Going back to the name Parliament was, in theory, a complication for our use of the Funkadelic name. It wasn’t a problem from the Westbound side—Armen Boladian wasn’t paying us anything, really. He would get us a van every year and a half or so and let us have access to the studio. That wasn’t nearly enough for him to have leverage over us. Jeffrey Bowen, though, subscribed to the old Motown ways, and as soon as we became his Parliament, he tried to block us from going back to being West-bound’s Funkadelic. We knew he didn’t really have a leg to stand on—the union could prevent certain aspects of a recording, but they couldn’t stop us from playing onstage. For that matter, the two bands could continue to function as separate entities, where Parliament was a group of singers backed by a band and Funkadelic was a band backing a group of singers. Still, he tried to muscle us. Jeffrey was a brilliant A&R man, but he had it in his head that good people don’t win—we used to drive around for hours arguing that shit—and that made him cutthroat in certain minor ways.
As it turned out, Jeffrey’s arrogance solved the same problem that it created, though it sacrificed Osmium in the process. We did a big show for CKLW in advance of the album, showcasing our single “I Call My Baby Pussycat,” and the distributors who came were so excited by our performance that they put in orders for a large number of Parliament albums, something like fifty thousand. At the same time, Invictus was releasing a single for one of its other acts, Chairmen of the Board. The song was “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” and the other side of the single was “Patches.” The record company realized that even though “Give Me Just a Little More Time” was a strong enough song, “Patches” was the potential hit. Just as they got ready to put it out, Clarence Carter covered it, and CKLW started playing his version. Jeffrey got very agitated. He told CKLW that if they wanted another Invictus record, they could go to the store and buy it. That next record, the one that got stranded by the “Patches” debacle, was “Pussycat.” Instead it went to a little black station, WGPR, which killed it two ways, quick. For starters, it was too pop for an R&B station—it sounded great, but within that narrow context of the radio-friendly pop sound that we were trying for—and then there was the matter of the lyrics. The black community, and especially the church community, pitched a bitch when they heard us singing about pussy. Osmium, when it emerged, sold well enough because of the long tail of Funkadelic—everybody knew that it was the same band, and more and more people were signing on for the Funkadelic experience—but by that time I was through with Jeffrey. We remained cordial personally, but our business relationship was effectively over, and they never bothered us again about cutting another record.
Making Osmium may not have been a fully satisfying experience, but the cover photo is one of my most vivid memories. We shot it up in Toronto. I wore a sheet and nothing else, and everyone was decked out in hippie regalia. What I remember most is how much acid we were doing at the time. We were eating lots of soul food and steaks, and when you eat that kind of food and drop acid, you start tripping on the meat. You see it pulsating, like it’s still alive. That was freaky, but what was worse was how it ran hell on our stomachs. They call LSD acid because that’s exactly what it is. It blows up your digestive system and blows your ass out. We spent more time in the bathroom in those days than you could imagine, and there were hemorrhoids everywhere. And while the acid may have given us second sight and opened our inner eye, it didn’t affect our sense of smell, unfortunately. We could smell perfectly and that shit was horrible. The shoot took place in a park, in a flower garden, and it was so hot that the sweat and the salt was getting in everyone’s ass. Motherfuckers were crying like babies. And then there were bees in there because it was a flower garden, so if it was a movie instead of a still photo, you could see people flinching and swatting, scared as shit.
By then, I was pretty much a Toronto resident. I had gotten involved with a woman named Elizabeth Bishop; Liz and I had met during the first tour that followed “Testify,” in Buffalo, where she was a waitress at a club. The next time we came through town, she jumped on board with the band and came on the road with us from time to time. We had a daughter, Barbarella, in 1968, and the three of us, along with two of Liz’s kids from a previous marriage, moved to Canada. At first we lived in Forest Manor over by the Bay Bridge in Toronto, and later we moved out to Mississauga. I was officially a Canadian resident for a number of years, though it was in the same way that I had been a Newark resident: I was on the road pretty much all the time. When I had the time to be there, I loved it. Canada didn’t seem like a different world to me at all. I was going back and forth so much the border was a street I crossed, Buffalo on the one side and Hamilton on the other. You didn’t have to have anything to cross back then, not a passport and half the time not even an ID. Toronto was good for kids, a nice lifestyle, beautiful people, excellent schools. Between 1967 and 1971 it was pretty ideal.
Many Americans went up to Canada to escape the draft, of course, but those weren’t my reasons. I was married so it didn’t affect me personally. For a little while, you could even say that I didn’t notice that there was a war on. I knew all about the army, of course. If you got in trouble in school, the teacher would try to convince you to enlist. They knew you would get a good education and they thought it would straighten you out. But I went off into music instead. Back then, I wasn’t that clear on politics, at least in terms of specifics: it was something you couldn’t see through and so I looked around it. We were touring musicians, which meant that we didn’t always know about things right when they happened, and when we found out about them, we didn’t always understand what they meant in the way that you would if you lived in a neighborhood and saw the same people every day. Vietnam was an abstraction until it started to happen to specific people I knew, and even then it was incomprehensible: young Americans being cut down in a distant land for reasons no one could adequately explain. Other events were equally abstract, even when they were thuddingly specific. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, we were on the road. I don’t even know where, to be honest. Could have been Akron, Ohio. Could have been Ann Arbor, Michigan. All I know for sure is that I was backstage, tripping so hard that when a head poked around the door to tell me the news, I couldn’t conceive of it.
For me, political engagement in general seemed like a trap. It was too easy to slip into a certain way of thinking and then, once you were there, to lead others into something you didn’t fully understand. All I could safely preach was that people should think for themselves. What was funny was that the younger members of our band, the kids like Billy and Eddie, they educated us. My crew, Fuzzy and Grady, we were from the streets. We were trying to be cool, looking like pimps, thinking we were the shit. But once we got on the road with the band, once we pulled into college towns and saw the way that kids interacted with us and with each other, we started realizing that they were dead serious about peace and love, and that took your breath away a little bit. Those kids were brave. They would walk up to a soldier and put flowers in the gun. And they were protected because of their youth. Once they got past eighteen, they were exposed and endangered, like at Kent State. Once the power structure had you on its radar, you couldn’t really put flowers into the gun anymore.
When people say the sixties were a revolution, they at least mean that it turned everyone’s head around. Everything was getting loose, and boundaries were breaking down faster than new ones could be drawn. One night we were at the Cheetah Club in New York, where the Chambers Brothers were playing. After the show, someone came to the microphone and asked the crowd to sit on the floor, cross-legged. We did, and we watched the stage to see what would happen next. But what happened next wasn’t on the stage. All of a sudden, people started standing up one by one in the crowd and singing. “When the moon is in the seventh house,” the first one said. “And Jupiter aligns with Mars,” the second one said. One of the people standing was the actress and singer Melba Moore, who had been at school with G
rady. We didn’t know what the hell they were doing, but the harmonies gave us chills. And they were staging it really inventively. Lights cut through the crowd and lit the place up. Strobe lights reflected off tinfoil. As it turns out, they had been rehearsing this kind of thing for weeks, a communal musical that extended into the audience. It was Hair, but not quite yet: it was the roots of Hair. There was so much happening in those days that it seemed like epiphanies stacked on top of epiphanies. The week we saw the kids singing what would become Hair happened to be the same week that Ken Kesey came through town with the Furthur bus. Music and books and films flowed to us through the same channels as sex and drugs. There weren’t publicists or managers controlling what you thought. There weren’t corporate entities to enforce corporate control. Maybe this is obvious, and maybe it’s part of the stereotype of the era, but it’s also part of the truth.
Everyone wonders what happened to the idealism of the sixties. As I see it, it ripened into something nearly perfect, and then it began to ferment. Woodstock was the end. Look at what it did to drugs, or to the way that drugs circulated through society. For years, it was a communal scene. You shared drugs with friends. Someone put money into the center of the table and then someone else did and then a third person pitched in, and the fourth swept it all up and went off to buy a lid of weed for everyone to smoke. Nobody talked about selling, really. And because no one talked about selling, no one saw the drugs as a product, and there was no issue of bad quality or bad service. But then, suddenly, it became an industry and the whole thing just flipped to the other side. Quality was a major issue; you heard the announcements over the loudspeaker at Woodstock about the bad acid. Service was an issue; if your dealer was just a middleman retailing a product to you, then you were allowed to demand what any customer would demand. Making drugs a commercial concern was the quickest way to end what was good about them. When the smoke cleared, there were thousands of small businessmen trying to stretch their profit, and they were willing to poison people to do it. Strychnine started showing up in the acid. People were cutting recreational dope with straight PCP. Woodstock may have been the mountaintop but it was also the beginning of the climb back down.
The same thing happened with sex. Free love was fine for a minute. For a while people fell in love innocently, and there’s nothing wrong with fucking. We all knew that it wasn’t a permanent condition, that people would eventually have to go back to work and get married and raise families. But it was a nice way of thinking until that, too, came to a crashing halt. Diseases started to creep in through the early seventies, more aggressively, more fatally.
All of these things were ways to make sure that societal movements stayed cosmetic, that they didn’t really change anything about the power structure. A peace-and-love message was the corniest shit imaginable unless it was coming from someplace special, which it was for a while. The war was going to end. Youth culture was going to be heard. Women were going to be respected. But people higher up on the ladder noticed that the wheels were turning, and they stepped in to stop them. To this day, I am sure that the State Department was involved in trying to end the culture wars. You can see the dossiers they kept on John Lennon, Bob Dylan, everyone else who had similar influence. Freedom’s dangerous because it lets you think for yourself, and no one who’s trying to protect their power wants a society full of free-thinking people.
OPEN UP YOUR FUNKY MIND AND YOU CAN FLY
We saw the way that the late sixties were peeling away from the Summer of Love. We sensed the seventies coming. And in that rip in time that had opened up, we made our second Funkadelic album, Free Your Mind . . . and Your Ass Will Follow. It dealt with lots of the things that were in the air at that time: issues of social control, self-awareness, the failure of intellectuals to connect their utopian philosophies to what was actually happening on the street. We recorded the album quick, over a matter of days, which gave it a unified feel and a unified philosophy. It was also the first time that I tried to match the power of the band—that mix of hard rock and prog rock, of deep soul and classical composition—with appropriate lyrics, and to write something with deep meaning that gestured toward something larger and more literary. Of course, when I say “deep meaning,” all I really mean is a kind of poetry. Lots of people were writing protest songs, from Country Joe and the Fish to Buffalo Springfield to Barry McGuire. Some were better than others, but all of them had a kind of earnest fervor. I moved in the other direction. To me, all the social and psychological content seemed funny, especially the most serious ideas: life, death, social control. When you stayed there, hanging in the space between comedy and tragedy, between reality and surreality, a kind of wisdom started to come through you.
The two artists who did this better than anyone else, obviously, were the Beatles and Bob Dylan, which is why they not only survived the era but set the tone for everything that came afterward. When the pressure started to mount for them to be spokespeople, when fans and reporters started fishing around for deep thoughts, they had sharp-enough instincts to deflect and say something off the wall. They made an art out of nonsense. Even when John Lennon got in trouble for saying that the band was bigger than Jesus, he was doing it sarcastically and snottily, to make a point. He wriggled so you couldn’t catch him. It got into his art, too, and you can see it clearly in a song like “I Am the Walrus.” Was it deep because it showed how shallow everyone else was? Was it making fun of the idea of being deep? Was it just a matter of opening people’s heads up a little wider than they had been before? It was the same with Bob Dylan, though it took me longer to understand how he was operating. At first, he seemed especially sincere: just a guy out there with his guitar, singing in a nasal voice about love and politics. But when I started seeing his interviews, and then especially when he broke out of that troubadour mold, I saw more clearly what he was. He was a poet, and he was using language to open things up.
Those two influences fed me during that first phase of Funkadelic, along with many others. I was also doing lots of reading: Black Power books, novels, pulpy shit, underground comics, and then all those bestsellers that people now think of as the classics of the hippie era. One of the most influential books of that time was Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Everyone had a copy of it. He had a theory that the greatest achievements of human history, from the pyramids to crop circles, were the work of aliens. They had come down from outer space and given the gift of advanced civilization to humans. Why else would the Egyptians embalm somebody to last so long and put all their belongings in the tomb with them unless they thought that they’d be collected later on? Maybe the aliens were coming back for the pharaohs. It was an intriguing idea that didn’t seem entirely crazy on its face. It seemed like something to explore. These ideas of serious wisdom, these intriguing theories that bordered on historical conspiracy, they all got mixed together in my head. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they were dissolved in acid. Free Your Mind . . . and Your Ass Will Follow was written almost entirely on LSD. You can hear it in the guitar sound we got, and the way we produced it, and you can read it in the lyrics and the song titles.
It was also the true beginning of another phase in black music. There had been hints of social awareness a year earlier, when songs like “Cloud Nine” found the old guard moving tentatively into this new space. But that was nothing compared to what was starting to happen. In the summer of 1970, Marvin Gaye went into the studio to start work on What’s Going On. Later that year, Sly and the Family Stone started recording what was essentially their answer record, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Free Your Mind was released right at the head of that new trend. I felt the same obligation they did, probably, but I dealt with it differently. We were tripping like this, and so when we turned the tape on and the band started to play I started to improvise lyrics, monologues, and slogans. The title track begins with pings and hums and the sound of a radio tuning. Then I come in with the title chant.
There are lots of voices th
ere, some that sound like children, some that sound like women. It’s not until about two minutes into the song that the music arrives: a funky guitar part and then a highly distorted sci-fi organ on top of it. It would set a kind of pattern for Funkadelic, for a little while at least, to kick off an album with an abstract manifesto. After that, there are more traditional funk-rock songs. “Friday Night, August 14th” is a paycheck and party song, getting your income-tax refund and going to town with it, though there’s a dark undercurrent. “I Wanna Know If It’s Good to You” is a fairly traditional love song with poetic lyrics (“You make my heart beat sweeter than / the honey that replaced the rain”). There’s a track on there called “Fish, Chips and Sweat” that’s a Funkadelicized remake of “Headache in My Heart,” which I had done back at Golden World with a group called the Debonaires. Free Your Mind was sung all over the place, in the sense that lots of different people took lead vocals. Billy Nelson did “Friday Night, August 14th.” Eddie Hazel did “I Wanna Know If It’s Good to You.” Even Tawl Ross had a lead on “Funky Dollar Bill,” which was a deeply funky piece about consumerism and capitalism, how they distorted the social fabric and erased real responsibility.
There are people who say that the album is antireligious because of the way the title song talks about the kingdom of heaven, and because of the spiritual overtones of the last song, “Eulogy and Light.” Musically, that song is another collage, with backward playing and vocals, disembodied noises, and just about every other effect you can imagine. But thematically it’s a close cousin to “Funky Dollar Bill.” I was seeing the beginnings of a kind of materialism springing up around me, and it was at its worst where people had the least. I couldn’t see how it made sense for the poorest communities to plant the seeds of self-destruction.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 9