A look back at the concert that kept Boston from burning

I've seen Thelonious Monk brought onstage by two guys doing a fireman's carry and setting him on the piano bench. Willie Nelson sharing guitar leads with Grady Martin. I've witnessed Charles Mingus and his band coming off the stage to make way for Dizzy Gillespie while playing "When the Saints Go Marching in." Cecil Taylor's hands poised motionless above the piano keyboard, at the Village Vanguard in 1965, then slamming down to start some forty-five minutes of absolute, exhilarating chaos. I've experienced many moments of musical sublimity from John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Ralph Stanley, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bill Monroe, Ornette Coleman, and Merle Haggard.

James Brown wasn't just an entertainer but a political presenceBut the big one, the one I've probably taken too long to get to, was a piece of history: James Brown, Boston Garden, April 5, 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated less than twenty-four hours before. I've read several accounts of how it got decided to go on with the scheduled concert. In one, Mayor Kevin White and other "authorities" argued about whether or not to cancel; those who thought cancellation would infuriate the black community further—there'd already been riots all over the country—finally prevailed. In another version, Brown himself did the persuading. White wanted to cancel, but Brown thought it would be smarter not only to go on with the show, but to televise it so people would stay home. The second version is obviously more attractive, and rings truer, no matter how skeptical you are of "authorities." Would a mayor in his right mind really have made things worse by failing to involve Brown in the decision? Brown wasn't just an entertainer but a political presence.

I had a decision of my own to make. I'd already bought my ticket, but how good an idea was it to be a young white kid among thousands of justly angry black people? I might well be intruding where I didn't belong; gawking touristically at Mr. Dynamite, the Amazing Mr. Please Please himself, and inserting myself into what must inevitably become a ceremony whose full significance I couldn't fully understand. No matter how righteous I might be. (I looked like a hippie, which was better than wearing a blue uniform, but maybe not by a lot.) My choosing to go was partly stubbornness, partly a conviction that it was fucked up not to go—I would not be afraid of black people—partly a desire to show my white face in solidarity with them and trust in their good will. And partly because I thought race was, at bottom, an irrelevant construct. That people persecuted because of their race might have a different take on it seems not to have occurred to me.

Boston was a tense, hostile city in those days: working-class ethnic whites, particularly the South Boston Irish, against the working-class-at-best blacks in Roxbury and, God help us, encroaching on Dorchester. And against the hippies: a couple of months after the James Brown concert, I got beaten with a two-by-four for yelling back at a car full of young white locals who'd yelled shit at me.