RHYTHM AND RHYME, RHYTHM AND RHYME, RHYTHM AND MOTHERFUCKING RHYME
There were only a few stars who carried the torch for raw funk in the mid-eighties, and the baddest of them all was Prince. He knew P-Funk in and out, and he was trying some of the same tricks we had. He believed in the two-band balance, though he did his own take on it, setting the Revolution up against the Time. He wrote and produced for outside acts like the Family, Sheila E., Jill Jones, and more. And his Camille character, a sped-up voice that was one of his alter egos, had more than a little Star Child in it. Prince had been hip to us since the early days. He was the perfect age. In the late seventies, when he was getting ready to debut as an artist, he had brought his first record to his label, which happened to be Warner Bros. During their meetings, they played him Ahh . . . The Name Is Bootsy, Baby, and it stopped him cold. He didn’t even want to go forward. He took his own record back home and worked on it for eight more months. Mo Ostin from Warner Bros. told me that he had been talking to Prince once and that Prince had given me a compliment: he said I was up there with Elvis and James Brown.
In the early eighties, the feeling was mutual, especially after records like Dirty Mind and 1999. I heard his songs everywhere but more than that, I listened into the middle of them and heard a rock or new wave update of some of the same things we were doing in Funkadelic: 1999 especially, with the sped-up and slowed-down voices, the mix of commercial singles and out-there experiments, even the cover art. Then he exploded with Purple Rain. He was such a talented songwriter, especially when it came to absorbing other people’s styles and making them into something distinctive. Like Stevie Wonder, he wrote songs that were instant standards. “Purple Rain” would have played straight as a country song, or a folk song. But unlike Stevie Wonder, he didn’t like people to cover his material. I didn’t get that. I thought he didn’t understand what publishing was for. It’s to stick a flag in a song and claim it so that when someone else works with it, you get paid.
After Purple Rain he could do anything he wanted, and one of the things he wanted to do to was run his own label. Warner Bros. set him up with Paisley Park, which was named after a song on his Around the World in a Day album. We had overlapping communities; our late-seventies bootlegger, Billy Sparks, had ended up in the Purple Rain movie, and the Electrifying Mojo, who was a P-Funk obsessive, became one of Prince’s important early supporters. I called him and started a conversation that led to a record deal. When I signed to Paisley Park, I split the money between myself, Archie, my lawyers, the IRS, and Armen. Armen got almost half, in fact, in repayment for fronting me the money that had saved my farm from foreclosure.
For my first Paisley Park album, The Cinderella Theory, I worked with many of the same musicians who had been with me during the Capitol years: Blackbyrd McKnight, David Spradley, Amp Fiddler. The sound wasn’t radically different from those records, though the production was glossier. The lead single was “Why Should I Dog You Out?” which grew out of some work I had done with a British group named Well Red. The song I made with them, “Get Lucky,” had a funky lick but was a dance track. I decided to bring it over to make a new song. The lyrics were built from a goofy “dog you out” chant we were doing onstage at the end of extended live versions of “Atomic Dog”; we name-checked famous dogs in pop-culture history: Goofy, Snoopy, Marmaduke, and even Spuds MacKenzie, who was huge at the time. I wish I had mixed it at United Sound, because it didn’t come out with the bottom as strong as it should have, especially on cassette releases.
That album was positioned as something expansive, because people thought that signing to Prince’s label would open up two generations of funk to each other, but in some ways it was a very claustrophobic record. The biggest songs on there were, at some level, about the elevating power of music, but they were also about the various kinds of prisons and limits that surround people everywhere they go. “Airbound” had a drug subtext, especially in the chorus: “We gone, we gone, we gone, we gone / Never to ever come down.” And “Tweakin’ ” was about drugs, too, but also about urban culture and the way that music functioned as a kind of inner-city news network. Both Chuck D and Flavor Flav from Public Enemy appeared on that song, and Flav had one of the most memorable lines: “George will tell you, ‘Hold my jammy while I go P.’ ” Other tracks came together the way they had in the old days, with a mix of new compositions, in-studio jam sessions, and reupholstered versions of old songs. There’s a cover of Harry Belafonte’s “The Banana Boat Song” that was born when Bootsy came up with a funky track and I just threw the first thing on top of it that popped into my head. “There I Go Again” is almost a ballad, with me, Belita Woods, and Joe “Pep” Harris from the old Motown psychedelic soul group the Undisputed Truth. The album also dipped into Bahamian junkanoo rhythms. A few years earlier, I had been asked down to the Bahamas to see if I could help figure out a way of making junkanoo as popular as reggae. That seemed unlikely—reggae came from a bigger island that was more capable of creating international stars, and it had a more developed political agenda—but I liked the junkanoo sound.
When I visited Minneapolis to work on Cinderella Theory, Prince came by the studio to say hi, but he kept his distance, tried to give me the right conditions to get work done. The most one-on-one contact I had with him was late at night. I’d be at the hotel by myself getting high, and he’d call me and ask me to come over to his house. I’d go over there and we’d talk: I was always interested in conspiracies, big international ones like the Trilateral Commission, or multiple governments banding together to conceal the evidence of alien landings. There’s a book that conspiracy theorists love called Behold a Pale Horse, by Milton William Cooper, and I used to read it to Prince out loud, more silly-serious than straightforwardly earnest. I believed in conspiracies, but they condition you not to believe in anything—it’s probably more accurate to say that I believed in the idea of conspiracies, in the idea that nothing was as it seemed and that strings were always being pulled behind the scenes by unseen hands. Prince listened, sometimes asked questions, sometimes joked. I don’t know for sure what he thought about the book. For the most part, I didn’t do drugs right in front of him. I wanted to be respectful. When I had to smoke, I took the pipe into the bathroom and did my business there. Prince has always claimed that he didn’t do any drugs, and I never saw him do any, but he must have at least done coffee, because I don’t know any other motherfucker who could go to sleep at five thirty in the morning and be back at eight daisy fresh.
The title song of that album, “The Cinderella Theory,” quoted from the melody of “Oh, I,” a Funkadelic song from Electric Spanking of War Babies. It also connected back to the themes of that record. Some people took the title as a comment on the fact that we were signed to Paisley Park—someday my Prince will come—and that was partly true. In the fairy tale, Cinderella comes out of the ball, loses her shoe, and the prince goes to find her. In my version, she was out skinny-dipping and she left her bathing suit on a tree; the prince went from girl to girl trying to match it. But the song also flips the story and wonders, briefly, if Cinderella wants to be found by the authorities—what’s the prince if not an authority?
I was trying not to be stupid about it, not to be too straightforward. I didn’t want to lean on the idea so hard that it fell over. But I knew that the system scrutinized entertainers, that they kept tabs on us, that in some cases they loaded up artists with drugs (sniff, sniff, sniffin’) so that they couldn’t interrogate the system and change it. That song was so slick. Sly wanted to cut it; he loved the counterpoint and the rhythm. But Sly was heading in his own direction in those days, which was always a deeply strange direction. A few years earlier, he had been in the studio working on a new record and all of a sudden a voice came in and said something. He assumed it was an engineer speaking to him through the mic, so he answered, but there was no one there. A few seconds later, he heard it again. He thought he was tripping but he was too hardcore to admit that he was
paranoid. As it turned out, he was working with one of those outboard pieces of gear that just regurgitates the sound that you put into it, and he had accidentally put a sound on the machine. Every sixty seconds or so, it would resurface, and Sly would think it was a voice talking to him. Even when he figured it out, he was still jumpy, and he called the whole sensation “Eek-A-Boo,” which was his private slang for being scared by the ghost in the machine. He recorded a song about it, “Eek-Ah-Bo-Static Automatic,” which ended up on the soundtrack to the Soul Man movie.
Another time, he blew up his house in Bel Air. Someone was doing drugs there and they left the ether open. The fumes are like wavy cartoon lines; they find fire and then the fire follows the fumes back to the source and explodes. When it’s going critical, you can hear it go up in a whistle. Sly was back in a corner of his house, in a bathroom, and the ether had drifted from the kitchen. When he lit the pipe, it blew up the part of the house he was in—it was an addition, and it separated from the rest of the structure. When the smoke cleared, the bathroom had fallen clean off. He was standing on the edge of the house as cars drove by. He was standing on a ledge about six inches wide, with the door heading into the kitchen right next to him. He slid back into the house, closed the door, and stayed like that for more than a year.
When I wasn’t in Minneapolis recording Cinderella Theory, I was spending much of my time in Los Angeles, and part of the time I was hanging around the fringes of the movie business. In 1988 I did a cameo in a movie called The Night Before, which was one of the first starring roles for Keanu Reeves. I lost a twenty-thousand-dollar check on the set and one of Keanu’s boys found it. The year after that, I moved deeper into the movies. I cowrote the theme song for Howard the Duck and also produced a record by a band that grew out of the film world—or rather, a band that pretended it didn’t exactly grow out of the film world. Otis Day and the Knights were an R&B band famous for their appearance in the movie Animal House, where they played a frat party and did a frenetic version of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” They were beloved and successful. The only problem is that they weren’t real. But in the wake of their movie, they started taking on the feel of a real band. DeWayne Jessie, the actor who played Otis Day in the movie, could sing (though in the movie they had him lip-synch over vocals by Lloyd Williams), and he had been touring the Knights around the country as an actual band. MCA Records decided to reverse-engineer them as a real recording act. Jheryl Busby, the president of MCA, came to me to oversee the project, and I got the P-Funk team together and assembled a set of songs for them: not just “Shout!” and other oldies like “Shama Lama Ding Dong,” but also a few early Parliament and Funkadelic songs, “Testify,” “You and Your Folks,” “I Can Feel the Ice Melting.” As we were producing the Otis Day and the Knights album, we gave MCA a record called Our Gang Funky, which was a compilation with some of the newer artists we were working with: Cadillac Heights, BabyFatt, Maxi Muff. Our Gang Funky wasn’t a huge record, but it started a trend that I’d revisit later, when P-Funk went through a collection and re-collection phase with the Family Series.
One evening in Los Angeles, Archie Ivy and I drove away from a coke dealer’s house up onto the 405 expressway, took the exit to head home, and saw flashing police lights in our rearview mirror. The cop who walked up to our window said that Archie’s headlights weren’t on, which wasn’t true. More than that, it wasn’t possible: you couldn’t even start his car without the lights coming on. The cops searched the car like they knew what they were looking for, though they didn’t find it—I stuffed the paper with the drugs down into my pants. But the paper was open, and as I walked around, everything leaked out: coke, paper, all of it. When we got down to the jailhouse, the police somehow managed to produce the same amount of cocaine that had leaked out through the bottom of my pant leg.
From jail, we called Nene’s daughter. We hadn’t seen him in a while—it had been a year or two since we’d spoken—but we knew that he could pull some strings in Los Angeles. He and one of his guys got there before anyone even knew. It was under an hour. And there he was just like old times, standing out in front, smacking the news people.
I probably shouldn’t have called him. We needed to get out of jail, but there was an unintended consequence, which was that Nene was back in my life. Almost immediately, he started in on me about a bank in Panama that he had a stake in, and how he wanted me to invest with him. I resisted. If nothing else, I had learned that. But then he went back to playing dirty pool. We were out one night, and he leaned over to me and said, “Your problem is that you won’t tell Stephanie about your bitches.” He had some nerve, because he was seeing people on the side, too. “I’m glad you’re into hippieism and freedom,” I said. “Everybody’s free to do whatever they do, right?” He said right. “Well,” I said, “can your girlfriend have her other man in here and fuck him in front of you?” I wanted to provoke him.
That night, I went straight back home and told Stephanie about all the people I had been messing with. I wasn’t proud of it or defiant or anything. It was a fact of life for musicians, and something that had been happening for decades, but I was going to be damned if I let Nene control what happened. Stephanie took the news in stride. She was angry at me for having girls on the side, but she was angrier at him for bringing up the issue the way he did, that kind of crypto-blackmail shit. We ended up getting married, Steph and I, in Toledo in 1990. Nene was mad about it—he didn’t like anything that was outside of his sense of control. The next time, he was frustrated to hear that we had gotten married, and he said so. She came right back at him: “Don’t you ever call me and tell on George. That’s not going to work.” Nene did the same thing to Archie Ivy, spread word that he wasn’t treating his wife right. Or he’d call Ronnie, get him upset, and then call me and say that Ronnie was freaking out without quite mentioning who had lit the fuse in the first place. And if he was talking to me about them, you can be damn sure he was talking to them about me. That’s how Nene was back in the seventies and how he was in the nineties, and it only took a bit for the present to fall in line with the past.
Hip-hop came in waves, and just as I was certain that I had understood the first and the second and the third, the fourth came along, and this time it was personal. The debut album by the rap group De La Soul, 3 Feet High and Rising, was released in 1989, and it immediately became a huge hit. One of its biggest singles, “Me Myself and I,” was built solidly on a sample of “(Not Just) Knee Deep.” I loved the group’s attitude and their music, and I was pleased with the way they dealt with the sample, too. The record was out, using our music. To head off a lawsuit and also, to some degree, to do the right thing, their record label, Tommy Boy, paid us $100,000 to use it. At the time, we didn’t know if that money was being paid as a result of masters or publishing. There were no rules worked out yet, no real understanding of how samples were supposed to be accounted.
A few other rap acts ponied up with money, too. Digital Underground paid for “Let’s Play House,” which was the basis for “Humpty Dance.” X-Clan paid for using “One Nation Under a Groove” in their song “Earth Bound.” In those cases, the process worked the way it should have worked. De La Soul also put the song out as a twelve-inch, and one side was basically just our original song. Still, in the Wild West of hip-hop, this seemed like it was okay.
We were just figuring out how to work the new system, but Armen was a full chess move ahead. Because he was getting regular earnings statements and we saw only occasional summaries, he had time to strategize. For him, the strategy involved more lawsuits. He filed suit against Public Enemy. Terminator X, the DJ for Public Enemy, had used a sample of the Trombipulation song “Body Language” on his solo album Valley of the Jeep Beats. The suit was for the outrageous sum of $3 million. Armen’s executive assistant, Jane Peterer, went on MTV explaining that they were suing on my behalf, which wasn’t the case. In fact, I had to go back on the channel myself with Chuck D and Flavor Flav and say that as f
ar as I was concerned, there was no problem using the sample. It led to the claim being dropped.
Nene came right back with a flurry of his own litigation. He threatened to sue every record company, along with Armen, on behalf of a group he called the Association of Parliament-Funkadelic. The group, which Nene assembled, consisted of a bunch of guys who had worked in our office. They weren’t musicians or songwriters. But Nene’s move was another false front designed to make it look like someone else other than Armen—in this case, him—was acting on my behalf. I guess he figured that in court people would look at four black guys sitting together and assume that they were seeing P-Funk.
With cooler heads, we could have worked out a nice system, scaled to sales. If an artist sampled us and didn’t sell very many records, that artist wouldn’t have to pay us very much. But if an artist sampled us and sold between half a million and a million records, the cost would be fifty thousand; if sales exceeded a million, the price would go up to a hundred thousand. That’s just a broad sketch of what I had in mind. I’m sure there were even more nuanced ways to charge, and I would have been receptive to them, too. What I wasn’t receptive to was tying everything up in court, in red tape and malice. That fucks it up for everyone, because then you’re talking about five hundred different cases involving thousands of songs. It’s litigation, and it’s a docket, and it’s a judge taking a panel of jurors and playing both records, the hip-hop song and the original, and asking if they can recognize one song in the other. If the jury couldn’t, the case was thrown out, no matter how egregious the borrowing was. And if they could, then there was a byzantine settlement process with no transparency. Artists couldn’t tell how much money was changing hands. Everything was obscured by a legal fog. At around that same time, Archie and I went to Warner Bros. to try to collect money from MC Hammer’s record “Turn This Mutha Out,” which basically lifted “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)” wholesale. In the process of investigating that record, we discovered that Warners claimed to have our catalog, and that Armen was claiming the publishing for the Mothership Connection songs, and in fact everything: every Parliament, every Funkadelic, everywhere my name appeared. When we looked into it further, Warners got nervous. They said they would have to get back to us. When they finally called Archie back, they were belligerent and unhelpful. But the paper trail, or whatever of the paper trail we could find, seemed to suggest that Warner Music had acquired our catalog by buying Chappell Publishing, which included Polygram, which also included Rick’s Music. (The Chappell catalog also included “Happy Birthday to You.”) But based on various provisions in our contract, Polygram had no authority to sell our catalog. And when we asked Polygram how it was sold, they said they had acquired my power of attorney and transferred those copyrights to the label, who later sold them to Warners. Strange doings, strange days.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 26