Hard Knock Life Lyrics

Documents of a hard-knock life

For more than 40 years, Charles Bradley played small shows across the US, his tough, ragged holler of a voice appreciated only by the crowd in front of him. There were more downs than ups during that time, he tells JIM CARROLL  , but he feels his time has come at last

It could have been so different. Somewhere along the line, somewhere among those hundreds of gigs which Charles Bradley did up and down the US through the years, the soul man could have struck lucky. All he was after was a record label to hear that powerful voice of his and give him a break. He wasn’t going to be fussy about where he hung his hat. Any label would have done. Any label who would show some faith in him.

But it didn’t happen. No one was prepared to go out on a limb for Bradley.

Instead, he kept on trucking. Nearly 40 years of banging out soul music in bars from New York to Alaska. Four decades of screamers, shakers and heartbreakers. When he wasn’t singing, he was working as a cook or as a carpenter. The dream never died.

Bitter? Bradley sighs when he starts to talk about those old days. He’s not bitter about the fact that it took so long because it all came good in the end. But it does obviously jar with him that he had to wait so long for his turn.

“No labels approached me,” he remembers. “All I could do was go around to different clubs and sing. I was trying to find a label who believed in me, but that was hard to come by.

“I sang and worked all over the United States. No one gave me a chance easily, I always had to work hard and fight for my chance. Recognition for what I did was very hard to come by. Other artists would get it for doing the same as I was doing, but it never happened for me then.”

It all changed for Bradley when a record label man walked into a bar, saw him in action and dug what he was doing. That record label man was Gabriel Roth from Daptone Records, the label which put Sharon Jones The Dap-Kings in the frame.

Roth walked into the Tarheel Lounge in Brooklyn and there was Bradley on the stage, doing his Black Velvet tribute to James Brown. There are not, let’s be honest here, many record label execs who can spot gold in a then-fiftysomething singer doing James Brown covers, but Roth’s a rarity in the business and he knew Bradley had something. He introduced the singer to a musician and producer on his label called Tom Brenneck and Bradley’s luck began to turn.

Middle Easterners Live "The Hard Knock Life", We Recite The Lyrics ...

“They got him, yo. They got Bin Laden.” That’s how I heard. Unlike other hip-hop journo cum Twitter pundits whose daily grind requires them to keep eyes glued to the tube (“flatscreen” just doesn’t do it for me, sorry) while thumb-typing their way into relevance at 140 characters a minute, my May Day 2011 was spent in a coffee shop, nose to the keyboard “the old school way,” hustling hard on my own projects.

“Say word. Wow.” I replied, and not even WOW in the all-caps way we now call a violation of text etiquette.

Got me to thinking: Hell of a life I’m blessed with that news of the death of the man who’d managed to explode his image and ideology upon the American consciousness so completely a decade ago now only elicits an annoyed glance at a text message on my iPhone, as I nestle in at my fave cozy Starbucks, sipping a chai latte and “working” on a writing project.

As a citizen of the world, I have that right, right? But as a citizen of the good ol’ U.S. of A., I’m afforded that very real luxury.