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

by George Clinton

  Armed with our artists, we sent our lawyer, Ina Meibach, and our managers, Leber and Krebs, to get a deal, and they came back with an offer from CBS. The plan called for four albums through Uncle Jam, with an advance of a quarter million for each. It was good money, especially since many of the tracks that would make up the albums were already under way, though I had friends who were wary. Some of them wondered why we needed to expand that way. Others worried that the Uncle Jam deal was part of a plan to topple P-Funk, that these additional albums were intended to overload the circuit and short us out. As I was getting ready to sign the deal, that occurred to me, too. I was already committed to something like seventeen other albums: releases from Parliament and Funkadelic, of course, Bootsy’s records, projects with the Brides and Parlet, the Horny Horns, a solo album with Eddie Hazel, and more. I had help, of course. Tracey, my son, was an incredibly prolific lyric writer. I had production and arrangement wizards like Junie and also Ron Dunbar, who had overseen the Brides. I was sure we could do it.

  As we were signing, I was told that Leber and Krebs were planning, with Ina’s knowledge, to overpay themselves out of the advance. Nene flipped out. He said that they were robbing me blind. He got loud on Ina about how she was ripping us all off. He may have been a little rough, but there was truth to what he was saying: that was just how things were done in the record business. Ina also represented the Who, and whenever their manager, Kit Lambert, was in New York, she would lock up her office early, because Kit had a habit of coming around unannounced, and she didn’t want him looking at any paperwork. Entertainment lawyers had a habit of being half in the shade, and Nene, at least at that point, wasn’t having any of it. We severed our ties with both Ina and Leber and Krebs. When Ina left, it was with a warning to Nene: “You can say anything you want to me,” she said, “but don’t ever talk like that in front of the artist.”

  The bad feeling from their departure lifted quickly. Archie, Nene, and I were now running a record label, and we went to seal the deal with Walter Yetnikoff, the head of CBS, and Dick Asher, who had been brought over from Polygram to be CBS’s deputy president. We were wearing the military outfits we used on the Anti-Tour and for Uncle Jam Wants You, and at one point during the meeting, Dick Asher leaned over and said, “Don’t sew those stripes on too tight.” I didn’t get a definitive interpretation of his remark, but I took it to mean that we needed to watch our backs, that we shouldn’t get too big for our britches. No one was safe in the record business. (It also seemed that Asher was taking a shot at Yetnikoff, who he would later feud with over using independent promoters. Yetnikoff would win that feud, and Asher would be out within a few years.) I laughed it off at the time. I saw only one goal, which was to make new music, and I had enough confidence in myself and the people around me that I was sure it going to be a Motown for real.

  Uncle Jam got rolling. We released the Sweat Band record. We released Philippé Wynne’s solo record, Wynne Jammin’. Third up was Roger Troutman. We were already familiar with Roger, not just because he had worked with Funkadelic, but because he and his family band, Zapp, were signed to Warner Bros. In 1979, they were working on their debut for Warners, which included a song called “Funky Bounce.” Someone—maybe Roger himself, maybe Bootsy, who was working with them, brought me the track. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hear where it was going. One section, though, really appealed to me. I thought that if I isolated that and then had Roger add his trademark talk-box vocals and organ, it could really be something. I looped the section, called Roger, and told him that I had made a new song. He wasn’t thrilled, but I had some leverage—I was trying to finalize his Uncle Jam solo deal—so he went along with it. That song became “More Bounce to the Ounce,” which was a monster hit. People loved the same groove I loved. I made sure that Roger and Bootsy were listed as producers, not from altruism but from strategy. I couldn’t afford to pay them what I thought they were worth, but both of them were extremely creative, and they deserved some real money. Making them producers was one way to make that happen.

  After “More Bounce to the Ounce,” we started right in on Roger’s solo album. The song I thought would be the single was a cover, Roger style, of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and there was another strong track called “So Ruff, So Tough.” Of all those early Uncle Jam records, Roger’s record was the one that I thought had the most commercial potential. Roger seemed to think so, too. A few weeks before the album was scheduled to come out, Roger told me that he wanted to make a gesture of his appreciation: he wanted to give me $10,000, and to do it onstage. Sly thought something smelled funny. “Suits don’t be doing nothing like that,” he said. “There’s got to be another reason.” Sly called Roger and his band “Suits” because of how they dressed, and he was skeptical about an onstage payout because the whole Zapp crew had a reputation for being extremely cheap. They had an old bus and some of the guys in the bus had to double as bus drivers. When they weren’t recording, they took jobs as roofers. “They ain’t just going to give you no ten thousand,” Sly said. I wasn’t sure he was right, but it was Sly talking, so I didn’t take the money.

  The release date drew closer. One night, I got a frantic phone call from someone at United Sound studio. “Roger’s masters aren’t here,” they said. He had come in and said that he needed to take them out so that he could “add horns in Ohio,” and the studio released the tapes to him. They shouldn’t have—he didn’t own them—but our stuff was fairly loose. We were running crosstown regularly; it wasn’t that odd for masters to go from one studio to another. I called around until I located them: they were over at Warner Bros., where Roger himself had taken them. He was planning to put them out with Warners. In short order, Warner Bros. released the album, and it was the exact same album that we had intended for Uncle Jam. It had the same title, The Many Facets of Roger. It had the same cover design. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” went out as the single, and it was a big hit, like I thought it would be. It just wasn’t a hit for Uncle Jam. Bob Krasnow came over to talk to me in Los Angeles; I was staying at the Beverly Comstock. “You’re a label now,” he said. “This is just business.” I raised hell and expected CBS to do the same. But they didn’t fight very hard, which made it clear that the backing I thought we had was more a figment of my imagination than a reality.

  When Roger’s tapes mysteriously disappeared from United Sound, other things began to come apart at the seams as well. When we turned in the new Funkadelic album to Warner Bros.—it included the tracks that I had been working on with Sly—I got an advance, but found that it didn’t go as far as it used to, both because we were doing so much recording and because the drugs were getting more expensive. Out there in Los Angeles, working on sessions, trying to piece together various projects, I suddenly felt stranded, without any real source of support.

  One of the projects was a record that had started out as something for my younger brother Jimmy Giles. We had created a band for him called Jimmy G. and the Tackheads, and we were starting to get songs lined up. One of them, “Hydraulic Pump,” was a standout. Philippé Wynne sang on it, and after him we got other vocalists aboard, too: Sly, Bobby Womack. With the three of them, it seemed larger than a Jimmy G. and the Tackheads record. I called Armen Boladian and proposed to him that we start a new label for the express purpose of releasing “Hydraulic Pump.” We decided to call it Hump Records, and he agreed to pay $90,000 for the song. While I thought of the deal with Armen as only a stopgap, Nene loved the idea that we had found a new source of funds. “He’s a water hole,” he told Archie. “Why just take this one little thing?”

  Deciding who to trust was complicated by the fact that I was high nearly all the time. One night, Sly and I drove out and sat in the car in front of a Denny’s for an hour or so, waiting for a dealer. Sly prepared all the equipment and utensils so we would be ready to smoke the crack as soon as we took delivery. When the coke came, he made a rock and took a hit. Meanwhile, the people in Denny’s had been watchi
ng us sitting there for so long that their suspicions were aroused. Someone made a call, and as we drove out of the lot, the police met us coming in. The car was so cloudy from crack smoke that they couldn’t really see in, but we saw them clear as day. I broke the pipe and put the remaining drugs in my mouth. When the windows went down they recognized us, and they sat us on the curb and mocked us: “If it isn’t Sly Stone and Dr. Funkenstein.” They went through the car, found nothing, but managed to get an old fragment of pipe from Sly’s trunk. It was enough to hold us overnight. The next morning, a friend of Sly’s came down and got us out. Jail wasn’t pleasant. It never was. But what was worse was the sense of being on the slide, with gravity increasing. I don’t like stories where people melodramatically announce that they have hit bottom, as if that somehow suspends or justifies the rest of the choices that they have to make, as if it erases the other characters and the very idea of consequence. On the other hand, I don’t know how else to explain that day and the days that followed, when I was marooned in the wake of turning in new material, when I was watching Uncle Jam come down around my ears, when I was scrambling to make a little bit of money so I could make more music.

  I didn’t necessarily want P-Funk to be all about me. At times I wished that others would step in and pick up the slack. But that wasn’t happening. Starting in the early seventies, maybe around America Eats Its Young, I had tried to set up a system where everyone was capable of creating records. All the people working with me trusted me and I trusted them to work with one another. The part where I earned their trust seemed to work out, more or less. I stayed optimistic. I dreamed up things that happened: as my friend Ronnie said, people saw some money come out of a bank and turn into a Mothership, and that process had some magic in it. On the other hand, as it turned out, people had trouble trusting each other. That was something I didn’t understand. If you’re going to learn anything, it’s that you have to work with other people. You can’t always ensure that your creativity is in working order, and people can differ on their opinions of a song. But damn, the basic shit that’s required is that you get along. Every time a band member started working as an arranger or a producer, I took him on a fishing trip and talked through the process. There was a kind of manual of what to do and what not to do. Working well with others was at the head of the to-do list. But the lesson had trouble sinking in. Instead, people who had every reason to be close collaborators kept their distance from one another; Junie and Bootsy lived right near each other, practically grew up together, and they never thought of working together. Roger used to call me every night to tell me what was happening in this session and that one, rather than talking to those other musicians directly. The result was that communication between the acts was poor, and fault lines started to open up. There wasn’t a quake yet, but there was the possibility of one.

  In the midst of all that chaos, another Funkadelic record came out. The funny thing was that I had nothing to do with it. Fuzzy, Calvin, and Grady did. They had left the band numerous times before. Grady usually came back, but the other two stayed away. Finally, Grady left for good, too. The concept of the band had moved beyond them, at least in their minds. They didn’t feel there was room for the Parliaments in the P-Funk world. They created their own band on the side, hooked up with a producer named Jerry Goldstein (who had been a singer in the sixties band the Strangeloves), and cooked up the idea that they were still Funkadelic, that the three of them somehow had rights to the name. And then they went and released an album called Connections and Disconnections, which came out in Europe in 1980 and then in the United States in 1981. How can you go and release an album by a band with the same name as a band still signed to a major label? It seemed patently absurd. But I knew what they were trying to do. I understood the impulse to create your own work. I never saw too much or heard too much about their record, but what little I heard made me think that it was neither good nor as bad as people said it was. When I was asked about it by reporters or by other bands, I played it off. As a kid, I never liked to see the artists that I liked fighting among each other. That kind of backstage drama wasn’t useful for fans. Also, there wasn’t interpersonal animosity. When we ran into each other on the road, or back in Detroit, the vibe was always pretty okay. They were guys I had known forever, since we were kids. Grudge didn’t come into it. In the whole messy business, only one thing bothered me: when they gave interviews as me. Those interviews were more sins of omission: reporters would call, thinking they were talking to me, and Fuzzy or Grady or Calvin would ignore the misunderstanding and just let the interview run. When the piece came out and someone clarified, the papers called them back and said, “Oh, I thought you were George,” and they would just laugh or shrug. Eventually, the courts got around to dealing with the case, and they determined that the three of them didn’t have any claim to the name. The actual ruling was stylish: in the judge’s words, “There is no partnership in the ownership of the Mothership.” Over the years they’ve kept rereleasing that record, and in 1998 they joined forces with Ray Davis, who was sick at the time with throat cancer, to put out an album under the name Original P.

  When we came back to Detroit after Roger’s defection, there was a cloud of stink around us. Ronnie Ford told me that it was difficult to find musicians to work with us, that people kept their distance. Maybe there was a whisper campaign, or maybe people had had their fill. Internally, there was just as much dysfunction. Personality issues with Nene were intensifying.

  From the first time I met him, when he came in to set up the P-Funk documentary, he was a relentlessly strategic person. He would interview me and scrutinize my beliefs. He tried to find out if I was into religion, which philosophies I endorsed. It could have been honest curiosity but it didn’t feel that way. At one point, he gave me a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which seemed to be a way of hiding behind a clear announcement of his own intentions. When he negotiated contracts for us—and there were plenty to negotiate, at all levels—he would march into offices, stand right in front of desks where nice people were trying to do their work, and be unnecessarily abusive. His attitude was never healthy, never forgiving, never straightforward. Once, we were riding along the highway in the bus and there was a billboard advertising some hip ministry that showed a picture of Jesus with a rock-star hairdo. “Wow,” I said. “He looks like one of the Bee Gees.” Nene got upset with me, but not on Jesus’s behalf. He looked kind of like that, too, and he seemed to take it personally. “Are you comparing yourself with Jesus?” I said. I was just joking, but that only made him angrier. I forgot about the incident right after it happened, but about a week later, in a hotel, Nene got the Bible from the desk, said, “You think I care about this?” and flung it against the wall. I just walked away from that one. “I’m not standing next to you,” I said.

  The Bible wasn’t his only prop. In his early years with us, Nene never bought us drugs; he steered clear of that aspect of the business. But then once, he was traveling to Argentina and asked for some money to bring back coke. He wanted $30,000. Everyone thought that was strange, and I agreed, but I was also relieved that he was finally asking for something. He came back with six kilos of coke, which is an ungodly amount, and brought one kilo over to my house. I broke it open. It was a motherfucking mountain of powder. I had all these puppets at my place, marionettes of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse hanging from the ceiling, and I liked to play little games with them, stuff money in their hands. Mickey had two thousand. Minnie had the same. Nene noticed the puppets and blew his top. “Disney will have you lynched for that,” he said. “You can’t do that!” But it didn’t stop him from bringing in more drugs, getting better and better at surfacing with them. He brought around something called “pasta,” which was cocaine melted into a kind of paste: I think maybe they treated it with airplane fuel, or kerosene, which soaked into the coke itself. It was brown and nasty and had everyone at everyone else’s throat, because when you used it, it didn’t give you more than a lit
tle buzz, which was irritating as shit. We knew some people at the University of Michigan, and we found a kid there who got us a scientist who could turn it back into powder. But for six months there, it was all pasta.

  By 1980, there was a division in the P-Funk world between the people who could put up with Nene and those who couldn’t. Jessica Cleaves couldn’t stand him. Boogie kept his distance; Catfish, too. Ronnie Ford, who started coming out on the road with us in 1979, later told me that it was evident to him that something was awry. He didn’t feel comfortable saying anything because he was fairly new to the P-Funk family, but he had been a barber for years, and he knew personalities. He had met every kind of motherfucker there was, and he bristled at Nene. Nene even clashed a few times with Sly. The two of them were arguing one day, and Nene said, “My man is Archie.” Sly paused for a little while, gave one of those slow-burn looks, and then said, “What is this, who-loves-Archie-the-most week?”

  His talent for rubbing people the wrong way extended beyond the band. We used to go to an El Salvadoran nightclub on Sunset Boulevard where the Cubans hung out. They would put on one Cuban song, and all those motherfuckers sitting there would start crying like babies. Lots of them were Bay of Pigs guys, and I learned some inside information from them. You know how you can tell if somebody was really at the Bay of Pigs invasion? Ask, “What happened to Milton’s drawers?” When they all got locked up in Cuba, somebody stole Milton’s drawers. If they don’t know what you’re saying, they weren’t there. All of those guys owed Nene a favor, but all of them hated him. “This guy here,” they’d say. “He got my mother out of Cuba and my brother of out jail. And while I’ll do anything in the world for Archie, I won’t do shit for Nene.” There was one guy named Jorge who used to sit there quiet. Nene got him to smoke coke all night long and he had a heart attack. He was almost dead. Nene went to see him in the hospital with a crazy therapy: he took towels from the rack and stuffed them in Jorge’s gown to make titties. He put a wig on Jorge’s head and then did his lips with lipstick. “My love,” Nene said, “you cannot die on me.” Jorge said that right there and then he made a pledge to himself: “I’m going to live so I can kill this motherfucker.”