There was a stage at the front of the room and folding chairs set up for the audience. Caldwood watched Brown rehearse before the concert. “He acted like he was on Broadway or someplace,” Caldwood said, adding that when Brown would criticize something a band member did wrong, “They didn’t say nothing, they just did whatever he said.” But when it came to the concert itself, Caldwood couldn’t catch any of it. “My eyes had to be on the crowd, I did not look at the show,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to relax and ended up missing out on the whole damn thing.”
Brown didn’t skimp on the Rikers show. “He had his entire troupe there, with backups and all that stuff. He was giving it 110 percent,” said Christopher Kende, who was an N.Y.U. law student working as a volunteer for the board. According to the tour manager Leeds’s records, including Brown, the group that day featured 18 people — musicians, backup singers, dancers and even a comedian, Clay Tyson. “The inmates were totally into it,” Kende recalled. “They just grooved on it and had a wonderful time.”
Anne Norman, a dancer for the Brown revue, called the crowd “enthusiastic,” and said there were no incidents with the detainees. In a phone interview from her New Jersey home, she said Brown talked to the kids and served as “a motivator.”
“His whole thing was: ‘Look at me. Look where I came from and look where I went. You can’t be successful if you’re not careful with what you’re doing, with how you present yourself to the world.”
She recalled how before Brown went into “Please, Please, Please,” he told the audience, “When you leave here, you can have a good life or you can have a bad life. However you do it when you get out is up to you.”
Brown showed his appreciation by giving Bond and her family tickets to his next show at the Apollo. But was he paid for the Rikers gig?
“Not to my knowledge,” Leeds said.
Anna Bond agreed. “I don’t think James Brown was paid for this show,” she said, “unless he was given an Afghan knit by my mother.”