Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 8, 1990 TAG: 9005080071
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JON PARELES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: AIKEN, S.C. LENGTH: Long
The job keeps him out of jail under a work-release program, and for the moment he is speaking more like a social worker than a rock star.
"We're working with the kids, we're working with the homeless, we're trying to train young people for jobs," Brown says.
"I go to schools, we go to different organizations, seminars, addressing the young people, and we try to keep a focus on what we're about here.
"Hopefully, we'll get across to someone that needs help and someone who also can support the organization. There's not enough money to go around. It's like the story of Christ, two little fish and five loaves of bread to feed oh so many."
James Brown is one of the most important figures in American music - a soul singer and shouter who taught the world a new way to dance when he invented the crisply syncopated, precision-drilled band riffs that echoed through Parliament-Funkadelic in the 1970s, Prince in the 1980s and innumerable rappers at the start of the '90s.
On stage, well into his 50s, he would do splits and twirls and dance steps that would wear out performers half his age.
"I was always 25 years ahead of my time," he says, "so I'd sit back and laugh at them trying to come and do what - it's been so long since I've done it, I laugh at it because it's elementary to what I'm about.
"When I see rap stuff, I admire it but I wish they'd done it 20 years ago, because I wouldn't have had to be sitting back waiting for them to catch up."
But Brown has been off the scene for about a year and a half. In December 1988, he began serving a six-year sentence at the State Park Correctional Center for failing to stop his pickup truck for a police officer, and for aggravated assault.
The sentence was the result of a high-speed chase that began after Brown carried a shotgun into an insurance seminar that was taking place next to his office in Augusta, Ga. Fleeing the seminar, he got into his truck, was pursued by the police and drove across the nearby South Carolina border, where he was arrested.
In Georgia, the same chase resulted in a six-year sentence (which he is serving concurrently in South Carolina) on charges including carrying a deadly weapon at a public gathering, attempting to flee a police officer and driving under the influence of drugs.
Brown was already on probation in Georgia after being convicted of assault and battery in an incident involving a policeman.
For the last two weeks, Brown has been in the state's work-release program, confined to the minimum-security Lower Savannah Work Center here when he's not on the job. Yet at the moment, he doesn't look like an inmate.
Natty in a teal silk shirt and a well-cut gray checked suit, wearing a large diamond ring and a turquoise-and-silver bracelet, he is holding forth in a borrowed office at Community Action.
When he takes off his purple, goggle-like sunglasses, his eyes are clear, with a twinkle; he is every inch the southern country preacher.
"I really think," he says, "that somewhere we should kind of take research on ourselves and remember the Bible said, `Judge ye not.' I think there's a lot of money spent on housing people away from home that should be spent on building them a home so they won't ever have to leave."
Brown is cooperating in the making of a television documentary, "James Brown: The Man, the Music and the Message."
It is to be produced by Steven Cooper Entertainment, based in Los Angeles, and by On the Potomac Productions, a Washington company that produced a documentary about Martin Luther King Day, featuring Stevie Wonder.
"What you see in my TV special will be factual and not fiction," he says. "Almost all the executives that are in the company seem to know me almost as well as I know myself. They've gotten basic stuff that probably you've never seen before."
Brown says he hoped to play a benefit concert for Community Action, to be filmed as part of the documentary, pending approval from the South Carolina Department of Corrections.
But the Department of Corrections refused permission for Brown to do the concert. A department spokesman, Francis X. Archibald, said it would have been "inconsistent" with the singer's employment with the community agency.
"We didn't allow him to perform while he was in prison and we can't let him perform down there just because he's been sent to a work center," Archibald said, adding that the concert was a commercial venture and that not all of the proceeds would go to the agency.
"As part of being in prison, your liberties are restricted and you're taken away from your commercial life. That applies to entertainers, stockbrokers, bankers and anyone else who goes to prison," Archibald said.
After three months on the job with the service agency, Brown could become eligible for extended work release, which would allow him to reside privately. But he would still not be permitted to cross the state line. He will become eligible for parole in South Carolina in March 1991 and in Georgia in March 1992.
For Brown, working at Community Action is an extension of his message songs, like "Don't Be a Dropout," "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud" and "King Heroin." He was such an important figure in the black community that he was called upon to quell riots in 1968.
"It's about me caring, that's what it's about," says Brown. "I've been doing that all my life, trying to help the disenfranchised people, and the ghetto definitely produces that. Sorry to say our country's producing a lot of it right now, and hopefully with some help we can slow down the production."
Although much of his community work so far has been spent in preparation, Brown has visited a few schools to speak to students. There, he is still treated as a star.
"The idea of me being there is to give them an up," he said. "But also, it's to let them know that I don't care who you are, you're somebody. I usually walk out and do something from my repertoire - I do that and I get their attention. I don't need a band, but I'd love to take a band.
"Here at the office, I'm on the phone, talking to people, reading mail, just staying involved with humanity. One of the things I didn't get a chance to do enough of when I was on the outside. You know, I was so busy trying to produce records, trying to get the movie parts set, do endorsements and travel."
"Everybody needs a rest," he said. "You've got to have a rest, find time to do something for yourself. Sometimes success can be badder than just being normal. When you're succcessful, you're definitely not normal, you're abnormal from that point, and being abnormal you can forget that you're human, forget to live.
"I don't do this for myself anymore. I'd like to come home and just sack out and put on a nice pair of denims and just run up and back and forth to the gate and sit out and play with the dog."
by CNB