‘Ain’t Nothing Changed but the Address’ : A Weary and Bitter Godfather of Soul Tries to Stay Upbeat in South Carolina Prison

It was day 49 of his six-year prison stretch, and inmate No. 155413 had finished his morning duties.

Inside State Park (S.C.) Correctional Institute, a hospital transformed five years ago into a minimum security facility, the Godfather of Soul had risen at 5 a.m. to help prepare breakfast for about 150 mostly older prisoners.

As he does every day, 55-year-old James Brown--sentenced for failing to stop for a police car, a felony in South Carolina--later telephoned his wife and his Augusta office to confer with the staff assigned to maintain operations. There were calls to Universal Attractions, his booking agency for some 30 years, his record label, Scotti Bros. Records, other associates and friends, including the Rev. Al Sharpton. On this morning, he also returned a reporter’s call.

Prison, Soul Brother No. 1 said with customary bravado, might slow him down, but he’ll be damned if it’s going to stop him.

“I’ve been in slavery all my life,” Brown said via the prison telephone. “Ain’t nothing new. It just means I don’t have to answer a whole lot of phone calls. Ain’t nothing changed for me but the address. I’m not worried. I feel fantastic. I’m James Brown 24 hours a day.

“I just glad I’m in this business. I can take one song and it’s restoration for my whole career. “

With that, Brown said he is looking for “It’s Your Money,” his new record release due next month, to be “one of the biggest records I ever had.”

“It’s what this country is all about,” Brown said. “It’s not your clothes. It’s not your car. It’s your money.”

That will be followed with an April release of a duo with Aretha Franklin, another big record, Brown predicted. It will be his first pairing with the lady long known as the Queen of Soul.

But as much as Brown tried to maintain a positive and upbeat attitude, there was a weariness to his voice and a bitterness in his comments.

“There’s something wrong with the system,” he said. “It’s designed for you not to make it. And if you make it, it’s designed for you not to keep it. Taking James Brown out of the music business is like taking Moses out of the Bible and saying it was a complete book.

“I’m a little disgusted. I feel that I haven’t been treated fair, no justice for the things that I’ve done over the last four decades. I did the ‘Don’t Be a Dropout’ campaign with Vice President (Hubert) Humphrey. I stopped the riots. I always tried to help. Had it been a man of another race, he wouldn’t be where I am. There’s no doubt about it. They wouldn’t have allowed it.

“I feel sad for Dr. (Martin Luther) King (Jr.). I feel sad for Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Benjamin Bannaker because they fought for nothing. We’re right where we were in 1968 when Dr. King died. The only thing is, we had jobs then; now we don’t have jobs. When is America going to wake up and live and stop discriminating?”

Brown said he’s been moved by the hundreds of letters that have flooded into the prison, but he notes with some irritation the lack of support from the music business.

“The only entertainer who has spoken with me is Little Richard,” he said. “The rest of them is jiving. The ones I helped personally, which is about 90% of the entertainers, I don’t even think about them. I don’t even wait for their help.”

It was almost inevitable to some, while inconceivable to most that the musical legend and cultural hero known as Mr. Dynamite would wind up where he started 39 years ago--behind bars, a convicted criminal with an uncertain future.

Like many of Brown’s friends, Fred Daviss, Brown’s finance manager for nearly 15 years, saw it coming. When Davis stopped by Brown’s office in Augusta, Ga., a week before the incident that landed Brown in prison, he saw a different man.

“It wasn’t the James Brown I know,” Daviss said. “He was totally out of it. I had never seen him high in the office before. I told his wife, ‘We’ve got to get him some help or he’s going to wind up in bad trouble.’ ”

But the idea of James Brown behind bars is still incomprehensible to many.

“It’s like losing a general,” said Dexter Moore, 33, director of artists relations at BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) in Los Angeles. “James Brown gave me a reason to get up in the morning and say I’m as good as the next guy. To see what I consider a hero fall like this, it’s shocking.”

The James Brown success story has been told often as a symbol of self-determination and triumph over racism. Born to grinding Georgia poverty, abandoned by his mother and father, raised by an aunt in a brothel, Brown fended for himself as a youth on the streets of Augusta. At 10, he shined shoes. At 12, he danced for nickels and dimes thrown to him by soldiers returning from World War II.

By 16, he was in juvenile detention, sentenced to four to 10 years for stealing a battery from a car.

Then he rose to become a multimillionaire and one of the most influential artists in pop music history. As a recording artist, Brown reigned for more than a decade, a black entertainer unparalleled. During that period he produced 45 Top-10 R&B; hits, 14 of which were No. 1. Only Elvis and the Beatles produced more Top-40 hits.

Brown’s music has influenced black artists from Sly and the Family Stone to Kool and the Gang to Prince to today’s rap and hip-hop. Today, snippets of his hits, “sampled” on hip-hop and rap records, are at the core of that music, artists and critics say.

Beyond his records, Brown’s concerts were legendary, two hours of nonstop action. He was said to have lost as much as seven pounds a night dancing and singing through his shows. His tour schedule was as relentless as his stage shows, 51 weeks a year, year in and year out. To keep pace, Brown would often have local doctors along the tour route give him intravenous injections of fluids and nutrients.

In the process, Brown amassed a fortune. By 1970, he owned three radio stations, a chain of soul-food restaurants, fabulous homes and a twin-engine Lear jet. By 1975, it was estimated that Brown was worth $41 million.

By the latter part of the 1960s Brown had become a cultural hero--particularly for blacks.

“Black leaders from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X had for years been preaching pride in your race, pride in your culture, pride in your heritage, but it wasn’t until James Brown made ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ it was on everybody’s lips,” said Robert E. Johnson, editor of Jet magazine.

Brown backed up his words by pouring millions of dollars into charities. Mayors of New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., called him in to help quell the racial violence that followed the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. Two years later, he did the same thing in Augusta.

“I wanted to be more than just a person who screams and hollers on stage,” Brown said in his autobiography. “I wanted to use my position to help people, and I wanted to have something to say about the country I lived in.”

But that was not the James Brown residents of Aiken County had seen over the last year and a half. Local television and radio stations reported during his trial that they had devoted more time to Brown and his troubles than they had even to the presidential race.

Last Sept. 24, a doped-up Brown, armed with a shotgun, led police on a high-speed chase after interrupting an Augusta insurance seminar to complain of people using his bathroom. With their guns blazing, tires squealing and speeds approaching 80 m.p.h., a convoy of police followed Brown from Georgia to South Carolina and back into Georgia, before he was arrested and jailed.

Fourteen bullet holes were found in his pickup truck and PCP in his bloodstream. “It’s an absolute miracle that James Brown is alive,” his attorney, Buddy Dallas, said.

Three months later, Brown was sentenced to six years in prison for failing to stop for a police car. In most states, that charge is a misdemeanor, but it’s felony in South Carolina with penalties ranging from a fine to as much as 10 years in prison.

Many were stunned by the sentence.

“It’s hardly what one would anticipate, but one has to take a look at the overall facts to look at the judge’s decision,” Dallas said. “There had been a year and a half of domestic problems and other problems. One has to anticipate that the court took in consideration all of those circumstances.”

Around the nation, many had watched with concern. There were bizarre reports of high-speed chases and wife beating. His wife, Adrienne, 37, a high-spirited former makeup artist who says she once dated Elvis, claimed numerous beatings, once with a metal mop handle. (She never filed charges, but police said they frequently were called to the Brown house to investigate her claims.) On another occasion, she said, Brown had piled her clothes, including a $35,000 fur coat, in the floor of their Beech Island home and shot them up with a rifle, and once he had even fired in a car with her inside.

There were hints and rumors of a drug problem, namely PCP, a powerful hallucinogenic known to produce strange and often violent behavior. Early last year, Brown had been placed on probation after pleading no contest to possession of PCP, and last October he checked into a drug rehabilitation clinic for four days.

It was the PCP matter that most disturbed those who knew Brown, who had waged a lifelong crusade against drugs.

“James has not always had smooth relationships with his wives, but he has never been into drugs,” said Patton, who worked for Brown for 10 years, until 1975. “He might smoke a joint every now and then to wind down from a show, maybe at 3 or 4 in the morning back in his hotel room. But that was it.”

Brown’s domestic problems also made national headlines.

Friends and business associates blame much of Brown’s current troubles on his marriage, a turbulent six-year romance that one friend called “a complete war.” In the last year and a half, the singer twice filed for divorce, but changed his mind.

Several friends and business associates said it is Brown’s wife, convicted of PCP possession in New Hampshire last year and currently under indictment in Georgia for allegedly twice bringing PCP into the Augusta airport, who may be at the bottom of the drug problem.

“Before she came into his life, he didn’t have the problems that he’s having today,” said Jack Bart of Universal Entertainment. “I like Adrienne personally, but she’s not good for him,” attorney Daviss said. “I think she cares for him in her own way, but she’s caused him a lot of problems.”

Aiken County Sheriff Carrol Heath said there is no doubt that the couple has had ferocious fights, for the details of which Mrs. Brown reportedly received $7,500 from the National Enquirer and $2,500 from the Star. But, he said, “I think Mrs. Brown gives out about as good as she gets.”

Brown refused to discuss those incidents in detail.

“This is supposed to be a positive interview,” he said firmly. As for his wife: “My wife is my wife. If I can live with it, everybody else ought to be happy.”

Brown said his problems with the law stem from harassment by law enforcement officials.

“They’ve been doing it to me for the last 2 1/2 years,” he said, “harassment over and over.”

Around the country, fans and friends have been mounting efforts to get Brown out of prison. Last month in Augusta, where Brown faced even more charges stemming from the Sept. 24 incident, his attorneys won an important first step when the judge there ruled that an additional six-year sentence would run concurrent with his present term.

Brown still faces a hearing on the violation of probation for his previous drug and traffic conviction. If that is set aside, Brown’s earliest release could come through a work-release arrangement. Outside of that, Brown comes up for probation in August, 1991.

Meanwhile, in New York, record producer Van Silk and rap artist Mellie Mel have launched a “Free James Brown” movement, complete with black-and-white buttons. They are hoping to get one million signatures to persuade South Carolina penal authorities to show leniency. Plans are also under way for a James Brown benefit concert, Silk said.

Brown said he had hoped that it wouldn’t come to this.

“I though the President (Ronald Reagan), since I supported him, would step in and help me,” he said. “I served on his task force for the last seven years. Mr. Bush is in now. I figure then when they get around to it, they will come to my aid. Hopefully, they will understand that there is a man in jail for nothing. All of those other people that got in trouble and got out. I’m asking that they straighten out my business so I can get out and help the Afro-American culture in this country, bring them some ideas, like I did in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s.

“It’s hard to believe that when a man outdoes Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, they don’t have a place for him.”