Therefore, this rap rendition in tradition of competition
Mace the motherfucker before the first emission
That whole record hit hard, and was overtly political in parts. “Martial Law” has a version of an old jailhouse toast from the fifties—“Cracking a bottle of champagne, they exchanged lyrical gratifications verbalized in the form of a toast”—performed by Louie Kabbabie, and goes on to talk about the hypocrisy of law enforcement and music ownership.
The songs sounded young, angry, reenergized, partly because I had fully absorbed that first wave of hip-hop and partly because I was working with producers who were right in the moment. I did both “Paint the White House Black” and “Martial Law” with Kerry Gordy, Berry’s son, who I had known since he was a baby. When I was with his mother, Ray, at Jobete in New York, she would go off to hang with her boyfriend, Eddie Singleton, and she’d leave the kids in the office with us. And “Hollywood,” which was a satire of West Coast entertainment life, I did with Dallas Austin. I knew Dallas through Joyce Irby, who I had recorded with years before. She showed up at a session, just a little girl with a bass in her hand, no case. We did a song called “Fenderella,” which ended up being her nickname—a funkier Cinderella. She went on to sing in the band Klymaxx, and then to collaborate with Dallas. That’s how he came to my attention. We worked on “Hollywood” in his new studio in Atlanta, which had been Bobby Brown’s building, and the place was like the barbershop had been back in Plainfield, and then some: there were so many young kids hanging around there, artists at the beginnings of their careers like Usher, Busta Rhymes, Outkast, the ABC crew, Too $hort, Goodie Mob. They were sitting around like kindergartners, learning from me but teaching me, also. Too $hort knew so much about Funkadelic that he gave me an education. He played every album I ever did, including ones I had forgotten. And I picked up new production techniques, too: I was still recording with real drums—I could sample them after they were played, but it wasn’t until Atlanta that I learned how to build them straight out of the drum machine. Within a few years, that Atlanta scene blew up. It seemed like everyone who was there became famous. When I first heard about TLC, they sounded cool, but it took me a bit to realize that they were the little girls who used to come around Dallas’s place.
Hey Man . . . Smell My Finger was a hot record. People loved its texture and its message. But support was lacking from the label. Over the years I’ve seen a variety of ways in which companies help records succeed or fail to do so. In this case, they deliberately stepped away from it. I can only speculate on their reasons. Maybe it was related to their lack of patience with Prince. Maybe they were breaking in new radio people. Maybe they honestly just didn’t see how they could succeed with it. But when we sensed that they weren’t working with us, we went over their heads and started dealing straight with the programmers and jocks. Berry Gordy, Kerry’s father, caught wind of it and told us not to do that anymore. His theory, being Berry, was that you can’t anger the company. He thought it would only make things worse. In retrospect, he was right. It’s a shame, because we had a video for “Martial Law” all ready to go. It had been directed by Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, who I had worked with on their movie House Party (I played the DJ at a fraternity reunion). The very next year, the Hudlins did a pilot for HBO, a black take on The Twilight Zone called Cosmic Slop. One of the segments was an adaptation of a short story by Derrick Bell, who was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard, called “The Space Traders.” The idea of it was that aliens came to Earth and agreed to solve all the planet’s problems—they would give us infinitely renewable energy, pay off the debt, leave a Utopia when they went—if they could take all the black people in America back to their planet. The spaceships that Bell imagined were “huge vessels, the size of aircraft carriers,” sort of anti-Motherships.
There were big-screen developments to go along with the small-screen ones: after Hey Man . . . Smell My Finger, we appeared in an Animal House–type movie called PCU—it stood for Port Chester University, but also for political correctness and the way that early-nineties thinking was getting in the way of fun. A version of P-Funk appeared in the movie as the band that saves one of the fraternity houses. We played a cover of Prince’s “Erotic City” (on the studio version, it was me and Belita Woods performing the song) and a new song called “Stomp.”
The British band Well Red, who I had collaborated with back in the mid-eighties, sent word to me that another British rock band, Primal Scream, were big P-Funk fans and wanted to work with me. They came to Detroit and I met Bobby Gillespie, their lead singer and songwriter. I liked their sound. They had absorbed lots of American music, the same way that British rockers had back in the sixties: they could do southern rock, swamp rock, all kinds of blues variations. I recorded a song with them called “Give Out but Don’t Give Up” that became the title track for their album. While I was working with them, I was reading the music papers, like usual, and I saw an ad for four Funkadelic rereleases: Hardcore Jollies, One Nation Under a Groove, Uncle Jam Wants You, and Electric Spanking of War Babies. They were the Warner Bros. albums, spanning from 1976 to 1981, but for some reason they were coming out on Priority Records. Why weren’t they still in the Warner vaults? I called Nene, who was surprised to hear that I was surprised; he said he had taken control of the masters on my behalf, under the auspices of his company, Tercer Mundo. The more he reminded me of that transfer, the less I remembered it. I felt that he was being dishonest, and Armen did, too. They started to fight about the ownership of the masters.
Looking back, it’s clear that I didn’t give the matter the right amount of attention or scrutiny. Some of my energy was taken up by my excitement over Hey Man . . . Smell My Finger, and then by my frustration over the way that Warner Bros. had failed to properly promote the record. Some of my energy was consumed by crack, and all the tweaking behaviors that junkies like to do—worrying when I’d get my next fix or what calamity would befall me if I didn’t. When I was able to sit down and think about the circumstances surrounding the albums that were rereleased on Priority, the picture was all blurry and folded. It was true that the masters had been with me since our settlement with Warners regarding the last days of Funkadelic. But they had just been sitting there, gathering dust. I couldn’t get a real label to give us a real deal with acceptable terms. So how did this happen? Eventually, I learned additional information that seemed to clarify matters. What Priority had in fact used was not the masters, but a digital tape of the records that was spirited out of Warner Bros. by the wife of a former employee. Some of them may have even been sourced from vinyl. If you listen to the Priority rereleases, you can hear that the right track is too loud.
I called Shep Gordon, a manager who had worked with Alice Cooper and then with us. Shep was one of the true legends in the business; everyone respected him for his honesty, generosity, and clearheadedness. Years later, Mike Myers would make a documentary about him called Supermensch. When I called Shep, I laid it all out for him—the way that Uncle Jam had collapsed, the bankruptcy hearing, my growing fear that I was up against more than a decade of deceit, paperwork pasted on top of paperwork, and possibly a two-flank assault by both Nene and Armen, pretending to be enemies when they were in fact colluding to take control of my music. Shep sighed and said that he didn’t see any way out. Even if I was right, he didn’t know how I was going to fight it.
In the midst of that period, I started work on a new album, Dope Dogs. I had listened to lots of hip-hop by that point, and certain styles in particular impressed me. I loved the Bomb Squad and the work that they were doing with Public Enemy, so I started to do my own version of the same thing, sampling older P-Funk records. I tried not to use the most obvious samples—other people had mined the ore right out of them—so for the most part, I drew from outtakes, rarities, or live tracks. I produced that album myself, in the most labor-intensive way possible. I took a loop of three or four seconds and ran it from the begin
ning of the song to the end, after which I muted the parts of the loop I didn’t want to use. I knew there were more sophisticated ways of handling the source material—the Bomb Squad actually cut songs into pieces surgically and put them in the precise places that they wanted for maximum impact, sometimes even changing the original in the process—but I didn’t have the skills to do that, or, for that matter, the interest. I was more like an old Disney animator who couldn’t get his head around what Pixar was doing. I needed to work by hand. Like hand-drawn animation, there’s something compelling about that technique. After that album was released, hip-hop kids started coming up to me saying, “Who made that beat for you?”
Once I had the loops, I brought Blackbyrd McKnight in to play over them, and then put Bernie on the organ. Blackbyrd was still in Detroit with us at the time, living on his own farm. Others came in and did the same thing, the present paying its respects to the past. I made sure that album was a complete account of family, not just the P-Funk family but my actual family. My son Shawn is on the record, along with my daughter Barbarella and her daughter Tonysha. My son Tracey, of course, had plenty to do with it, and his kids contributed vocals: his son Trafael and his little girl Patavian, both of whom Stephanie and I were raising at the time. They may not have been clones of Dr. Funkenstein, but they had his DNA.
More so than any album since the golden years of Parliament, Dope Dogs orbited tightly around a set of ideas. For that one, I sat down and thought hard. It started out with a simple curiosity sparked by a news story I saw about what happened to drug dogs when they retired from the police force or the DEA. They were cast aside and basically left to die. I started asking myself questions about the life that those dogs were forced to live. In the process of being trained to look for drugs, they had to sniff for drugs, which means that they got a habit. When they were finished, they were strung out and incapable of doing anything else. It was the existence of an addict. Then I started to look into other uses and misuses of dogs, and I was struck by how many of them were related to drugs in some way. Drug dealers always had pit bulls with them for protection. In Michigan, there were university labs where they experimented on animals: dogs with rods to their heads being used for everything from behavior modification to cosmetics testing. Whereas on past records, I had written traditional verses and traditional choruses, on Dope Dogs I just wrote and wrote until stream-of-consciousness puns turned into rivers. The result was probably the densest set of lyrics I had ever produced. In “Just Say Ding (Databoy),” I imagined the life of a lab dog.
Just say ding-dong and I’m sprung.
I spring every time a bell is rung.
I’m not a ding-a-ling, I’m not a ding-dong.
Mine is another story.
Told of a goddamn laboratory.
Biological, illogical.
Where’s the logic in a rod
That’s lodged in your head till you’re dead.
“U.S. Custom Coast Guard Dope Dog,” which functioned as a kind of title track, tied together various strands of thought that had been alive in P-Funk since the seventies: government conspiracy, selective prosecution, why society insists on punishing basic animal behaviors.
U.S. Custom Coast Guard dope dog
Keen sense of smell, trackin’ the telltale trails of cartels,
Dope boats, big dope
Never a gram or o.z., kilo too low-key.
Gotta be tons of P-blow, bales of lumbo
When other dogs sniff at other dogs’ tails,
He can track the profits from a dope sale straight to the stank account.
That song took me back to the day in the Sheraton when I saw George H.W. Bush’s helicopter landing so that he could deliver the Zero Tolerance speech, and took me back even further than that, to Electric Spanking of War Babies, and its ideas of how media controlled the culture.
There are party songs, too, but they party across history: “All Sons of Bitches” quotes, or samples from “Atomic Dog” and “One Nation Under a Groove,” not to mention Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand.” There’s also a callback to “Paint the White House Black,” but the song’s really about the human party, how we’re all sons of bitches no matter what our racial background, political beliefs, or national affiliation.
If the dogs in the world unite to get the riches
The silly may really pay sons of bitches
Can paint the White House black like the president requested
I voted for that son of a bitch I suggested
Just think of the type of the shit that we could piss on then my friend
I got a list of the top ten
The Great Wall of China
Woof!
North and South Carolina
Beneath the rush of lyrics, there was something more personal at stake. I forced myself to consider the possibility that all the catastrophic things that had been happening to me financially might be less a matter of dominoes falling than one of dominoes pushed. I had started off with an inkling that Nene was creeping, but when the Funkadelic masters had migrated mysteriously over to Priority, the ink spread until it blackened the water. And the stress of it all was getting to me. I had let myself get so tired that even if I saw the enemy clearly, I didn’t have enough energy to war to that.
At risk of being taken down, taken apart, and taken away, I went back to the only powerful place I knew: funk. There was something big in there for me, an overarching idea about how a man who is on his last legs can renew himself through the creative process. That’s when I started thinking back to Star Child, reviving the idea that artists came from somewhere else, that they were not of this earth. People who make art are the bringers of the dawn, the children of light. It was just an idea at first, a what-if to shake up the what-is, but it made too much sense. During the writing of that record, I cycled through all that shit, running my mouth, testing how good it felt. The first track, “Dog Star (Fly On),” was a close cousin to “Maggot Brain,” with Blackbyrd paying (and playing) homage to the recently departed Eddie Hazel, along with an opening monologue about interplanetary matters:
So what is the real deal in this world?
Once upon a shine, a long time aglow
A beautiful bright star, as fine as any goddess
She has long held the dominant position in the sky,
And had been admired by all for her beauty.
But lately, she felt unwell.
Indeed it seemed as though her life was ebbing away.
Failing and failing, she clung to any companion star she could find
Only to discover that they, too, felt the deathly grip and were weakening.
The weakness of the dying star eventually turns back into the strength of a reborn one. It’s a creation story, a funk nativity: at the end of the song, a shepherd goes out to see the star’s “resurging renewed existence, as quick as the sun behind her.” There had been other times in my career where I was clowning, but this time I was Sirius.
IF ANYBODY GETS FUNKED UP, IT’S GONNA BE YOU
The Priority rerelease of the four last Funkadelic records back in 1993 had been a shock, but it had only been the first shock. After a year or so with the records out, the label had profits, and they needed to know where to pay them. Since Nene had sold them the records, they assumed that the checks should be directed to him, but they were well aware of Armen’s reputation for litigiousness. They asked a New York court to help them decide where the royalties should go. It was something called an interpleader, a civil procedure that allows a plaintiff—in this case Priority—to compel two or more other parties to settle a dispute. In the interpleader, Armen and Nene, who were already fighting in California court over ownership of my catalog—everything from licensing to distribution to publishing—each staked their claim to the copyrights, and each set out to prove that the other side had no valid argument. At one point, in New York, Nene’s side deposed Armen and his executive assistant Jane Peterer. The results, which we heard about
from Nene’s side, were shocking—Jane admitted that Armen had been doing cut-and-paste tricks on contracts, which involved taking signatures from one place and transplanting them to a new location or even a new contract. The New York judge found this behavior abominable. Nene assumed that this meant everything would come back to him. Instead, the New York judge simply ruled that Armen’s claim was invalid and shipped the case back to California. The judge there, Judge Real, set up a Special Masters so that the songwriters could get paid while the case raged on. After a little more back-and-forth between Armen and Nene, Judge Real grew frustrated. It’s too bad, he said, that Mr. Clinton isn’t alive, or he could help us straighten this out. Armen and Nene had to sheepishly explain that I was, in fact, alive. The judge sent for me, but before I could get there, Armen and Nene settled. The settlement was sealed, so I don’t know what really happened, even to this day, but one of the results was that the publishing for many P-Funk songs were transferred from Nene and his lawyers to Bridgeport, Armen’s publishing company. And then it was back to business as usual: Armen could collect and not pay anyone. The songwriters never got what they were owed, though they could always go and get a few hundred from Armen if they were in dire straits—if they were willing to sign away more of their future.
About a year after that, Armen tried to evict me from my farm in Michigan. He had been collecting on my behalf, supposedly, ever since we had cut a deal in the mid-eighties. I had paid him $100,000 and asked him to save my farm for me. What he had done, it seemed, was pay off the farm, but also transfer the title to himself. I made a counterclaim to try to expose the illegal transfer of title. During that case, in Michigan, I looked into the paperwork from the 1984 bankruptcy hearing, and I really started to see the strategy behind creating the false impression that I was deep in debt, millions of dollars to Armen, Nene, and record companies, among others, when the truth was that it was more a matter of a slight cash-flow issue. Not only had the amount I owed Armen been grossly inflated on the paperwork—a few months before that hearing, he set my debts to him at around $200,000, only to appear in the paperwork at more like $600,000—but he had also claimed similar debts for his various companies, Bridgeport, Westbound, and Nine, raising the total to $2.4 million. For his part, Nene had claimed that I owed Polygram and Casablanca each $800,000, and Capitol about $1 million. None of the labels had shown up in 1984, partly because those fake debts were absurd. The Michigan judge wouldn’t let me bring in the information from the previous case, or from the case that was in progress in Los Angeles, so we lost. We appealed. But out there in Washtenaw County, there were only three judges: the woman who had heard our case in the first place, her husband, and one other guy. When the appeal came up, somehow the same woman ended up hearing it, and we lost again. Years later, I was explaining the case to a lawyer, and he stopped my story cold. “A judge heard her own appeal?” he said. “Tell me that didn’t happen.” I had nothing to say to that, and he just shook his head.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 28