Was James Brown murdered? (Even skeptics should read this.)

Books, comics, TV, music
1

It’s not often that I see a post like this on my twitter timeline:

https://twitter.com/richarddeitsch/status/1096156933780697088

What Deitsch is referring to is this story that was just posted at CNN.com.

https://twitter.com/thomaslake/status/1092746805199151104

Now let me echo Richard Deitsch. This is one of those stories where at about the 3rd or 4th paragraph, you’re like “Lemme get comfortable; I gotta read all of this.”

And first things first: Thomas Lake – who I’m completely unfamiliar with – is just an absolute master of prose. I mean, understand this: he’s doing real reporting here. But he’s also writing with the kind of flair that you’d expect to see from a lost David Foster Wallace essay, or some Truman Capote draft from In Cold Blood. It’s masterful stuff.

And then there’s the story. Just…wow. Read it. Seriously.

I mean, here’s the first three paragraphs. The story and storyteller rise to meet one another.

Two years ago, I got a phone call from a woman who sang in the circus. She said she could prove that James Brown had been murdered. I met her on a hot day near Chicago, where the big top was rising and the elephants were munching hay. The singer’s name was Jacquelyn Hollander. She was 61 years old. She lived in a motor home with two cats and a Chihuahua named Pickles. She had long blond hair and a pack of Marlboros. She said she was not crazy, nor was she lying, and she hoped I would write her story, because it might save her life.

Or maybe it would get her killed. That was also a possibility, she said. Bad things happened to people who ran afoul of the James Brown organization. “I’m sure you know that Adrienne Brown was my good friend,” she said, referring to James Brown’s third wife. “That’s a very long story, when I tell you about it. There’s no doubt she was murdered.”

We got in my car and drove to Panera for lunch. Jacque’s story widened, deepened, growing ever more strange. New characters appeared and disappeared, suffering one calamity after another. Some were shot to death. Some were maimed or killed in vehicle crashes. Some appeared to die of natural causes, but Jacque thought they’d been poisoned. She had questions about the deaths of at least nine people, all of them somehow connected to the Godfather of Soul.

2

I just started reading it aloud to my wife, and I’m not sure we’re going to get to bed at our usual bedtime now.

3

OK, I read part one. This is, uh, certainly a story. I mean, I knew about some of James Brown’s ugly side, or at least some of it. But this is a whole new angle.

4

I spent nearly two years checking out Jacque’s story. I traveled through nine states, read tens of thousands of pages of police and court records, interviewed nearly 140 people, questioned Jacque for hundreds of hours, mined the depths of her three storage units for records stretching back more than 30 years, analyzed more than 1,300 pages of text messages from her iPhone, and sent an item from her green plastic bin for testing at a forensic laboratory.

In examining the deaths of Adrienne Brown and James Brown, I also discovered many things Jacque did not know when she called me.

At least three other people believe the death of Adrienne Brown was not an accidental overdose, despite what the authorities said in 1996.

There are legitimate questions about James Brown’s death that can only be answered by an autopsy and a criminal investigation.

And there is a disturbing pattern of similarities between Adrienne Brown’s death and James Brown’s death 11 years later.

Damn!

5

Given the way he abused his body, the people he hung with, and the fact that pretty much everyone who knew him thought he was one of history’s all-time assholes, the really amazing thing is that James managed to make it to 72.

6

One night she watched the movie “Forrest Gump” without him, and the next day he asked if she’d ever seen “Forrest Gump.”

This is like the evil, undercover boyfriend version of tailing a car from just one car-length back. Are you even trying??

7

So, full disclosure: the reason for the following is that I am completely bereft of a sensory imagination. My mind can’t conjure up a reasonable facsimile of sight, sound, taste, scent, or touch. My interior world is essentially an endless, echoingly silent black void.

But god damn do I hate the “Let’s just describe some pointless scene setting nonsense for a paragraph or eight before getting to the useful substance of what we’re writing about” thing in journalism.

Apart from that, this really does sound pretty fascinating. I regret I need to hit the hay, but might try to read it over tomorrow morning :)

8

Ah, it’s not journalism so much as the place where true crime meets literature. And this guy is good at it!

And I don’t think it’s pointless scene setting so much as an effective hook to get you interested in the story to come.

9

It’s an incredibly long-form piece. If it was in book form, it’d run 25-40 pages, at least.

And it’s a confusing, twisting and turning piece. And without a lengthy lede to establish a setting, it’s going to come off weird. “Why is CNN doing this super long story about a guy who everyone knows died of pneumonia and heart failure 12 years ago? Because some crazy woman says it happened?”

It’s so much deeper and more nuanced than that. And it’s very good writing.

10

Oh, also, part 2 of the story is basically one “Holy shit” moment after another.

11

Again, for me, personally, it’s pointless, because it’s describing a bunch of unrelated cruft that I can’t even imagine anyway. Get me to the cool bits; I don’t really care where they sat down to have a chat.

This piece–well, the very small bit of it I’ve read so far–isn’t even especially guilty of the nonsense (I’ve read some longform articles that feel much more like essays about the authors’ coffee shop habits than pieces about whatever they were ostensibly actually about); just a pet peeve that I decided to bitch about tonight :)

12

One very early cue that this writer is not writing a straight up news report: he invokes first person early and occasionally throughout the story. In straight up news reporting that’s completely verboten, including in the context of CNN’s own style guide I’m sure.

13

Ugh, nothing worse than that kind of self-indulgence, but I don’t think Lake is doing that here. It’s more about the challenge of honoring the victim/primary witness in spite of her lifestyle and the paranoid, outlandish nature of her claims.

This part is great…

In journalism, and in life, you will meet a certain kind of person. This person tells a story that involves a grievance or an unmet need. This person may be injured or destitute. This person may smoke too many cigarettes. In any case, this person tells the story to anyone who will listen: in church, at the police station, on a phone call transferred from the newsroom switchboard. You have heard this story before. You think it might be an exaggeration. But this is what really scares you: It also might be true. Because if it is true, you might have to do something.

14

Yeah, this reads more like the kind of in-depth stories you see on Sports Illustrated. That’s not a criticism, it’s just in their kind of style, injecting the author and their judgment at certain points.

15

Is this hyperbole, or are you literally incapable of imagining anything non-conceptual? If this is the case, do you read fiction?

16

I can’t speak for Armando, but some people do in fact lack a “mind’s eye.” It’s called aphantasia.

17

HumanTon answered with the link I was going to.

I consume fiction as a lengthy spooled narrative flow. Things like action sequences and overly flowery descriptions of landscapes basically slide right off of my brain, as do a lot of sensory allusions and metaphors as anything apart from internal head-nods of, “Ah, yes, trees are things which do exist and I am aware that their tops can be round, apparently much like the aliens being described herein must appear to the author.”

I suspect that I miss a lot of what people love about books, but I nonetheless read them voraciously growing up. It took me a long time to realize that other people actually imagined things while reading. For instance, I always thought the basic premise of the show Bobby’s World (a children’s show from when I was a kid whose titular character uses his impressive imagination to go on all sorts of amazing adventures) was basically, like, a superhero show, like he was some kinda telepath who’d just forge whole worlds around him IRL.

I don’t know exactly when things clicked for me that it was weird, but I do distinctly remember being very confused the first time I heard someone complain about a character in a film adaptation of a book “not looking how I had imagined them” :)

18

Reading your post washed the dust of daily life from my soul.

Nothing?

19

Much like souls! Hah! Atheism joke. I’m on a roll shitting up poor triggercut’s interesting thread.

20

Like, did we know the dude was doing PCP for long stretches of his middle age? Holy shit.