"James Brown, ladies and gentlemen." "The hottest record man in the world!" "James!" "James!" "James!" "James!" "James!" "James!" "James!" "James!" "A lot of people have tried to define exactly what soul music is." "How would you define it?" "It's the word "can't" that makes you a soul singer." ""Can't"" "I think one thing that made a black man is more heavier for soul coming from the States is because of the fact that he had extra hard knocks and he lived with the word "can't" for so long." "So, every time he can sing about it, it kind of..." "I want to tell you a little story." "This is a thing that they don't write in newspapers, or hear on a record, because I am sure it wouldn't sell." "My father being a very, very poor man, undereducated, he only got a chance to finish grade two." "There just was no way for me to dream of becoming anything, but trying to be a..." "just a laborer, trying to work, you know, because that's all I could see around me." "My father was a laborer." "I dreamed then of eating." "When I was a kid, we would go out and hustle the men for the women that was practicing prostitution." "And I had to buck dance for the soldiers." "They would throw quarters and nickels to see me dance." "And I used to sing a lot." "I'd make up songs." "The story of it touched me so deeply." " You were a shoe shine boy..." " In Augusta, Georgia." "In Augusta, Georgia." "And you carried the shoe shine box around with you, and one thing I was reading not too long ago, you held it up as an example to kids." "Would you tell that story?" "I said, with all of the success and everything that you said it still don't get away the fact that I come from the ghetto and that I got my shoeshine box on my mind." "And it broke the people up because they were very glad that I still remembered." "It was Bobby Byrd's family that took young James Brown in when he got paroled and really kind of helped him find his feet." "And then they went on to create music together with the Famous Flames and Bobby Byrd had to be humble enough to understand this used to be my group, but now I got this young guy coming in here just kind of taking over." "Well, he's got that thing, so I'm going to let him have it." "After he got out of prison and at my home," "I asked him to join the group." "Had a lot of dissension in the group because they didn't know what type of person he was, they know that he was kind of rowdy, but when he started doing some songs that he knew, gospel songs of course during that time," "something about it was different." "The rowdy type of thing, the up-tempo, gutsy stuff." "And the reason we know it was good because we start rehearsing and we had the porch would be full of people and everybody peeping through windows and that kind of thing." "They didn't do that for no other groups." "I knew we had something." "At that time "Soul" was more or less church slang, you know." "They found that most rhythm and blues sounds came out of the church, so they named them "soul singers."" "When James Brown and Bobby Byrd decided to put together the version of the Famous Flames, they took great care to not let the people in the church know that they were doing the secular music on Saturday night and coming in and singing in church on Sunday night," "because that was taboo." "A lot of people I liked in the past, Louis Jordan..." "Mr. Brown says, "Louis Jordan was my biggest hero"" ""because he could sing, he could dance,"" ""he could act, he could play."" ""And he had good hair and good teeth."" "It's the longevity of Louis Jordan's career that had an impact, the way he handled his own business, the fact that he was doing music that was a hybrid of blues, swing music, bebop." "That music was the RB to rock and roll, the hip-hop of its time." "And James actually considered himself a jazzman at heart." "It's a pleasure to present to you the one and only Duke Ellington." "James Brown, he liked big bands, he liked a big horn section and he liked instrumentals, he liked arranging." "He liked to be a bandleader." "He carried some of that past, of the swing era in a funny way." "It's always been soul with me, ever since I've been singing." "It was my opportunity, it was my knock on the door." "THE JAMES BROWN SHOW" "Soul is survival." "And a lot of days I sang and we got 25 cents." "But I knew it was something I had to do." "Every time I got the opportunity I did everything I could." "The hardest part was being black and being allowed to perform." "Not even black at that time." "Colored." "That's what you call the segregated years." "I came up through those years and I never will forget some things that happened with us." "It's behind me but I won't forget them." "You've got to keep the white and the black separate!" "James Brown, he was a father I never had in many ways." "He said, "You didn't know about sitting at the back of the bus."" "I used to have to perform in clubs that I'd have to get dressed in the bus because I wasn't allowed to use the dressing room." "They didn't like black folks, I'll put it that way." "They didn't like black folks." "Boy, what we went through." "What we went through." "You played what you called the chitlin' circuit." "All of the gigs that you'd play were for black audiences." "A lot of down-home Southern places that were kind of rough, you know." "I remember being in Mr. Brown's dressing room... and something happened with the promoter didn't want to pay, and everybody started pulling out their guns and everything." "And, you know, I was frightened to death." "That was definitely the chitlin' circuit at that time." "James Brown said, "You have to remember, Reverend,"" ""when I was coming up, you had to be tall,"" ""light-skinned, long wavy hair like Jackie or Smokey Robinson."" "And I was short, had African features and I didn't have any of what was considered beautiful at that time." "I was determined to out dance and out sing everybody out there and I was going to work every night." "James actually said," "Little Richard and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were probably the two greatest influences on him and really that whole generation, moving out of gospel into doing what was called rock 'n' roll or RB." "I was in Toccoa, Georgia and Little Richard came down from Macon and saw me, and told his manager about me and I went back to Macon." "I got to give Little Richard that credit, you know." "Little Richard got a big contract to record in" "Los Angeles and he left behind about 30 dates that the management was committed to, so they had the bright idea to have James Brown go out and impersonate Little Richard." "And so they let him do a little bit of Little Richard and he would do a little bit of James Brown." "That's where James Brown really learned to scream, being Little Richard for about two weeks." "It was before television, so nobody knew what Richard really looked like." "He said, "And my goal was,"" ""I was going to be bigger than Richard."" "The word is that when Syd Nathan, who ran King Records, heard them rehearsing the song, he fired the AR guy." "Could not hear it being a hit." "He said, all this guy does is say "please, please, please"" "like, 17 times." "Mr. Brown snuck it out, got it to the radio stations and it became a hit, and Syd Nathan just had to swallow his disdain." "I guess my all time favorite tune would be," ""Please, Please, Please" now," " because that's the tune..." " That's the one that did it." "Yeah." "It gave me that extra meal." "You think you wanted success so badly at the time that you were really singing "please, please, please."" "I wanted to eat, period, man." "That's Why I did it." "He's begging, "I got to have you, I need you in my life."" ""You got to come on, my heart is shattered..."" "...and the women would go:" ""Somebody really hurt that man, oh, they hurt him so badly," "I feel so sorry for him."" "It worked all over the world." "For some reason I grew up with a passion for black music." "I was a disc jockey at a black radio station in Richmond." "I loved James Brown like everybody else that was into black music in the early '60s." "At some point you discover James Brown and it's like," ""Oh, my god, this is the gold standard."" "The first time I saw James Brown perform live was in the fall of 1963, and I had never experienced anything like it." "The energy that was in the room, it was like going into another dimension." "In the '50s and '60s, black music and pop mainstream music, the segregation was even more rigid than it is today." "The black music industry was entirely dependent on black radio, and the whole goal became, how do we cross these records over?" "Because a hit on pop radio represented as much as a million, a million-and-a-half more sales." "After I got "Please, Please,"" "it took me three years to get another hit." "But I wouldn't give up, and my next hit was a tune entitled "Try Me."" "Somebody like Elvis, one record would sell ten or 15 million, and see, I would have to come through the race era, when my records were classed as RB and race music." "I'm just trying to figure out the market like a stock man, trying to see what the people will go for." "I always worked hard on the stage, but you still need that record as a performer, you know." "Everyone needs a hit record." "James Brown was an anomaly in the industry, not just in his ambition, but he also had a situation that was pretty much unlike any other artist." "He had a manager who embraced him and became a mentor father figure, who was Ben Bart." "Ben taught James a lot of the music business and how to handle things." "And Ben really loved him, and James loved him." "It was kind of a father-son thing going on there." "Ben was doing everything he could to move the act, but James had his own idea about things." "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is Star Time." "Are you ready for Star Time?" "Thank you, and thank you very kindly." "It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time, national and international known as "The Hardest-Working Man In Show Business."" "Here to sing "I'll Go Crazy,"" ""Try Me,"" ""Mr. Dynamite," the amazing "Mr. Please, Please" himself, the star of the show," "James Brown and the Famous Flames." "He would go up to the Apollo Theater and they'd be standing around the Apollo Theater for the next show and that'd be around from one end of the Apollo around to the other end." "And that's around the block." "And they'd be standing there for the next one." "That next show let out, and they let them people in, and then another line is there, waiting to get in." "Unbelievable!" "And those blocks are not short." "They made money." "James Brown is just so linked with the Apollo in terms of a standard that was set, in the '60s onward." "It was the peak of the chitlin' circuit, so the bands would be touring around and they would arrive in New York City to show off what they had been honing on the road." "You'd play about six shows a day, each show is about two hours, and that's a lot." "I remember going there, and I sat in the balcony." "And there was this sort of older lady sitting next to me smoking a big joint." "And I didn't know that older ladies smoked, you know, I was a kid." "The James Brown show, it was like a Revue show." "The band would play instrumentals, a female singer would come on, then Bobby Byrd would come on and sing." ""TV Mama", they said she was five by five." "She was five feet tall and very wide, and she would sing the song "All Of Me"." ""All of me, why not take all of me?"" "Then he would come on eventually and do, you know, his show." "Apart from the fact that it was very entertaining," "I was obviously learning from him, you know, trying to steal everything I could possibly do." "Seeing him dancing and doing the audience rapport." "Especially very young girls would go to the front and be screaming and carrying on in all these places where he's, he's teasing them to do, you know, he's like, in total control of them." "Danny Ray was the so-called "Cape Man."" "He was the guy during "Please, Please, Please"" "that would drape that cape over Brown." "James told me that he was watching Gorgeous George the wrestler one day, after the match they'd throw a cape on him and he said he liked that." "Between that period of "Please, Please, Please" and "Try Me,"" "there were a gazillion singles released, and none of them were really catching on." "He felt like, "Man, if people knew..."" ""...what I was offering on the stage,"" ""they would come in droves."" "Syd Nathan, who ran King Records, didn't want to back it." "Mr. Brown says, "No, this has got to happen."" ""I know better than this guy, you know, about my audience about my business."" "Mr. Brown paid for the recording himself." "That was a huge album, and it was the worst album." "Screams and stuff all over it, cymbals falling, and they put that out, just like that." "Every black household had "Live at the Apollo Volume One"." "Mine included." "Like that album was so powerful," "DJs would love to play the entire side." "His first million seller was the "Live at the Apollo Volume One."" "It really just kind of blows up on the national marketplace." "For an RB record to be released in England it had to be quite big." "Everyone had that record and they played it to death." "He did want the benefits of crossing over." "He resented being pigeonholed as a "race artist,"" "but he embraced what that meant emotionally and culturally, so it was a very, very thin line he was walking." "Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force." "We're nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us." "My fellow Americans, I am about to sign into law the civil rights act of 1964." "This civil rights act is a challenge to all of us, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country." "The James Brown tour was able to do hundreds of shows all over black America, grossing about a million dollars a year." "We're talking about '63, '64, he became a millionaire quietly, so a lot of what the civil rights movement was trying to do in terms of the hope of economic justice, he's already been to the top of that mountaintop." "He's a civil rights movement of one." "This is the group that was there in 1964, that's Maceo in the back." "That's Melvin Parker, 19 years old." "James told me, "If you ever need a job,"" ""playing those drums the way you play,"" ""you have a job with me."" "I said, "Oh, by the way..."" ""This is my brother, my brother Maceo,"" ""he's a saxophone player."" ""He needs a job, too."" "He said, "Well, I don't need a saxophone player."" "And I gave him that look." "He said, "Oh, just a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,"" ""we had, we need a baritone player."" ""My baritone player left the other night."" "He said, "Can you play baritone?" to Maceo." "My major instrument at the time was the tenor saxophone, but I answer like this, "Uhhh,"" "with a long "Uhhh", yes, sir, yes, yes I do."" "I can't say no." "He said, "I tell you what,"" ""you can meet us, along with your brother,"" ""two nights following."" ""How about that?"" "And we would go, "wow, this is great."" "And then we got The T.A.M.I. Show, now that was fun." "I have been in the black community ever since '56, but it really started happening for me in 1964." "I had the pleasure of doing The T.A.M.I. Show with the Rolling Stones, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Supremes, all the major acts, you know." "It made the white America familiar with James Brown, and what he was doing." "The T.A.M.I. Show was a major breakthrough." "It pitted Brown, who had largely been confined to the chitlin' circuit, against all these artists who were tearing the country up at that time." "The T.A.M.I. Show is not really a show." "It was shot like a movie." "You break for an hour, and then the other act comes on and then they break for an hour, then they re-light and they change the audience, and another act comes on." "The story goes that James Brown is annoyed that he is not closing the show, and so I was asked by the producers of the show to go and talk to him because I knew him." "I said, "sure," you know, I was, what, 20 years old." "I was supposed to talk him down and say:" ""Yeah, don't worry it's a movie,"" ""you don't know what's going to happen in the movie."" ""They may, you know, cut it..."" "which, which ever, which is all true, but I mean, that wasn't really the point as far as James Brown was concerned." "He wasn't really that mad, but he was a bit pissed off, I think." "Well, wait a second, wait a second..." "He apparently said something like," ""Well, I'm going to kill."" "Well, fine, but that, that's good." "He did." "It was definitely an apotheosis." "You were distraught to where you'd collapse in begging." "But somehow the strength sweeps you up, and then you rise like a phoenix again." "And people you could watch in the audience would go through this, probably reliving their own lives." "The idea is that he's got to be taken away against his own will." "It's just not good for him to do anymore." "It's obviously an act, but you worry about him." "The people would say, "Oh, don't take him." "He must be looked after."" "You know, "I want to be the one to look after him."" "Are you ready for the "Night Train"?" "When we got to "Night Train"," "Sam, the bass player, whispered in my ear." "He said, "Melvin."" ""Let's see if those guys can keep up with us."" "Night!" "Night!" "He said, "Night!" "Night!" "Train!"" "It was off to the races..." "There's that famous story of Mick Jagger standing off the side of the stage watching Brown, and just being devastated and traumatized." "No, that's bullshit, because the whole place was cleared." "And, like, they re-lit the whole thing." "Now it went to another audience and screaming teenage girls." "I don't think they'd even seen James Brown." "And it was hours later." "So, what I said to him was actually true." "But if you watch the film, then you see us up against him." "So it's a bit..." "Then you go, like, "Well, you know,"" ""they're not quite as good as James Brown for real."" "But, you know, whatever." "We were performing at the Howard Theater." "We were on stage, it was such a big ruckus in the audience." "You know, and I said, we must be getting down." "The people getting crazy out there in the audience, making all that noise, jumping up and down." "Of course, James Brown in the audience." "You know, so, it was so exciting to meet James Brown, 1965." "He was at his peak." "He asked us, would we travel with him." "It was like, oh, my God." "And he gave me the name High." "My name is Martha Harvin." "But he said to me one day, "Martha Harvin,"" ""that's not a name for the stage."" ""I got to come up with a name for you."" ""Let me see." "What should I call you?"" ""I know."" ""I'm going to call you 'Martha High.' "" "And I said, Martha High?" ""How you like that?"" "And I said, oh, okay." ""Martha High, that's what it's going to be."" "He wanted everything." "He wanted your all." "And he gave his all." "Up until "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" in 1965, all of the James Brown stuff seemed pretty traditional." "It was like kind of coming out of this blues gospel feel." "That, coupled with his love for jazz and embracing the unknown, it came as the early ingredients of what we call funk." ""Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" had the guitar sound." "James heard it." ""Jimmy, give me this."" "I mean, the funk was just there." "Now what you had was called a vamp." "Vamps were only used mostly in live performances." "The vocalist wanted to talk to the audience and jive around." "Now of course, in his live shows, he vamped all the time." "But nobody would ever think to go in the studio and record the vamp." "You don't take a two bar phrase and repeat it ad nauseam and call that a song." "That's exactly what James Brown wound up doing through that period." "It was James Brown." "I think, without question," "Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis is one of the most important co-pilots of the James Brown sound." "Pee Wee's seriousness and his sense of jazz and understanding what Mr. Brown was going for." "I think the two of them really were a quite a formidable team." "I got drafted." "James mentioned to me that he was thinking about getting Bobby Bland's drummer," "Jab'o, to join the group." "I said, yes, that's what you do." "James Brown had been listening to Bobby and he sent one of his people to ask me if I wanted to join his band." "He said "Whatever they're paying you over there with Bobby,"" ""I will double that."" "But then you have to understand when I joined that band, what was going on when I first got there, too." "Five drummers on stage." "Maybe two weeks after that, he hired Clyde." "He took me out on stage and there was five drum sets." "Five drummers on his show, I went, oh, my God!" "You know?" "All these drummers." "What do he want me for?" "He says, "Pick out a set of drums." "We going to do a little jam." "See what you do."" "And I was scared, number one." "I was totally scared." "I was going, God, what am I doing?" "And I left out of there and went to the dressing room where the band was dressing." "And there was Jab'o sitting in there." "I said, who you used to play for before you came here?" "He says, "Bobby Bland."" "I said, you played with Bobby Bland?" "That was one of my favorites." "And that's when Jab'o and I said, man, we're not playing enough." "We got to get rid of some of these drummers." "I go, yeah, man." "We got to get rid of them." "So we started knocking them off until it got down to Jab'o and I." "Jabo's style is more of a blues shuffle." "Like..." "My style is..." "He plays jazz and blues more, and I played funk and soul." "We took it over." "We had it." "Attention, everyone." "James Brown is coming to your area." "The show everyone has been waiting to see." "The dynamic king of rock and roll." "Star of stage, screen and television, James Brown!" "And his big variety show for '66 featuring Bobby Byrd, the Famous Flames," "James Crawford, "TV Mama" Elsie Mae," "The Jewels." "In the early '60s, he worked almost constantly." "Three hundred sixty two days, probably." "Thank you, greetings and Salutations, ladies and gentlemen." "I'm your emcee, Danny Ray." "I would like to name a few tunes of the past and the present." "Such tunes as "Try Me", "Signed, Sealed and Delivered"," ""Out Of Sight", "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag"," ""Oh, I Feel Good"." "Introducing the King of Soul, recently has been crowned as one of the hardest working entertainers in the world." "The living legend, the fantastic, Mr. Dynamite," "James Brown!" "Once he walked on stage, the band, we pay attention to James Brown, nobody else but him." "You never took your eye off of him." "Because, see, he had things that he was doing." "I had to keep the time going to the music, but ready at any time to accent his moves." "Hits, that's what we would call hits." "He'll make the hits." "We loved to do that, you know." "We would hit with him." "And he would try to trick us, and we would get him." "If he would see that you're not watching him, he would change the song just like that." "To throw you off, and then he'll fine you." "He would go like this, you know." "That would be like five, ten, fifteen, twenty." "He would look at a guy, and fine them five, fifteen, twenty dollars like that." "Oh, God, yeah." "That's $30 coming out of your pay." "For what, you don't know." "There's one more thing I want to say right here." "I guess you can say James Brown was a tyrant, maybe because he fought so hard to learn what he was doing and learn every aspect of his business." "He set the bar very, very high." "There was nobody in the business, period, that dressed no better than the James Brown Band." "Oh, man." "He would play seven days a week, tailor your uniforms twice a gig, show up every gig, pressed, clean." "I don't know how we did it." "I can't even remember how we did it." "He would look me up and down and say," ""Miss High that dress has gotten tight."" "He was very particular about what you wore or how you look." "We had fines if you didn't have creases in your clothes." "Fines if your shoes weren't together." "And then it got to where you had to ride on the bus in a suit and tie." "As he always said," ""Well, you can't never tell what might happen." "Somebody might be there, and you'd be already dressed."" "He preached stage decorum." "Punctuality." "Mister this, Mister that." "Pride." "It was all positive." "As the years went on, I said, the Mister thing, where did that come from?" "He said, "Alan, you got to understand something."" ""Where I grew up, when I grew up,"" ""I was always Jimmy."" ""My name ain't never been Jimmy."" ""If they wouldn't call me James,"" ""you know they really weren't going to call me mister."" ""But I reached a point"" ""where if you were willing to do business with me,"" ""you had to call me mister."" ""And the only way to do that is set the example."" "I realized how that really had contributed to his relationships with white people." "Again, particularly in the South, who controlled a lot of the venues." "Business is a part you've got to adapt yourself to so you can be prepared for whatever might come up." "I work with the artists, and I've..." "Forever and ever talking and trying to get the fellows to get their business together." "James was in charge of whatever happened with his organization." "The manager that he had, Ben Bart, it's still was James that made the decisions as to what happened." "Because everything had to come through him." "He saw people like Berry Gordy and what they were accomplishing and he wanted to be a part of that." "He didn't want to just be that guy who sings and dances." "But then there was The Ed Sullivan Show." "I was talking to young Jim Brown, he was born in Augusta, Georgia." "Where he worked on a farm, picked cotton and worked in a coal yard, and always sang his songs." "So we are delighted to present James Brown on our stage on this show." "So let's have a fine welcome for a very fine talent." "I remember when James Brown was booked to play Ed Sullivan for the first time, black radio was promoting it like a major event." "Understand when black artists would come on Ed Sullivan, they would usually come on and perform with Ed Sullivan's house band, who were excellent musicians." "But you got no soul out of them at all." "James Brown made it clear he was coming on one way and one way only, and that was with his full band." "So you were going to see the James Brown Show." "Sullivan was the kind of show where the whole family sat in front of the TV on Sunday and watched together." "So my mom and dad, it's like," ""Oh, that James Brown you always talk about."" "It was like watching something from outer space for them." "And I imagine white America, probably their jaws dropped." "The Ed Sullivan Show was the peak of American musical entertainment at that time." "The black community was very proud that he would be on the same show that presented Elvis and the Beatles, and that catapulted him to a whole new level." "My act was so revolutionary, they couldn't believe it." "I got so many applause at the dress rehearsal, they didn't know if they should keep the dress rehearsal or film it again." "I was sure of myself, I knew what I had." "Fine." "Thank you very, very much." "Singing was the first step to the real things I wanted to do." "Programs normally seen at this time will not be broadcast in order to bring you this CBS News Special Report:" "The March in Mississippi." "I plan to begin my voter registration march into Mississippi on Sunday, June 5th, 1966, from the downtown Memphis Peabody Hotel." "They call it the place where the Delta begins, the Mississippi Delta of rich soil and big plantations and a population that is predominantly Negro." ""If I can walk through Mississippi without harm,"" "Meredith told reporters," ""other Negroes will see that they can, too."" "Not everyone was glad to see him." "Two miles further on," "Meredith was felled by three shotgun blasts." "From the moment the civil rights leaders rushed in to continue James Meredith's march, there's been a struggle to see whose philosophy would guide the steps." "The moderates or the militants." " What do you want?" " Freedom!" " When do want it?" " Now!" " How much of it do you want?" " All of it!" " We want Black Power!" " Black Power!" "We want Black Power!" "What do you want?" "Black Power!" "As we went down the highway, we recognized that we had to overcome our fears." "And we also knew that we had to challenge the old tactics and strategies of the civil rights movement." "It was just too slow for the younger generation." "We wanted our freedom and we wanted it then." "Black Power!" " What do you want?" " Black Power!" "We had some situations where they used tear gas and beat the hell out of people." "But we began to recognize that we gonna actually make it to the state capitol and we said that we needed a major event." "And who was the better person to carry the message we're trying to carry in, but a soul singer like James Brown." "Like a lot of black entertainers, as the civil rights movement really begins to pick up steam, they had to kind of pick a side." "He said, "You got to understand, I don't believe in non-violence."" ""You grew up admiring Dr. King."" ""I respected him,"" ""but I carried two or three guns all the time."" ""But I wanted to reflect the fervor of what's going on."" "When we flew into Jackson, they met us out there and they had the dogs and the guns." "They surrounded his plane while we went in to do the concert." "I don't know if I had enough time to be afraid." "It was touchy." "At Tougaloo College, just eight miles outside of Jackson, Mississippi," "Hollywood and Broadway's salute to the Meredith Marchers." "The program has just started and on the stage right now, James Brown." "Let's join him there." "Dr. King and all the other civil rights leaders were working out the program for the next day." "And Dr. King said, "Look here, you all."" ""You all can sit around here and have this argument if you want to."" ""I'm going to go see James Brown."" "It was just euphoria all over the place, that James Brown is here with us, you know." "And he said, "Hey, you all, you marched all the way through"" ""and you have fought back and gave a courageous fight."" "He just galvanized the crowd." "We have Dr. Martin Luther King right before the platform." "Dr. King, what do you think of this rally tonight?" "Oh, it's a marvelous turnout and I'm happy about the fact that many of our outstanding entertainers have been willing to take time out of their very busy schedules to be a part of this struggle." "On that particular occasion, it was James Brown that made the difference." "He found a way to fit in and contribute, but also to learn a lot about the people who were trying to change America." "The James Brown you witnessed, the rest of this show." "This is Black Power, baby." ""In A Cold Sweat", cut one." "He said..." ""In a Cold Sweat", cut two." "By 1967, when "Cold Sweat" comes out, now he was officially away from the rest of the pack." ""Cold Sweat" is a vamp." "But you have all these different parts." "It was this juxtaposition of something being tight but very loose at the same time." "And that's what jazz really is all about." "Maceo Parker is probably the most recognizable sound of the James Brown Band." "When he got to the point where he start calling my name, telling me to come out and play, it was like, "Wow."" "When I recognized I could hear the funky side of stuff," "I said, well, I got to use that because there is nobody that can hear it like I do." "And he appreciated that." "Now give the drummer some." "Give the drummer some." "Give him some!" "Drummer, you got it!" "Now, Clyde Stubblefield, he was almost like part man, part machine." "Clyde had all these subtleties, this kind of bouncy left hand." "Music, and especially with soul and funk music, it's based on a very simple emphasis of the one." "Now, in gospel music, if you played direct rhythm with the tambourine," "adding grace notes is those small notes." "And that's the sound of church." "Clyde Stubblefield had perfect grace notes on his snare." "I never took lessons." "Music, to me, looked like Chinese writing." "So, I don't know." "I play from my heart and soul." "That concept of the one, it changed the emphasis from where it had been in jazz." "In jazz, it had been on the two and four." "That's two, four." "You move into the funk period, they change the emphasis to the one and the three, and put it down on the bottom with the drums, to pick you up, drop you back down." "Give the band a big round of applause!" "When I joined the band, he had "Cold Sweat" as a hit." "I didn't like it, you know." "I said it's incorrect, you know." "It's bad, bad musically." "It had a bridge that didn't go with the head." "But I decided to take the job to get out of the South, and go to New York and be discovered as a great jazz trombone player." "And even though I wasn't crazy about these songs," "I knew that they were different from the ordinary rhythm and blues that was happening." "And the band performed them real good." "The thing about performing live is there's this energy going on between the musicians and the audience." "You don't get that in a recording studio." "That doesn't mean you can't make great music in a studio." "You just have to have a different discipline." "I think Mr. Brown's studio recordings are somehow just live shows with no audience there." "James always had to work himself into what you were recording." "You used to hate to do that." "You'd go from this time of day till next day almost." "He would come in and say, "Wait a minute, Jab." "Let me show you how I want it to go."" "So I'm, okay." "And he would get up, you know, and he'd sit there and whatever it was he was doing." "And he said, "You got it?" And I would say, yeah." "So I would go back and play what I already was playing." ""That's it, you got it."" "And you just laugh to yourself and keep going." "James is not trained at all." "Which makes it difficult to understand what he's talking about." "He knows that he's working with musicians who are the best at what they do." "He doesn't care." "He's like, "Look, I know you can read music."" ""I can't do any of that."" ""But you still got to follow me because I'm the man."" "Part Two of "Get it Together", they're having an open rehearsal right in the middle of the song." "I'm thinking, he left this on the record?" "This is brilliant." ""Engineer, I got to go." "Fade it out."" "You don't say that on the record." "I was like, man, this is raw." "When he get through in the recording studio, they would print up his records right there, next door, in King Studio." "So everything was coming out in a day." "Didn't take no week or nothing, just right there." "He owned King Studio, not money-wise, but talent-wise." "There was no other artist who had that kind of control or those kinds of resources." "At that time, his manager, Ben Bart passed away in 1968." "From that point on, James Brown was essentially self-managed." "All he talked about was, how much money he could make and how big he was." "Sometimes we'd start a conversation about football or baseball, but he'd always get right back to what song we were going to do and who messed up and stuff like that." "He never partied with the band." "It was not a business with us." "He was mainly with his girlfriends, and once in a blue moon he might ride the bus." "He didn't have any friends, no close friends." "He had to force people to be around him." "I think he was lonely." "He grew up with a sense that you really can't trust anybody." "This is a guy who basically was taught at a very early age you can't trust your mother." "Not to say you didn't love her, but you can't trust her." "Because she's gone." "He was absolutely haunted by that." "I remember one night we were riding around and I told him," "I come out of a broken home, my father left." "He looked at me and said, "Your father left?"" ""My mother and father left me."" ""My father gave me to my aunt." "I was raised in a whore house."" "He said, "I'd watch the church women come"" ""and turn tricks all day and leave at 4:30"" ""so they could be home to cook for their husbands"" ""and they didn't know that they were prostitutes."" "To grow up like that, it's hard for you to trust anybody." "I think it also was why he was a loner." "And once he came of age, he could never shake that." "We were in Sacramento and we performed, and he left without making sure that the bus could get us back to the East Coast." "We basically quit." "Eventually everybody came back to him but he was angry about it." "He would remind them, you know, "You left me, you left me." "And I don't trust you because you left me."" "And I think that was one of his reasons too of not really getting close to anyone in the band." "Didn't matter where I was." "I was always strapped." "Because sometimes James had good days, sometimes he had bad days." "I didn't want to be a part of the bad days." "We're in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I can't forget that." "Gertrude Saunders, the wardrobe mistress, comes down, said, "Hey, Melvin, Maceo." "He wants you guys up to the dressing room right now."" "As we walked in the door, Tony Walker, the henchman, is strapping on his .45." "James is doing his hair and looking in the mirror." "He says, "Maceo, they tell me you picking at me on the bus."" "He put the comb down, and he stood up and turned around, started to walk toward us." "He said, "When we come for you, you better be ready."" "I could see with that left hand, he was getting ready to punch Maceo in the mouth so that he couldn't play his horn." "I pushed Maceo to the side, went in my pocket at the same time, pulled it out." "When you have that automatic, you always keep one in the chamber." "Pump it." "Let him know that it's loaded." "When I hit it, the .32 shell went up in the air, came down, seems as if it was slow motion." "And when it landed on the floor, it hit, boom, boom, boom." "I stuck it right in his nose, and I said, "I'm ready now."" ""What do you want to do?" "What do you want to do, huh?"" ""What do you want to do?"" "He put his hands up and said, "No, no, no, no, no!" "I didn't mean that!" "Not like that!" "Not like that!"" "I said, "you don't come for me." "You don't come for my brother."" "And that was that." "You had to approach him with strength." "You had to always be a man." "And I really loved the guy." "But I could never say to him, "Hey, man, I love you, man."" "Because he had a way of taking advantage of that, or taking that for weakness." "With men, he isn't that super tough guy." "He wants to be." "He is not." "He is with women." "Brown would be a super tough guy with women." "And the women do what he want, when he want, so..." "I do remember the lady that he was dating when I first joined him." "She only focused on him." "She would never turn and look at anyone." "Not unless he said, "Baby, look." "You know, there's the Jewels."" "And then she'll turn around, "Hello."" "He was very jealous." "He was a very jealous man." "But I don't think that any woman deserves to be beaten." "I know he was arrested for domestic violence, and he has told me he hit women." "I remember he got into one fight that I was in the hotel." "I walked him out of the room." "When I came in, they obviously been fighting." "And we went down and sat by the pool, and he looked at me, he said, "Reverend."" "He said, "Don't ever hit a woman." "Don't be like me."" "He said, "I come from generations of that."" ""It's wrong."" "Pillage, looting, murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights." "They are criminal conduct and the federal government has no alternative but to respond." "I think we've got to see a riot is a language of the unheard, and what is it that America has failed to hear?" "It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened." "We've got to turn our backs on this country." "This country has never cared about black people." "Soul is when a man has to struggle all his life to be equal to another man." "Soul is when a man pays taxes and still he comes up second." "Soul is when a man is judged not by what they do, but what color they are." "The rebellions that we see are merely dress rehearsals for the revolution that's to come." "We've got some difficult days ahead, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land." "At 7:10 this evening," "Martin Luther King was shot in Tennessee." "Martin Luther King, 20 minutes ago, died." "Probably the most important show of James Brown's career is April 1968." "Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and all of America is erupting in violence." "We were on the way to Boston and we didn't know if the show was going to happen." "We knew that Dr. King was shot." "He was dead." "And we didn't know what that meant for us." "The band was kind of fearful." "The Mayor didn't want James to come there and do that show." "But that city councilman told him upfront." "If you don't let him do that show, they are going to burn this city down, and he was serious." "They were poised to do just that." "I think there's reason for apprehension but not a lot." "Boston has great hope and we are a mature, patient community and I hope we're going to weather this." "Tonight you've turned the Brown concert into a memorial service." "We're going to broadcast that live and I assume you feel that that will have an effect in the community." "Well, I'm hoping it's one valve that will let off some steam and I think it's an appropriate place to have it because it's a peaceful gathering and that's synonymous with everything that King did." "Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen." "I want to say thanks for coming out to see the show and you've made it possible for me to be a first class man in all respects." "Thank you." "In Augusta, Georgia, I used to shine shoes on the steps of a..." "Thank you." "In front of a radio station called "WRDW."" "I used to shine shoes in front of that station and I think we started off..." "I used to get three cents, then up to five cents, then finally, I got to six cents." "But now, I own that station." "You know what that is?" "That's black power." "When we did the show, we were hurt but you didn't think about anything but doing that show at the time." "Wait a minute." "Move off." "I'll be all right, I'll be fine." "I'm all right, I'm all right." "I'm all right, I'm all right." "You want to dance?" "Dance." "People started rushing the stage and we weren't playing no more but they came on, getting ready and trying to come all up on the stage and the police was pushing them, the guards and everything was pushing them off the stage" "and Brown says, "Hold it, hold it, hold it."" "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, they all right." "It's all right." "That's all right, that's all right." "Now look, wait a minute, wait a minute." "Let me finish the show, now wait a minute, let me finish the show for everybody else." "I didn't know what to say about that myself." "I'm sitting there on the drums still just waiting, you know, like, wow, what's going on?" "This is no way." "We are black, we are black!" "Now wait a minute, can't you all brother get down from there and let's do this show together." "We are black, don't make us all look bad, let me finish doing the show." "Get off the stage, step down there." "Let's represent our own selves." "Now step down." "No, no, that's not right." "You're not being fair to yourselves or me, either." "You're not being fair to yourself or me or your race." "Now I asked the police to step back because I think I can get some respect from my own people." "It don't make sense." "Now are we together or we ain't?" "Hit the thing, man." "I was like, oh, my God." "You did not just stop the show, told people off, then went like" ""All right, let's get it together." "Hit it."" "If I were in the band, I would've been like," "Uhh, that's my cue, goodbye." "See you." "There's like a riot about to break out." "I'm out, James." "Oh, God, he handled that crowd like he was the King and they respected him." "He cleared them up and there wasn't no more fighting or nothing." "It could have been a turnout of that place." "He was damn good." "Boston was one of the few cities that avoided any sort of a fire retaliation in the inner cities." "Everyone stayed calm." "Trouble was very minimal." "We'd like to announce that the city is very quiet and calm, and the report also states that everyone is home watching the TV program." "So I think the fact that we do have the television cameras here," "I think it was a big success." "I wanted to see people get off the streets," "I wanted them to calm down," "I didn't want to see no more bloodshed and lives lost." "But yet, still, I shared in the same convictions of the people on the streets because I understood what they were fighting for." "Around the country, I've been doing a lot of things," "I guess I'm real concerned about people." "Overlooking the city, overlooking Harlem," "I've seen all the torn buildings, buildings that still standing that should be removed and you know who lives there?" "The black people." "You know, in Washington, houses that we were walking in front of, condemned, and no one can be living in these houses." "I went to Watts," "I found a lot of people staying in an area that didn't have nothing to offer." "I went from black America and I started talking to the white America and I was saying, these are the things that has to be done, we need education worse than any other race." "We got to go to the people that are not even surviving." "My fight is just starting." "My fight is against the past, the old colored man." "My fight now is for the black America become American." "Here he comes." "James." "Come here, James." "Come here." "He's my friend." "First, I would like to say good morning." "I want to say this:" "We would like to know sometimes what's going to be done for black people." "The black man wants ownership." "He wants to be able to own his own things and make up his own mind." "Number one in the black community, the lower income areas, we need housing, so we don't have to stay in the dump, like I've stayed in when I was a kid." "We need our own banks so we can get some money to do things by ourselves." "We don't want nobody to do it for us, we want to do it by ourselves." "Now the candidate that gives me those kind of things, that's the man I endorse." "I don't endorse the party, I endorse the man." " So good." " So good." "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Black Dignity." "This Sunday afternoon will be our most spectacular program." "This is not only Soul Brother Number One, and rhythm and blues but there is no man in our race who has gone as far as he's gone." "Welcome James Brown to Black Dignity." "Thank you, brother Don." "All right, we are ready to go for some calls, and, ask whatever you want." "Hello, this is Don Warden, you are on Black Dignity." " What's happening, James?" " How you feel, brother?" "All right." "Well, I just want to ask you one question." "I would like to know why you got your process cut?" "Well, this is a black move and regardless of what you are thinking, we all got to think one way and when we look alike, we can think alike." "You know, the way I see it, it's really what's in the mind that counts." "Well, the mind counts, but see, we all don't have a good image and the image is like, black." "See, we've never thought together." "You know, in Africa, a man can do what he want to do because he know who he is." "Over here, you don't know." "So first, we got to get our image, our identity." "Everybody thought when James Brown cut his hair and went natural, that was it, that was the height of the black power era." "James Brown was known for his hair, he was absolutely fascinated with the "Conk" as we called it." "And for him to give it up was to show he ultimately did feel that blacks needed to learn their natural pride." "Hello, this is Don Warden, you're on Black Dignity." "I wanted to tell you that I'm glad you got rid of that stuff you had in your hair and I wish everybody would wear a natural and be what they are supposed to be." "How are you going to get respect?" "I'm black and proud." "He told me, "I was in Los Angeles"" ""and there was all this in-fighting,"" ""this crime and all,"" "and he said that "I looked"" ""and I said to myself, we've lost our pride."" "He said, "I went to my room"" ""and I sat down and started writing on a napkin."" "On the spur of the moment, it became a song that literally changed the social dynamics of the United States." "Mr. Brown is Number One Soul Brother United States." "He's black and he's proud." " He brings out the good in me." " He's like the preacher." "First thing, a man has to be a man and when we say, "Negro,"" "this is a term that's been used so many times but I don't particularly care for that term." "I'd rather be a black man because that's identity." "A black man is a man who want to pay his own way, who want to earn his own keep, a man that stands up among men." "You see, when you stand up in the States they say you're a militant but I say you're a man." "As an eight-year-old" ""Say It Loud I'm Black And I'm Proud" was very clear." "I remember defining myself as these American terms of Negro to colored to black." "Because of that one song, black was beautiful, the beginning of being beautiful." "I was 13 and it was revolutionary, because not only did some whites look down us, there were many light-skinned blacks that looked down on dark-skinned blacks." "And overnight, dark-skinned girls became the thing you wanted." "Overnight, James Brown changed our whole teenaged life." "There was fear he had alienated his white audience and white people began to be afraid to come to the shows." "I don't think that was his plan at all." "Brown's whole sound is an assertion of black beauty and black pride." "There is a black revolution taking place on many campuses." "Now, what is your feeling about this?" "Well, that's very complicated." "The blacks on the campus in the first place are complete separatists, the campuses I've visited." "They don't associate with the whites, they don't eat with the whites, they advocate their own dormitories." "They seem to me to be going back in time to separatism, when there was a white society and a black society." "I got to disagree with you there now." "I think it's wrong for blacks to eat with blacks and whites to eat with whites." " Well, wait a minute..." " We have been fighting forever to get together." "Why can't I know about me, if you know about yourself?" "I know more about you than you do about me." "You know nothing about me." "That probably true, Jimmy, but it's not" "But I have to know that." "Do you call yourself a man, knowing that I pay taxes same as you, to stay right here and use my sweat and blood to help build this country and I got to be a second or third class citizen?" "Do you call that a man?" "I believe you ought to be as good as me and do..." "Ought to be?" "I know I'm good as you!" "What do you mean, ought to be?" " But the conditions..." " What conditions?" "You haven't had a fair crack at it." "A fair crack?" "How long does it take, man?" "I'm 36 years old, when am I supposed" " to be a grown man?" " Now." "Oh, I'm supposed to be a grown man at 21, man, no, no, not 36." "Jimmy, I'm on your side." "What are you so mad about?" "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed in you being ignorant to what's going on, man, you just don't know what's happening." "This is not really a joke." "You're laughing at something that's going to be a big problem." "Because you got kids out there that can't eat and they are robbing and stealing doing what they have to do to make it and if you don't do something about it, we're going to lose the country, not..." "There is a new survey out today..." "We don't want the survey, the survey is out there on the street." "Wait a minute, Jimmy, you can't do that." "You've got to open your ears." "My ears has been open, have your eyes been open?" "Nixon's the one." "His lead over Humphrey was so close but he won it and, in winning that, he won the presidency." "According to present statistics, only 10 percent of the black vote was cast for Nixon." "The president has proposed several plans which he claims will assist the Afro American to get a piece of the action." "The president calls it "Black Capitalism."" "Richard Nixon saw there was this great desire among professional middle class members of the black community to make it in America." "James Brown was privately very politically conservative." "He had supported Humphrey in '68 but James Brown believed in bootstrap economics, lift yourself up." "So the appeal of Richard Nixon, which was a total, total atrocity to me but to James Brown it was black capitalism." "We got a food franchise getting started called "Gold Platter."" "It's basically set up to get the black man into being able to run and own his own business." "It's geared to the ghetto because I think every man should help where he understands where it's needed most." "And we have the James Brown food stamps, which is very important." "This is the idea of us getting together an idea of getting money into the black community." "If we keep the turnover going, then we shall overcome, only if we all come over." "If I could give you one specific James Brown song where the "one" is underlined bold and italic I would say, "I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing."" "The James Brown hard beat was the one." "It's the beat, but it's also that you're the one, you're setting the tone, you're the trailblazer." "He told me, "You can't be big and small at the same time, Reverend, you got to be the one."" ""You got to be the one."" "At that time, Nixon was preaching self-reliance and not really espousing systematic structural change in society." "And in a way that fed into Brown's own illusion that he had done it himself and that, if he could do it, other people could do it, just by working hard." "But the fact of the matter is," "Brown was a supernaturally talented individual." "Not everyone else is that talented or that ruthless, or that driven." "Well, you know, he said he was a businessman." "But he never took care of business." "He just hung on to his money, you know." "When you tried to own a radio station, they failed, a restaurant, they failed, you know." "I mean, this is a man that would pack an auditorium, take boxes of money out of that auditorium, and not pay the band." "When you got ready to get paid, you know," ""Hey, look, we don't have all of the money."" ""We're going to pay you this amount"" ""and you get the rest the next couple of days."" "And sometimes, it would happen and sometimes it wouldn't." "Actually, we didn't get nothing from anything, just a salary." "The most money I made was around $300 and I don't remember getting any checks for recording." "It was just my regular salary." "I had gotten to be sort of like a handyman, you know." "For whatever reasons." "You know, James would say, "Oh, you're not such a big deal," "Maceo could do that I bet you."" "And I hear him, you know, from a distance saying," ""Oh, Lord, what is he getting me into now?"" "He and I got together, I said, "Man, I'm working hard, am I being, you know, funded for all this work?"" "And the answer to that was, no." "Get your James Brown programs!" "His attitude towards politics was the same attitude that he took towards his music." "On stage, he was the front man that channeled the energy coming from the band in a totally unique way." "But it is very easy to fall into the illusion that it's all coming from you." "There's no way that the James Brown sound would have come together without the Maceos, the Freds, the Pee Wees, Clyde and on down the line." "If it wasn't for Pee Wee, we wouldn't know what to do, you know." "When I came to work for him in November of '69, the thing that I sensed, once I got kind of "behind the scenes,"" "was the discontent in the band." "The band had just reached a point where they were pumping each..." ""We don't need to take this."" "And they came to James with an ultimatum with a list of their gripes one by one, and James is just not the kind of guy to be intimidated." "He's like a stone." "You know, he's like a stone." "You know?" ""I will not be moved."" "What happened is he sent Bobby Byrd to Cincinnati, to round up Bootsy Collins, his brother Catfish, and their little group." "They had a five or six-piece band." "And he had Bobby bring them down to Georgia." "He came in a James Brown Learjet sent a limo to the club over in this rat hole where we was playing at and picked us up and everybody was looking at us like, "Wow."" "You know, and we was, like "Yeah, James Brown," you know." "But we didn't find out what he really wanted until we actually got there." "He parades towards the stage with this new band." "So the old guys are just sitting there, literally holding their instruments and uniforms, watching Bootsy and these guys walk on stage." "That was the sad part because they were our heroes and we could see, it's like, dag, these cats are mad about something." "We didn't know what it was." "Everybody got their bags and instruments, and who ever had cabs or rented cars, everybody left." "And I'm the only somebody that was left." "I guess he didn't want to get into details because the people were at riot stage, so he didn't have no time for no explanations to us and this and that." "And, plus, we didn't need no explanation." "It was like, "What you want us to do, you know?" "We ready."" "I see a few new faces in the band." "Yes, this is a New Breed band." "Kids like to see the young kids up there." "That's the idea." "These were definitely his peak years, so to lose his band and have that kind of a transition was pretty shocking and those of us in the office were really worried about it." "And I'll never forget the first show that I saw with the new band, which was about a week or two into their tenure, that just to me, sounded horrible." "I had to be something like around 17, 18." "I want to go out there and have fun" "I want to get girls like my brother's getting girls." "James talking about, "Nah, son, nah."" ""Nah, can't go out there and play tonight, nah." "Got to ride with me." "Ride with me, son."" "He wanted to know what was on my mind." ""Why are you laughing at my shoes?" You know," ""What's wrong with my cape?"" "You know, I'm saying, I mean, "wouldn't you wear this?"" "He wanted to know, what a young kid, how he thought about it." "I remember flying on the jet with him." "He'd be telling jokes." "I mean, he was the worst joke teller," "I mean, God." "But he would be cracking up and then he'd act like he'd go to sleep on you and he would bow his head a little bit, then he shut one eye and then he keep the other eye on you." "That's what he did to me all the time." "I say, don't you go to sleep at all?" "And he was "Nah, you know, 75 percent business,"" ""and 25 percent music."" "He said, "Watch me and get yourself together."" ""It ain't just coming out here"" ""and lolly-gagging and having a good time."" "He wanted me to see that it took hard work." "I'm like, 'What?" "And James Brown, he wasn't on to the new style that was coming in." "It really started with James Brown teaching me about the one." ""Just give me the one, then you can play all that other stuff." "But if you give me that one you can play that."" "And he would tell me that every night." ""Nah." "You haven't got it, son."" ""No, son, you haven't got it." You know?" "And I mean, it was so cold, it was like, dag." "Little did I know that the way he was drilling us, was all the encouragement we really needed, you know, because it made me want to practice harder." "He always said "Catfish understood," you know, because Catfish was older than me and he wasn't wild like me." "He really loved my brother." "I could see the love." "Bootsy and Catfish, they brought a complete different rhythm." "I had to adjust to playing with them, playing James' stuff." "He took the funk from the drum and put it in the bass." "It was a life-changing moment." "We got the rehearsals, we got tight." "James started digging it, you know, he started grooving." "He started opening up after he starts seeing that it was somewhere else to go." "And it was on then." " Fellas!" " Yeah!" " Fellas!" " Yeah!" " Fellas!" " Yeah!" "I'm ready to get up and do my thing." "I wanna to get up and do my thing." " Like a..." " What?" "Like a sex machine." " Got to got it on." "Got it on." " Got it on." "Got it on." "1, 2, 3, 4..." "The song "Sex Machine" came about on the bus." "The lyric wasn't saying all that much but the fact that we were saying "Sex Machine,"" "which weren't supposed to be said on records, you know what I'm saying, you can't say that, you can't say sex, you know, and that kind of thing and they let it out," "and, of course, at that time, maybe things was changing." "Once "Sex Machine" came out, and once he had enough time to really rehearse that band and rearrange his music to fit that band, it really did kind of reinvent the James Brown template." "And reinvigorated the show and, frankly, the box office results." "And, you know, six months later, we're like, okay, we're safe." "Just 24 hours ago, these streets were filled with rioters, looters and burglars." "Six men are dead, 51 businesses have been burned, and the National Guard was called in, while city officials and black leaders tried to work out their differences." "Negro entertainer, James Brown, flew into his hometown and went on television to tell black people to "cool it."" "We're can all walk to the bargaining table and sit down and be men and human beings and find something that..." "Find a medium of reasoning." "Brown toured the troubled area, asking for calm." "Many blacks say they listened to him and would not have listened to anyone else." "Jim Whipkey, WSB News, Augusta." "Do you feel that whites, have they accepted you because of your ability to deal with your people?" "I don't like the word accept, you know." "You are a beautiful young man but I think you're interviewing me a little wrong." "How's that, sir?" "I don't think you understand me." "Number one, I'm not trying to prove nothing to the white, that I can be a head nigger." "See, that's not my bag." "I'm a man." "I'm not trying to make the white man accept me but I would like for people to accept me whether black or white, you know, and understand what I'm doing but if they don't I still got to do what I feel like is right." "I'm not a cat that get up there grinning and laughing and say take me in, please, you know." "I'm saying don't give me nothing, just open the door and I'll get it myself." "Mr. Brown, why are you endorsing President Nixon?" "Well, I'm endorsing President Nixon because I believe in the future of the country lies with Mr. Nixon and I feel that some of the things he's done is very close to my heart as a minority, as a black man." "I think James Brown was going to endorse whoever was going to give him an audience." "If a poor kid from Augusta who's a soul singer can get the White House on the phone once or twice a year, that's more important than having the phone numbers of the guy who lost." "And that confused the hell out of a lot of people." "He did not see any difference between being strong black, strong cultural, authentic who you was but politically being conservative and Republican and it was this paradox." "So are you saying that you're Republican or Democrat, sir?" "I'm saying that I'm a countryman and I'm endorsing the country and I feel that my best way of endorsing the country is to come and endorse Mr. Nixon." "James and Nixon had talked and on occasions," "and Nixon was going to change some things." "Before he got into this Nixon thing people would tell him to just be a musician, be a singer." "Stay out of the eyes of the camera because that is going to cause you a problem down the road and, of course, it did." "The blacks turned against him, the albums were being burned and the record sales went plummeting." "He knew that he would be attacked and people picketed James Brown shows." "What amazed me is he didn't care." "He really believed he was right." "A lot of promises were made, a lot of things were said that didn't never happen." "Then he got real bitter about that situation and he felt that he had been let down." "And he had been let down." "We have a young man in the studio who's here to make a presentation to James Brown and his name is Al Sharpton." "1973, I was 18." "I had a met a young man named Teddy Brown, who was James Brown's son." "And Teddy got killed in a car accident." "James Brown and I became very close, and eventually he became the father I didn't have, and I became the replacement for Teddy." "Then he flew me to California to give him an award on Soul Train." "What do we have here?" "Well, we feel "The Payback" is sort of like the theme song of young black America in 1974 because it says many of the things that young blacks have tried to say and could not musically express in our own little way." "We weren't from the "We Shall Overcome" era." "We grew up in the "I'm Black and Proud"" "and "Payback" era, and it was that era that introduced those of us that grew up in the 70's, 80's, 90's." "By the mid 70's, James Brown was so much of the basic fabric of American music." "You could definitely tell his musical children with no problem." "Easily Michael Jackson, easily Prince." "Most people, when they look at the mustache period of James Brown, see that as sort of the beginning-of-the-end period." "But the true disciple of the mustache period is Prince." "So even James Brown's down period was influential." "In the late 1970's when they said" "Mr. Brown was having all kinds of issues and problems getting a hit record, he was hot in the DJ community." "The B-boys and the hip hop artists were playing "Get On The Good Foot"" "and especially the Sex Machine album." ""Give It Up Or Turn it A Loose" was the hip-hop b-boy break dance anthem, so it was like an obvious thing to actually mimic Mr. Brown." "In the mid 80's, there was a period in which producers would take these James Brown breaks and create all these new songs." "Funky Drummer was essential for that classic hip-hop period." "Everybody used that sound." "I hate that song." "Was it the Funky Drummer?" "I don't like that song." "We had been playing somewhere that night before and as we get to Cincinnati going to check into the hotel to go to bed," "Brown says, "Go take them to the studio."" "We all were so tired, didn't even want to record, so I started playing just the drum pattern." "Brown liked it and we recorded it and it became our "Funky Drummer."" "They've only had one failed single, and that single's name was "Funky Drummer."" "Go figure." "It's like the song that birthed my whole movement, that magic count-off every rapper loves to hear." "One, two, three, four, hit it!" "The hip-hop act that best utilized "Funky Drummer"" "was Public Enemy." "Fight The Power also sampled "Hot Pants Road."" "It was just like, "Wait a minute," "James Brown is like all over hip-hop these days."" "James Brown would go into a riff and it would be a nice break." "But for a hip hop record, you could say," ""Man, we could take this for like, five minutes."" "We are going to keep vamping on the vamp." ""Fight The Power" comes from James Brown saying it like it had to be in the 60's." "I love James Brown." "There would be no me without James Brown so we all owe it to James Brown." "My greatest inspiration of all time, musically, is James Brown." "If you listen to, like, "Watch The Throne", the most soulful part of the Otis song is that sort of climactic..." "The James Brown scream, it's gospel, it's soulful, it's primitive, sexual, angry..." "Even now, James Brown is here, whether you acknowledge it or not." "He never saw himself as a hit artist." "He always saw himself as a historic figure." "He said, "The reason I'm going to be historic"" ""is I wasn't one of the boys."" "And he would always tell me," ""Whatever you do in life, be you, be different."" "I think it was also why he was off to himself in his own way, musically because he grew up in the woods, by himself, laid there in the whorehouse by himself, so it gave him the sense of, "Me against the world."" "What was his negative may have ended up being his strength." "When he got on that stage," "James Brown personified his music and he reflected a life experience." "Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, the greatest entertainer in the world," "Mr. Please Please himself, hard-working James Brown!"