The Hardest Working Man by James Sullivan

Author:James Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Always seeking the upper hand, Brown was one of the first major performers to understand the value of owning the rights to his own recordings and publishing. When in the mid- 1960s he negotiated a new agreement with King Records, he demanded, and won, control over his master recordings, stuffing them in a bag and taking them on the road with him. Determined to leave as little room as possible for rivals to challenge his chart domination, he pumped an endless stream of recordings into the pipeline, often recycling castoff songs from long-forgotten sessions. (In this practice he was perfectly in tune with Syd Nathan, the irascible, crassly entrepreneurial founder of the King label, with whom Brown would otherwise engage in never-ending debate over the artistic merit, and commercial viability, of the singer’s material.)

Brown often used his songwriting credits as leverage, dangling them in front of associates in return for favors or, perhaps, the annulment of debts. Charles Bobbit, the personal manager who was with Brown until the day he died, is ascribed as co-writer on many of the singer’s songs, and Bobbit is sole owner of the writing credit for “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” recorded in 1968, just after he joined the organization. Several of Brown’s mid-1960s recordings feature the name Bud Hobgood, an artist and repertoire man who worked for Syd Nathan. “People wondered for years—did Bud Hobgood have something on James?” as David Matthews, a jazz-trained arranger who worked on many sessions with Brown in the early 1970s, once said.

But offering his associates publishing credits was also Brown’s way of imparting his hard-earned wisdom. “Soul Power, Pts. 1 & 2,” for instance, recorded in January 1971, in Washington, D.C., was Fred Wesley’s initiation as arranger. Brown offered his associate a choice: he could either take $125 or 25 percent of the publishing royalties. Wesley, who had just returned from California, needed a coat for the chilly East Coast weather, so he told his boss he would take the cash. Brown shook his head and said, “Son, I’m gonna tell you something. If you had taken the twenty-five percent, that’d take care of your family from now on.’ ” Wesley took the publishing every time thereafter.

“I don’t know if he liked me,” says Wesley. “But he did open my eyes. He gave enough [credits] to where it has taken care of families. I don’t know if Pee Wee got all he was supposed to get, but I’m satisfied with what I got.”

As much as he considered himself a churchgoing man, Brown’s true religion was capitalism. It was “enterprise as emancipation,” as Philip Gourevitch put it in a 2002 New Yorker profile, “ownership and tycoondom as the ultimate social justice.” He tried his hand as a restaurateur and a nightclub owner (his short-lived food chain, launched in 1969 and likely inspired by Ali’s own restaurant venture of the time, Champburger, was called Gold Platter). Recordings credited to individual band members and other protégés were “James Brown Productions.

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