Part of the reason I pulled back from show business was my wife. Deedee wanted me to be at home more and be a good father to our children. We had two sweet little daughters, and they meant everything to me. They were a kind of consolation to me after losing Teddy. Staying home was what would make my wife happy, and that’s what I did. We even moved out of Augusta to a big, secluded piece of land not too far from where I was born. If I was really going to be a family man, I wanted to do it on the same ground my family was on when I was a child. It was almost like I was trying to make good at what my own parents hadn’t been able to.
I had gotten back to my roots. In 1973 Big Junior—Mr. Willie M. Glenn—started working for me in New York. We’d always stayed in touch, but he’d been working in the numbers game in Harlem for ten or twelve years until he finally got tired of being arrested. He was just trying to support his family, but one Christmas Day when he was shoveling snow on Riker’s Island, he decided the risk of working policy wasn’t worth it anymore. He drove a cab for a while after that and then joined me.
Honey was still living in Augusta, and I saw her all the time. I wanted to build her a nice house, but she wouldn’t let me. She said she wanted to stay where she was, among the people she’d known all her life. When she died in 1974 it almost destroyed me. I think she took so many of those headache powders all her life that it just took everything out of her. Looking at her at the funeral home, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I reached in and hugged her, and Junior had to pull me away.
Not long after Honey died I heard that Mr. Brantly was very sick in Macon. I went to see him and found out there was nobody to take care of him or pay his medical bills. He was more than eighty years old by then and needed constant care. I had him brought back to Augusta and put him in a convalescent home where he was comfortable up until his death a few years later.
During this time I kept my hand in the business. I started a television show, a syndicated dance program called “Future Shock” that lasted from 1974 through 1976. But it was done in Augusta and later on in Atlanta, so it didn’t take me too far away. It was a strong show—I invested over a million dollars in it—but I couldn’t get sponsors for it. The same thing happened to my radio stations. I had the numbers but not the ad billings.
I was still recording and producing right along, but a lot less than before. The hardest thing for me to do was to get Polydor to release a record. They were paying me to be inactive. I still did gigs occasionally in the States, but it was tough because I was really at a very low point. That’s where “Get Up Offa That Thing” came from—a gig when I was really down.
I was playing Fort Lauderdale at the Bachelors III, owned by Joe Namath. The audience was sitting down, trying to do a sophisticated thing, listening to funk. One of the tightest bands they’d ever heard in their lives, and they were sitting. I had worked hard and dehydrated myself and was feeling depressed. I looked out at all those people sitting there, and because I was depressed they looked depressed. I yelled, “Get up offa that thing and dance til you feel better!” I probably meant until I felt better. My wife came down later to join me, and when she saw me, she liked to had a fit, I was in such bad shape. Nothing was going right.
There was more turnover in the band. Fred Wesley and Maceo left to join Bootsy in P-Funk. I think they wanted to work more than they were doing with me. I was sorry to see them go, but I didn’t blame them.
There were lawsuits against my radio stations. Every time you play a record you’re supposed to pay so much money to the performance rights societies like ASCAP and BMI. ASCAP had put in five or six lawsuits against WEBB for nonpayment of the money. That was just part of the trouble I was having in the radio business. The people I bought WEBB from in the first place were suing me for money they said I still owed them from the sale. Also, no matter how good my numbers were, I couldn’t get national advertising on my stations. I was pumping the money from my record and songwriting royalties into the stations to keep them going. I didn’t get into the radio business to make money in the first place, but when you have the numbers, you’re supposed to get the advertising. I just couldn’t understand why we didn’t.
Then I got dragged into a payola trial. Frankie Crocker—who had been on all the major radio stations in New York, WLIB, WWRL, and WBLS-FM, where he was program director—was indicted in Newark for perjury. They said he didn’t tell the truth about a $10,000 payment he was supposed to have received from an independent record promoter and about money he was supposed to have received from a promo man from Philadelphia International. See, a program director is very powerful because he approves every record that’s put on the air. If your record was played on WBLS at that time, it meant two hundred thousand in sales in the New York area.
Charles Bobbitt, one of my managers, was subpoenaed by the prosecution, and he testified that he paid Crocker almost $7,000 to play my records. I didn’t hold it against Mr. Bobbitt for testifying to that—he probably had to give Crocker some money—but I testified that the only money I ever gave to Frankie was payment for emceeing my show. To pay somebody to play a record is a little heavy, but I think to pay him to do our shows was important. I guess Mr. Bobbitt had to get my records played, and that’s what independent promotion is about: You try to compete against what the other people are doing. I guess he did it with money instead of with drugs. I think they used Mr. Bobbitt for a scapegoat for what others were doing before Mr. Bobbitt even came on the scene. Later on, his testimony was thrown out on a technicality.
The whole payola thing is a hustle. A main reason for it is radio management. They underpay their people and expect them to make up the difference in favors from outside. With a lot of black-format stations, it was usually black jocks who suffered and white management who got off. A lot of it depends on what you consider payola in the first place. If you give some underpaid jock $50 to buy groceries, that’s payola. If you’re a big record company handing out $750 television sets as Christmas gifts, that’s not payola. I always tried to have jocks emcee my shows and legitimately pay them. That way, everybody knew what was going on, just like the laws that make politicians tell where their campaign contributions came from.
Not too long after the Crocker trial I lost the jet. It was a Sidley-Hawker 125, the third jet I’d owned since Pop and I got the first one. There was a mechanical bill due on it, and Polydor agreed to pay it, then reneged. I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money myself, so we let the plane sit while we discussed it. Then they discovered a crack in the tail. I took it to Newark, but they couldn’t fix it, so I had it flown to Canada to be fixed. The authorities grounded it. When they did that, I let it sit there. It was repossessed.
All these things happening made me pull back further from the business and spend more time at home, like Deedee wanted. I have a picture from that time in my life that’s the only picture in the world that doesn’t look like me. You can look at it and see how far away I’d gotten from show business. I was still trying to look sharp, to look debonair, but I look at that picture and I don’t know who that man was. I just did not know where I was going.
When Elvis died in August 1977, I think I got a clue. For some reason his death hit me very hard. We were a lot alike in many ways—both poor boys from the country raised on gospel and R & B. “Hound Dog” and “Please” both came out the same year. He had lived in Hollywood a long time and then, like me, had moved back home to try to preserve himself. Somehow or another he just didn’t manage to do it. They kept him shut away all the time; he couldn’t get out and be with the people. I knew he was a poor boy and never intended to go that way. When you’re poor, you have survival in your mind.
When he died, I said, “That’s my friend, I have to go.” I went to Graceland that night. The crowds had already started gathering around the gate. Some agents from the Tennessee Bureau of Identification put me in one of their cars and got me in without anybody seeing. I saw Priscilla and his daughter, and I saw one of his aides who’d been a good friend of mine for sixteen years. I talked to Elvis’s father, saying what I could to help console him. But when I walked over to the open casket, I needed consoling. I put my hand over his heart and said with tears in my eyes, “You rat, why’d you leave me? How could you let it go? How could you let it go?”
It was very strange; that was only the second time in my life I’d ever touched someone who was dead. It made me think about the waste of such a great, great talent, and it made me wonder what I was doing with my own life and about everything that was going wrong. During that time I couldn’t find any way out of it. Like Elvis couldn’t find any way out of it except dying.
I knew things were going to get worse, too, when one day I found a book lying around the house. It was a book about women’s legal rights. My wife was reading it. She’d underlined the parts about community property in divorce. I knew then she was planning to leave; I knew it in my mind, but in my heart I hoped it wouldn’t happen.
I was working somewhere—I don’t even remember where—and I left early to be with my family on Valentine’s Day. I wanted to have a candlelight dinner and then a long talk about us to see if we could work it out. When I came up the drive she already had the station wagon packed and the two girls inside ready to leave. I talked to her, I argued with her, but it didn’t do any good. She left and took the girls with her. I watched them go down the drive until they were out of sight at the bottom of the hill, heading toward the front gate. I stood there in the middle of all that land, by myself, just listening to that car fade away.
She was a very good woman and we had a lot of good years together, but she did not want a man who was in the entertainment business. She might say there was some other reason that we broke up, but I believe that my being an entertainer was the real reason. If I had been a man who came home every night, she would have been much happier. I gave up a lot to be with them, but she had no aspiration for my being in show business at all. But that’s what James Brown is all about.
After she left I tried not to let it get me down. You must be intelligent about it first. When a person leaves you, the person has just expressed something to you. Understand that before you understand anything else. The person would never leave you without wanting to. That’s hard to accept. She did what she wanted to do. She went where she wanted to go.
I couldn’t think that way about the children, though. They weren’t adults making up their minds of their own free will. I missed them, and I couldn’t think it through the way I could think through a grown-up leaving me. I picked up the telephone and called Deedee to ask if she wanted to come back. I knew she didn’t, but I was really asking her for the children. If it hadn’t been for them, I probably never would have called her. After that, I didn’t call her anymore. I accepted it and went on. But the girls—that was sad.
I was free to get back out there on the road if I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. It had been a long time. A New York newspaper even had one of those “where are they now” stories about me, so when a group of Harlem businessmen bought the Apollo and tried to reopen it, I agreed to play it. The place had been closed for three years, and I hadn’t played it in almost four. I already had a short tour of Europe planned right before that, and I could go right into the Apollo as soon as I got back. I scheduled two shows a night for a week, thinking it might rejuvenate me and the theater at the same time.
I opened on Wednesday, July 12, 1978. It was like always—lines as far as you could see. There was so much demand that I added two shows. It was like I’d never left. The crowds were fantastic. I told them, “I was here in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies. Now I got to get ready for the eighties.” I was starting to think that maybe I should come back full-time. “I’d rather play for my folks at the Apollo,” I said, “than play the White House.”
Everything went smooth until Sunday night. When I came offstage after the second show, there was a U.S. marshal waiting for me with a bench warrant issued by U.S. District Court Judge C. Stanley Bair in Baltimore for contempt of court. It was connected to the civil suit I was involved in with the people I’d bought WEBB from. See, the court didn’t like the fact that I’d left the country. It really got me down because I’d called the judge to ask if I could leave to go overseas to do my show. He refused to talk to me. When I went, he got me for contempt.
The marshal arrested me right there and carried me to Baltimore. I went into the city jail in handcuffs and spent three days there. I couldn’t understand it; the whole thing was about money in the first place, a civil suit. I thought we were way past putting people in prison for debt. What kept running through my mind was the connection between being in jail when I was a kid and being in jail as an adult. Here I was successful, well known and, most of all, respected—and still in jail. I’d come out of prison to do right and still wound up in jail. I knew we still had some problems; the same problems they have in South Africa still prevail in some parts of this country.
I had to put the station into receivership. I’d already sold WJBE in Knoxville, and the beginning of the end at WRDW had come a month before when a fire damaged it real bad. I posted my bond and got out of jail.
Meantime, the show had gone on at the Apollo without me. That was it. I could get out of jail, but I could not get out of whatever had been happening to me—for years, it seemed like. I could not find another way to go. For the first time in my life I said something I never thought I’d hear myself say: “I just don’t care anymore.”