Fairly quickly, we realized that a band aiming for the radio needed a killer song: more than that, a title song for the first album. We hadn’t gone that route before. When we put out Osmium, we were still in the frame of mind of album artists. There was no song called “Osmium” because there didn’t need to be. And while Funkadelic had plenty of title songs, from “Maggot Brain” to “Cosmic Slop,” they weren’t exactly commercial singles. I was thinking along those lines when, in the middle of a jam session, like “Testify” before it, I thought of “Up for the Down Stroke.” The riff was something we had been toying around with, and all of a sudden the lyrics came to me. It was everything all at once: sexy, paradoxical, and even a little political, if you looked at it a certain way. Most of all, it was catchy as hell, the kind of thing an audience would chant if a band was playing it onstage.
Like many of my ideas, it probably would have been lost to time if it hadn’t been for the people around me, especially Archie Ivy. Archie had started as a journalist who first hung out with the band in the Maggot Brain years, when he was reporting for Soul magazine. He was from Los Angeles, though his cousin had been close to Eddie Hazel in New Jersey. I liked having Archie around, and other people like him—Tom Vickers, from Rolling Stone, was another one—because I understood that they were the message makers, the designers and disseminators of what we liked to call “impropaganda.” Archie became a regular in the P-Funk camp and then a member of the inner circle. When we restarted Parliament for Casablanca, he became essential, in part because he was the one who wrote down all the crazy ideas and began to organize them into a coherent message. If I made a joke or a pun, if I spouted a slogan just for fun, Archie would get it down on paper, where it started to take on a more profound significance. It’s a good thing, too, because my handwriting and my spelling were awful. I could have had every good idea in the world, and no one would have been able to find them for shit. Archie’s official title was personal manager, which increasingly meant confidant and soundboard and brain annex.
The rest of the album followed in the footsteps of “Up for the Down Stroke,” though much of it was an exercise in listening to old tracks with new ears. There were some songs from the old Parliaments catalog that we hadn’t been able to do—or do justice to—as Funkadelic, so we picked them back up and remade them with our new sound in mind. We redid “The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg).” We redid “All of Your Goodies Are Gone.” And, of course, we redid “Testify.” Why not? Even though it had been a big hit for the Parliaments, the conventions of the time had hemmed it in. Finally, on Up for the Down Stroke, I got to record it the way I had originally imagined it. We had Bernie. We had Bootsy. We had Tiki. We had a half decade of constant touring and the momentum of new ideas. It was like a painter going back to the same river bridge and creating another canvas.
The cover of Up for the Down Stroke tries to deliver on all the consolidated innovation. It’s a blurry photo of me surrounded by a trio of women, and I’m wielding a whip. The idea came from Cholly Bassoline, our manager at that time, and fit in with other things that were happening in R&B around that time—especially the S&M-themed covers of the Ohio Players, a Dayton soul and funk group that had been a labelmate of ours at Westbound. Our imagery was more theatrical, with more elaborate costumes, and maybe it was more comic than dark, but I didn’t exactly love it at the time. It wasn’t the visual match for our music that I wanted. We even did a video for that album, though it was more like a commercial. Joyce, Neil’s wife, who was very involved in the imagery of the label’s bands, went with me to the West Fourth Street basketball courts and made a short film that showed me dancing up and down the street in tall boots with a boom box on my shoulder that was playing “Up for the Down Stroke.” Now they show it as a video on YouTube, but at the time it was a commercial that ran on TV.
The single quickly became our first top-ten R&B hit. You heard it everywhere: I think I was in Los Angeles the first time it came on the radio. But the record business was never easy. Just as Neil was putting out the album, Casablanca and Warner Bros. had a falling-out. Warners was having trouble with the manufacturing side and couldn’t focus on promotion and other aspects of the business, so Neil went to Mo Ostin, the chairman of Warners, to complain, after which Mo released Neil from the deal. Casablanca went out into the world as an independent label. This was great news for freedom, though slightly more worrisome for finance. To make money, Neil came up with a scheme: he bought up the record rights to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and released a double album of highlights, which he distributed through a new deal he struck with Polygram. It didn’t do as well as Neil had hoped, and things were a little rocky there for a while, but I never lost my confidence in Neil.
The way he handled us on tour was proof of that. We revisited all the spots in the Northeast that were part of our regular circuit, but he also focused on a new set of cities: Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, and especially Washington, D.C. Neil made sure that we were doing promotional work in all formats—R&B, rock, pop. Funkadelic had been popular mostly with FM rock stations and college programmers, but “Up for the Down Stroke” brought us back to R&B for real. I started hooking back up with lots of the DJs I had known in the mid-sixties, people like Butterball Jackson in Baltimore and Frankie Crocker in New York. In fact, playing off the personas of the black radio jocks would become a central part of Parliament’s identity. One thing about Neil and the people he worked with—Jheryl Busby and Cecil Holmes, especially—is that they never separated R&B from pop when it came to promotions. There was a division at the radio level, so at most labels there was a competition between different parts of the staff. Would the song break pop or break R&B? Who would get credit? Neil had a very diverse roster and he made sure that all promotions staffers were able to move freely between categories.
What did it mean to have a hit like “Up for the Down Stroke”? The easy answer is that it meant everything, that it was a dream come true, the cherry on the sundae of the fifteen years I had spent making records. The true answer is that it didn’t feel like a big deal at the time. I was always so busy pushing forward creatively, trying to come up with the next big thing, that chart success changed my immediate surroundings without affecting my destination. The success brought more money in the short term, which increased the number of hangers-on and improved the quality of drugs. But even that wasn’t as drastic as it was with some other bands, largely because when we made money, we spent it on new sessions, new equipment, tour props. That arrangement seemed to work for everyone. Neil never even minded that we were maintaining our existence as Funkadelic at the same time that we were blowing up as Parliament. I would let him come in and listen to the tracks, and if there was one he felt strongly about keeping with Parliament, I’d let it go that way.
Handling it like business—if a song sounded like Parliament, it was Parliament—actually helped us maintain our split personality. The very same month that Up for the Down Stroke was released, we released Standing on the Verge of Getting It On as Funkadelic. It was the least Parliament-like album imaginable, an exercise in guitar excess. By this point, most of the core Funkadelics had been in and out of the band more than once, and Standing on the Verge was a kind of reunion for me and Eddie. We wrote alongside each other for almost the entire record. On the original pressings, those songs are credited to me and to Grace Cook, who was Eddie’s mother; he used her name because he didn’t want to get hit for the publishing rights. But it was a blazing guitar record from door to door. We picked up one of the Invictus songs, “Red Hot Mama,” and set it on fire. And the title song: man, watch that thing go. That’s Eddie, primarily, but he taught the part to Garry Shider and Ron Bykowski so that everyone could play in concert. It was like one of the jams we did onstage, finally captured on record: loud, sloppy, undeniable. I didn’t think of it as an anthem, necessarily. It just came out that way. Eddie played his fingers off on every song. You know that old western Bad Day at Black Rock? Standi
ng on the Verge was a good day.
It was also the growth of Funkadelic as an idea, or a way of life, or a cult, or a comedy troupe, or however you want to see it. I started to hear the way that we were carrying on the legacy of people like Jimi Hendrix and even extending it into a new black rock and roll. That meant that we were off in another country, and we had a language of our own. Ron Bykowski was credited as “polyester soul-powered token white devil.” I was “Supreme Maggot Minister of Funkadelia; vocals, maniac froth and spit. Behavior illegal in several states.” We used computer-altered vocals more and more, throwing in shit that no one else was doing in pop records. At one point you can hear me, in a squeaky voice, call someone a fat motherfucker. That was Armen’s right-hand man, a guy who weighed about four hundred pounds. He pulled his shirt up while we were recording; he was always there doing something gross and nasty. When he wasn’t being disgusting, he was responsible for bringing around contracts for assignment of publishing rights. They were usually blank; we were told specifics would be filled in later. We didn’t think enough about what we were signing. We were preoccupied with the art, not to mention that we were always at a point where somebody needed money fast. That’s how it goes for working musicians, and it wouldn’t always work out to our advantage.
If Standing on the Verge of Getting It On had some of our most uncompromising music up to that point, it was also a high-water mark for Pedro Bell. His cover was a work of art in every respect. I told him I wanted a vehicle and a biological entity combined, some sort of living spaceship. What he did with those instructions was staggering. He designed something that was truly visionary, years before any Robocop or teledildonics. He drew terrifying monsters and eerie alien landscapes and a line of little tiny characters in the front parading with a flag that reads UNITED STREAKERS FRONT. It was a combination of Ralph Bakshi and Samuel R. Delany and Superfly and Fat Albert and Philip K. Dick and Krazy Kat and Flash Gordon, all mixed together in Pedro’s brain with some kind of blender that hadn’t even been invented yet. On the back, there’s a winged warrior in a chariot, and he’s saying, “There’s nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass! Funkadelic is wot time it is!”
We toured for that album without Eddie. He was flying somewhere, and while he was sitting in his seat waiting for takeoff, he heard something in his ear telling him to get off the aircraft. He was doing so much angel dust that he was higher than the plane. He thought there was a radio in his teeth. He flipped out and struck an air marshal, who arrested him. When the tour stopped in Cleveland, someone came backstage after the show and told us that there was a seventeen-year-old in town who could play “Maggot Brain” like he had written it. We went to his house and saw him play. He played the whole solo. That was Michael Hampton. A few days later, we contacted his family and asked them if he could come out on the road with us, and that went so well that he became part of the permanent band. It was both strange and familiar to have a kid around—it was like a throwback to the days when Fuzzy, Grady, Calvin, and I had to drive around with Billy and his friends in tow.
Mike was part of a repeating phenomenon of bringing in the youngest and the best musicians, because they kept the rest of us young. Even so, it wasn’t easy. We were a bigger band by then, with more access to everything both good and bad, and Mike was beside himself at first: sex and drugs and rock and roll, you know. We had to bring in a guy named Lodge, Mike’s cousin, to be a chaperone. Lodge ended up working with us for years in management. Even with a chaperone, Mike couldn’t hold off all the temptations, and early on that got him into some tough spots. Part of the problem was that he ran with the younger half of the band, Eddie and Billy and Tiki. Tiki was always the furthest out on any ledge. He would drop acid with Mike, and as soon as they were high, he would steal Mike’s money or even his clothes. “We forgot to tell you,” we told Mike. “You got to protect yourself. When you walk around naked, you ain’t got your pants on.”
Parliament was, from the start, intended to capture mainstream attention and bend the ear of the radio. Paradoxically, that led me to investigate heavier ideas. For starters, thoughts weren’t bitter when they went down candy-coated. You could do things with humor and a nice horn part that you couldn’t with an assaultive rock guitar and a twelve-minute jam. That’s what ended up pointing me into the heart of the second Parliament album, Chocolate City, which came out at the beginning of 1975.
One day, sitting around the house, I heard someone on the news saying that Washington, D.C., was 80 percent black. A little light went on in my head. Damn, I thought, we got the vote. By the rules of any sane democracy, we’ve already won. And on the heels of that came other thoughts. Sane democracy? That was the blackest black comedy. I started jotting down slogans like “You don’t need the bullet when you have the ballot.” We had a black mayor in Newark in those days, Kenneth Gibson, the first black mayor elected to run a big American city, even though many of the Black Power people thought he was a patsy who didn’t understand the real workings of power. I didn’t have any huge amount of admiration for Gibson, but his color was a fact, and that meant that some version of that same situation was about to wash up on the shores of other American cities. I kept taking notes and kept making jokes, and I ended up imagining it forward, all the way to the White House: “They still call it the White House, but that’s a temporary condition, too.” By the end of the first few pages, I had signed and populated an entire imaginary federal government: President Muhammad Ali, Education Secretary Richard Pryor, Arts Secretary Stevie Wonder, and so on.
The rest of the album didn’t quite deliver on its promise. It’s not that it was a bad album at all—it’s one of my favorites—but it wasn’t a fully executed idea the way I wanted it to be. The politics, or the topical commentary, tapered off after the title song. We were a half step away from figuring out how to do that part of it more comprehensively.
On the other hand, the record was a landmark for how it expanded our sound, and much of that expansion came courtesy of Bootsy Collins. His megastardom with his Rubber Band was still a few years off, but Chocolate City was really his breakout record. There was a company out of New Jersey called Musitronics that was founded by a guy named Mike Beigel, and he had spent time at another company developing a synthesizer that ended up being abruptly unfunded. He had nowhere to go with his technology, so he rebuilt it as a guitar-effect pedal and went to Bob Moog, the synthesizer pioneer, to help get a patent. That was the Mu-tron III, and Stevie Wonder used it, and Bootsy used it, too, feeding his bass through it and getting this incredible wah-wah sound. “Ride On,” the second song on Chocolate City, after the title song, is maybe the best example of Mu-tron funk on that record. It’s basically a dance song (“Put a hump in your back / Shake your sacroiliac”) with a little detour into questions of personal liberty and integrity (“It ain’t what you know, it’s what you feel / Don’t worry about being right, just be for real”). But the real draw is the bass, which is wah-wahed into outer space, just undeniable from the beginning of the song right up to the end. “What Comes Funky” is like that, too, a solid funk foundation underneath lyrics about dancing and freedom (“I don’t need approval to be a mover”).
From a bandleader’s point of view, Eddie Hazel’s accomplishments on that album were spectacular. When you think of how out there he was on Cosmic Slop or Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, and then look at the control he had as a player on Chocolate City, it’s mind-boggling to imagine that both styles came from the same person. Much of what he was doing on Chocolate City was influenced by Sly and the Family Stone. Sly’s bands were never heavy in the rock sense—Freddie Stone, his brother and lead guitarist, never played like Jimi Hendrix, but instead went for a big pop sound. Eddie could move in either direction, and he did. It was like an old-fashioned football player who went two ways, lined up at receiver and then came back as a defensive back.
As the musicians found their voice, the writers and producers worked out a band s
trategy. In general, Bootsy and I laid down the basic track and then Bernie revised and extended it. Other songs were more conservative, genre numbers basically. “I Misjudged You” came straight from Motown. We had written that at the Brill Building years before for Jobete, and even recorded it as a demo. And then there’s “If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It),” which is one of those rare cases where Bernie and I just sat down and cowrote from beginning to end.
Because Parliament was mainstream, because “Chocolate City” was aiming for radio, I made sure to wrap the political statement in humor and a kind of theatrical cloak. It was my way of protecting myself. When I saw artists who stepped out without that cloak, I was scared for them. I was scared for Bob Marley for a long time. He was saying things of import and consequence, and saying them in a straightforward way. That was very dangerous in Jamaica, very dangerous. Over the course of his career as an artist and activist, he crossed wires with legitimate politicians who were mixed up with power brokers and gangsters. It was all high-level shit, world domination and social control. That kind of shit will get you killed. I never wanted that responsibility, not the responsibility of a political spokesperson like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, and not even the responsibility of a musical spokesperson like Bob Marley. He was almost like a Dalai Lama. Critics and fans were thrusting him into that position even before he knew he was in it. We went the other way, played so crazy that nobody wanted to be connected to us at that level.
As a band, the Wailers were something else. They had transcended just the reggae groove, and they were playing everything from doo-wop to straight pop. Around Chocolate City, we crossed paths with Bob fairly often. There was a story going around that Bob had been born in Delaware—that his mother, Cedella, had come up to the States to make sure that her baby was an American citizen. Whenever we saw them on tour, I would call Bob “Delaware,” which drove him crazy. We would needle each other about weed, too. He would roll joints that also had tobacco in them, which was the English style, and mock me for being “bougie” and having the money to smoke straight weed. “They got you fucked up wanting that shit,” he said. “You’ve been programmed.” Somewhere in the mid-seventies, there came a point where we didn’t see him around very much anymore. At the end of 1976, gunmen broke into his house and shot Bob, his wife, and his manager. He wasn’t seriously injured, just minor wounds in his chest and arm, but it was a scare. And then after that he had a bad toe injury, which turned out to be an early sign of cancer. Whatever happened to him, in my mind, was a consequence of how big he got. I just felt certain that there were forces trying to take him down, and they weren’t going to stop until they had. The same thing happened to John Lennon. The Beatles were a British version of ghetto kids, smart as hell. But peace and love was a dangerous platform. When you talked about it too often, and too prominently, you messed shit up for all the businesspeople in the world who made money off of chaos. If you come in peace and love, they will get rid of you.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 12