At the same time I was getting back to my roots in my private life I was branching out in my career. I started 1970 by playing the showroom of the International in Las Vegas and ended the year with an extensive tour of Africa. The International had just been built to be the most luxurious hotel in Vegas; fifteen hundred rooms and thirty stories high. Barbra Streisand opened the showroom, and Elvis made his comeback as a live performer there. Matter of fact, Elvis was scheduled to be back there as soon as I closed. Colonel Parker was at my show with Mr. Neely to see what he could pick up.
Playing Vegas can create problems for a performer. The main room of the International is huge and spread out. I wasn’t worried about that because I’d played stadiums and other spaces where you really had to work to connect with the audience. The biggest problem was going to be the kind of audience; it was a lot different from what I was used to, and I was a lot different from what they were used to. I knew this because I’d first played the Flamingo there back in 1967. Vegas audiences were a lot older and mostly white, and my music was funky and raw. Rock ’n’ roll never had succeeded in Las Vegas, much less R & B or soul. You had to figure out a way to get over to that particular audience. I found out you can go too far.
I expanded the band, adding some strings and other things, and put in more ballads and songs like “If I Ruled the World” and some traditional show songs. There were smoke machines and other stuff that later became commonplace even in rock shows. Rehearsal went fine except for this fella who worked as a booker or something like that for the hotel. He didn’t like what he saw.
“If I’d wanted Frank Sinatra,” he said, “I would’ve hired Frank Sinatra. I was told that everywhere you go you have audiences standing on their seats. Well, I want to see this audience standing on these seats.”
I told him not to worry. I probably told him to get out. We went on with the rehearsal and got the cues for the audio and the lights worked out, the choreography, everything.
On opening night the house was packed. I think I started with “If I Ruled the World.” The strings were going, the smoke machines were pumping. I did “It’s Magic,” “September Song,” and other tunes like that. They thought I was crazy to sing those songs. They didn’t want that from me: They wanted the gutbucket thing.
Like I say, when I’m on stage I’m aware of everything from the shine on the band’s shoes to how the people in the back row are reacting. That night they weren’t reacting well. The applause came, but it was too polite, too restrained. After a little while I got that feeling every entertainer has had at one time or another: I felt like I was dying out there, and here it was opening night.
I decided to redo the show on the spot. I called different songs to the band, I flashed hand signals to Byrd and the others, and just rebuilt from the ground up. I started giving an Apollo show. I don’t think anybody knew what I was doing, but I knew what I was doing. Mr. Neely caught on, though. When he saw what was happening he jumped out of his seat and ran upstairs to the control room. Nobody up there was calling the lights because now the key sheets from rehearsal didn’t mean anything anymore. The union people didn’t want to let him do it, but he started calling the lights and the sound anyway. He’d seen me work a hundred times so he didn’t have any problem. Pretty soon all those people in their minks and suits were up on their seats, hollering and carrying on. I never worked harder in my life, and we killed ’em. Dead.
Between shows the booker came in again. “Great show,” he said. Then he looked kind of embarrassed. “But, uh, listen... if they get up on the seats of their own accord, that’s okay, but would you mind not telling them to?”
During our time there, Diana Ross and the Supremes were closing at the Frontier down the street. Between my two shows one night I caught their last show. For a long time people had been saying that Diana was leaving the group, but I didn’t know this was going to be their last performance together. The show went along fine, but Diana was talking a lot. She was saying how they’d gotten together, how long they’d been at Motown. Then she said, “Whatever we do or wherever we go, we’ll still be family.” Then they broke off into “Someday We’ll Be Together.” When they got to the chorus, the crying started. I think Mary Wilson broke down first. She turned around, hung her head, and cried. Then Cindy Birdsong started crying. That was it for Diana. Tears started streaming down her face, and she walked into the wings, crying. After a minute she came back on, and they all pulled themselves together and finished the song.
Backstage there was more crying. Berry was trying to console them. “It’s not like you’re breaking up,” he said. “We’re getting bigger. We’re going to have two acts—the Supremes and Diana Ross.” I talked to each one of them myself, telling each one she was fixing to make a big change and had to be strong.
It’s a different thing, but I lost my own band soon after that. I was doing a gig in Columbus, Georgia, when the band threatened not to go on. They wanted more money. I wouldn’t give in to a threat like that—never. You cannot lose control of your group. Once you give in to that kind of thing, there’s no stopping it.
I found out what was going on that afternoon while I was still at the hotel. I called Byrd in Cincinnati. He was doing some work at King and was supposed to join us in Corpus Christi in a few days.
“Byrd, you know the band we’ve been working with on some of the sessions? Do you think you could get hold of ’em right away?”
“Sure, James. Why?”
“Because I’m fixing to do something with them.”
“Fantastic, James. I could sign ’em up right now.”
“Sign ’em up right now.”
“What’s the rush?”
“Just do it.”
They were called the Pacesetters and were all from Cincinnati. They’d hung around King for a while and then started doing session work there. I had used them myself on several things. Bootsy Collins (who later went on to become a big star with the Parliament-Funkadelic Thang and his own Rubber Band) was the bass player; his older brother, Phelps “Catfish” Collins, played guitar; Frank “Kash” Waddy played drums; Robert McCullough played sax; a fella called Clayton “Chicken” Gunnels played trumpet.
At around six o’clock it still looked like my band wasn’t going to budge. I called Byrd back.
“Bobby, you think they’d like to come down here?”
“And play on that show? I’m sure they would.”
“See if you can get a flight out. I’ll call you from the auditorium.”
My band showed up at the auditorium and set up their stuff on the stage, but they still refused to go on unless I gave in. I called Byrd again. There were no flights that could get them there in time.
“Okay,” I said, “go out to the airport. I’ll send my plane from here. You come, too.”
In case the Pacesetters couldn’t get all their stuff on the Lear, I called a place that rented musical instruments and amplifiers. By now the auditorium was full of people. It wasn’t yet time for us to hit, but I knew there was going to be a delay so I went out and asked the audience to bear with us. Then I fired my entire band.
When Byrd got there with the new band I told him to take them straight to the stage and set them up. While they got set up, Maceo, his brother Melvin, Jimmy Nolen, and the rest carried their stuff off. The audience was beginning to wonder what was going on. So was Byrd. I gave him a rundown of the show and told him to take the new men downstairs to run over it with them. They had played some of my stuff on their own gigs and knew most of it anyway, but they didn’t know the vamps and things like that and how we stretched out on some of the stuff in live performance. He took them down there, wrote out some of the licks for them, and sketched out the arrangements. We were a little late starting, but the show went on.
Bootsy and the others turned out to be the nucleus of a very good band. They were studio musicians so when I hummed out solos and things they knew how to give me what I wanted. I think Bootsy learned a lot from me. When I met him he was playing a lot of bass—the ifs, the ands, and the buts. I got him to see the importance of the one in funk—the downbeat at the beginning of every bar. I got him to key in on the dynamic parts of the one instead of playing all around it. Then he could do all his other stuff in the right places—after the one.
Out on the road I’d call Bootsy into my dressing room just to talk to him. He wasn’t but sixteen or seventeen years old at the time, and I kind of felt like a father to him. He reminded me a lot of my son Teddy. I was trying to keep him straight out there because he was a kid who was suddenly pushed into all this show business craziness—thousands of people screaming for you every night, money, women, drugs. All of those possibilities. So many different ways to go crazy. It was hard to discipline him and keep him in line; I couldn’t spank him, so I lectured him. He wasn’t bad or anything; he was just determined to be wrong. I saw a lot of spunk in Bootsy, a lot of life.
One night I called him in to give him a present. When I’d first seen him at King, the bass guitar he had was nothing but a regular guitar—a $29 Silvertone he had converted into a bass. It was a weird greenish blue color with a white pick guard. A very strange looking instrument. But it was all he could afford at the time. I knew his family was having a hard time paying the rent because they were moving every month. When he came out on the road with me, he was able to fix that situation, but he still had that $29 guitar. He didn’t use it on the road; he had borrowed another cat’s, but I knew he couldn’t keep it forever. What I couldn’t understand was why he didn’t take the money he was making and buy himself an instrument. He’d get paid and spend his money but wouldn’t buy a bass. That night I called him in and gave him a Fender bass, kind of exasperated like you’d be with a difficult child you really loved. He said a whole bunch of thank yous, but he didn’t really know what to say. What’s funny is that when I saw how it affected him, I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t ready for that.
I started to build the band back up pretty quick. Maceo and some of ’em stayed out there on their own as Maceo and the Kingsmen, but I got several of the fellas to come back: Fred Wesley, guitarist Hearlon “Sharp Cheese” Martin, Clyde Stubblefield, and drummer Jabo Starks, which gave me three drummers. I added a couple of trumpet players called Hasaan and Jasaan. Everybody called them the dancing trumpet players because they danced and twirled their horns. When the band jelled I cut them on several records of their own. I was still cutting Byrd and Vicki and lots of other artists, and still playing lots of gigs, in addition to all the stuff going on in Augusta and getting married and taking care of my radio stations and restaurant business.
Not long after I got married I toured Africa and Europe. In Africa we toured the Ivory Coast, Zambia, Nigeria, all over. In Zambia, President Kenneth Kaunda invited us to a state dinner to welcome us to the country. We had a long talk about soul music. He knew about my music and about Aretha, Otis, and Joe Tex. He could name all the songs and everything, but he said he had to listen to it secretly now that he was president.
What surprised me the most over there was that everybody knew our music everywhere we went. One time we were riding through the countryside on a bus to a remote city, and a little kid came running out of the bush. He ran alongside the bus holding up one of my records. The funny thing was that he didn’t have any way to play the record, but he had it anyway.
We got to Nigeria not too long after the Biafran war, where so many people starved. Things were still torn up from the fighting. We were supposed to play a big soccer field in Lagos, the capital. The day before the concert there was a group of us standing around the hotel, which was not too far from the field. We kept hearing gunshots, then bursts of cheering and clapping. We asked a Nigerian what was going on.
“Oh, nothing to worry about,” he said, “just some public executions at the soccer field.”
The next night there must’ve been eighty thousand people in the stadium for our show, a lot of ’em pressing toward the stage. For security there were soldiers everywhere, and they were very rough with the crowd. Anybody who got out of line at all got jumped on and beaten very severely with the billy clubs. We didn’t know all this was going on until we got on stage, and once my show started, it was nonstop to the end.
I remember there was this one blind fella trying to get close to the stage, and I could hear him hollering, “I want to see James Brown! I want to see James Brown!”
A guard said, “You want to see James Brown? I’ll show you James Brown.” Then he hit him with the club—bop, bop, bop.
I was very disturbed by the brutality and spoke to some of the officials about it after the show. They said, “Well, we’ve just had a war, and many of these people are not what you think.”
I believe the audience was just trying to express its appreciation. When Vicki was on, this very strange looking old woman approached the stage. None of the soldiers bothered her; they kind of stepped back to let her pass. She came straight toward Vicki and offered some kind of long silk shawl or garment of some kind. It turned out that it had some kind of spiritual significance. We didn’t know it at the time, but you could tell just by the way the woman was acting. Vicki accepted it but didn’t really know what to do with it, so she twirled it over her head in a circle three times. We found out later that was exactly what she was supposed to do—pass it around her body three times. The lady pressed money on Vicki’s forehead, an old custom they had there when they heard a performer they really liked.
While we were in Lagos we visited Fela Ransom Kuti’s club, the Afro-Spot, to hear him and his band. He’d come to hear us, and we went to hear him. I think when he started as a musician he was playing a kind of music they called Highlife, but by this time he was developing Afro-beat out of African music and funk. He was kind of like the African James Brown. His band had a strong rhythm; I think Clyde picked up on it in his drumming, and Bootsy dug it, too. Some of the ideas my band was getting from that band had come from me in the first place, but that was okay with me. It made the music that much stronger.
It’s a funny thing about me and African music. I didn’t even know it existed. When I got the consciousness of Africa and decided to see what my roots were, I thought I’d find out where my thing came from. My roots may be imbedded in me and I don’t know it, but when I went to Africa I didn’t recognize anything that I had gotten from there.
From Africa we went to Europe and played London, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin, and a few other places. The Europeans loved us, like always. They’d be on their feet from the minute we hit until way after we left the stage. We checked out their music scene, too, and I thought it was very strange at the time: The disco thing had already started there. These huge places, especially in Germany, were packed with people dancing to records. At some of the places we played they were doing disco before we came on. There were always clubs where you could dance to records, but this was a whole different scene and a different music. In a way it was very disturbing because it was so popular, even with people who could afford to hear live music. Working musicians don’t like to see that. The music was very lightweight, just bits and pieces from everybody, including me, taken and made very simple, especially the rhythm.
It didn’t worry me, though. I didn’t think it would make it across the water to America. I thought it was so popular in Europe because they didn’t get enough of the real thing. And the music itself was nothing. My music had passed that a long time before. Real quick. Disco just didn’t make any sense.