Funk that

Nonetheless, Anderson says she was spared the worst of Brown's hassling tendencies because she was married to his right-hand man Bobby Byrd: "When things got crazy, I could always go home, and we still had a salary that was coming in, so I could always afford to do that."

The relatively generous salary Brown paid his entourage was the big reason they were willing to go in the studio and not ask questions. Many of them have never gotten any royalties for records they made when they were with Brown, and writer's credits tended to mysteriously end up switched to Brown's name or the name of somebody to whom he owed a favor.

Lyn Collins is more than a little frustrated by not getting paid writer's royalties for songs she says she wrote on her own--particularly "Think (About It)," which went gold a few years ago in a cover by Patra. But Brown favored singers and musicians who could roll with his whims, and as with nearly everybody who toured with him, Collins was drafted in and tested to see how well she worked on the fly.

In 1970, Collins was a show promoter and singer, touring the chitlin circuit and military bases, when she got a call from Brown's production company--at 3 a.m.--telling her to be in Macon, Georgia, the next day to record. She cut two songs; the day after that, she was flown to the King Records offices in Cincinnati to sign a contract. A few months later, she was conscripted to go on the road with the band--just to observe, not to perform.

"One night, in Houston, out of the blue, [Brown] said, 'I want you to go on.' From then on, I toured with him, doing other people's songs; then 'Think' came out, went up to No. 9, stayed on the Billboard R&B charts for 17 weeks, and that was it."

Think (About It), the album, was put together in a hurry to capitalize on the hit--the back cover includes a shout-out to "Viki [sic] Anderson," as well as exhortations to "Use 18 Power to Vote" and "Fight Sickle Cell Anemia." It was followed by a slew of other singles, some hits ("Mama Feelgood," "Take Me Just As I Am," the wonderful disco oddity "Rock Me Again and Again and Again and Again and Again and Again"), some not. There were calls for feminist unity--"We got to use what we got to get what we want," she declares on "Think"--and then there were numbers like "How Long Can I Keep It Up," an ultra-codependent paean to sitting around until one's man comes home that includes the couplet, "I'm gonna have some fun/Even if it's at the point of a gun."

"All our sessions were impromptu," Collins says. "Nothing was ever planned."
Sometimes, that philosophy resulted in some very weird records--such as a cover of "Don't Make Me Over," repeatedly interrupted by a DJ intoning "burn, sister, burn!"--but even misery and dissension could turn into great music. She refers to a session with Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker of the legendary JB Horns during which they were recording "If You Don't Know Me by Now."

"This was one of the days that James Brown decided he was going to fire me again," Collins recalls. "Nobody ever knew. On that particular day, he said, 'I'm not going to produce you anymore.' Like, OK. Maceo and Fred were still in the studio, and he went and got in his limousine and left. I went in the studio, and I said: 'Is he gone?' Someone went to the window and looked for his limo, and said yes. I said 'OK, all the guys, get out of the studio--it's time for me to go to work.' And we did it. I'm proud of it, because it's really me."

That track ended up as the centerpiece of her second and final album, Check Me Out if You Don't Know Me by Now. Shortly after its release in 1975, Collins began negotiating with Ted Turner to host a 30-minute talk show, Woman Talk; Brown, though, wanted her to continue on with him, and something had to give. She ended up leaving Brown's entourage, the show never panned out, and for most of the next year, she avoided listening to music at all. By 1978, she had moved to Los Angeles to find out about the other side of the music industry.

"Everybody wants to go where the money goes; nobody knows," she says. "So I got a job at a big recording studio, the Record Plant, in the accounting department. In college my major was business, so I used that to my advantage: seeing how the whole thing was done, taking engineering classes, learning a little more about what I'd been doing the last seven years with James Brown. I worked there for a year before ever letting them know that I was a singer--I wanted to prove myself. I used my first name and a nickname that I had in high school. Lyn Collins was not an office person--she was a stage person. I'm a Gemini, so you can see, I can separate the two."