Our uncle's band was called The Blue Notes, so we called ourselves The Junior Blue Notes. I had a brother a year ahead of me play trombone, and I can't play the piano in a marching band, so I moved on to the saxophone. "My mother and father sang in church, and my uncle had a marching band, I'm born into this. Parker grew up in a musical family, he explains. So it's almost like, psychologically, people would be thinking 'This Maceo guy must be OK, he must be good if James Brown keeps calling his name all the time.' (laughs) It opened a lot of doors and made it very very easy for me." "Working with James Brown, you know that he started calling my name on the records, and as his music went out all over the world, so did my name. In an industry where diva-like behavior is not only expected but encouraged, Parker is still genuinely humbled by his good fortune. He is generous with his time and reminiscences, and his laughter is quick and infectious. Read TIME’s take on Brown’s 1988 incarceration, here in the archives: Soul Brother No.Some 55 years after his first collaboration with the Godfather of Soul, Parker joins me by phone after a soundcheck from Wolfsburg in Germany. “Unlike O.J.’s,” TIME’s Richard Corliss wrote, “J.B.’s were naturally high-speed.”
JAMES BROWN BEST OF YOUTUBE FULL
TIME noted in remembering his life that Brown had thrown his full energy into all pursuits in music and in life, including his two police chases. When he died two years later, of congestive heart failure, obituaries listed his arrests alongside his achievements, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, and 116 singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart from 1958 to 1986. In 2004, at age 70, he was arrested on domestic violence charges against his fourth wife. On this occasion he was sentenced to a drug rehabilitation program, although his recovery doesn’t seem to have lasted. But in 1998 he reprised his antics and was arrested again on nearly identical charges: discharging a rifle, this time at his South Carolina home, and leading police on another car chase. He was freed in 1991 after serving half his six-year sentence for the blowup at the insurance company. (Among other things, he allegedly ventilated her $35,000 black mink coat with bullets.) Last April she filed suit against him for assault, then dropped the charge. His eight-year marriage to Adrienne, his third wife, has been tempestuous. In 1985 the IRS slapped a lien on his 62-acre spread on rural Beech Island, about ten miles outside Augusta, and he was forced to auction it off. The 1980s were a particularly rocky time, according to TIME’s 1988 report on his prison stint, which noted:īrown’s fall from the top of the charts to a four-man prison cell has been going on for several years. He earned the nicknames he gave himself: “ Godfather of Soul,” “Minister of Super Heavy Funk,” and the “Hardest-Working Man in Show Business,” among others.īut despite his staggering successes, he couldn’t stay out of legal trouble for long. He became a soul and R&B legend for his innovative songwriting and his impassioned showmanship, influencing performers from Michael Jackson to Mick Jagger. In many ways, his was a classic American bootstrapping success story, fueled by raw talent and unrelenting effort. He sang in the prison choir and started a band when he got out. It became the latest entry on a rap sheet that had begun during Brown’s impoverished childhood in rural South Carolina, where he went to prison for the first time at age 15 for breaking into cars. Years later, this episode would frame the 2014 Brown biopic Get On Up. They shot out two of his tires he drove on the rims for six miles. He tried to ram police cars with his pickup truck. When the police arrived, Brown led them on a high-speed chase through Georgia and South Carolina.