James Brown: Wrestling With the Devil
The Georgia Judge who is about to give James Brown a six-year prison sentence is in a jovial mood as he surveys his courtroom, taking in the television cameras, news photographers and reporters. “You know they’re giving out reports of his progress on the radio,” says Judge Gayle B. Hamrick of the Richmond County State Court.
Brown, already serving another six-year sentence at South Carolina’s State Park Correctional Center, is being escorted to Hamrick’s court in downtown Augusta. The singer is expected to plead guilty to misdemeanor weapons and traffic charges that stem from a now infamous interstate chase that began when he entered an insurance seminar carrying a shotgun last September. It is the same series of events that led to his incarceration in South Carolina.
The judge is talking to a bailiff. “Every few minutes it’s ‘Hey, we got a report in on James Brown–they just passed us in a police car,’ “says Hamrick, smiling. “Judge, gonna charge admission?” asks the bailiff. “We’re gonna set up three rings out there,” Hamrick says.
The courtroom begins to fill. Brown’s mother, his aunt and one of his sons, as well as Danny Ray, his longtime master of ceremonies, and Leon Austin, a childhood friend, find seats. Brown’s wife, Adrienne, who is here to plead no contest to her own misdemeanor traffic charges, the result of a 1987 incident, bustles in. “Nothing but a zoo,” she says with a frown. “Don’t these people got nothing better to do?”
Adrienne Brown’s case has already been heard by the time her husband is finally brought into the court a little before 11 a.m. Judging by his appearance, no one would know that James Brown has spent the last six weeks in prison.
Attired in a three-piece suit and a burgundy silk shirt, a gray silk scarf tied around his neck, he flashes a smile as he greets an acquaintance. But standing before the judge, the singer quickly becomes subdued and somber. As Brown begins speaking in a low, hoarse voice, reporters strain to catch his statement.
“My life has always been a model, and I just don’t feel good about it now,” says Brown, adding that he is “very sorry for what happened…If I had it all to do over again, well, I just wouldn’t do it.” With his hands clasped behind his back, Brown looks up at Hamrick and says quietly, “I hope this is behind us.”
Brown’s contrition pays off. After he pleads guilty to the charges, the judge gives him what amounts to a slap on the wrist: a six-year sentence that will run concurrently with his South Carolina term. Brown could be free in August 1991. Albert “Buddy” Dallas, one of Brown’s lawyers, tells the judge that his client is sincere, that he “wants to do good.”
But three weeks later Brown is on the telephone, calling from prison, complaining wearily that the police have harassed him for the last two and a half years, expressing disappointment that having served on President Reagan’s anti-drug task force for seven years, no one from his administration has stepped in to help.
“I was very much surprised that I didn’t get a call from the White House,” Brown told Rolling Stone in late February. “I think I should get some help. I knew President Carter on a one-on-one basis. I know a lot of the state senators, governors. When they get the message, they going to help me out.” Comments like these aren’t surprising.
Brown recently described himself to one of his former backup singers, Vicki Anderson Byrd, as “the only man who can do anything I want.”
Brown thinks he should be released. “Special treatment I’m not looking for,” he says. “But I don’t think I should be in here. I am not a man who breaks the law. That [the insurance-seminar incident] was something that happened very fast, and I think the policemen just wouldn’t accept their responsibility once they shot the car up. Thank God I’m living. Regardless of who did it, I didn’t protest against the police, because I didn’t want to cause problems. I figured if we could work it out some other kind of way, if I had to go to jail for sixty, ninety days, and then we work it out, I would accept that If I had actually fought it like it actually happened, we’d have a lot of problems in the state, and I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want to have a racial problem. So I took it all on me.”
James Brown has always had a tremendous ego, and not without justification. He is arguably the greatest artist in the history of black music, and his contribution to American popular culture is, simply, immeasurable. His 33 years as a hitmaker dwarf the accomplishments of current stars like Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson and U2.
He invented funk and rap, and his profound influence on music is international in scope. Brown has sat with American presidents and last year even had an audience with the pope. His words once cooled rioting in Washington, D.C., Boston and Augusta, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
According to Joel Whitburn’s new book Top R&B Singles: 1942-1988, Brown is the most popular black musician of all time. His recorded legacy–114 charted singles–includes such classics as “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Out of Sight,” “(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Night Train,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and “Say It Loud–I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
Brown’s fall comes at a time when his influence on the pop scene is as strong as ever. You can see it in the dance steps and music of superstars like Prince and Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and George Michael, and dozens upon dozens of other entertainers. His own recordings have been sampled to death by Eighties rappers, like Run-D.M.C, the Beastie Boys, Eric B. and Rakim, the Fat Boys, Ice T and Public Enemy, which takes its name from an old Brown record.
“Everybody samples James Brown,” says rapper Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. “You can’t make a rap record without using some James Brown.”
Or as Brown himself put it with a laugh during his telephone call from prison, “The music out there is only as good as my last record.” But another James Brown is now surfacing–one whose bearing is not so regal.
Since Brown disappeared behind bars, friends, business associates and musicians have come forward with horror stories about their days with the man. They say that for 30 years he has been beating women; that he has gypped collaborators out of record royalties. That he threatened musicians with guns; tried to steal their girlfriends; left band members stranded on the road; and got so high on marijuana and PCP that he thought he could “fly like a bird.”
“They don’t know, sir,” counters Brown, who won’t talk about his drug use. “My employees tell you, ‘Oh, James Brown smokes a little pot.’ I won’t say nothing about those gentlemen. I’m going to be more man than they were. I’m a clean man.”
But what of the PCP that was found in Brown’s blood after his arrest? “They can find anything they want to find, don’t you know that?” he says. “I’m just the last of the Afro-Americans to have enough intelligence to deal with the business world. And they would like to kick me out, back over into that fast lane. And they’re not going to get me to do it.”
Despite such denials, Brown’s problems are the dark side of the tremendous ego and self-determination that helped a neglected child of poverty to fight his way to the top. But like fellow rocker Jerry Lee Lewis, Brown is a man who has been wrestled to the ground by a host of personal demons.
Some years ago in a fit of rage. James Brown scolded one of his employees by saying, “You know I got the Lord in one hand and the devil in the other, and I can control you. You’re nothing without me!”
James Brown might just as well have been shouting at himself.
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James Brown is a mess. It is May 6th, 1988, and in his plush suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Brown is tripping on PCP, the potent hallucinogen known on the street as angel dust. He is in such bad shape that the hotel doctor must be called to treat him for high blood pressure and hypertension, and his aides are forced to cancel his show at the Lone Star Cafe.
This is almost unheard of: for decades, Brown has been the self-proclaimed “hardest working man in show business.”
This also occurs at what should be a time of celebration for James Brown. He is in the midst of a major comeback. In 1986 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and with “Living in America,” he made his first appearance on the Top 10 pop charts in 18 years.
His latest album, I’m Real, is strong on the black charts. But in the hotel room, there is nothing but misery. “Doc, you just don’t understand,” says Brown, who is upset by his marital troubles. “You just don’t understand.”
At the Lone Star, word is brought to Brown’s band by his wardrobe mistress, Gertrude Sanders. “Martha, James is really sick,” a teary-eyed Sanders tells backup vocalist Martha High. “He’s just about gone. I’m scared he’s going to die.”
A group of Brown associates and employees–including the Reverend Al Sharpton (who is making headlines for his role in the Tawana Brawley debacle), drummer Arthur Dixon, music director Sweet Charles Sherrell, saxophonist Maceo Parker, High and Sanders–head back to the hotel.
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