Please, Please, Please Mister Brown, Mister James Brown

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Fritz Jasper, the crazy lazy ex-record, CD, and video store owner (before the big Blockbuster and Tower Record-type chains blew him away and who were subsequently blown away by Netflix and Amazon on-line type operations so that many brick and mortar operations like his and theirs became passé), had been talking to his lawyer, Sam Lowell, whom he had known since back in college when they shared the same dorm floor at Boston University at 700 Commonwealth Avenue, about how music had changed, or rather more correctly how music had moved on to other forms while their tastes stayed essentially the same, since they got wound up in their mutual love of Motown/soul/blues/James Brown music.

Back then more than one dorm floor mate, and not a few girlfriends, looked askance when blaring from their stereo would come that high heavens James Brown beat that one could not exactly trace but which got to some primordial truth, and if they were a little drunk (or later when drug-of-choice became the “in” thing) they would unabashedly try to make their lily white asses put on some “funky” primitive James Brown moves. Moves so primitive and basic that James had picked them up by accident and discarded when he was about sixteen. Yeah, plenty of people looked askance and with good reason when Fritz and Sam went on their James Brown binge. Of course even guys, white guys, with serious moves like Mick Jagger, a guy with some definite James Brown moves on the concert stage paled when the heat went up and James was in please, please, please high dudgeon.  

All this talk by Fritz coming from that traditional Fritz place as Sam well knew, that seemingly never-ending need to trace the roots, the roots of what James Brown was all about, all about what for lack of better name became the genre of soul music. They had started out just like lots of guys just liking the music, the beat. That never-ending need to know roots addiction had been the legacy of their late friend Peter Paul Markin who had been on that BU dorm floor the first two years of school before he got caught up in the doings out in San Francisco in the great Summer of Love, 1967 and left school which shortly thereafter got him a trip to Vietnam courtesy of the United States Army which he never talked about much but which both men had believed right until the end that he had never gotten over and which caused him to go over the murky deep end in the late 1970s.

Markin, who loved James Brown as much as they did although not as demonstratively when drunk, always seemed to have about two thousand facts in his head at any given time about any given subject, including James’ roots in gospel, in blues, hell, going back to someplace in ancient Mother Africa. In his hometown of North Adamsville not far from Boston Markin had a reputation among the guys he hung out with for always having those damn facts to counter any argument, right or wrong. Usually right. Frankie Riley and Allan Johnson the guys who knew him best, knew him from junior high school dubbed him “The Scribe” in high school and that name got tabbed on him at BU once Fritz found out from Frankie at some dorm party Markin threw Freshman year.  

Sam, Fritz and Markin had all agreed, agreed once Markin “won” his argument about the roots that drove James Brown’s music that he was “boss” not just because he was the “godfather” of that soul music they devoured but because when he came on the scene in the 1950s with Please, Please, Please he brought something new to the American songbook. Not classic rock and roll, no way, no way it fell into the Elvis/Chuck/Bo/Buddy/Jerry Lee mix, as Markin was at pains to announce one night when they had had too much cheapjack Southern Comfort some rummy or wino had purchased for them at Jimmy’s Liquor Store in Kenmore Square once he got his money from them for his own bottle of some cheap wine. It was a different beat that he produced and that they grabbed onto. Surely not folk, no way although that genre too had its roots devotees including Markin for a minute (Sam never could abide that stuff but got dragged for that minute by Markin when he “discovered” some old Delta blues guys and hokey white mountain music guys he had heard on some radio show on Sunday night). Not be-bop jazz then in its heyday through the bad boys of “beat,” none of those things but something more primitive, good roots primitive, going back to some mist of time Mother Africa beat that got passed on through the generations to Mister James Brown. So that was how rooted he was, that roots stuff was the stuff that was running through James’ brain as he tried to take that beat in his head and make people jump, to celebrate, at first mainly blacks down South and then once white kids got hip to his sound the whole freaking world, the world that counted anyway.           

So Sam and Fritz freaked out (an old “hippie” term Sam still used from his 1960s days when he got dragged, no that was not right, he went willingly with Markin on a few hitchhike trips to California during the summer breaks and after Markin got out of the Army and Sam had graduated got caught up in the whole counter-cultural scene out west. Fritz worked the summers so was never washed by that Markin travelling on the road breeze) when a serious James Brown movie, Get On Up, produced almost naturally by the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger who owed James some serious debts came out in 2014. They both eagerly looked forward to seeing the film, did so, did so twice in fact. Freaked out to see how Markin had had it right from the biographical flash-back scenes interspersed with the music presented in the film about Mister Brown’s sense of musical roots.

They also picked up another thing that Markin, like James minus that damn Mister James Crow southern racist anti-black thing a boy “from hunger” who only had gotten into BU as a special student with a scholarship based basically on guys who showed promise but were “under-achievers” in high school, had mentioned back at BU that it had been a very close question about whether an uneducated (formally anyway) black kid growing up in the post- World I South, out in the country, in the countryside outside of Augusta, Ga, an Army town as Markin well knew having gone to basic training at Fort Gordon located there (oh yeah, and the town where the then very white Masters Golf Tournament only is held Markin, who in early high school had been a caddie so knew about that Masters bit too), to a derelict and ill-fit mother and wife and child beating father  would make it to twenty-one never mind becoming a world famous celebrity. (Markin always carried a certain doomed “half Mick, half mountain hillbilly” sense about himself in his morose moments, unfortunately, which proved too true in the end).

But see Mister Brown carried that beat in his head, carried it right to the end and he never let go of that notion. Of course there are many stories about musical performers who almost had it but for some ill-omened reason fell short so some luck was involved. Finding a big time friend, Bobby Byrd, who got him out of jail and also a guy who knew enough to latch onto James’ wagon and go as far as he could with him despite his own considerable lead singer dreams and plans. Being at the right place at the right time when the first record producer insisted to his bewildered boss that he knew what he was doing by letting James let it rip his own way on Please, Please, Please and the rest is history.  Although not without the problems of keeping high-strung musicians satisfied, drugs, financial difficulties, martial problems, and loss of friends and fellow performers for lots of reasons, mainly because he was number one and there was no number two really in his company. No question Mister James Brown had a very clear perception of who he was, how he wanted to handle everything from finances to his image and stage presence that came through in the actor who played Brown Chadwick Boseman’s performance.          

After the second time Fritz and Sam had seen the film in downtown Boston they went to a Starbuck’s to compare notes about things they might have missed the first time. It was there that Sam made a couple of personal points not directly connected to the film but since James Brown had been part of the scenery of the life of their 1960s generation they can be tacked on here. First a few years after James Brown released his Please, Please, Please in the 1950s Sam had been at a junior high school dance at Myles Standish in Carver where he had gone to school the DJ played that song and Sam, spying a girl he had been eyeing all night until his eyeballs were sore, went over to her and lip-synched James’ song and it worked. Second, years later in the late 1980s when the comedian Eddie Murphy had started his “Free James” campaign at a time when Brown was in jail Sam had been working with a group of young college students whom he had assumed would not necessarily know who James Brown was when he shouted out “Free James” to see if he would get any reaction. Jesus, all of a sudden there was a hall full of college kids picking up the chant shouting back “Free James.” Yeah, get on up.