Once again, we were thinking in pairs: every Parliament album had a Funkadelic twin. In 1975, we delivered our babies in spring—Chocolate City came out in March and then, a month later, Funkadelic put out Let’s Take It to the Stage. When we made that record, we were in the process of extricating ourselves from Westbound and moving over to Warner Bros. I wasn’t done with Funkadelic by any means, but our time on Westbound wasn’t working for us anymore. It wasn’t a financially profitable situation—we would just make a record and Armen Boladian would put it out. We didn’t get tour support, really, and he wasn’t a creative partner in the way that Neil was. Our attorney, Ina Meibach, along with our manager, Cholly Bassoline, started looking for a new deal for Funkadelic, and found one at Warner Bros.—which was, ironically enough, the label that had parted ways with Casablanca just as Up for the Down Stroke was coming out. Leaving Westbound wasn’t very complicated. We agreed to finish up with Armen, at which point we’d be free to release new Funkadelic material on Warner Bros. It wasn’t even a contractual matter, since we never had a proper contract. The only questions that made it sticky at all in a corporate sense came from the Warner Bros. side: they needed proof that we were free of all prior obligations, that Armen wouldn’t turn around and make any claims on us.
Sometimes bands approach the final records they owe a label as a tiresome duty. Funkadelic wasn’t that kind of operation. “Good to Your Earhole,” the opener, is straight-ahead heavy funk, with one of our best chants: “Put your hands together. Come on and stomp your feet.”
We also reinforced our straight funk bona fides with a track called “Stuffs and Things” that we recorded with a drummer named Barry Frost, a white kid who was in an Oakland funk band called Leon’s Creation. We shared management with them, and Tiki wasn’t there the day we recorded, so we briefly created a kind of hybrid band, a ParliafunkadelicmentLeon’s Thing. Another song on that record, “Be My Beach,” is maybe the first appearance of the Bootsy character, the high elastic vocals, the elaborate metaphors. It’s kind of an early sketch for the underwater boogie that would later turn up on Motor Booty Affair, or for that matter on the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster.” There are tons of puns and references to other songs, like when Bootsy says, “I’d just like to be your bridge over troubled waters, mama / Dig . . . while I smoke on it,” which somehow pulls together Simon & Garfunkel and Deep Purple. And then there’s the title track, which has all these old nursery rhymes and dozens-style blue humor:
Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, snorting some TAC
Along came a spider, slid down beside her, said, “What’s in the bag, bitch?”
Andrew Dice Clay used much of that material later, and made quite a bit of money with it. But for us it had a deeper significance. There were always rivalries with other bands, and never more so than when we started to take off. Groups were starting to get jealous of each other. We were on a double bill with Earth Wind & Fire once, and they prevented us from playing. “Let’s Take It to the Stage” means “We ain’t got to argue and fight—I’ll meet you on the stage.” In the process of settling scores, we gave those other bands ridiculous names: we called James Brown the Godmother instead of the Godfather, said Sloofus instead of Rufus. We even called out Earth, Hot Air, and No Fire. We would end up doing that more and more in Funkadelic, keeping up a line of patter about other pop culture, taking good-natured shots at competitors, the kind of thing that would become popular in hip-hop fifteen years later.
One day we were at Hollywood Sound in Los Angeles, cutting “Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” one of the rock-guitar showcases on the record. Eddie Hazel wasn’t there, and Michael Hampton, who was the guitarist on the song, was playing on a stack of Pignoses—that’s the type of amplifier—rigged together for the rhythm. We finished one take, took a smoke break or something, and noticed that a white kid had wandered into the studio, a smack addict. We didn’t know him at all, but he said he played a little guitar, and he wanted to know if he could play with us and pick up a little cash in the process. “You got something I could put a solo on?” he said. “Just give me twenty-five dollars and I’ll do it.” I guess I could have been offended, or laughed it off, but I figured it differently. As far as I was concerned, if he had enough nerve to say that, to offer his services to Funkadelic, I wanted to see what he could do. So this boy went outside and got his guitar, which didn’t even have a case. We set him up, started the track, and he just started to play like he was possessed. He did all the rock and roll that hadn’t been heard for a few years, and he did it for the entirety of the track. Even when the song ended, he didn’t stop. All of us were up there goggle-eyed, saying, “Damn.” We had agreed on twenty-five bucks, but I gave him fifty because I loved it. He pocketed the money, walked out, and that was that. When we played the track back, I was even more impressed. “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” smoked, and over the years it’s proven to be one of the most enduring songs from that record. I tried to find the guy and put him on another song, but he was gone. He never resurfaced. We never heard from him. He’s not credited on the record because we have no idea who he was.
THERE’S A WHOLE LOT OF RHYTHM GOIN’ ROUND
Our thought, always, was to release albums in twin-like pairs, a Parliament record accompanied by a Funkadelic record. But we were making so much music at that point that we were outpacing the plan. And so in 1975, along with Chocolate City and Let’s Take It to the Stage, we birthed a triplet at a slight delay. The record was called Mothership Connection, it arrived in December 1975, and it quickly changed the landscape for all of us.
Chocolate City had set the table for Parliament. It let us see that we were on the move. In its wake, I started to sense that a bigger feast was on the way, in part because I heard what was happening in the music, and in part because I knew that the Casablanca team would put us across. The title song not only became part of the vernacular, but also the name of a spinoff label at Casablanca: Cecil Holmes ran it, and signed artists like the New York City Players, who would soon be known as Cameo. With Chocolate City under our belt, Bootsy and I went into the studio and laid down track after track. Some of them sounded like they were Parliament hits, which was a category we were starting to understand: bouncy horn part or smooth R&B ballad or big bass funk.
As I sorted through all the tracks, I knew that they needed a unifying idea, too, not just a theme but a kind of plot. Mothership Connection was that idea. Now, with almost forty years of hindsight, people can look back and take it in stride: a concept album based around a crazy alien funk mythology. But at the time, it was harder to understand exactly where the idea came from. Drugs may have had something to do with it: they furnished confidence and momentum and sometimes turned sparks of ideas into bonfires. But it was also the natural—or, if you’d prefer, unnatural—step in our thinking. In Chocolate City, we had imagined a black man in the White House. That would take thirty-four years to come true. For Mothership Connection, we went even further afield and imagined a black man in space. Joyce Bogart, Neil’s wife, had a slightly more limited idea of the concept, which was that a ship had come down from outer space and landed in the ghetto. In fact, that’s what she wanted to call it: Landing in the Ghetto. In their mind there was a black-liberation dimension, alien beings coming down to save all the poor people. I saw it differently. To me it was pimps in outer space, the spaceship as a kind of high-tech Cadillac. Space was a place but it was also a concept, a metaphor for being way out there the way that Jimi Hendrix had been. Imagining a record in space was imagining artistry unbound, before it was recalled to Earth. I did love science fiction, of course, especially Star Trek, because it moved along on its ideas. They came up with some brilliant concepts and developed amazing realities. Plus, they personified the idea of teamwork. Kirk needed Spock. Spock needed Kirk. They both needed Bones, Scotty, and Sulu. All of them together made an entity that could cope with almost anything. They personified the idea of teamwork.
As much as it was a space album, Mo
thership Connection was also a radio album. At the time, radio stations were changing radically. They had been these independent businesses, underground tastemakers. They worked to bring new artists to listeners, and they were as important in shaping the sixties as drugs or free love or any other part of the culture. So in my mind, the concept of Mothership Connection wasn’t just Star Trek in the ghetto, but pirate radio coming in from outer space. It’s not thought of in that way as much, at least anymore, but that’s at the heart of the album. In fact, it wasn’t until I recorded “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” that the concept really came together in my head. For that song, and all the ones that followed, I wrote lyrics that were raps, not in the hip-hop sense, exactly, but raps in the style of the Last Poets.
I say the Last Poets, but there are other influences in there as well, Frankie Crocker and Rod Serling and Lord Buckley and Wolfman Jack and dozens of other voices I had heard over the years. Radio was magic. It could transport you to a place without moving you at all. That monologue required a certain voice, and that voice became a character—Lollipop Man, also known as the Long-Haired Sucker.
Mothership Connection refined what we were doing on Chocolate City. For starters, we were leaning more heavily on brass. Horns had always been part of soul music, but they were all over rock and roll in the mid-seventies, from Chicago to Blood, Sweat & Tears to Tower of Power. Bootsy knew Fred Wesley from working with James Brown, and Fred brought in Maceo and Michael and Randy Brecker, who were just starting out as the Brecker Brothers after playing with everyone from Aerosmith to Horace Silver to Billy Cobham. It was just unbelievable what we could do with those guys added to what we already had.
In the title song we introduced Star Child, another character, who was an alien who brought funk to Earth. I folded in the Chariots of the Gods mythology, sprinkled some contemporary science fiction on the top, and stirred it all together.
We have returned to claim the Pyramids
Partying on the Mothership
There was a great chorus there, too: “If you hear any noise, it’s just me and the boys.” Neil’s appreciation for bubblegum, our musicianship, these new expansive lyrics: I could feel that it was all coming together into a sound that no one else had. I started to see how it could dominate the charts.
The third major song on Mothership Connection first occurred to me when I heard the David Bowie song “Fame,” which is itself a James Brown–style performance. We had a new drummer, Jerome Brailey, who had come over from the Chambers Brothers, and he was with me when “Fame” came on the radio. “Remember that beat for me,” I said. He did, and that’s one of the reasons that he got a cowriting credit on that song. Back in the studio we fired up that beat and built it back into “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker),” which incorporated chants that we were already doing in concert. With those three songs nailed down, I went into the vault of unreleased tracks and began to retrofit the strongest ones to this new concept. “Unfunky UFO” was a funky track that I knew I could link to the same theme. “Night of the Thumpasaurus Peoples” was an undeniable chant. And “Handcuffs” is a track left over from Chocolate City, but we updated it for Mothership by adding those alien accents, accelerated voices and such. I had a collaborator on that song, sort of: Janet McLaughlin, a girl I was seeing in Los Angeles. She had come out from Chicago with a group of young women. They were just out of college, all of them, but they were getting close to stars; one of the girls in her circle was Janis Hunter, who ended up marrying Marvin Gaye. They had this hip Chicago rap, talked about how they were living, how they were making it, and one of the ways they described getting their hooks in men was handcuffs. I liked that idea, so I used it in a song and gave her a cowrite. That was always my theory: give them credit for whatever bullshit they were talking, especially when it was an interesting turn of phrase. That was better than nabbing a star, wasn’t it? Publishing credit stuck around long after the man departed. It was real bank that you could count on. And what was the alternative, really? One morning I came out of bed and saw Janet making pancakes. She was pissed off at how I wouldn’t ask her to marry me, mumbling angrily to herself loud enough for me to hear. As I got close to the kitchen, I heard her say, “Motherfucker jumping up and down on me for free.” It was the funniest fucking thing I ever heard.
For the cover photo of Mothership Connection, I wanted a spaceship. Who doesn’t? Cholly Bassoline went straight to one of the prop stores in Los Angeles, and the next thing you know, we had the actual ship from The Day the Earth Stood Still, a classic sci-fi movie from the early fifties. It was your basic flying saucer, classic round, little doorway near the top, and we took a series of pictures sitting on it or near it. And there it was, the first fully mature Parliament record: songs all nailed down tight, concept worked out in advance, artwork in service of the larger idea. It came out in December of 1975. I remember some of the other headlines. The observation deck at the World Trade Center had just opened. There was some news story about China: I think President Ford was visiting there, and they were returning the remains of two navy pilots who had been shot down in the sixties. Our record wasn’t the only thing happening in the world, but it was in the world, happening.
We picked “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” as the first single. We were all in agreement: everyone in the band, and everyone at Casablanca. It was an R&B record, basically, with slippery horns and a strong hook, and it started killing at the R&B stations immediately. The song was big in the hood. A little while after we released it, though, pop stations got onto “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker).” I have to say that none of us saw it coming, though I see in retrospect how it could happen. The song had a catchy pop melody, a memorable catchphrase, and that light and bouncy chant. It wasn’t really deep funk like “Mothership Connection.” Pop programmers had one little idea. They wanted us to take the chant off the front, the part that said “Tear the roof off the mothersucker,” because it bordered on profanity, and they said that if we did it they’d promote the record like crazy. Once we did, and once they did, the effect was immediate. It was like Motown putting out a new Stevie Wonder record, or Atlantic with Aretha. That thing moved like nothing I had ever seen. You could turn on two or three stations one after the other and they all would be playing it. It was in Philly. It was in Detroit. It was in Los Angeles and St. Louis. After a while, even if we were in West Virginia, going through the mountains, and we turned on the radio, there it was, “Give Up the Funk.” It reached the top five on the soul chart and got to number 15 on the pop chart. That was the year of “Silly Love Songs” by Paul McCartney and Wings and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee, and we were right there with them. It was such a big hit, in fact, that it temporarily cast a long shadow over Funkadelic, which was the DNA of the entire enterprise.
On and off again over the years, we had shared bills with Mother’s Finest, an Atlanta-based funk-rock band. They played great, had a great look, wrote real nice songs. I liked their whole operation. At one of the shows we played with them in the early seventies, they had a little rocket on a string that used to shoot up from offstage and pass right over people’s heads. It was just a firecracker, nothing more than that really, but it was exciting to the people in those smaller venues. I took note of it. When Mothership Connection came out, and especially after “Give Up the Funk” took off, I went to Neil and told him that I wanted a real spaceship. I didn’t know how much it cost to have one. I didn’t know anyone else who had one. I just knew that it suddenly made sense for me. Many label heads would have balked. Neil wasn’t a balker. In fact, he jumped at the idea, and came right back at me with an idea of how it might be financed. Neil was always having creative ideas for how to finance things. He knew how to move money around. When he released a record, for example, he would go to the bank and get a loan to press the discs, and then sell them to a distributor and go back to pay the pressing plant. He could have $10 million in his bank account at
nine o’clock in the morning and then be a hundred thousand overdrawn in the evening, or the other way around. And so when I said “spaceship,” Neil just nodded and set up a million-dollar loan for me.
As it turned out, that was the beginning of a bit of trouble—my management took commission on the loan, which you’re not supposed to do. And a good deal of the spaceship money also went to buy cars for everyone connected to the band. Cholly got a Jaguar. Boogie and Calvin got Sevilles. Garry got a Thunderbird. Ray got a Thunderbird. Bernie got a Volvo. I think there were twenty-six cars in all. I didn’t need a car. I didn’t drive. I just wanted my spaceship.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 13