Rejected by fans after his embrace of Nixon, James Brown records his final string of classic albums and No. 1 R&B singles. George Clinton fuses Motown and Detroit hard rock on acid and creates the P-Funk empire. The Black Panthers attempt to go mainstream. And DJ Kool Herc births hip hop when he deejays his sister’s party on August 11.
James Brown had been unassailable in the Black Power movement. Poet Amiri Baraka wrote, “If Elvis Presley is King / Who is James Brown, God?”
Then Brown threw his support behind Nixon in the 1972 campaign, as did Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Brown, and Wilt Chamberlain. Theoretically, this was so Brown could get into the White House and push Nixon to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. Nixon took the meeting, though he initially complained to his staff (captured on the White House taping system), “I’ve done the blacks!… I don’t want any more blacks, and I don’t want any more Jews, between now and the election.”1
Many biographers now assume Brown also hoped Nixon would protect him from the IRS in return for his support. The agency said he owed $4.5 million in back taxes. Brown also wanted FCC approval for radio stations he owned.
The backlash from the black community blindsided Brown; it was far more intense than what Kanye West received for supporting President Trump. Nixon’s administration had supported the FBI’S COINTELPRO’s efforts to sabotage the Black Panthers and other dissidents, and his “Southern strategy” appealed to racist voters through dog-whistle codes of “state’s rights” and “law and order.”
“I’m not selling out, I’m selling in,” Brown insisted.2 But protesters picketed his shows with signs like JAMES BROWN, NIXON’S CLOWN.3 His concert attendance significantly dropped, and 1973 became the first year since 1964 he did not score a No. 1 single on the R&B chart. Davis, meanwhile, received death threats. He and Brown were scheduled to sing at January’s inauguration, but neither turned up.
Nixon made some calls to the FCC on Brown’s behalf and had his IRS case changed from criminal to civil, but otherwise didn’t deliver. In the spring Nixon also cut over a hundred social programs overseen by the War on Poverty’s Office of Economic Opportunity. Brown didn’t comment much, except for a song on his band the JBs’ album Doing It to Death: “You Can Have Watergate Just Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll Be Straight,” whatever that meant.
It was a catastrophic year for Brown for an infinitely more important reason. His son Teddy was killed on June 14. In the aftermath, he got to know a friend of Teddy’s who, though young, had already toured as a preacher with Mahalia Jackson and served as activist Jesse Jackson’s youth director—Al Sharpton. “I first knew James because his son, Teddy, and I were close when we were teenagers. When Teddy was killed in a car accident in 1973, James took me in like a son. I was 19, the same age as Teddy.”4
Sharpton served as Brown’s tour director while continuing his leadership of the National Youth Movement, which fought to alleviate poverty in the inner city. Brown told him, “If you listen to me I’ll make you the biggest [civil rights leader] out there.”5
Brown told Jesse Jackson how he saw the difference between Jackson and Sharpton. “You’re a Motown act. You are black but you are accepted. He’s (Sharpton’s) a James Brown act. He’s raw and authentic, and he’s going to outrun you in the end.”6
In the Wattstax concert film released in February, Jackson led the stadium in raising fists and shouting the “I Am—Somebody” poem by Reverend William Holmes Borders, which Jackson fused with Amiri Baraka’s poem “What Time Is It? Nation Time!” Jackson had an angrier edge to his voice than his mentor MLK, but then he had seen MLK shot to death right in front of him. He also led the children of Sesame Street in a gentler version.
His organization PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) secured government grants for black businesses and arranged for companies like Schlitz, Coke, and General Foods to hire more blacks.7 When Dick Clark attempted to start his own version of Soul Train, Jackson said Clark was attempting to destroy the only black-run show on television and threatened ABC with a boycott, so the network canceled Clark’s show.8
It was a banner year for blacks securing mayorships of huge cities: Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit, Maynard Jackson in Atlanta. They diversified bank boards and integrated police departments, reducing police brutality.9 Following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal registrars monitored the South to make sure blacks could vote, and the number of African Americans holding elective office rose from 1,185 in 1969 to 2,991 in 1974.10
In the wake of such progress, even the Black Panthers believed they could go mainstream. Their membership had fallen from its peak of five thousand in five states,11 due to sabotage by the FBI and infighting between the faction led by co-founder Huey Newton, who wanted to work with the US government, and the faction led by Eldridge Cleaver, who advocated revolution through guerilla warfare. (Cleaver advocated revolution from the safety of France, where he lived in exile.) Newton closed all Panther branches except the original in Oakland, California, and called in the remaining members to focus on a five-year plan to win power in the city’s political establishment.12
Newton himself did not run for office, even though 1973 saw the publication of his memoir Revolutionary Suicide, featuring him on the cover with a rifle in his right hand and a spear in his left, wearing his black beret. Co-founder Bobby Seale ran for mayor, and Minister of Information Elaine Brown ran for city council. (Brown also released two albums as a singer that year with gospel-inflected songs like “Until We’re Free.”) They gave speeches on buses, organized black gangs and white radicals to stick thousands of chickens into bags with voter registration forms and handed them out.13 They registered somewhere between twenty thousand and fifty thousand people, but Seale ultimately lost the runoff to the incumbent in May. Brown garnered 30 percent of the vote but lost as well.
Numerous disheartened members resigned after the losses, and Newton purged many of those who remained. Perhaps if they had won the election Newton might not have gone mad. But now he prioritized a plan to become kingpin of the Oakland underworld. He sent a team of former prisoners to rob dealers and pimps, or force them to join his protection racket. They resold the drugs they stole and pulled stickups.14
Newton and Seale had started the group together to monitor police harassment, inspired by the death of Malcom X. They had written the manifesto while playing Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” in the background. Now they argued over a movie Newton wanted made about them, to be produced by his patron, Hollywood mogul Bert Schneider (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, the Monkees’ Head). Newton lashed Seale with a bullwhip, and Seale left the party.15 Newton pistol-whipped his tailor and fractured his skull, murdered a hooker, fled to Cuba. The Panthers’ accountant was killed.16
For all the past decade’s progress in civil rights, many cities witnessed an alarming decline in quality of life. In the aftermath of MLK’s assassination, President Johnson pushed through the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in housing, which enabled many to leave the inner city for the suburbs. The black exodus was accompanied by white flight after the riots of 1965–68. Detroit lost up to 27 percent of its white population. As the inner city’s tax base for police and schools plummeted, the murder rate surged. The MC5’s Wayne Kramer observed in his memoir that before the riots, Detroit had been safe to walk anytime, and people solved conflicts with their fists. After the riots, gun purchases skyrocketed, and people increasingly settled beefs with bullets.17
Billboard identified War’s The World Is a Ghetto as the bestselling album of the year, hitting No. 1 on both the pop and R&B album charts.18 The title track made it to No. 7 on the pop singles chart and “The Cisco Kid” hit No. 2.19 In Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street,” the pensive opening instrumental coupled with Womack’s indelible howl created the template for future songs about treacherous landscapes like Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” Rapper 50 Cent told NME it was the first song he fell in love with. “Because of how the situation was for black people in America at that time, there were a lot of struggle songs around. It seemed to be something that really moved the people around me. I felt the power of music to raise people up; to make them angry or proud.”20
Willie Hutch provided the soundtrack to the pimp drama The Mack (“Brothers Gonna Work It Out”). After Curtis Mayfield agreed to score Super Fly (directed by the son of Shaft’s director, both named Gordon Parks), he grew dismayed when he saw that the film amounted to a “cocaine infomercial,”21 especially since he had been the premiere songwriter of civil rights anthems like “People Get Ready.” He turned one of the film’s instrumentals into the single “Freddie’s Dead,” warning that dealing could get you killed. In the “Superfly” single, which made it to No. 8 on January 13, Mayfield sang there was “no happiness” in “mov[ing] a lot of blow.”
The movie spurred the NAACP’s Junius Griffin to invent the term “blaxploitation” (“black” plus “exploitation film,” a term for B movies). “We must insist that our children are not exposed to a steady diet of so-called black movies that glorify black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters, and superfly males.”22 CORE’s Roy Innis said the movie promoted “Black genocide in the Black community.”23
The big three civil rights groups—NAACP, CORE, and SCLC—teamed to form the Coalition Against Blaxploitation (CAB) and boycotted theaters to try to stop the film’s distribution. Star Ron O’Neal countered, “The heroin pusher is indeed the scourge of the black community, but we’re talking about cocaine, which is basically a white drug. Very few black people can afford cocaine at $800 an ounce. And since cocaine is not physically addictive, people do not steal and rob to get it. There are no coke junkies.”24
O’Neal directed the sequel, Super Fly T.N.T., and tried to redeem the character by having him leave the dealer’s life behind to help African revolutionaries. Alex Haley wrote the script, presumably needing money between his dual landmarks The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots (1976). In the end, CAB’s fears were realized as Superfly and the Mack ignited the imaginations of future gangsta rappers like Tupac and Biggie and drug dealers like “Freeway Rick” Ross.
James Brown released soundtracks to two blaxploitation films that year: Black Caesar and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (one of Jim Brown’s action films as the titular ex–Green Beret). The poster of Black Caesar trumpeted the “Godfather of Harlem,” and Brown quickly turned the phrase into a new nickname, “Godfather of Soul.”25 Originally the producers sought Stevie Wonder, but Wonder decided the film was too violent.26 It included a scene in which an informant’s ear is cut off, later echoed in blaxploitation fanatic Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
Though James Brown was credited for the instrumentals, he delegated them to his trombonist Fred Wesley. The single for Black Caesar, “Down and Out in New York City,” was written by outside songwriters and gave him something more to chew on than his usual dance-song catchphrases, allowing him to channel the feeling of being abandoned by some of his audience. For the B side, “Mama’s Dead,” he insisted on being alone to record and cried when he did,27 even though its lyrics of a loving parent conflicted with the fact that his own mother abandoned him to an abusive father when he was four, leaving him to live in his aunt’s brothel. In press releases Brown claimed his mother died when he was that age.
Brown recorded “The Payback,” the song that eventually returned him to the top of the R&B charts, for a third blaxploitation film in August, Hell Up in Harlem. Wesley believed Brown was angry when he recorded the revenge mantra after hearing that one of his female employees had dated Harold Melvin of the Blue Notes. He hollered so many “damns” that the engineer had to work overtime editing them out.28 When they submitted the soundtrack, however, the film producers called it “the same old James Brown stuff” and replaced him with Edwin Starr.29
The joke was on the producers, though. Brown released the material as the nonsoundtrack album The Payback in December. AllMusic’s Mark Deming ranked it “one of James Brown’s last inarguably great albums.” Another song recorded that August for the movie, “Papa Don’t Take No Mess,” became Brown’s final R&B No. 1 when released the following summer.
James Brown’s direct impact on the R&B charts waned in the immediate years ahead, but a second life awaited him as the most sampled man in hip hop. Another figure whose samples provided the foundation for rap was about to lead his Parliament-Funkadelic empire to a new plateau.
George Clinton co-founded the doo-wop group the Parliaments in 1956 in New Jersey with Grady Thomas, Stingray Davis, Fuzzy Haskins, and Calvin Simon and soon emerged as the leader. “I couldn’t play an instrument. I couldn’t sing as well as some and I couldn’t arrange as well as some others. But I could see the whole picture from altitude, and that let me land the planes.”30 After Clinton briefly scored a gig as a Motown songwriter-producer, they moved to Detroit in 1967. Clinton pulled together a permanent band to play with the vocalists onstage, including guitarist Eddie Hazel, who proved a contender for Hendrix’s throne.
That year Clinton did acid for the first time in Harvard Square as the band and a crowd of students and teachers got naked in the rain.31 Clinton decided to tear down the wall between R&B and the psychedelic British rock he loved by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Cream, and the Who. When a label dispute prevented them from using the name “the Parliaments,” they renamed the outfit Funkadelic. Clinton claimed Motown producer Norman Whitfield secretly taped their shows and copped ideas for the more polished version of psychedelic soul he was creating with the Temptations.32
Clinton received mail from his R&B base imploring him not to rock, but the band signed with the management team that handled the Stooges, the MC5, Ted Nugent, and Mitch Ryder. “We saw that Detroit had its own version of rock ’n’ roll coming out. [The MC5 and the Stooges] influenced us a lot. We was changing from Parliament to Funkadelic, and it would’ve been Iggy Pop (who) had a lot to do with that. That craziness. I saw how far you could go and still entertain people.”33 Their publicist encouraged Clinton and Iggy Pop to get married onstage for coverage in Creem magazine. Clinton said Pop’s rudeness inspired him and guitarist Garry Shider to start wearing diapers made of hotel towels (or sometimes the flag) onstage. Clinton progressed to face paint, penises painted on his shaved head, and plastic duck feet. The only time the group experienced tension was when they opened for Black Oak Arkansas. The redneck crowd sang “Dixie” at them, but keyboardist Bernie Worrell played a monumental version of the song back at them and won the audience over.34
For the time being, Clinton avoided the hard drugs and booze engulfing the rest of the band, sticking to hallucinogens and Star Trek. Bootsy and Catfish Collins, who joined after defecting from James Brown’s band, called him “Prez,” the president of the no-pussy-getting club.35 But no one else in the heyday of protest soul released a song as darkly empathetic as the title track of Cosmic Slop. Instead of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” here was “Mama Was a Prostitute.” She tries to hide what she does to feed her family from her kids, asking God for forgiveness as she hears the Devil call to her, “Would you like to dance with me? We’re doing the cosmic slop.” On the other side of the album, “Trash A-Go-Go” features the singer receiving ten to twenty years for pimping a woman “to support my high and keep me fly,” to the foreboding strains of a Hendrix–meets–Chambers Brothers jam. Clinton was writing what he knew. “We called [our] shows ‘Pimps, hos, and hippies,’ because that’s what they were, and the groups converged in these wild after-show parties, orgies up the yin yang.”36 You could see it in the cover art by Pedro Bell, the first of many albums he illustrated for the group. Originally Bell introduced himself to Clinton by sending in his artwork as fan mail.
“This Broken Heart” reached back to simpler days for relief. Sung by Parliament Ben Edwards, with strings arranged by Worrell, it was a cover of a ’50s doo-wop song by the Sonics (not the garage rock band)—though the spoken-word interlude sounded not unlike Tupac’s spoken word break in “Life Goes On” twenty-three years later.
But the album missed the R&B Top 20, and Clinton feared the band had been too “far out” for too long. “The view was breathtaking, but the air was thin.”37
He decided it was time to come back down to earth with a return to horn-and-vocal-based tracks that could get on mainstream R&B radio. He pitched his new vision—“Jazzy James Brown” or “pop Pink Floyd”38—to label executive Neil Bogart. Bogart had enjoyed success with bubblegum groups like the Ohio Express and 1910 Fruitgum Company and was starting his own label, Casablanca, the title riffing off his last name. He had just signed Kiss to bring in the hard rock fans.
Warner Bros. funded Casablanca, which enabled Clinton to regain control of the original group’s name. He modernized “the Parliaments” to “Parliament” to resemble contemporary British groups. Clinton played the songs he was developing for Bogart, and if Bogart liked them they became Parliament songs. The hard rock/funk jams went on the next Funkadelic album. “Up for the Down Stroke” returned Parliament to the Top 10 for the first time since 1967’s “Testify.” Funkadelic’s “Alice in My Fantasies” went toe-to-toe with Sabbath or any other metal band for roller-coaster anarchy. Both sides toured together under the moniker Parliament-Funkadelic or P-Funk and planted the soil for West Coast G-funk by artists like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
The genre that eventually overtook rock and roll as the most popular American genre germinated in records by proto-rappers the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets, and Gil Scott-Heron. But hip hop DJ Kool Herc maintained, “Hip hop came out of Trenchtown,” a ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica.39 An example could be found on the The Harder They Come soundtrack.
“Draw Your Brakes” by Scotty featured the Jamaican tradition called toasting. Back in the 1950s, most people in the Kingston ghettos could not afford to pay for live music. Instead, deejays orchestrated street parties by loading up trucks with generators, turntables, and huge speakers the size of wardrobes to blast American rhythm and blues. They charged admission and sold food and drinks, drawing thousands. They called their setups Sound Systems.
Count Machuki became famous for his ability to imitate the frantic jive of American deejays, whom the islanders heard through radio broadcasts emanating from New Orleans. He proto-rapped or chanted over the music, bragged, shrieked, commented on social issues—i.e., toasted, something the musicians of West Africa (griots) had been doing for centuries over percussion.40
Deejays often paid studios to make vinyl copies of records for their Sound System. Around ’67 or ’68, a Sound System operator named Ruddy Redwood requested a copy of the Paragons’ “On the Beach.”41 The studio inadvertently left off the vocals, turning it into an instrumental. The operator gave it to his deejay to toast over anyway, and the crowd went wild. Other deejays began asking for copies without vocals. Producers like Duke Reid issued singles with the song on one side and the instrumental on the other. Instrumentals were named “dubs.” Engineers like Lee “Scratch” Perry turned up the drum and bass, moved parts of the song around, added echo and sound effects. The Jamaicans called these “versions.”42 When the technique became popular in the US in the ’80s, the States called them “remixes.” In 1973, Perry released the first pure dub album, Upsetters 14 Dub.
On “Draw Your Brakes,” DJ Scotty took a rocksteady single called “Stop That Train” by Keith and Tex and dropped out their vocals on the verses so he could toast and shriek. Six months after it was released in the States on The Harder They Come, a deejay from the Bronx pioneered an American variation of the process.
Clive Campbell was born in Jamaica in 1955 and moved with his family to the South Bronx in 1967, the neighborhood with the largest Jamaican community in the US. He was tall and lifted weights, so the kids called him Hercules, a.k.a. Kool Herc. He decided to become a deejay after seeing how James Brown’s “Sex Machine” drove dancers to ecstasy. His father was a technician for a band and helped Herc score two turntables and a mixer.
His little sister Cindy needed money to buy clothes for the upcoming school year, so she decided to hold a “Back to School Jam” in the first-floor recreation room of their hundred-unit apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. She enlisted her brother to provide the music. Her mother rounded up snacks. Her father handled soda and beer. She wrote out invites on index cards: twenty-five cents for girls, fifty cents for guys, 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.
Kool Herc asked his friend Coke La Rock to be MC (master of ceremonies) so he could concentrate on spinning records. Coke recalled, “The first time I got on the mic, it was just me goofing with my friends. Dudes like Pretty Tony, Easy Al and Nookie Nook, I’d be messing with them, telling them to move their cars.”43 Even though none of them actually had cars. “We were trying to impress the girls.”44
Just as the Jamaican dub producers switched song sections around, Kool Herc extended the intros, instrumental breaks, and drum solos, because that’s when the dancers cut loose. With a copy of the record on each turntable, he could jump back and forth between the discs and stretch out “the break” as long as the crowd seemed to dig it.
He tried the technique (which he later dubbed “the Merry Go Round”) with James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turn It Loose,” then the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Bongo Rock ’73” and “Apache.” The Incredible Bongo Band was a group of studio musicians hired to create the soundtrack for the camp horror film The Thing with Two Heads.45 They went on to release two albums. Hip hop artists later dubbed “Apache” the “National Anthem of Hip Hop.” (Ironically, the drummer and bassist were white, though the percussionist was black.)
Kool Herc: “I was sittin’ back, observin’, watching the crowd who were all waiting for this particular part of the record. And after I did it for the first time, there was no turnin’ back—everybody was comin’ to the party for that particular part of my set.… They always wanted to hear breaks after breaks after breaks.”46
The kids bugged Herc’s family for more parties, and they obliged, staging dance contests with a $25 prize. Herc christened the kids dancing to his breaks “b-boys” and “b-girls.”
Future deejay Grandmixer DXT recalled, “Everybody would form a circle and the B-boys would go into the center. At first the dance was simple: touch your toes, hop, kick out your leg. Then some guy went down, spun around on all fours. Everybody said wow and went home to try to come up with something better.”47
Soon the parties grew too big for the rec room, then too big for their high school. When Herc saw a construction crew plug into the base of a lamp post, he realized he could hotwire lamps for his equipment, and saw how they could expand to block parties, not unlike the street fairs of Jamaica, when summer came round again.