E-mail a friendDavid Leaf
airdate March 17, 2008
David Leaf has won numerous awards for his work on pop culture programs, music specials and retrospectives. His credits include co-writer on the landmark post-9/11 telethon, A Tribute to Heroes and the documentaries, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and The Night James Brown Saved Boston. Leaf has written three acclaimed biographies, as well as liner notes for many successful CD re-issues. He began his career as a news and sports writer/producer, before moving to L.A., where he worked on a number of classic TV specials.
David Leaf
Tavis: Beginning Monday, March 31st, we will be in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel and the National Civil Rights Museum for a special week of programs marking 40 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Following the tragic events of April 4th, 1968, violence, as you'll recall, broke out in many cities across the country, which is the subject of the new documentary by filmmaker David Leaf.
The new project is called "The Night James Brown Saved Boston." The film premieres on VH1 Saturday, April 5th, and features a number of notable people, including our friend, Dr. Cornel West of Princeton. Here now a scene from "The Night James Brown Saved Boston."
[Clip]
Tavis: David, nice to see you.
David Leaf: Great to see you, thank you for having me.
Tavis: My pleasure, I got a chance to pop this in the other night. You did a wonderful piece of work here.
Leaf: Thank you. Well, one of the real challenges for me as a filmmaker in this story was to stay out of the way and let the people who were there, the people who really felt the time and the story, tell it, so we have members of James Brown's band, we just saw Jabo Starks, who was the drummer in the band. We have Reverend Al Sharpton, who was close to James Brown the last 35 years of his life.
We have commentators like Dr. Cornel West to tell us the context of the times and to put it all into perspective so that we really understand what happened the night James Brown saved Boston, not from my point of view but from the point of view of the African American community that was in such turmoil at that time.
Tavis: Tell me about what was happening in Boston and what the fear and trepidation was in that city, a very segregated city.
Leaf: Boston notoriously was a city that was, as we hear in the film, was Balkanized. One of the commentators, "Newsweek" reporter David Gates, who was in Boston at the time and was at the concert, basically said that Roxbury was like East Berlin. It was a separate territory in the city of Boston. Now that night, the night Dr. King was assassinated, there was violence in Roxbury.
From the Boston city point of view, their concern was the idea that 15,000 young Black people were going to come downtown, about four miles from Roxbury to the Boston Garden, to this James Brown concert. They were concerned that that big a gathering posed a threat to the safety of the city, and so they wanted to cancel the concert.
The African American community, in the person of Jimmy Bird, who was a DJ in Boston at the time, called the mayor's office and said, "You cancel that concert, you're going to have the exact opposite effect - you will have a riot." And so the question became, how do we keep the peace in Boston?
And the mayor came up with the idea of asking James Brown to put the concert on television, and then encouraged the community to stay home, inside, watch it, feeling if we could keep people off the streets for one night, maybe we can avoid what was happening in inner cities throughout the country.
Tavis: Tell me more, then, about the back story of those negotiations between the mayor's office and the James Brown entourage, the James Brown contingent.
Leaf: This is an unbelievably complicated story, and to this day I'm not sure that anybody knows the entire truth. But essentially, James Brown was an artist first, a businessman second, an American patriot third, but he was also from the ghetto, he was from the street, so he really felt what was happening in America at that time and was horrified by it and wanted to do what he could to help.
But as a businessman, he's looking at the concert, nobody coming, well wait a second, I'm going to lose $50,000 or $60,000. I've got a band, I've got an entourage, I've got a Lear jet that I'm flying from city to city. Who's going to pay my bills? So a negotiation began between his side and the city. The city didn't have the money to compensate James Brown, so they went to a secret fund that was administered by a group called The Vault in Boston.
And there was a young city assistant at the time in the mayor's office by the name of Barney Frank who was apparently in charge of making withdrawals from The Vault. And they got some money, and some of the money made its way to Mr. Brown, but some of it didn't, and no one really knows to this day what happened to the rest of the money.
Tavis: Of course, Barney Frank, we know, is a congressman, a long-time congressman now from Boston, and one of the power brokers, in fact, in this Democratic-controlled Congress. How was James - Dr. West makes the point in the clip we saw earlier that James Brown was no pacifist. James Brown would tell you very clearly, you hit me, I will hit you back.
Leaf: Yes.
Tavis: So James Brown was no Dr. King. How interesting, then, how ironic that one who was not a pacifist ends up being the one who saves Boston.
Leaf: Well, it's amazing because when James Brown went on stage, his goal was literally to make the audience so excited that they would lose control. And on this particular night, he had to take them right up to that edge, and then when they start to get out of control, as we saw at the clip at the beginning, he had to literally grab them and calm them down - the exact opposite of what he did on any other occasion.
But he had - Reverend Sharpton talks about it in the movie, because of who he was, the audience would listen to him. And on this occasion, there was really no one else in America who could control the audience and the community the way James Brown could that night.
Tavis: Tell me more, then, about what happens with regard to the concert being televised and people staying home, not staying home, what happens?
Leaf: Well the concert starts late, in part because there's these last-minute technical difficulties and part because there's still negotiations going on backstage. And Mr. Brown, being a veteran of the R&B circuit and the rock and roll circuit knew you don't go on stage until you get some money. So he finally comes -
Tavis: In cash.
Leaf: In cash. (Laughter)
Tavis: That's the James Brown-Ray Charles way. They do not come out without cash.
Leaf: Absolutely.
Tavis: Exactly.
Leaf: And when he does finally hit the stage and start the show, it's past 9:30. So the audience has gotten restless. He actually goes out before the telecast begins and does quite an impassioned speech to the crowd about how we have to honor Dr. King's memory with this peaceful memorial concert. When he hits the stage, the concert starts, and within an hour of the concert starting the reports have trickled back to the Boston Garden that not only is everything quiet in the city of Boston, but it's even quieter than it would be on a typical Friday night.
Essentially, everybody has stayed inside to watch James Brown. This was really a unique event. In those days, there was not much music television. James Brown might get one song on "The Ed Sullivan Show." So here was a chance to see perhaps the greatest live entertainer of all time for two hours, and then the television station decides to run it again and again throughout the night. So the city of Boston stayed in and watched James Brown.
Tavis: So what do we know - I was going to ask this question, so I'm glad you went there - what do we know, if anything, about how that show rated in Boston that night?
Leaf: Well as somebody says in the movie, it was like the night the Beatles were on "Ed Sullivan." Everybody was watching it. I saw one interview with a Boston resident who said, "When you walked through the streets of Boston that night and looked in the living room windows, you saw everybody was watching the television show."
Everybody was entranced by what they were seeing, the magic of James Brown coming through the television.
Tavis: I know Dr. West, as you know, very, very well, and Doc and I have had any number of conversations over the years - in fact, if you ever heard him give a speech where this issue comes up he's very clear about the fact that he believes that Black artists have always been the most courageous of Black people, the most courageous, in part, because they have always - those at the top (unintelligible) gain - the James Browns, the Stevie Wonders, the Aretha Franklins - that's a long list of people.
But these artists have always been the most courageous of Black people because they could say things that we could not. Their lyrical content and their expression of our culture, etc., etc. The gospel. They could say and do things that the rest of us could not say or do, and they really were our voices to the rest of the country and to the rest of the world when we could not speak.
What, then, as a filmmaker, did you learn, did you take, relative to West's formulation about the role that artists played during the civil rights era?
Leaf: From the point of view of what happened with Mr. Brown, you had an artist who was trying to avoid politics. He had played at a James Meredith peace rally, he had done a song about "Don't be a Dropout," but he really was walking that very fine line. He had just, in 1965, finally had mainstream success, and he knew better than to get involved politically.
It was charged enough for anybody to be politically involved. So what happens in Boston is through really no fault of his own there's this collision of events: Dr. King's assassination, the rioting in American cities. He happens to be giving a concert in Boston that night and he's thrust onto the national stage. This is the crucible moment of his career.
This is the moment where James Brown goes from being arguably the greatest R&B artist of all time - we know he's probably the most influential artist in terms of hip-hop and the Godfather of Funk - we know all of those things about James Brown going into the movie, but what we learn here is that coming out of Boston, he becomes one of the most important Black Americans.
Tavis: And then we get "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud."
Leaf: Well, there's a couple of detours before "Say It Loud." James Brown goes to the White House, where he's honored what he's done in Boston, and he tries to help keep the peace in Washington, D.C. as well, and it's out of the White House that he finally gets permission to go and play for the troops in Vietnam. He'd been trying to get there, but it wasn't until he sort of got the blessing of the folks in power that he was able, at his own expense, to go to Vietnam.
His attitude was, there's a lot of black troops in Vietnam who want to see what I'm doing, not what Bob Hope is doing. He goes to Vietnam and now he finds himself in an unusual crossfire, because by playing for the troops he's now accused of supporting the imperial presidency, and the Black Panthers are upset. So coming out of that, he records "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud,"" which as the effect of alienating the White audience.
Tavis: And then "Santa Claus Goes Straight to the Ghetto," and everything else that James Brown did. It's fascinating watching this because I wonder, and I interviewed James Brown a number of times while he was living, never got a chance to ask this question, but if he were here now I'd be fascinated to know, to the point you made a moment ago, how that night and how those worlds colliding changed him,
How, in fact, it might have put him even in closer contact with his own blackness, given, to your point, what he became to Black America because of that night. It'd be fascinating to get his take on that.
Leaf: He clearly never lost sight of who he was and where he came from. There's footage in the documentary where you see him going, as Reverend Sharpton says, into the 'hood. Every city they went to, he went to see the kids, and when Reverend Sharpton said, "Why do you do this?" he said, "They have to see that somebody can get out."
And so he knew he was an example. And my favorite line, or one of my favorite lines, because both Dr. West and Reverend Sharpton, it was like pitching batting practice to A-Rod. They kept - whatever you asked them, it was one home run after another.
Tavis: They put them over the fence pretty regularly, yeah.
Leaf: It was great. And Reverend Sharpton says, "You have to understand that James Brown wasn't just a star to us, he represented hope." And I think that's something that I couldn't understand growing up the way I did, but hearing it from people like Reverend Sharpton, it's really a powerful formulation.
Tavis: "The Night James Brown Saved Boston," premiering April 5th on VH1, and I'm sure, not unlike the TV station in Boston, VH1 will find a way to play this over and over and over again. Nice to have you on.
Leaf: Great, thank you for having me.
Tavis: Good to see you, David Leaf.
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