D.C.'s "national treasure" Chuck Brown created go-go music 'cause he never dug disco.

By Jeff Chang

MONICA, A fly, thirtysomething, master's-degree-possessing, denim-and-camouflage-sporting speech therapist hailing from Fort Washington, Md. ("south of Southeast," she says), the Chocolate City that tourists never visit, is scribbling the names of her crew on a scrap of paper like she's a 10-year-old out past curfew. "You want your name on the go-go list?" she asks, just as Chuck Brown fires up the band.

Looky here: ain't no party like a D.C. party in NYC. Chuck Brown has come to the Village Underground, and before Monica pushes to the front of the stage to hand Brown the paper, she says, "I'd be here with a broken leg!"

It's after midnight in the steamy basement of the Greenwich Village club, but it might as well be a warm summer night at the Maverick Room in 1976. Turning 67 this month, Brown is still go-go swinging, still bustin' 'em loose in his trademark brown Stetson, brown shirt, natty slacks, shiny new silver Nike Hyperflights, just like the coolest grandfather in the world. (Can you name another grandfather who knows all the lyrics to "Playing Your Game Baby" and "Fiesta"? Who can still get the fly girls to freak their boyfriends in untold ways?)

Although this isn't your normal go-go crowd – they're 10 years older, wear sensible shoes, don't rip up their T-shirts, hell, there's even white people in here – Brown's hype-men, Rare Essence cofounders Lil Benny and Jas. Funk, are making themselves right at home. The band fires up the "2001" theme; it's about that time, and Brown fills conga player Foxy Rob's and drummer Mr. Smith's spacious pocket with bluesy guitar riffs.

Magic man

What is D.C. go-go? Imagine an alternate reality, where bands never lost their hold on the nightclub scene, where fans flock to hear hip-hop interpreted with a spankingly different backbeat by flesh-and-blood musicians, where DJs merely fill in during the set break and still wish they'd taken trumpet lessons. Imagine that every band in this bizarro universe was as funky as the Roots but just didn't stop – two-hour medleys of covers and originals with blazing breaks of drums, congas, and bass pulls in between.

Oh, and shouted out every last person in the house.

Thus spake Chuck, part Stanley Kubrick, part Hoochie Coochie Man, and part Mister Señor Love Daddy: "Happy birthday to sweet Tawana over here." "We got Allan and Suzaaaay newlyweds celebrating their honeymoon." "Raise your hand when I call your name!" And by the way, it's Mr. Smith's anniversary, which will be duly celebrated like all the rest.

As the band breaks out of "Mr. Magic" into Foxy Rob's easy dook-dooka-dook groove, the crowd starts chanting, "Oh-Oh-Oh my goodness!"

Then the inevitable "Wind me up, Chuck!"

"Oh, talk to me, baby!" the godfather of go-go says, laughing. "I don't forget. I remember everything!"

Live from D.C.

There is probably no other living musician who more defines a city and a sound than Chuck Brown does Washington, D.C., and go-go.

He has entertained three generations of fans and mentored three generations of bands. Thousands still see him play three times a week in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia triangle. Locals refer to him as a "national treasure." Since late June tens of thousands have signed petitions sponsored by local radio station WPGC-FM in a campaign to get him nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Brown, who always seems to end his sentences with a belly laugh as deep as his baritone, just says, "See, I haven't retired, because I'm still inspired, and I'm still getting hired. And I thank God for that. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

Brown is the sole reason why D.C., unlike the rest of the planet, is not under the thrall of hip-hop, why dance clubs there are still dominated by bands, not DJs.

His new album, Your Game ... Live at the 9:30 Club, a hour-long live recording of his current show, is the biggest go-go album in years. It has dominated the area's top 10 since it debuted in June, crushing the competition. Tom Goldfogle, one of Brown's managers, who, as the co-owner of Liaison Distribution, also handles distribution for most of the area's go-go acts, says, "When it came out, you had Missy's record that's getting hit 100 times a week on the radio. Brown's record is getting hit 3 times a week on the radio, and it's blowing past her in the market."

At Willie's CDs store in south Maryland's Iverson Mall, where Brown's CD signing is causing a multigenerational stir one July weekend, manager Eugene Goodrich says fans bought a thousand copies the week the record dropped. By contrast, Missy Elliot sold "maybe 100 the first week." He shrugs, saying, "She did an in-store here. So maybe 2 with her."

Every night of the week go-go bands pack sweaty clubs throughout black D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. There are but a handful of popular DJs in town, and many of them spin go-go. Kevin "Kato" Hammond, publisher of Take Me Out to the Go-Go Web site (www.tmottgogo.com), the scene's leading zine, says the top bands play consistently, some up to six nights a week. (Some performers, like Lil Benny, may play as many as five times a night.) Perhaps up to two dozen more bands play less frequently.

And Brown, all agree, is in a category by himself. "As far as the younger generation, it's to the point where people have their daily conversation of who cranks, and everyone always says, 'Well, Chuck don't count, he's on another level,' Kato says. "Talking about Chuck is like talking about Stevie Wonder, talking about Duke Ellington."

"Think of [go-go] as an industry that he created," Goldfogle says. "You think of what he's really responsible for: 10 to 20 bands coming up behind him, and their livelihoods, and all the livelihoods of the sound companies, and the record labels, and the folks that work with the bands, and the sales in the stores. It's just one person responsible for bringing this about, and continuing it, not just doing and going away."

He adds, "I don't know of any other artist that can play three to six nights a week for 30 years and be more popular than the day he started."

Big breaks

The day he started was in 1966, a few years after he emerged from Lorton Prison, finishing a four-year sentence on an assault charge. The man he shot in self-defense, he says, died.

In his 20s he ran the streets of D.C. "I was a bricklayer, tractor-trailer driver, sparring partner, ex-boxer, you know? A lot of good things: ex-pool player, ex-hustler, you might say. Back in those days, the word 'hustler' meant you were a good gambler – pool, cards, craps, and women," he says. "I hadn't made up my mind what I wanted to do."

The Lorton stint focused him. There he revisited a childhood dream of playing music. As a child he had pounded the piano keys in the humble halls of the Mount Zion Holiness Church. At Lorton he picked up a guitar for the first time. When he stepped out into freedom, he never looked back.

"For a long time the social scene was segregated, and black people didn't really have access to the popular clubs," says Charles Stephenson, coauthor with George Washington University professor Kip Lornell of the definitive book The Beat: Go-Go's Fusion of Funk and Hip-Hop. "People started using the term go-go to describe where they were going, which really was the physical location. Instead of saying, 'I'm going to a dance,' they say, 'I'm going to a go-go.' "

He found work in the go-gos with a Top 40 band called Los Latinos, whose syncopated backbeat enthralled him. When he formed the first Soul Searchers band in 1966, he took Los Latinos' percussion breakdowns and used them to create a continuous medley of hits.

As DJs later did for hip-hop, Brown turned the music inside out in order to move the crowd. Instead of the songs themselves, the transitions between the songs – a mix of breaks, right-on shout-outs, and church-style call-and-response – became his band's main draw. Dancers loved it.

Barbara McCrea, a longtime D.C. resident, regularly saw the Soul Searchers at the Ambassador Hotel downtown in 1968. "My husband stayed from the time when he hit the door to when Chuck would say, 'Good night ladies!' I would go sit down, but he would never stop dancing to Chuck. He'd dance about eight hours, continuously."

Brown's band became the top band on the cabaret scene when their toughest competitors left the city to back Eddie Kendricks. The Soul Searchers had a minor hit with We the People, a message album that moved local bands to develop their own black-power hits. They struck again with "Blow Your Whistle"; "Ashley's Roachclip" would become a hip-hop staple, sampled by Eric B. and Rakim and LL Cool J.

But go-go wasn't go-go just yet. As Brown puts it, "You had go-go halls, go-go clubs, go-go girls, go-go shows, but you didn't have no go-go music."

Instead there was disco. Across the country nightclubs were replacing bands with DJs, spinning the hits of the day, rather than paying 10 guys to play them. By the mid '70s bands were struggling to survive. The breakthrough came in 1976, still commonly referred to as the year go-go was born.

Brown had heard Grover Washington Jr.'s "Mr. Magic" and wanted to work the beat into the repertoire. He fired a few drummers to get it. "I had been doing that beat in church when I was a little boy. It was like this doomp (hit) doomp-do-mm (hit) doomp-doomp (hit) doomp-do-mm (hit) real fast, right? Grover Washington came out with 'Mr. Magic,' slowed it down. Nice groove, you know?"

"We used to do the disco, then break it down and do all the percussion in between," he adds. "But then I just decided to cut the whole thing in half. Disco was like 120 beats a minute. So now we cut that in half and put that groove up in there and start talking and messing with them people out there in the audience, call-and-response, back and forth. That's when you come up with the go-go."

The bomb drops

Brown's new beat – and bands in town were quickly taking notice of what back then they simply called "the Beat" – scored big with "Bustin' Loose." It turned the cabaret scene upside down. "The DJ used to play, and everybody'd get dressed up to come," Brown says. "But when we started pumping that new style of music to them, they started jumping right up, coming out of their neckties and shirts. Got so they stopped wearing suits and things. No more sitting around. Had to start taking out all the tables and chairs. It was all over."

It fast became clear that the Beat would be the bomb that ended the war. All that was left was for bands to follow or die. E.U., a band that years later would have go-go's biggest hit with "Da Butt," nearly split up over the new sound. Up until then they had described themselves as a progressive funk band, inspired by the message and music of War and Earth, Wind and Fire. But why would anyone pay to see an EWF copy when a cheap DJ could just spin the $7 record? So E.U. went go-go too.

Many disco clubs eventually began splitting their ticket, booking go-go bands during the week and keeping DJs on the weekends. Stephenson, who as E.U.'s manager argued for the losing side, laughs in retrospect: "Some disco clubs, just before they went out of business, as a last ditch, they would bring in the go-go bands."

And that was how Chuck Brown conquered disco and DJs in D.C. Or, as he puts it, "Disco? Well, dis-got-to-go! Talking 'bout disco? OK, dis-go dis way and dis-go dat way. No! We goin' go-go this way! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

During the '80s Chris Blackwell came to town with a plan to break go-go with a movie vehicle, "Good to Go." He signed Trouble Funk and E.U. and brought singles like Brown's high-spirited "We Need Some Money" and T-Funk's "Drop the Bomb" to international audiences, all in hopes of making go-go the next reggae. But the movie stank, some of the artists thought it was racist and defamatory, and the experiment collapsed in a year. When the local media began unfairly blaming go-go gigs for a wave of drug-fueled violence sweeping D.C., R&B writer Nelson George prepared go-go's epitaph.

Big house to White House

But the music never stopped. Brown cut back on his shows (as a statement to the crime lords), but the band he had mentored from 1976, Rare Essence, continued to expand its following. And a new wave of bands – Backyard, Junkyard, Northeast Groovers, the Huck-A-Bucks, and others – attracted a third generation of go-go fans.

Now old-school heads like Monica are coming back to the go-go, and once again Brown is leading the way. He was recently invited to visit George W. Bush in the White House. (It's an irony not lost on old schoolers, whose faded Go-Go Crankin' cassettes still bear the slogan Paint the White House Black!)

"This is the height of my career. I was lucky," Brown says. "I was lucky."

At the Kemp Mill store in Iverson Mall, Linda ("I used to go by Lulu") Poulson ("used to be Brown"), now 41, is telling Brown, "I tell you what. I got 27 years of dancing to you. I done aged, and you haven't!"

"I got in trouble so many times coming home too late," she adds. "Oh lawd, did we get in trouble! And you know what, every weekend we'd travel, travel, travel."

"Just to see Chuck?" I ask.

"Didn't we? Lawd, he's still the man!

"Where did you use to see him?"

"Always be at these churches. Something like, you are not going to believe this, maybe a dollar to get in or something. I'm telling you. Let me see. I had to be at least 14. Yes, and I still dance on 'Bustin Loose.' Matter of fact, we were out last Saturday night at the Zanzibar, and they played 'Bustin Loose,' and me and all my girlfriends all got up and had to dance to that."

Brown breaks in. "Hey, listen. Do you know we had to play that tune for four years before I recorded it?"

Linda says, "You ain't gotta tell me! I heard it the first time you played it. I was there! Did you hear me say how many times I heard that song before it ever became a record?"

Brown looks up as he signs Linda's Chuck Brown's Greatest Hits jacket. "Before it ever came out!"

I say, "You had to perfect it."

Brown corrects me. "They the ones that perfected it!"

"We used to always give love for that jam, and when it became a record, we had already knew about it," Linda says. "Every weekend I was singing it."

Brown says, "They knew the record before I cut it!"

"I'm older," Linda says. "I've aged now, and he hasn't. What is his secret? I've aged what 27, 28 years? And last Saturday night I was 14 all over again. Thank you so much, Chuck. You just have no idea. I've come full circle now. You've become famous, and I done come full circle. What can I say? I'm gon' be the envy of all my girlfriends. You have a good rest of your life. You have to age like me, though."

He laughs heartily and waves as she walks out, day made.

It reminds me of something he said at another record signing, in a gravelly whisper: "From the big house to the White House, you understand what I'm saying? Isn't that something? Huh? Unbelievable. It's unbelievable. The height of my career."

Placing bets

The fading wooden marquee outside the club on the lonely Maryland country road reads, "THE CLASSICS, FRI – CHUCK BROWN."

Inside the Classics Club, a restaurant that looks like it never left the '70s, it's after midnight and all the way live. Sisters in white zebra caps, ripped and airbrushed tees, and fly DKNY, bandanna'd brothers back from college, local hardrocks in shorts and sockless leather shoes, downing Moët straight out the bottle, and a braided girl in the corner over there freaking like an ice-skater, left hand on the iron pole, right leg back over her man's shoulder.

"I love you so much!" Brown grins. "Y'all are the grooviest people on earth!"

The band play Barry White, Sunshine Anderson, and Missy covers and call 'em what they are, classics – like "Back It on Up (Sho Ya Right)," the "Go-Go Swing" medley, even Rare Essence classics like "One on One." Down in the pit the dancers surge with the music. "Tell me what you feel like doing?" he asks.

And the crowd gives it up: "Wind me up, Chuck!"

At the end of the show, the crew packs up the equipment. Some are passing Rock and Roll Hall of Fame petitions among the club stragglers. Brown goes around to each of the 10 band members and all of the roadies, hits them off with the night's cut, and jokes with them. They all call him "Pops." Some, like Jas. Funk and Lil Benny – who calls Brown "a grandfather, a father, and a teacher" – have been with him since their teens, more than two decades. He calls each of them "son."

Back in his white Town Car, four in the morning, he says, "My band, the people that work for me, yes indeed, they're all like my children. They kept the old man going all these years. Some of these kids coming out now, their parents met at my shows 20 to 30 years ago. Fell in love, got married, had them, now they coming to my show. And they probably used to sneak out of the house, get whuppings coming to my show. I wish I could take some of them beatings for some of them. Hey, I feel for ya, but I can't reach ya! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

"That was my dream," he says quietly. "To create a sound for this town."

I ask him about a saying he often uses to end his show, what it means. He produces a cassette and pops it in. It's a jazz trio playing a ballad: a languid piano and bass, a softly brushed snare and a hi-hat, and then Chuck is singing those mysterious words in a passionate, spine-tingling vibrato: "No complaints and no regrets, I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets."

"So here's to life and every joy it brings," he sings. "Here's to life, to dreamers and their dreams."

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