REMEMBERING TWO BROWNS AND A FORD
This Christmas season brought gifts, as usual, to millions of people and also brought the gift of Rest to three famous people, Ruth Brown, James Brown, and Gerald Ford, an ex-President.
They called him the ‘quiet’ President, but I remember the way they portrayed in the press. Made president after Richard Nixon resigned, ‘Jerry’ Ford really was a President you could have a beer with and obviously didn’t have a 91 IQ. No flash or drama, no affairs or scandals, Ford simply took care of business and made the country run. He wasn’t a visionary or a manipulator, but he had been a football hero at Michigan. He knew how to be a team player instead of egocentric and he knew how to make the ‘big’ play. His big play was ending the Vietnam War, where we picked the wrong side to back, and he brought our boys home. He also pardoned Richard Nixon and after that, to quote a line from Monty Burns, ‘couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this town’. It was business as usual, day in and day out, because he was a man of routine and not showy. The press, looking for anything ‘newsworthy’ soon made fun of his clumsiness, his Achilles Heel. Chevy Chase roasted him on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons used that foible in a closing scene with Homer on one show. I find it characteristic of this society to forget that we used to make fun of him and now have nothing but accolades to bring forth. Perhaps in retrospect Gerald ford is receiving the gratitude from a grateful nation he deserved all along.
Ruth Brown was a torch singer from the early days of R&B. When ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll was born Siamese-style in the twin houses of ‘white’ and ‘colored’, the business establishment cleaved one from the other and gave the ‘dark’ funkier music twin the name of Rhythm & Blues, because all the folks of both color groups knew who always had the music rhythm and who invented the blues, plus the country was segregated as a tradition. Miss Brown rose to fame in the early 50’s but only to the ‘cats’ and ‘chicks’ who were going to honky tonks, roadhouses, and house parties. She recorded on Atlantic Records and was a big influence in making the label a ‘soulful’ place. Ray Charles was also coming to Atlantic around this time. I remember reading about Ruth Brown in our weekly Jet Magazine, or as we called it, the ‘Black Dispatch’.
But the biggest news for me was the passing of the R&B ‘master’ James Brown. Like The Rolling Stones, James Brown stayed fresh and continued to perform up until he took sick. Remembrances of ‘the hardest working man in show business’ go all he way back to my first serious girlfriend, the one who took my virginity. It was she who gave me James Brown’s legendary vinyl album, ‘Live At The Apollo in Harlem’. Besides Yvonne, my hottie who lifted me from the level of nerd, this single album enhanced my social status immensely. I remember Playboy naming this album as one of the essential works to have, if you considered yourself any kind of music aficionado. JB was big in the ‘hood, before it was the ‘hood, actually he was huge. He was the ‘Oprah Wimfrey’ in his prime. He was in Jet once a month at least and sometimes once a week. They listed his tour stops, his marriages, his tussles with the law, and his charitable deeds. One of the first big, really big to me, concerts was when Vonnie, as was her nickname, and I went to see our first James Brown show. We left there a ball of sweat and for years compared all concerts to James Brown’s. He played the crowd like a Southern Gospel preacher, with the crescendo being his famous ‘cape draping’ at the end of the show. The sweat would be dripping off him, glistening on him in the various color spotlights, and each time he threw the cape off and ran back to grab the mike, we went crazy!! Except for cigarettes, booze and sex, we were innocent and the only speed we knew about was when the cop pulled you over for exceeding it, not doing it.
I remember James Brown as the only performer, ever, who would release three singles (45’s) at the same time, on that dark blue King Label with the silver lettering. The records were a buck each and if you had a ten spot, you wanted to get all the latest Motown, Gordy, Tamla artists, then Atlantic usually had a couple to get, also there would be some Indy label hits, and then three James Browns. You didn’t know which of the three would be the party fav so you got all three. Like Motown, James Brown crossed over the blurring color line, but unlike poster pictures of Motown artists which were as non-threatening as the Beach Boys, posters on the backs of doors featuring a ‘hot’ sweaty, dramatically suited, pompadoured ‘black man’ holding the mike by the throat as he would a ‘white’ man, tended to unnerve the fathers of blonds, brunettes, and redheads. But the saying, ‘you can’t keep a good man down’ isn’t an empty motto. I remember seeing a roomful of suburban collage folks at a Catholic campus consuming beer and partying down to the last great James Brown hit I recall, ‘The Big Payback’, which if you listen to the lyrics, would seem to mean paying back ‘the establishment’. I guess Dick Clark was right, ‘if it’s got a good beat and is easy to dance to, give it a 95’.
Another earlier college memory is slow dancing to a song called, ‘O Mary, Don’t You Weep.’ It was a direct version of a Gospel song and was quietly re-released with a different name of, ‘O Baby Don’t You Weep’. I hope one day to find a complete box set of JB’s King Records catalog. James Brown once put a single out that talked about being proud to be an American and the ‘community’ let out a hush. It was during the civil rights period and being an ‘american’ wasn’t what black folks were feeling. That record was also quietly retooled and re-released, sort of, as, ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’ which made the community let out such a roar it made the ‘white folks’ shut up for a minute. Later when he did ‘Living In America’ for Rocky, the split had healed and James Brown because a national ‘hero’, going beyond his cultural base and making it alright to have a James Brown poster in the conservative ‘burbs AND redneck trailer parks. At the height of his prime before he broke out into nationally accepted fame, he said he ate oatmeal once a day to remind him of where he had come from.
Well, James, you have earned a better diet than oatmeal now, and a rest from being the ‘hardest working man in show business’.  The golden cape draped over you now you means the show here is over and the ‘Eldorado’ chariot will take you to meet and greet some contemporaries, like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Marvin Gaye, and Elvis, who want to say ‘Welcome, and thanks for being Soul Brother No.1. For me, I say thanks for all the memories, the concerts, and the legacy of the music you created. What a party in Paradise you must be going to.