There is a tent backstage at the Doheny Heritage Music Festival, where artists hang out till it’s time to go on. The festival is small, by the beach at Dana Point, a prosperous resort 60km south of Los Angeles, where the traditional hang-ups of blues music don’t really apply.
Tonight, Dana Point is receiving a legend. ”See that guy in the yellow cap? He’s the head hog in the trough,” says one of the roadies, pointing out the stage manager, who reports to the tour manager, who reports to the record company executive, who has flown in from Las Vegas to be here tonight with the Godfather of Soul, James Brown.
The hospitality tent is so alive with anticipation that the sandwiches curl and the celery wilts.
Brown isn’t on until 8pm. Before then, the audience, largely white and in straw hats, sways gently and lets out the occasional, self-conscious ”yeah, man” to old-school blues acts such as the Blind Boys of Alabama (collective age 243), Koko Taylor (68) and Etta James (66), second on the bill after Brown and conveyed from her trailer to the stage in an electric wheelchair with the smooth-running of a Dalek.
With the aid of two sticks, she performs a routine of jaw-dropping crotch- and cleavage-grabbing explicitness — in the world of the blues, infirmity is an advantage and no barrier to sex appeal.
This is just as well. Brown says he is in his early 70s, but it is whispered abroad that he may be nearer to 80. While the crowd ogles Etta James, a limo pulls up backstage and a man gets out, hair first. Brown has a trim waist and square shoulders, with tiny, booted feet and that combination of masculine attitude and feminine delicacy that you see in bullfighters and male flamenco dancers.
It is an hour before show time. He is grand — the limo, the shades, the entourage — and at the same time not grand, mucking in with the other artists in makeshift dressing rooms under canvas and surrounding himself with people he has known since the old days in his home town, Augusta, Georgia.
One of them is with him tonight. Charles Bobbitt tells me I have 20 minutes if Brown likes me — and two minutes if he doesn’t. The man from the record company adds: ”It helps that you’re a, ahem, woman.”
He raises an amused eyebrow. We enter the tent. Brown is seated in an armchair behind black shades. Music thumps from the direction of the stage. I ask if he’s nervous.
”I’m still human,” he says. ”I just thank God.”
The festival crowd doesn’t look tough, but neither does it look like the sort of crowd that Brown enjoyed in his early career, when his Sex Machine act was new and people leapt on stage to manhandle him with love.
”We had 150 000 people in Australia, we had 400 000 in Leeds, England, one time. Oh, the biggest crowd was in Paris, France. I had 1,3-million people.”
How have the crowds changed?
”Well, they got bigger and bigger and the kids started bringing their daddies and they became daddies and started bringing their kids and all of a sudden we’ve got more people than anybody in the world and thank God about that. You know. Because it didn’t have to be that way.”
It didn’t. Brown was brought up in poverty by his Aunt Honey, the madam of a brothel. He could have been a professional baseball player, but ”I knew what I wanted to be involved with”. He chuckles and turns to his hairdresser, a woman with blonde hair who will later make a bizarre appearance on stage with him to co-sing a song. I ask him if he’s still a hit with the ladies and he chuckles again and, exchanging a look I don’t understand, refers me to her.
”Oh my God,” she says. ”Oh my God, when they find out he’s single, they come crawling out of the woodwork. All ages. All ages.”
”Well,” says Brown, ”you know, I got married two or three times, and I’m not married really right now. We’re in court, actually. And when the girls hear that I’m single, I can’t believe what happens. It’s like I am 19 years old. But I try to keep myself in pretty good shape, you know?”
His skin is pebble-smooth and he could be 30 years younger. Brown is proud of his mixed-race heritage. He is part African-American, part Cherokee Indian and part Apache.
”My father knew nothing but work. And Mr Bobbitt and I — he’s North Carolina, I’m South Carolina — we don’t know nothing but work. We don’t know nothing but work.” He beams.
If he was starting out in music now, would he be a rap artist?
”Well,” he says, ”I started rap. So how could I join something I started?” Much of his income these days derives from hooks from his old songs being sampled on rap records. Brown was famously smart about copyrighting his material. I ask where he got his business acumen from.
”Well, I was very correct and I did right and I prayed to God. Even though right now they’re taking so much money from me. Oh yeah, yeah. I don’t have a seventh-grade education, I’m not going to get into taxes and trigonometry and stuff like that; somebody is supposed to do it for me and they don’t.
”So about a month ago my money was taken. But I want to help a lot of people and you can’t help the people when they take your cash money. I have my own plane sitting there and I can’t use it because you need the cash to use it, with the change in oil prices going up and everything. They’re taking advantage of me. But the ones that are taking it, they will be cut down. It’s like Psalm 37: ‘Fret not thyself because of evildoers.’ And I believe that.”
This rant is a reference to the difficulties Brown is experiencing with the revenue service. I ask what he does to help the people.
”I don’t really wanna brag on that. I would like for you to speak to Mr Charles Bobbitt and find out what do I do for the people, and what I’ve done my whole life.”
He is still a familiar face in his old neighbourhood, which he has been known to cruise through in his limo, handing out cash through the window. It is genuinely not something he publicises.
”Yes, I go down and try to help them. I feel great with all the things I’m involved in because it’s for the betterment of hu-man-it-y. I talk to small people, and people who are unaware, and I try to address some of the problems that they don’t dare address.”
”They” in this context is not the government, but an unspecified authority, which Brown refers to as if it was formed with the sole purpose of pissing him off. Whatever subject we talk about, he always brings it back to the matter of ”their” attempt to bring James Brown low.
He has had brushes with the law and served a three-year jail sentence from 1988 after being chased by the police for a public order offence. (He waved a gun at some workers in the office next to his and accused them of using his toilet without his permission.)
I ask when he was least happy.
”Least happy? Well. After Dr [Martin Luther] King’s death. After Robert Kennedy’s death. With the wars that we’ve got going on, with people losing their life.
”I don’t want to defend the politics but I’d like to defend their lives. Their lives are beyond politics. Young kids are getting destroyed through the bombs and shrapnel and actual fatalities that don’t have to be. Afghanistan, Iraq and right on our street. Because our kids don’t have no place to go. I made a song, Killing Is Out and School Is In, and they wouldn’t put the record out. Wouldn’t put it out, and we needed it.”
The whisper about this record is that it wasn’t put out because it wasn’t very good — too preachy and out of step with the times. I ask why ”they” didn’t let him release it.
”Well, you know, why did Moses have to do what he had to do and not be able to go to the Promised Land? Why did our saviours die?”
I ask if he voted for Bush.
”Hmm?” Brown looks vague. ”You asking me about politics? I thought you s’posed to ask about show business.” He thinks for a moment, then answers anyway.
”The Bush family have been very good friends of mine, like the Kennedy family, the Nixon family, the Johnson family. I can’t get angry with the president, because the president don’t control the country… But I love all human beings … I don’t know you but I love you. Why should I hate you? You a human being. Now I think we’re just running out of time. Mr Bobbitt?”
Bobbitt says five minutes. I ask Brown whether he was suspicious of white people when he started out in the business.
”Suspicious?” He looks at me curiously. ”When I grew up, it was ruled that the white was here and the black was there. Suspicious? I wasn’t trying to figure them out, I was trying to get out of the ghetto. You know …” He starts chuckling and shaking his head.
”When I was trying to get out of the ghetto I was fighting for blackness because that’s all I saw. But when I got out and saw the world, I had to fight for people. Because when you go to a blood bank you don’t want black-people blood or white-people blood; you want the type of blood you need.”
We get up to leave. Brown shakes my hand.
”Thank you,” he says, ”you’re a very beautiful person.” He frowns, as if trying to remember something, then brightens and says: ”I hope I live 200 years and you live 200 and a day, so I never have to see beauty like yours passing away.”
Ten minutes later, I see the back of his head disappearing into the make-up truck, a riot of pink and yellow curlers.
And then it is show time. I am allowed to watch from the back of the stage, where clouds of dope waft up from the audience. ”Ah,” says a roadie, sniffing the air like a Bisto kid, ”you know when James Brown is coming on.”
The band plays a series of riffs from Brown’s greatest hits: Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, Please, Please, Please and Sex Machine.
The crowd chants his name and he slides on to stage, the fringe-work on his epaulettes swinging.
”Make it work,” he cries and goes into his furiously energetic routine. ”How many people here know James Brown?” he yells. ”Have you forgotten the old days?”
He is screaming. The audience is screaming. ”Aaaaooooow. I got a whole lot of soul!”
Brown whips around to face the back of the stage and I catch a glimspe of his expression, grinning wildly, sweat pouring. All of a sudden he looks small and very fragile. — Â