Author: kim

I suppose it wasn’t a total surprise to wake up this morning and read that James Brown had left the building. He was, after all, 73 years old, and when you advertise yourself as the hardest working man in show business, you, well, you work hard at it. And there was never any doubt that James worked hard.

I got to see him up close once, in one of those random moments that happen when you least expect them. My friend TV Tom used to be the publicist for the Parliament-Funkadelic organization in their heyday, around 1977-78, which meant that there were several James Brown alumni on the bus: bassist Bootsy Collins, who fronted his own amazing band which included his brother Catfish (who’d played alongside Bootsy in the Brown band), saxophonist Maceo Parker, and trombonist Fred Wesley. Bootsy was always grateful for the protection the man he called “Mr. Brown” had given him as a young, green, but phenomenally gifted 16-year-old bass player, on the road with the “Sex Machine”-era Brown band. Catfish, Maceo, and Fred, however, would just give you the evil eye if you asked them about “Mr. Brown.”

Anyway, Tom and I had flown in from the East Coast, since I was doing a story on the band and, with Tom, would follow them from Savannah, Georgia to Washington D.C. over the course of four or five days. We’d flown non-stop from L.A. to Atlanta, and were going to get some tiny plane to cover the last leg, but the weather coming in had been very unpleasant, and I’m a fearful flyer at the best of times. (Almost Famous wouldn’t be made for years, but I am so there during that airplane scene.) Tom and I looked at the map, saw how close Savannah was, and decided to blow off the flight and pick up a rental car instead. We were going to have to do this anyway, and the chances were better that Atlanta would have a “floater,” a car not assigned to a pool, and, thus, not subject to dropoff charges. And hey, it was the record company’s money.

So we approached the Avis counter, which was next to the Hertz counter and maybe one or two others. As we were standing in line, Tom gripped my arm. “Don’t look, but that’s James Brown standing over there in the Hertz line!” So I casually rolled my eyes, and there he was. He was very short, very black, and had ridiculous hair. James Brown, all right.

Our line moved pretty quickly, and it became evident, the closer we got to the counter, that the black guy at the next counter was working for James Brown, because the dialogue was repetitive. Clerk: “I’m sorry, sir, but the card’s not going through.” Guy: “I’m certain there’s some mistake. We always use you people. The name is Brown, James Brown.” Clerk: “Yes, that’s the name I show, but the card’s not going through.” Guy: “Could you please try again?” Clerk: “Yes, sir. Let’s give it a minute.” And there would be some more business, and the card wouldn’t go through. “Do you suppose we should go vouch for him?” Tom wondered, more idly than asking a serious question. “Naaah, it’s the card that’s the problem, not the Godfather.”

Our business took a while, because we insisted on a floater, and civilians aren’t supposed to know about them. And we got to hear that dialogue several more times. The guy was just not going to give up. I think Tom was on the verge of taking his card over and putting it down for the beleaguered star when the clerk said “Well, how about that? It came up fine this time! I don’t know what the problem was, but it’s solved now.” At this point, James hustled up to the counter and said “It’s the car we always have reserved for us. The Lincoln. The purple Lincoln.” Tom made a face and tried not to laugh.

But I’ll tell you one thing: as we walked with our keys to the car we’d rented, we passed James Brown and the guy in the hall, and neither Tom nor I was brave enough to open our mouths and say a thing. Short, black, ridiculous hair, but the man had one powerful aura around him.

***

Actually, in the middle of writing that, I remembered the time I didn’t meet James Brown. In the early ’70s, John Goddard of Village Music, arguably America’s greatest record store, bought a warehouse full of King Records, and I discovered, through him, a goldmine of American music. I bought dozens of them, and one thing they all had in common was the address: 1540 Brewster Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio. I became obsessed with King and its amazing hillbilly and R&B artists, although I didn’t bother to pick up any of the albums John stocked by the man who had saved the company’s life in the late ’50s by being the only person on the label to have substantial hits: James Brown.

A lucky gig found me working in Chicago and picking up a nice check for it, so I arranged (back in the days of “triangle fares,” which let you add on a destination to a round-trip ticket for a negligible amount) to visit friends living near Dayton, Ohio. And, I reasoned, while I was there, I could drive to Cincinnati and visit 1540 Brewster.

Which, of course, I did. And found nothing. Well, not literally nothing, but the huge space was empty except for a little lady behind a desk. John had asked me to find any memorabilia, particularly photos, but also press releases, point-of-sale material, anything they might have, and, if there was a lot of it, to call him collect so he could arrange to pay for it and have it shipped. Naturally, I asked her about that first. “Oh, we got rid of all of that. Just threw it out. We saved some of the more important stuff, though.” Oh? I brightened up. “Like Steve Lawrence’s first contract. Did you know he started with us?” I almost passed out. Threw it out???

Just at this moment a string-bean with an explosion of orange hair walked into the room, obviously back from lunch, asking if he’d had any messages. “No, but there’s this young man who’s come asking about King. Maybe you folks have something he’s interested in?” “Sure,” the guy said, and said “Come with me.” We walked down a hall, and he stuck a key in a door labelled James Brown Enterprises.

Even with that warning, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The room froze as I walked in, and the redhead said “It’s okay, he’s with me.” He then introduced himself as James Brown’s road manager. (Note for historians: I remember his last name as Jaffee, although I note that Alan Leeds was Brown’s tour director at this time. Anyone out there can straighten this out?)

He showed me to a seat, and everyone went back to what they’d been doing. In the case of the couple over at the next desk, that was (him) counting $20 bills into an attache case and (her) languidly puffing on a cigarette. This action was even more noticeable than it might have been because of the very short skirt she was wearing and the huge emerald that had been pierced into her left nostril.

“Those people out there,” the roadie said, “they don’t care about anything! We were the only asset they had, and now James is with Polygram, and they had to give James Brown Enterprises all his files but the rest of it? Pfffft! They don’t have any idea what they’ve got, they don’t know what to do with it, and it’s driving everyone crazy. All I can say is, it’s great your friend got all those albums, because if they weren’t pressed on such cheap plastic, they’d probably already have recycled them, too. Sorry, I’d like to help, but…” and he shrugged.

As a naive white kid in my mid-20s, I was freaked out enough by the scene around me, so I thanked him, shook his hand, and went back to my car. The last I saw of 1540 Brewster was in my rear-view mirror.

The good news, incidentally, is that a lot of the King tapes and acetates were, in fact, saved, and are being sorted through by people who do know what they’re doing. The bad news is, the people who own the label still don’t have a clue. But James Brown’s legacy is safe, thanks to the aforementioned Alan Leeds.

The very bad news, though, is that his legacy is now at an end. Thanks for everything, Godfather.

Had my third annual Christmas dinner at the dancer’s last night — kabocha squash soup followed by an excellent wild-hare ragout — followed by a troll through German television looking at Christmas stuff (and a remarkable documentary about people who escaped over the Berlin Wall — or tried to — on what must’ve been the Burden of History Channel, since what’s that got to do with Christmas?) but, alas, nothing on the way home to match the delightful aftermath of our first annual dinner, which I recounted here.

Actually, this Christmas had a weird edge to it. Saturday, walking to stock up at the store (Berlin doesn’t open again until Wednesday morning), I heard rapid footsteps approaching me from behind. My New York instincts took over, and I looked over my shoulder to see a little guy in a green hooded windbreaker, arms filled with boxes of awful Glühwein, running like crazy. His face was flushed, and he had a full beard, which, as he passed me, made me think of a garden troll, since he had his hood up. I heard more footsteps, and saw a skinny young guy running after him. It was too late for me to do anything, and I’m not sure I would have if I could have, because the situation looked pretty ambiguous. At Bergstr., the little guy hung a right, and the skinny guy passed me, panting audibly. (New Year’s resolution for you, dude: it involves cigarettes). As I turned left, I saw the skinny guy, almost doubled-over, grab a cell phone and make a call. I guess it was just a larcenous wino and maybe a guy from the store where he stole the wine, but it was an odd sight.

Not to mention that last night, getting out of the U-Bahn by the dancer’s, there was what appeared to be a flaming cocktail parasol burning brightly on the platform and some Arab-looking guys walking away from it. I took the wrong exit, which was fortunate, because by the time I got to where I saw the exit I should have taken, it was awash with police cars and vans, and cops interrogating a large crowd of these same Arab-looking guys, who might have been rousted out of the Internet cafe on the corner. Guess this year was Crimesmas.

But I did have a story for today in readiness, something that happened to me about ten years ago. It doesn’t make me look particularly smart, for the most part, but it does have a weird ending.

I was walking to the store, along the same route as Saturday, when a white van pulled up and the passenger-side window rolled down. A youngish guy asked me, in German, if I needed speakers. Well, it just so happened I did, since the ones I’d cobbled out of a defunct stereo system a friend had given me had crapped out. One didn’t work at all, and the other was iffy. What luck! But…what was going on?

The guy started speaking rapid-fire German, and I asked him to slow down because my German wasn’t that good. “English?” he asked, and I said sure. “Wow, that’s good; we’re from Holland and our German’s not so hot either. Listen, we’ve been working on a club here in town, setting up the sound system, and this guy’s not sparing anything; it’s a great system, and he’s paid a lot for it. Anyway, we ordered the equipment, and somehow they shipped us double the number of speakers we needed, so we’re making a little extra Christmas money on this job and we’re selling them super-cheap. These are great speakers: look at this.” He pulled a loose-leaf notebook out from somewhere and showed me an article from some high-end stereo magazine I’d never heard of. The speakers he had had come in third, just beneath two brands I’d heard of. Interesting!

“Look, every penny we make on this deal is free money, so we’re not going to rip you off,” he said. “We’ll sell them to you for DM 200 a pair. Hey, you have any friends who need speakers?” In fact, I did. I’d been bitching about mine going out while I was at the radio station where I worked, and one of the guys there said he’d just blown one of his and didn’t know if it’d be cheaper to get it fixed or just buy new ones. “So why not buy two pairs and sell him the other? That way, you make money on the deal, too.”

I looked at them, and the address on the boxes was a company in South Carolina. But I wasn’t sure. They might have been stolen, for one thing, but by Dutch guys with their own van? That didn’t seem plausible. But the facts were the facts: I had some extra money, I needed speakers because mine were dead, and here was an opportunity. So they drove me to my bank around the corner and, at my insistence, stayed in the van while I hit the cash machine. We drove back to my place, I paid them, and they helped me unload the speakers into my front door. I asked for a receipt, since it was a professional expense, and got one, with an address in far north Berlin on it. “Just remember,” the guy said, “if for any reason you’re dissatisfied, just bring them back, opened or not, and we’ll refund 100% of your money.” So…how could I lose?

After I got back from my trip to the store — I still had to eat, after all — I hooked them up. They sounded okay, but I was suddenly feeling weird about the whole thing. There was one person I knew who’d have the skinny on these things, a guy in Austin who had sold high-end stuff to unimaginably wealthy Texans, so I fired off an e-mail to him. Almost immediately, he wrote back. “Were the guys who sold you this in a white van?” he asked. How bizarre, I thought. How could he know that? I said yes, and he sent me back a URL for something called the White Van Speaker Scam. From looking at it, it seemed like I was the only person in the world who didn’t know about this. I’d let my greed and my desire to get my stereo working again — and, let’s face it, my wanting to buy myself a Christmas present, since nobody else was going to — cloud my better judgement. I felt like a moron.

So I packed the speaker back up, and looked at the receipt, then checked the map. It was in Wittenau, which was a long ways away, and I’d have to take a cab, but I was going to do it. The next morning, I hailed a cab, and the driver let me load all four speakers into the car. About DM 20 later, I was at an industrial park of some sort out in the middle of nowhere. It took some doing, but we found the “suite” listed on the receipt — by now, the cabbie had gotten into it and was hoping I’d get my revenge on the scamsters. Anyway, I knocked on the door, and guy opened it and said “We’re holding a meeting. We’re not open.” I responded in English and told him that I had a receipt in my pocket that said I’d get a 100% refund within three days, and I was returning the speakers. “You’re returning them?” he said, amazed. “You’re the first person who’s ever done that!” Yeah, well, I was returning them. We hauled them into the space, and sure enough, there was one of the guys who’d sold them to me, dressed in a suit, standing in front of a blackboard with diagrams labelled in English: “Sales Talk,” “Customer Satisfaction,” stuff like that. “You’re not returning the speakers?” he said. “What was wrong? Were they defective? We’ll replace them.” No, I said, I just got a better deal. He goggled. “You did? Where?” Ah, I lied, my little secret.

At that point, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a couple of bills. Just a couple, but high-denomination. “Man, this is all the money that’s in the place. You’re going to leave us penniless.” Like, by then, I cared. It was exactly enough, and I thanked him and left. The cabbie was still there, although I’d paid him. “You got your money back?” he said. “Great! I’ll drive you to the U-Bahn for free. It’s good to see that sometimes you can stand up to the gangsters and win!”

Two days later, the guy who buys my used CDs showed up at my house. I told him the story, and even he had heard about the White Van Speaker Scam! “If you want good speakers, though, I know where you can get JBL studio monitors for 1/3 their normal price.” Oh, yeah? “Sure,” he said, and named a huge electronics chain. “They price them cheap to get you in there and hope you buy more stuff. But this price is only for 24 hours.” And a couple of hours later, I had a new pair of excellent speakers, made by a firm I’d heard of, set up and working in my house. I’m still using them, in fact.

Remember, this was ten years ago. Today, all you have to do is Google “white van speaker” and you get a handful of pages. I’m still very grateful to the guy in Texas for making the connection. Not to mention the righteous cabbie and the honest scammer.

Ho ho ho, as they say.

I just came back from a brisk walk, stockpiling coffee before our coming 4-day weekend (after Saturday, nothing will be open until Wednesday morning, at which point there’ll be nothing in the shops because they won’t have re-stocked yet), and on my way back up Friedrichstr., almost to Torstr., I saw that a new business had opened in a bad-luck location that’s been a half-dozen things in the past few years. This one, though, might make it.

Its predecessor was a store called Come In, which sold, uh, jewelry and stuff, just another un-thought-out business waiting to get pounded into the ground, which happened in due time. The new joint has just as cute a name: Yum Mee. Irritating as that is, it both advertises what’s for sale and shows off the horrid Orientalism which holds forth here in those two words. However, what it sells (in part) could be a godsend to the ‘hood: bánh mi. Half the menu is regular baguette sandwiches, the other half a somewhat timid approach to this classic Vietnamese snack.

My own introduction to bánh mi came in Honolulu, whence I’d gone to do a story on Hawaiian music, which is a much harder assignment than you’d think. Still, I had a motivated researcher in the person of my friend Margaret, who’d moved there with her new husband, Rollo Banks, one of America’s leading tattoo artists. (Please note this was before every idiot teenager in the world had a tattoo. Rollo had inherited the designs of Sailor Jerry, and was still poking them out at China Sea Tattoo on Army Street in Honolulu’s Chinatown.) The day I’d arrived in Honolulu, I’d done something very smart: not fought the jetlag. This was Margaret’s idea: “If you wake up at 6 and go to bed at 10, you’ll be keeping local time, and you’ll never see the tourists.” She was right.

One morning, then, Rollo offered to take me on a tour of Chinatown at 6 in the morning, and I of course jumped at the opportunity. They tell tourists Chinatown is dangerous, and if you’re asked, you should echo that opinion. It’s not, of course, true, but Chinatown is sleazy — or it was back in 1990. at any rate. Rollo was an inspired guide to the sleaze, too; we went to a dime-a-dance place where there was a live orchestra of Filipinos. The drummer — and I can swear to this, having stood right next to him — was asleep, keeping perfect time (all he needed to do was whack the snare), and picking a scab on his neck in his sleep. On the periphery of the dance-floor were little booths where the dance-hall girls — Okinawans, Rollo said — gave blow-jobs for five bucks. There was an antique shop (and why was this open at 6am?) where I bet someone who knew his Chinese or Japanese stuff might well uncover a bargain: it looked like the stock hadn’t been added to since about 1920. Various closed bars were passed and their legends commented upon, and then we went to the wholesale fish market, where multi-ton tuna were being wheeled in straight off the boat while the sushi chefs from the best hotels in the state swarmed over them bidding on the choicest bits. Outside the fish market was a fruit and vegetable market, and Rollo bought a perfectly ripe mango, whereupon he pulled out his knife, stabbed it, and started carving it with careful in-and-out motions. He withdrew the knife, wiped the blade on his jeans and popped the mango open, its flesh falling apart into discrete bite-sized chunks, much to the admiration of the young Vietnamese woman who’d sold it to him. “I learned that trick from a teenaged whore in Bangkok,” he said, and she turned a very unusual color.

We ended the tour in a Vietnamese coffee-shop whose name I carefully wrote down, only to discover later that the two words meant “coffee shop” in Vietnamese. And there, for breakfast, I had a paté, shredded daikon, shredded green chile, homemade mayonnaise, cilantro, shredded carrot and lettuce bánh mi on a perfect baguette, with two cups of that rocket-fuel Vietnamese drip coffee with condensed milk to wake me up. By the time we got back to Army Street, there was a line in front of China Sea that led around the block. “Oh, hell,” Rollo sighed. “Fleet’s in.”

Anyway, with that kind of intro to bánh mi, no wonder I’ve been waiting for them to show up here. I doubt Yum Mee will be that good, but I’m also intending to head down there tomorrow at lunchtime.

Today, partially goaded by a blitz of recent postering, I headed to Berlin’s brand-new DDR Museum, located in a truly odd underground bunker beneath the Radisson SAS Hotel on Karl-Liebknecht Str., with a branch of the Spree River separating it from the Berliner Dom. It’s a brand-new, wired kind of bunker, though, with a flat-screen displaying the museum’s logo to catch the eye of anyone who might be walking alongside the Spree in the rain these days. (A noodle restaurant a little further along had tables set for about 150 people and was completely empty).

It’s an odd place. To call the lighting “muted” would be an understatement. It’s not quite gloomy, but it sort of forces the eyes towards the exhibits, not all of which are on eye-level. Some of its displays aren’t very intuitive, either: I walked in and saw a very good model of the Berlin Wall, with all of its between-the-wall barriers and security devices, and wanted to know more. It wasn’t until I’d spent some time in the museum that I noted that these bars fixed onto the wall with captions on them were actually handles for various drawers and cabinets which contained exhibits, so I had to head back and check the one by the Wall model. It’s a good way to conserve space, but it can also block aisles and cause congestion.

But what’s even odder is that it doesn’t really seem to take a stand on the DDR — which I admire. (For you Americans, DDR stands for Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the name given to the East German nation. The museum has it as GDR, German Democratic Republic, in the captions, but I’ve always preferred the German abbreviation). It may be a bit naive to assert, as they do, that “the DDR never knew misery and poverty,” since that sure wasn’t the case if you lived outside a handful of cities which were kept (relatively) well-provisioned by the central government, but they give equal treatment to the upside and the downside. There’s a Stasi secret-police listening-post in an obscure corner as well as an exquisitely fitted-out model apartment, its TV showing a nice sample-reel of DDR TV shows, and all of its cabinets and drawers filled with artifacts and consumer goods. One wall of the kitchen has some great old DDR cartoons dealing with women’s place in the daily life of the country, and the bookshop has a DDR cookbook for the very brave. There’s also a couple of exhibits about resistance to the regime, from the rather apolitical punks to the “environmental” magazine (really part of a nationwide movement centered in Leipzig) that was secretly printed in the basement of the Zionist movement’s office. The sports section has a drawer which opens to show one box of anabolic steroids, the killer drug which the nation’s sports officials used to try to bring their athletes to Olympic glory, but backfired into cancers and weird gender-altering problems.

One particularly educational exhibit is a Trabant automobile, which you can wedge yourself into if you’re so inclined, with an unsentimental account of the problems of ownership (mechanics were apt to ask, if you brought yours in, whether you’d brought the parts; they were apparently very difficult to obtain). There’s also an unusually large part of the museum given over to the FKK (nude beach) movement. Was the DDR really so big on nudism?

All in all, it’s an odd thing to see this impeccably preserved collection of artifacts so lovingly assembled, and then to step outside, gaze slightly to your left, and see the skeleton of the soon-to-vanish Palast der Republik, the DDR’s main administrative building, in its last throes of demolition. And to walk back home, musing on the things you didn’t see: the DDR and foreigners, the DDR and minority groups (including Jews), the DDR army… In some ways it’s a counterweight to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. In others, it’s yet another odd statement of the Burden of History.