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

by George Clinton

  Seeds, stems. Those tracks link the new work to the old work. Sometimes the link is personal rather than sonic. One afternoon, my son Tracey and I were sitting around talking about all the different aspects of poles: the word, the idea, the concept. It was like an old-fashioned Funkathon, the free-association sessions where we volleyed jokes and puns back and forth. Strippers use poles. Race-car drivers do their best to get pole position. And junkies use pipes, which are just poles with holes in them. That turned into a new song called “Pole Power.” There’s another song Tracey and I wrote called “Catchin’ Boogie Fever” that has classic Parliament-style horn riffs, one called “Baby Like Fonkin’ It Up” that revives Star Child, one called “As In” that’s a beautiful piece that Jessica Cleaves recorded, and one called “Jolene” that I’m singing with Sidney Barnes, my partner from half a century ago; the guitar work on the track is by the rapper Scarface, Garry Shider, and Blackbyrd McKnight. In other places, we’re looking not into the past of P-Funk but into the distant future, at the spot where time curves. Take the title song, “Shake the Gate,” which is both primal and futuristic, which uses both didgeridoo (an ancient Australian wind instrument) and electronic effects. It’s another dog song—“Coming up in here without shakin’ the gate / Fucking bit / You gonna get ate”—that’s about the gate around the planet Sirius, and the way that it protects the funk from unannounced visitors. The song is defiant, too: we’ve had to contend with plenty of trespassers and intruders, second-story men, larcenists. We’ve stationed guard dogs to protect what’s ours. The song is way out of the box, like “Maggot Brain.” I don’t know if it’s commercial, but I know that I don’t care. It’s not the first time.

  First time, last time. In the studio, listening to songs, you lose track of time. But when you’re inside music, time doesn’t exactly apply. One of the songs from the new record is called “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?” It’s a memoir just like this book, a song that looks at my time in the funk business and how I keep moving through it. My answer in the song is my answer now, has been my answer always: “I was hard when I started / I’ll be hard when I get through.” You can measure the truth of that statement by looking at the hardest world around: the prison world. Jails are full of P-Funk fans, and each one is stuck to the time when they last heard us in the free world. If they went inside in 1974, then Cosmic Slop might be their definitive P-Funk. If they went inside in 1983, their P-Funk of choice might be “Atomic Dog.” Each of them thinks they have access to the heart of the matter. But there’s a softer answer, too. When I get up there onstage, when the musicians behind me are turning the corner and heading into “Let’s Take It to the Stage,” when the angels of our better nature are spreading their wings and the devils are going to the lower level, I feel like the music that I’m giving is, above all, a gift. It’s not a word I like to use often, but it’s a word I’ll use now and again.

  Angels, devils. Some of my old bandmates have passed on. Catfish Collins died in 2010, the same year as Garry, Mallia Franklin, and Ron Banks. Belita Woods died in 2012, Boogie Mosson in 2013, and Jessica Cleaves in 2014. Others remain, still committed to keeping the funk alive, and still others remain committed to keeping the funk down. Armen continues to use his ill-gotten copyrights against the interest of everyone but himself. In 2013, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was everywhere, including in court: the Thicke camp sued Bridgeport Music preemptively because they knew that Armen was getting ready to sue them for copyright infringement for using the Funkadelic song “Sexy Ways,” from Standing on the Verge of Getting It On. Armen’s claim was baseless, but that didn’t stop him or his lawyers from going out there and trying to grab some cash in a quick settlement. When I first heard Robin Thicke’s song I loved it. I was wishing I wrote it. I can hear a little bit of the quality of my voice in the vocals, a certain urgency, but it’s nothing more than that. It’s certainly not plagiarism. Pharrell, who cowrote the song, is good at mimicking different characters, at imitating certain styles from the past and bringing them into the present. That’s permissible. In fact, it’s more than permissible. It’s necessary. You’ve got to change up something. The rules are well known. You can’t do seven notes in a row the same, so you just do six, change one, and then come back to the original model. In the early days, people bit melodies all the time and no one bothered looking into it with any degree of scrutiny. Rock and roll got no respect unless your name was, say, George Harrison—the Beatles were so big that the shit became undeniable. Anything associated with them attracted worldwide notice and mountains of cash. Plus, with “My Sweet Lord,” George was putting his hand in the till of one of rock and roll’s most famous songs, the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” Occasionally there are artists whose style lets them protect everything they play. Jimi Hendrix was like that: you can’t even do his licks without getting sued. You have to respect the fact that he coined those phrases—not just the songs but the parts on the guitar. But those cases—the Beatles, the Hendrixes—are few and far between, and “Blurred Lines” isn’t one of them. I told TMZ that I would go into court as a witness for Robin Thicke. A few months after that, there was an equally ridiculous lawsuit: the Jimmy Castor Bunch sued Ariana Grande for using the phrase “What we gotta do right here is go back, back into time,” because it’s similar to a line from their 1972 hit “Troglodyte.” The lawyer in charge of that was Richard Busch, who was one of the architects of Armen’s strategy. You can read about him in Jane Peterer’s statement. But all we can do is get the word out. The word gets out. In November of 2012, Kid Rock was debuting a new song he had written about the history of Detroit music at the halftime of the Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving Day game. I went out to midfield with him, wearing a Flashlight2013.com shirt. I was proud to support the city, of course: Detroit is the most important place for American music, hands down. We have Motown, Aretha, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Kid Rock, Eminem, and of course Parliament-Funkadelic. It’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame all on its own. Last year, faced with a possibility of a highway project running through the center of Detroit, a group decided to turn United Sound studio into a museum of local music. It’s beautiful now; they even restored a piano I had out at my farm and put it on display. There are framed records and photographs on the wall documenting recording sessions from Charlie Parker right up to the Chili Peppers.

  Moving forward, taking back. What is past and what is present, really? You’re only purely in the present once, when you’re born, and then you’re divided between present and past. That’s why you have to reach into the future. I try to remember that we are only new once. And once you’re not new, you’re in that much bigger bag of old. Kids today don’t know the difference between me and Snoop Dogg, or me and Stevie Wonder. Everybody who’s old is old. And because of that, being old is a growth industry. I look at other musicians my age and pay special attention to the ones who don’t stop making things. A few years ago, Paul McCartney put out a song, “My Valentine,” that was a beautiful motherfucking piece of music. I know it was for someone special, because it made him into someone special again. And that’s after being a Beatle, after being in a place when you’re so big that you can’t even hear yourself to make music. How did Paul come back from that point where the eeks took over, where it was all screaming girls and deafening fame? I’ve been on stages and heard the crowd shriek for us. I was careful never to take audiences for granted. The key has always been thinking of people as family, whether it be my blood family, my family of musicians, or the extended family of fans. I think about what Sly said, gently mocking me for my sense of responsibility: “You got those little ones.” Maybe over time, those little ones make you big.

  Little, big. When you don’t top the chart anymore, does that mean that everyone’s over you? Or are there other ways to get over? In the last decade, people have started to say that something popular goes “viral,” that it moves around the world, usually through the Internet, on its own. That’s
nothing new. Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter came on TV in 1954, and I sat down to watch it in New Jersey. Davy Crockett killed a bear with his knife. That was a time before hula hoops, before Maggot Brain, before “Bop Gun.” There was only Davy Crockett, or at least that’s how it seemed. I remember it so clearly: on our lunch bags, our jackets, our hats, and toy guns. Everything was Davy Crockett. When people say “viral,” it’s just a new name for that same old thing. Look at kids nine to thirteen and pay attention to where they find their enthusiasms. These days it’s on YouTube. They spend hours looking for the silliest thing, and that’s what they decide to admire. That’s what they decide to imitate. And it’s that world where P-Funk is resurfacing now. We have a channel there. We have videos of songs, new ones and old ones, serious performances and comedy.

  Surface, submerge, surface again. The last few years have been some of the best years of my life. It’s not 1970, being turned out in Boston by topless girls bearing acid. It’s not 1978, with Motor Booty Affair rocketing up the chart and side projects bursting brightly around us like fireworks. It’s not even the mid-nineties, when you could hear our songs coming out of every lowrider in Los Angeles, cut and pasted into rap anthems. I live in Tallahassee. I record. I tour. I spend as much time as possible with my family. And I’m trying new things all the time. In the last year, we’ve developed and sold a reality show. There’s comedy and drama in it, but there’s also a specific argument about the pitfalls of the record business. I want my kids and grandkids to understand what I went through. I can’t lecture them from a whining stance, cry about how I was on dope and fucked up. But I can impress upon them that whether or not there’s dope, you have to have each other’s backs. I want to leave them with a concrete understanding of the realities of how things work, and what to do when they don’t.

  The other day I did a session with the rapper Kendrick Lamar. My grandkids were hyping me up on him, and I listened to his record. Even before I met him I was laughing at “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” which had the same silly-serious tone we tried for in Funkadelic. He came down to Tallahassee to record with me, and it was beautiful. We did about four songs together and he took some tracks with him, and when we weren’t recording, we just talked. We talked about everything. We talked about nothing. I found myself running my mouth more than I ordinarily do because he was so interested in discussing it all: the record industry, social engineering, the function of art. He acts like he’s about fifty with all his theories. When I met Sly Stone, he knew of P-Funk because he heard those records himself, as they came out. When I met Rakim, he knew of P-Funk because he listened to his brother’s records. With Kendrick, it was his parents’ records. He didn’t just know the hits. He knew the deepest of the deep cuts. When you talk about your old work with a young man with an old mind, the work feels less old. We talked about my old songs and they were renewed. When the past comes rushing into the present that way, I can see clearly that artwork is a living thing. Younger artists teach me that I taught them. That’s why I’m grateful to Kendrick Lamar, and to anyone who is carrying on the P-Funk tradition, which itself carried on the tradition of Louis Jordan, the Beatles, Cream, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, Frankie Lymon. We talked about everything. We talked about nothing. We talked about my old songs and they were renewed. We talked about my old songs and we were renewed.

  1 Even from the beginning, I looked like I was coming out of the Mothership.

  2 The father of the father of funk: my dad, also George Clinton.

  3 The Parliaments, letter sweaters and all, in 1955.

  4 Funkadelic in 1970, Armen Boladian at right.

  5 Music for your mother: me, my mom, and my brothers.

  6 With the family, in the seventies.

  7 At home with Liz, Barbarella, Kim, and Tracey in 1972.

  8 The fur is flying: me in full regalia, at the height of P-Funk.

  9

  10 Casablanca promotion head Cecil Holmes, two gentlemen from the House of Lords—the other Parliament—and me, holding my spokesperson.

  11 Emerging from the Mothership.

  12 What’s more dapper than a diaper? Onstage with Garry Shider.

  13 Stretchin’ out with Bootsy Collins at Disneyland.

  14 The nose knows: me in Sir Nose garb, in the seventies. That’s not Elvis in the background.

  15 Up against the wall, you mothers: the band, including Garry Shider and Eddie Hazel.

  16 Bernie Worrell, Debbie Wright, and me.

  17 Funkadelics on parade: with Grady, Fuzzy, Boogie, and Eddie.

  18 Touring Funkentelechy in the late seventies: Gary “Mudbone” Cooper, skinny me, Larry “Sir Nose” Heckstall.

  19 I’m no numerologist, but I like this Soul magazine cover from the seventh month of the seventy-seventh year.

  20 Black is the brightest color: patchwork in 1977.

  21 Has anybody seen Sir Nose? P-Funk artists Pedro Bell and Overton Loyd, the men who made the images that made the images that made the men.

  22 Blonds have more fun: at the microphone with Garry Shider.

  23 Michael “Clip” Payne goes under the sea, with one of the Motor Booty Affair tour costumes designed by Larry LeGaspi.

  24 Military men: Archie Ivy, Nene Montes, Raymond Spruell, and me, as General Chaos.

  25 The General in his chambers.

  26 P-Funk was full of cartoon characters, from Sir Nose to Star Child. Here’s an Overton Loyd cartoon of a man who’s anything but a cartoon: my longtime confidant and manager Archie Ivy.

  27 Promoting One Nation Under a Groove with Archie Ivy at a Los Angeles radio station.

  28 Enlisting in Uncle Jam’s Army was more painless (and funkier) than enlisting in Uncle Sam’s Army.

  29 Another Overtoon: Sir Nose, refusing as always.

  30 New doo review: Philippé Wynne, Bootsy Collins, me, and Maceo Parker in 1980.

  31 You shouldn’t-nuf bit, fish: hung up and hanging on the line.

  32 Taking a break on the set of the “Atomic Dog” video.

  33 Smelling the stank: just offstage in Washington, feeling how funky the band is.

  34 Sons of the P: Me with my sons Darryl and Tracey.

  35 Doing some paperwork in the office.

  36 Funk Rock: with the great comedian Chris Rock.

  37 Office meeting: With Sly Stone, dressed for work.

  38 Let’s play house: standing in front of my childhood home in Chase City, Virginia.

  39 Rainbow hair, mirrored glasses, and an endless crowd.

  40 Doing hair is like riding a bike: once you learn how, you never forget.

  41 In the studio with Sly Stone.

  42 Dr. Dr. Funkenstein: receiving an honorary degree from the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

  43 The Smithsonian has its own spaceship, just like P-Funk.

  44 A cat in a hat.

  45 Taking it to the stage at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island.

  46 The past surprises the present: posing with the spectacular mechanical ad for Motor Booty Affair, many years after the fact.

  47 Funk reigns eternal at Red Bull Studios in Los Angeles.

  48 The new Funkadelic album, Shake the Gate, with cover art by Pedro Bell. For a taste of the album, including a free download of the title song, “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?,” just visit www.BrothasBeLikeGeorge.com.

  49 And your glass will follow: in New Orleans, 2014.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The music has been the main thing, always, and for the musicians who have helped me make it, see the end of the discography in the appendixes. But there are nonmusical matters, too, and in that light I’d like to thank Carlon Scott, for being there for me in ways I can’t fully explain. Simple gratitude isn’t enough. I’d like to also thank my managers, from Cholly Bassoline to Archie Ivy, for keeping me afloat when seas got stormy. I’d like to thank politicians like Sheila Jackson Lee, John Conyers, and Bobby Rush for helping bring to
light some of the dark things that have transpired in this business. I’d like to thank the writers who wrote about the funk, the artists who drew about it, the dancers who danced about it, the tour musicians who toured with it, the DJs who spun it, the photographers who captured it, and the audiences who got up out of their seats for it. And most of all, I’d like to thank my parents and my children and their children and their children’s children, on into whatever infinity permits us. I love you.