Who Was Mr. Rolling Stone?
Outtakes & Residue from Encounters with James Brown (and Others)
Grabbing music for a twelve-hour drive this summer with my fifteen-year-old son, I threw in a couple of my favorite James Brown compilations, In the Jungle Groove and Motherlode. I brought fifteen or twenty other CDs, but I shouldn’t have bothered. These were the only two we listened to.
Someone once explained to me that when you shared a meal with Italians in Italy, food was likely to be the only topic of conversation. This may be overly broad, but I’ve often found it to be the case. And perfectly nice, too. For twelve hours my son and I listened to the two James Brown compilations, and for twelve hours we talked about James Brown. A compilation/conversation. We didn’t turn down the music to be heard — we shouted over it while we enthused and analyzed, while we laughed at the lyrics and asides, while we grunted and hooted along.
My son just got his “Spotify Wrapped” and told me it informed him that he was in the top one percent of all listeners to James Brown in 2022. This strikes me as prodigal, but of course I’m biased.
Sixteen years ago — it astounds me to type that — I spent four days in a recording studio in Augusta, Georgia, with James Brown and his band. The group of musicians was the current incarnation of what for so long had been called the “J.B.’s” (and it included players who’d been in versions called the J.B.’s), only now it was called “The Soul Generals”. The Generals were his touring band and now they were trying — and failing — to make a record. I was there to interview James Brown for Rolling Stone magazine.
I intentionally wrote an epic — an attempt to say everything I could think to say, and to report everything I saw. I think it’s one of the best things I ever did, in non-fiction, or at all.
(The piece is currently behind a firewall. Sometimes Rolling Stone makes it available, but not at the moment. I collected it in a book of essays called The Ecstasy of Influence. It’s also in The James Brown Reader. If you want to read it, I guess you have to decide who you want to give some money to. I added about a thousand extra words back in to the version in my collection — which may or may not be a sales pitch, depending on your appetite for “director’s cuts”.)
I spent time with the band during one evening in New York City, as well, backstage at a gig. And later I’d travel with them for a single concert in Newcastle, England. But it was the four days in Augusta which provided the immersion in the life of the band, and gave me my real access to James Brown.
My son knew this, but he’d never read the piece. (He’s opted not to read me, at least so far as I know. I trust that for him that’s a good and healthy approach to this aspect of his life-situation.) Instead, he essentially required me to tell him everything I remembered from my four days with James Brown and the Soul Generals.
I told him all I remembered putting in the piece, and things I’d excluded, too. Doing so, it occurred to me that it was long enough ago now that I could write down a few of those excluded tales. So, here, in the spirit of “Now It Can Be Told”, is some of the memory material which floated up to the surface during that drive.
2.
The gist of my Rolling Stone piece, should there be any confusion: James Brown is (was) a god, the greatest popular musician on this or any other planet. At the same time: James Brown is (was) a crazy dysfunctional manchild totally dependent on his collaborators, whom he treats like shit. (This is the right moment to acknowledge that I’m well aware of the irreconcilable fact that my musical hero was a person who treated many people with shocking brutality, especially women.) At the same time: his bandmates adore him. At the same time: they mock him. At the same time: they fear him.
3.
In Augusta, witnessing James Brown’s relationship to his final band, I became fascinated by the psychological dynamics that bound them together. Writing the piece didn’t expunge that fascination. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
The situation between James Brown and the Soul Generals was in keeping with the Godfather’s abusive-codependent syndrome with his bands since the Famous Flames, in the 1950’s. The “Hardest Working Man In Show Business” had long since systematized his exploitation of his collaborators, to a point where it was a fetish — a kabuki arrangement. These accounts are legendary: the tirades, the firings and finings, the gobbling-up of credit for their musical innovations, the cult-like deprivations and six-hour rehearsals. Yet the 2006 version of this relationship, as I witnessed it during the failed recording sessions, was also something new. The system had reached an endpoint because of James Brown’s advanced age, and because of the exhaustion of certain possibilities for change or growth.
By now, things had taken on a certain King Lear vibe. The tyrant was invited to roar by his subjects, in order that everyone concerned might feel the world still worked the way it should, the way they were accustomed to. Better, it seemed, to have an abusive god-clown-father than no god-clown-father at all — so the musicians were working from their side to keep the game alive.
As it turned out, that would only be possible for another five or six months after my visit.
While I was there, the band members told me things they shouldn’t have. Many of these I ended up putting in the piece. One example: the band members were recording in secret, in a hotel ballroom, against James Brown’s wishes. The fervent hope of the youngest and most optimistic among them was that they might find some way to bring these secret tracks to James Brown, so that he could approve them, make use of them, and thereby find one more hour of glory. Why not? The secret tracks (I still have them on my iTunes) were funky. They were ten times better than what James Brown was laying down in the “official” sessions in the studio.
Yet this was double-think on the Generals’ parts. They also knew it was pointless. The older and more veteran members of the band counseled this continuously, even while they participated in the secret recordings. Even if James Brown didn’t fire them on the spot for recording without him, he’d never validate the results.
Several members of the band were eloquent about this one fundamental law: if James Brown wasn’t present, commanding his band with his arcane funk methodology (which consisted of teaching them each their part by singing, chanting, or grunting his sonic notions for them individually, while they stood listening, terrified, trying to understand) then nothing they recorded could ever be considered in any way worthwhile, in any sense funky, at all.
Something I didn’t put into the piece: my own bewilderment that men who were so bullied and cowed by their employer that they’d go for long hours standing obediently ready with their instruments, not going to the bathroom, desperate for food, while he berated them ritually about inconsequential matters, were boldly telling me what they actually thought. Weren’t they afraid I’d write it down? Wouldn’t it be a disaster if I published these facts? Wouldn’t they be fined, or fired, or eaten alive?
No, they explained to me. There was no risk. No offense, but despite all his apparent interest in me while I was on the scene, James Brown would never read the piece. For one thing, he didn’t have reading glasses.
No, they further explained, what was likely to happen was that James Brown would ask his manager Mr. Bobbit to read it aloud to him. Then, he’d lose interest within a few minutes, and wander away, or begin bragging about himself again, abruptly reminded — as I witnessed several times up close — of a tale of his own prowess at music, or gambling, or one-upmanship, that had just occurred to him to retail again. So long as I didn’t put the band’s secrets into the first paragraph, they were safe. No one — Mr. Bobbit, or anyone else — would choose to be the messenger who told James Brown about anything in the piece that would displease him.
I put their secrets in. But there were others I left out, or spun more gently. For instance, there was one day when James Brown put on a particularly extended show of berating his musicians, who stood in grim silence, like bullied children. I was afraid Brown had done this for my benefit — to prove how “hard-working” he required his “family” to be — to demonstrate that the legend was true. When I was alone with the band next, I tried to apologize. I was at least embarrassed that I’d witnessed the humiliating rite.
In a spirit of weary bitterness, they explained he was just in a bad mood. The abuse I’d witnessed was typical of a thing that was possible for the band to have to endure at any moment, at the drop of a hat.
“Why?” I asked.
“We’re his toys,” I was told, in moment of candor that included more than a little contempt and revulsion. “His little tin men. He likes to set us up and knock us down. He’s playing with his toys, it’s nothing more than that.”
This, I wrote down, but left out of the piece. I think I felt I was protecting the band, not from the wrath of their employer, but from having to confront the emotional violence of their situation too directly. I wanted them to feel proud of what they saw in the piece.
4.
Though I found it helpful to employ the first-person, I was ambivalent about my own presence in the story. James Brown was obviously playing to me at times, with hints of the hot/cold teasing, the flattering aggression, that he used on his band, though without any of the real menace that came with an advantage of power. He nicknamed me “Mr. Rolling Stone” (and promptly forgot my real name, if he ever knew it). He had a huge chip on his shoulder about the magazine, which he claimed had never given him the cover.
Well it had, once, but whether he knew that or not, no one was ever going to speak of it, because of the timing and subject matter.
I promised James Brown the cover for our story — wrongly, because I couldn’t promise it. In my one meeting with Jann Wenner in person (more about my encounter with Wenner later) I’d championed giving James Brown the cover, but it was ridiculous to think I’d negotiated any guarantee. Here is what the cover actually looked like when my story was published.
Six months later James Brown got a very nice cover, but wasn’t around to appreciate it.
Anyhow, it wasn’t going to work for me to write about his (justifiable) feelings that the magazine had short-shrifted him. It would be too self-referential. It would be edited out. So I sublimated those remarks within his more general (justifiable) grumblings that the white world had short-shrifted him continuously throughout his life.
Speaking of which, I also deep-sixed my own uneasy speculations on the question of whether “whiteness v. Blackness” had something to do with the conversion of the J.B.’s into the Soul Generals.
To put it simply: the J.B.’s were almost all Black. The Soul Generals were mixed — but more of them were white. The great musical director/horn players in each of the Brown’s great recording eras — Pee Wee Ellis, Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley — were Black. The (capable and devoted) musical director/trumpeter in the Soul Generals, Hollie Farris, was white.
In my piece I’d speculated that in this latter phase of his life Brown had traded-off any risk of giving his musicians freedom to innovate on his behalf, in favor of total control. You see, Brown was terribly afraid, always, that people would abandon him. If musicians discovered their own powers in the recording studio, they might wish to depart, to make records without him. The Generals didn’t look to be going anywhere, but it appeared that Brown had nonetheless told himself that keeping their loyalty entailed crushing their creative ambitions.
That’s to say, these guys would have liked nothing more than to be exploited the way Ellis, and Parker, and Wesley (and Bootsy Collins and Bobby Byrd and Jimmy Nolen and Jabo Starks, etc.) had been exploited: exploited straight into the annals of popular music, as sidemen on a classic James Brown recording.
But did race play into this?
Could it be that he felt the white players were less talented, and therefore would be more dependent on him? (This wasn’t the case. The Generals, white and Black together, were astounding musicians, and like earlier groups might have been able to take him to new places he couldn’t take himself. Maybe. He was old.)
Or did he think white people were more controllable?
Or was it that in this endgame phase it gave him a peculiar satisfaction to have it be white musicians who were so frustrated beneath his thumb?
I don’t know. It might have been random. It probably took a while for very many white people to figure out how to play funk well enough to interest James Brown.
5.
I fell in with the band easily, and enjoyably, once they saw that I saw what kind of life they were living. It was also clear to them that in my eagerness to please James Brown for at least long enough to keep my access to the recording sessions, I’d entered into a relationship with him similar to theirs, albeit very temporarily.
Two of the young white guitarists, Keith Jenkins and Damon Wood, took special interest in filling my ear with their eloquent interpretations of the James Brown/band dynamic. Because they were such passionate fans themselves, Keith and Damon both stood in a double relation to their experience. They endured it, but also catalogued it.
Keith, in particular, had an archivist’s passion. He’d grown up in Augusta, studied Brown’s music as a teenager, and joined the band when he was barely twenty. Keith was responsible for helping reintroduce a number of songs that Brown hadn’t included in his live performances for decades. Backstage in England, just minutes before going onstage to perform for a stadium full of British fans, Keith paused to show me a video clip on his laptop, of a performance in the ‘70’s he’d been wanting me to see.
I remember thinking about Keith and Damon that they should be the ones writing the piece, not me.
It makes sense that Damon went on to write a terrific book, wherein he makes his own reckoning with having spent years “on the bus”.
Keith’s legacy hasn’t made it into hardcovers, but I promise you that this two-and-a-half hour ramble through Keith’s James Brown recollections is as good as a book. I listened to the whole thing twice. At this remove, Keith is brutally fair — he repeats the metaphor of “toys” and “little tin soldiers” that I’d hesitated to repeat— and he shows a enviable wisdom about himself. The tale of his audition for the band, including his perfect James Brown impersonation, is fantastic. He also tells an amazing story about Brown accepting some Italian cowboy boots as a gift from Hollie Farris, with an awesome punchline that I won’t steal — you’ll have to watch. Keith’s joy in James Brown’s music appears undamaged.
In the interview, Keith says that the hope of being the guitarist on a classic James Brown recording was “the elusive pearl.” It never happened for him. A moment later he says, laconically, “Turns out I got to play on the worst thing he ever did. That’s something.”
Among the things I’m grateful for, in my recent searches into the post-James-Brown lives of the Generals, is to learn how they’ve gone on taking care of one another, like war veterans from the same unit. Here’s one example: Damon Wood’s band Harmonius Junk backing up Fred Thomas. In my Rolling Stone piece I explained that Fred Thomas was the J.B.’s/Soul General’s longest-enduring, or longest-suffering, band member, playing bass since replacing Bootsy Collins in 1971. How long had Fred waited to be the one at the microphone singing?
6.
I also left out some stuff about Danny Ray, the tiny, dapper enigmatic valet with the booming voice who did the famous on-stage announcements (“Welcome Mr. Please, Please himself, the Godfather of Soul, the Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness, etc.”) and, most famously, was the “cape-man” — the one who threw the cloth over James Brown’s shoulders during the legendary routine. The band adored Danny Ray: as James Brown’s literal footman for five decades he was the emblem of their endurance, their servitude. I shared their fondness — on principle.
And yet. And yet. Danny Ray, as the person in charge of costumes, was often used as an emissary for chiding and reprimands. He’d be the one to report, for instance, that James Brown wasn’t pleased to see you keep a supply of extra guitar picks sitting on an amp during a show, or that your “Generals” costume was missing an epaulet button. I got the feeling that in many cases a tug on your sleeve from Danny Ray wasn’t actually a thing to be anticipated joyfully.
Danny Ray didn’t ever speak to me—was it discretion or his employer who’d dictated this? He loomed around, almost creepily, I felt, just as he so often drifted on stage with nothing to clearly do except wait, for James Brown to decide to strip off a jacket, or for a cue to fetch the cape. At the stadium concert in England I idiotically stood in the wings between Danny Ray and the valise containing the cape, and at the crucial moment he was forced to shove me aside to retrieve it. Not a word was exchanged, but I think he would have killed me if I’d tried to reach for it myself.
At one point I sat with Mr. Bobbit and several band members and dancers, including Roosevelt “R.J.” Johnson. R.J. had been introduced to me as James Brown’s personal assistant; he was in fact a vocalist who covered a lot of the Bobby Byrd parts in classic jams like “Soul Power”. Also present was Fred Wesley, who’d come to visit the studio during my time there. These were people with access to a lot of lore, and so I’d begun waxing historical.
In that vein, I referred aloud to Danny Ray as “the Original Cape-Man”. Someone, I’m not sure who, quietly corrected me, perhaps concerned that I might put this error into print: “Danny’s actually the Second Original Cape-Man.” When I tried to pursue this, I was discouraged. No one seemed to wish to tell me more. Despite Danny Ray’s half-century of service, had there really been a cape-man before him? One who’d disappeared, never to be referred to? Unable to verify this haunting suggestion, I left it out.
7.
Other things, I underplayed in my piece: for instance, how much the band loathed James Brown’s organ playing. This was the epitome, for them, of the fraudulent side of The Godfather’s fraudulent genius. Brown had reinvented popular music five times over, but when he stepped up to the organ his musicians had to fight to keep straight faces.
Keith, in the Youtube interview, isn’t shy. “Childish,” he say. “Jazz wannabe.” His advice to the concert attendee, faced with one of these interludes on the organ? “Go to the concessions.”
Also underplayed in my Rolling Stone piece: the very large quantity of marijuana that was smoked, behind closed doors in the suite of the recording studio, or in the alley behind the studio. Smoked by certain members of the band, and by the journalist — me — who wasn’t about to say no to the opportunity for bonding, and chilling out his nerves.
Was this what real grown-up music writers did? I didn’t know. It was what I did.
The amount smoked was — it was a lot. I flew high through much of four long days in the studio. The experience of being stoned out of my gourd while standing in a room full of silent musicians, some of whom are also stoned, and listening — and trying, or pretending, to take notes—as James Brown stares into your eyes and boasts for half an hour about his control of his “family”, specifically of how “clean” he keeps his organization and how he’d fire any of them on the spot for drug use — well, this isn’t an experience I can exactly recommend either for or against. But it was (as Keith said of being the guitarist on the worst track James Brown ever recorded) “something.”
“You got high with the J.B.’s!” exclaimed my friend Luke when I called him from my Augusta hotel room after the first night. I got high with the Soul Generals, I almost corrected, but didn’t. It occurs to me I am generally guilty of being a person who prefers not to rain on parades.
Here’s a detail I left out entirely: I snuck them food. On the longest and direst of the “bad mood JB” days, when everyone had been made to wait around doing nothing for upwards of five hours without a break for a meal — tin soldiers made to stand at attention, for fear of reprisal if they weren’t available at the Godfather’s whim — I asked, in innocent incredulity, whether a quick lunch run truly wasn’t permitted. I was informed that it truly wasn’t. “We can’t go,” someone said, “But you can.”
There was a barbecue joint a few miles from the studio location. I had my rental car. This was all done as stealthily as we’d smoked the joints, under fear of the who-knows-what penalty. (To consent to be childishly bullied is to find oneself reduced to the condition of a bullied child. I’d joined the “family”.) I took orders, mostly for pulled-pork sandwiches. Some sides — rice, slaw. A round of Cokes. Band members tried to stuff dollars into my hands; I refused. (Was this what a real grownup music writer did? I didn’t know. Still don’t.) Then, while the musicians all remained petrified in the sixth hour of useless readiness, I drove off and scored the haul of barbecue, feeling the adrenaline risk that it would be with this gesture that I blew the entire assignment.
Long story short: it wasn’t. I got them (and myself) fed, somehow, entirely in secret.
8.
Who was “Mr. Rolling Stone”? What, actually, was this strange period in my life that I’d been recollecting for my kid in the car? It seemed imaginary now, but it had happened. Robert Christgau even once called me “the great lost rock critic” in print. Yet when I’d set out writing fiction I’d never meant to write non-fiction, not even the briefest of essays, or reviews — and for the longest time, I hadn’t.
Then Rolling Stone magazine came calling, offering me the moon — i.e., this chance to play fly-on-the-wall at a James Brown recording session. The way it came about is weird and funny; this is another story I’ll feel relieved to tell.
I got my chance because Jann Wenner made a mistake, a typical mistake: he thought that everything a novelist wrote in a quote-unquote autobiographical novel had literally happened to the writer. In a book called The Fortress of Solitude I’d created a fictional rock writer, named Dylan Ebdus. I gave him some pieces of my life, some aspects of myself. I grant that this method often sows confusion.
The fact that my character Dylan Ebdus was described as a regular contributor to Rolling Stone (I suggested that Ebdus had written a lot of the obituaries of R&B and Soul musicians, in particular) made Jann Wenner believe that I was already an established writer at his magazine. Or at least that I’d done plenty of music journalism at some point. Nope.
Wenner liked my novel. I suspect he was also flattered that the magazine was mentioned. So he instructed a go-between, a commissioning editor, to offer me the moon. I accepted, and then Wenner called me in for a private meeting in his office. The editor accompanied me.
Jann Wenner sat at a giant round wooden table, one completely empty apart from a single orange placed at the center. The orange wasn’t peeled. No one touched the orange — it just sat there.
Just now I googled the words “Jann Wenner table”. The table was famous to me and I figured it might have drawn some other person’s attention. Could I locate an illustration, perhaps a photo of Wenner at the table? I was disconcerted to find this:
Anyway, we sat. I mostly listened. Wenner told stories of Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson. He wanted me to know he’d give me a long leash — extensive pages in the magazine, a lavish per diem for expenses, etc. — and that he expected something marvelous. He pulled out a card with Al Sharpton’s cell number on it, insisting I call and interview Sharpton about James Brown, promising Sharpton would oblige if I mentioned Wenner’s’s name. (I never called.) I did my best to promise a marvelous result. At some point I said something that set off an alarm. Somehow I tipped my naivete about the methods and situations of long-form interviewing — I’m not sure how.
“You’ve done this before, right?” said Jann Wanner.
“Well,” I said humorously, or so I thought, “I did interview Jonathan Richman once, for Tower Pulse.”
Tower Pulse was the house magazine of Tower Records, back when there were record stores that had house magazines. I wasn’t lying. Back in the ‘90’s my friend David Bowman had gotten me a one-shot gig, interviewing Jonathan Richman. On the telephone. We probably spoke for about twenty minutes. (I don’t have a copy of the result anymore. Or maybe I do, in a box in the barn.)
I saw Wenner convulse, like something had been stuck up his nose. He turned to the editor. “You brought me a Tower Pulse writer?” He delivered the line like a joke, but it was a joke to cover real surprise, and annoyance.
Too late, though. I was off to Augusta a week or so later.
I told this story recently and a waggish friend said, “Yeah, and if you do a good job, you get to come back and eat the orange.”
9.
Mr. Rolling Stone’s star burned briefly, but brightly. In spite of all the weed and pulled pork, I nailed the James Brown piece. I was given another plum job almost immediately, which entailed sitting in a hotel suite with Bob Dylan for three hours. Long story; I’ll tell it another time. (I sense your relief.)
As far as major jobs, that was it. I don’t really enjoy writing profiles — especially those where the subject might actually read them — so I began turning such assignments down (Sly Stone and Bruce Springsteen, if you want to decide I’m an idiot). But I’d accidentally conferred on myself the status I’d awarded to my character Dylan Ebdus. I was a rock writer. To this day Rolling Stone sends me a ballot whenever they do those “100 Best Songs by X or Y” polls. I try not to treat the polls as a joke, except when I treat them as a joke. When the recent “100 Greatest Songs Ever” ballot arrived I let my kids fill it out; it ended up including “Duck’s Ditty” from the Wind in the Willows musical.
The last hurrah of the person who once was Mr. Rolling Stone was this rather tepid exchange with — of all people — one of the Rolling Stones. I took the gig because it seemed easy and I was listening to a lot of Exile on Main Street at the time, so I went for the cheap thrill. The result, though, appears half-assed on both our parts. My questions are sycophantic and rote, and Keith replies like a guy doing a phone interview during a book tour, which is exactly what he was.
The Keith piece brings me all the way back to Tower Pulse territory, really. Doing a phoner with one of my heroes, and hearing only their impatience to get off the line.
A happier epitaph is provided by this brief piece commissioned by the art magazine Frieze. It was the sole thing I’d written about James Brown after the Rolling Stone epic, until now. It shows me doing what it turns out I like a lot better than doing interviews and profiles: writing about visual culture.
As for Mr. Rolling Stone: R.I.P.
