Kill 'Em and Leave (16 page)

Brown's penchant for hiding cash is legendary among friends and associates. He was of that Depression generation who grew up when the banks closed their doors and left millions of people high and dry. That generation hid their money in mattresses, stuffed it into cookie jars and under floorboards. My mother was that way. She hid quarters and five-dollar bills. Brown, on the other hand, hid thousands of dollars in cash—in vases, safes, buried under trees and in gardens, hidden in the floorboards of a car, under rugs in far-distant hotels that he'd visit every year while touring. For the last twenty years of his life, he walked around with a pocket full of $3,000 in cashier's checks, $3,000 being the number that kept you beneath the IRS's radar. Trumpeter Joe Davis, an ex–band member, recalls Brown telling his band, “If you want to keep your money, bury it in your yard.” Brown liked to keep money in every conceivable kind of place, apparently, except for the one place where it would have been safe. “Mr. Brown did not trust banks,” Cannon says. “Period. You could not make him.” Buddy Dallas concurs.

Brown was just as fussy about money when it came to getting paid on his gigs. I've seen the brown-paper-bag routine myself—where the money passes from the promoter of the gig to the star in a little brown paper sandwich bag. Some bags even have stains on them to make it look like it's loaded with a ham-and-cheese sandwich, except that the thing's got enough cash in it to buy the pig
and
the farm. That was standard procedure for a lot of old entertainers, who had been burned by labels, recording executives, and those DJs who would collect their illegal payoffs to play their records and still wouldn't play them. Some of those stars, including Brown, had gone through the routine of managers buying them a brand-new Thunderbird or the like, instead of royalties or payment, or who would supply them with dope or pay a few dollars for songs or recordings, some of which became classics that would sell forever. John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley were each paid about $150 per session to record
Kind of Blue,
an immortal jazz classic and one of the bestselling jazz records of all time. Among musicians, the stories abound: there's a legend of one singer being hung by his heels from a tenth-story hotel window for not honoring a contract; there's Sam Cooke's mysterious murder. There's another story I heard from a musician buddy, about a famous female soul singer who came to his city to record a car commercial. Before she sang a note, she made it clear that she didn't want any residuals or royalties. All that fancy figuring, she said, never worked out. She wanted—and got—straight cash, $75,000 in American chips. She sang the sixty-second jingle and out the door she went. Those old stars had been burned so often, they didn't fool around.

The upshot of Brown's money paranoia was that his finances were a disaster. By 1984, he resorted to the 1950s method of doing gigs, collecting the gig money in a suitcase or box—sometimes handing that box to Al Sharpton or Charles Bobbit or, later, another trusted road manager named Albert “Judge” Bradley—and playing ignorant about paying taxes. In 1972, he met Richard Nixon, who was running for president on the Republican ticket. Nixon called him a “national treasure.” Brown, who was bombed by the black press and fans for associating with Nixon, ran with that “national treasure” bit when the IRS chased him down. He claimed he didn't have to pay taxes because he was told by the president that he was a “national treasure.” Later, as part of an attempt to argue against IRS claims against him, he announced that he was part Indian and claimed, with a seemingly straight face, to be related to Geronimo.

The IRS was not amused, and by the 1980s they came after him with both fists. “He had a show in Texas,” Cannon says. “The IRS came and took the money off the date. He couldn't pay the band. They were stuck.” That was the financial state of affairs when Cannon was given marching orders to fix Brown's financial life in 1992.

“He didn't even have a tax attorney,” Cannon says. “I went to his office to look at his records. They showed me a few files. I said, ‘This is all?'

“They said, ‘The IRS took eight or ten boxes.' ”

Cannon tried to track the boxes down. “The IRS had them all over the place.” He flew to Atlanta, called Tennessee. “I never found all of them. I said to the IRS, ‘You've got to prove you have his records.' ”

“They said, ‘No, we don't.'

“I said, ‘You've got to show me.' ”

They could not produce them. The testy negotiations between Cannon and the IRS took two years. The IRS wanted $15 million and not a penny less. They threatened to toss Brown in the clink. Cannon, with James Brown's shoddy records as ammo, found himself backed into a corner. He had no numbers to work with. The IRS, on the other hand, knew what Brown earned. But Cannon noted that the IRS negotiators seemed worried that Brown would go bankrupt, leaving the government empty-handed or able to collect only the maximum that bankruptcy would allow, which was then $1 million. Privately, Cannon knew that Brown would never declare bankruptcy. Brown had his pride. And Cannon understood that notion of “proper,” the southern mentality in which both were raised. Cannon understood that a man like James Brown, who insisted on being called “Mr. Brown” and who addressed everyone, even the lowliest worker, as “Mister” or “Miss,” a man who spent three hours after every exhausting gig sitting under a hair dryer so that people wouldn't see him with his hair undone, looking ragged and improper, would never want the world to see him on his knees broke.

Cannon knew that Brown would go to jail before he allowed himself to go bankrupt, but he packed that bullet in his gun anyway, and at the negotiating table, when it appeared that the IRS had him cornered, he discharged it.

“We're filing bankruptcy,” he said. It was a bluff.

The bluff worked. The IRS backed down and asked to meet again in a week.

A week later, the IRS agreed to settle the $15 million debt at $1.3 million—with two provisions. The first was that in the future, when dealing with Brown, they would deal with Cannon only, not the plethora of other Brown employees they had seen before. And secondly, “You'll have to do Mrs. Brown's taxes too,” they told him.

That nearly killed the thing, because Cannon refused. Cannon and Dallas, the two men who revived James Brown's career, distrusted Brown's third wife, Adrienne, a makeup artist whom Brown had met on the set of a TV music show called
Solid Gold.
Both Cannon and Dallas can fill the room with stories of Adrienne's wild behavior—stealing Brown's money, stuffing his cash into closets and into ceilings, stealing silverware and bread from the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, reportedly stabbing one of Brown's girlfriends in the rear end with a pair of scissors in a New York hotel suite. They can list her drug problems and expensive plastic surgeries—one of which killed her. She had Brown arrested four times between 1987 and 1995 for assault. Dallas calls her a “kleptomaniac” and “a committed drug addict.” But Brown loved Adrienne. He called her “my rat.” She was an intelligent, pretty woman of mixed-race heritage, a loyal wife who helped him in his comeback and stayed committed to him when he was imprisoned from 1988 to 1991 after the PCP-filled episode in Augusta that ended in a police chase. She tried to give him some semblance of family, inviting his various children to the house for the holidays to eat and commingle. Living with Brown was not easy. She told Brown's friend Emma Austin, “Emma, I have to get high just to put up with his shit.”

But Cannon did not trust Adrienne. He was on the receiving end when Brown would seek a few hours' peace from her by driving his Lincoln to Cannon's modest Barnwell house to tinker with Cannon's collection of antique swords and lie on Cannon's living room couch and complain about his wife's spending. Cannon listened, powerless. That was a marriage issue, he thought. He knew that Adrienne was helping herself to too much of Brown's cash, which created all kinds of tax and accounting headaches, but “You did not tell Mr. Brown what to do,” he says. “You simply did not.” And you did not tell Mrs. Brown what to do either. To make matters more complicated, Brown floated Cannon out as a shield against personal leeches. If someone asked Brown for a loan, he'd say, “See Mr. Cannon.” Then he would tell Cannon, “Tell 'em no.” If someone needed firing, Brown would say, “See Mr. Cannon,” and Cannon would do the firing. It created personal enemies within Brown's family, his entourage, and among his old professional acquaintances, who would turn on Cannon viciously after Brown died. It also created a huge personal problem in Cannon's house, because Brown, trusting no one, insisted on stashing a disturbingly high pile of cash in Cannon's safe. Cannon rarely challenged his boss, but in the matter of storing Brown's money, he resisted.

“I told him all the time, ‘Mr. Brown, I am not a bank.'

“ ‘Just hold it for me, Mr. Cannon. Hold it for me.' ”

Cannon reluctantly agreed.

“Had I known what was going to happen, I would have never done it,” he says. “But who knew he was going to die suddenly?”

T
he first time the villagers heard it was back in 2000. It was early afternoon on a gorgeous spring day in Frome, a town in Great Britain just thirteen miles from Bath. The shops were open. The workers had already gone off to the nearby Whatley and Merehead limestone quarries, and the streets were quiet—the commuters had long since hopped the trains to nearby Bristol and Warminster. Afternoon had settled into its familiar calm. Suddenly, echoing from the town cemetery, came a sound never before heard in the town's twelve-hundred-year history.

It was the sound of a man with a horn.

A lone black man sat on the wall of the cemetery, right in front of Christ Church, playing a tenor saxophone. He was an American, it was rumored, though no one in the town was sure, because no one wanted to disturb him. Whatever he did, whatever he was doing on that horn, by God, it was gorgeous, so they said to one another,
Leave him be
. He'd been seen around town in the shops. He was said to be quiet and mild mannered, but nothing more was known about him. The Frome villagers, ever polite, did not ask. They understand artists in Frome—pronounced
froom,
as in
broom.
They know what it feels like to be different. That understanding goes back four hundred years to the Reformation, when the nonconformist Anglicans of Frome were killed for parting with the Protestants and Catholics and building their churches within a stone's throw of the ancient cemetery where the black man sat.
Don't disturb him,
they said to one another.
Let him play.

And so he played. He played that day and the next and in the days following, seated on the wall of the graveyard, working the horn, the harmonies, the scales and arpeggios, the songs he knew so well, the songs of his history, dressing the cemetery in the gorgeous melody and drifting beauty of jazz. That cemetery was full of the dead, but the horn man gave their memories bone and substance and sustenance. And when he was done with those in the graveyard, he turned the bell of his horn toward the town square. His thick tenor wail covered the walls of the village and the surrounding hills with melody, the supple notes echoing into the ears of the lorry drivers as they made deliveries on the narrow highway leading to Nunney.

Fifteen years later, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, seventy-two, saxophonist and composer, student of the legendary tenor saxophone great Sonny Rollins, the principal architect of James Brown's sound and one of the most important figures in American musical history, walks down the streets of Frome like just another local guy. It's a cool afternoon in 2012. He and his lovely British wife, Charlotte, are headed to a local ice cream parlor on Frome's famed Cheap Street, a medieval stone avenue split by a tiny stream curved into its middle, a stream that has run along this stone street for at least a thousand years.

As Pee Wee passes the shops, the merchants—manicurists, booksellers, antiques-shop owners, tea sellers—wave through their windows. Some come to their doors to greet him. Every hello is cheerful, every smile is warm. He's the Legend Next Door.

“Morning, Pee Wee!”

“Aye, Pee Wee!”

“Pee Wee!”

“Pee Wee! How goes it?”

Pee Wee moves along the street slowly, his wife at his side. “Going good,” he grunts, “Going good.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the village madman appears. This guy genuinely looks like a madman. Maybe he lives in the Blue House just up the road, the ancient stone building that once housed the poor. Or maybe he sleeps on one of the benches in front of the library, where the townsfolk like to gather to chat and read. Wherever he lives, he looks like his bubble has burst. He holds his head to the side a bit, as if it's screwed too tight onto his neck; his cap is perched on his head like a loose bottle cap. He approaches Pee Wee, who is sporting a neat tweed Irish cap and a short jacket.

“Pee Wee, guess what?”

“What?”

“I got my clarinet back. I'm ready for another lesson.”

“Okay. Later on.”

The madman is happy. He disappears, and Pee Wee and Charlotte move on. At the ice cream parlor, the shop owner, a young woman, greets him by name. Pee Wee grunts his greeting, sits down, and orders an ice cream called “gin and tonic.” I sit with him. I'm amazed at how much of a local he is.

After the shop owner takes my order and wanders off, I turn to him and ask, “Pee Wee, would you ever leave here? Maybe come back to America to live someday?”

Pee Wee, his wonderfully cute face and playful dark eyes moving about the room, scoops up his ice cream and regards it carefully, holding the spoon before his brown face, a face still smooth and cherubic despite his years. He glances outside the window at the lovely shops, the gorgeous old brick walkway, the laughing mothers chatting as they push baby carriages, the passersby who smile and wave at him through the window.

“If I do,” he grunts, “I'm walking there on my hands.”

There are probably two hundred musicians who went through James Brown's band or played on one of his records over the course of his fifty-one-year career. Of that number, probably ten contributed key components to his sound. None were more important, lesser known, and less credited than trombonist Fred Wesley and the man he learned from, Pee Wee Ellis.

It's a complicated piece of business, to describe the originality of a music that had no previous label until these guys got to it, partly because music is a continuum. Soul music, or rhythm and blues, had pieces of life, plenty of it, before James Brown or any of his musicians got to it. For example, Brown's bassist Bernard Odum, who arguably had as much to do with James Brown's early sound as anyone, started with Brown as a pickup player back in the fifties, when Brown was traveling solo on the chitlin circuit. His looping Fender bass lines on dozens of James Brown's hits, lines that floated above the beat at times and at other times thundered in concert with the kick drum, are a signature element of the James Brown sound. Yet Odum, who started out swinging the blues, is relatively unknown even within music circles. Similarly, Jimmy Nolen, Brown's greatest guitarist, along with Hearlon “Cheese” Martin and Alphonso “Country” Kellum, is a key creator of the melodic, nitpicking guitar licks that are sampled on thousands of records and copied on millions of cheap computer keyboards sold today. He, too, is virtually unknown. The fact is, James Brown's band, the 1965–69 version, fronted by Pee Wee, was, I would argue, the greatest group of rhythm and blues musicians ever assembled.

Music experts can argue this point till they're blue in the face, I suppose, but Motown, for all its dazzle and polish, did not have the grit and fire of the James Brown sound. Motown had a genius—Stevie Wonder—and the Jackson 5, and other indomitable forces, like Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, the Supremes, and extraordinary writing teams like Holland-Dozier-Holland and Ashford and Simpson. And there were others before Motown as well: great bands of the 1950s from Memphis, the underrated, killer soul groups out of Philadelphia International Records in the seventies, and unmatched soul singers like Aretha Franklin and Ruth Brown, the likes of which we will never hear again. But even Aretha, for all her soul and all her tight rhythm sections, could not match the burning fire and individuality of the James Brown sound. They were different sounds. Different musicians. Different cities. Different blacks. But James Brown's uniqueness stood him above them all.

The problem with the categorization of “soul” is that it's a generic term that means nothing and everything. It's like the term “Christian music.” It's a label. A sales term. The label leaves out legions of heavy influences and creators whose previous contributions to the form actually made Brown great, including two grandfathers of rock 'n' roll, Lionel Hampton and especially the deeply talented Louis Jordan. Jordan, the 1940s Arkansas-born saxophonist, singer, and composer whose stage antics and theatrical approach Brown later aped and modernized, is one of America's secret musical treasures. Jordan had a tremendous effect on Brown and his contemporaries Little Richard, Little Willie John, and Jackie Wilson. In terms of polish, slickness, musical dexterity, and entertainment value, Jordan and his Tympany Five were virtually unmatched at their height. They laid down a groove in dance and swing shows that drove audiences wild. That band was a well-trained, impeccably dressed musical outfit, delivering swing melody with military precision, playing behind Jordan's laughing wisecracks and show-business guffaws and gags with the efficiency of a groove machine—one that was nearly as tight as Count Basie's band and more fun to dance to than Duke Ellington, who, by contrast, fronted a cadre of knockout soloists playing serious compositions. Jordan's influence on American pop music has never, to my knowledge, been given more than cursory attention. As for vibraphonist and percussionist Lionel Hampton, Quincy Jones, one of the greatest record producers in American musical history, began his career as a teenage trumpeter and arranger with Hampton's band. Q told me that Hampton was the first to introduce electric bass into the rock 'n' roll genre, in the early fifties, via his bassist Monk Montgomery, brother of the great guitarist Wes Montgomery. He insists that Hampton was one of the first real rock 'n' rollers. And while I'm busy hurting people's feelings and riling up music experts, I might as well finish the job by throwing in a nod to legendary Latino musicians like Chano Pozo, Machito, Mario Bauzá, and the great Tito Puente, who the late Jerome Richardson, the tenor player and pioneer jazz flutist, said was a far greater figure in the development of American music than he was ever given credit for. Richardson worked in Lionel Hampton's band back in the forties, and said Hampton's band often played opposite Puente's at New York City dances. “Tito's band,” Richardson said simply, “used to give us the mumps.” Puente and America's Latino musicians are rarely even mentioned in the discussion of the evolution of soul and jazz, but even the most cursory hearing of their music shows its heavy stamp on that sound—and vice versa.

This question of “who created the music” is, therefore, sticky business, particularly when discussing Brown. It's complicated by the fact that Brown's music, fully evolved, is more easily, in my mind, compared to Count Basie's or Duke Ellington's than to any simple rhythm and blues group, because the “James Brown sound” was an intricacy of shifting parts that moved harmonically, often in counterpoint, back and forth, up and down, patternlike, with each pattern combining to make a whole. An entire industry of samplers, sequencers, and computers, the staple of hip-hop music, is clear evidence of its complexity. That music came from someone—from many someones. Not just one. And not just Brown.

But much of that sound harkens back to the heavyset man who now sits before me in the parlor of his home, with his horn on a stand in the corner facing a music stand that is open to page 34 of Franz Wohlfahrt's
60 Studies, Op. 45
for the violin, a book of arpeggios and études he practices on the saxophone.

As a fellow saxophonist, I look it over. “Man, this is hard,” I say.

“I'm working on something,” Pee Wee replies. “I got a concert with Yusef Lateef coming up in Paris. I gotta practice.”

Pee Wee Ellis has gotta practice. After forty-five years of being one of the most unique voices in the music world, co-composer of at least twenty-six James Brown songs, including “Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud,” “Mother Popcorn,” “Licking Stick,” and “The Chicken,” he's still practicing. And I haven't picked up my horn in months.

I change the subject. “Let's talk about James Brown,” I say.

“Can't we talk about something else?” he asks.

Spin back to late 1964. James Brown was at a musical crossroads. His seminal song “Out of Sight,” which took the I-IV-V chord, twelve-bar blues a giant step closer to soul, with its lesser chord movement, had, in part, been dreamed up by saxophonist Nat Jones, Brown's principal arranger and music director. Brown was in his prime then, and a fury to work for: endless rehearsals, cheap salary, constant yelling, heavy demands, fines for small infractions like shoes not shined properly or missing an entry. Jones, Pee Wee remembers, was already showing signs of mental illness. He would later lose his mind completely and fall into such despair that when soul sideman Curtis Pope, who was with Wilson Pickett and the Midnight Movers, saw him at a gig in Florida, Pope was shocked. “I couldn't stand it,” he says. “I reached in my pocket and gave him two hundred dollars.”