Video by Thomas Cordova.
Harold Ray Brown is back. All the way back, to where his life in many ways began. The 72-year-old Brown stands on the very spot. “There was a single snare drum right here,” he says, standing on the baseline inside the gymnasium of the 113-year-old First Lutheran Church in Downtown Long Beach.
“The principal, Principal Kenneth Hahn Jr., he sat me down right here and showed me how to hold the drumsticks, how to play a quarter-note beat.” Tears show up in Brown’s eyes and his voice quavers a bit with emotion. “Five minutes. He gave me five minutes. Right on this spot. And who would have thought I would become a drummer running around with Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley? Who would have thought that I’d be a drummer and one of the writers of ‘Why Can’t We Be Friends,’ ‘Slipping Into Darkness,’ ‘The World Is a Ghetto,’ ‘Spill the Wine,’ running around with Eric Burdon?”
Brown got a trophy from the church for his drumming a year later. He still has the trophy — small, tarnished, battered. “I have kept this since I got it,” he says. “It’s more important to me than any gold record. It’s banged up a little bit, just like me.”
Brown, never stopped playing drums after those five minutes in the First Lutheran gym. Just a couple of years afterward, still as a student at Poly High, he met Compton’s Howard Scott, a guitarist influenced by such blues giants as Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker and they formed the band the Creators, which played in nightclubs in Long Beach and Los Angeles. The band’s first gig was at the Cozy Tavern on Orange and Alamitos. The duo acquired more members along the way, and by 1969, War was born.
War became one of the biggest bands in history to emerge from Long Beach. The group members hung out together in the neighborhood around Lemon Avenue and 21st Street and practiced in a warehouse on Lemon and Hill Street. War’s songs were summertime anthems and funk-beat odes to brotherhood, which were performed worldwide. Its LP “The World Is a Ghetto,” which contained the hit “The Cisco Kid,” was the No. 1-selling album of 1973.
After a long and successful career, including 17 studio albums and a half-dozen huge hits, War splinted in the 1980s. Legal hassles over the band’s name resulted in the current version of War, which features the band’s original vocalist-guitarist Lonnie Jordan as the only member from the group. Four members of War, however, started the much more War-like Low Rider Band, which includes bandleader-drummer Brown, guitarist Scott, harmonica great Lee Oskar and bassist B.B. Dickerson.
Brown moved to New Orleans in the mid 1980s and became a professional tour guide and worked with inner-city youths, teaching drums and playing drums in second-line parades. He still has a house in New Orleans, and there are still Louisiana plates on his green truck. Brown has an affinity for green: “I was born on March 17,” he says. “I’m chocolate Irish.”
His life’s full circle has brought him back to the neighborhood and church of his boyhood. “I grew up here; there were six of us, five boys and a girl,” he said. “Can you imagine sending six kids to a private school?” He came back to the church to work with kids in the community, still using his drum kit as a way of giving back to his community, five minutes at a time.
Brown has a little office on the church grounds that’s crowded with piles of books, gold records, hole-in-one trophies, framed music awards, several small guitar amps, a piano and his drum kit.
“I remember the first day he came here, two years ago,” says the church’s young pastor Kyle Blake. “He was walking around on the grounds, so I went over to see what he was doing and he shook my hand and said, ‘I’m Harold Ray Brown.’ I thought, ‘Well, OK, who’s Harold Ray Brown? I went back in my office and Googled his name and I went, ‘Oh, wow!’ and rushed back outside and showed him the screen on my phone and said, ‘Are you this Harold Ray Brown?'”
Brown also spends a lot of time with older children, too, and the nearby homeless — in fact, he’ll talk to anybody, really. “I tell them to make something of themselves. Learn. Study. I remember listening to (former Long Beach radio station) KFOX and fantasize about beng a drummer, and the Holy Spirit told me to quit fantasizing. Be a drummer. That’s what I tell people. Dream, then act on that dream. Put down that iPhone. Changes don’t come to you laying around on your ass.”
Brown says Low Rider Band will play all the War hits on Saturday, with plenty of blues thrown in for the occasion. “We’ll be doing a bluesy version of ‘Me and Baby Brother,’ but it’s all the blues, it’s all everything.”
Presented in conjunction with the Long Beach Blues Society, the fifth annual New Blues Festival will take place on Labor Day weekend, Saturday and Sunday, at El Dorado Park Area 3/Glider Field, 7550 E Spring St., with headliners including Low Rider Band on Saturday and the King Brothers and the James Harman Band on Sunday, along with several other blues performers. Click here for the days’ schedules and other information.
Tickets are $45 each day, or $75 for both days. Parking is $8.