Kill 'Em and Leave (18 page)

Says trumpeter Joe Davis: “Pee Wee was the one who put the sound together, in terms of locking it in, translating what James wanted. That was Pee Wee.” The arrangements? “Mostly Pee Wee,” he says. Adds violinist Richard Jones, an exceptionally skilled reader and technician, “Pee Wee was the opposite of Mr. Brown. His gift was that he made even the guys who couldn't read music musical. He guided them to their strengths. He was very patient.”

The result of Pee Wee's work is most evident in “Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud,” which Pee Wee wrote on the spot at three in the morning in a Los Angeles studio and recorded with thirty kids that Charles Bobbit had miraculously dug up from Los Angeles somewhere to sing the chorus. That song is drooping with jazz—the movement from the I chord to the IV chord, tightly voiced horns on a sharp nine chord, very unusual in pop music, even then, band hits accented by the snare of Clyde Stubblefield. Even today there is nothing like it. Pee Wee's other works, “Mother Popcorn,” “Licking Stick,” and the instrumental “Chicken,” are long-standing favorites. “Chicken” is a jazz classic, generally assumed to have been written by the fretless-bass genius Jaco Pastorius. Another Ellis hit, “Cold Sweat,” is drawn straight from Miles Davis's “So What.”

“Miles affected everybody,” Ellis says. “He grew till the end of his life.” Even a novice can listen to Miles's lead horn line on “So What” and the horn hits on “Cold Sweat” and hear it: they're in the same key, but the difference is the groove. “So What” swings. “Cold Sweat” grooves.

Let me take a moment to mention groove here. And funk. When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn't stand funk. Their reasoning: it was technically simple. Unlike jazz, there was no harmonic or technical challenge, no furious chord changes that required mathematical efficiency in your head to figure out where the thing was going and how to make your knowledge of theory and harmony fit. Jazz requires a blend of split-second timing, skill, and training. It's like playing basketball. You need a lot of skills to play basketball: running, jumping, shooting, defense, conditioning. On the pro level, you have to put all these things to use and shoot the ball with a guy your size or bigger sticking a finger in your eye with one hand, pulling your shorts down with the other, and calling your mother names. Jazz soloing is akin to that. Funk soloing, on the other hand, is more akin to playing baseball. Baseball requires athletic talent but specific learned skills that have to be exercised flawlessly. Hitting a curveball can only be learned through years of practice. No matter how gifted you are athletically, you cannot step up to home plate and hit an eighty-mile-per-hour major-league curve or splitter without learning how to do it. And you cannot swing at every pitch. You only get three strikes. So you have to recognize the pitch in a split second, decide where it's going to break, adjust to it, and know when to swing. And you must do this flawlessly. Enough to stay on the team, anyway.

That's why funk is as challenging as jazz. You must know
when
to enter the groove, and
what
to play. Funk—any good music, really—requires space. Knowledge of when to throw in your small contribution and when to lay out. Musical silence is one reason trumpeter Miles Davis was such an extraordinary musician. He epitomized the use of space. There are gorgeous silences in Miles's music. Many jazz players, especially horn players, can't adapt to the demands of space that funk requires. They find funk frustrating and blow right past it. That's why Brown's longtime saxophone soloist Maceo Parker is so revered. There are dozens of horn players more skilled than Maceo. They have more chops. They play better, faster, more. But Maceo, like Miles Davis, knew when to play and when not to play. He knew how to groove. He played with simplicity, which is difficult. He played so rhythmically that he basically played drums on the sax. That's the difference between him and most of today's young players who try to ape his sound. Those who try to cop his sound are schooled on patterns, learned licks, various approaches to specific chord changes, things they learned out of books—things that were new when Charlie Parker played them in 1941, but sound old now. To play funk, you have to be less methodical, feel it, lay out, use space, understand that your moment might come on, say, beat three of bar seven. And put your thing there. Consistently. Every time. Consistency is often a key to great music. Consistency on the inside can make the outer part beautiful, if that's what the composer wants. If you pull the second violin part out of a Beethoven or Brahms concerto, it will still sound beautiful. Pull out the guitar part of a James Brown song, it might not sound beautiful. But though the language is different, rhythmically and aesthetically it will make sense to the human ear.

It's like driving a race car. Anyone can drive the straightaway, but who can drive the curves? That's what made Pee Wee Ellis, and later Fred Wesley, stand out among the great musicians that worked under Brown. They were co-originators. Brown wrote the lyrics, handed them the recipe, and they were the cooks; they translated Brown's grunts into musical language, which in turn set up his onstage dances, creating a backdrop of musicality that was original and, to this day, infinitely interesting.

“Pee Wee was studied,” says Fred Wesley. “He had mastered a lot of things. A lot of what I learned about music, I learned from him.”

But the demands of those four years working with Brown ground Pee Wee down. Brown was insecure around studied musicians—he certainly wasn't alone in that—but in that regard, his musicians complain he could be simply unbearable. Pee Wee doesn't like to talk about those years. You can bend him this way and that, joke with him until he gets loose as a ball of cotton candy, and still he will not tell it. Sitting in his parlor, in his room full of instruments and awards and drums, you ask him about those years again and again and watch his friendly smile and happy grunts descend into silence. He backs into that silent corner and stays there. There's pain in that corner. He doesn't have to tell the stories. I've heard them. The fines, the cruelty, rehearsing for hours after a gig for a tiny mistake made by one person.
My band. My show. My gig.
I know that feeling, when you work for a lousy musical boss. You sift through your own memories and feel the painful push against your gut, thinking of the humiliation, the lack of dough, the we're-all-in-this-together bit the star sells you until it's time to get paid. Then, as you look at that twenty-dollar bill in your hand, you realize there's no democracy. It's a horrible feeling when the whole gig, the life-as-a-musician thing, backs up in your throat, like cheap whiskey that you can smell on your breath from one room to the next. A musician knows that smell. It's the smell of
the game.
Show business. You practice all your life, for days, months, years, waiting for the Big Gig, your moment in the sun, and suddenly the gig of a lifetime comes along and it ain't what they said it would be. You find that the gig is just a soap commercial, or the guy holding the strings is a graceless, selfish, narcissistic, self-hating jerk who plays humble and smiles for the audience while holding his foot on your neck at the same time, knowing you can't complain since you need the dough, running his hand through your pocket to make sure you're broke while sleeping with your girlfriend, and you wake up to the whole thing feeling like a worm living inside a peach who pops his head out one day and sees a bunch of white chompers and suddenly realizes what the whole deal is.

Brown's behavior toward his musicians is one of his saddest legacies. In two years of gathering the data, I found that the answers were pretty much the same: “He didn't pay enough.” “He was mean.” “Outright cruel.” He fined musicians for small infractions onstage—missing a cue, shoes not shined, missing a tie. He was divisive. He slept with his female singers. He was a master of manipulation. He tried to get his musicians to buy big houses and cars, only to fire them and watch them suffer under heavy debt, then hire them back at a lower salary. He ran senseless, endless, punishing rehearsals for hours, sometimes right after the gig, sometimes till daylight, for no reason other than to show who was boss. The band traveled by bus. Brown traveled by private plane. He demanded instant acquiescence. His temper was frightening and seemingly anything could touch it off. He slapped this guy. He pulled a gun on that guy. He made this one buy a Cadillac from him. Fred Wesley, in his clairvoyant autobiography
Hit Me, Fred,
describes how Brown once went around the room at a rehearsal and forced each of the band members to say the order of songs in his sets at fast speed, timing each of them, which was a problem, because musicians remember their part or the chord changes, but they don't necessarily recall the title to every song, let alone the song order of a show. He kept spies on his buses, bodyguards or hairdressers or plebe-entourage members, who ratted out any musician who spoke poorly of him. In short, Brown dehumanized them. Most of them, while respecting his musicality and utter showmanship, disliked him intensely.

But that card flips the other way too. In a band, democracy does not work. Somebody has to be the boss, collect the money, deal with the promoters, the agency, the record company; someone has to order the sets, dream up the thing. Musicians are hard to work with. This one drinks. That one hates the other one. This one needs more money. That one can't cut the part but is a nice guy. This one is a hell of a player but a troublemaker. Quincy Jones told me he nearly went mad the first time he ran his first big band around Europe in 1960. Taking care of so many people is a big job. And Brown did not know how to be a friend. He needed his men, but he did not need them. He vacillated between being one of the boys onstage and the boss man off of it. But when faced with a choice, he had to be the boss. Only in his later years did he realize what he'd had in his great bands of the sixties and seventies. The last of his great musicians that remained, bassist Sweet Charles Sherrell, sax man Maceo Parker, and St. Clair Pinckney, often had to help him keep his show together in those later years—Sherrell recalls rousing Brown out of a PCP-induced slumber by pouring milk down his throat to get him out of his hotel room and onstage. By then most of his great singers and musicians had been replaced by younger musicians who did the old hits at ridiculously fast tempos, with showgirls shaking and baking behind Brown in cheerleader getups. By then his two greatest bandleaders, Pee Wee and Wesley, had long since departed. Pee Wee walked off the gig in 1969.

“He deserves credit,” Ellis says quietly. “I learned a lot. But it ran its course. He felt he was a king. You have to raise an army for the king.”

He peers out of his parlor window, and I watch him. I'm dying to ask the question, the answer to which I already know.

What happens to the king when the king's men leave?

I start to ask it, but then what's the point? In another year this guy will receive an honorary doctorate in literature from Bath Spa University. Dr. Alfred Ellis. He's a legend, more recognizable in Europe than he is at home. And I'm sitting with him. So instead I say, “You wanna eat? I'm buying.”

His face crinkles into a smile. The old jazzman reaches for his cap. “My man…”

A
s early as 1987, James Brown began to think about his death. He would formalize his will and trust thirteen years later, but by then his life had unraveled. His second marriage, to Deidre (Dee Dee) Jenkins, had ended in divorce. His father, whom he'd held dear, had died. His third wife, Adrienne, was lifted into God's kingdom tragically two years later, after liposuction surgery in California, a crushing blow for Brown. His fourth marriage, a December 2001 union to Tomi Rae Hynie, a backup singer he met in Las Vegas, would unravel into a marital disaster that would spill into court for years after his 2006 death. He was sixty-eight when they married. She was thirty-two. She bore a son, James, Jr., that same year. But Hynie had not divorced her previous husband, a Pakistani national named Javed Ahmed, before she married Brown, which broke Brown's heart when he discovered it, according to Emma Austin. (Hynie's marriage to Ahmed was annulled three years
after
her marriage to Brown.) Brown's children—six claimed, one adopted, and at least four others unclaimed—were a mishmash of grace, tragedy, or greed, depending on whom you ask. They had to make appointments to see him. Brown, by 1998, had become an increasingly isolated old man.

He was still a force, though, irascible, unbearable, opinionated, impulsive, and even successful, having made a remarkable comeback after leaving jail in 1991 with a Kennedy Center Honor, an HBO concert, a couple of movie cameos, and a new management team of Buddy Dallas and David Cannon, who brought him back to solvency. But the glory days were gone. The record business had a new king, rap music, and Brown's body was breaking down. The years of dancing had created chronic pain in his knees and toes. He fought off pancreatic cancer. His teeth constantly bothered him. They were implants, those of a man with tight teeth who had lived a life full of loose ends and deep disappointments. Even the city Brown loved, Augusta, had deteriorated to urban blight, with white flight, drugs, the emergence of violent hip-hop, and the usual array of complicated difficulties that helped destroy black families. Brown, though generous to the poor himself, was no fan of welfare. He disliked anything that took away a man or woman's incentive to work. Cannon recalls Brown visiting a New York City men's shelter, where his appearance caused so many men to crowd him that he had to stand on a stepladder to address them. He looked around the room full of men, many of them seemingly able-bodied, and said, “Y'all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You ought to be out working instead of being here.”

“There ain't no jobs out here,” a man said. “We're poor.”

“I'll tell you what,” Brown retorted. “You take my clothes and I'll put on your clothes. Come tonight, I'll have me some kind of job. I won't be the boss. I won't be wearing the boss's uniform. But I'll have me something.”

The world had become complicated, and there he stood atop it once again after years of being down, a mass of contradictions himself, a man with miles of scorched earth behind him. He'd spent most of his entertainment life preaching the gospel of education and hard work, and now he was seen as a kind of clown. James Brown the convict. James Brown the troublemaker. James Brown, who fell down on his face like so many of them eventually do. He knew it. And it hurt him. He sought to make amends. Brown decided to give back.

In 2000, he spent $20,000 in legal fees to have an airtight will and estate drawn up. The will left his personal effects to his children, plus a $2 million education fund to send his grandchildren to college should they decide to attend. The rest of it, the bulk of his estate—songs, likeness, music publishing—he left in a trust fund that he named the I Feel Good Trust, said by Cannon to be worth conservatively at least $100 million when he died. The trust was set up to help educate poor children—white and black—in South Carolina and Georgia. Brown was specific about that—the main criterion: need. Not black over white or vice versa. With regard to race, he said, “There's enough of that.” The trust was to be run by the same two business partners who had brought him back to prominence, David Cannon and Buddy Dallas, and a trusted African American road manager and local magistrate named Albert “Judge” Bradley.

At least $100 million left behind to educate poor children of all races in South Carolina and Georgia. And ten years after he died, not a dime of Brown's money would go to educate a single impoverished kid in either state. Why?

The short answer is greed.

The long answer is boring, which is how lawyers like it. That's how modern-day gangsters work. They don't pull out a gun and stick it in your face. They paper you to death. They bore the public, hoping you'll turn the page, change the channel, surf the Internet, watch the football game, mutter about how shameful the whole bit is, say the hell with it, and move on.

And that's exactly, more or less, what happened.

It's a complicated business, describing the legal morass of South Carolina, a state that feels fifty years behind the rest of America in the matter of race and class. This is a state where nearly 30 percent of children live below the poverty line, where you see poor blacks in Barnwell County shuffling up and down the roads in white T-shirts, farmer's pants, and old shoes, looking like slaves of old, some having never left the state in their entire lives, and where internal state politics are rife with political cutthroats who at the smell of red meat will knock one another over the head hard enough to send the most grizzled political veteran blabbering to therapy. The horrific massacre of nine African American parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by an avowed racist peels back only a small window to the tumultuous boil that exists beneath the outward calm of that state's swirling racio-political world. If all politics is personal, it's nuclear-strength personal in South Carolina, where four state legislators, known as the Barnwell Ring, basically ran the whole state for nearly thirty years, where the Speaker of the House in 2014 went down in ethical flames only after the most embarrassing public disclosures of his oversight, and where the current network of male bullyboys and legal bruisers, many of them judges and graduates of the University of South Carolina School of Law, run the state's legal system like a private club. “Even if you have a Harvard law degree, you won't go far over there,” says Buddy Dallas.

Into the morass of legal backbiting, nepotism, and personal feuding walked David Cannon. Cannon had once headed the local Republican committee that had hosted former president George W. Bush's campaign visit to Barnwell, and he had actually lunched years ago at the Edisto Beach house with the very same judge, Doyet Early, who would one day be among those who handed him his head. According to Cannon, the trouble began just days after Brown died. Several of Brown's children, led by daughters Deanna and Yamma, sued, claiming that Cannon, Dallas, and Bradley had “unduly influenced,” i.e., flimflammed, their father in his later years. Tomi Rae Hynie, Brown's “widow,” who was said to be three thousand miles away in Los Angeles when Brown died and whose bill from a California drug rehab facility that year cost Brown $50,000, filed claims of her own. She appeared on the Larry King talk show shortly after Brown's death, using the term “my husband” enough times to make your head spin.

The suits hit the South Carolina courts like a smoke bomb and quickly spread. The mostly white political and legal entities in South Carolina could not have been overly fond of James Brown anyway. The guy had led cops on a two-state chase and brought international spotlight and embarrassment to a proud state, with his six-year sentence drawing international calls for his release—public pressure drummed up by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who among the South Carolina legal bullyboys is probably about as popular as a can of sardines in Rome on a Friday.

In the wake of Brown's death, a weird toxic trio of good-old-boy lawyers, Brown's children, and his poor white widow battled together, using “the poor children” that Brown left most of his money to as a kind of carrot that each of the three dangled publicly as justification for their greed. The mob needed a head on a platter. David Cannon was available. They called for his head. And they got it.

Cannon sits in the back parlor of his modest Barnwell home, facing his modest yard, surrounded by antique swords and paperwork. In front of him, on the table, is a Scooter Pie and a Coca-Cola. In front of me is the same—my reward for days of grilling the poor man about events that have flipped his life upside down.

“Have a couple for the road,” Cannon says of the Scooter Pies. “I got a whole box.”

I saw the crate in the kitchen. That's when I knew I really liked the guy. I love Scooter Pies.

Outside, the sound of a lawnmower roars to life, and a middle-aged black man in cool-looking shades and a baseball cap roars past, waving, mowing the grass outside. Cannon calls to him out the window.

“Hey, hey,” the gardener calls out.

Cannon watches him. “I've known him a long time,” he says. “He wanted to buy a house. He came to me and said, ‘I can't do it. I don't know how to get it done.' ” The gardener knew nothing about banks. He didn't even have a checking account. Cannon opened one for him, then arranged a meeting for him with one of Cannon's friends in the mortgage business, who got the gardener a bridge loan. When the gardener had a serious operation, Cannon showed up at his hospital bed. “He was just about to go into surgery, and I was setting by his bed,” Cannon says. “He was worried. I put my hand over his hand and was talking to him. The doctor came into the room and said to him, ‘I see your boss is here!' ”

“I'm not his boss,” Cannon said. “I'm his friend.”

That kind of thinking was one reason Brown asked Cannon and Dallas to join his team in the first place, and why they later became friends. They also did for Brown what several high-powered northern executives and lawyers could not do. They brought him back to prominence and cleared his $15 million debt to the IRS. It was something Brown never forgot, and when a group of northern managers and promoters sought to undermine Cannon and Dallas, promising Brown the moon if he left his southern management team and brought them on instead, Brown told them to get lost. “Mr. Brown died not owing the government a penny,” Cannon says proudly. “He used to tell folks, ‘Mr. Cannon told the IRS what to do.' But I didn't really.”

What Cannon did was maneuver Brown out of an IRS situation with great skill over a two-year period. Brown appreciated that skill, and celebrated the trust between the two when he introduced Cannon and Dallas to thousands at the October 2006 naming of the James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia, as two friends who deserved credit for helping his career. As the overseer of Brown's accounts, Cannon had power of attorney to sign Brown's checks. He tried to curtail Brown's crazy spending habits by putting him on a salary of $100,000 a month, which they both agreed on. (Brown called that “walking-around money.”) He and Dallas worked to keep Brown on the right side of things. Dallas's job was to “keep him out of the ditches.” When Brown put a $300,000 deposit on a private plane, then changed his mind, or made an offer on the land next to his house, then walked away from it, leaving the seller incensed, or found a contractor who ruined his basement, leaving Brown ankle deep in shit, having somehow constructed the basement so that the house sewage poured into it, it was Dallas's job to handle those matters. Cannon oversaw the money, watched the deals, sometimes made the deals, and worked to keep Brown out of tax trouble. His job, he says, was to advise Brown as to options. But the ultimate decision regarding all deals, Cannon says, fell to Brown. “No one told James Brown what to do,” he says.

After Brown's IRS troubles ended, Cannon and Dallas helped Brown sever ties with his old booking agent, Universal Music, and brought him over to William Morris. Rev. Sharpton marshaled his enormous capacity to push the public relations machinery in the right direction, mounting a huge public outcry for Brown's release from prison, which led to more gigs. Brown's appearance as a preacher in
The Blues Brothers
and later in a Sylvester Stallone Rocky movie had brought him new, young audiences. Things were looking up.