The media beams vacuous nonsense at people nightly such that any thoughtful person must stretch to take meaning from it. Boomers raised on the basic mind control box find it hard to avert their eyes; and the latest technological advances have made its pablum even more ubiquitous. On FOX recently, bad action movie has been Chuck Norris substituted for Sean Hannity on the far-right-vs.-near-right TV show Hannity and Colmes. Wayne Rogers, the original Trapper John on MASH, appears regularly on one of FOX's financial shows, the only voice of reason on a crew of craven money idolaters. Rogers did investment banking even while playing Trapper John. He quit the series because producers gave his character only the second banana, and Rogers was already shaking many more off the Wall Street tree. Bonanza star Pernell Roberts is the only other person to play Trapper John. Maybe they can get him on something at FOX. Both are far more decent celebrities than usually can be found there, and far greater actors.

    I recently had occasion to open files from a time when I worked as a rock critic for a daily newspaper and did a lot of freelance writing about popular music and put me closer than usual to celebrity, silly and serious. My effort then, as ever, was to get around simply saying that I liked or disliked a particular performance or celebrity, since in many instances my attitude otherwise would have tilted toward vacuous adulation, since I mostly pursued reporting on people I respected. These files included a report of my attendance at Elvis Presley’s funeral, thoughts about Abbie Hoffman, notes on some conferences I attended with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Tim Leary, and the following book review of the autobiography of James Brown, who passed away last Christmas.

James Brown, The Godfather Of Soul
By James Brown with Bruce Tucker;
epilogue by Dave Marsh
Thunder's Mouth Press,
352 pages, $13.95

    This biography of the hardest-working man in show business was first published on the heels of Brown's last hit, the "Living in America" theme from the last Rocky movie in 1986. At the time, the trade paperback edition failed to materialize because of takeover of its imprint,Thunder's Mouth Press, by MacMillian. This gave time to both co-author Bruce Tucker, who produces a new introduction, and critic Dave Marsh, who offers his analysis of Brown’s legal troubles as an epilogue. Both add much to an already compelling oral history.

    To recap Brown's recent run-in with the law: in September 1988, Brown took a shotgun into an insurance seminar in Augusta, Georgia, outraged that someone had used the restroom of his office, located in the next building. After the incident, police chased Brown in his pickup down roads that ran along the South Carolina border, stopping him by shooting out his tires with a total of 23 bullets.

    Brown was charged in both Georgia and South Carolina with failing to stop for police. He was released on bail, and charged again the next day for driving under the influence of pot and PCP. Shortly thereafter, Brown’s wife, Adrianne, announced that she was considering filing assault charges. She never did, however, and police dropped the narcotics charges in both states. A South Carolina judge gave Brown six years for driving under the influence and assaulting police. Brown received a concurrent sentence in Georgia.

    All this figures prominently in the new introduction and epilogue of James Brown: Godfather of Soul, almost to the extent that it obscures the rest of Brown’s retelling of his life and career. This is, after all, JAMES BROWN – a mythic alter ego so capitalized by the author – the dynamo responsible for “Please, Please, Please,” “I Got You,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and many other soul hits, whose boasts of being the forebear of funk, disco, rap and worldbeat music are not even challenged by more likely candidates.

    Between the contributions of Tucker and Marsh lies a wealth of anecdotal material containing the kind of detail that makes an autobiography come alive. Brown recounts his birth in his parents’ one-room shack in the woods near Barnwell, SC and his heroic Aunt Estelle slapping him into life; his young years living in a bordello in Augusta, GA run by his Aunt Honey. (“It was a funny thing about the soldiers…they didn’t believe in oral sex; they thought it was unholy.”); and the early development of his stylish, powerful stage presence as part of his shoe-shining routine, “popping the rag and beating the brushes behind my back.” Music, of course, was the saving grace of a poor and difficult childhood, and Brown provides generous praise to his antecedents, from the nearly anonymous Mr. Dink, who taught him drums, to the guitar taught to him by blues great Tampa Red.

    Not all the detail comes unvarnished, however: Brown and his band upstage Little Richard and his Upsetters after being coaxed onstage by an audience. Although it’s easy enough to understand Brown’s boast - that he had everything Little Richard had but he could dance, too - one wonders how Little Richard’s version of this encounter goes.

    James Brown, The Godfather of Soul also contrasts the flamboyant JAMES BROWN, the showman whose business it is to be popular, with James Brown, an African-American compelled to use his fame to address an unpopular concern for black pride. Sometimes the effort works, as with "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I’m Proud" developing from a throw-away riff into an anthem for young blacks as events developed in 1968; and sometimes it fails miserably, as with Brown's endorsement of Nixon in 1972 ('"You can't change a house from outside,' I said. 'You have to be inside the house. That's why I endorsed Mr. Nixon. I'm trying to sell us in. I'm trying to put pressure on the government not to forget about us.'"), which met with near-universal scorn and protests at his concerts.

    Obviously, the James Brown of the Rocky theme still walks that tightrope between the conservatism of a mainstream, that has, after all, brought him fame and wealth, and the mainstream's bastard brother — racism -- which landed Brown in jail with two six-year sentences for a traffic violation, surpassing in its unfairness even the recent $5000 extortion by local authorities of Chuck Berry over bogus drug and child-porn charges. Dave Marsh finds in Brown's philosophy "the convoluted simplicities of the skilled evangelical preacher” and at times seems exasperated that even now the singer does not feel his legal troubles have anything to do with institutional racism. Of course, only Brown and the police know the truth behind the aggravated assault charges. Marsh dismisses them parenthetically with the specious reasoning that they played a minor part in the overall sentencing. Although Marsh's rhetorical flashes sometimes go a long way in measuring the contributions of a performer like James Brown, biases are transparent. They would have been better served informing the extensive discography in this book with some annotation. His analysis in his epilogue adds a lively component to James Brown,The Godfather of Soul, but the reader does not come away feeling the whole story has been told.