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

by George Clinton

  In July of 2001, I turned sixty, and a few months later Archie and I went up to New York to do some recording. We were in midtown, using some studio time that Bobby Brown had bought. He and Whitney Houston had finished up early and let me and Archie use the balance of their time, along with a hotel room across the street.

  We never made it across the street. In the morning, after a long night of work, Archie and I turned on the news, and we couldn’t turn it off. It was wall-to-wall with coverage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. The city was locked up frozen all day. A girl brought us food on a bicycle. Archie went down the street to try to buy a copy of Behold a Pale Horse, but thought better of it—what if his name ended up in a database as having purchased the book minutes after the towers fell?—and turned back around. Everything was eerie. I had the same feeling I had when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or when Sam Cooke died, or even when Hendrix passed: it was a surreal, underwater sensation, with things slowed down so much that you couldn’t even get a good look at them. After an event like that, it’s always hard to know what to do with art. Do you sharpen its tip and try to point with precision at the inexplicable thing that has just happened? Do you try to take people’s minds off of it? Do you just go ahead as you would have anyway, under the theory that if you go off course, the terrorists have won? And there was another feeling, too—that I was being watched over by some kind of force. There had been so many major historical events that I had missed by a day or less. I had been in the air going to a concert during the San Francisco earthquake: the rest of the band was already on the ground. That kind of thing had been happening for years. We were in Berlin the day the Wall came down in 1989. We were playing in northeast Ohio a day before the Kent State shootings. P-Funk had, if not a guardian angel, at least a connection to history.

  Later that year, I reconnected with Sly Stone. He had vanished into the Bay Area, but I ran into an engineer who had worked with him, and he put me in touch with Sly, and soon enough the two of us were messing around in the studio again. We were both pretty fucked up, but we were putting down sounds that lasted. Sly had moments of real sharpness; he wasn’t any less of a genius at making music, but he was less confident about it. When he let you hear what he was doing, it would knock you out. But he was just as liable to get worried that it wasn’t good enough and erase it. I explained to him that someone needed to preserve the work. If it didn’t turn into a song that year, it would the year after that or maybe a decade later. Slowly, he started to trust me with the files. Some of them I’ve held on to since then, worked with them, put new parts on top of and around them, and they’re songs for 2014 or beyond.

  The legal and financial malfeasance continued. In 2003, Epic Records put out an album called Six Degrees of P-Funk, an anthology of tracks from the P-Funk family, some of which were licensed from Uncle Jam. Despite the fact that the record went platinum, somewhere on Epic’s books I’m accounted as in debt for the project. How is that possible? It used Bootsy’s records, Junie’s records, some other material. People got paid as producers. I wasn’t contacted or consulted. I had nothing to do with it. And yet it wasn’t worth fixing or even finding out the specifics of the breakage. There were messes everywhere, and most of the battle was knowing when resolution was even possible. And I wasn’t clean enough to think about cleaning up the rest of it. The same thing was happening with Sly. He wasn’t able to stay off drugs long enough to pursue redress in an organized fashion. And yet in some ways he was better off than I was. They have taken from him so openly—box sets of old material where not a penny finds its way back to him—that if he was to be clean for six months, he could probably make a case that he’s due a significant amount. But his story isn’t my story to tell, and his battle isn’t my battle to fight.

  I kept recording. It was all I thought to do, for the most part, though I wasn’t sure what made sense in the way of releasing material. Since T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M., I had seen clearly that the record industry wasn’t managing its releases and sales the way it once did. Putting out music so it could just drop into a bottomless well didn’t seem worth it. But around 2004 or so, I looked at the studio tapes and suddenly realized I had dozens of songs that were completely or mostly done. That became the basis of How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?, an album credited to George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars that was released in 2005.

  An album? Maybe that doesn’t quite explain it. It’s an anthology and then some, with twenty-four songs. It’s a Hollywood movie and then some, with a two-and-a-half-hour running time. Some of the songs are reworks of early tracks: “I Can Dance” is built on a demo session from “Nappy Dugout,” which was recorded all the way back in the early seventies. “Paradigm” was a track I had done with Prince, initially during the Hey Man . . . Smell My Finger sessions and then touched up over the years. There’s a song on there with Bobby Womack (a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”), a song with my son Tracey (“Su Su Su”), and a song with my granddaughter Sativa (“Something Stank,” which is an ode to marijuana, long before Colorado legalized it).

  In many ways, the album is a showcase for the female singers who did such wonderful work for that phase of P-Funk, specifically Belita Woods and Kendra Foster. Both of them are prominently featured. Belita had been around in Detroit from the late sixties: she released a song called “Magic Corner” the same year that the Parliaments did “Testify.” After that, she was the lead singer of Brainstorm, a Detroit funk and disco group that had two big hits, “Lovin’ Is Really My Game” and “This Must Be Heaven.” Belita joined us in the early nineties and was a big part of P-Funk for two decades. Kendra, even though she was a generation younger, was a P-Funk fanatic. She not only watched Belita, but she studied every trick on every record. The two of them were vital to the survival of P-Funk as the group evolved, as we moved away from a regular record-release schedule and became more about consistent touring and occasional recording. I wanted them to have their due on How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?, and one of the funny things I’ve found is how that record works on a kind of time delay: it’s so big and sprawling that people can’t absorb it all at once. But songs will surface from it. As people come up to me to talk about the record, I’ll start to get the sense that they are listening to “Bounce 2 This,” which is one of Kendra’s songs, or “Saddest Day,” which is one of Belita’s.

  When we put out the record, we scheduled a release party the week of the Grammy Awards. Everyone came: the old Motown royalty like Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson, and then new talents like RZA, from the Wu-Tang Clan, and the film director Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is a huge P-Funk fan. Years later, he invited us onto the set of Django Unchained, and he and Reginald Hudlin and Jamie Foxx had a kind of cutting contest to see who knew more about P-Funk. I don’t remember who won. They all did pretty well. But you can’t even imagine how fucking crazy that shit was, Jamie out in a cotton field with that blue Fauntleroy suit on, bopping around to “Aqua Boogie.” Jamie let us use his home studio to record some new music. His mother cooked for us. A few weeks later, Samuel Jackson came to see us play in New Orleans and he took the microphone during “Maggot Brain” and did a recitation of his moment-of-clarity speech from Pulp Fiction.

  Are there bright spots? There are some. In 2005, we saw in the trades that twenty years had elapsed and that Capitol was getting ready to approach Priority and acquire the masters of the four Funkadelic records that had been rereleased in 1993. More determined than ever to get my catalog back, I looked around for a lawyer who specialized in that kind of thing and found a man named Yale Lewis who was based in Seattle and had represented lots of music-world clients: the Jimi Hendrix estate, Buddy Holly’s widow, Courtney Love. In May of that year, a forensic document expert gave his official opinion that the document showing Nene’s ownership of the masters, which was the only thing that would have allowed him to sell them to Priority in the first place, was bogus. In June, Judge Real made a determination
on the fate of the masters. By this point, he was starting to see the larger picture of trickery and misrepresentation: he had been the judge in the case a decade earlier, when Nene and Armen had acted like I wasn’t alive. Judge Real looked at the facts of the case and decided that the masters should come right back to me. He determined that there were only three reasons they had gone away in the first place: scandalous managers, corrupt attorneys, and uninformed judges.

  Getting the masters back was a huge victory, practically and morally. It gave me strength for the fight ahead. But it also exposed the degree to which I had let things get out of hand. Soon after Judge Real’s decision, I was thinking about the records we had released over the past decade, and I realized that during the course of putting together Greatest Funkin’ Hits, we had sold some of our own masters to Capitol. How could Capitol have ever needed to go to Priority for the masters when they had, years before, already acquired those masters from us? I had been so focused on the legal fight that I had overlooked an obvious solution that would have cleared things up immediately. I didn’t like the effects, but—at least in part—I had produced the cause.

  How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent? was the last official release of that decade, though there was another Funkadelic record, Toys, in 2008, that was rushed out without my involvement in order to satisfy some kind of settlement agreement between Armen and Westbound and Capitol. I didn’t pay it much mind, mostly because I was paying more attention to the presidential election. Like many other people, I was caught up in the excitement of finally having a black president—though maybe with a slightly different perspective on events, since I had released “Chocolate City” back in 1975 and “Paint the White House Black” in 1993. I liked Obama when he first came onto the scene, in part because he seemed comfortable moving between worlds, and that’s how agreements are brokered. The strongest political decisions, like the strongest musical ones, combine black and white, tradition and innovation. Obama had the potential to be a binding force for the fabric of the country, someone slick and black who didn’t seem to be full of shit. He danced without seeming like he was dancing, which is the Aqua Boogie principle: you have to have a certain rhythm to be able to appease people without appearing spineless, and you have to keep your eyes open and know for certain that there are people who are going to tear your shit down at every turn. Change is a difficult thing for people, and the more powerful they are, the more powerfully they resist change. Why would you permit any shift in a system that’s disproportionately benefiting you?

  It was a lesson that was equally true in politics and music. I was still in the position of seeing my catalog misused—or, rather, used in ways that didn’t benefit me at all. In 2009, the indie-rock group Sleigh Bells released a song called “Rill Rill,” which was built on the back of “Can You Get to That.” A few years later, the song ended up being the centerpiece of a big Apple campaign for the iPhone. I didn’t see a dime from that use of the song. So hearing “Rill Rill” on the television was a source of pride, but also a source of anger and disappointment. I wasn’t sure what would be resolved, whether I was dealing with an if or a when. And life wouldn’t go on forever, for me or for anyone else. There was a major reminder of that in the summer of 2009 when Michael Jackson died. I had followed Michael’s career since it started, since Berry set up the Corporation to push the Jackson 5 into superstardom. They had done one of the first mainstream covers of one of our songs, “I’ll Bet You,” back in 1970; it was on their ABC album and also part of a promotional release with Kellogg’s, a cardboard-cutout record that came on the back of a Rice Krispies box. As he got older, Michael got better and better, a finer singer, a more exciting dancer. But he had been something else, too. He had been a beacon. Children loved him. People in every country loved him. That’s dangerous when you can get kids all around the world to agree with you, when you can move across national borders. Unity, in the hands of someone that powerful, is a dangerous philosophy, and I came to believe about Michael what I believed about Sam Cooke, or John Lennon: he was trying to heal wounds that people had a vested interest in keeping open. I never thought I’d outlive him, but I wasn’t shocked when I did.

  I had started working with the Parliaments, and then at Jobete, in the late fifties. As 2008 rolled around, my time in the music business was nearing a half century, and maybe that’s why I found my mind drifting back to doo-wop and street-corner soul. Whenever we got together, Belita Woods and I would challenge each other, sing lines from songs by all the old groups: the Capris, the Chantels, the Elegants, the Edsels, the Shields. When I was a kid I was in lots of Italian neighborhoods in New Jersey, and the people there were always playing shuffleboard and listening to those songs. Over the years, I thought that maybe I should do an album of them, just straight covers, not bring the sound into the present but bring Parliament back into the past.

  When I mentioned the doo-wop project to a friend of mine, Bobby Eli—he had worked as a producer with the Stylistics, the Spinners, Billy Paul, and other Philly acts—he suggested that we do it as a tale of two cities, Philadelphia and Detroit. That gradually evolved, too, into the idea of tracing the history of love in pop music. In the fifties it was “Darling, I love you, I get down on my knees.” By the nineties, she was getting down on her knees to suck something. To me, it was always the same: there were still babies that grew up to make families. Kids still danced to their music, even if it was about someone sucking a cock. When I first heard that kind of thing, it seemed jarring to me. It fucked me up. But what fucked me up worse was realizing that I had moved into the parent position. That’s what people said to me in the fifties, that my music was crude and senseless, that it couldn’t capture love and romance like Guy Lombardo or Harry James. Age isn’t only a number: it’s a way of blocking other people’s numbers. Bobby picked out a set of songs for me, everything from Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” to Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” to Tommy Edwards’s “It’s All in the Game” to Dean Martin’s “Sway” to Ruby & the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come,” and we called the group George Clinton and His Gangsters of Love. There were plenty of special guests, too: I recorded “Ain’t That Peculiar” with Sly Stone and El DeBarge, and Curtis Mayfield’s “Gypsy Woman” with Carlos Santana.

  Initially, I had imagined it as a covers-only record, but I ended up including some originals, including “Mathematics of Love,” with guest vocals by Kim Burrell. Along with the songs from the past and the songs from the present, we tried to imagine the future. There’s a song on that album called “Stillness in Motion” that’s a kind of Zen poem surrounded by sound effects. We recorded that with Shavo Odadjian, from the band System of a Down, who was collaborating with RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan. They were making these psychedelic tracks, these dissonant spirituals that also drew on punk jazz, and Kendra Foster sang a nice little lullaby over that background:

  Fly with me to the mountain

  Lie under the sea

  Through the stillness in motion

  We can be free

  When that record first came out, we promoted it heavily. We played “Ain’t That Peculiar” on Jay Leno’s show. We went on Letterman and played another track called “Heaven,” which sampled Prince’s “I Wish U Heaven.” Right after Letterman, Universal, the parent label of Shanachie Records, who released the album, called and said we had to take that song off because Prince hadn’t authorized the use of the sample. I had assumed that the two of us had an understanding, in part because I had gone to bat for him when Armen sued him for using “Atomic Dog” in various songs: a Nona Gaye song, a remix. I thought we were fine with “Heaven.” When that came off the album, the label backed off of everything, withdrew the album. It’s a shame, because there are a few songs on there that are real nice late-period funk, as abstract and strange as “Stillness in Motion.” “Mathematics of Love” even got Grammy buzz when it first came out. People were calling me and telling me that it was under consideration. But when the alb
um vanished, “Mathematics” vanished with it.

  YOU GONNA GET ATE

  The first time Nene brought Sly Stone around it was the late seventies, and the two of us became running buddies: getting high, making music, navigating the record business. Thirty years later we were reprising the roles. I was out in Los Angeles often during 2010 and 2011, hanging out not only with Sly but with Mark Bass, a Detroit producer I had known since the eighties. Mark, who had helped discover Eminem, was directly connected to Armen through a producer named Joel Martin, and Armen had paid Mark $6,000 to lie and say that he wrote some of the songs on T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. To say that he was intimately acquainted with the crooked practices of the industry was an understatement. For months verging on years, Sly, Mark, and I spent as much time with each other as our schedules allowed. We were crackheads together, but our main thrust was getting a platform to tell our story. Dr. Drew’s office even called me for Celebrity Rehab, and when I expressed that I wanted to have Sly and Mark on with me to discuss this circumstance, they seemed to lose interest. We were trying to make news, to get a hearing so that we could tell our story.

  We also consulted with so many lawyers that I lost count. One firm represented both me and Sly. They set up a situation for him to sue BMI, which wasn’t paying him properly, and his ex-managers, and they tried to get me to file a bankruptcy again. I might have done it had it not been for Jeffrey Thennisch, a lawyer in Detroit who was fighting Armen on behalf of other Detroit writers. When I was considering a second bankruptcy, Jeffrey warned me against it. Anything like that, he said, would jeopardize copyright recapture. After a certain term, he explained, copyrights revert to the original creator; any music made after 1978 was subject to a thirty-five-year term of copyright, while anything made before returned after a fifty-year term. The idea of copyright recapture went off like a grenade in my mind. It meant everything for the golden years of Parliament and Funkadelic. Specifically, it meant that starting in 2013, music would start to come back to me—everything from Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair to Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove, not to mention records from that same year by the Brides of Funkenstein, the Horny Horns, and Bootsy’s Rubber Band. The second that Jeffrey told me about that, I ran as fast as I could from the idea of bankruptcy, and from the lawyers who had recommended it.