Brown - Every Little Step: My Story

When I stretch my mind back to my earliest memories, music was always there. While other little kids in Boston dreamed about playing for the Red Sox or the Celtics, I dreamed about stepping onto a stage and thrilling the crowd with my singing and dancing.

Music was constantly playing in my house, with everybody throwing their own sound into the mix. With six children and my mother and father, were talking about a lot of sound. Whenever my dad, Herbert, came home from work, he would put on some blues, or maybe funk. Then he would start dancing and acting crazy. We would be laughing so hard our stomachs would hurt. My late father is still the funniest man Ive ever met. Not Eddie Murphy or Martin Lawrence. Not Kevin Hart. Herbert Brown. And my mother actually sang in a duo with her brother Robertwhom I was named afterwhen they were younger, so she had performing in her blood.

But I think the biggest musical influence on me was my grandmother, my mothers mom. She had an apartment on the first floor in the Orchard Park projects; we lived right above her on the second floor. My grandmother had a massive record collection. I knew her apartment was a place I could go and lose myself in music. It became my sanctuary, where I could get away from the noise and craziness of my large family and go exploring in her records.

My grandmother loved Duke Ellington, so thats where I would usually start. I didnt mind the big-band jazz because I could jitterbug to it. I liked all types of music though; Id play the Chi-Lites, the Manhattans, Blue Magic. This was the mid-to-late seventies (I was born in February 1969), so these groups were still in their heyday, before disco hurt their popularity. From there, I would gradually move into the funkier stuff. My God, funk was everything to me. James Brown, Bootsy Collins, Parliament, Rick Jamesdamn, Id lose my mind. I had no idea how influential Rick James would later become in my life.

When I put on the funk, Id start the dancing, working out the routines I was always putting together. My grandmother would be watching me from the kitchen, where she was cooking, and shed have a big smile on her face as she watched me move. Id be getting down and shed be getting a big kick out of it. For me, the best thing about dancing was making her smile, making her laugh, knowing she was enjoying what I was doing. Looking back on this time now, pleasing my grandma was probably where I got this drive to do whatever I can to please my fans. My grandmother was my first fan.

Eventually my badass brother, Tommy, would come into the apartment. He would get mad that my grandmother was paying me way more attention than himso hed have to fuck up everything. Hed pick up a big stack of records and throw them all over the floorthen hed call out to my grandmother in the kitchen, pointing at me and saying, Ooh, look what Bobby did!

He was nine years older and a lot bigger than me, so I had to take his mess. But Id get so mad. I knew it would all stop when I grew up to be as big as him. I would stand there all mad, thinking, You just wait a few years...

Everybody in my family thought they could sing. If you asked us, wed tell you we were the second coming of the Jacksons. That was actually my fathers master plan, to make us into a Boston version of the famous family group. The Browns of Boston. Since we were four girls and two boys, the Browns would have looked quite a bit different than the Jackson 5. And my brother was too shy to sing in public, so he was the DJ. But the girls? You couldnt tell them nothing. Not a thing. But although my family members played around with singing and performing, I was the only one who was adamant: This is what I want to do with my life.

My parents tried to encourage my musical talent by buying me a couple of cheap instruments. First my mother bought me some drums when I was in the third grade. They were cheap as hell, with skins made out of material not much more durable than typing paper. My little sister, Carol, made sure those drums didnt last more than a week or so. One day I came home from school and saw that she had beat them up, putting big holes in the snare, the bass and the tom-toms. Yeah, they were cheap, but they were still mine. So of course I had to beat her up.

A year or so later my mother bought me a bass guitar. She knew I had always loved listening to the bass, the smooth rumbling coasting along at the bottom of those records I enjoyed listening to. I played around with that cheap bass for many hours, tinkering in my room with those strings. But I never got any lessons to go along with it, so eventually I laid it downand didnt pick it back up until several years later, when I got lessons on a New Edition tour from one of the funkiest bass players who ever lived, Mr. Rick James.

Hitting the Stage

My parents were huge fans of James Brown, as most of the black community was in the early 1970s. James was filling black people with a sense of pride with memorable records like Say It Loud, Im Black and Im Proud, which came out in 1968, the year before I was born. Though I dont remember, my parents say I really responded to James Browns music even when I was a baby. And when I was three, James unknowingly gave me my first chance to take over a stage. My parents brought me along when they went to a James Brown concert in 1972 at a well-known club called the Sugar Shack on Boylston Street. The Sugar Shack hosted all of the top R & B acts in the 1960s and 70s when they came through Boston. At a certain point during his show back then, James would welcome kids on the stage to dance and entertain the crowd. Apparently that was all the invitation my three-year-old self needed. Im told that I immediately grabbed the attention of the crowd and had them screaming with my James Brownlike dance moves. It would be a telling baptism for me as a performerfor the next four decades, grabbing the crowd would become as important to me as breathing.