Race was an issue on the sidewalk outside the theaters and arenas, and it was an issue on the radio, too. Just as Funkadelic had tried to carve out a space for black rock, Parliament was redefining the way people thought about funk. Suddenly, it was part of the mainstream pop-music conversation. This had happened before, on a more limited scale. Sly had crossed over to pop stardom. But Sly was both a trailblazer and a genius, so he didn’t exactly create a category around him. In the mid-seventies, in fact, nobody wanted to be funk, or at the very least they didn’t want to be called that. Everyone wanted to be pop and crossover because the budgets were adjusted for category. The English rock groups had come over and heightened the budgets. If you were a black act, the budgets stayed relatively low. We got decent advances for Mothership and Clones, but nothing approaching the rock bands. We called it the “junior budget.”
After Clones, the money started to come more easily. We were proven as a chart performer. Everyone assumed that the next Parliament record would up the ante again. But even in this new environment, some bands couldn’t quite take advantage. The Ohio Players, for example, were a band I loved: they were supremely talented, with smoking grooves and the ability to really put it across onstage. But in their formative years, they didn’t play in front of large crowds with any regularity, and so when they started to have big hits and get more money to make their records, they couldn’t adjust to being a bigger live presence. They knew how to play to people standing right before them, when they could see the crowd with their eyes and feed off the energy. But when we played with them at the Summit in Houston, they showed up with these small column speakers that echoed when you shook them. They insisted on using them no matter how big the house was. It was like putting a high school gym in the middle of an arena.
We had rivalries with other bands, to some degree, or at the very least we were careful to always look around and keep track of the competition. The biggest black group other than us was Earth Wind & Fire, though we were profoundly different operations. They had decided early on that they were going to abandon hard funk for crossover pop, although that didn’t stop them from hiring Jules Fisher, the same guy who had made the Mothership for us, to design pyramids for their stage show. There were up-and-coming acts like Cameo and Rick James, who toured with us, along with veteran soul groups like the Bar-Kays, who remade themselves as funk bands.
The one place we didn’t really have any rivals was inside Casablanca. The label had no staff producers, the way Motown had. Giorgio Moroder produced Donna Summer. Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise produced Kiss. We had our people. Since there wasn’t overlap, there wasn’t competition in the Motown sense. Instead, the other acts were like colleagues. We bumped into each other a little bit in the office, congratulated each other, watched with admiration as Kiss took over hard rock and Donna took over disco. I mostly credited Neil for creating the kind of environment that made all of it possible. He was so fast and so smart that no other label could keep up with him, and he had an infrastructure of veterans, from Cecil Holmes to Gene Redd, who had more knowledge about the record business than almost anyone else around.
The operation felt like a real triumph—creatively and financially and in every other way. That included drugs, of course. Casablanca was nothing but drugs. You answered the phone with cocaine in your nose. But it wasn’t like we were doing anything strange for the time. Cocaine was the diet of the day. Hollywood was doing it. Wall Street was doing it. Main Street was doing it. You’d go to lunch with a record executive, and midway through the meal he’d take the little bottle of coke from his pocket and empty it onto the table and do a line. You could be at a lunch table or fully out in the open: I remember being at the Bud Billiken Parade in Chicago with a well-known syndicated morning show DJ, snorting coke up on top of the float. It got to the point where you didn’t even pay attention anymore. It’s like looking at a painting of a forest and noticing that there are trees.
Coke wasn’t the only drug. Most musicians smoked weed regularly, and a few did harder shit like heroin or dust. The best drug of all was quaaludes. That was Casablanca’s main drug besides coke, and it was nothing but pussy. That drug made you want to fuck, and if you were lucky enough to spend an evening with it, fucking is exactly what you’d do. You’d end up with a pretty young secretary or a backup singer or maybe even someone you thought was ugly until the minute you took the quaalude, a piggly wiggly, and you wouldn’t care a bit. It was almost like being drunk, but without any of the performance drawbacks: you could get a hard-on in a second or come without a hard-on. And girls loved it, too. When you saw those little pills with “714” printed on them, you knew you were going to have a good time. And then, all of a sudden, it was gone. You could not find it anywhere. There was briefly a Mexican substitute called lemons, but that didn’t live up to the standard of bona fide quaaludes. I can’t help but feel that the government made it disappear. Anything that works that good, it goes away.
Drugs definitely had genres, just like music did, and the two were closely related. Rock and rollers had one kind of drug, a little down and dirty, either to come down for a show or expand your mind or get loose with a girl. Around that time, though, disco started to emerge—Casablanca was on the leading edge, of course, because of Donna Summer—and I noticed immediately that the disco people were a different type. There’s a difference between funky people, who tended to be poor people, and disco people, who were rich partiers. Some of them were straight, many were gay, but most were materialistic. When rich people start partying, it becomes decadent. You have so much money. You can pay for anything you want. You start getting too much, and then you get desensitized, and the high isn’t about the drugs or the sex. It’s about access and entitlement. That’s what I started to feel as disco emerged. You saw Mercedeses and Lamborghinis parked four deep at parties, and when you saw the people doing drugs, you noticed that they were demanding in every way: they wanted the best sex and drugs and they wanted them right away. Their preference ran toward things like poppers. We had done them once or twice back in the barbershop, because you could buy them over the counter back then. It was a heart drug, amyl nitrate. If you didn’t know it was coming, you would think you were going crazy. It made you sweat and opened up your pores. You got a big bang for thirty seconds. In the hands of the disco crowd, it was a fuck drug—but not cool and sexy like quaaludes. It was hard-edged, a little vicious. Drugs made for straight freak behavior.
At heart I was still a hippie and disco left me cold, even though it also amused me sometimes. I was staying with Cholly Bassoline right up on top of King’s Road on Hollywood Boulevard, and we would hear these insanely loud predawn fights, some rich chick out there at four in the morning screaming, “I want cocaine!” There was one girl in particular who did it all the time, and she was down the road from the house of Paul Lynde, the comedian. He would open up his window and with the maximum amount of gay attitude shout right back at her, “Shut the fuck up, bitch!” Cholly and I used to wait up for her outburst and Paul Lynde’s return fire. I took it all in with interest, because I wasn’t only in the music business anymore, but also in the business of creating characters. I could make better cartoon characters in my music by watching the people who were acting like cartoons in real life.
Drugs was one problem, but it wasn’t a problem if you didn’t see it that way. The same was true of sex. At that time, everyone started to get worried that they were subject to unnatural perversions or passions, and they investigated by going to see high-priced shrinks. That was the hip thing in Hollywood. People would talk to one in the hopes that something was wrong with them. I went to one myself, a Hollywood sex psychiatrist, mainly to have conversations and trade stories that might help me with my songwriting. It turned out that she was a bigger freak than anyone she was treating. She was privy to all these insane situations and circumstances, and when someone told her an especially crazy story, she got off on it. I can’t say her name. Patient-doctor confidentiality.
Sex, check. Drugs, check. Rock and roll, check. The only thing that really got under my skin was the materialism of the time. I had always lived a gypsy existence. I didn’t even own a house—all I had was a two-bedroom apartment in Detroit, on 8 Mile. Ownership struck me as vaguely silly. Once, around that time or a little later, I ran into Satch, who played sax and guitar for the Ohio Players. The record company had bought him a $35,000 bracelet that read OHIO PLAYERS in chip-diamond lettering. He was showing it off proudly, and I just didn’t understand it. What were you going to do with a thing like that? Years later I went over to his house, and that bracelet was on his mantel, but he wasn’t in the group anymore. For me, that was a symbol of how priorities could get twisted. When I got money, I didn’t think about jewelry or cars or houses. I thought about experiences. Again, some of them were sex, and some were drugs, but most of them were rock and roll. I kept studios running all the time. I cut tracks with all the artists I knew and shaped them into songs, which in turn were shaped into records. What did I need with possessions? I had a spaceship and that was going to be enough for a long while.
Bootsy’s second Rubber Band album, Ahh . . . the Name Is Bootsy, Baby! came out in January 1977. The first record had been a success, but it was still a tentative step, like any debut. On that second record, the Bootsy character snapped into focus. I understood that it was a version of what Parliament would have been had we made it big in the late sixties. It was still doo-wop, in a sense, still classic romantic R&B ballads, but with a surreal and futuristic twist, and funnier than Parliament. I had real inspiration for writing that record. In late 1976, I went to Hawaii with Stephanie Lynn, my new girlfriend. Stephanie and I had met on tour, and fairly soon after that she had started coming on the road with us. We got close fast, and then it was off to the islands, where the two of us relaxed in the sun and watched all the other lovers running on the beach and diving off the cliffs and hang-gliding. In that paradise, I wrote about a dozen of those ballads. The vast majority went to Bootsy.
The Bootsy program was simple at that point. It was clear that we had to extend him further into cartoon land, while keeping him legitimate as a romantic figure. We had talked about Casper the Funky Ghost on the first album, and we did more of that kind of thing, with broader strokes and stronger hooks. And when there were straightforward love ballads, we made sure to give them outrageous titles, like “Rubber Duckie,” so that someone scanning the track list wouldn’t think they had accidentally stumbled on a Teddy Pendergrass album. We were also building the larger P-Funk myth, brick by brick, though we didn’t always know it at the time. There’s a song called “The Pinocchio Theory,” which introduced the notion that funk represented some fundamental emotional honesty: “If you fake the funk, your nose will grow.” Later on, that would help me to develop one of our most famous P-Funk characters, but on Bootsy’s album it was just an isolated idea. At the time we recorded it, Bootsy didn’t even know who Pinocchio was. When he saw the movie a few months later, he thought Walt Disney was copying us.
Of all the albums I worked on during that time, Ahh . . . the Name Is Bootsy, Baby! is one of the highlights. It was the first P-Funk album to hit number one on the Billboard R&B chart, and it made it into the top twenty of the pop chart. That record was far ahead of its time, and it’s an almost perfect example of how to combine commercial music and artistic music. For me, it fulfilled a promise I had made to myself after “Testify,” which was that I wasn’t going to let anyone put me in a bag. Self-expression was the only real point. It helped to have two groups, of course, and it helped even more to have three or four.
WHEN THE SYNDROME IS AROUND, DON’T LET YOUR GUARD DOWN
We had been told that movie studios were looking at us for a film like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a documentary that would combine onstage footage and backstage looks. Originally, it was going to be directed by Robert Downey, but he dropped out and a new group came around that included a guy named Sy Libinoff and another one named Nene Montes. Nene had a slick seventies look, casually fashionable and counterculture, like a kind of Serpico figure. The first thing he did when he came into the room that day we met him was pull down a bottom eyelid and say, “I’m an outlaw.” The second thing he did was get rid of Sy, who committed the cardinal sin of confusing me and Bernie. That was embarrassing for someone who wanted to make a movie about us, and Nene took notice of it and disposed of him. Maybe they never had Sy attached anyway. Maybe it was a Hollywood ploy. Who knows? The point was that we suddenly had this new guy, this outlaw, attached to the band.
Nene was constantly filming footage, but very quickly he established himself as more than a cameraman. One day in 1977, we were scheduled to play at the L.A. Coliseum. Fans were lined up around the block starting at noon. In the early afternoon, a strut gave way and the roof partly collapsed. They called me immediately at the hotel and told me the show would have to be canceled. There was handwringing and wailing. All those tickets, and nothing could be done. It wasn’t safe for crowds and it wasn’t safe for the band. It was a catastrophe. I got in a cab and hurried down to the Coliseum, and by the time I got there, there was a crane holding the roof up and the promoters had calmed down significantly. There was no more handwringing and wailing. It was going to work. I asked around and found out that no one had been able to solve the problem until Nene stepped up. As soon as he saw the roof collapsing, he ran down the street to a construction site and paid a guy a thousand dollars to bring a crane over. The guy came by and put his equipment to use holding up the roof of the building. It worked perfectly. Prince was in the audience for that concert, and neither he nor anyone else had to deal with a falling roof.
In the wake of that Coliseum brainstorm, Nene became indispensible. He was very aggressive and very smart and went after everyone in the camp who wasn’t pulling their weight. For example, there was a special plug in the Mothership that I was paying a thousand dollars a show to use. Nene went in there with a pliers and rewired things. I didn’t need the special plug, so I didn’t need to pay that guy anymore. There were dozens of examples of that kind of thing. Nene had called himself an outlaw at our first meeting, but as time went on he called himself a janitor, and that was probably closer to the truth. He cleaned up messes.
I was so grateful at first that I didn’t notice how fond he was of the divide-and-conquer strategy. After the Coliseum incident, for example, it wasn’t enough for Nene to take credit for going to get the crane. He also had to make sure that I knew that everyone else wasn’t taking the situation seriously, and to prove it by showing me film he had taken of the promoters standing there, pointing up at the partially collapsed roof and laughing. Every job Nene did came with something else attached to it, usually the implication that other people didn’t have my best interests at heart. The situation was complicated by the fact that Nene refused to take a salary. He stressed that he didn’t work for anyone. That seemed strange, but I looked past it at first, especially since he had no problem running up a huge fucking expense account. But as time went on, something about his unwillingness to be straightforward unnerved me. If someone isn’t taking money, they’re taking something else, and it’s probably something you can’t see.
In the late sixties and early seventies, whenever I got ready to move into the next P-Funk project, I convened what I called a Funkathon: a rambling, open conversation about the ideas circulating that would eventually produce an album. We talked through all aspects and concepts to ensure that we didn’t miss a trick. By 1977, the Funkathons were a little different for me. The early years of strategizing and brainstorming had gotten me too much in love with Eddie, Billy, Tawl, Tiki, and Calvin. We were too emotionally tied together. As they left, one by one, I found I couldn’t do it anymore. I had great admiration and affection for the new band members coming in, Michael and Tyrone and Garry, but that first ring had been so tight around me, like family, that it was like my heart was broken. I didn’t make a bi
g announcement about how I couldn’t participate. I just stopped doing it.
Nene noticed that I was withdrawing a little from the group and took it as a sign—or an opportunity. He started taking the lead in introducing new ideas and challenging me to think through the various things that were circling in my brain. He was pretty new to the P-Funk world, but he had a talent for establishing himself quickly. One day, Nene brought around a guy who was a famous Santeria priest. This priest had observed P-Funk from afar and decided we were into all kinds of voodoo and black arts. We were meeting with him to talk it through, put his mind at ease, maybe learn something. During that meeting, Nene passed me a note that said “entelechy.” That’s all. One word. I asked him what he meant and he said that he would explain it later. A few minutes later, he passed me another note that said “placebo.” In a way, I had to admire him. He had figured out that we made our things according to information and ideas, and he wanted in.
Entelechy, as it turned out, was about potential: it was a word coined by Aristotle to explain the process by which a species becomes most itself. And a placebo, of course, was a sugar pill. I started to think my way around in those concepts. Man has a need to improve, but how does that improvement happen from within a society that numbs you with fake pills? We had investigated politics on Chocolate City, communication and social justice on Mothership Connection, and individualism and groupthink on The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. So what would this new album do with these two new ideas? Maybe funk itself was a form of evolution. Maybe if you refused to participate in it, you were holding yourself back. We had already created and deployed Star Child, an agent of interplanetary funk. Did he have the secret for improving the species, funkateer by funkateer? There had always been a strain of self-actualization in our music, though it had also always been sharpened by humor and irony and dirty jokes.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 16