James Brown's Limousine Soliloquy

Photograph by Sal Idriss/Redferns via Getty

In the early summer of 2001, James Brown agreed to let me tag along with him for a Profile while he toured California—the Paramount Theatre, in Oakland; the Monterey County Fairgrounds; the Greek Theatre, in Los Angeles. Members of his band and entourage told me that he liked to talk late at night, especially after a show, and that I could expect to be summoned at such a moment for a long interview. That never happened. When he came offstage, he usually greeted important visitors in his dressing room while having whatever damage the performance had done to his hairdo repaired, then retreated amid a hive of attendants into his limo and disappeared into the night. So I arranged to go to Augusta, Georgia, where he came from, and where he maintained the headquarters of James Brown Enterprises, and a community radio station, in an old department store on Broad Street. On the June day when I showed up, he had hired a white stretch limousine to drive me through the slums where he grew up. Charles Bobbitt, his longtime right-hand man, came along for the ride, and for three hours, Mr. Brown talked non-stop into my tape recorder.

In the magazine I described his “long, looping monologues” like this:

In his speech, as in his music and dance, he is at once fiercely controlling and wildly spontaneous, unpredictable even to himself. But, unlike his songs, his conversation can be nearly impossible to follow. The patchwork of his syntax and the guttural slipstream of his diction—a gravelly, half-swallowed slur whose viscosity has increased through the decades, in lockstep with his pursuit of perfect dentistry—are only part of the challenge. After deciphering what he’s saying, it frequently remains necessary to determine what he’s talking about. And much of the time he appears to be wondering the same thing, because his speech is a form of improvisation. So Mr. Brown speaks with an attentive ear, stringing words and ideas along in contrapuntal themes and variations, at times falling back on reliable old formulations to give the jam shape, until he hears some new riff emerging, at which point he works and worries the key elements, juggling their sequence and refining their emphasis, until they converge in a sudden burst of determined lucidity, or fade out and are forgotten.

A lot of wondrous things that Mr. Brown said went into that Profile, but it’s always terrible, when you look back, to see how much of your best reporting you have to leave out to write your best pieces. So with Mr. Brown’s story now on the big screen in the new movie, “Get On Up,” I went back to my tapes and pulled out a sample from that limousine for you to listen to (with a lightly edited transcript below to read along with it). Because that was always the point with Mr. Brown—to listen. Because what Mr. Brown was, and what Mr. Brown still is, and what Mr. Brown will forever be is, above all, a voice—this voice:

[audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/161268667"]

P.G.: I know that you feel like you’re James Brown first and foremost, but do people continue to identify you, frustratingly, as a black entertainer? Do you see yourself that way?

J.B.: Uh—maybe some black people would like to hold onto the legacy. But they know I’m not a black entertainer—I’m an entertainer, period. But naturally a black man that don’t have that much to hold onto, he’s gonna hold onto James Brown as long as he can. And the black woman going to hold onto James Brown as long as she can. And the black kids—those that got ’em. The rappers—I respect them very, very much—that thing when it started, I showed them how to rebel with their music but I also showed them how to clarify what a rebellion is about. And rebel—if you–I want to be able to—I want to own part of it. I don’t want to tear it up, I want to build it up, and then own part of it. Or I want an opportunity to build one just like it. The United States, you know, when people unite their ideas and come here and hopefully you gonna put ’em all into practice—I wanna put anything I can think of in practice.

There’s a man went to service, and served his country over there, dodgin’ bullets, and I did the same thing, I volunteered, went over there—we people have the right to do anything we want in this country. When a man can come in this country from other places and do what he want to, then we want to do what we want to do. But that’s not just black. Poor whites—you got poor white men, families, send their sons to service and gotten massacred. You have not just sons, but some daughters. You send them in the Air Force, as WACS, served as nurses. You know, and they didn’t get their due, they didn’t get just a rightful share or a right—or what—they didn’t.

We want the intent. Whatever happened basically to the ethnic man, it happened through trials and tribulations. There’s no intent to make them better. Martin Luther King—and Black Panthers organized to start riots. SNCC—the hate groups, whether it was the Panthers or whether it was the Klansmen, or whether it was they called the self-defense to come down and save our daughters here—the Panthers trying to get aboard. But what it ever came to, it was intent. The intent behind it is for better. America didn’t show an intent as a country. They let the people show intent, but they never showed it. America never ruled the people, cause they set up something they called free enterprise. And free enterprise is as good as it can be, but when you start going with "one is educated and the other’s not," it’s not free enterprise no more. When one is educated, and the other don’t know A from B, it’s not free enterprise no more. It’s gone.

P.G.: So you mean that social inequalities undermine…

J.B.: It’s undermined openly. It’s not undermined by our country. Our country’s gotta run the country, and there are some lives they got to help run. The same intent they showed to keep us separated years ago, they should show that same intent to put us together. You see what I’m saying? They had signs there—where they white, colored, blah-blah-blah, they let you know. And all of them are taken down. They paid a fortune in taking down signs, and building one bathroom. You know what I mean?

It almost like—see, there are some intents are great. You take water and sweeten it and put lemon and make it sour. But that intent because you wanted a twang from it. You know. There’s intent there. But you just put water—sugar in the water—you gets nothin’ but sweet water. That’s nothin’. You know—you just, bam!—I’m gonna get some water. There’s no intent to make it refined, and people made better liquor than some of them sweeten water people make. They put some intent behind it.

P.G.: That’s for sure.

J.B.: We need intent. We need intent very, very badly. The only school I’ve ever gone to in my life, we passed it—and I didn’t want to elaborate on it, because it’s just a nice old brick building that was my school. And during that time, 1940–late ’39 or early ’40, I forgot what year I went to school—I thought it was ’40. But I only went to school about four years, and I wound up a juvenile delinquent, because if you had an idea that you want to do anything you gonna wind up in trouble, because the only way you get it is by getting through the sweat of somebody else’s eyebrow and not through your own. So you had to be a criminal. What we called survival is your criminal.

America has committed a lot more crimes on civilization than we committed trying to get into civilization. We was out of civilization. What we was livin’ was not civilization, it was uncivil. [Aside: You never heard that, have you Mr. Bobbitt?] Our whole thing was uncivil. It wasn’t even civilized! The people know that. You gonna let people come in your house and cook for you—look here, you gonna let people come in your house and cook food and plan for the whole family, little babies come and there’d be a nanny and let the baby suck the titty, and then tell ’em, "Lady you can’t be eatin’ with them?" Come on. It’s crazy.

P.G.: You can’t eat with them, yeah. Well, the world’s changed—when I think about the world you’re describing coming up in, and the world that even these kids are coming up in that we just drove past…

J.B.: Excuse me—[pointing at a narrow canal]—this here was like where the Titanic sunk as far as I was concerned. This looked so good—and this was nothin’ but a canal—this was the same canal that you saw down there that they quit workin’ with. This was the canal. That’s where you could eat fish out of. This was like the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean for me. That’s all the water in the world! If I was swimming in a place that had stool, and all your bathroom let out and that. I’m swimming in and eatin’ fish out of. Which, all places are like that and there’s nothing wrong with it still—whether it’s the river, the sea, the same thing—but we figured that that running water, makes it clean every fifty feet. But it don’t do it here, ’cause maybe we got forty-nine feet.

You know it’s been a big joke, I think, on us as a people. And the people, and the powers that be—I ask you, let up a little bit. Let’s give the small man a little more chance to be human. Let’s not dehumanize the man and put him in jail for bein’ a criminal. Dehumanize! I mean, you won’t put a dog in jail for tryin’ to eat out your garbage can or eat out your yard. So why you gonna do that to a poor man that has no guides. More schools. The people in jail need to go to school. Anybody with any less than a ten-year sentence should stay in school all the time. ’Cause you know that’s a dumping ground. Even the toilet dumps into a refinery and goes round and back to you as clean. Even a toilet. O.K.? It goes to the reservoir and everything before it come back to the people as drinkin’ water. But you take a man out of prison, who don’t know nothing but killin’ and doin’ anything wrong, and put him out and expect him to function … like he can live with them. He cannot live with them. He can’t live with nobody. I think of all this stuff, and I see it’s a cause that’s called l-o-s-t, lost—unless you put music back in it. Music right now, whether it’s gospel, jazz, you need music. You need to have a music revolution to get these people’s mind right. The President don’t have a chance with these people, cause musically he been taunted—and then you almost be annoyed at being wrong behind the music coming out.

P.G.: Because on account of the gangster lyrics and things you mean?

J.B.: Sure. Music—let’s don’t label it. You definitely trying to get to the black people. No. Let’s go U-T, let’s go hard rock, let’s go heavy metal, let’s go with gangster rap, let’s go with the President—with the politician promising things and not delivering them and them cats sittin’ there watchin’ it. Then later on they gon’ say he told a damn lie. Son of a bitchin’ lie. What he talkin’ about. He didn’t do nothin’. You keep waitin’ on the right man to come out, Mr. Right. Who is Mr. Right? Somebody gotta come along and just blaze a trail like a Kennedy did, or like a Nixon, who they got funny with. I mean, man, the music made a mob. You know Wilson made a mob, even Jesse James made a mob, the Jordan brothers—in those days, you gotta remember, the worst hero in the world, the worst was the citizen called [inaudible] … the people have ever had.

So we are not unraveling it with intent. We are unraveling it with tradition, and we’re gonna let it run out. You know, run out. I mean, I—I don’t know, I don’t know whether this freedom is as good as segregation or not.

P.G.: Really?

J.B.: Yeah. I don’t know whether this freedom is as good as segregation.

P.G.: What was the advantages that segregation had over this?

J.B.: I’ll let you figure that out.