I worked all the time now, as many as 350 nights a year, most of them one-night stands. I played every place—arenas, auditoriums, clubs, ball parks, armories, ballrooms, any place that had a stage or a place you could put one. Pretty soon I became known as the King of the One Nighters. I think I took the title from Hank Ballard. But the more famous name that came out of that time was given to me by Fats Gonder. Fats used to emcee the shows, and one night—I don’t even remember where we were—he introduced me and ended up with: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, the haaaaardest working man in show business, Jaaaaaames Brown.”
A lot of the places I worked during that period don’t exist anymore. After the municipal buildings opened up to black performers, most of the black clubs disappeared. By the mid-sixties integration killed them off. Performers could go into a city auditorium and do one show in front of five or ten thousand people, instead of doing a whole bunch of shows every night for a week in front of a few hundred. The Palms in Jacksonville, one of the biggest clubs, held maybe two thousand people, but the Jacksonville auditorium held seven thousand. Before the clubs went under in Texas you could work fifty days in fifty different places, and it was the same thing in Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Florida. After integration took hold, those places just evaporated.
But before they did, I played them all, and when the auditoriums and armories opened up, I played all of them, too. When I played I gave good value for the dollar, presenting a complete program and staying on stage for hours at a time. When you’re on stage, the people who paid money to get in are the boss, even if it cost them only a quarter. You’re working for them.
I was on stage about eighty hours in an average month. Wore out a lot of shoes that way and lost a lot of weight, too. Every night I sweated off anywhere from seven to ten pounds. In those days I built the fluid back up by drinking beer after the show; later on I took a saline and glucose solution intravenously. Today, I drink Gatorade.
I started out on the road in Guy Wilson’s beat-up station wagon in Toccoa, moved up to some brand-new station wagons with Mr. Brandy, to a Cadillac and a bus, to commercial airliners, and then to three different private jets. It doesn’t matter how you travel it, it’s still the same road. It doesn’t get easier when you get bigger; it gets harder. And it will kill you if you let it. There are lots of ways it can kill you: accidents, shootings, drugs. If you don’t have the stamina, you can even work yourself to death, like Jackie Wilson did. The road has killed a lot of good people: Jackie, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, all those great entertainers.
But even if you live, you have to see to it that you last. I wanted to last. I’d been a shoeshine boy, a jailbird, and a janitor, and I had less than a seventh-grade education: I knew there weren’t a lot of opportunities for somebody like that. That’s reality. Reality is what drives me. When I go around the streets of Augusta today, the same streets I grew up on, it makes me return to the stage and work that much harder.
To last you have to think about more than the performance. I started carrying an entire show, working every night, learning everything I could about the business. When you travel with a whole show it costs a lot more to run. You’ve got to draw and you’ve got to make it pay for itself. One way you draw is to have a good show in the first place; we had a good one, and it was getting better all the time. You have to be smart, too. Mr. Bart and I came up with all kinds of ways to make the whole thing work. Most acts hooked up with a regular promoter who gave them a guaranteed amount of money for the date. Acts who traveled all the time liked that system because they knew in advance how much money they were going to make and whether they’d have enough money to pay their people and get to the next town. It was comfortable, but it was limited. I thought we should promote our own shows. You take a bigger risk, but if you’re good and smart, you can make a lot more than a guarantee.
A lot of the promoters were in trouble financially. An entertainer can always tell what shape the economy’s in by how the promoters are doing. Hard times don’t affect attendance that much, but they affect promoters. I could tell from all the trouble promoters were having coming up with guarantees in 1958 that the country was in a recession. You’re just traveling, not thinking about things like economics, but you can always tell.
Instead of working through a promoter we sometimes rented the venue ourselves, taking all the risks—and the profit. A lot of times, we co-promoted with local disc jockeys (I think we were the first in the R & B field to do that). The jocks had the placards put up and made sure the tickets were on sale at all the outlets. There was no Ticketron or Chargit then; independent people sold the tickets—drugstores, barbershops, and things. Someone had to make sure the tickets were distributed and that we received a correct count. Counterfeit tickets were a big problem then, too, and somebody had to stay on top of that.
We worked with disc jockeys because we knew they’d make sure the people heard about the show coming in, and it created good will with the jocks so they’d play our records before and after our arrival. I knew how little jocks got paid and co-promoting was a way to help them stay honest. See, the people who ran the radio stations created the whole payola thing by underpaying the jocks, knowing the jocks could get money from the record companies. They let the whole payola situation develop, but when the time came for somebody to take the fall, it was the jocks, not the owners. By co-promoting with jocks, I helped them make the kind of money they deserved—honestly.
After I got me a Cadillac to travel in, I started doing some of the advance work myself. The show traveled in the bus while Mr. Bart, Byrd, and I, and maybe Johhny Terry, raced on ahead in the car. I went to the next town as soon as I could and visited the radio stations and did interviews. I talked to program directors, telling them how well our records were doing. If they didn’t believe me, I called Roy Emory, King’s promotion manager, and got him to tell them how many orders we had for a particular record. Mr. Bart checked with the ticket outlets, and Byrd went to the hall and straightened out the band when it got there. Then I went over to the hall, checked out the sound, and rehearsed the group if I thought we needed it. It might look like riding in the car made things easier for me, but really it made it harder because it allowed me to do all that extra work.
On the way to the next town, Mr. Bart and I discussed how the gig went, how we could make it better, and how we ought to promote it the next time. The funny thing was that he wasn’t even managing me then. Officially, he was my booking agent, but we were becoming more like partners even then in 1959 and 1960. He had other acts at Universal, but he spent all his time out there with me, and we developed a special relationship. He called me Jimmy—just about the only person who ever did—and I called him Pop. He was like a father to me; we had mutual respect and we had love.
One time he said to me, “Jimmy, you’re going to outlast them all—Jackie, Clyde McPhatter, Little Willie John—all of them.”
“What you talking about, Pop?” I said.
“You’re going to last in this business longer than anybody else,” he said.
“Why you say that, Pop?”
“Because you’re intelligent.”
I couldn’t understand that then. Still can’t. But I was smart enough to know that a big group had to have discipline to succeed, like Billy Ward had with the Dominoes.
Billy had a rule that everybody had to be inside the theater forty-five minutes before they were supposed to hit. That way, if anything was wrong, you had time to take care of it. Billy lined up his group and inspected the uniforms and shoes. He carried a long tablet, and if a uniform was wrinkled or shoes weren’t shined, he recorded a fine by the person’s name. I watched him do this backstage once when Jackie Wilson, the lead singer then, came in about four or five minutes late. Billy chewed him out right there, saying, “This is the second time you’ve done this. You do it again, and the substitute will take your place.” Billy always traveled with an extra person who could go on as a substitute. Jackie said, “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again,” and then went out and did a fantastic show.
With the original Flames I didn’t worry about that stuff too much because we had all come up together and everything went smooth naturally. But when my show got bigger and I was hiring people, I saw that we had to have discipline. I put in a system of fines—so much for a dirty uniform, for unshined shoes, for being late. If somebody showed up drunk, he sat out and might get fired. Some of the cats resented the fines, but I think it gave me the tightest band in show business. I abided by the rules, too. I fined myself. When I fined somebody else, I didn’t keep the money but put it in a pot to pay for parties later. I wouldn’t take anybody’s money.
When we had a chance and were in the right city, we recorded. When we were traveling out west, we recorded in Hollywood; up North, we recorded in New York; in the South and Midwest we went to the King studios in Cincinnati; and we recorded in Miami, too. A session might last thirty or forty minutes, or it might last twelve hours, however long it took. Usually it didn’t take too long, though, because by the time I went in the studio I knew what I wanted. The material had already been worked over every kind of way on stage and in rehearsal. Most times we came out of a recording session with at least three masters; then King had a stockpile of material to draw on for releases.
Out on the road I probably had as much fun as most and more fun than the poor, but I never abused it. Besides, I still lived with Dessie back in Macon. Later on I tended to go with whoever was my lead female singer on the show at the time. So, on the road, she’d be with me.
I smoked like the rest of ’em, but I didn’t get any further than that because I think cigarettes are worse than marijuana. I didn’t use hard drugs; I never wanted to get so deep into something that it got me. I know some of the fellas from the old school who smoked marijuana all their lives, but they didn’t get any further than that. Those are the people who are still around.
At one time I was into the whiskey drinking thing. Put seven shots of whiskey and one shot of wine in a glass—it was called a zombie. Boy, drink one of them and you start flipping over, and you can’t imagine what you had or hadn’t done. That’s another kind of trip.
Every once in a while we had trouble traveling in the South, but not too much. I always conducted myself like a gentleman, and I think people respected that. We didn’t go looking for trouble, either. But sometimes we were on a tour with white acts like the Dovells or Jay and the Americans, and at certain places where we stopped to eat we had to send them in to get the food. Once in Jackson, Mississippi, those two groups and the Hollywood Argyles, the ones who did “Alley Oop,” checked into a hotel and got our rooms, too. Then here we come, all these black folks. The desk clerk gave a phony smile and said he’d made a mistake; he didn’t have as many rooms as he thought, and we couldn’t stay there. The other groups standing there heard this, so one of the boys in Jay and the Americans came over to the desk and told the clerk, “Well, I think I made a mistake, too. My group is checking out.” One of the Dovells came right behind him. “We made the same mistake. My group’s checking out.” One of the Argyles came over and said, “Well, I guess that makes it unanimous. Check us out, too.” The desk clerk liked to had a fit. He called the manager over, and they spoke together a long while. Then the manager sent the clerk away, came over, and checked us all in himself like we’d just walked in the door.
More often I had trouble with transportation or with promoters. Next to his instruments, the most important thing to an entertainer is his transportation. Maybe more important because he can always borrow or rent equipment for the gig, but first he has to get there. The original Flames had all kinds of trouble when we were using Guy Wilson’s raggedy station wagon. We were late to a gig at a club in Birmingham because the car was acting up. When we finally got there, we pulled in front instead of going around to the back like we usually did, grabbed our stuff, and went on in. The people were already seated, waiting for us, so we went right to the stage and killed ’em—one of the best shows the original Flames ever did. When we were done we went out to the station wagon, but it wouldn’t crank. We started pushing it, but now the people were coming out. We didn’t want them to see us pushing our car, so we put our shoulders to the back of it and ducked our heads down by the side, hiding. We got the thing rolling, and Byrd jumped in so wouldn’t nobody see him. I jumped in, too. I wasn’t going to let ’em see me, either. Some of the other fellas hopped in. Now the station wagon was picking up speed. Cats were diving in through the back window. We were rolling down a hill, fixing to pop the clutch and kick the motor over. We thought we’d got away clean, but when we peeped over the back of the seat we saw Sylvester and Nash running after us in their uniforms with their bags. They were holding their arms straight down at their sides, trying to run real dignified. The people were standing there cheering ’em on. When they caught up to us and jumped in, the people applauded.
See, you’re an entertainer, trying to be a star, and you think you have to keep up appearances. During the “Try Me” period, when I got a brand-new 1959 red Cadillac, we kept the windows rolled up to pretend we had air conditioning, no matter how hot it was. We had the name of the group painted on the car and on the trailer that we pulled behind it, and we wanted people to think we had that cool air. If we stopped in traffic, the windows were zipped up tight. We even did it out west, crossing the desert. If a car came up behind to pass us, up went the windows. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic on those western highways.
When we pulled in for gas or something, we had the windows shut. One time we stopped at a gas station somewhere in the desert; I don’t remember where it was, but it felt like Death Valley. We sat there, and the service station attendant moved real slow so we started to sweat. This little old white lady in her car at the next pump watched us. We smiled and sweated, sweated and smiled. Now it was really getting hot. The service station man disappeared, going after our change—we just did crack the window to pay him—and we were boiling. But we weren’t going to lower the windows. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, the little old lady jumped out of her car, jerked open one of our doors, and yelled, “Get out quick before all you niggers die in there.”
On that same trip, on a long flat stretch of highway, cruising along, we all felt kind of drowsy in the heat. The car was so crowded that sometimes Bobby Bennett rode in the equipment trailer, which had vents in it and wasn’t any hotter than the car, and it gave everybody else more room. I was driving, just daydreaming, when I thought I saw something pass us. It was beginning to get dark so I couldn’t really see good, but I thought it was kind of a strange-looking vehicle and it was passing us on the desert, not on the road. I said to Byrd, who was dozing, “Byrd, it’s a funny looking kind of something going by out there.”
He glanced out real casual, yawning. “Look kind of like our trailer, don’t it?” he said.
“Sure do,” I said.
“Matter of fact, it look exactly like our trailer.”
We jerked around in the seat and looked behind us. Nothing but empty highway stretched out back there. Byrd looked back at the trailer bumping over the desert with Bobby Bennett in it. “I thought the car was running awful smooth all of a sudden,” he said. The trailer mowed down a few cactus before it finally stopped. We had to pull Bobby Bennett out from under a pile of drums, but he was all right. He didn’t want to ride in the trailer again, though.
That California trip was the first time we ever ran into Ike and Tina Turner, too. We were playing a place called the Five Four Ballroom in Los Angeles when they walked in to catch our show. Ike was already well known by then, and Tina was just getting out there good. They watched us a while, and then when I was singing “Good Good Lovin’,” Tina jumped up on stage and joined in, singing it like she’d been doing it all her life. The Flames backed off and let the two of us go to work. She stayed right with me. I did a spin, she did a spin. I did a slide, she did a slide. We were bringing down the house and I wanted it to end with a bang, so I spun around, backed up, mashed potatoes over to the piano, jumped on top of it while she was at the microphone singing, and then flew off the piano and landed in a split on the stage. I thought that ought to just about do it. But she wasn’t finished. She spun around, backed up, mashed potatoes over to the piano, jumped up on it, and then she jumped off onto the stage and landed in a split. We really upset the place that night. Ike came up and sat in on a song, and then Tina and I did “Please”; and she got down on her knees and everything. That lady knew what to do on a stage from the first.
The next day Tina brought the newspaper by our motel to show us the big write-up we’d gotten. We used to stay at a place called the Nighty Night Motel, and when we weren’t making too much money the manager let us stay for free. Like a lot of people, he saw something in us and wanted to help, and he was fascinated by the fact that the maids didn’t have to do any cleaning in our rooms. We emptied the trash, swept, whatever.
I think that write-up was probably the first we’d ever seen about us. It said we were “the picture of entertainment,” and when it got to Tina it said, “Don’t tell me what a woman can’t do.” We talked to Ike and Tina about doing a tour together. They were getting ready to spend a lot of time in the studio, so they couldn’t do it right away, but we all agreed we’d like to someday. We never did get it together. On the road after that, it always seemed like they were right behind us or right in front of us.
Seemed like a lot of things were always happening to us in California. I was playing the El Monte Legion Hall for Alan Freed in Compton once when the bus was broken into. A lot of equipment was taken and some of the fellas’ uniforms. You can replace instruments on short notice, but not uniforms. Some red suits and some blue ones were taken, so I had the cats go on in whatever suit they had. Afterwards, people told us how fantastic the mixed colors looked, so we kept it in the show.
At another gig I got to the club a little late, and the band was already on stage doing their set. They usually opened with “Do the Mashed Potatoes,” and that’s what they were playing when I showed up. I couldn’t understand it because I knew they’d been on for a good while already, but later I found out they’d played it over and over because of a cat sitting at the front and center table. Each time they finished playing it, he requested it again and flashed a pistol at Nat Kendrick. Couldn’t nobody see the gun but the fellas on the stage. After they’d played it five or six times, the cat stood up and said: “I sure do like that tune.” Then he left.
Promoters can cause you problems on the road, too. Most times, you’ve never seen ’em in your life until you show up for the gig, so you don’t have any idea whether they’re honest. I was playing a club in North Carolina one time—I was up on stage, doing my show—when I saw the promoter leave the door with the cash box, so there was nobody on the door, and it looked to me like a bunch of people were coming in free. I spun around and mashed potatoes over to Byrd, and he did a slide over toward me; we talked it over while we were dancing.
“That man’s done left,” I said.
“Who are all these people coming in?” Byrd said.
We danced and talked about it some more—you can do a lot of talking that way—and I said, “Let’s stop.” So we stopped right in the middle of the song. I went to the mike and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we want to finish our show, but I don’t see the promoter on the door. I don’t even see a doorman over yonder, and all these people are coming in. We have to get this straightened out before we go on.”
By now the people had been drinking a long time and were having fun, and they didn’t want to hear nothing about no money or stopping no music. Some of ’em started toward the stage. I gave the band a downbeat and the music started. I mashed potatoes back over to Byrd for more conversation. “They look like they’re getting ugly,” he said.
I looked over at the door, at the stream of people coming in. Finally I said, “Man, I’m not going for this,” and I stopped the music again. The people started booing then. Some started throwing bottles, glasses, and stuff like that. Windows started busting out. Before long it was a complete riot. We fought them off the bandstand and tried to protect ourselves. During this time I had a bodyguard called Baby James. He saw what was fixing to happen and he ran out to the bus and got a .22 rifle we had fixed so it would shoot like a machine gun (nineteen rounds with one squeeze of the trigger). He came running back in and shot a burst, brrrrrrppppp, right across the ceiling. The people spread out then, and he was able to get to us. He gave me a pistol while the other fellas grabbed as much of our stuff as they could. We went charging out of there; me in the lead with the pistol shooting, pow, pow, pow, into the ceiling, and Baby James bringing up the rear with the rifle, brrrrpppp. Everybody ran out and jumped on the bus, and it started to pull out. But the cats carrying the amplifiers couldn’t keep up, so we slowed down for them to jump on. The people came pouring out of the club and piled into trucks and cars and started after the bus. Now they had their guns and were shooting at us. Somebody yelled, “Get on the floor. Everybody lay down.” We hit the floor and rode all the way out of town that way, window glass busting over our heads. We never did get our money. Never did go back to that town, either.
A similar incident happened in Kentucky during the same period—the promoter walked off the door with the money. But this particular club had glass all around the back and I could see him leaving, so I stopped the band like I’d done in North Carolina. This time I said to the fellas, “Everybody, put something in your hand.” They all grabbed mike stands, drum stands, anything they could hit somebody with. A bunch of us walked off the bandstand and cornered the man outside while Fats explained from the stage about the previous incident in North Carolina. This time the audience cheered. They didn’t do anything to us because they knew the promoter was a crook. He was always promoting shows with big names and then switching the bill to unknowns at the last minute and refusing to give refunds.
But somebody had called the police. Before they got there, Baby James had gotten me to the airport and on the plane for Cincinnati with our money. I had started flying on ahead of the rest by then so I could do advance work and be rested for the show. I hadn’t wanted to do it at first, but Byrd and them insisted. He said that no matter what else happened, if I was rested then we knew we had a good show.
It turned out that one of the policemen was related to the promoter, and the others knew him well. He told them the cats were trying to rob him. That was it. They took the band, the Flames, and everybody to jail and charged ’em with armed robbery. On top of that, the police found a five-dollar bag of reefer on one of the cats in the band. Back then, a five-dollar bag wasn’t some little sandwich wrapper full, it was a bag. Now the fellas were really in trouble.
I was up in Cincinnati trying to get them out. They finally got out by giving up all the watches, rings, and money they had on them. But they wouldn’t let out the cat who had the reefer. To get him out I had to send back to the promoter the money we’d made on the gig. We found out later that the promoter also got the fellas’ watches, rings, and money.
No matter what happened on the road, I was always developing the show, picking up new ideas, new sounds. There was one sound, though, I couldn’t hear anywhere but in my head. I didn’t have a name for it, but I knew it was different. See, musicians don’t think about categories and things like that. They don’t say, I think I’ll invent bebop today or think up rock ’n’ roll tomorrow. They just hear different sounds and follow them wherever they lead. Let somebody else give it a name. Like they’d named the stuff we’d been doing rhythm and blues. It would take the world a long time to catch up to what we were fixing to do, but when they did, they gave it a name, too: soul.