James Brown pulled a shotgun on a man for using his toilet
They didn’t call him ‘Mr. Dynamite’ for nothing. James Brown is perhaps the most enigmatic performer of his day, a pioneer of funk and soul who backed up his shimmering back catalogue with a stage show that never failed to impress, despite the various controversies that threatened to end his career.
A highly contentious character, Brown’s life makes for a fascinating read, comprised of as many highs as there as lows, with one thing certain: without him, many of our favourite acts that followed suit, from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Public Enemy, would sound completely different.
It’s a testament to Brown’s musical achievements that Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin once opined: “He [James Brown] was almost a musical genre in his own right and he changed and moved forward the whole time so people were able to learn from him.” Brown’s influence is so extensive that even proto-punk Iggy Pop has discussed his love for him, saying that he was “a big, big deal to me”.
Although we could spend an age discussing the importance of James Brown’s musical efforts, it is impossible to ignore the character behind it, with his increasingly riotous off-stage persona a storied one. It has been noted that in the 1960s and ’70s, Brown’s performances were at their peak and that this was primarily because he had a strict no drugs and alcohol policy for his band. Although he was known to serve unique highballs to his friends at his house in Queens, New York, during the 1960s, intoxicants were prohibited when it came to performing.
Famously, this brought him into conflict with his various bands, as members of his early group, the Famous Flames, were sacked for alcohol consumption, with Catfish and Bootsy Collins then fired in 1971 after intentionally taking LSD before a performance. Brown suspected that the pair had been on drugs all along, with the Collins brothers then going on to perform with both Parliament and Funkadelic.
However, Brown’s aversion to drugs would not last long. Aide Bob Patton has claimed that he accidentally shared a PCP-laced joint of marijuana with Brown in the mid-1970s, which led to the ‘I Got You’ singer hallucinating “for hours”. However, Brown would later talk about it as if it was only marijuana he was smoking.
This was the start of a new chapter in Brown’s life, and by the mid-1980s, it was widely known that Brown was using drugs regularly, with his Revue singer Vicki Anderson telling Barney Hoskyns that he had been routinely using PCP since “before 1982”.
Brown’s drug use in the 1980s gradually impaired his life, with him arrested numerous times across the decade. Although he had already had scrapes with the law throughout his life, it was here that things took a more severe turn. In 1988, it was reported that he had pulled a shotgun on a man for using the toilet in his office. Afterwards, he fled, leading to a police chase on Interstate 20 near the border of Georgia and South Carolina.
Later, he was duly convicted of various drug and driving offences, as well as assaulting a police officer and carrying an unlicensed pistol. He was sentenced to six years in jail but only served two and was released in 1991. However, this would signal the start of the final chapter of his life, 15 years blighted by various problems, including sexual harassment and domestic violence.
