Along the way, up there in Newburgh, we managed to finish up our record for Warner Bros. There wasn’t much of a concept for Hardcore Jollies other than what the title says: it’s about playing the shit out of your instrument and getting your jollies—or, if you’d prefer, getting your rocks off by getting your rock and roll on. That’s why I dedicated that record to “the guitar players of the world.”
Finally, after weeks of rehearsing every song and every stage cue, after nailing down every second of the production, we were ready to kick off the P-Funk Earth Tour. It debuted in October 1976 at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans. That first show went the way Jules Fisher imagined: the little ship flew over the head of the audience and transformed, via the magic of misdirection, into the big ship. But in following Jules’s blueprint, we learned an important lesson, which is that it was impossible to follow the ship. Everything that happened after it arrived seemed like an anticlimax. We performed the entire show in its shadow.
After New Orleans, we knew that the ship had to come on at the end of the show rather than early on. Doing so at the second tour stop, in Baton Rouge, proved that. It was so powerful—and such a perfect way to cap off the concert, with Glen calling the ship down—that it took your breath away. Every night we packed the whole assembly onto seven trucks and set out for the next stop. All the shows through Louisiana and Mississippi were impressive, but Houston, the fifth stop of the tour, showed us what we really had. I got to the venue, the Summit, early enough to see the stage before people came in. The place looked like a megachurch without a congregation when it was empty; as the stagehands arranged the stage for the show, it began to look like a circus. But by the time of the show, the circus looked like a church again, this time full of parishioners. Sly was opening for us, backed by a new Family Stone that included Lynn Mabry and Dawn Silva, who would become the Brides of Funkenstein. He played a great set, and then Bootsy stepped out there and the crowd went crazy. When he left the stage, we came out and tore through Parliament hits like “Do That Stuff” and Funkadelic hits like “Cosmic Slop.” Sly’s band came back to join us for “Night of the Thumpasaurus Peoples.”
Even in a perfect show like that, there were things that bothered me: dropped cues, slight glitches on the soundboard or lighting rig. And then there was the matter of the small Mothership, hanging out there over the heads of people who were paying good money to see us, throwing off sparks. Who could promise that the thing wouldn’t fall into the crowd and injure our fans? As soon as I got it in my head that the small ship was a potential liability, it wasn’t long for this world. Besides, it only worked in certain venues anyway. It was great for the Garden, the Forum, the Spectrum, but as soon as we got outside in a festival setting, it was useless, and any smaller stage posed a problem, too. After about twenty shows, we retired the small ship. But that wasn’t the strangest hiccup on the tour. In Norman, Oklahoma, about a month into the tour, we were playing “The Undisco Kidd (The Girl Is Bad)” when it came true. A woman walked right up the center aisle onto the stage. She was smoking a joint and wearing overalls, and she hit the button of one strap and the overalls slid right off. There she was, completely naked, nappy dugout and everything. She turned around, waddling on account of her pants were around her ankles, stuck the joint up her butt and blew three smoke rings. Every time we tried to start the next song, people were laughing so hard that we had to stop. We kept jamming, kept trying to find our way into the next song, but it was no use. I talked to her about twenty years later on the telephone: she knew someone who knew someone. By then she sounded old and tired. “Did I really do that?” she said. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget.
We had the records. They had the ear of the radio. We had the stage show. It had the eyes of the audience. And after a few months on the road, we had the full force of Neil Bogart’s promotional genius. He hired a lieutenant from the air force to travel around with us. They toured us through NASA facilities: Huntsville, Alabama; Hampton, Virginia. We even got the entire band into NORAD—the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs—for a blink. The Mothership was almost a band member in its own right, subject to quirks and tantrums like anyone else in the band.
That first wave of shows went through me like an electrical current, recharging me and showing me what a rock show could be if it had the full participation not only of musicians but of set directors, choreographers, and prop masters. We were putting on the equivalent of a touring Broadway show. I was so fascinated by all the moving parts that it was sometimes hard to concentrate on the message in the music. When I was reminded that there was a philosophy behind it all, the idea sometimes came as a shock, and never more so than when the Black Muslims developed a special interest in the show. The Mothership, of course, had a rough precedent in Black Muslim theology and mythology. In the biblical book of Ezekiel, there was a prophetic vision that some believed was a story of alien visitors. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, wove that into a much more elaborate idea that was later explained by Louis Farrakhan:
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Mother Plane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects. Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the Original scientists. It took $15 billion in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel. America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. [Excerpted from “The Divine Destruction of America: Can She Avert It?” (1996)]
I had heard plenty about the Black Muslims from my kids and other kids their age, and I remembered shards of the Mother Plane story from my customers in the barbershop back in the fifties. But to me, it was just another mythology to draw on, no different from stories of mummification in ancient Egypt, from sci-fi movies and their vision of outer space, or from cloning. That’s why it was such a shock to look out into the crowd in Philadelphia and see all these guys with bow ties in the front row, shouting up at me. “Teach the knowledge, Brother George,” they were saying. The knowledge? Holy shit. It suddenly struck me that they were serious. When I looked at their faces, they were bowing down, praying almost. I started looking directly at them and saying, “Ain’t nothing but a party.” I started making more jokes about money and pussy, to make sure that everyone in the crowd, bow ties included, knew that I was getting paid for entertaining people. I wasn’t interested in promoting an eternal truth of any kind. I was leading a rock and roll band. The prospect that our music might be used for dogmatic purposes or associated with true believers of any stripe, well, that hadn’t worked for us back with the Process Church, in the early days of Funkadelic, and it wasn’t going to work with the Black Muslims.
Plus, the show itself was its own kind of high. Our faith in our ability as a live act is one of the reasons that we never went on TV shows like Soul Train, or anything else that required artists to lip-synch or play along with a prerecorded track. We didn’t want to do pantomime. TV was all about little ticky-tack speakers, which meant that it depended upon an artist’s ability to create intimate moments. Al Green could sing soft and pretty, so he worked in that medium. Sly could sit at the piano, play “If You Want Me to Stay,” and break your heart in the process. We were closer to Led Zeppelin, big enough that there was no point in shrinking ourselves to fit inside the box. We stayed big, stayed in arenas, and documented the tour on Live: P-Funk Earth Tour, a double live album that we taped in January at the Los Angeles Forum and the Oakland Coliseum. The set list was made up of Mothership Connection and Clones of Dr. Funkenstein songs, mostly, with one Funkadelic song (“Undisco Kidd”) and two new studio tracks, “This Is the Way We Funk with You” and “Fantasy Is Reality,” a song from our
Invictus days that we recut. Back then it had been a piece of pop soul, with fuzz guitar in the left track. For the live record, we redid it more grandly, with dripping piano chords and doo-wop vocals. The new version sounded older, maybe, but less dated, and the sentiment was the same.
Fantasy is reality in the world today
I keep hanging in there, that’s the only way
The P-Funk Earth Tour album mainly documented Parliament. But that was only part of the P-Funk story, and it didn’t tell how all of our other artists were helping to create a new genre. The most important, of course, was Bootsy and his Rubber Band. In the studio, all of us worked on the Bootsy records, but when he played live, he took the stage with a stripped-down group—just him, Bone, and P-Nut. Most of the time I only saw the Rubber Band from backstage, because I was getting ready to go out and follow him, but one night I went out in front of the audience to watch Bootsy’s set. When he came onstage, he didn’t move for two solid minutes. He just stood there in the dark with this thumping beat behind him, only his silhouette visible, and the crowd went crazy. I was so overwhelmed I could hardly stand it: the loudness of the people was something I had never experienced. He hadn’t made a sound yet and the place was vibrating. And then he said, “Hallelujah,” just a single word in that cartoon voice, and what was already exploding in the crowd exploded again.
We had set up P-Funk like Motown, at least in the sense that there were shared musicians and shared songs, and so if you were the act that had the current hit record, then you had the upper hand. Bootsy’s debut went top ten on the R&B chart. The title track was a top-twenty single. “I’d Rather Be with You” was a monster ballad that could be heard at radio stations and dances everywhere throughout the summer of 1976. When Bootsy took the lead on the charts, everyone inside the organization started telling me that it was only fair to make him the headliner. I agreed. And so we let him top the bill one night. Rick James was playing with us, and he was complaining all afternoon. He felt even more trivialized. He didn’t want to go out onstage at all. We followed Rick, and our set closed, as always, with Glen calling the Mothership down. When we wrapped our set, we went offstage, and as we passed Bootsy it was clear that he was quaking. Nobody could follow the spaceship. He had been nervous that night before the show, and he was worse afterward. He would have been worse still the next night if we hadn’t moved him back to his middle position.
As an experiment in character, as an expansion of P-Funk, Bootsy worked like a charm. For a while there, he was the hottest thing going. We had succeeded so well at building him a separate identity that for many people he was the only P-Funk name they knew, the only individual who had an existence independent from the group. Still, he was more or less a quiet guy. When his star ascended, he had to shoulder lots of the burden of being the public face of P-Funk. It wasn’t easy for him. But you couldn’t argue with success.
There were others, too. I knew we had to do a solo record for Eddie Hazel. He was a Jimi Hendrix type and most of his playing didn’t fit within the confines of traditional songs or even traditional labels. Most record companies were willing to go about as far as an artist like Ernie Isley, who was a hell of a player but stayed part of the Isley formula. Anything more extreme wouldn’t have worked—and in fact when Ernie did a solo record, High Wire, a little later, it was too daring and unexpected. Like the Isleys, Funkadelic was a safe place for Eddie. We kept R&B and funk in there for him as a foundation, and so he was able to get away with it. When it came time for Eddie’s solo album, though, we knew he was just going to play his heart out, and so we had to find another way to anchor him. Our solution was to pair him with existing rock and pop songs. I put him on to a Beatles song, “She’s So Heavy,” that we used to do to death onstage. We used to tear that one a new asshole. And he got to the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’ ” through some work he did with Shuggie Otis, who was the son of the bandleader Johnny Otis and a psychedelic folk artist in his own right. Those were both known pop songs, so Eddie could just work his magic on them, and they made up the spine of his album, Game, Dames and Guitar Thangs. Many of the tracks were from Bootsy, which was ironic, because the two of them never really played together. They were great friends, but each of them was creatively elbowed out of place by the other. We had to get Eddie out of jail to do the record. He was in prison up at Lompoc after his altercation with the air marshal, and some guys at Casablanca were able to pull strings and get him out. He rode back with us, did the album, and then went straight back to prison.
We also made an album for Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker, which we credited to Fred Wesley and the Horny Horns. Fred and Maceo wanted their own project, and they had helped us plenty, so we helped them. I got tracks from Bootsy, along with covers of existing P-Funk hits like “Up for the Down Stroke.” Much of the challenge of that record was getting Fred and Bernie to work together, encouraging each of them to arrange the horns in their own style and then weaving the two together. The result was more about the talent of our musicians than aiming for the charts. There were commercial concerns, of course—you want to eat—but there was also a real artistic agenda, too. I respected Motown and I wanted to tip my hat to that. I respected the English groups and their take on American blues. I respected show tunes and vaudeville music. With all the players around me, all either finding their voice or finding ways to use the voice they already knew they had, P-Funk was painting with all the colors and then some, on a canvas that was getting bigger and bigger.
Commerce fed art, and art fed right back into commerce. The radio was on fire with our music: Bootsy had his hits and we had The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, which went top twenty and also had two big singles, “Do That Stuff” and the title track. It happened so fast we didn’t have time to really let it sink in. What we did have time to do was to build a business infrastructure to preserve our momentum. Much of this came from our live shows. When bands toured, it was the same drill. Artists worked with radio stations and promoters. Radio stations talked up the show on the air. Promoters brought acts to venues. Acts appeared on radio stations in advance of the show. DJs came onstage during the show to promote their stations. But we had a unique arrangement. We were a package deal. We came to town as a unified army, Parliament and Funkadelic and Bootsy all rolled into one. That meant that we could come into town firing on all cylinders: one radio station would have a promotion with Bootsy, another would have Parliament, another would have Funkadelic. When it came time for the DJs to appear onstage, we required that they all come out together in space suits and stand next to the Mothership. We weren’t about to stop the show three times for promotional announcements.
We instituted another innovation, too. The traditional system divided financial responsibilities and financial gain between promoters and DJs; radio jocks weren’t supposed to actually promote concerts. We taught them how to circumvent the system, mainly by getting their wives promoter’s licenses. This was something I remembered from the mid-sixties, from when Armen took me around to stations in the Midwest. If DJs set their wives up as promoters, they didn’t have to pay a deposit to a promoter. We didn’t let them pay us less than a promoter would, but we didn’t ask for more, either. This empowered DJs and made them more than happy to work with us.
And yet there were problems, minor controversies. As we started to tour with the Mothership, as it became clear that we were a major concert draw, there were people who started to lament what they perceived as a lack of fairness. Much of it centered on race. A group in Atlanta hired the civil rights activist Hosea Williams to picket our show because we didn’t have a black promoter. He came by to check up on us, put a briefcase up on the table, and started to ask questions about our business practices. We told him something about them that he didn’t know: when we started doing big arena and stadium shows, we had also started donating twenty-five cents from each ticket to the United Negro College Fund. We had been doing it for years, and since shows were bringing in tens of thousan
ds of people, the money added up. When Hosea Williams found that out, he just closed his briefcase and left. “We ain’t got nothing here,” he said.
That didn’t stop the carping, though. White promoters got upset in the other direction, worrying that we were going to cave in to the pressure of picketers and hire only black promoters. To placate everyone—and, at the same time, to keep doing exactly what we wanted to do—we hired the team of Darryll Brooks and Carol Kirkendall, a black man and white woman with a company called Tiger Flower based out of Washington, D.C. The first show they promoted for us, I think, was at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland. We explained ourselves on radio and then I went out and talked to the guy who was picketing us. Once it was clear to him that there wasn’t any more juice in protesting against P-Funk, he offered his services to us to help manage any future protestors. Almost any political alliance works that way. You can have someone fucking with you or you can defuse and co-opt them. It’s all a matter of realizing that everyone wants their bread buttered on a certain side. Years later, in the nineties, there was a summit meeting at the home of Joe Jackson, Michael Jackson’s father. They were upset with Janet Jackson for the same reason—too many white promoters—and there was talk of a boycott. We got there, listened for a few minutes, and then Archie Ivy went to the podium to speak. “We’d love to go along with this,” he said. “We’re for black business, of course. But as I look around the room, half of you motherfuckers owe us money so I find it hard to go against Janet and deny her the freedom to make the choices she wants to make.”
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 15