February 3, 2005

A Legend of Soul and Voice of a Race

arly in his career, both musically and maritally, James Brown vowed to put his ambition ahead of all other concerns, including those of his wife and children. As he testifies in his uneven but occasionally jaw-dropping "I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul," he struck a bargain with his soul, to live "the way I had to: high-pomped, decked-out, emotionally double-barreled." If doubt ever nagged him, he says, "all I had to do was look out the window of the bus and see bare-chested Black men picking in the cotton fields."

This reflection serves as a signal that Mr. Brown's remarkable journey - from poverty in the Deep South to the chitlin' circuit to stardom to arrest to state laurels to arrest again, with pungent detours along the way - is only as absurd as the backdrop against which it takes place. As a reminder of this greater absurdity, Mr. Brown keeps with him a heavy set of shackles and chains that he bought in Africa. His life and accomplishments deserve a proper biography, and his many brushes with the law, beginning in 1949, when he was sent to a Georgia reform school at age 16 for petty theft, and continuing at least up until last year, when he pleaded no contest to a charge of domestic violence, call for a juicy tell-all.

Mr. Brown's self-made genius and self-destructive behavior make a grand American narrative, filled with impossible triumph, unlikely haberdashery and indestructible funk, all forged in the racial cauldron of the last century. He performed on national television to calm potential rioters after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then alienated black audiences a few years later by supporting Richard Nixon. He danced for pennies and nickels as a poor child in Augusta, Ga., then built a musical empire that included airplanes and radio stations, only to lose it all to tax, legal and marital problems.

"I Feel Good," Mr. Brown's second stab at an autobiography after "The Godfather of Soul" in 1986, touches on each of these moments, attributing most of his troubles to racism and racial conspiracies, including government use of "reverse X-rays or something" to spy on him through his television. The book is porous enough that some readers may even appreciate its 37-page introduction by Marc Eliot, which fills in some of the who-what-wheres of Mr. Brown's 71 years.

But at its best the book works as gnostic commentary on the action. Mr. Brown is nobody's easy fix. "Remember the 'Segregation before, segregation now, segregation forever!' speech he made?" he writes about George C. Wallace, the late governor of Alabama. "He, too, became another of my best friends." (The other "best friend" was Lester Maddox, a segregationist and former governor of Georgia.) As with his music, Mr. Brown's literary métier is not exposition but transcendence and gall.

He built his stage show and persona from three roots, he writes: comic books, the bandleader Louis Jordan and the professional wrestler Gorgeous George, who gave him the idea to wear a cape. (Curiously, George also appears as an inspiration in Bob Dylan's memoir "Chronicles: Volume One" - what would the 20th century have been without him?).

Mr. Brown can be frustratingly vague. "The details aren't important," he writes of his first marriage's collapse. But he is by no means hesitant to take a stand. Besides Nixon, Maddox and Wallace, he defends music-industry payola (what's a favor between consenting businessmen?), infidelity on the road (it's part of the workplace) and Anna Nicole Smith (may Mr. Brown's own young fourth wife provide an older husband as generous a lap of luxury).

He identifies particularly with the actor Robert Blake, who is on trial for the murder of his wife. Pairing Mr. Blake with James Cagney, Mr. Brown writes, "I always felt that in their hearts, they were Black men playing White men so that mainstream audiences could understand their suffering. But to me, they were Black."

I promised transcendence. Mr. Brown delivers it when he expostulates on the "One," the ineffable property that marks his sound, his soul, his funk, his ambition and his poor-Georgia yearning. "I don't call it the Two," he writes, "because the 'One' stands alone at the head of the beat, with force, leadership and, most important, self-pride."

On the surface he is talking about which beat to accent, but really he is after bigger game: "The 'One' was not just a new kind of beat; it was a statement of race, of force, of stature, of stride. It was the aural equivalent of standing tall and saying, 'Here I am,' of marching with strength rather than tiptoeing with timidity." Mr. Brown discovered the "One" while messing around with the song "I Feel Good," and once he found it, he writes, everyone tried to copy it: "And I don't blame them. Everybody wants to copy from the best."In truth, as intuitive as Mr. Brown's music seems, no one has been able to copy it - including, often, Mr. Brown himself. For all this book's lacunae, it provides a glimpse into how hot-wired Mr. Brown's intuition is, and how hard to follow. And if he has done some bad things, we are prudent not to judge him before we've done a leg split in his shoes.

Ow!