The Uncomfortable Goodbye File: Jim Brown

Plus the strangely connected reality that OXBOW, too, is moving to a place beyond "next time"...

What do you wear to the funeral of a legend? When I know I’ll let YOU know

Jim Brown is dead.

At the age of 87 this should surprise no one. However, the fact that people were surprised was maybe more a mark of the man’s legend status as anything else connected to those that seemed somehow to sit outside of death.

But sit outside death he did. For at least a minute of time. A great, grand minute of doing shit only dreamed of by mortals and all with an insouciance that hinted at you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now I’m not saying he was a good man. But Jim Brown was a man who was wholly the man he was. A competitor nonpareil it should have been known that if you played golf with Brown and had the temerity to win? You were not even just risking an ass beating on the links, you were literally asking for one. And if you dated Brown the likelihood of finding yourself defenestrated? Also exceedingly high.

And finally the high point of Jim Brown being Jim Brown, the kind of emblematic shit that marked the man for all eternity for at least a man like me, was when in the middle of an interview with a then-60-something Brown a reporter had suggested that he was indeed that. That is, a 60-something man. Only to be interrupted by a non-scripted moment of Brown asking him, all smoldering menace: “do you think you can take me?” Effectively yanking away the mask of politesse to reveal exactly what the FIGHT book claimed most people were driven to conceal and that is, the naked face of raw politics.

At an age when most men are planning their retirements he was flirting with continuing an ass kicking that had marked his entrance on this planet…

That was the Brown I knew and loved. The Brown that never at any time appeased, appealed or applied for entry into the “OJ Club” where Black celebrities believed that they were not Black anymore but, in the case of OJ, just…OJ. Brown’s irredeemable negritude was as endearing as OJ’s act was appalling and growing up I hated what I felt was the phony OJ shuck and jive and was shocked that America bought it all (until I guess they didn’t). But I loved Brown’s slow boil and his Bad Brains-esque refusal to “do what they want or do what they say.”

That he ended up being a commentator in the early days of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, well before Anthony Kiedis and Halle Berry were hogging up cageside seats, was absolutely the least surprising thing that he did. And even less surprising than that were the any number of moments when Brown himself teased an entry into the business side of the cage just to test his mettle. At an age when most men are planning their retirements he was flirting with continuing an ass kicking that had marked his entrance on this planet and very likely his exit.

I’m glad to not be Jim Brown but if I have to go out and I do, like we all, have that in my future I could only hope to go out with as much aplomb as Brown had and did. Which is what I think of every time I get hit with the recall of that fictional place called “next time”.

This past week, in addition to marking the passing of Jim Brown, and The Smiths’ Andy Rourke, we…as in the members of OXBOW… announced our first tour in six years.

Inevitably we were hit with “why no — name the country of your choosing that we are missing — on your tour schedule?” But beyond that we were also hit with emails from the countries of places we are going to but that don’t happen to sync well with whatever the writer was planning on doing and without fail concluding with acknowledging their absence and then this: “well we’ll catch you NEXT time.”

I’ve never known how to answer this and beyond that how do you address that next times are growing scant? In the middle of a recent interview for an upcoming cover story for WIRE magazine the author Laina Dawes asked me a fairly innocuous question about family and in a surprise move to end all surprise moves I lost it. As in 10 minutes of uncontrollable sobbing. Shoved up against, as it was, a daily reminder that some day there will be no tomorrow.

To her credit she just rolled with it, and in the end it was just 10 minutes of an almost two hour interview, but it uncovered my absolute lack of belief in “next times”. If you’re even half way thinking of coming to see OXBOW in September but are unsure, be sure of this, “next time” is promised to no one. Also this: for everything you’ve ever done there will be a last time you do it.

But then a curiosity: if you knew, for example, that the last time you had sex with an ex was actually going to be the last time you had sex with that ex would you have done it any differently?

Probably not. So come to the OXBOW shows in September. Or not. But if not, then do so with the understanding in total that “next time” is a mug’s game. I’m sure Jim Brown and, if last week is any real measure, Andy Rourke from The Smiths as well, could tell you that. If only.

If only?

Yeah, if only they weren’t already dead.

And there again is that awful and unstoppable calculus: we all gotta die. Now. Soon. Tomorrow. One hundred tomorrows. Some time that’s not any time that’s forever.

So plan accordingly.