James Brown: Wrestling With the Devil
“You could smell the stuff from the elevator,” Sherrell recalls later. “It was heartbreaking. Both of them [Brown and his wife] were just out of it. She could hardly open the door.” Inside, a disheveled Brown sits on the edge of the bed, staring into space. For the next few hours, Brown’s visitors try to bring him around by getting him to drink milk, massaging his shoulders and offering their support.
“That was a good show tonight,” Brown eventually says. “Wasn’t that a good show?” “Man,” says Maceo Parker, “I think you’re talking about last night.”
“We supposed to work tonight,” Brown says.
“He didn’t know he’d missed the show,” Martha High recalls later. “That’s not James Brown. That’s out!”
***
Last year the self-styled Godfather of Soul continued to make news: in the spring he was arrested after beating up his wife, a one-time Solid Gold hair stylist and makeup artist named Adrienne “Alfie” Rodriguez; since then he has been repeatedly busted on drug and weapons offenses.
It hasn’t helped matters that his wife–also arrested and charged with possession of PCP–told her story to the National Enquirer, describing the beatings she had received at her husband’s hands in an April 26th article headlined “James Brown Tried to kill ME” and let the tabloid photograph her bruises.
Drugs were also tightening their grip. Brown had been smoking reefer spiked with angel dust for years, but he was in command onstage. So band members were shocked when he hit the stage stoned and out of control at both the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and at the Valley Forge Music Fair, in Philadelphia. In midsong he would stop the band, stare at the audience and, says Sherrell, “talk about something in left field. It was horrible.”
The sad denouement came on Saturday, September 24th, 1988, when Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar taking place in a building adjacent to his Augusta office.
According to Geraldine Phillips of Atlanta, who was leading the seminar, Brown wanted to know who had been using his private restroom and began asking her questions. “I thought if I answered one of those questions wrong, he was going to kill me and everybody else,” she said later, although it turned out the shotgun didn’t work.
The police were called, and a two-state high-speed car chase ensued in which Brown allegedly attempted to run over two policemen who were setting up a roadblock. The police shot out the front tires of Brown’s truck, but that didn’t stop him. He drove another six miles on the rims, circling back to Augusta before stopping in a ditch.
The police said that after they removed him from the truck, he started singing “Georgia” and “was doing his ‘Good Foot’ dance” as they gave him a sobriety test. Released on bail, Brown was in trouble again within twenty-four hours, when he was arrested for driving under the influence of PCP.
Brown claims the incident happened somewhat differently: that he was just trying to find out why people were using his bathroom without permission and that he stopped for police but that they kicked in his window and shot at his truck. “A man fires twenty-three rounds of bullets in a truck, two in the gas tank, and then rush me to the hospital and say I am on drugs and I’m going to kill him–they wanted me to plead guilty to that,” says Brown. “Worst day of my life.”
People close to Brown–his agent, Jack Bart; his attorney Buddy Dallas; his childhood friend Leon Austin–blame Adrienne Brown for the big man’s troubles. “She no good for him,” says Austin. But artist manager Joyce McCrae, who has known Adrienne Brown since the early Eighties, believes she is as much “a victim of James’s problems as James is himself.
“Alfie has been portrayed as the scapegoat, the cause of all of James’s problems,” says McCrae. “James certainly knew about drugs long before he ever met Alfie. On the few occasions that I sat and listened to her talk, she reminded me of the women I’d seen suffering from battered-wife syndrome on TV talk shows. For her to bear the blame for the downfall and destruction of James is absurd.”
“A scapegoat is right,” says James Brown. “She is a scapegoat for some people who have taken advantage of her because they don’t like the relationship between she and I. They don’t like it because we are third-world people. Third-world people are not recognized.
“I’ll tell you what got us into this problem,” he continues. “Number one, they didn’t like the marriage between my wife and I in that small area. Next, they didn’t like my wife leaving NBC, coming and staying with me. Some group of people want me to go to New York or Los Angeles. They want James Brown in a big city, think he’s more effective with the business world. They need my guidance because 85 percent of the business is all James Brown. But I don’t want to live in L.A. I like coming back home.
“I been a human all my life, but we don’t get human rights. Should get them. I don’t have to explain myself. You know who explains my problem? Martin Luther King. Kennedy dying for human dignity, human rights, Adam Clayton Powell, James Meredith, Hubert Humphrey. You all want to spend your time trying to make me a drug addict when you should spend your time trying to get me back on the streets so I can help you with the problem.”
***
There is a small painting hanging in James Brown’s private office. The painting shows a bull, its back already bloodied, butting its horns into a red matador’s cape.
Most stars of Brown’s stature are handled by experienced managers based in New York or Los Angeles. Not James Brown. He didn’t have a manager, and when he was not on the road, you could often find him in Augusta handling his own business out of a suite of offices in an anonymous-looking executive park near 1-20.
On the afternoon following Brown’s Augusta court appearance, his wife is sitting at a big desk with an engraved plaque that reads, “James Brown, President.” She is on the phone with USA Today. “This has been one of the worst days I’ve had,” Adrienne Brown says. “I almost broke down today. I’m ready for the hospital, but I’m trying to keep going.” Brown hangs up.
“How much do they want us to take?” she asks. “We’re just two people. They had James and I in the same courtroom today! I told God last night I can’t take too much more.”
Sitting across the desk from Brown is 40-year-old Ray Ferrill, who looks like a low-rent Tom Waits and says he is James Brown’s godson. “What we have is a conspiracy to incarcerate,” he says and then proceeds–in a rambling monologue–to the James Brown’s problems to Iran, racism and national security.
Adrienne Brown is exhausted. Her eye shadow is smeared, face puffy. But she is hanging in there, staunchly defending her husband and their marriage. She says his troubles have only helped his career. “This man is so hot right now it’s scary,” she insists. “There are movie contracts right now they want to negotiate in jail.”
Brown pops a diet candy into her mouth. “My husband doesn’t take drugs,” she says flatly. “They say they want to treat James the same as anybody else. Well, he’s not anybody else. And then, what they want to do is come down even harder to show that they’re not treating him like anybody else.”
“Scapegoat and an example,” says Ferrill.
Adrienne Brown says she has also been victimized. “We love each other,” she says. “And that’s where it’s at. This bull of me feeding my husband drugs. You can’t make James Brown do anything.”
The phone rings, and this time it’s Sharpton.
“Hi, Rev,” she says. “These asshole attorneys made him plead guilty. He got another five years. Well, it’s because they figured he’d get a deal. He got no deal. I’m telling you, Rev, we’re both doomed people if someone doesn’t move on something.”
In Adrienne Brown’s world, as in her husband’s, paranoia runs rampant. She recounts an incident last year in which “a nickel bag of grass” was planted in her husband’s coat pocket and insinuates that his lawyer may have had a hand in it “A month ago, before he went to jail, my husband had his coat hanging here in the office,” she says. “We were sitting here in the office–Mr. Dallas, myself, my husband, the people who work here, some reporters. Mr. Dallas says, ‘That’s a beautiful fur coat–may I see it?’ Mr. Dallas walked up to the coat, looked at it, touched it. We went home, and my husband emptied the coat pockets. Do you know what he found? A nickel bag of grass. Now that was put there!”
Adrienne Brown sighs. “Do you understand how we can be set up?” she asks. “These things happen with us. And it’s hard for people to believe, because it’s like a soap opera. But it isn’t It happens to us every day.”
Asked later about the coat incident, Buddy Dallas recalls “being in the office and asking about the cougar coat.” He says, however, that he has had nothing to do with–let alone planting–illegal drugs of any kind. Adrienne Brown denies she has been beaten by her husband, and she doesn’t want to talk about the photograph of her bruises that appeared in the National Enquirer. But pressed on the subject, she makes it sound like a publicity stunt.
“We sold newspapers,” she says. “James couldn’t get in those newspapers, no matter all the good he’s done. There are many P.R. schemes that people use.”
But at the moment Adrienne Brown is unhappy with the way she and her husband are being portrayed. “Let these animals talk all they want to talk,” she says. “As soon as this is over, I’m taking care of them.” She pauses a moment. “If this story is wrong, I will hunt you down.”
***
On the Saturday afternoon before the Augusta trial, Bobby Byrd–a former member of James Brown’s Famous Flames and at one time the singer’s closest friend–is brooding in the upstairs bedroom of his Atlanta home. Just a few weeks earlier, Byrd, who is in his fifties, suffered a mild stroke when he learned he wouldn’t be getting the money–some $25,000 in artist’s and writer’s royalties–that he claims James Brown owes him.
A spokesman for PolyGram Records, Brown’s former record label, says there may be royalties owed to Byrd by Brown. The label currently credits all royalties from James Brown records or productions against monies previously advanced to Brown (Brown’s attorney says that figure is about $2 million); it is Brown’s responsibility to pay artists like Bobby Byrd who were under his production umbrella.
“Bobby need his name in the paper,” says Brown, who denies owing Byrd any money. “Whatever Bobby Byrd did, he did. I know nothing about it. Bobby made a mistake years ago–he quit [Brown’s band]. That’s his problem. He shouldn’t have quit.”
James Brown: Wrestling With the Devil, Page 2 of 4