A brand-new bag
In 1968, James Brown stepped into the role of peacemaker for a troubled Boston, just a day after the death of Martin Luther King Jr.
THE HARDEST WORKING MAN: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America
By James Sullivan
Gotham, 244 pp., illustrated, $25
It has come to exemplify James Brown's near-mystical musical ability: the night he managed, with nothing more than the force of his personality and the sheer power of his band, to keep an entire city from rioting. It was April 5, 1968, that most turbulent month in the most turbulent year in the most turbulent decade of the American 20th century. A white man had shot Martin Luther King Jr. dead in Memphis only the day before.
"I AM A MAN," read the placards carried by the striking garbage workers in Memphis, and, for some, the rioting after King's death embodied a similar declaration. But how could violence serve as a legitimate expression of anger over the loss of the patron saint of effective nonviolent protest? In Boston, Mayor Kevin White was hoping to keep a lid on the disturbances that had already rocked Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago, and the prospect of the Boston Garden canceling a concert by the Godfather of Soul, as officials planned to do, sparked concerns that 14,000 James Brown fans trekking from Roxbury and Dorchester, only to find out there would be no show, would set off a riot.
As James Sullivan's book "The Hardest Working Man" informs us, White and city councilor Tom Atkins got on the horn to the Garden's management, making sure the concert went ahead as planned. Then someone had a brilliant idea: What if the concert were broadcast on local television? The magic of seeing the singer on TV just might be enough to tamp down the rage roiling African-American neighborhoods in Boston. All day long, the city had been telling people to stay home, and the crowd for the show was expected to be sparse. Brown cannily negotiated with White, getting the city to guarantee a concert take equivalent to that for a sold-out show before agreeing to let his performance be televised.
What do you say to mourners? It is customary to begin by praising the dead, and Brown was nothing if not a traditionalist. "We got to pay our respects to the late, great, incomparable - somebody we love very much, and I have all the admiration in the world for - I got a chance to know him personally - the late, great, Mr. Martin Luther King."
Seeking to ally himself with his audience without embracing their seething rage, Brown thanked them for their support, telling them that they were responsible for his success. "I want you to know that I'm still a soul brother. You've made it possible for me to be a first-class man in all respects," he told the crowd.
He then launched into a parable from his favorite book - the book of his own life. His first job had been shining shoes in front of Augusta, Ga.'s, WRDW, starting at 3 cents a shine, then moving up to 5. "Finally got up to 6 cents. But now I own that station. You know what that is? That's black power. This is the way you do it."
Then Brown played a show, and the crowd had as good a time as could be had under the circumstances, and everyone went home in one piece. The story of this concert forms the core of "The Hardest Working Man," a superb book idea in search of enough material to justify its existence.
Strangely, for a book that centers on a single performance, "The Hardest Working Man" gives us little sense of the drama of the show. Who attended it? Who watched it on television? What songs were performed, and how did they sound? Most important of all, how did it all feel? A single quote from novelist and critic David Gates, who attended the show, provides the most insight of all. The glory of the concert, according to Gates, "was how [Brown] made a crucial moment in American history vanish for two hours by pulling us into private worlds of passion, pleasure, pain, and joy. . . . He could have torn the city apart. All he did was tear me apart, along with everybody else."
The same drive that made Brown a great performer made him a capable peacemaker: He wouldn't take no for an answer. "His talent was not for courtship," Sullivan rightly says of Brown. "It was for coercion - the indoctrination of his audience by a fervor that might be considered spiritual, were it not so clearly earthbound."
Not having been there himself, and without much in the way of first-person reportage to offer, Sullivan is forced to improvise. "The Hardest Working Man" is padded with copious asides - about White, the history of the Garden, black radio stations, and Brown's hairstyle choices. In essence, Sullivan's book turns into a capsule biography of Brown, as seen through the other end of a telescope. Brown becomes almost as much politician as entertainer, and the cape, while well proportioned, does not fit.
James Brown made a savvy diplomat, but he would not have made for a coherent politician. A supporter of civil rights and economic equality for African-Americans, he once told Rolling Stone magazine that his hero was Strom Thurmond. A supporter of Hubert Humphrey in 1968, he performed at Richard Nixon's inauguration, and ended up endorsing Nixon in 1972.
For at least one night, though, Brown was undoubtedly, as Look magazine had it, "the most important black man in America." "The Hardest Working Man," part reportage and part biography, is an adequate retelling of a captivating anecdote, but a full portrait of this deeply contradictory, self-destructive, immensely gifted performer awaits other hands.
Saul Austerlitz is a regular contributor to the Globe. 