too, that Mr. Bobbit has fried chicken and a frosted doughnut together on the same plate. Perhaps he, in turn, is afraid James Brown will finish his chicken and eat all the dessert.

  Following this five o’clock lunch break, James Brown leads the Bittersweets in some more insert vocal arrangements, leaving the band and Fred Wesley sitting on their hands. Though James Brown’s energy is phenomenal, as the evening drags toward seven the general belief is that nothing further will be accomplished here today. Jeff says, wonderingly, “I never even took my horn out of my case today. Checked my e-mail, smoked a twist, ate some Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Yet it is on this cue, seemingly as if he has gleaned the risk of mutiny, that James Brown sends the Bittersweets home and calls instead for the band—the whole band.

  James Brown’s mood has turned again. He’s so determined he’s almost enraged. “Got to be ready,” he chastises while they assemble. James Brown has decided he wants to play his organ, but snaps at Howard and snaps at Jeff as the amplifier cables get tangled and, briefly, unplugged. He also castigates Fred Thomas, who he claimed has missed a cue: “You want to play bass? Then play.” Next he rages at Mousey, who, trapped in a separate booth, can’t watch the hand signals. James Brown actually steps in and briefly plays the drums for Mousey, ostensibly showing him how it’s done—shades of Nat Kendrick! The silence in the room, during these attacks, is suffocating. I can’t help thinking of the present band’s embarrassment in front of Fred Wesley, and of Fred Wesley’s embarrassment in front of the present band. Here’s living proof of every complaint they’ve wi
shed to register with me.

  The tinkering preparations and ritual outbursts at last conclude. James Brown takes his place behind the keyboard, looking ferocious in his shades and sleeveless top. He leads the band through an endlessly complicated big-band jazz-funk piece, which, after three or four false starts, he runs for a perhaps fifteen-minute take, long enough for him to request, by hand signals, two Fred Wesley trombone solos and a bass solo from Fred Thomas, and to give forth three organ solos himself. During his own solos—his famously atonal and abstract keyboard work is truly worthy of Sun Ra or Daniel Johnston—James Brown looks fixated, and again appears to have shed thirty years. At the end of his last solo he directs the horns to finish, and laughs sharply. “Takes a lot of concentration!” He turns to me and slaps me five. Fred Wesley turns to the ashen Fred Thomas and, perhaps trying to put a chipper face on what they’ve been through, says, “Playing that bebop, damn.”

  (Again, from Wesley’s memoir: “Mr. Brown would sometimes come to the gig early and have what we call a ‘jam,’ where we would have to join in with his fooling around on the organ. This was painful for anyone who had ever thought of playing jazz. James Brown’s organ playing was just good enough to fool the untrained ear, and so bad that it made real musicians sick on the stomach … after we got accustomed to the jams and saw the looks on his face when he played, the real pain got to be trying to keep from busting out in uncontrollable laughter.”)

  That night, a portion of the band gathers to lick its wounds in Jeff’s room at the Ramada. Fred Wesley was, needless to say, detained at the studio too long to return to the hotel with them, so the “Pimp Danny” solo will have to wait for another opportunity. I ask about the long jazz song they recorded at the finish, fishing for some impressions of James Brown’s rabid outbursts but not wishing to press too hard. The song, I tell them, was somehow familiar to me.

  “That’s some old number he’s made us play a million times,” Keith tells me. “That’s just him wasting our time.”

  I ask if it is in fact some standard. Jeff says, “Yeah, I think it is based on something. We’ve been playing his version for so long, I can’t remember what it is. Hollie, what does he call that?”

  “He always just calls it ‘Basic Brown,’ ” says Hollie, listlessly. None of them can recall the actual source melody, buried under the James Brown arrangements. Later, humming it for a knowledgeable friend, I’ll learn it’s the Harold Arlen–Johnny Mercer chestnut “Blues in the Night,” recorded by everyone from Doris Day to Louis Armstrong to Van Morrison. The fact that these veteran musicians can no longer retrieve it from their own context is a perfect example of the James Brown Zone of Confusion. For them, “Blues in the Night” has become “Basic Brown”—the color of their world.

  Jeff, one of the primary victims, tries to put the day in context. “Hey, we had good James Brown for four days. I’ll take it. He was tired toward the end. But he just wanted to set up his toy soldiers one more time and go—” To make his analogy vivid Jeff sweeps his arm violently, as if clearing a table stacked with dishes, and makes a crashing noise with his voice.

  Keith explains to me how little they were surprised. “We could tell it was a bad day first thing—by the way he was dressed.”

  9. Gateshead

  I rendezvous with the band in England ten days later, for a performance in Gateshead. The musicians seem mildly amused to see me in this distant place, as though the week of touring and the Atlantic Ocean between this week and last have made my arrival in their dressing rooms a reunion. See? Everybody comes back. The doormen stand by the door, the hairdressers start dressing hair, and Mr. Rolling Stone starts asking questions.

  The players are in another kind of survival mode now, keeping themselves healthy under punishing travel conditions, while trying to stay in the mood to put on The Show. Donning their red tuxedos, the guitarists point out details they can guess will amuse me. “Danny Ray had jackets made without pockets,” says Damon. “He doesn’t want to see any lines. So I don’t have any place to put my picks onstage.” I obligingly examine his tux—sure enough, no pockets. Damon explains that he has no recourse but to stack a supply of picks on an amp, where they invariably vibrate off, onto the floor.

  The guitarists play James Brown songs in the dressing room. When “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing” comes on Keith’s iTunes, Daryl says, proudly, “This is my song.” I ask what he means and he tells of being present as a child for that session. Keith, sensing my interest in his archival material, displays on his laptop a video clip of James Brown at the Apollo in 1971. All three guitarists lean in to study it. “See his hand signal,” Damon says. Keith explains: “This band was brand new. This is one of Fred Thomas’s first gigs. He wasn’t fucking with them yet. He was just trying to get through the show.”

  I ask them how the tour’s been to this point. Damon, while not critical of the previous week’s shows, says, “He needs to warm up on tour, too. Think of all the bits he has to remember. If he screws up, you notice.” Damon recalls for me a night when the floor was slick and James Brown missed his first move, and as a result “lost confidence.” Lost confidence? I try not to say: But he’s JAMES BROWN! It is somehow true that despite my days in his presence, my tabulation of his foibles, nothing has eroded my certainty that James Brown should be beyond ordinary mortal deficits of confidence. And with this thought I discover that a shift has occurred inside me. I wish for the show tonight to be a triumphant one, not for myself, or even for the sake of the band, but so that James Brown himself will be happy.

  I’m wanting to take care of him, too.

  It’s as if I’ve joined the family.

  Bumbling along with the red-costumed tribe in the tunnel to the stage, I find myself suddenly included in a group prayer—hands held in a circle, heads lowered, hushed words spoken in the spirit of the same wish I’ve just acknowledged privately to myself: that a generous deity might grant them and Mr. Brown a good night. I still haven’t seen Mr. Brown himself. Now I can hear the sound of the crowd stirring, boiling with anticipation at what they are about to see. As the players filter onstage into their accustomed positions, bright and proud in their red tuxes, to an immense roar of acclaim from the Gatesheadians, I settle into a spot in the wings, beside Danny Ray.

  When the band hits its first notes and the room begins to ride the music, a metamorphosis occurs, a transmutation of the air of expectation in this Midlands crowd. They’ve been relieved of the first layer of their disbelief that James Brown has really come to Gateshead: At the very least, James Brown’s Sound has arrived. I realize—as if for the first time, despite the fact that I’ve crossed the ocean for no other purpose—that I’m about to see the James Brown Show. After the band’s long overture, Danny Ray, every impeccable tiny inch of him, pops onstage. The crowd hesitates. I suspect some percentage of them actually wonder: “Is it him? Has James Brown shrunken to this size?” The moment Danny Ray speaks, though, they are spared this confusion. “Give yourselves a big round of applause!” says Danny Ray, inviting the Gatesheadians to feel smug just for having gotten themselves into this situation. Then Danny Ray says, “Now comes Star Time!” and the roof comes off. Under Danny Ray’s instruction the crowd rises to its feet. They begin to chant their hero’s name.

  When James Brown is awarded to them, the people of Gateshead are the happiest people on earth, and I am one of them. Never mind that I now know to watch for the scissors-paper-rocks hand signals, I am nevertheless swept up in the deliverance of James Brown to his audience. The sun god has strode across a new threshold, the alien visitor has unveiled himself to another gathering of humans. I see, too, how James Brown’s presence animates his family: Keith, fingers moving automatically on frets, smiling helplessly when James Brown calls out his name. Fred Thomas bopping on a platform with his white beard, an abiding sentinel of funk. Hollie, the invisible man, now stepping up for a trumpet solo. Damon, who during Tomi Rae’s rendition of “Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” can be heard
to slip a reference to “Lady Marmalade” into his guitar solo.

  This night James Brown gets the cape routine out of the way early, the way Alfred Hitchcock in his later films got his cameo out of the way in the first ten minutes or so, to spare his audience the distraction of waiting for it to appear. It turns out I’ve chosen to stand in a spot right over the hidden cape, and Danny Ray is forced to nudge me aside in order to fetch it. James Brown refuses the cape almost instantly, and Danny Ray stoically returns it to its place, seeming a little skeptical, a little disappointed, as if decades later he really still believes his task is to usher James Brown offstage at that moment, at last to give the man a rest.

  The show builds to the slow showstopper, “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.” The moment when James Brown’s voice breaks across those horn riffs is one of the greatest in pop music, and the crowd, already in a fever, further erupts. James Brown’s voice, it occurs to me, is hornlike—but not like a musical instrument, like an actual animal’s horn. His voice is clawlike, fanglike, tusklike. When they cap the ballad by starting “Sex Machine,” it is a climax on top of a climax. The crowd screams in joy when James Brown dances even a little (and these days, it is mostly a little). Perhaps, I think, we are all in his family. We want him to be happy. We want him alive. When the James Brown Show comes to your town—when it comes to Gateshead, U.K., in 2005, as when it came to the Apollo Theater in 1961, as when it came to Atlanta or Oklahoma City or Indianapolis, anytime—life has admitted its potential to be astounding, if only for as long as The Show lasts. Now that James Brown is old we want this to go on occurring for as long as possible. We almost don’t wish to allow ourselves to think this, but the James Brown Show is a precious thing that may someday vanish from the earth.

  Now James Brown has paused the music for a monologue about love. He points into the balconies to the left and right of him. “I love you and you and you up there,” he says. “Almost as much as I love myself.” He asks the audience to do the corniest thing: to turn and tell the person on your left that you love them. Because it is James Brown who asks, the audience obliges. While he is demonstrating the turn to the left, turning expressively in what is nearly a curtsy to Hollie and the other horns, James Brown spots me there, standing in the wings. Everyone comes back. The smile he gives me is as natural as that he gave Fred Wesley, it is nothing like the grin of a statue, and if it is to be my own last moment with James Brown, it is a fine one. I feel good.