Back when he was James Brown's "lackey,'' Fred Wesley had to work hard to keep up, The Australian newspaper reported today.
The young trombonist from America's Deep South had earned his stripes playing with Ike and Tina Turner, but this was different. Brown's standards were notoriously high, and there was no room for error. Now, on the eve of an Australian tour, the 66-year-old remembers Brown's band as a tough but rewarding gig. ``It worked out real good for me,'' he says.Wesley was Brown's music director between 1968 and 1975 and, as leader of the group called the JBs, found himself part of the ``hottest band on the road''. It was an enormously productive period for the band: they recorded several successful records and toured the world, including a famous trip to Zaire, with B.B. King and others, for a music festival timed to coincide with the Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fight, the Rumble in the Jungle.
As well as writing, arranging and performing on dozens of tunes, Wesley had the added responsibility of trying to interpret the singer's garbled commands on stage. Often he had to guess (``He paid me real good to take a guess'').
But the Godfather of Soul was a complicated man. While Wesley and Brown were friends, their friendship had its limits.
``You couldn't be a close friend with James,'' he says. ``I think he respected me as a friend and I definitely respected him as a mentor and as a leader ... But he was definitely strange, much like Michael Jackson. A person who aspires to be a star is a different kind of person.''
The Australian also reported:
- While Wesley was a pioneer of funk in his own right, a conversation with him inevitably comes around to his experiences with Brown. He doesn't seem to mind too much, having called his 2002 autobiography Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Side Man. His trip to Zaire is also the subject of a recent documentary called Soul Power.