James Brown by James Brown & Bruce Tucker

James Brown by James Brown & Bruce Tucker

Author:James Brown & Bruce Tucker [Brown, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784082857
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.


22

Lost in a Mood of Changes

First thing, I moved out of the South—for good, I thought. I wasn’t bitter or anything like that, I just wanted to be closer to the center of the entertainment business. It’s funny about the South. It did a lot to me, but it also made me what I am. My roots, my religion, and my music all come out of the South. Generations of my family, as far back as I can trace them, lived around one little area in South Carolina. I never even traveled outside the South until that first recording session at King.

I moved my father into the house I had on Ell Street in Macon and bought a big twelve-room Victorian place in St. Albans, Queens, in New York City. I bought it from Mr. Bart and Cootie Williams, the great trumpet player with Duke Ellington. The Ell Street house was available because Dessie and I had broken up.

She was a good woman—we were together for a lot of years—but she did a lot of wrong things. I guess I did, too. We fought a lot. She went through a lot of money, but she didn’t know any better. She often played pinball, the kind that pays off—if you win; otherwise, you lose money. She lost a lot—a lot. She also bought presents for men with my money. Once she bought a present for a fella in the hospital and didn’t even buy one for me. She was a hardworking girl, but she didn’t know any better.

The house in St. Albans needed a lot of work—the basement was full of water, things like that—so I hired a bunch of people to work on it while I went on tour. The move was just one part of several big changes I was getting ready to make. First, though, I wanted to do another live album.

Even before the Apollo record got so big, I was talking to Pop about doing another. I wanted to do it in Washington at the Howard because I figured that was a good audience for me. Fop said, “It doesn’t matter where you cut it, Jimmy, you’re going to have a wild audience now.” So in November, after we left the Apollo with all the long lines and everything, we went into the Royal and cut Pure Dynamite: Live at the Royal. At just about the same time, Atlantic Records was recording all their people live at the Apollo: Otis Redding, King Curtis, Ben E. King, Doris Troy, Rufus Thomas, and the Coasters.

I think Pop was wrong, though. It did matter where we cut the album because we had some acoustic problems with the Royal. The album didn’t sound bad, but it didn’t sound as good as the Apollo recording. Live at the Royal was kind of lost in the shuffle anyway because when it was released in February 1964 the other record was still climbing the charts, hanging in there much longer than anybody thought it would.



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