When I got back from Europe I went into the Copa in New York for two weeks—and left after one. I saw myself in there trying to do something the audience didn’t really want to accept—the raw, gutbucket thing. The man who ran the place didn’t like it, either. That was not the place for my kind of music. I saw myself playing to these people, and there weren’t many of them, so I said, “Well, what am I doing here?” I gave the man back his $25,000 for the second week and said, “Here’s your money, sir. I don’t want to work here anymore.”
At the end of the engagement Mr. Neely came into my dressing room.
“James, I think it’s time to redo the band,” he said. “They’re a super band, but it’s time for a change.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “We’ve gone about as far as we can go.”
Mr. Neely and I knew I needed to change bands from time to time to get new energy and new ideas. I think Bootsy and some of the others were ready to leave anyway. They’d gone to school in James Brown and they wanted to graduate and go on their own. A lot of times, too, a band will start trying to dominate and dictate to me, and I don’t like that. Or they’ll think the music is all them. That’s why I’ve had stormy times with my bands over the years. Plus my strict rules. Mr. Neely was right; it was a great group. You can hear it on the things they did with me and the things I cut them on by themselves: “The Grunt,” “Across the Track,” “These Are the JB’s.”
Bootsy and the four cats he brought with him eventually hooked up with George Clinton and the Parliament-Funkadelic. Later on they spun off from that as Bootsy’s Rubber Band. I revamped my group with Fred Wesley as the leader. Clyde had left, but Jabo stayed on drums and St. Clair Pinkney on sax. Byrd stayed, singing and playing keyboards. They were the real nucleus. Jimmy Parker played alto sax. On trumpets, Jasaan stayed, and Russell Crimes came in. “Sharp Cheese” and Robert Coleman played guitars. Fred Thomas played bass guitar. John Morgan eventually came in as second drummer. Johnny Griffin played congas. I cut that group of JB’s on a lot of good stuff, too.
Bringing Fred out front changed my sound somewhat. I think it made it even funkier than when Pee Wee Ellis ran it. Pee Wee was a reed man, and Fred played trombone, which is on the same clef as the bass, piano, and guitar. So Pee Wee and Fred, as arrangers and band leaders, would come up with two different concepts of voicing the stuff. Rhythmically, Fred had more than Pee Wee did.
I think the first thing of my own I recorded with the new band was “Hot Pants (She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants),” and it was one of my biggest records. It came out in July 1971 and went to number 1 on the soul charts and number 15 on the pop charts. At the same time I recorded another live album at the Apollo, Revolution of the Mind, a two-record set that came out in December. In August I followed up “Hot Pants” with “Make It Funky,” which went to number 1 on the soul chart, and with “I’m a Greedy Man,” which went to number 7. Those songs did well on the pop charts, too. Most of my music right on through the mid-seventies did, but a funny thing was happening to music on the radio then. It was starting to get segregated again, not just by black and white but by kinds: country, pop, hard rock, soft rock, every kind you could name. Radio formats became very rigid. Because of that and because of my political thing, about 80 percent of the popular stations in the country would not play James Brown records. But my sales were so strong to Afro-Americans and some hip whites that they couldn’t keep me off the pop charts. Matter of fact, in all of the seventies I tied with Elvis for the most charted pop hits—thirty-eight. The bad thing about it is that I was making some of my strongest music during that period, and I think most whites have been deprived of it.
My son Teddy was getting into the business a little bit now. He was very talented and could do almost everything I could do. He could sing and dance. In Toccoa he formed a group called Teddy Brown and the Torches, but I didn’t really want him to pursue a show business career. I didn’t think he was that serious anyway because the name of his group showed he was trying to ride on my coattails. I knew how hard the business was, and if he didn’t make it and had no education, he wouldn’t have anything. I wanted him to go to college. The plan was for him to get that degree and then go to law school and become a music lawyer. I started carrying him with me in the summers so he could see the music business from the inside and start learning about it.
He had a chance to learn a lot right away because I was getting ready to wind up on Polydor Records. What was left of King was about to be dissolved. After Mr. Nathan died, Mr. Neely exercised his option to buy King Records and turned it into Starday-King. In late 1968 he sold it to Linn Broadcasting as a wholly owned subsidiary with headquarters in Nashville. He took me with him into Linn. I was still under a personal services contract to Mr. Neely that had six or seven years to run, but he didn’t like the arrangement with Linn. A lot of their radio stations wouldn’t even play my records. I don’t know if they were worried about a conflict of interest or what, but it was frustrating and something was going to have to give.
Meantime, Jack Pearl, an attorney with King for a long time, said to me, “James, there’s a company moving into the American market called Polydor, and I think you should be with them. I think they’re going to be very big in the businesss.”
“They can be what they want to be, Mr. Pearl,” I said, “but I don’t want to be with them.” He couldn’t talk me into it.
Then two fellas named Julian and Roy Rifkin started talking to me about signing with them. I thought they had their own company, but it turned out they had a production deal with Polydor. They talked me into going with them before I really realized it was Polydor.
Mr. Neely thought I should go to Polydor, too. He got fed up with Linn and exercised a buy-back of all the music assets he’d sold them, including my masters. He was planning to sell my contract, my masters, and my share of the publishing companies Dynatone and Chri-Ted to Polydor. Dynatone had been owned half by King and half by me. Mr. Neely and I personally owned Chri-Ted, which was named after his son Chris and my son Teddy. Polydor had bought Mercury so they already had all my Smash stuff.
When he told me what he wanted to do, I said, “I have to decide what I want to do with my life. I don’t want to go along with it.”
He said they could do the deal so that Polydor didn’t just pick up my contract but had to renegotiate a new contract with me. Mr. Neely was close to Polydor anyway because they distributed King records in England and Germany. See, Polydor is part of a worldwide conglomerate of record companies which at that time was owned by N. V. Philips, a Dutch electronics company, and Siemens A. G. of West Germany. After the people with the parent companies saw the response to my shows when I toured Europe the last time, they wanted to sign me up. Polydor got into the American market in 1969 and hadn’t done much in their first two years even though they’d spent millions of dollars. By signing me up they could get a foothold in the American market real quick.
I had a lot of doubts about it, but if I could negotiate the new contract then I thought it might be all right. The week before I recorded the third Apollo album, Mr. Neely sold everything to Polydor. He took the money he made on the deal and bought the rest of Starday-King from Linn. He also made good on Mr. Nathan’s verbal promise to me that I would get 10 percent of the sale price of the masters. After the transfer of the personal services contract and title to the masters, we negotiated a new long-term contract with Polydor that gave me a substantial advance, a production company, a separate office so I could be independent from them, and artistic control of my work. I wasn’t overjoyed to go to Polydor—King Records had been my family for fifteen years—but it was a very favorable deal, and there was some talk at the time that Mr. Neely might move over with Polydor a little later. So I signed.
Right after that a rumor got started that I was going to play in South Africa along with Brook Benton, the Isleys, and Muhammad Ali. I saw a newspaper article that said I’d be playing to black audiences only. I put out a statement through Jack Bart right away, saying: “I am unwilling to undertake a tour of the Union of South Africa under any circumstances because of the policies of that country with respect to the black members of the nation.”
I was still playing the coliseums and the auditoriums anywhere there was one. I was back in the Apollo in early November, instead of my usual thing of finishing up the year there. I was doing a lot of television, too; before the Apollo gig I had a special on WPIX in New York.
Because of my stuff, Polydor was really starting to hit the singles charts for the first time. My first album for them, Hot Pants, came out soon after I signed. Revolution of the Mind came out in December. At the beginning of 1972 I released “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing” and “King Heroin,” which was a rap song like “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved” and “America Is My Home.” But, really the very first rap in my career was a thing I did back in 1963 called “Choo-Choo (Locomotion).” We were in the studio at King one night recording it, and it just wasn’t happening. It was about two or three in the morning, and Mr. Neely said, “Why don’t you just play conductor and call off the names of the towns and talk about them?” So that’s what I did.
In August 1972 I opened the Festival of Hope at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island. It was the first rock festival held to help an established charity, the Crippled Children’s Society. It was a big show: us, Chuck Berry, Ike and Tina Turner, Billy Preston, Sly and the Family Stone, Stephen Stills, Jefferson Airplane, Commander Cody, and so on. The festival didn’t bring in as much money as everybody hoped, but it was worth it if it brought in anything. I had visited an Easter Seal summer day camp in Albertson, New York, and my heart went out to those kids.
Right before the festival I put out “Get on the Good Foot.” Afrika Bambaataa says it’s the song that people first started break dancing to. I feel solidarity with the breakers and rappers and the whole hip hop thing—as long as it’s clean. Their stuff is an extension of things I was doing for a long time: rapping over a funky beat about pride and respect and education and drugs and all kinds of issues. I did what I said in the songs: I got up, got into it, and got involved. I was determined to have a say, and I thought anybody with a big following had a responsibility to speak out like I’d done with “America Is My Home” and with “Black and Proud.” Even if it hurt, like those two songs did. I guess they prepared me for the next big storm: endorsing Nixon.