I had credited Dope Dogs to the broadest possible version of the organization, Parliament-Funkadelic/P-Funk All Stars, but it was time to get everyone back together for real. As I started going through tapes for the next record, I found that I had enough tracks, and enough different kinds of tracks, to bring everyone together again—Bootsy, Bernie, Junie, Garry, the whole organization. The legal wounds that had been inflicted on all of us (some were self-inflicted, of course) might never heal entirely, but music was a way of starting us on the road back to health.
Bernie and Bootsy took the most effort. I had to pay them $40,000 each to participate. People around me thought it was a crazy waste of money, but as far as I was concerned, they were needed. A reunion without them was like a stool without enough legs. It wouldn’t have stood. Musically, they proved my point almost immediately. “Sloppy Seconds,” one of the songs they did, was just ridiculous, a new coin minted from an old mold. “New Spaceship” is the other reunion song, though that one wasn’t wholly new but assembled from old pieces. Whatever we were doing, we were doing right. That DNA was still there. Those two songs became two of the pillars of the new record, which we called The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership, or T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (pronounced “tap-oh-a-foam”). I credited it to George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars, but it was the full real deal.
Many P-Funk albums had themes; that’s one of the ways we built our legacy. On this one, the theme was the idea of legacy itself. The same way that we reunited the musicians, we reunited the artists: the album art included contributions from Pedro, Overton, and Stozo. The songs continued on in that vein. “Fly Away” was a kind of title song, and it argued that funk will always be here, that it will survive beyond all doubt and time. “Hard as Steel” figures personal and musical persistence as a kind of virility:
She like it hard
Hard as a rock
Hard as steel and still getting harder
Cause shit’s got a heavy metal hard-on
Pussy posse pumped to get the throb on
Eardrum bashin’ sounds come crashin’ down
From the dance band on the bandstand
To the dance floor encore
Hard up for more
Other songs, like “If Anybody Gets Funked Up (It’s Gonna Be You),” looked at how creative renewal could help to push past issues with copyright and intellectual property—they were an extension of the things I had started to write about on Dope Dogs. We had been taken away from the root of what we were doing: more to the point, what we were doing had been pulled up from the root and taken away from us. We had to fight for what was ours, for what we made. We had to find our way back.
T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. was the triumph that came after the moment of painful introspection. Of all the records from the period, it’s the one that people most often talk about as a source of late ripening: they sit on it for years and suddenly it comes clear to them.
To celebrate the release of the album, we scheduled a big concert in New York: Central Park, July 4, 1996. We called it the Mothership Reconnection tour, not just because Bootsy and Bernie were back, but also because the show marked the return of the Mothership itself. The original ship had met a sad end. The team we had hired as promoters, Tiger Flower, had ended up with it, for a time storing it in Darryll Brooks’s mother’s garage in Clinton, Maryland, of all places. And then they had sold it off for parts: the motor went to this person, the elevator went to that person. It was the dumbest thing in the world to do to something historical like that. Since it had been twenty years since the original build, we decided to rectify the mistake: we got blueprints from Jules Fisher and paid for a new one to be built.
The Central Park appearance felt triumphant: we had played in New York over the years, in one configuration or another, but we hadn’t made a real impact like that since we pulled down the original Parliament and Funkadelic. It was a complex triumph, though. On the day of the concert, it was a little rainy and foggy in Central Park, which gave the show a mysterious feeling. That only increased when we went out for sound check and saw a little remote helicopter with some kind of invisible guidance system flying around the stage. Everybody was joking that it was aliens and shit. And in the wake of the show, we started to receive conspiracy letters that said the same thing and more—that the show had been watched by extraterrestrials. Many of them centered on the fact that July 4 was the anniversary of the supposed alien landing in Roswell, New Mexico, back in the late forties; those fans tried to establish a connection between Roswell and the reappearance of the Mothership. I hadn’t thought about Roswell in years, though when I did, the string of coincidences started to vibrate again. I remembered back in the late seventies, when I bought my Michigan farm and found the book about Area 51 in the barn. I remembered the original Roswell incident in 1947, seeing the newsreels before the Saturday movie in Chase City, Virginia. I remembered how the government was supposed to have transported the alien corpses to Wright Field, which was just near Dayton, Ohio, which was also the home of so many funk bands. Years before, Bootsy and I had been in Toronto, listening to the radio, and the DJs were clowning on a news report about an old maintenance man who claimed to have seen those bodies coming in to the airfield in Dayton. “I know what I seen,” he said. “You’re not going to make no goddamn fool out of me.” We did that impression for a while, saying, “You’re not going to make no goddamn fool out of me” in that old janitor’s voice. I wondered, not for the first time, if this web had a spider somewhere that was spinning it.
After Central Park, we took the reunited group, including Bernie and Bootsy, to play a series of shows in Europe. The feel wasn’t quite the same as the New York concert, and it wasn’t the same as it had been twenty years earlier. Both Bernie and Bootsy, understandably, expected to be reinstated as coleaders, or at the very least, members of my inner circle. They were accustomed to being stars. But I couldn’t let them come back and immediately lord it over the musicians I had toured with since the Capitol years—I had been with that group for more than a decade at that point. That perception of stardom, of tiers of status, had a kind of nostalgia attached to it; it reminded me of how things had felt in 1978, as the Brides and Parlet started to take some of the shine away from the Rubber Band. This time, though, it was worse: everyone was older, so they were needier, and they had spent a decade protected and promoted by their own families, who didn’t hesitate to criticize me when they thought I was setting up an unfavorable situation. And so, almost immediately, it became clear to me that the reunion would be short-lived.
Even if everyone had been calm and accepting of the terms of the reunion, it wouldn’t have lasted. No sooner did word get out that the band was back together than Nene and Armen popped right up. They started making offers to people: they dangled some money for Garry to do a record, or Garry and Bernie to go off to a side project. It was their same divide-and-conquer strategy, and it sounded even more alarms. If they had just been interested in money, they would have kept quiet and let us reunite. But their actions seemed to suggest that they were more interested in a lack of communication, that what terrified them the most was the prospect that we would all start talking and comparing notes.
As the T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. tour ran its course, even the Mothership seemed to get the idea that things weren’t going to be the same. The second Mothership looked good, but it hadn’t been fabricated with the same care as the first one, and the insides weren’t engineered as well. There were glitches in the mechanism. When the smoke cleared, I was supposed to be right there on top of the stairs, emerging from the cabin. Sometimes, though, the elevator stopped before I got there. In one show, I just climbed out and walked to the front of the stage. “I don’t need a ship anymore,” I told the crowd. “I’ll just walk.”
T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. didn’t do much commercially, and I started to see that the record industry that we had grown up with, and grown up in, didn’t exist anymore. For that record, the label—Sony 550—didn’t eve
n want to press any plastic, which had consequences for the music but also for the package in general. It had such a good cover, but we couldn’t explore the story with inside art. Back at Casablanca, Neil would let us tell the story, no matter what the cost. It was also depressing to see how it was handled in internal accounting. The record started out in pop but was moved over to R&B, which was a sure sign of trouble—the budget got cut in half. It was also a time when labels were gobbling up new artists whose music was made by computer, not just hip-hop but new pop acts, because those acts cost considerably less.
The computer revolution was, for me, a mixed bag. As much as computer production let record companies skimp on money, computer distribution and the birth of networked computing truly reset the game. Putting out songs via the Internet meant world reach. That was the first record of ours to be sold as a download. At first, I had no idea what that meant. I had so many of those early machines and so many young kids explaining it to me, and it still was gobbledygook. But once I understood what they were saying, it made more than perfect sense. I couldn’t wait until the moment when people could come and download it straight from me rather than using the label as a middleman. For that matter, I wasn’t worried about unauthorized downloading—it seemed like a solution to a problem rather than a problem. Neil used to give away up to fifty thousand records, loss leaders, to sweeten the pot and get people interested. Free downloads were a newer, faster, cheaper version of that. Ultimately, the number of people who download for free is going to be a fraction of the total, easily offset if you distribute correctly.
As T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. was coming out, Capitol sent a young executive to me to propose a new greatest-hits record, with the twist being that it would face hip-hop head-on. I had always collaborated with rappers on songs and remixes, most visibly with Ice Cube on “Bop Gun,” which was a reworking of “One Nation Under a Groove,” and they wanted a whole record of this kind of thing: P-Funk paying tribute to the way that hip-hop had paid tribute to it. Most of that record was done in the studio by others: they had rappers and producers work on the original tracks. I worked on just a few of the tracks. I rerecorded “Flash Light” with Q-Tip, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Busta Rhymes; I recorded a new version of “Star Child”; and I remixed “Knee Deep” with new contributions from Digital Underground, one of the rap acts that was most open about the way they extended the P-Funk tradition.
Just as our music was coming back for a second term, the actual Clinton administration was reupping as well: Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole to extend his presidency. We had played the Youth Ball for Clinton’s first inauguration. It went off without much incident, except that the president happened to walk out onstage during “I Call My Baby Pussycat,” or “Pussy,” which was an unfortunate (or maybe prophetic) coincidence given what would happen a few years later with Monica Lewinsky. At that show, his security people locked up one of our roadies, Barry Fields. Barry was one of those old sixties revolutionaries who was always mumbling about how the system was locking us up by locking us down. He had a book that he carried around that claimed that both Clinton and the elder George Bush had been part of a plot to run huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S. through the Mena, Arkansas, airport. At the show with Bill Clinton, Barry turned to one of the Secret Service guys and said something about Mena. They held him backstage until after the show, at which time the Secret Service agents returned him to me. I didn’t understand Barry; I asked him what he was thinking. “I was just saying that so that motherfucker would know that I knew,” he said.
That summer, right around my birthday, we were playing in Atlanta as part of the festivities surrounding the Olympics, and Chelsea Clinton came to the show. Before we played, she came backstage, and she was so excited. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “All of my friends are going to be so jealous.” We set up to take a picture, and at the last minute it occurred to me that maybe I should conceal the little crack pipe I was holding in my hand. I made a fist around it. It was hot as a motherfucker, burning my hand up, but it worked—the picture, without a crack pipe in sight, was in People magazine. As we walked out to the stage, Chelsea was joking with me about the birthday cake that my crew had bought. “Let’s start a cake fight,” she said. “Hey,” I said, “don’t you make no sudden moves.” Security was all around us—armed security. That’s not how I wanted things to end, shot at close range by a guy who thought he was protecting the First Daughter. Later that night, there was a disturbance in the crowd, a Muslim teenager talking loud about the government. One of the Secret Service agents came up to me and asked me about him, and I vouched for the kid—he was related to people we knew, and he was outspoken, but he wasn’t any kind of threat. “Thanks,” the agent said. “How’s Barry Fields?” Barry Fields? I did a major double take before I realized it was the same Secret Service guy who had held Barry over his Mena comments. And while holding Barry may have been excessive, those guys had a nearly impossible job to do: they had to keep people safe, assess threats, and do the impossible, which was to prevent all trouble. As we were leaving, we heard a muffled thump. That turned out to be the bomb in Centennial Olympic Park. It didn’t sound like much of anything at the time.
At the end of that year, I moved down to Tallahassee. I had no farm. I didn’t have very much money. I set up a studio and kept recording, and the band kept touring. My main goal at that point, though, was to try to get control of my catalog back from Armen: he was collecting on Parliament and Funkadelic, on solo material, and also on all the hip-hop payments for sampling. I refiled the suit I had lost in Michigan. Right at the start of that lawsuit, I pulled my new lawyer aside. “Listen,” I said, “I know they’re going to offer you lots of money to back down. If they offer you five million, take it and give me a million and a half.” As it turned out, he didn’t do very much for us. We eventually lost the case, I believe largely because of a backdated document that claimed that I had signed the rights to all of my songs to Armen back in 1982. The document had already been discredited as part of the interpleader back in 1994, which led to the settlement of the California case, but it resurfaced in Florida. My lawyer didn’t object strenuously to it, and in my opinion it cost us the case. The day we were supposed to be doing the appeal he was in Switzerland. We lost the appeal, too.
If you were a historian of deceit, you could trace the legal trouble back to 1980, when Roger Troutman had gone from Uncle Jam to Warner Bros. Roger’s departure ended the dream of Uncle Jam Records, and thrust us into the first phase of a legal nightmare. That’s why April of 1999 was so strange. In a neighborhood in northwest Dayton, Ohio, one morning, police found Roger shot several times in the midsection outside his recording studio. He died a few hours later in surgery. When police searched the area, they found Roger’s brother, Larry, also dead, in a car that matched the description of one that had fled the scene of Roger’s shooting. There was a gun next to Larry with bullets that matched those that had killed Roger. The killing was a mystery, but not much of a mystery: Roger had wanted to dissolve the business partnership, which would have left Larry broke, and Larry had panicked.
When I heard about Roger’s death, I was shocked. I could not have seen it coming. That kind of thing, sudden violence from within the inner circle, is always a shock. But the more I thought about it, the more I had to admit that I could have predicted some trouble. Larry was Roger’s biggest fan. He gave his brother so much unconditional approval. I always thought that’s what kept Roger from being a real rock and roll star like Eddie or Blackbyrd. The Troutmans, and Roger in particular, were very good performers, but they didn’t realize how much it took to go further. He was always having his ego stroked close to home, and because of that he never got big in the broader world: never really tested his idea of himself creatively or financially, never did the coliseum circuit.
Money—the ways that it moved or failed to move, the way it blocked up good sense and severed blood ties—was at least partly responsible for Roger’s death, but by that poin
t, Roger had separated from the rest of us. I saw similar things happen closer to home, as other members of the P-Funk tribe died off and the problems with their underlying finances were exposed. When band members died, money supposed to go to their rightful heirs somehow went to other people claiming to be their wives. For example, Glen Goins’s mother was improperly listed as his widow on copyright renewal forms after Glen died. And even these deceits are executed over monies that were a fraction of what they should have been. The total amounts left behind are paltry when they should have been a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars a year minimum. You’re talking about millions of records sold, in four different formats (vinyl, cassette, CD, and download), and then beyond that all the licensing and sampling. All the P-Funk members would be able to set their families up for life, and not just me, Bootsy, and Bernie, but Eddie, Michael, Glen, Billy, Boogie, and the rest.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 29