 |
(Photo: Aiken County Sheriff's Office/Getty Images) |
So what was it like being James Brown’s booking agent? New Yorker Jeff Allen, 50, who worked with the late Soul Brother No. 1 for 25 years and is headed to Georgia this week to testify in a court case adjudicating his estate, knows consistency wasn’t Brown’s bag. “You are a fantastic, fine gentleman,” says a 1998 fax Allen received from his client. “You are a clean, fair, intelligent man, and one that I can trust, there’s very few.” Another arrived four days later: “I cannot continue to do business with you.” Why was Brown so unpredictable? Because, Allen says, “he was stoned out of his mind.” The singer’s drug of choice was a concoction of embalming fluid and tobacco he called “gorilla,” Allen says. Ah, memories—like the $15,000 payoff to a woman who was stabbed almost a decade ago in Brown’s room at the Waldorf-Astoria. She’d been hanging out with Brown and his then-wife, Adrienne, when Adrienne decided the other two were flirting, Allen recalls. “So Adrienne picked up a butter knife from one of those room-service trays,” he says, and “stabbed her in the ass, and stabbed her well.” Allen immediately got Brown out of New York via private jet. “When the movie comes out about the real James Brown,” Allen says, “there ain’t gonna be much singing.”
Email
Print
Eight Year-End Films Vie for Oscar Contention
Sondheim and Lansbury on a Lifetime in Theater
The Black Keys Release Their Hip-hop Debut 
How the BQE Became an Artistic Muse
On Great Jones Street, Shopping Is Art 
Classic Fare, Old-world Charm at Le Caprice
Buy a Brownstone for Less Than $1 Million
Fifty of the City's Tastiest Soups
Reasons to Love New York 2009
New York Politicians Refuse to Quit
A-Rod Has Babe Ruth in His Sights
McCain Yields to the Party's Pressure
