When you sit down, like I did, one of the things you think about is the danger of freezing up. It has happened to a lot of entertainers. They leave the stage, and then after they’re away from it a while, they get where they can’t go back even if they want to. It crossed my mind that it could happen to me. Up to that point I’d never retired completely. I had still played huge arenas and stadiums in Europe and Japan and Africa, and I still did American concerts occasionally. But now I was ready to throw in the towel entirely. It got to where I didn’t care about freezing up. I wasn’t going back out there anyway. Ever.
Leon Austin, the childhood friend who first showed me some chords on the piano and who I had cut on a lot of singles from the late sixties on, came by and talked to me. He’s soft-spoken, but he can be very insistent and persistent. “You can’t quit,” he said. “You can’t lay down.”
“I’m tired, Leon,” I answered. “I’m tired of fighting the government and the record company and the radio establishment.”
“You can’t let ’em beat you.”
I told him what I’d been telling myself. “I don’t care anymore. I just don’t care.”
“You got to care,” he said.
“I wish I could, Leon. I wish I could.”
He kept coming by, kept talking to me, arguing with me, encouraging me. I wouldn’t budge. He could see how far down I was, so he got off the retirement thing and started talking to me about spiritual things. He told me how he’d recently let God back into his life and what a difference it made. He didn’t preach to me or anything like that. He just talked real quiet about what it meant to him personally, how it gave him peace of mind.
I was always religious, even before I used to help Charlie Brown, the crippled fella, to the different churches on Sunday when I was a kid. I’d sung gospel all my life. Gospel saved me in prison and got me out. Over the years I presented a lot of gospel acts on my shows, too, but somehow, I guess, I’d just been going through the motions lately.
Really, a lot of the ways I communicate with people and what I communicate I owe to the church. When I’m on a stage, I’m trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don’t go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it. Same thing with a James Brown show. I’d always felt that as an entertainer you shouldn’t bring your personal problems to the stage. Your job is to send people home feeling better than they did when they came in. I wasn’t sure I could do that anymore.
Leon got me thinking about all that and gave me the moral support I needed. We all need moral support; we don’t get any bigger than that. When we don’t need it, we’re in trouble. And we need to trust in somebody, something bigger than ourselves. That’s what I did. I rededicated myself to God. In a little country church near where I was born, I was rebaptized. I’d been baptized when I was a little boy, but I wasn’t as serious then as when I went on my own as an adult. Eventually I just let go and put things in His hands.
The final turning point came one day when I walked outside the house and found my father down on his knees working around the walkway. It must have been 100 degrees in the shade.
“What you doing, Daddy?” I asked him.
“Pulling these weeds.”
“It’s too hot, Daddy. You don’t need to do that.”
“Somebody’s got to, Junior.”
“What you mean?”
“We can’t afford to hire nobody to do it.”
I got down beside him and started helping. Before long I was sweating. The more I sweated, the harder I worked, like he was doing. He had more energy than any man I’ve ever known. He’d never been out of work more than five days in his life, and anybody he ever worked for would hire him back in a minute. Something happened while I was down there beside my father. He knew what I was going through, and he straightened me out.
“You’re lucky, Junior,” he said. “The yard you pulling weeds in belong to you.”
In his whole life he’d never stopped working. It didn’t make any difference to him: turpentine, heavy machinery, filling station work, picking vegetables. That’s what he was about. And his son was about working on the stage. God showed me the direction. I knew it was time for me to get up and go back to work.
That’s what I did. But I had a lot to rebuild, a lot of fights still ahead. In destroying my sound, Polydor had cost me my audience, and it was around this time, 1979, that the record business in general collapsed. Except for a few blockbusters every now and then, you couldn’t give records away. The whole industry was depressed. And disco had killed off live music and a lot of middle-level venues with it. I could go out of the country, where I was a superstar, but there was no place for me to work at home.
Polydor got a couple of breaks with Saturday Night Fever and Grease and had a chance to sell ten or twenty million of each album while I sold maybe two hundred thousand albums. That spoiled them. After that, all they wanted was the blockbusters. But they didn’t get them and they got off their acts that were doing good but not spectacular.
They tried to take me over into disco by bringing in an outside producer, Brad Shapiro. I was against it from the first. Disco had no groove, it had no sophistication, it had nothing. It was almost over anyway. I fought against doing it but finally gave in. They called the album The Original Disco Man. It wasn’t disco all the way, but I was very unhappy with the result. Then they had me do another one with Brad Shapiro called People, but I wanted to release a live album I did in Japan.
When I made the decision to come back, I decided to fight back, too. I got the lawyer William Kunstler to help me. He came down to Augusta and discussed all the aspects of the trouble I was having and decided he’d take my case. In November 1979 we called a press conference and charged Polydor with skimping on my royalties; we talked about the discrimination by national advertisers that had cost me two radio stations already; and we charged the federal government with harassing me through the FBI and IRS. I was trying to protect some of the things that I thought were being taken from me unfairly, including my career. The idea was to fight on all fronts at once by bringing my case to the attention of the public. One thing about William Kunstler: He brings out all the injustices in a case and gets a lot of press doing it. After a while I realized that those injustices would make a lot of people angry, and when they got angry they were going to defend James Brown. I didn’t want it to get out of hand. Mr. Kunstler even told me at one point, “You know, a lot of the people I defend get killed.”
After that press conference I realized that the reporters would ask me questions I really didn’t want to answer, because the more you answer and the more you talk, the more you hear yourself talk. Pretty soon, after all that talking, you become bitter, and I did not want to become a bitter person. So I backed off. I decided that if there was any way to work things out, I would.
After the live Japan album Hot on the One came out, Polydor and I separated. We’d renegotiated an album-by-album deal, and they didn’t like the one I gave them, so I took it to Henry Stone—the same one who’d put out “Do the Mashed Potatoes”—and he put it on TK Records with the title Soul Syndrome.
I think with Polydor I was caught in the middle of some forces that you have in conglomerates that have nothing to do with the record business. I don’t think everybody in Polygram and Polydor was involved, but if I had to summarize it, I’d do it this way: I think I got caught in a fight between the Jews and the Germans in the company. The Jews wanted James Brown to make it; the Germans didn’t.
Meantime, I went back to work in America as a live performer. It wasn’t easy. There were people who wanted to put me on oldies shows. I refused. I said, “I’m a contemporary artist.” I wouldn’t let ’em call my greatest hits albums golden oldies, either. Called ’em Soul Classics.
For the first time in my career I played the rock club circuit in New York, places like the Lone Star, Irving Plaza, and Studio 54. Some places that size didn’t want me because I refused to cut back on my band, which was too big and expensive for the clubs. They didn’t think they could make it pay. That’s why I’ll always be grateful to the Lone Star. They were one of the first places that would book me in New York when I came back. They showed it could be done.
Mr. Daviss and Mr. Garner thought the clubs would be a good place to expose me to people who’d never been exposed to me before, and I wanted to go into the clubs because while playing arenas and stadiums in Europe I’d started to doubt myself. From the distance of those big stages, I began to wonder if I was getting over to the people. The clubs got me back in close touch with audiences.
But I knew I’d eventually need some kind of wider exposure than that. With all the problems I was having with my record company it didn’t look like the exposure was going to come from recordings. Only place it could come from was a movie. Somebody must have been reading my mind because not too long after I went into the clubs I hooked up with the two people who really turned it around for me: John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.