My relationship with Polydor went sour almost from the beginning. I made some very good records for them—“Make It Funky,” “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing,” “Get on the Good Foot,” “The Payback,” “Get Up Offa That Thing,” “It’s Too Funky in Here”—but they didn’t know how to promote or distribute them. It was basically a German company, and they didn’t understand the American market. They weren’t flexible; they couldn’t respond to what was happening the way King could.
They weren’t flexible about creativity, either. They expected you to go into the studio on such and such a day at such and such an hour and finish up at a certain time. Like a factory. At King we went into the studio and put together arrangements and worked at all hours until we had it right. Polydor back then didn’t work that way. They had no respect for the artist, no personal feeling for the artist, no concern for what he had in mind. They would say this is what’s going to happen: blah, blah, blah. And what the artist felt meant nothing.
I’d mix a song until I thought—until I knew—it was right, but they would want their machines to say whether it was right or not. It had to register certain numbers on the machines. It didn’t matter whether the track was alive and moved; all that mattered was the numbers. I had a warmth in my sound I was trying to preserve, and I wanted the track to be an instrumental before it was a vocal. I wanted it to have the right feel before I put any words to it. It’s like having a good bedspread but wondering if the mattress is comfortable. They wanted a pretty bedspread. I wanted to make the mattress comfortable.
In the early years with them I was hitting the singles charts in spite of the company. The songs were hits because I forced them through the company and made them hits myself. I was supposed to have creative control, but they started remixing my records. I mixed them, but when they came out they didn’t sound like what I’d mixed. The company didn’t want the funk in there too heavy. They’d take the feeling out of the record. They didn’t want James Brown to be raw. Eventually, they destroyed my sound.
It took them a dozen different presidents of the company to do it, though. Every time a president came in that I got tight with—like Jerry Schoenbaum—he’d be replaced. They were always sending in somebody to put a bridle on James Brown.
Their artist promotion was strange, too. To me, they didn’t want a man of African descent to appear sophisticated. They did not want him to come across as a man. They wanted the female Afro-American artists to look good, but not the men. That’s the vibration I picked up from the company, but when you pinned ’em down one-on-one, you didn’t get that. Dr. Vogelson, who was head of the whole thing, was a fine man, though, and he treated me like a gentleman. But I never got that warmth from the company. Not one time.
Whatever King Records had been about, Polydor was the opposite. Every King act was individual; Polydor tried to make all of their acts the same. King wanted to be an independent company with individual artists; Polydor wanted to be a conglomerate. King wanted to be a little company with big acts; Polydor wanted to be a big company with little acts.
The funny thing was Polydor had great facilities and Mr. Nathan didn’t, but we made great records at King anyway. To me, Polydor didn’t have a musical background. If you check the whole concept of the company, you see they weren’t in the record business; they were in telecommunications and electronics. But they paid me; I can’t get away from that. They gave me more money than anybody ever gave me. Mr. Nathan didn’t pay me; he was a good man, but he didn’t pay me. Polydor would pay me, but they wouldn’t give me the freedom Mr. Nathan did.
Polydor might have been fed some bad information about me being difficult to work with. I am difficult if you want to change me from being James Brown. If I had been a new artist, it would have been different. But I had a track record—everything was a hit. Everything that Polydor did turned the other way unless I forced it. Once the door was open to them in the American market, they had no more need for me.
Besides groove tunes like “Make It Funky,” I was doing a lot of message things during my first few years with Polydor. “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing” was aimed at the politicians who were running their mouths but had no knowledge of what life was like for a lot of people in this country. It was also aimed at some of the cats on their soapboxes—I won’t call their names—who were telling the people one thing while manipulating their emotions for personal gain.
I was getting a lot of visions during those years. “King Heroin” was something that I foresaw. I wasn’t using drugs, but it was like I had lived it anyway. During that time I had an office at Polydor, and I maintained an apartment in New York, too, but I lived in Augusta. I was seeing New York and then getting away from it and writing about it. But producers don’t know the truth. They write about what they think is happening. I was writing about what I was living.
“The Payback” was originally supposed to be a tune for the soundtrack of It’s Hell Up in Harlem, the answer to Black Caesar, but the producer said the tune wasn’t funky enough.
I said, “What did you say?”
“It’s not funky enough. We can’t use it.”
That was all I wanted to hear. “I’m going to put it out as a single, and you’ll see,” I said.
I knew the song wouldn’t make sense without the movie, so I came up with a story line that you could see. It came out in February 1974 and went to number 1 on the R & B chart and 26 pop.
Somewhere during this time I picked up the name the Godfather of Soul. Fred Williamson in Black Caesar was supposed to be the Godfather of Harlem. I was talking to the disc jockey Rocky G about the movie one day, and he said, “You’re the Godfather of Soul.” I think some of the jocks started using it on the air, and it kind of stuck.
I was still playing everywhere, but I was getting ready to cut back on all the one-nighters. I did a benefit in Madison Square Garden on July 4, 1974, for the National Youth Movement. It was a self-help group for teenagers run by Reverend Al Sharpton. When I lived in St. Albans, he was just a kid, and he’d come over and we’d rap. I encouraged him and the other kids around there to stay in school and work hard and have pride. He took it to heart and started his youth movement. I think he was only about nineteen when we did the July Fourth date.
In September I went to Kinshasa, Zaire, for the music festival that was supposed to coincide with the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight there. The Spinners, the Crusaders, B. B. King, the Pointer Sisters, and I arrived in Kinshasa at two o’clock in the morning. When we landed thousands of fans were there to greet us. So were Foreman and Ali. The fight had to be postponed, though, because Foreman got a bad cut over his eye while sparring, but they went ahead with the music festival.
In October I was back in the Apollo for six days. By this time the Apollo was in trouble. A lot of the big acts wouldn’t play it anymore because it wasn’t profitable enough. I could see it wasn’t going to make it, and I said that this show might mark the end of an era in black music. I think a lot of people realized it. Mick Jagger and Ahmet Ertegun showed up for the Friday show; they knew what was happening. Not too long after that, the theater closed. It reopened a few times, but it didn’t stay open. I didn’t play it again for almost four years.
I released another message song around this time, too: “Funky President (People It’s Bad).” It was about President Ford, who had taken over from Mr. Nixon in August. Every time he made a speech, it gave people the blues. He was a nice man, but he talked a lot and didn’t say anything. He was there as a caretaker after Watergate, and I think he did that. He was a good man, but I never looked at him as a president.
In February the next year I went back to Gabon in Africa and played for President Bongo’s birthday party. We had some discussions about building a recording studio and a pressing plant there but never got any further than that. In July I was back in the Garden for Reverend Sharpton’s National Youth Movement again. I had Tito Puente, Joe Bataan, Tyrone Davis, Lyn Collins, and the Swanee Quintet on the bill. Charles Sherrell had a solo spot, too. He has a sweet, high voice, and I had cut him on an album called Sweet Charles: Music for Sweet People.
By the middle of 1975 disco had broken big. Disco is a simplification of a lot of what I was doing, of what they thought I was doing. Disco is a very small part of funk. It’s the end of the song, the repetitious part, like a vamp. The difference is that in funk you dig into a groove, you don’t stay on the surface. Disco stayed on the surface. See, I taught ’em everything they know but not everything I know.
Disco was easy for artists to get into because they really didn’t have to do anything. It was all electronic sequencers and beats-per-minute—it was done with machines. They just cheated on the music world. They thought they could dress up in a Superfly outfit, play one note, and that would make them a star. But that was not the answer. It destroyed the musical basis that so many people worked so hard to build up in the sixties. The record companies loved disco because it was a producer’s music. You don’t really need artists to make disco. They didn’t have to worry about an artist not cooperating; machines can’t talk back and, unlike artists, they don’t have to be paid. What disco became was a lawyer’s recording; the attorneys were making records.
Disco hurt me in a lot of ways. I was trying to make good hard funk records that Polydor was trying to soften up, while the people were buying records that had no substance. The disco people copied off me and tried to throw me away and go with young people. You can’t do that. You have to come back to the source. Disco hurt live music in general. The black concert business was already hurting. Whites wouldn’t come even if the black artist had big record sales. Black America was in a serious recession; there was just no money in the black community. Later on, that situation hurt records sales, too. For everybody.
By this time I was in semiretirement anyway. I still did big shows in Europe, Africa, and Japan, but I cut way back on American appearances. I was mad and I was tired and I was disgusted. The tax thing was making it hard to function, I was fighting my record company all the time, and the music business was all going one way. It was similar to the period after “Begging, Begging” or the time I was caught between Smash and King—I was stopped, but I wasn’t finished. I was going to pull back and wait for it all to work itself out. After the Nixon thing, Teddy’s death, the taxes, disco, and the bad blood with Polydor, I didn’t see what else could happen. But a lot did. Before too much longer I thought I might be stopped and finished.