For more than 40 years, Charles Bradley played small shows across the US, his tough, ragged holler of a voice appreciated only by the crowd in front of him. There were more downs than ups during that time, he tells JIM CARROLL, but he feels his time has come at last
It could have been so different. Somewhere along the line, somewhere among those hundreds of gigs which Charles Bradley did up and down the US through the years, the soul man could have struck lucky. All he was after was a record label to hear that powerful voice of his and give him a break. He wasn’t going to be fussy about where he hung his hat. Any label would have done. Any label who would show some faith in him.
But it didn’t happen. No one was prepared to go out on a limb for Bradley.
Instead, he kept on trucking. Nearly 40 years of banging out soul music in bars from New York to Alaska. Four decades of screamers, shakers and heartbreakers. When he wasn’t singing, he was working as a cook or as a carpenter. The dream never died.
Bitter? Bradley sighs when he starts to talk about those old days. He’s not bitter about the fact that it took so long because it all came good in the end. But it does obviously jar with him that he had to wait so long for his turn.
“No labels approached me,” he remembers. “All I could do was go around to different clubs and sing. I was trying to find a label who believed in me, but that was hard to come by.
“I sang and worked all over the United States. No one gave me a chance easily, I always had to work hard and fight for my chance. Recognition for what I did was very hard to come by. Other artists would get it for doing the same as I was doing, but it never happened for me then.”
It all changed for Bradley when a record label man walked into a bar, saw him in action and dug what he was doing. That record label man was Gabriel Roth from Daptone Records, the label which put Sharon Jones The Dap-Kings in the frame.
Roth walked into the Tarheel Lounge in Brooklyn and there was Bradley on the stage, doing his Black Velvet tribute to James Brown. There are not, let’s be honest here, many record label execs who can spot gold in a then-fiftysomething singer doing James Brown covers, but Roth’s a rarity in the business and he knew Bradley had something. He introduced the singer to a musician and producer on his label called Tom Brenneck and Bradley’s luck began to turn.
It’s been a long old trip. Singing is what Bradley always wanted to do and he started out singing church music. “I was raised up in a church-going home, that’s where a lot of my music comes from, and I used to sing Sam Cooke songs when I was a kid.”
His epiphany as a performer came when his sister took him to see James Brown in action at the Apollo in Harlem in 1962. The 14-year-old Bradley was smitten by what he saw and heard. “That was it for me,” he says. “I’d never seen anyone perform like that before or since. I got a chance to meet him twice and I talked to him and he was inspirational. I just wanted to sing like him.”
He wanted to dance like him too. “Oh, I had the moves,” Bradley chuckles. “I used to be a great dancer when I was a kid. My grandmother used to take me to the recreational centre and I just wouldn’t stop. I still can move. When the music sounds good to me, you never know what I’m going to do.”
Bradley took a different road to Brown. After a tough spell living on the streets as a teenage runaway, he travelled around the United States working by day and, every now and again, singing by night. He was a cook in Maine for 10 years before heading west for spells in Seattle, Alaska and California.
Eventually, he came home to Brooklyn in 1996, got his Black Velvet tribute show to Brown together and started to make a living from singing, which is where Tom Brenneck comes into the story.
“Tom took me to Staten Island to see a band he was playing with called The Bullets and asked me to sing with them if I liked how they sounded, so I sang with them for a while.”
Despite releasing two singles, The Bullets didn’t go anywhere and Bradley parted ways amicably with the band. A few years later, Brenneck had moved to Brooklyn and was putting together the Menahan Street Band, a combo of gritty classic soul players. Brenneck remembered Bradley and decided to give him a call.
“I was still doing my everyday music, you know, playing in clubs here in Brooklyn when I got the phone call from Tom”, recalls Bradley. “He was moving to Brooklyn so I went around to see him. I was in a deep depression at this time because my brother Joe had just been shot and killed.
“We started talking and I told Tom that I didn’t want to talk about my depression or my brother. He fixed me up with a hot toddy and it just all came out in a few hours. He said that I should take what I had just said about my brother and put it into music as lyrics.
“I told him that I didn’t think I could do that because I got too emotional when I talked about my brother – I’m emotional even today when I talk to you what happened to him – but Tom said that I needed to do it and people needed to hear it.”
They did some recordings that day. “I started talking and singing and Tom started recording. I was a little afraid, but we tried it. I got emotional but Tom kept recording. I went home and Tom got the rest of the band and started putting music to it.
“Two months later, he called me and I went down to the studio and he played the finished recording for me. It was just so emotional that I walked out of the room crying. But I took the CD home and played it to my mom and she was crying because she knew it was good and coming from a good place. All of my family started crying when they heard it because it was about Joe.”
What the Bradley family were hearing was Heartaches and Pain,the closing track on No Time For Dreaming, Bradley's fantastic debut album. Topped and tailed by Bradley's tough, ragged, gritty, distinctive holler of a voice, the songs on the album are the honest-to-God documents of a hard-knock life.
“It’s a true story, man. It’s my life, it’s what happened to me, all those things are real,” he says. “People respond to those stories because they’re real. I’ve been waiting for a long time to get the chance to tell my story and I’ve seized that chance with both hands.”
Now, Bradley gets to play to bigger audiences at home and away. The album release has increased his profile and the now sixtysomething is finally enjoying some time in the sun. Yes, it has taken time, but Bradley always knew he was born to do this.
“The music industry is a dog-eat-dog world”, he says. “When you’re an artist and you try to show your heart and be yourself, music business people don’t like you. They think you’re trying to show them up. But I never let that get me down, I was always myself and didn’t let them push me down. I knew that one day, my time would come. I really, truly believed that.”
***Charles Bradley plays Sea Sessions on June 26.
Donegal Catch
The Sea Sessions music and surfing beano has come a long way since its first outing in 2008 when the main draws were live sets and DJ slots from Asian Dub Foundation, Republic of Loose, Donal Dineen and one of the lads from Belle Sebastian.
This time out, there's a meaty selection of headliners to attract punters to Bundoran with appearances by domestic big kahoonas Villagers, Bell X1 and the Japanese Popstars.Aside from the wonderful Mister Charles Bradley, visiting acts to catch include The Go! Team, Grandmaster Flash and Norman Jay, the only DJ you'll find in Co Donegal this weekend with an MBE after his name.
If you want to see some bands now before they come bigger than those Atlantic Ocean waves hitting the shore, check out Funeral Suits, The Danger Is, Kanyu Tree, Cashier No 9 and Bona Fide Federation over the weekend.
