Mojo
FEATURE
Interstellar Overdrive
1974 was the year George Clinton’s P-Funk philosophy went overground, taking the psychedelic black rock of Funkadelic and the horn-heavy dance grooves of Parliament into the charts, onto the stage, into the Whitehouse, up to outer space and beyond. Lloyd Bradley shines his flashlight on a black music revolution.
Words by Lloyd Bradley
Can You Get To That: Parliament, Funkadelic and P-Funk founder and frontman George Clinton.
DETROIT, 1973. MOTOWN, THE city’s black music institution since 1959, has just moved operations to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, another less prominent Detroit concern is facing its own career crossroads.
In the space of 15 years George Clinton had transformed his New Jersey barber- shop quintet from doo wop harmonisers The Parliaments into a Motor City troupe of guitar-fuelled black hippies; Funkadelic, a group so adept, yet so committed to psychedelic revolution, that their 1970 declaration of intent – Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow – remained astonishingly cohesive, despite being recorded during a heavy group acid trip.
However, as relatively successful as Funkadelic had become, playing mid-sized venues in the hippified ‘Draft Dodgers Triangle’ of Detroit, Toronto and Boston and releasing five albums in three years on Westbound Records, the group had also become a black band without a significant black following. As soul music mutated into the far more self-determining funk, this was looking like an unworkable model.
“We were too black for white radio, too white for black radio,” is how Clinton sums up Funkadelic’s commercial positioning today. During the first few of years of the 1970s, the group’s albums were minor R&B chart hits, barely troubling the mainstream Top 100. Their motivation had been to reintroduce a black take on the modernised blues upon which the rock world was built and put a contemporary Motor City spin on American black music as it shed the mohair suits and the afros got bigger. But the confusion resulting from the execution is understandable: theirs was a black rock, harking back to the blues, drenched in Timothy Leary-quality LSD, born in Motown but incubated in the Motor City’s fiercely working-class, largely self-contained and genuinely alternative hippy scene. Unfiltered and unencumbered by major label constraints, Funkadelic’s blues was furious, funny, wry, confrontational, existential, political, articulate, oblique and off-the-charts in terms of the rush of images and ideas, some familiar, some wildly imaginative.
Less circumspect as to the impact of albums with titles such as Maggot Brain, America Eats It Young and Cosmic Slop, is Tom Vickers, P-Funk’s former in-house press officer. “The simple truth is Funkadelic scared the shit out of black audiences,” says Vickers. “They simply couldn’t get past the scary, dark, mysterious content of those albums… sleevenotes quoting the Process Church of the Final Judgment, stuff like that.”
The defining aspect was acid. “It meant a connectivity with a hippy audience as it opened up their minds to an alternative reality far less inhibited by colour [race],” says Vickers. “[But] it was never a mainstream drug among black audiences. It wasn’t embraced the way it was in white youth culture, which put Funkadelic on a different plane to much of the audience they hoped to reach. And then, even if you had taken a pill you still had to be as far out there as the group themselves to get into what was going on.”
Something had to change.
“We were a circus with spaceship ambition ready to pop big like super bubblegum”
Enter a Jewish former crooner from Brooklyn called Neil Bogart. General manager at MGM Records at 22, dubbed ‘the King of Bubblegum’ at Buddah for successes with frothy pop acts such as Ohio Express and 1910 Fruitgum Co., Bogart had been financed by Warner Bros to launch his own label. Casablanca Records would bring the world Kiss, Donna Summer and Village People, but for the time being he wanted to do business with George Clinton of Funkadelic.
“I’d known Neil for the longest time,” explains Clinton. “We were on Invictus [for Parliament’s first album, 1970’s Osmium], with Holland, Dozier and Holland, and their other label was Hot Wax, which Neil had distribution for at Buddah. But more than that, I grew up with his business partner at Buddah and Casablanca, who was Cecil Holmes. I’d known him from the ’50s back in New Jersey, when I knew Neil as Neil Scott, the singer. We’d wanted to be with Neil for a while, and he’d always been interested in us, so we’d been flirting for some time, but he couldn’t do it until he had his own label. With Funkadelic signed to Westbound and me having got the Parliament name back from Invictus, that’s what he signed us to Casablanca as.”
Casablanca’s first Parliament album was 1974’s Up For The Down Stroke, George Clinton’s most consistently conventional set of recordings since The Parliaments’ harmonising 7-inches 10 years previously. Safe to say it didn’t tear up too many trees. Vitally, though, it shifted the group’s direction out of the underground. The man who had only recently been referring to himself as ‘the Maggot Overlord’ relished such an opportunity.
“They were promotion people, Neil and Cecil – they were good at it,” says Clinton. “They’d done all the bubblegum things at Buddah. You give them a character and they would know what to do with it – we gave them plenty to promote. We were a circus! I knew this was the shot I was going to get at taking it big – pop big, like super bubblegum, because we had spaceship ambition even back then, and we had some substance to go with it.”
One Nation Under A Groove: Clinton in Miami, Florida, 2014
TIMING WAS EVERYTHING. BOGART’S RECORD LABEL launched at exactly the point acid rock had played itself out. Following the social and political upheavals of the previous decade, black America’s middle and professional classes had become far more visible to the country in general. Mainstream advertisers soon learned there was a new dollar to be pursued. Black radio boomed and major record labels, acknowledging this new spending power, started taking the new black music – music they might not listen to themselves – much more seriously.
It was a winning situation for musicians and consumers alike. Acts had bigger budgets and greater creative freedom, and as radio programming expanded, so did the myriad of genres and sub-genres within “black music”. Funk, the more robustly representative soul music that emerged at the end of the ’60s, rose to the occasion with gusto. From 1973 to ’74 albums were released as stylistically varied as The Fatback Band’s Keep On Steppin’, Herbie Hancock’s Thrust, The Ohio Players’ Skin Tight, Kool & The Gang’s Light Of Worlds, Donald Byrd’s Steppin’ Into Tomorrow, Curtis Mayfield’s Sweet Exorcist, Gil Scott-Heron’s Winter In America, Earth Wind And Fire’s Open Our Eyes, The O’Jays’ Ship Ahoy, 24-Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, The JB’s’ Damn Right I Am Somebody and The Payback and Black Caesar by James Brown. Musically adventurous, with heavy grooves, politically pertinent and instinctively black, this broader marketplace had overtaken Funkadelic, evolving from what Clinton had called the “beating on a box records” of Soul Power-era James Brown, to a more sophisticated, stimulating music. It was the ideal environment for the arrival of the reborn Parliament.
“Right then was the right time for us,” Clinton agrees. “Not just with Neil [Bogart] coming along, but black audiences had evolved, just as they would do if they were exposed to something constantly which itself is allowed to change. The best example of that is The Beatles: they would hit you with all kinds of shit, all kind of good music – rock, funky, classical, pop, witty, folky – and their audience would go with them because once they put it up there and it was good, people wanted to get into it, they wanted The Beatles to take them with them. Wherever they were going. It was the same with funk once it had the commercial power to take care of its own business and could move forward on its own terms, the audience wanted to evolve right along with it. In fact they expected it to take them somewhere else, funk weren’t no different from any other type of music.
“By that time, black was going pop, and it had evolved to the point at which it knew that and groups could make the most of that and there really was no limit to where it could go. Up until then the music itself didn’t even realise how popular it was, and it was still defending itself and it even didn’t realise that it was the shit at the time. It took us a long time to catch up with where we actually were, because we were up in there so busy trying to fight for the right to be what we already were! When I signed us with Neil, there was no reason we couldn’t shoot as high as we wanted. We knew it, the industry knew it, the audience knew it.”
While at Buddah, Neil Bogart had played a considerable part in that evolution, striking distribution deals with embryonic independent black labels – Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom, The Isley Brothers’ T-Neck and Sussex, home to Bill Withers and Dennis Coffey – affording them promotion and racking clout but maintaining their creative autonomy.
“George Clinton knew how to mix the chemicals, I mean the musicians & songs. Well, drugs too.”
With a new label and a new name for, essentially, the same bunch of players, Clinton needed a new sound. “I knew there was a lot of elements to the funk as it was, so I came in and said, ‘OK, gimme all of that shit and Motown, because Motown was at the centre of everything, and The Beatles and the English rock groups. So we had Funkadelic with the guitars, the James Brown horn players, the Motown rhythm sections, the Sly Stone mentality – which is a lot of music to play with – and because I worked at Motown, [Clinton was a staff writer and producer there in the ’60s] I knew how to stack the different elements together, then move things out of the way when something else is coming through, so you can have any weird combination, but everything will be heard. We had Bernie [Worrell] who was a conservatory-trained classical pianist, but we also had Bootsy…”
It was Bootsy Collins’ extraordinary musicianship upon which the Parliament vibe was built. A bass player in the JB’s, who quit to join Funkadelic for America Eats It Young in 1972, Collins’ technique brought the discipline of the James Brown band and the ambition of a former lead guitarist to the freedom of Funkadelic, elevating the bass to a featured instrument.
“Funkadelic had been established as a black funk rock band,” explains Collins, “so each act [Parliament; Funkadelic] had to have their differences. We were very aware of that. George, being the overseer, wanted Parliament to be more James Brown danceable. That was really easy, and challenging at the same time. I knew the James Brown grooves and band hits, the breakdowns and dynamics, but I always wanted to be a part of a big band sound. I loved how big bands sounded back in the day – Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Williams – they had that tension, drama, they could be emotionally charged, or innocence and silence, then… Jaws breaks out of the water! That was the challenging part, because it plays with every emotion you have and a few others you don’t know you have.”
The main thing Collins brought to Parliament was something he’d learned from his time with James Brown, funk’s big beat and metronomic timing, aka ‘The One’.
“I brought the mighty One,” says Collins, “and I had band arrangements that were playing in my head, which George Clinton gave me the opportunity to let out. I was always wild, so the band and I fit right in, as if we had been together from the beginning.”
Collins, who had just turned 21, had a youthful rawness to his playing, the perfect foil for more seasoned P-Funkers such as former Juilliard School graduate Bernie Worrell and jazz-oriented trombonist Fred Wesley. However, the bass player also brought order to proceedings, a by-product of growing up under the Godfather of Soul’s command. “I loved to rehearse,” says Collins, “so I brought a certain discipline to a very chaotic situation. It worked out really well as a balance. George needed someone like me and I needed someone like him.”
If Collins brought discipline and how to keep it on the One to Clinton, the leader opened up a new world of freedom and experiment for Collins. “I could not sleep with chicks with James Brown,” says Collins, “because he was more of a father figure. George, however, was my older brother or like an uncle. I could do anything I wanted to in front of him. In fact he endorsed it. George looked like the craziest mother on the planet but he was actually the complete opposite. He was very Funkentelechy [aware] he knew how to mix chemicals – meaning the musicians and the songs. Well, drugs too, but at this time we were all pretty focused on the newness of playing together, riding in cars together, writing together. I’d love seeing George’s face light up when I hit the studio because he knew that I knew something, but I never knew what it was, neither did he, but we both knew and it was magical. It was not a job, it was an adventure.”
THEIR ADVENTURE CAUGHT THE audience’s imagination. Whereas Up For The Down Stroke consolidated the sound, the following set, 1975’s Chocolate City, established an attitude: smart, articulate, constantly surprising and funny, building an alternative reality that was both recognisable and cartoon-crazy in its depiction of a black US Presidency (this was nearly 40 years ago). It struck a chord and gave the group their biggest-selling album (150,000 copies sold in Washington DC alone) and became the basis of a committed fan following.
“We wanted to say something because that was our background as Funkadelic,” says Clinton, explaining the Chocolate City concept. “It wasn’t just about putting ourselves in an unusual situation. We had to do it so it was something we could be proud of, something we could look up to. We thought, Where would we most want to be in America? And that was in the White House, with Richard Pryor, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin forming the government. And that was what the whole Chocolate City thing was: where would we like to be but haven’t been allowed? Since that worked so well, we figured we had to find another place that ain’t used to seeing blacks, somewhere else we would like to be but haven’t been allowed, and that was in outer space.”
The result was 1975’s Mothership Connection.
“We got us a space ship and started making out like black folks would do if they had a space ship,” says Clinton. “A low ridin’ space ship! Then there was The Motor Booty Affair, when we thought, Where else can we take black people where they never been before? Under the sea! So that took the whole story down to Atlantis for that underwater vibe.”
Neil Bogart got behind Parliament’s potential as something bigger than just another funk band. “Neil totally understood it,” says Clinton. “The succession of the Mothership, then the Clones, then Motor Booty. He knew how to market it like one big book – a comic book. He worked it as one chapter at a time, leaving people always looking forward to the next one as they get taken along with the story, they feel part of it.”
Bogart also knew how to sell Parliament to the mainstream pop market. He broke the first single from Mothership Connection, P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up), on black radio, but when he heard some pop stations playing its B-side, Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker), he reissued the record for mainstream stations and stores with the labels reprinted as a double A-side. On another occasion, he sent his teams out to bribe security guards at rock and pop stations to let them in to super glue the current Parliament single to every turntable in the buildings.
But Bogart surpassed himself in terms of promotion in October 1976 with the P-Funk Earth Tour, a massive $250,000 touring stage show complete with a full-scale model space ship that landed and took off to facilitate George Clinton’s entrance as the funk overlord, Dr Funkenstein. “When we got Chocolate City we knew we had it,” smiles Clinton, “but when we got Tear The Roof Off The Sucker, I knew I had to take it out live. I told [Casablanca] to get me a space ship. I wasn’t even going to chase them down for the royalties on the albums, because you gonna catch hell trying to get paid on the back end anyway, but I wanted them to do that for us.
“That was such an incredible thing at the moment we did it, that it’s still doing what I thought it would do.”
“He did it too, because the one thing Neil would do was invest in something that would help the record sales – and he wasn’t scared of doing it on a big scale, because he’d already done it with Kiss. He spent all that money on their stage show when they couldn’t sell records worth a damn and it turned them into the biggest group in the country. That’s what broke us across all audiences, because it was so big. Even if you didn’t go to the shows you were aware of us as something you ought to get into.”
The tour captured the music, mayhem and excitement of P-Funk in full flow, lives on in a DVD – 1976 Live: The Mothership Connection (see sidebar) – and brought together both of Clinton’s vast band projects.
Back at Funkadelic, the catchy chorals of the title track to 1974’s Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On presaged a series of almost normal (by their standards) LPs for Warner Bros as Funkadelic moved closer to Parliament. On-stage the two concepts blended seamlessly, on record the unification was best illustrated by the collective’s biggest hit, One Nation Under A Groove. Originally intended as a Parliament song, Clinton knew Groove was going to be massive and gave it to Funkadelic as they were, for him, where it all started. The track charted all over the world at the end of 1978 and became the P-Funk stage show’s rallying closing number.
Yet, just as P-Funk came to dominate and define the 1970s, it struggled to gain traction in the 1980s after Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight drastically moved American black music’s goalposts. By that time, George Clinton’s empire had expanded to include two girl groups, Parlet and The Brides of Funkenstein, Bootsy’s very successful and superfunky Rubber Band, Fred Wesley & Maceo Parker’s Horny Horns and the Bootsy-produced disco-flavoured Sweat Band. He’d also launched his own label, Uncle Jam Records. Under the weight of administration difficulties, financial disputes, internal jealousies, and Clinton spreading himself too thin, the P-Funk empire began to crack and crumble. It was a demise hastened by changing tastes and what Clinton called “the built-in obsolescence of the music business. Nobody expects you to be on top more than five years.”
The irony was, even he didn’t expect it to last that long. The Parliament album Gloryhallastoopid (Pin The Tail On The Funky), was so titled to mark the ridiculousness of the fact they were still around in 1979.
Another significant contributor to Parliament and P-Funk’s shift in fortunes was Neil Bogart’s absence. He and Cecil Holmes had personally shepherded the group to the heights of success, but by 1978 Bogart was making arrangements to sell to PolyGram and start again. It made a difference, one that Clinton is now stoical about.
“He wanted to take us with him,” he says, “but all the time he was fixing to sell I was too out of my head on drugs to be paying attention so wasn’t aware of what was going on. Once the company was sold, we definitely didn’t get the attention we’d been getting before.”
Although Clinton recorded a few very good albums with Parliament personnel in the early 1980s, it was essentially all over 10 years after the Mothership first took off in 1976. But Clinton, a naturally life-affirming soul, has few regrets. He’s back on tour with a band that mixes a few veterans with a number of original members’ children and grandchildren. Still recording, he’s about to star in his own TV reality series and will have his memoirs published later this year.
“I know where I stand,” he says, in conclusion. “Those records are still around today in one way or another, either out in their own right or on somebody’s record, and the spaceship itself is in the Smithsonian Institute. That was such an incredible thing at the moment we did it, that it’s still doing what I thought it would do. Forever. We could ride the Mothership forever.”
This article originally appeared in issue 250 of MOJO.
Words: Lloyd Bradley Images: Getty