Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir

by George Clinton

  We had made fine records before. We would do it again. But if I had to pick one P-Funk record to take to the moon, I’d take Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. It did certain high-concept things with such a nice light touch, and the music was tight as a motherfucking drum. Almost everyone was responding to our sound, to the tradition we were creating. One of the biggest soul songs that year was “Float On” by the Floaters; it was written by James Mitchell from the Detroit Emeralds, which was a Westbound group. Artists in every other genre fell into line, too. George Duke, who had primarily been a jazz player up to that point—though he had worked with Frank Zappa—moved squarely into the funk world, releasing songs like “Reach for It” and “Dukey Stick,” both of which were cookies from our cutter. New artists were another great way to measure influence: every week we’d see some young band springing up, trying to make (or fake) the funk. Once again, the only artist who truly remained surprising on his own terms was Stevie Wonder. When he recorded Songs in the Key of Life and Journey through the Secret Life of Plants, he was gone for real. He left the planet in a way that nobody else could do, and while I used to get upset that he didn’t do more funk songs, he had a different kind of ear. He was already way ahead. He was a composer in the classic, and maybe even classical, sense. He was writing instant standards.

  Right on the heels of Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, Bootsy released his third album, Bootsy? Player of the Year. If the first album had been an establishing shot and the second one a confirmation that he was a star, this one was all about him being ready for his close-up. The cover had a giant image of his trademark sunglasses, and they were actually a cutout so that kids could wear them. The songs on the album followed that script: the production of product, the oddity of commodity. “Bootzilla,” the single, imagined Bootsy as a toy, “the world’s only rhinestone rock-star doll.” This was long before Toy Story, but it was the same idea: he was there to be played with, to entertain kids, and he even had a chip on his shoulder about the value of other toys: “Teddy bears and Barbie dolls can’t boogie down.”

  Bootzilla, the toy, was futuristic (he came equipped with “stereophonic funk producin’ disco inducin’ twin magnetic rock receptors”), but he was also rooted in American pop culture, in the kind of hunger for novelty that had led to Davy Crockett, to hula hoops, to Motown, to the British Invasion. The fact that he was a fictional toy made little or no difference. “Bootzilla” rose into the highest heights of the R&B chart, where it replaced another song at the top. Let me check which song it knocked out. Oh, that’s right: “Flash Light.” It was a combination punch: hit ’em with the right, and while they’re reeling, get ’em with the left.

  The second single from Bootsy? Player of the Year, “Hollywood Squares,” came at the same idea from the other side, arguing that celebrity was a game but one that had to be played with a certain amount of sincerity: Bootsy’s alter ego, the Player, has a kind of romance with Hollywood itself. Other songs were more straightforward love ballads, but they became product, too, by virtue of their titles. Take a song like “May the Force Be with You.” We wrapped a contemporary slogan around a timeless idea and the whole package looked a little brighter. That’s how factories operated, by taking tried-and-true products and reworking them for the modern era.

  We were reworking our own product, too. At the end of 1977, we hired a new management team: Steve Leber and David Krebs, who had been with Aerosmith and also managed Ted Nugent and Mahogany Rush. We knew we were in that rock space, and we thought they could help us navigate. Around that same time, most of the original Parliaments left the band: Calvin, Grady, Fuzzy. They hadn’t been fully happy in years, and I could understand why. In the early years they were out in front, getting all the attention, all the girls, and then the spotlight shifted over to musicians like Billy and Eddie. Those guys were like their little brothers. They had sponsored them out of Plainfield. Those younger guys were brats and it was hard for the older guys to stomach them. Plus, when new members came in, like Bootsy, their stars shot right up past those original guys. They always had the nagging feeling that things could have gone in another direction, that they could have been on top of the elevator instead of inside it. They were wrong, of course, but you can’t always control for right and wrong. In the music business, like in everything else, so much dissatisfaction has to do with outsize dreams. When people start out in groups, everybody imagines making it, but no one thinks hard about what that means. Does it mean being a star, staying in the top hotels, headlining arenas? Or is it enough to be able to do what almost no one in the world does, and sustain a career as a professional musician? The mere fact of surviving in this industry is a huge victory. But survivors forget that the alternative is annihilation. They think that the choice is between a good career and a great one. They reach for stardom. And those unrealistic expectations are compounded by creative ability, or the lack of ability. People don’t have a clear idea of what they can and can’t do as artists. I knew my limits. I knew what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t play an instrument. I couldn’t sing as well as some and I couldn’t arrange as well as some others. But I could see the whole picture from altitude, and that let me land the planes.

  The live shows were getting even liver. We had everything that the P-Funk Earth Tour record had going for it, plus “Flash Light” and “Bop Gun.” It was like topping off a skyscraper. Because of the success of “Flash Light,” we added a stage effect. When the Mothership landed, five hundred lightbulbs exploded on either side of me. That was rock and roll but not just rock and roll. It was theater but not just theater. It was a kind of transformative moment, a secular religion, a level of experience I had never before imagined, and that few bands—the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones—ever reached. Crowds were starting to become hysterical. They were also helping us to understand how we were being understood: there was a level of membership and participation that was almost like a Rocky Horror Picture Show thing. At a show in Richmond—it was the same night when we almost couldn’t take the stage because our costumes were late—they turned off the lights in the arena before the show and the crowd looked like a field of stars. Everyone was holding flashlights, which was something we’d never ever considered. The next show, in St. Louis, people were standing on the streets on the main road that led to the arena, selling light sabers for people to wave around in the dark. By the third show, we were selling both flashlights and light sabers ourselves. We were making as much money on lights as we were on T-shirts. In Washington, D.C., a cab driver who picked us up asked if we were Parliament. We were. “I’m pissed at you guys,” he said. “I had a flat tire last night and I couldn’t find a flashlight in the whole goddamn city.”

  Our official merchandising was handled by Billy Sparks. In Prince’s Purple Rain movie, there’s a rotund little chipmunk of a guy who plays the owner of First Avenue. He’s always walking around in a tracksuit, talking to Morris Day, or sitting at the bar wearing a Detroit Tigers cap. That’s Billy, and seven years before Purple Rain, he was the P-Funk merchandiser. Billy was the son of a guy named Diamond Jim, who had worked for Armen Boladian in Detroit, and they all were part of a crew that included the Electrifying Mojo and the promoter Quentin Perry. Before every show, we’d do a walk-around, check out the scene, and during that tour we started to see an increase in bootleg merchandise: T-shirts, posters, pins. We also noticed that some of the bootleg stuff looked nicer than the official merchandise we were selling. It was product that came from one bootlegger in particular, a guy named Slim Goody. Not only was his product good, but he had a gift of gab: he really connected with audiences, made them feel like they were buying a part of the group’s excitement when they bought his merchandise. Billy wanted to shut him down because he was stepping on our profits, but I told Archie to cut a deal with him and make him an official bootlegger.

  The tour rolled on, picking up momentum and picking up new fans in the process. Very little dropped off, except occasional pieces of
the Mothership itself. We had a side rig on the stage set that included a few giant props connected by a light truss: one of them was a sneaker about nine feet high. The whole piece of equipment was heavy as shit, a ton but for real, and the roadies got tired of putting it up for each and every show just to take it down again. It broke their backs. One day, they took it off the truck and just left it on the side of the road in North Carolina. We didn’t notice that it was missing that night or the next. In fact, we didn’t notice for six months. That tour was so complete that you could take away from it and it would still have been everything.

  SO HIGH YOU CAN’T GET OVER IT

  In the course of two years, we had released two Funkadelic records, three Parliament records (including the live set), two Rubber Band records, and side projects from acts like the Horny Horns and Eddie Hazel. Other groups might have taken a break. We opted for breakneck instead. We really felt like we had found our sound, and we kept rolling right into the next Funkadelic album, One Nation Under a Groove.

  Funkadelic was the senior band (senior to Parliament, though junior to the Parliaments), but it was in a strange place. Hardcore Jollies, the first record we had done for Warners, was a hell of an album, but it had been folded into the big Mothership tour and then Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, both of which were overwhelming. It wasn’t that Funkadelic was becoming an afterthought, exactly, but there was no denying that Parliament, both on record and onstage, was so massive and bright that it was hard to look away from it.

  As we got ready to go back into the studio as Funkadelic, we added some new personnel. The most important arrival at that time was Junie Morrison. Junie had been one of the cornerstones of the Ohio Players, a band that had been around even longer than their name: in the early sixties, they had called themselves the Ohio Untouchables and backed the Falcons, a Detroit vocal group featuring Wilson Pickett. Junie had joined the Ohio Players in the early seventies, and I had introduced them to Armen, who signed them to Westbound. Junie was one of the main songwriters during that period, responsible for hits like “Funky Worm.” Junie left before the Ohio Players went on to Mercury Records and even greater success, with songs like “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster,” but he was known around the music world as a brilliant guy capable of doing almost anything: writing, arranging, playing keyboards, preparing a band for a tour. He came aboard as musical director as we started to make the new Funkadelic record. In fact, you can hear his first day on the song “Doo-Doo Chasers”; that’s him saying, “Which one is George Clinton?” That was kind of a joke that was going around at the time, because Bootsy was such a public face and I was a little less recognizable out of character.

  Junie was a fascinating person to work with. He could do it all, and if you weren’t careful, he would. When he made a record, his preference was to put down the bass, then the guitar, then the keyboards, then the drums. That was fantastic for demos. He could do brilliant things while you weren’t looking. But it also meant that the finished product, at least when he was off on his own, could sound a little characterless. Just because you can play all the instruments doesn’t mean that you should; you have to be mindful of which instruments sound like something special coming out of your hands, which ones have a distinct character, and you also have to play off others. That’s how you get chemistry, by mixing elements. Junie wasn’t the only one in danger of disappearing into the solitary-genius bag, of course. Sly had been like that before him. Prince would be like that after him. Even with them, there was a danger: if you don’t go back to a group environment now and then, you start to lose your juice. With Funkadelic, he put himself back in the group environment, and it started to pay dividends immediately.

  The title song of One Nation Under a Groove became one of our most beloved anthems. I didn’t think of it that way at first. It was just another song, sparked by something two girls said to me after a concert in Washington, D.C. The girls, LaTanya and Darlene, came up to the car. “That’s the greatest concert we’ve ever seen,” they said. “It was like one nation under a groove.” Junie and I wrote a song around that idea, and we went right into the studio and cut it. That day we had just gotten some new equipment, and we opened the boxes and went to town. It was the last song that we all played in the studio together, live and loud. There was such a feeling of togetherness in the room that it put the lyrics across. It was all of us, all the guitarists, all the keyboard players, all the drummers. Plus there was a dude playing the banjo who we didn’t even really know. Years later, I ran into the girls who suggested the slogan. One of them was married by that time, and when I met her husband, he said, “How close were you and George exactly?” I said, “Man, that’s a hell of a question to ask after seventy years.”

  Other songs pushed the concept forward. “Promentalshit-backwashpsychosis Enema Squad/The Doo-Doo Chasers” looked at funk from the other side, outlining all the horrible (and unsanitary) things that could happen if you didn’t possess the clarifying power of funk: mental diarrhea, mental constipation, anything logical, illogical, or scatological.

  The rhythms were leisurely and hypnotic, for the most part. One of the prettiest songs on the record, “Groovallegiance,” was kind of an anthem for newcomers to the funk nation. The melody was taken from a Latin song I had heard back in the fifties. I had remembered it, and I’d always wanted to incorporate it into a P-Funk song. At one point, Nene had someone in Cuba go to the library and research the original lyrics, and it turns out they were about a spaceship landing in Havana, and the aliens getting out and dancing the cha-cha-cha. That clinched it for me. When I brought the song to the session, Bernie knew it instinctively. I sang the first few notes and he was able to finish it, exactly as it was in the fifties.

  It’s not the only time on that record that we used older songs as inspiration. “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!” took its melody from a church tune. Inspiration in these cases is unavoidable—there are only seven notes in music—and it’s not even desirable to avoid it. Every Led Zeppelin song is an old blues. The Beatles lifted the famous solo in “Revolution” directly from Pee Wee Crayton. Living things find nourishment where they can. The point of music is to take what exists and to make it matter again, in your own style, with your own stamp. To talk about “original” and “unoriginal” is as unoriginal as talking about genres or categories. You never want to be in a bag, let alone someone else’s bag. Music is music, and bands become what they are. They play because they want to, and audiences sense that and listen because they want to. That’s what “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!” tried to explain, in fairly direct terms. It was a kind of encyclopedia entry, a sequel to “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” And while “One Nation Under a Groove” is thought of as the anthem from that record, “Who Says a Funk Band” is just as anthemic.

  One Nation Under a Groove came out in September of 1978, with a bonus EP for the fans that included one extra song (“Lunchmeataphobia”), a second version of “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad/The Doo-Doo Chasers,” and a live version of “Maggot Brain” we had recorded in April in Louisiana.

  We had toured with the Mothership for two years, and we were exhilarated but also exhausted. When One Nation Under a Groove came out, we headed off on what we called the Anti-Tour. We had no big stage set, just stripped-down equipment. We weren’t playing huge venues, but rather smaller theaters. We even switched the bill around so we weren’t the headliners of our own tour; we were opening for the Brides of Funkenstein. The band called the tour the chitlin circuit. Some of the new members made fun of the idea, though for the older musicians it felt like a throwback. We had been there before, driving overnight between cities just so we could play a short set to promote “Testify.” We emphasized the basic-training feel by outfitting everyone in fatigues. It wasn’t exactly U.S. Army issue, but it wasn’t quite Maulana Karenga’s U.S. Organization either. Most people had private rank, though Roger was an admiral and Junie was a general. In a way, i
t was a rebellion against what we had been told since the late sixties, that the band needed a brightly colored focal point to succeed. We were going back to democracy: that was the one nation.

  At the start of the tour, our participation was kind of a secret, which meant that it was hard to fill venues. Sometimes I would go out into the street in front of the theater and pretend to sell the comp tickets: “Yo, man,” I’d say, “five dollars for these? I’m just trying to get some dope.” People looked at me strangely, not sure what my game was. They would whisper, “Is that George Clinton?” or, “Is he crazy?” We ran the Anti-Tour across the whole country, P-Funk and the Brides, barnstorming. We had new musicians like Jeff “Cherokee” Bunn, who played bass for the Brides, and we had part of Bootsy’s band, too, though Bootsy himself wasn’t there. By that point, he was starting to think a little bit like a solo act; he was booked into venues as himself, separate from the rest of us. During his very first show, they had to call me because he got shingles. He had people stationed outside his dressing room to guard him from fans and other musicians. Even Maceo couldn’t go in there. It looked like he was pulling star attitude, though I think it was more a case of sunstroke. He was starting to feel a little like Icarus, getting too close to the sun, wings melting down, not certain how far he would fall or whether there was a net to catch him anymore.