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Feb 14, 2008 21:20:04 GMT -5
Post by Steve on Feb 14, 2008 21:20:04 GMT -5
Local free-jazz legend has paid his dues
By Jeff Simon
Updated: 02/13/08 6:39 AM
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Concert Preview Charles Gayle 8 p.m., Saturday Hallwalls Gallery, 341 Delaware Ave. The great Buffalo free-jazz saxophonist returns home for a concert with bassist Hillard Greene and drummer Michael Wemberl.
Charles Gayle is an authentic jazz legend. And, in fact, hero.
The free-jazz saxophonist, soon to be 69, is certainly the most extreme musician ever to emerge into international renown from the streets, clubs and churches of Buffalo.
And yet there is no Hall of Fame anywhere that is ever likely to have him, for the same reason that there has never been a mainstream record label to record him (all of his many discs are on VERY independent labels) and no major mainstream venue that has ever paid tribute, despite the astonishing lifetime of utter purity he has brought to his music.
There will, you can be certain, be no evenings with Charles Gayle at Wynton Marsalis’ Lincoln Center.
That’s because, to many listeners, his music — still — isn’t music at all, just a cacophony of squeals, howls, whistles, honks, bleats and sonic furies on his saxophones. To ears saturated with Mozart and Schubert piano sonatas — ears whose furthest journey is the reassurances of soft rock — Charles Gayle creates anti-music.
In up-from-Buffalo jazz circles, Gayle can even be thought of as the anti-Grover Washington, a tenor saxophonist of similar age and background (the late Washington was four years Gayle’s junior). Instead of the soul-drenched commercial jazz that made Washing-ton’s career, Gayle came up — largely independently, he says — in the post-Coltrane world of such paint-peeling multiphonic free-jazz players as Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler. He moved to New York from Buffalo in the mid-’70s.
And while all of them — even Ayler — compromised their music and, for their own reasons, made major concessions to the jazz middle, Gayle remained so pure that he spent many years as a homeless musician in New York, playing for pocket change on the streets and in subways and sleeping wherever he could find a place.
And that is the harrowing and truly profound part of the Charlie Gayle legend. What more pungent metaphor could there be for the art of jazz at its most extreme — playing for change to an audience of those who were, at best, likely to be bewildered.
I must confess, personally, that my own listening experiences to Charles Gayle in live performance in Buffalo in the late-’60s and ’70s never quite exceeded reverent puzzlement. The Romantic visionary madness of his art always seemed admirable (I once waited for a Gayle event to begin at its announced beginning time in the wee small hours); listening to an entire evening of Gayle in concert was another matter entirely.
It was always clear listening to Gayle wrestle sonically with the Lord that the innermost aspirations of the human spirit are somehow turning into sound. Whether or not you can actually stand the resultant music is almost a separate matter.
And then, after years of near-total anonymity in New York, the cause of Gayle — Buffalo avant-gardist and Manhattan street and loft musician — was suddenly taken up by the proprietor of the Knitting Factory in 1988. Gayle recorded a disc on the Knitting Factory label. And suddenly the dam burst.
People immediately understood that the purest apostle extant of post-Coltrane high-energy saxophone bedevilment and ascension was Charlie Gayle, who seems never to have wavered for a second from his original musical mission back in Buffalo.
In an exceedingly rare appearance back home, Gayle will perform in a trio with bassist Hilliard Greene and drummer Michael Wimberly at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Hallwalls Gallery, 341 Delaware Ave.
Gayle’s arsenal of reed instruments has expanded since his original Buffalo appearances and he has played so much piano that he has even recorded a solo piano disc. So, too, have his performances sometimes been enriched with dramatics, masks and costumes (there’s a Gayle character he calls “Streets the Clown”).
In a powerful May 2006 interview with writer Rex Butters in the Web site “All About Jazz” he talked about the music he heard at home growing up in Buffalo.
“Jazz was there, what they called popular music: doo wop or whatever the people were doing at the time. We had Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, piano players ‘Fatha Hines,’ that kind of stuff. We had some of the popular music of that time that we had in the neighborhood. I guess you could call them black records. Dinah Shore, Nat ‘King’ Cole, that was in the house. Louis Armstrong.
“I was about 12 or 13 years old and I started to really get into jazz, started really paying attention to it as I got older. I wanted to find out how they did what they did.”
He started playing saxophone only to challenge a friend that he’d be better at the instrument than he was in six months. (He wasn’t. “I have to admit, I didn’t get it.”)
Gayle stoutly maintains to Butters that long before Ornette Coleman made a free-jazz reputation “some of the freeer music, not completely free, was in the church, and it was also in the bars, some of the blues bars when they were letting it all hang out. . . . I heard people play it before it became national. I think a lot of people in different cities can say that. . . .
“If I have to give credit to anyone, it’s my parents. They were independent thinkers. Maybe everybody is, but I know them best of course. They spoke their mind in a very peaceful way, not afraid. They told me to think for myself. I don’t do this to be independent; I just don’t see how you could not be. It’s just natural for me to be the way I am. It’s not for show. The clown, the mask, the drums — it’s just like drinking water to me. I put on a clown nose because I thought this will strip you of your ego. I didn’t do it to look funny. It’s just me. . . . ”
“It’s a privilege for me to play, considering what people have to go through in life. It’s a privilege and an honor to be able to play music and travel and do things you just don’t get a chance to do in life. There’s enough musicians who have passed that have been here to push you to the edge, and to motivate you and keep you going. The level of music is so high considering people who were here and passed on that you can’t quit. I don’t think I’ll ever reach it, but maybe it’s best that I don’t feel like I can and keep trying.”
jsimon@buffnews.com
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manho
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Feb 16, 2008 20:56:33 GMT -5
Post by manho on Feb 16, 2008 20:56:33 GMT -5
A funk inferno
When Martin Luther King was assassinated 40 years ago, only one US city was spared the riots that followed. Ed Vulliamy tells the extraordinary story of a James Brown gig that changed history
Ed Vulliamy
Sunday February 17, 2008
Observer
That ugly thing of vile violence - the assassin's bullet which struck down Martin Luther King - did more than kill a visionary man of peace on the night of 4 April 1968, on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King was in town to support a strike by garbage workers; his trip had already been haunted by death threats, and although they were hardly the first, the 39-year-old Baptist minister and activist eerily predicted his own end, proclaiming to his audience:
'And then I got to Memphis. And some began to ... talk about the threats that were out ... What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers ... But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land! I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.'
His assassination the following evening changed America for ever and defined almost everything that ensued, including music, especially black music. For the preacher of 'The Dream' of peace and brotherhood to be gunned down in what was already a political and cultural cauldron meant there could now be no turning away from what was happening in America and the world. The moment had come - as Sly Stone sang - to 'Stand!' and be counted.
The assassin had found the right man, as would another, killing Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles two months later. It is hard to imagine what the four decades since would have been like had both men lived.
On every radio set, at home and in Vietnam, Marvin Gaye's honeyed yearning for love became urgent demands: 'What's Going On' and 'What's Happening, Brother', the Temptations now spinned a 'Ball of Confusion (That's What the World is Today)', Stevie Wonder saw something different in the mirror of his mind from 'My Cherie Amour' - and was now 'asking 'Heaven Help us All'. Sly and the Family Stone insisted: 'Don't call me Nigger, Whitey, Don't Call me Whitey, Nigger' and Aretha Franklin demanded 'Respect', casting off the 'Chain of Fools'.
And James Brown went from 'Papa's Got a Brand New Bag' to 'Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud'.
Along with Muhammad Ali, the soul singer was America's most prominent black figure in 1968 and the song became a slogan for his generation and those to follow, a slogan which would also set cities across America, Britain and later France ablaze. But igniting the ghetto was exactly what Brown didn't want, and exactly what he stopped from happening. Because before he recorded that song, this deeply ambivalent emblem of the period would enter the annals of the history not only of music, but also the narrative of King's death itself - on the night after the murder, that of 5 April 1968, James Brown made music keep the peace with one of the most remarkable concerts ever.
As news spread that the bullet had found its quarry in Memphis and that King was dead, a wave of rioting engulfed 150 cities and towns across America. One of those cities, potentially, was Boston, where Kevin White, the Irish-American mayor, elected only three months beforehand, was in a cinema watching Gone With the Wind when an aide passed him a note reading: 'Martin Luther King has been assassinated in Memphis'. White went back to Scarlett, Rhett and Mammy until another aide tapped his elbow, saying that Edmund McNamara, the Police Commissioner, wanted a word.
In the cinema manager's office, White learned by telephone that fires were sprinkling the night sky over Boston's Roxbury and South End ghettoes. He headed on foot for police headquarters, and thence to join his assistant, Barney Frank - now a senior Democrat congressman - in the mayoral office. White was of a mind to deploy a heavy police presence but Frank recalls cautioning him that this might only escalate the violence, and wherever possible, prudence should allow black community leaders themselves to try to contain it.
According to an account of events in J. Anthony Lukas's epic history of postwar Boston, Common Ground, 'nothing in Kevin White's experience had remotely prepared him for the racial explosion he faced in April'. Nevertheless, White counted among his supporters Boston's first and only black councilman, Tom Atkins, who now disturbed the mayor's troubled sleep on the office couch with a call at 9am to announce that 'something terrible is about to happen'. James Brown was coming to town.
Not that Atkins wasn't a fan of the Godfather of Soul. He hailed from Indianapolis, but had to leave his home state for Michigan to wed his white college sweetheart because interracial marriage was illegal in Indiana. He studied Arabic at Harvard and stayed in Boston to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for which he became Boston's executive secretary. The Boston Globe of 1963 recorded his 'stern young voice boom metallically' as it exhorted a rally of 6,000 blacks to 'march to the polls and vote'.
What troubled Atkins was that he had taken a call from a DJ called James Byrd on Boston's soul station, WILD, who doubled as the local agent for James Brown. Byrd said that Brown had been booked to play the Boston Garden to an audience of 14,000 that night, the vast majority of whom would be young and black. For all its claims to American aristocracy, the city remained highly segrated and the violence over desegregation of schools had been worse than anywhere else in the north.
The Garden, nervous that the concert was tantamount to hosting a riot, had cancelled the show. Atkins needed no time to realise that, with America in tinderbox mode, for the gig not to go ahead would light the fuse to an even bigger powder keg. 'There'll be thousands of black teenagers down at the Garden,' he later recalled pleading to White, 'and when they find those gates locked, they're going to be pretty pissed. King's death and Brown's cop-out will get all mixed up and we'll have an even bigger riot that last night, only this time it will be in the heart of downtown.'
Frank admits that he had thought Brown was a famous football player. White had never heard of him, and kept referring to him as 'James Washington'. Atkins persuaded the mayor not only that the concert should go ahead, but that the proceedings should be televised to keep people off the streets. The task was to convince the Garden, the TV stations - and James Brown himself. Three commercial channels balked, but public broadcaster WGBH agreed. Byrd was livid, explaining that Brown had recorded a television show in New York, conditional on exclusivity, and would 'not like' this breach of contract. With Brown in the TV studio, Byrd called his manager, Greg Moses, who raised another problem: Brown would 'take a bath' if no one turned up for the show, in which case who would underwrite the gate?
The answer dawned on Atkins: the city of Boston. White was appalled, but Atkins won him round, the mayor warning that it must never 'get out that we underwrote a goddam rock star with city money'. Atkins told Moses that the city would make up the difference between whatever Brown netted and the value of a full house. So Atkins and White boarded the mayoral limo for Logan airport to greet the Godfather of Soul.
America had reached a point of explosive convergence between the politics of race and racism, the Civil Rights movement led by King, the culture of insurrection in mid-Sixties America and war in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson made civil rights a pillar of his 'Great Society' agenda but approved massive increases in spending on the war in south-east Asia. King, meanwhile, had the insight to see how 'the bombs in Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the hopes of a decent America. The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam.'
'Vietnam invaded every corner of American music', music historian Craig Werner later wrote, and 'no matter how often LBJ, Nixon or for that matter the Weathermen or the Panthers lied about how profoundly our experiences of Vietnam were connected, the music told the truth'.
It had been in the South that King launched the movement against American apartheid, but Chicago was the focal point of America's insurrection in 1968: where the black movement converged with Abbie Hoffman's 'Yippie' revolt - whereby the 'Summer of Love' had grown up and got serious about race and Vietnam - and violence engulfed the Democrat party convention, for which both Black Panthers and Yippies would famously stand trial. The city's Southside ghetto had, to a greater extent than its counterparts, brought with it in the migration from the cottonfields the dual howl of the black odyssey, the blues and gospel. But, as the great Chicago bluesman Willie Dixon confessed: 'Every time you change the news, you got to change the blues because the news ain't always the same.' While the blues had chronicled the tribulations of black America, they did not confront the system. To do that, a new sound emerged: soul, and soul was about to become inescapably political.
Curtis Mayfield, born in Chicago in 1942, recorded his 'People Get Ready' with the Impressions in 1965. 'There's a train a-coming', it cautioned, 'you don't need no baggage, you just get on board'. The train was 'picking up passengers from coast to coast' and although it was a nominally a train to religious salvation, this locomotive was a barely coded metaphor for an iron horse a-coming in this life too.
This is what, looking back, Chuck D of hip hop group Public Enemy explains as the 'brewing period. When what is sung ain't necessarily what is heard. When Martha Reeves sings "Dancing In the Street", people are thinking about doing other things in the streets, so that song becomes an anthem of the riots.'
In 1967, the Impressions released 'We're a Winner', but now the message was loud and proud: 'No more tears do we cry/ We have finally dried our eyes/ And we're movin' on up'
Mayfield performed it at a Panthers rally in the Oakland Auditorium early in 1968, in the company of Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael. On the other hand, he praised King - Mayfield's 'musical truth' involved a high-wire act between 'Black Power' and a democratic world for all people.
There were other strains, too: Nina Simone had hitched her heart-stopping voice to the mast of the civil rights movement as early as 1964 with 'Mississippi Goddam', in response to the murder of Medgar Evers by the Ku Klux Klan and the bombing of a black church in Alabama, killing four children, in 1963, and Aretha Franklin was engaged directly with Dr King, a family friend and regular visitor to the Franklin household.
In Detroit, Tamla Motown had burst black music's banks into the mainstream. In California, whites and blacks played together for the first time in Sly and the Family Stone, of which the Panthers disapproved. And then there was the Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness.
By 1968 James Brown become a superstar and businessman, a pioneer of black capitalism, telling audiences that 'Black Power' meant owning radio stations, a restaurant franchise and a Rolls- Royce as he did, and employing a retinue of staff. He had travelled far: born, according to his autobiography, in 1933 in a shack outside Barnwell, South Carolina, he had been abandoned by his mother and then his father, and raised by an aunt at the brothel she ran in Augusta, Georgia. He hustled, picked cotton, shined shoes, cut sugar cane, excelled in sports and boxing and stole cars for which he was sentenced to hard labour - and learned music, playing piano in the prison gym and forming a gospel quartet.
Brown's stardom, his cogency and hypnotic dazzle, his blackness, was beyond rhetoric. It got called 'soul' or 'funk' but even these words were insufficient - Brown's potency was mercurial and subliminal as well as in-your-face and primal.
The sound that he was speeding towards by 1968 all but dispensed with melody and harmony, bringing an orgasmic howl and raw rhythm to the fore; even Jimmy Nolen's chicken-scratch guitar was percussive. Its power was in the pulsating, restless, heartbeat that gave voice to the energy, virility and vibrancy of the ghetto street, but without a trace of victimhood. Quite the reverse: Brown and cuts like the seminal 'Cold Sweat' were becoming a gale-force statement of pride, black pride even before 'Say It Loud'.
As he rose to mega-stardom, it was as though the new generation of black youth of America had found and created James Brown, rather than the artist finding his public. His sound was the uprising, it was (to re-assert Craig Werner's phrase) 'the truth' and the truth was political without Brown having to say so.
Then between 23 and 27 July 1967, the worst riots in American history had swept Detroit and 47 people, mostly black, were killed. Brown joined Martha Reeves to plead that 'it's not time to steal, shoot and kill one another'. To address the causes of rioting, Lyndon Johnson tasked his Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, to oversee a commission on education among blacks. Humphrey approached leading figures to solicit their support for a 'Stay in School' drive and entertained Brown at the White House.
The result was Brown's 'Don't be a Dropout', with its chorus: 'Without an education, you might as well be dead'. In January 1967, Humphrey decreed the distribution of 'Don't be a Dropout', with badges and supporting literature, to almost every radio station in America.
While Brown's relationship with Humphrey was seen as vainglorious by black militants, his campaign was prescient of the movement's later shift from 'Burn Baby Burn' to 'Learn Baby Learn'. Never simple to characterise, the singer's politics could be described as being even whimsical.
'When a great man is killed for no reason and he happens to be your friend,' he continued in his autobiography, 'you feel the loss twice over. In Martin's case, it was all one feeling, because with him it was like the nation had lost its greatest friend. That's what Martin was - America's best friend. And a lot of Americans didn't even realise it ... Like a lot of people, I knew [the assassination] was going to bring a great deal of violence, burning and death, and I know everybody would lose by it. I don't want it to happen, and I knew Martin wouldn't want it to happen.'
Brown called the radio stations he owned in Baltimore and Knoxville, demanding to be put live on air. 'I urged the people to stay calm, to honour Dr King by being peaceful.' Next day, he recorded his TV show in New York and went 'from the studio directly to the airport and flew to Boston. I wanted to go through with my concert there because I thought it would give me an opportunity to keep some people off the streets that night - the night everybody was predicting the worst rioting - and to talk them out of the situation.'
He remembers being met by Mayor White and Atkins, and being 'filled in on the situation' in the limo. Atkins, recalls Brown, had told the mayor that if the show had been cancelled 'he'd be lucky if his own office was left standing'. After a long wrangle about Brown's other TV contract in New York, 'we both got to talking about how we felt about Dr King.
'"You know", I said, "I didn't always agree with him, but he was a great man and he did a lot for all of us ... If I was faced with some of the same situations he was - people beating me, throwing things at me, cursing me, spitting on me - I don't know if I could stay non-violent, not as a matter of philosophy'.
'"I know what you mean", [Atkins] said, "I once spent an entire night in Mississippi in 1964 arguing that point with him. I'm non-violent if I have to be, but I don't want anybody to ever make the mistake of thinking they could hit me and get away with it".
'"Brother, that's where I'm at," I said. "But I had the deepest respect and love for him."'
By now the car was arriving at the Boston Garden, surrounded by fans come to claim refunds because they could now see the concert for free at home on TV. And Brown stops thinking about King, turning to the matter of money again. 'Now things were really a mess. For the first time I got really mad.' The TV recording of the show was 'killing the gate ... I'm going to have to play to an empty house, I'm going to have to pay for it myself.' Atkins calmed him down, and told him that 'the city guarantees the gate'. 'Fair enough,' said Brown. 'Let's get to it.'
Brown's own later account omits a huddle in the mayor's office during which he demands a guarantee of $60,000. The mayor was appalled. 'Martin Luther King had just been killed', J Anthony Lukas later wrote, 'and the highest paid black performer in America who made $2 million a year, had a Victorian mansion, a Rolls-Royce, two Cadillacs ... was worrying about the gate from one measly concert! But White was running out of options. "Okay Mr Brown," he said, "you've got your commitment, now get up on that stage!" '
Actually, it was Atkins who took the stage, watched by 2,000 mainly black youths in a hall less than a sixth full. 'This country owes James Brown a great debt,' he said, 'and we're lucky to have him here tonight with us. Give a great round of applause to James Brown!'
The audience did, but it was not the Godfather of Soul who took the next turn, it was a man Atkins described as 'young, a man who cares, and he's going to make this a great city - the honourable mayor!' The crowd deflated at the sight of Kevin White in a slick blue suit. Sensing his anxiety, and the crowd's hesitation, Brown seized the mike, telling the audience: 'This is one swingin' cat. Okay, yeah, give him a round of applause, ladies and gentlemen, he's a swingin' cat!'
Masterfully (if absurdly) blessed, the mayor told a now willing audience that, 'Twenty-four hours ago, Dr King died for all of us, black and white, that we may live together in harmony. Now, I'm here to ask for your help, to make Dr King's dream a reality in Boston ... and pledge that what any other community might do, we in Boston will honour Dr King in peace."
'The man is TOGETHER!' shouted Brown, adding: 'Let's not do anything to dishonour Dr King.' Then he lit the fuse under one of the great concerts of all time, throwing off his jacket and launching into a frantic, pleading, driving account of - of all things - 'Has Everybody Got the Feeling?'.
They sure as hell had, and there was no turning back now, not for Brown, not for Boston, not for music. The Godfather of Soul stormed through the songs they loved best in the Garden and at home on TV, while the streets of Boston remained empty and silent, as every other ghetto in America burned.
The concert was a fulgent stroke of lightning, as surviving footage proves, Brown in overdrive and on fire, even by his standards. The sound was impenitent, his body and voice way up the Richter scale as he thundered through 'Papa's Got a Brand New Bag', 'Please Please Please' and the rest, punctuating the music with his own prototype of rap - gasping and rasping his lyrics - entwined with impromptu homage to the dead Dr. King.
'Throughout the show,' Brown recalls, 'I tried to work in a little rap about Dr King and the whole situation. I talked about my life and where I'd come from. At one point, when I was just reminiscing about Martin, I started to cry - just a few tears rolling out, nothing anybody could see - but it was like it was all starting to really sink in what we lost. But I pulled myself together, I thought that would do the most good, and went on with the show.'
Backstage during the course of the concert, talking by radio to police cars patrolling empty streets, Atkins and the mayor negotiated with WGBH, Boston's public radio broadcaster, for the whole show to be repeated as soon as it was over. Brown came back to agree between numbers that was 'fine by me', and announced as much before going into his finale, at which point a group of fans breached security and clambered on to the stage to shake Brown by the hand.
The police made a move to clear them off. 'All it would take,' recalls Brown, 'to destroy everything I had been trying to do all night long was for there to be an incident with the police and have it televised.' Brown stopped the music, and parlayed with the police: 'I'm all right', he said, 'I want to shake their hands', which he did, before asking the fans to please, and quietly, leave the stage, which they did, before hurrying home to watch the televised re-run.
One of those roaming the streets that night was Peter Wolf, lead singer in the J Geils Band. 'I remember going through the South End, and every window seemed to be watching James Brown,' he says.
'My wife and I went to the Garden that night,' remembers one fan, Robin Upton, now living in Cambridge across the Charles River. 'We were so upset about the King assassination ... and were probably the only white people over 30 in the place.'
Years later, Upton met Mayor White and he mentioned 'how frightened we had been when we first got there'. White replied: 'Nowhere near as frightened as I was.'
But, says Leon Rock, another witness to the show, now living in Maryland: 'I grew up in the old Orchard Park public housing, and was one of those black teenagers Mayor Kevin White was scared would riot at that time. I knew councillor Thomas Atkins well, and if it were not for Mr Brown and his impassioned plea from the stage for blacks to be cool and not set fire to their own neighbourhoods and communities, Boston would have had a race riot on its hands. But James Brown was more than Mr Please Please Please. He was a brother who ... energised generations: "Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud".'
By the time James Brown recorded that song, his capriciousness had taken him elsewhere. He travelled directly from Boston to Washington DC, were several people had been killed in the rioting, and 'I couldn't believe the destruction: buildings smoking, smashed glass all over the streets'. He went on live television, and said: 'I know how everybody feels. I feel the same way. But you can't accomplish anything by blowing up, burning up, stealing and looting. Don't terrorise, organise. Don't burn, give the kids a chance to learn. Go home. Be ready. Be qualified. Be somebody - that's Black Power.'
Within a month, though, Brown had dined at the White House and cut the patriotic 'America is My Home', before he endorsed Vice President Humphrey, who was contesting the Democratic nomination for the Presidency against the man who embodied the civil rights movement more than any other since King's death, Bobby Kennedy. So in early June, while the 'cool' artists flocked to a massive Kennedy fundraiser at the Los Angeles Sports arena, Humphrey appeared on stage with Brown at a concert in the same city with the crucial California primary approaching.
'You can do the boogaloo, man', Brown rapped at the VP, who started, excruciatingly, to gyrate. He was trounced in the California primary. But when Kennedy went to make his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel on 6 June with the White House in sight, he was assassinated.
Brown had backed a bumbling pro-war loser agsinst the great hope of the civil rights movement, and it hardly helped his standing when within days, he left on another extraordinary adventure: for Vietnam, of all places. The very fact of his Pentagon-assisted visit was seen as a further betrayal. After King's killing, some white soldiers in Vietnam paraded in KKK robes, a Confederate flag was hoisted at another base for three days and the slogan 'I'd rather kill a nigger than a gook' (ie the Vietcong) was scrawled on barrack walls.
Unlike Bob Hope, who flew in from and straight back to Bangkok, Brown - an honorary lieutenant colonel for the occasion, Brown stayed in Saigon with a slimmed-down version of his band. Just before arriving at their hotel a mortar hit a few doors down the street and killed 17 people. The group proceeded to tour a series of bases aboard a military plane, 'harder than any tour I'd ever done', as Brown later recalled. The reaction from the troops, though, was 'incredible ... they found out I wasn't no Oreo cookie' - that is, black on the outside, white in the middle.
Three days after his return, Brown filled the 48,000-capacity Yankee stadium in New York's Bronx. And on 7 August, Judas of the anti-war movement, he went into a studio in Los Angeles and cut 'Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud'. Such is the existential and cultural irony of radical show business.
The song became an immediate, huge hit, but Brown dropped it from his live repertoire within a year, disturbed (as he later wrote) that it was perceived as being 'militant and angry - maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song. That's why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride ...'
And one further, incidental irony: most of the children that Brown was able to recruit for the recording session were white and Asian, with only a few black children included.
Given their lead as much by events as from their musical peers, black artists staked their political claims. In 1969, Sly and the Family Stone released 'Stand!': 'Stand! For the things you know are right/ It's the truth that the truth makes them so uptight ... Stand! There's a midget standing tall/ And the giant beside him about to fall.'
That 'truth' again, and the music telling it. Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, who had been preaching the revolutionary truth for years, now released such songs as 'Check Out Your Mind' and 'Stop The War'; the latter featured on the 1972 album Times Have Changed, which also featured a cover of Marvin Gaye's 'Inner City Blues'. Gaye had become one of Motown's top-selling entertainers, but now something different happened, with What's Going On, whereby rage and deep anxiety were spoken, sometimes even seductively whispered, through a musical tapestry which is on the surface easy to listen to, but ultimately disturbing, yearning and a masterpiece of sophistication and innovation.
Another 'entertainment' group transformed by the events of 1968 were the Temptations, who had been the smash-hit, swinging and swaying masters of love song. But in that year came 'Cloud Nine', which dealt with poverty and abuse driving black youth to drugs, and the remarkable 'Ball of Confusion', lamenting that 'Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation/ Ball of confusion/ Oh yeah, that's what the world is today'.
The Temptations bring out a timely re-visitation of their history next month, called Reflections (Universal), and, reflecting, the group's leader Otis Williams sums it up: 'They were turbulent times, and there came a point when you couldn't ignore what was happening. And yeah, the music had to change.' But, says Williams, 'when we sing those songs again on Reflections, I realise that we're singing about the present, the world is still a Ball of Confusion.'
Indeed, the giant in 'Stand!' did not fall. Now, when you download those lyrics, you are bombarded by adverts urging you to buy it as a ringtone. Tapping in 'Ball of Confusion' admits one to just that: a pandemonium of adverts for '3D chat bubbles'. Hip hop of the sort criticised by Chuck D of Public Enemy is a multi-billion dollar business glorifying the militarisation of the ghetto by gangs.
And from the zenith of 1968, although some of his greatest hits like 'Sex Machine' and 'Hot Pants' were still to come, James Brown's life, including his political life, embarked on a path towards weirdness and disaster. He began 1969 by playing at President Nixon's inaugural ball. And while the bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia became one of the war crimes of post-Holocaust history, Brown heartily endorsed the US commander-in-chief of those war crimes, in 1972, the year of the 'Black Woodstock' at 'Wattstax'.
Brown's concerts were picketed and 'James Brown, Nixon's Clown' became a popular chant. In 1974, he wrote 'Funky President' for Gerald Ford, among the un-funkiest Presidents America has ever had - the man of whom LBJ, Brown's other pal, said: 'He has trouble chewing gum and walking at the same time.' But worse was to come.
One of the singularities about Brown's road team during the Sixties was that drugs and alcohol were all but banned; 'Nobody got blitzed because you didn't do that in front of the Godfather,' his manager Alan Leeds recalls. 'Anyone of us who wanted to made sure he wasn't around - that was a ticket home.' Which made it all the more dangerous for Brown to experiment with drugs as he hit middle age, and especially when that drug was PCP. Much has been written about Brown's descent into drug addiction, depression, grotesque decadence, violence against his wives, self-delusion, and the charges for firearms and car chases for which he was finally jailed again.
Little did Brown think before performing at San Quentin prison in 1981 - when he told the NME how scared he was to be there, and how appalled by the uniformity of the prisoners' skin colour - that he would end up behind bars again himself. 'Those black kids [the prisoners]', he also said then, 'ain't ever seen a black president, and nine times out of 10 they won't ever see one.'
The idea was to establish a quasi-Masonic, secret stash, an emergency fund to underwrite the city's fortunes in an hour of need. The Vault was a shadow city cabinet, with a shadow city budget if the Irish-American political establishment - behind whose various candidates the Vault moved as it wished - spent all the money, which it often did.
The Irish-American mayor White distrusted the Anglo Brahmin establishment but in mid-April 1968 he appealed to the Vault to solve what he called his 'James Brown problem'. Soon returning from the long table in the Vault's boardroom to City Hall, he took a call from the Vault's Charles Coolidge, who said: 'Mayor, you have a hundred thousand dollars on account'.
One of the Vault, Gilbert Catlin, later explained that 'we had some pretty fierce arguments about that James Brown thing, but the mayor persuaded us that if we didn't come up with the money, the blacks were going to burn the city down'.
James Brown was, in the end, paid $15,000, the Vault having arm-wrenched the Garden into waiving its slice of the profits.
By the turn of the millennium, the Vault had died off, but Kevin White had become the longest-serving mayor in Boston's history, from 1968 to 1984; he would recall James Brown as 'a bit of a snake-oil salesman.'
Tom Atkins became a street hero in the de-segregation of Boston's schools, and went on to become general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which for decades remained America's largest, as well as first, civil rights organisation.
Recalling all these events 12 years ago, Atkins described his 'preferred way to deal with barriers - knock 'em down!'. He admitted to the Boston Globe that he had been to church 'thousands of times', but was not a religious man. 'I am not one to sit around and wait for miracles', he mused. 'I believe miracles are usually man-made'. And with James Brown, 40 years ago this April, he pulled one off.
Revolution soundtrack by Chuck D
The Public Enemy writer and rapper offers his own 'Black Power' Top 10 - 'for anyone who can't remember 1968 - or wasn't even born then.'
1. Sly and the Family Stone, 'Everyday People'
2. James Brown, 'Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud'
3. The O'Jays, 'A Gamble'
4. Nina Simone, 'Young, Gifted and Black'
5. Carlos Santana, 'I am Somebody'
6. Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, 'We're a Winnner'
7. Isley Brothers, 'FIight the Power'
8. Gil Scott Heron, 'The Revolution Will not be Televised'
9. Marvin Gaye, 'What's Going On?'
10. The Beatles, 'Come Together'
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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