Kill 'Em and Leave (9 page)

Bro got hung up trying to make dough by lifting cars to sell their parts, and when James got busted in 1949 for four counts of breaking and entering and sent away for an eight-to-sixteen-year stretch at the boys' reformatory near Toccoa, Georgia, there was nothing Leon could do to help.

But Leon never judged, and they stayed friends. In 1955, when James showed up at Leon's doorstep in Augusta with four country boys from Toccoa who called themselves the Famous Flames, saying, “Bro, me and my band need a place to stay for a few days,” Leon said, “Bring 'em all in here, Bra! Bring 'em all!”

For the next two decades, James Brown would park anyone he needed—band members; friends; even his children, sons Teddy and Terry, and later his “adopted” son, a young minister from New York City named Al Sharpton—at Austin's house, then later at the McBowman's Motor Inn, which Leon ran with his lovely wife, Emma, and then later at Austin's house on Martin Luther King Drive. Leon's home was safe territory, where Brown's problems found a resting place, where band members and Brown's sons were treated as family, housed and fed by Leon and Emma for days, weeks, sometimes months.

The friendship that was born during the grimy poor 1940s evolved into the soup days of the fifties, and then into the laughing wonder and gravy days of the sixties and seventies, when James Brown was at his height. The two Bros watched the civil rights movement unfold in awe. They analyzed Brown's role in it, talking into the wee hours at times like two college students in a dorm room, considering the problems of the world. They traveled together, Leon riding along, sometimes reluctantly, only because Brown insisted. He needed help. He needed an honest man in his entourage. He needed his brother. Both were awestruck at the influence Brown had suddenly developed in the world. The February 1969
Look
magazine cover featuring Brown with the headline
IS HE THE MOST IMPORTANT BLACK MAN IN AMERICA
?
made them laugh. Bra once confessed to Leon, in a fit of candor that would occasionally slip past the know-it-all bluster that crept into his manner during those years, that he didn't know any more about solving the black man's problem than the Man in the Moon. He wasn't a politician. He was an entertainer. A musician. He had some ideas. The black man needed jobs. But everybody knew that, right? Did the white man ask Fred Astaire or Elvis Presley to speak for
their
people when
they
became stars? “It's all about money, Bra,” James said. “The black man needs money.” Leon agreed, but allowed that the black man needed education more than money. Brown agreed and confessed he wished he'd at least finished high school.

From 1945 to 1975, the two watched the segregated black community of Augusta, a thriving metropolitan area before World War II, decline into helplessness. Almost every single major black business they had known vanished. What was once their favorite downtown area, the main drag, “the Golden Blocks” of Augusta, located near Ninth and Gwinnett, descended into urban blight before their eyes: businesses, restaurants, hotels, a movie theater disappeared as manufacturing eased away, cotton died, drugs poured in, ambitious blacks fled for the North, and white residents scattered for the suburbs. The once glorious Palmetto Pond in nearby North Augusta, a swimming hole and popular stop on the chitlin circuit where Ella Fitzgerald, Tiny Bradshaw, Cab Calloway, and Jimmie Lunceford once came to perform; the mighty Paramount Motor Motel with more than eighty rooms, owned by Charlie Reid, Sr., a local black enterprising genius; the Penny Savings Bank; the Lenox Theater; the Georgia Colored Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association; the Four Sisters Beauty Shop; the once mighty Pilgrim Health and Life Insurance Company; the Red Star Hotel—where folks waited for hours for Mom and Pop Bryant's magical fried chicken; Crims Service Station; Geffert's Ice Cream Company; McBowman's Motor Inn, owned by Austin's mother-in-law—all gone. Employers like the Silby Mill, the Enterprise Mill, the Plaza Hotel, the Del Mar Casino were also gone. The only big deal that remained in Augusta from their childhood years was the Augusta Nationals, a white man's golf tournament that began in 1933 over on the city's west side and had no relevance to their lives.

“If we don't help ourselves, we ain't gonna make it, Bro,” James would say. In the good years, Brown tried everything he could to help. A radio station. Two of them. Three, if you included the one in Baltimore, which was the hometown of his second wife, Deidre. A green-stamps idea, where his face was issued on green stamps used as money-saving coupons; a restaurant; a nightclub. But Brown was not a businessman. They all went bust.

In the early years, the 1950s and '60s, the big dream for young men like those two was to get to the North, where the white man's foot was off your neck. Brown had a ticket out. He was a star. He moved to New York City in 1960. He told Leon, “Come with me, Bra.”

Leon refused. He'd married Emma McBowman right out of Fisk University—he'd been chasing after her since she'd graduated from high school. “What would I do in New York?” Austin said. “Emma's here. My home's here.” After ten years of floundering in New York—traveling the world and coming home to a city with its own set of racial problems, working with northern white record-company folks whom he never completely trusted, who he felt smiled in his face even as they stabbed him in the back—Brown gave up on the North. He hated New York. “Down home, I know who I'm dealing with,” he said tersely. He returned to Augusta.

He came home to Leon. Steady and familiar Leon was the same guy, living in the same house with the same wife, same car. He even played the same piano at the same church, Macedonia Baptist Church, that they both knew as children. He had opened a barbershop by then, and his kindness, his ready ear, his laughter made him popular in town. It was Leon, in fact, who first gave Brown his trademark hairstyle when they were both young. In thirty years of friendship they rarely argued. But when they did, it was bad. And their biggest argument was around the thing that had first united them: music.

As a child playing piano at Macedonia, where his dad and mom were deacon and deaconess, Leon was considered a boy wonder. He could play by ear anything he heard. He was a sought-after musician in Augusta circles because he knew all the great gospel hymns by heart. Brown constantly warned him, “Bra, if you play too many funerals, the next one you play might be your own,” but Leon enjoyed giving comfort to the families, some of whom he'd known all his life. He felt he could sing and lay in groove on piano as well as some of Brown's musicians—in fact, better than some. He decided he wanted to leave his barbershop, go on the road, and make a chunk of big money so he could settle back with his wife and not work so hard. He could make a record or two—the record business seemed easy. Big money. Big thrills. Not a lot of work.

He hinted this to James for years and Brown ignored him. Finally, one afternoon when Brown was complaining about one of his musicians, Leon said, “Put me in your band. I play good enough. I gave you your first music lessons.”

Brown was flummoxed. He could not easily explain to his friend the headache of running a band. This one wants more money, that one gets drunk, this one can't tie his shoes by himself, the other one forgot his uniform, this one wants an advance, that one wants songwriting credit and hasn't played a note, while this one doesn't want songwriting credit and he played
all the notes—
but if you hit him up with credit, you'd have to pay two guys behind him whom you didn't pay before. And the girls! Not the women he slept with, but the kids he was responsible for. Like little Geneva Kinard, of Cincinnati, who along with her sister Denise Kinard and Roberta DuBois sang background on a lot of his early hits, recorded in Cincinnati at King Records headquarters. These were young talents—but they were literally kids. Geneva was in high school. He was like a father to her. He'd heard her sing in El-Bethel Baptist Church in Cincinnati and had to promise her mom and dad that no one in the band would touch her, and that after gigs he'd send her home by taxi or limo in time for school. And he did! She went on to graduate in 1972 from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music as a piano major—one of only five blacks in her class—and later served as pianist with the Cincinnati Ballet and the Middletown, Ohio, orchestra, one of the few blacks in that field. But few of his musicians knew that. Onstage, the musicians were his friends, but offstage they went in different directions. They wanted more, deserved more, and nobody appreciated nothing. They moaned about the fines and the extra rehearsals he imposed; they saw him grab a box of pay money after each show and depart, but none of them knew of the headaches that came with that box of money: dealing with the slick promoters, the record labels, the radio stations, the managers; bribing the DJs—which was illegal even though everyone did it, but if a black guy did it and got busted he was going straight to jail without passing
GO
; pleasing the promoters, pleasing the fans; dodging the mobsters in various towns who tried to shake you down every time you came to their city—sometimes the same mobster would offer the same threat every time he came,
take my loan or else….The music itself was a small cog in the mighty machine of entertainment. Leon did not understand that. He just wanted to play. So Brown simply said, “Bra, you got the talent. But you ain't cut out for show business.”

“Sure I am!”

“You got a good life, Bra. A good wife. You got a good business. Why you wanna leave that for show business? They'll eat you like a piece of red meat.”

“I can take care of myself,” Leon said.

“It ain't the music, Bra. It's the money. Money changes people.”

“It won't change me,” Leon said.

“Money will
make
you change,” Brown said. “Your heart may be the same. Your head may be the same. But if people knew you had millions of dollars, you couldn't even stay in your own house.”

“I'd put up an electric fence and keep 'em out.”

Brown laughed and quit the subject, but Leon barked on about it so much that eventually Brown gave in. He produced several of Leon's records himself in the late sixties and into the seventies. He brought in his own band, the J.B.'s—crack players, some of the best R&B players in the history of that genre—to play the sessions. The records were good. Leon played and sang soulfully, but the records ran into distribution issues and died. Leon, who would give a stranger his last dime, didn't have the heart to be a slickster, paying off DJs and working angles between record companies, bands, the promoters, and all the other things that it takes to be a star. But only after Leon gave up on the idea did Brown confess, “Bra, I don't need you in my band. I need you to be my friend.”

Leon never raised the subject again. Besides, he saw for himself the headaches the parade of hangers-on, cousins, second cousins, friends of friends caused his friend. Take Brown's cousin Willie Glen, Aunt Honey's son. Brown had shared a bed as a child with Willie Glen while staying in Aunt Honey's house. In 2000, Willie Glen's son, Richard Glen, robbed Brown's office and then set it on fire, just to hide the robbery—the guy burned the entire office down. It shamed Brown to see his cousin's son get locked up. He loved Willie Glen. And it didn't stop there. In the 1970s, when his daughter Deanna was six and his daughter Yamma was three, Brown gave them writing credits for a couple dozen songs. It was a tax dodge. Twenty-seven years later the two sued him in federal court for $1 million for their cut of royalties. He settled with them for a sum far less, but the suit stung him. It was, Leon saw, always about the money. Everybody needed money:
This
guy borrowed money and never paid it back.
That
guy needed a car, so Brown got him a used car and the guy griped about not getting a new one. As soon as Brown dealt with that guy, another guy popped up with his hand out. And the women? His appetite for them drew the strong and the meek, the good-hearted and the cunning, and all of them chipped away at the man's generosity, leaving him angry and spent. It never ended. Over the years, even the line of people at Leon's barbershop who were trying to get to Brown through him had become a growing headache for Leon. But the door to James Brown—Leon let it be known—that door was closed.

In the earlier years, when Brown first became the King of Soul, these kinds of annoyances were ice cream and cake. Those were the fun years. Brown was young and strong, with girlfriends and cars and his own plane and three radio stations. He and Leon traveled to New York, to the West Coast, to West Africa. But in the later years, the weight of carrying that heavy load began to hammer at Brown. He never slept. He called Leon at all hours. He worried a lot and tried to hide it. His friends kept turning on him, mostly around issues of money. By the late eighties, his great musicians were leaving or gone: his great musical directors Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley had departed; Waymon Reed had joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers; Joe Dupars split for the Isley Brothers; Richard “Kush” Griffith, a gifted musician with perfect pitch, had left too—and that was just the trumpet players. The ever loyal sax man Maceo led a revolt. The crucial rhythm players bagged it as well. Drummers Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield. Bassist Sweet Charles Sherrell, with his easygoing disposition and deep talent, Sweet Charles, who played keyboards and bass, sang, and directed the show—who did everything, and whose solid grooves laid out the thundering bass of “Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud,” who helped James keep his band together and pulled him out of bed when he was too tired or too high to go on—Sweet Charles grew tired of him and left. Brown always paid these guys, but who was paying him? He always gave, but who was giving to him? His wives, he'd driven off. His cruelty sent his girlfriends packing. There was no one who lived at his level who understood how pained he felt. A man who carries the troubled history of an entire people on his back and a twenty-four-piece band and a record company and three radio stations to boot cannot find peace. Brown was lonely. He remembered every snub, every promoter from the 1950s who'd called him a “black monkey,” every girl in high school who'd turned him down because his pants were too short or he wasn't light-skinned enough. The memories kicked back on him at odd moments, twisted him like a pretzel, and, at times, made him unbearable to be around, and that's when he began to reach for the drugs, the PCP, which he smoked secretly. It was so secret that even Leon never saw it. Brown wouldn't let any of his close associates see it. Not the Reverend Sharpton, not Leon, not Charles Bobbit. Leon knew Bra wasn't right, he could see in the way Brown acted that he was taking something, however he took it in.