The Education of Fred Wesley Jr.

Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman by Fred Wesley Jr. Duke University Press, 326 Pages, $29.95.

Fred Wesley Jr. is the Muhammad Ali of sidemen: not only the world's most famous, he says, but the best, with a trombone sound that "has yet to be successfully copied or even imitated." Big talk, but as is true with the champ, no idle boast. As player, arranger and bandleader first for James Brown and later for George Clinton's stable of late 1970s funk acts, Parliament/Funkadelic and Bootsy's Rubber Band, Wesley was one of the architects of funk. Wesley and sax greats Maceo Parker and Pee Wee Ellis were the nucleus of Brown's JBs, Wesley and Parker were together in Clinton's Horny Horns. They gave funk its fire.

But life has been a tough gig. The sad fact of a backing musician's existence is that at the end of the day the star is still a star and the sideman is just part of the woodwork. Wesley has never gotten over this inequity, and it's not hard to sympathize. Wesley's chief nemesis in this regard is Brown, with whom he has a love-hate relationship. What he loves about Brown is what everyone loves: his dynamic stage presence and extraordinary sense of groove. What he hates is everything else.

As Wesley describes him, Brown is greedy, manipulative, egotistical, selfish, insecure, cruel, and - no surprise to anyone who has followed Brown's story for the last few years - physically abusive to women. He is, also, sometimes downright crazy: Wesley recalls how Brown, feeling he had been disrespected, once pulled a gun on a pilot in midair. According to Wesley, Brown treated band members like slaves. One standard ploy was to encourage them to buy a new house or car; once they were heavily into debt, he would fire them, then take them back at a reduced salary, making them both absolutely dependent on him and an example to others. He was also cheap. Wesley figures that at the height of his fame Brown was pulling down as much as half a million weekly, yet keeping his total payroll at $6,000. Brown also had virtually no formal musical knowledge: His tunes, lyrics, and trademark grunts and shouts, Wesley says, had to be translated by arrangers like himself or Ellis into actual songs.

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