Clyde Stubblefield and Monday night in Madison

In August 1991, at Inn Cahoots in Madison, Wisconsin, a forty-eight-year-old man is setting up his drums for the Monday rhythm and blues night he hosts.

While he sets up he answers questions from a writer at Isthmus, the city’s weekly. The first one is about the James Brown records his name was missing from.

“Brown never did put too many people’s names on the albums,” he says. “But since these European labels started reproducing his stuff, they started listing everybody who was playing on it. Nobody ever knew who was playing on anything when Brown was putting out the albums.”

The afternoon of 20 November 1969

The beat everybody talks about was cut in Cincinnati, at King Studios, on 20 November 1969.

Stubblefield had been in Brown’s band since 1965, one of two drummers: the other was John “Jabo” Starks. Born in Chattanooga in 1943, he had come up through Macon, Georgia, where he played with Otis Redding.

On the recording, just before the break, you can hear Brown telling him what not to do: “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got. Don’t turn it loose.”

The break arrives at five minutes and thirty-four seconds: twenty seconds, eight bars, with the band dropping out and the drums left alone.

The single came out in March 1970, reached number 51 on the Hot 100 and number 20 on the rhythm and blues chart, and stopped there. The full take, nine minutes and thirteen seconds, only surfaced in 1986, on the compilation In the Jungle Groove.

That is the version everything else was taken from.

Listen while you read

We put on the nine minutes and thirteen seconds and took turns stopping a finger exactly on the start of the break. None of us got it first time.

Two drummers, one groove

The way Stubblefield described his own trade never sounds like technical boasting.

In 1999, on the Modern Drummer cover devoted to him and Jabo Starks, this is how he defines the pair: “I consider us to be human metronomes.”

Then he explains the part nobody pictures. Brown would switch them while a song was going on, and the groove had to stay standing. “That took some doing, but we got it.”

And on the drums themselves: the toms were not solo drums, they were seasoning. With Brown they worked on snare, hi-hat and bass drum, with the floor tom used barely at all.

There is one line in that interview worth more than the rest: “I didn’t actually know what I was doing back then. I was having a good time, and everybody was bragging about what I was doing.”

1991, with the break on other people’s radio

In 1971 Stubblefield left Brown’s band in Toledo and moved to Madison. He stayed, playing full time, with an eight-piece band and a pile of local work.

Outside, meanwhile, his break was becoming the foundation of a decade. By 1991, when the interview runs, the records using it are charting all over the world.

He lists them without ceremony, and the verdict he passes on his own beat is the least predictable thing on the page.

And the whole thing about “Funky Drummer” is that I think that’s the worst drum part in the world. Out of all the patterns I have performed on songs, they picked that! I think it stinks, but the rappers love it.

Then comes the second half of it: “Sinead O’Connor. Fine Young Cannibals. All these big artists are using it. But they haven’t paid me anything, of course. Hopefully, one day they’ll step out and say, ‘Well, we should give this guy something.’”

What reached him, and who from

Stubblefield came back to the payment question for thirty years, and never in the voice of a pamphlet.

In Copyright Criminals, the 2009 documentary, the line he uses puts the two halves that do not add up side by side: Brown “didn’t tell me what to play. I played what I felt but he owned it.”

In 2016, to the Philadelphia Inquirer: “I can dig that others try to do what I do, and am happy when people try to play what I play, but I do not appreciate not getting paid.”

Real help arrived once, and from an unexpected direction. In 2001 he had ninety thousand dollars in hospital bills, run up after chemotherapy for bladder cancer.

Prince paid them, having used that break himself. Stubblefield’s wife, Jody Hannon, told the story: Prince’s people called to say he wanted to cover the whole balance, because Clyde was one of his drumming idols.

Stubblefield died on 18 February 2017, of kidney disease.

Monday night, for him, was a gig like any other. The rest was a record going round somewhere else, with his beat inside it and his name outside.