One special memory I will always hold dear was from a cold, black night in his music studio. In October 2002 my brother and I had written an article for the now defunct Tampa magazine "TooSquare". It was a review of a live James Brown appearance at the Suwanee Music Festival. We wrote it in a quasi-gonzo style in a comical homage to our favorite writer Hunter S. Thompson. It was a hot mess on all counts but fun to do nonetheless.
Generic loved the article and offered to record a live reading of it with some accompanying guitar work he'd throw in. It was one of those magic, drunken nights between brothers filled with booze and banter that one never forgets. He had a great music studio hidden in his sprawling property in middle-of-nowhere Florida. Generic had recorded hundreds of hours of music and scores of bands from near and far. For a strange chapter in the late 90s it was a punk rock mecca drawing acts from across the country and beyond.
James
Brown Comes to Town
By
Bob Wire and TJ Swan
Oct.
2002
We
passed three horrible crashes under a ripe harvest moon on the way to
the Spirit of Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida. There’s
something Superbad about a trip that begins so black-heeled, but then
this was more or less a pilgrimage and one expects some sort of omens
to litter the path. My superstitious side capitalized on all these
ill portents. I envisioned all sorts of calamities awaiting us on
the dark highway ahead: blood-eyed biker gangs, rabid hordes of
raccoons, locusts, plagues…..hare krishnas…..
Soon
though I switched the brain to the Good Vibe Station, loosing a
pleasant stream of cloud-hopping rainbows and flipping unicorns.
Good vibes, good vibes…..It wouldn’t do to arrive at the feet of
the Godfather burdened with Paranoia. After all, you can’t be down
if you’ve got James Brown.
Dammit!
Stacia needs a Chalupa! We stop at a Taco Hell to feast. The rest
of the drive vaporizes soon after and we arrive at the Spirit of
Suwannee camp square at midnight. I can feel the hippy vibrations
howling beyond the gates, Technicolor tentacles poised to engulf us.
It’s
a volatile alphabet soup of chemicals in there, some natural, some
hastily conjured poisons—LSD, MDMA, THC, PMS, GHB, SPF, MSG, etc.
This is no ordinary venue. It’s deeply set in the woody rural
district of Redneck County Florida—hosting noneother than the
Blackest, Baddest, Muthafuckin’ Muthafucka of them all—His
Highness….James Brown!!
With
all obligatory respects, there were of course a great mass of other
performers at this music festival, none of which I gave a rat turd
about. I’m sure they are all fine, fine young folks with oodles of
talent and charm, but to a monomaniac en route to see a legend, they
amount to so much dust on the lens of the binoculars. I came to see
the Man who liberated the troglodytes from their bourgeois slumber.
Sure I love Elvis too—after all he freed the groin and knees, but
King James gave us Soul……
In
we go.
The
spectacle inside resembled a disintegrating riot—a saturnalia in
its formative stages, citizens long soaked in rum and sunshine.
People….hairy people…..were milling about cockroach-style in and
out of flickering tie-dyed displays. Beer was reasonably priced with
little kickback to the middleman in charge of tickets. G Love and
Special Sauce were laying down a fine groove. Their set nearly
drained, they took the opportunity to extol the merits of cannibis
and “cold beverages”. Indeed. So it was for the lingering
shades of the evening proper…..stinky, basically peaceful and
swampy in a way only Florida can be.
Suddenly,
the atmosphere smoldered with anticipation. The weighty chains of
civility stretched ever thinner with each shared breath. The crowd
was becoming a Beast! Breezes combed us all with virile smells and
the rich aroma of stirred dirt.
The
first musicians began filing in. When the stage was adequately
loaded with black muses and white session players, the unwieldy crew
began lubricating the audience with showy, rhythmic noise. The whole
affair took on the cadence of an ancient circus. Apparently, as a
species, we all secretly love to boogie and get high. Now was the
time for our tribe to Get it On.
Something
in the blood responds to the reckless Truth and as James Brown took
the stage a glittering new fuel began coursing in my veins. He
looked like a bloated aborigine wrapped in a diamond pelt. He
croaked out a few undecipherable salutations and began the two-hour
ritual immediately. Slithering, shaking, stomping, grooving! The
Old Man kicked out all the jams. Lawdy! What a flurry of feet and
flash!....Make it Funky…..Pleasepleasepleeeeeaase….unnh! Get on
Up….Heh! Ha!
The
man is a triple-caped gigolo, pimping out the holy human sex sound
locked in the gene pattern. He howls like a captured tiger, each
note steady and strong. Every sterling syllable streams out like a
seraphic night train into the full moon sky. The bliss-wet crowd cavorts en masse, hooting and caterwauling savagely. He slows it
down…..gospel style. Big Finish. No encore.
Our
departure was one seamless shuffle to the car. Somehow we managed to
lose the car keys inside. Stalled, perhaps, by Fortune to soak up
the lingering scents of the predawn twilight.
Finally
we make it to a truck stop Waffle House to refuel our rattled bodies.
The waitress was a strange specimen of the outback female—pimply,
certainly intoxicated and glistening under the harsh glare of the
fluorescent light. “Pot smoking causes…..I forget…heh,heh,heh…”
was her opening line. The rest of her twaddle has since faded from
my memory, but this backwoods nymph drooled out a fine epitaph for
our exhausted night: “the Spirit of Suwannee is the most beautiful
place you could ever go.”
Truly.
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