As manipulative as Nene was, he was still effective, which is why I was slow to harden against him. Plus, I saw the way he tweaked authority—my style was different, but the aim was sometimes the same—and how people were infatuated by his aggressiveness and daring. David Carradine was one of his best friends, and the two of them would set up a meal, get all the food on the table, and then pee on it. I wouldn’t have done that, but I understood the idea of disrupting something so traditional. Every time my suspicions about Nene began to mount, I weighed my misgivings against the fact that he was clearly helping with our business relationships. He was a fixer, a clarifier. He spoke frankly to managers and lawyers who were robbing us blind, and the next thing you knew, they were gone. In that sense, at least, I trusted him. Plus, it was vital to send him around with Archie on his visits to labels. Archie was fairly young and he wasn’t yet sophisticated in business matters. He hadn’t yet mastered the rhythm of a board meeting: when to lay low, when to speak up, when to charge in with a demand. Nene was a master at those kinds of things.
The record that I turned in just before Sly and I were busted outside of Denny’s, Electric Spanking of War Babies, came out in August of 1981, and it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. The recording process had been long and spread out—I did some sessions with Sly, some with Junie, some with Bootsy, some with Ron Dunbar—and as we wrapped it up, I realized that I hadn’t been in any shape to bring things into proper focus. The sound on the record was too thin, without that trademark United Sound power. There are some arrangements that are too busy. I’m not sold on the way the tracks were sequenced.
It’s a shame, because I love that album. I love the title. I love the concept. Electric Spanking of War Babies was an extension of the line drawn from Uncle Jam Wants You to One Nation Under a Groove, in the sense that it examined the darker side of patriotism: the idea was that governments promote their own agenda through mass media, which was electronically manipulating and beating up the brains of the Baby Boomers. The bomb was dropped on Japan. They were flattened. Over the next decades they advanced so much. I wondered if maybe some of their abilities had been enhanced by the bomb, or if some defense mechanism was triggered that had strengthened them. I knew we were being bombarded by technology and radiation, these threats of nuclear power. This was at the height of the Cold War, when every James Bond movie found him fighting over missiles. What if the bomb was, in small doses, a solution? I put a party song down, with lyrics like “You can walk a mile in my shoes, but you can’t dance a step in my feet,” and then I got to the more complicated issues: Vietnam, LSD, the moon landing, computers.
We imagined a government in partnership with big business, which is something that has since happened for real with Clear Channel. These days, try to find a radio station that isn’t rigidly formatted to maximize corporate profit. At that time, at the beginning of the Reagan era, there was a movement toward deregulation of industries, and that meant antitrust laws and other safeguards to prevent companies from acquiring total control were weakening. The new deregulated mass media could be controlled by whoever put the most money on their side of the scale.
The other major song on that record is “Funk Gets Stronger,” which exists in two versions, one produced by Sly and the other by Sly and Bootsy. Both of them have serious grooves, and the longer one, which we called the “Killer Millimeter Longer” version, has some of Sly’s most poetic lyrics.
“Funk Gets Stronger” was our way of reminding people that we could take a punch. It presented the antidote to the electric spanking, the pure and powerful force that could stop the deception from happening.
Other songs explored different types of deception. Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No to drugs campaign didn’t start until a little later, but that idea was something you could already feel in the culture. That was, for me, a major misstep in social management. As far as I was concerned, anytime you made something taboo, that increased its value. Human intelligence, when denied something, will immediately ask why. That goes right back to the Garden of Eden. As a form of social management, a war on drugs is a terrible strategy, ineffective and self-defeating. Nancy Reagan was probably sincere in her motives when she promoted Just Say No, but she had to know somewhere deep down that it didn’t work.
Another form of control that was beginning to bubble up at the time was oversensitivity in sexual matters. Prudishness seemed like another terrible strategy, especially since it usually went hand in hand with media using sex as a false shock tactic. Cue “Icka Prick”:
Icka prick and iron pussy
Yucka fuck and muscle cunt
Almost every song on Electric Spanking of War Babies dealt with those same central issues, though they approached them from various angles. There’s a track called “Brettino’s Bounce” named for the kid of the percussionist Larry Fratangelo. It was an instrumental with various world rhythms all mixed in together: African drums, Bahamian junkanoo. Even that was connected to the main theme: there was a beat, a rhythm, that communicated as effectively as a television or radio. That was the original mass media.
If we hadn’t felt like we were on good terms with Warner Bros. for Uncle Jam, Electric Spanking of War Babies made it clear that we were on even shakier ground. The record was abandoned by the label. They only pressed ninety thousand copies, and that was in the wake of two consecutive platinum albums. I saw that they really didn’t want it to happen.
Since the lyrics talked overtly about social control, it made sense for Pedro to draw one of his man/machine covers, and he did a piece with an H.R. Giger feel, a portrait of a woman who was using a kind of military-industrial-complex sex toy. We were told that we got letters of protest about it, which wasn’t anything new. We had gotten a few letters of protest on every album since the beginning. Every artist does. But this time, the record company acted on it, and every time they pressed more copies, they switched that cover art for inside art. This dance over the cover—it wasn’t censorship, exactly, but it was control—felt like spillover from the last few years. They still seemed upset about the unexpected way that “One Nation Under a Groove” had blown up and nervous about what we might do if we regrouped and started a new label.
At the time, it was hard to see the whole chessboard. When you’re fucked up on crack, you function from behind a thickening smoke screen. Whenever I had an inkling that something was amiss, I discounted it by 60 percent at least. I figured that more than half of what I was thinking was coming directly from the drugs and the paranoia. But sometimes when you say the sky is falling, it actually is. Warner Bros. wasn’t there for Funkadelic. Casablanca didn’t exist in the same way it had, for Parliament or anyone else. Uncle Jam Records had been like Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, which had flown for a second and then returned to earth. As we went out on the road with a series of concerts we called the World’s Greatest Funk Tour, I started to realize that we were not just touring behind Electric Spanking of War Babies, but behind the entire decade. Funkadelic, our debut, came out in March of 1970. Electric Spanking of War Babies had been released in August of 1981. Between Parliament, Funka-delic, and all our spinoff acts, there were almost forty albums in all. You could stack them and the pile would be too high to get your hands—or your head—around. In late 1981, after a final show in Detroit, I suspended operations for both Parliament and Funkadelic.
THE DOG THAT CHASES ITS TAIL WILL BE DIZZY
Getting high laid me low. I’m not especially judgmental about drugs, but I can’t ignore the fact that they interfered with my ability to do what needed to be done. The record companies had done their best to put the brakes on P-Funk, and I was fucked up enough to let it happen. At a time when I needed the best advice and counsel, I had Nene Montes. I couldn’t get rid of him, because he was my lifeline as the ship was sinking. All of a sudden, it was impossible to line up work. It was like rolling the clock back fifteen years, back to the mid-sixties, when I was just getting in good with Mr. Wingate at Golden World.
At the worst down-and-out point, a man named Ted Currier brought an idea to Nene. Ted, who was heading up the black-music division for Capitol Records, had a band he wanted me and Bootsy to produce: they were called Xavier, and they came from Dayton, Ohio. They wanted us to create a single for Xavier, though under slightly unconventional conditions—we would be monitored closely, because people weren’t sure that we could deliver. We wrote a straight funk record called “Work That Sucker to Death” that turned into a big hit for Capitol (and, years later, was featured prominently on the Sonic the Hedgehog video game). It was a Xavier single in name only: you can hear me call out to Bootsy right in the middle of the song. It was P-Funk through and through, with P-Funk percussion, P-Funk guitar, P-Funk chants, and P-Funk energy. We just flipped that shit right around. It was easy. I knew we still had our fingers on the pulse.
Within a few months, the success of “Work That Sucker to Death” led to a solo deal for me with Capitol. Nene was instrumental in getting the deal, but as always, his style set the tone for my relationship with the label. He ran the shit out of both Capitol and Currier, raising so much hell in my name that no one wanted to deal with him. Sly still had his antennae up around him, and he wasn’t too fond of Ted Currier, either. One time, we were riding in a car and Ted was sucking up to Sly. Sly hated that. Once he figured out that you were buttering him up, he’d misuse you to death. Flattery was his weakness, and he was always on guard against it. After that, Sly just drifted away, there in the car. He pretended to be so high that he nodded out so that no one would talk to him. I learned to do the same thing from him. When you go out in public like that, acting stoned and dizzy, people leave you alone. They think you’re a crazy motherfucker, and they respect your right not to participate in their reality. In that car, at that time, reality wasn’t cutting it. We were all talking about music, and someone mentioned Miles Davis. “Who is that?” Ted said. We all laughed until it was clear that he wasn’t joking: the head of Capitol’s black-music division didn’t know who Miles Davis was. After we all got out of the car, Sly turned to me. “Man,” he said, “that motherfucker’s full of shit.”
That may have been true, but I had to be signed, and so I signed with Capitol for four albums. As usual, I had tracks ready to go. I was recording with two different production groups. One was led by Junie Morrison, or rather, it consisted of Junie and me, trading ideas, polishing up tracks. The material I did with Junie was an extension of the songs we had recorded for One Nation Under a Groove and Electric Spanking of War Babies, though with even more decoration and sound effects—the eighties were all about bright colors, the neons of new wave. There were songs like “Pot Sharing Tots” (a pure pop ballad about a love affair between two toddlers) and “One Fun at a Time” (an ode to monogamy), along with “Computer Games,” which became the title song of that first solo album. “Computer Games” was a door to the future, even if it was an unhinged door: it was a diamond-hard dance song narrated partly by Mother Funkenstein that devolved (or evolved, depending on how evolved you were) into a surreal, cartoonish list of boasts about how I could out-Woody a pecker, out-banana a split, out-toilet a seat, and so on.
Junie and I had gotten so comfortable working together that we didn’t even really need to be in the same place. He would go in, do his work, and leave. I was mostly in a hotel getting high, and I got out when I could get out and came to the studio and added my part. When I wasn’t working with Junie, I was cutting tracks with Garry Shider and David Spradley, not just for Computer Games but for a second album that was growing from the seed of the “Hydraulic Pump” single I had put out on Hump Records. That second record wouldn’t be credited to me as a solo album—it was a group album I had decided to credit to the P-Funk All Stars, which was just Funkadelic by a different name. Those two projects sprung up simultaneously, which was a kind of throwback to the Parliament-Funkadelic days—I had two distinct styles that I could go to, depending on the material. The difference was that I wasn’t necessarily looking to make albums that had a single tone. So maybe one day I’d concentrate more on work I was doing with Junie, but the next day David and Garry would do something that fit better with the solo album, and I’d rearrange the set. That’s what happened with “Loopzilla,” which was a kind of medley song that David, Garry, and I imagined as the sound of a radio station running through snippets of other songs: “Dancing in the Streets,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” Zapp’s “More Bounce to the Ounce,” and even recent late-period Funkadelic hits like “One Nation Under a Groove” and “(Not Just) Knee Deep.” “Loopzilla” was originally the end of another song called “Pumpin’ It Up,” but while “Pumpin’ It Up” ended up on the P-Funk All Stars record, I saved “Loopzilla” for the solo project.
Working with Garry and David was a different experience from collaborating with Junie—they were a team rather than a solitary producer, so their work had more of a social component, with more conversation and more fellowship. That meant, oddly enough, that there was a greater chance that I’d feel left out if I came by and saw them working. One night I came in to find that they had done up a new track, just the basic music. I was fucked up something major, nearly out of dope, starting to get paranoid that they might be moving ahead without me. Can you be left off your own solo album? That’s crack for you. Anxiety focused me, and I shifted over to a supervisory tone, told them to play me what they were making. “I’ll just put some vocals on here,” I said, trying to sound businesslike. At that point it was mainly just a dragging percussion sound, without the keyboard melody, and I just started right in with a freestyle, making things up as I went. The vocals stayed spoken rather than sung because I didn’t know what key the thing was in. As with “Computer Games,” the lyrics were a free-associative stream of puns and phrases.
Yeah, this is a story of a famous dog
For the dog that chases its tail will be busy
The spontaneity of the lyrics didn’t mean that they weren’t considered. Dogs had a long history in soul music, stretching back to that great string of Rufus Thomas singles in the early sixties: “The Dog,” “Walking the Dog,” “Can Your Monkey Do the Dog,” “Somebody Stole My Dog.” I was thinking about how those combined comedy and soul, but also how they connected to other common phrases. Treat him like a dog. Dog day afternoon. It’s a dog’s life. What did those sayings mean, exactly? That men had instincts that couldn’t be suppressed? That failure was an inevitable part of the equation? Most of the hard-luck cartoon characters were dogs. They were hangdog. They were underdogs. I settled on “Atomic Dog” because it was a Reagan-era idea, something for the Cold War. I wrote a song about human behavior as animal behavior: “Why must I chase the cat?” could have been about pussy, drugs, or money, but no matter which of those you picked, it was still about the unthinking, relentless instinct to pursue. “Atomic Dog” was rooted in cartoons, too, though not as aggressively as “Computer Games”: only Huckleberry Hound made a second appearance. And then, of course, there was a chant, the kind of thing that would spread out across a crowd and keep on moving until it filled an auditorium:
Bow-wow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-ay
Bow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-ay
It was the catchiest thing I had made since the glory days of Parliament, and just as I was finishing it up, I got bad news from the past. Neil Bogart had died, not even forty years old, from cancer. People said he had lymphoma, but they said other things, too, and there was talk that he was taking quaaludes in large amounts right up until the end. I don’t know. I wasn’t with him. I can’t say if fast living caught up with him or if he was still going so fast that he ran into something immovable. But his death reminded me what it was like to have a collaborator on the business side who understood our creative vision.
When Computer Games came out in November 1982, Capitol picked “Loopzilla” for the first single. We played a few small club dates to promote the record, and then, after the New Year, Capitol sent me over to Eng
land for a series of promotional appearances. At that time I was in Miami, living in a hotel, mostly staying inside and getting high. The day I went to England I got my hair done in a little shop in Coconut Grove. The girl did it up in braids and put beads on them. Those braids pulled the skin on my head back; the effect was like a face-lift. When I look at those pictures now I laugh because I know how tired and strung out I was, but I look real fresh. Over in England, I appeared on Top of the Pops with Grandmaster Flash. I was technically promoting “Loopzilla,” but all anyone wanted to talk about was “Atomic Dog.” That’s when I realized that the song had blown up.
I went right back to Miami to get a group together for the tour. It was a full house: we had Eddie, Blackbyrd, and Michael on guitar; Bernie and Junie on keyboards; Dennis Chambers and Rodney “Skeet” Curtis on bass. We had Boogie and Ron Ford, Garry Shider and the full horn section, even Bootsy and Catfish for some of the shows. Maceo was the bandleader, and that let us do a kind of greatest-hits set. “Atomic Dog” was going to have bite along with its bark. A few days before the tour, Nene took us to the house of a guy he knew somewhere in Miami. There were so many keys of coke you couldn’t get in the front door. Once you were inside, you had to slide around the edges of rooms. I got so paranoid being around this much drugs. There was an Italian guy there with a Spanish accent, which didn’t make much sense, but he was nice enough, and he kept saying how happy he was to meet me. “George,” he said. “Take whatever you want.” I was scared as shit to be there. I was ready to run and they were laughing at me. I grabbed a handful of powder and when I got home I made a big crack rock from it.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 23