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

by George Clinton

  That rock became my good-luck charm. The success of “Atomic Dog” rattled me a little. I liked knowing that I could succeed, but the spotlight was a little blinding. I didn’t want to fuck things up. To settle myself down, I vowed that I was going to go everywhere on tour with that crack rock, but that I wasn’t going to smoke it. I wasn’t going to kick drugs, but I pledged not to break that specific rock for the duration of the tour.

  I got through one day with the rock intact, and then a second day. By the third or fourth day, I started to think that maybe I really could go the whole six weeks. At that point, the “Atomic Dog” rock became an ego fix all its own. I’d play marbles with it, or show it around, proud that I wasn’t going to give in. Other people would come by and look at it like they were staring at the Hope Diamond. “You haven’t broken that?” they’d say. If I wanted anything, I would buy half a gram of coke and snort it. And if there was a girl who wanted crack, I would buy some for her. “If you care about that rock,” I’d say, “you don’t really like me.”

  The rock presided over a great tour. We played everything from early Funkadelic and mid-period Parliament right up through the Computer Games material. And the band was versatile and powerful. It was like a fusion band. The rhythm section, Dennis and Skeet together, could make everything go so fast. They were always trying to run Blackbyrd off the stage, and he was the last person in the world you could run off of a stage. The Atomic Dog Tour took us across the country, from New York to Cleveland to Detroit to Long Beach. After the last show in Los Angeles, I went to my room at the Renaissance Inn to celebrate the end of the Tour—and by celebrate, I mean smoke the rock. I had been holding the whole time, six weeks without crack, and now the rock and I were going to pat each other on the back.

  I prepared all the equipment, and then sat on the bed buck naked with my legs folded in full lotus position. As I got ready to light the pipe, I could feel my heart and my mind racing. All junkies have rituals, trivial things they do to make them think that they’re in control of the experience rather than the drugs being in charge, and one of mine was to take some toilet paper and wad it up in my nostrils so that I wouldn’t get too excited and blow the flame out with my nose. I took a hit and was getting ready to blow out the flame when the toilet paper caught on fire. I dropped the pipe and heard it pop on the floor next to the bed. Then I took my finger, covered one nostril, and blew my nose so hard that the flaming toilet paper shot out across the room. It hit the drapes and that shit just went up in flames. It seemed like it was covered in gasoline. I was still in full lotus, legs numb, but I rolled out of the bed and snatched down the drapes. That left nothing on the window, and right across the way I saw an office building with three secretaries looking out over their desks. I ducked down behind the air conditioner so they wouldn’t see me naked.

  So there I was, down on the floor, beating the drapes, trying to put out the fire, when the smoke alarm went off. Now I didn’t care if the secretaries saw me. I grabbed a chair and reached up to the smoke alarm to take the battery out, but as soon as I touched the alarm the noise stopped. I got down off the chair, and it started again. Paranoia started to set in. I started to feel like I was being watched; I started to see the whole scene from outside of my body. I sat on the bed stock-still, certain someone was coming to arrest me. When no one came, I swept everything into the desk drawer and called downstairs to the desk. “I was smoking a cigarette and the alarm went off,” I said. She told me it was okay but she was laughing like somebody had told her a hell of a joke. I put on my pants and went downstairs past the desk. Nobody said anything, and it was only then that the paranoia started to recede. When the maid came in the morning, I gave her seventy-five dollars to get everything fixed.

  As it turned out, Los Angeles wasn’t the final stop. The promoters added one more show in San Francisco, and that night somebody gave me some shit that was bad news. I don’t know if it was poisoned or laced with dust, if something was really wrong with it or if I wasn’t right for it at the time, but I really crashed. I got deathly ill, which was a real rarity for me. Most health problems I solved with prune juice: fever, blister, whatever. My constitution was strong. Not that time: I was ruined on crack and having trouble recovering. As soon as the tour ended, I went up north in California to Crescent City to fish, and had myself a kind of retreat. At that time, in that cabin, I started putting the crack in joints and in a wooden pipe, and that way I was able to smoke for the next three years without incident.

  “Atomic Dog” put me back on the map. We filmed a video, and it won several awards, even though MTV wouldn’t show it—this was before March of 1983, when Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video broke the network’s color line. The song was on the radio wherever I went, blasting out of boom boxes, store windows. Kids were quoting it back to me.

  Funnily enough, Bootsy had an “Atomic Dog” of his own that same year. I hadn’t worked with him very much since Sweat Band and Ultra Wave both came out in 1980. When P-Funk dissolved, he went his own way to tend to the solo career that he had been thinking about for a few years anyway. In 1982 he released a record called The One Giveth, The Count Taketh Away that didn’t do much on the charts, or for that matter, creatively; I did only one song, “Shine-O-Myte.” In the wake of that album, though, he put out a song called “Body Slam,” which was basically a remix of “Countracula,” one of the songs from the record. A DJ worked it up for him and they did it right. It was futuristic and danceable, kind of like the records Malcolm McLaren was making—it made sense to me that they ended up working together later. The bass was huge and elastic, and there were some funny horn arrangements in there, too. To see “Atomic Dog” and “Body Slam” meet on the chart reminded me of when “Flash Light” had stepped aside for “Bootzilla” back in 1977. It felt like a reunion. Bootsy had been one of my most valuable collaborators through the highest heights of P-Funk, and whenever I heard one of his records, especially after “Body Slam,” I had mixed feelings, some nostalgia, some regret, and plenty of itchy trigger finger. He always had good tracks at the root of his records, and I always wished that I could have gotten to them. Without the extra ingredients of P-Funk—the idiosyncrasy, the community, Bernie’s keyboards or my lyrics—he reverted to something more conservative, James Brown grooves like “Philmore.” He never faltered in setting up a great foundation, but he didn’t always know where to take it from there.

  “Atomic Dog” was so huge that it brought along other records in its path. The first was Urban Dancefloor Guerillas, which was what we called the P-Funk All Stars record that grew out of “Hydraulic Pump.” There was another pet song that Garry and David and I finished up as a kind of sequel to “Atomic Dog” called “Copy Cat.” There was a great track called “Generator Pop” with shuddering bass and screeching guitar. But Garry and David weren’t the only producers on the album. Sly had worked with me on “Hydraulic Pump,” and he also coproduced “Catch a Keeper,” which was a holdover from Electric Spanking of War Babies. There’s “One of Those Summers,” a beautiful ballad I did with Junie Morrison. There’s “Pumpin’ It Up,” which sounds almost like electronic music until Eddie Hazel uncorks a solo. And so many great vocalists sing on that album: Philippé Wynne, Bobby Womack, Lynn Mabry, Sheila Horne. If Urban Dancefloor Guerillas had come out as a Funkadelic record, it would have been a perfect comeback.

  For the cover, we had an embroidered jacket made, put it on a young woman who was the daughter of one of the promotions guys, and then took a picture of her standing on a boat. The record was released on Uncle Jam, of all labels. I had assumed it would come out on Hump, like the single, but Nene took the record back to CBS without asking anyone and submitted it to fulfill the terms of the Uncle Jam deal. It replaced the Jessica Cleaves record, which was never delivered, and that was the four-album history of Uncle Jam Records. I was sad then that the Jessica album didn’t come out, and I’m still sad. She was a great soul diva, mainstream enough to be a big chart artist but w
ith enough of the P-Funk character to really stand apart. That’s a beautiful record that deserved release then. I hope it gets released in its original form eventually.

  Urban Dancefloor Guerillas came out at the exact same time as my second Capitol solo album, You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish. In the most superficial way, it was a sequel to Motor Booty Affair—or, at the very least, a chance for me to use the leftover fishing puns I had collected for that record. Again, I worked with both the Junie camp and the Garry and David camp, along with other collaborators like Michael Hampton and Bootsy. The first song on the record, “Nubian Nut,” was credited as a cowrite with Fela Kuti, because we took a section out of a song of his called “Mister Follow Follow.” I loved Fela and everything he did. He was like Bob Marley but without any of the naïveté—he practiced realpolitik through and through.

  The rest of the songs were dance songs, more or less, though they were also little morality plays. “Quickie” starts out with rock guitar and a sharp electronic drum and goes on to look at the proper sexual protocol when it’s the woman who wants the one-night stand.

  Another song, “Last Dance,” was a complementary scene piece, the story of a guy trying to pick up a girl in a club and failing because he was a “psychedelic wallflower.” The main idea is that you should always try, because you never know when you’ll succeed (“Maybe she’ll get funky with you”), and in the background, there’s a vocal re-creation of the chorus of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” We filmed a video for that song, filled with brightly colored 1980s backgrounds. The director had the concept, based on what he thought MTV might want. I would have been into something more avant-garde or comic. Visually, I was more influenced by the animation of Monty Python and the Beatles, and I always imagined doing something like what Peter Gabriel did for “Sledgehammer.” But the times called for a certain style.

  Though it was only my second album with Capitol, the label was already acting like Warner Bros. had in the waning days of Funkadelic. Promotions men started having strange ideas about how to put a record out into the world. They picked “Nubian Nut” as the single, which was clearly the wrong choice for the market we were trying to crack: “Quickie” would have lit up the ghetto first, and then the pop stations would have come and found us. Selecting “Nubian Nut” was a form of chasing pop success, and that was like chasing your tail.

  Toward the end of mixing You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish I was in Miami, staying at the Sheraton Four Ambassadors. At that time it was part hotel, part residence, and Stephanie and I would go down there for a week, fish, work, fish some more. One day we came home from the boat and I had an ounce of cocaine in my pocket. The second we came into the hotel, I noticed that the lobby was all lit up, and that among the normal staff there were a few strange men. They were clearly government agents, and of a high order. You could see the Petrocelli suits and earpieces. And then I remembered: the week before, one of the guys at the hotel had told me that the vice president, George H. W. Bush, was coming to the hotel for a presentation. They closed in on us the second we came through the door, not just the men in suits but the dogs who were with them. The guy at the desk waved to the agent. “That’s the Clintons,” he said. “They’re all right.” Two of the men walked us to the elevator, and a lady agent and a dog stepped in with us. I was scared to death. I was sure we’d be busted. All the way up, I tried to be friendly, made small talk with the agents. We got off at our floor and as I hurried into the room, I saw a cop stationed at one end of the hall and another cop at the other end. When I called downstairs to ask, the guy at the desk told me not to worry. “Just stay out of their way,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”

  We started some work on a track, and all of a sudden a huge helicopter rushed past the window, decorated with the presidential seal. I turned on the television and found them setting up for a speech on one of the news channels. I followed it in real time in my head as it happened on screen. Bush would land on top of the hotel, take the elevator down to the lobby, and come to the podium. Sure enough, in two minutes, he was there. The speech he gave that day was one of the keynote events for the Reagan administration’s Zero Tolerance policy toward drugs. If they discovered any drugs, even a seed and a stem, they could confiscate boats and cars. They could freeze your assets. And there I was, twenty floors above him, doing lines of the coke that had been hidden in my pocket as I came through the lobby. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

  Strangely, the Bush helicopter wasn’t my only run-in with the U.S. government that year. The Uncle Jam lawsuit, which had started back in 1981 when Roger Troutman had taken his masters from United Sound and left CBS Records for Warner Bros., had been clarified to some degree. We had come into possession of a letter written by Bob Krasnow, an executive from Warner Bros. Back when Zapp’s first singles were out, Krasnow had gone to see the band in concert, and he had noticed that everything was about Roger. All the energy onstage revolved around him. Even though Warner Bros. had Zapp tied up, Krasnow felt that he had been tricked, and we found a letter by Krasnow in which he said, in no uncertain terms, that he had to move fast in getting money to Roger and signing him above and beyond his Uncle Jam commitments, which were probably sealed by handshake deal only—if you can believe it, that’s how we did our business.

  Just as we were getting ready to take this letter to court, along with other documents, the case took another crazy turn. William Westmoreland, the American general who had been in charge of American military operations in Vietnam, filed a libel suit against the CBS television network—Westmoreland claimed that CBS, in the course of preparing a special, had lied about the way Westmoreland had estimated Vietcong troop strength. With Westmoreland v. CBS looming, Pierre Leval, the judge for that trial, cleared the rest of his calendar—a calendar that included us. What that meant was a quick, unsatisfying ruling, a summary judgment that determined that, on the merits of the case, it didn’t look like we would win. We could have appealed, but one of our legal philosophies, promoted by Nene, was that we never took legal representation on a contingency basis. And so the result was that many questions remained unanswered: how exactly Roger had moved from point to point, who (if anyone) in our camp had known about it, why CBS Records hadn’t fought harder to punish Warner Bros. for taking Roger’s album away from them.

  As confusing as the Roger case was, it was only the beginning of a series of legal tangles. When I had dismissed Leber and Krebs as managers, our office had drafted a letter explaining how we no longer needed their services. In that letter, we had included a line about how if we owed them any money, we’d be happy to discuss it. It was just a formality, language designed for politeness in the hopes of bringing things to an amicable close, but that line hung me. In legal terms, it gave them an opening to take us to court, which they did, asking for just south of $300,000. And when the court looked at the language, they saw it as a tacit acknowledgment that we owed them money. It wasn’t a tremendous amount of money—somewhere around $250,000—but the P-Funk organization was at a point where cash flow wasn’t great. We had offices in Detroit and Los Angeles. We had studios open all the time. There was plenty of money coming in, but plenty more going out. But how a cash-flow issue turned into a bankruptcy was beyond me. We had plenty of assets and no debts. I could have walked right into BMI and gotten a loan staked against my catalog.

  Still, the people I had around me, the people I trusted with managing my affairs, advised me to go to the hearing. Nene and Howard Hertz, a lawyer who was working with us, went with me to get representation, and Armen even paid for those lawyers, who included Bob Hertzberg and Mike Ryan. I went with my team to the hearing, and nobody showed up on the other side except for Leber and Krebs and their attorney, Stanley Kramer. There were claims connected to that bankruptcy that suggested that I owed money to record labels as a result of unrecouped advances. So where were the labels? Why hadn’t they at least hired local counsel? We went through a series of questions about my assets and debts. One of
the central questions turned on the copyrights, and whether I had transferred them to Armen. This was an important issue for any court trying to figure things out. If the copyrights had been transferred more than a year earlier, then they officially resided with Armen. If they had been transferred less than a year earlier, then they were still considered part of my assets. But the fact was that I had never transferred them. They were still owned by Polygram, because of the deal we had struck with Casablanca. I said, quite clearly, that I hadn’t transferred anything to Armen or Nene or anyone else. How could I? The line of questioning continued. At one point it was so redundant that the judge dozed off a bit. The lawyer seemed skeptical. He wondered where all the money from our biggest mid-seventies hits had gone. “What happened to the Mothership?” he said. “It just flew away?”

  “Don’t they all?” I said. Everybody laughed and it woke the judge up. When I left that hearing, as far as I knew, it was over. But the proceeding kept going for almost two more years without my knowledge. In the years since, several times, we’ve gone back to Detroit and tried to look more closely at the full set of claims and the actual final judgment, and we can’t find it.

  My third Capitol solo record, Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends, came out in the summer of 1985, and though it wasn’t technically a concept album, I wanted to look a little more aggressively at the way that music was changing. I stayed on top of shit by talking to the younger people. We called those kids and their tastes “bubblegum,” and I watched them closely, kept an open mind for everything, whether it was Duran Duran or Howard Jones or Animotion. Lots of bands had good grooves of a certain flavor. As it turned out, many of those acts were copying us, or at least their idea of us, so we copied them back and watched how that weird feedback loop turned out. That record was a strange one in other ways, because I mixed it with Nene.