Back in Newark, things were less cool. They heated up all through 1967. In fact, we were in New Jersey for the Irvington riots. Traffic was snarled and we had to walk despite the heat. We had just bought these new suits, and when we ran into the police blockade, the officers made us put our jackets on the ground, where they stomped on them to see if we had weapons. We canceled our show that night, which was a double bill with the Four Tops. Our next show was scheduled for Detroit, and by the time we got there they had started some riots of their own. We didn’t really know about them before we went onstage. Even during our show, when people started coming onstage, yelling and flapping their arms, we didn’t think much of it. That kind of thing happened not infrequently at our shows. But outside there were so many people in the street, running around tornado-style like they had been back in New Jersey, that we realized what was happening. That night, we were scheduled to drive down to our next show, in Chicago, but first we had to drop my friend Ron Ford at his house. We ran into a barricade, and the cops wouldn’t let us pass. We pulled off to the side and Ronnie slipped out of the wagon and went home through the alleyways.
Changes in politics, changes in music, changes in drugs, changes upon changes. In the context of this new world, our old ways were fading fast. LeBaron wasn’t flourishing; Revilot was going under. He had lost his connections and was getting squeezed tight by Motown. We recorded more songs and released more singles, some of which were very good, others of which were holding patterns, and still others of which were experiments that gestured toward the future. We had “Little Man.” We had “The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg).” We had “Look at What I Almost Missed.” We had “What You Been Growing.” We had “A New Day Begins.” If there was an overall plot, it was that we were moving slightly toward rock and slightly away from conventional R&B. But the sound I had imagined when I first wrote “Testify” still wasn’t quite crystallizing.
At some point, LeBaron decided he had to get out of Detroit while the getting was good. His exit was inauspicious at best. He went around to clubs where we had booked gigs, picked up some of our money from the club owners, and then skipped town. We didn’t see him again for years, until he was well into his next career as a radio man in Philadelphia. Just as he vanished, we had our creative breakthrough in the form of a record called “Good Old Music.” We had cut it with the entire band and released it with a B-side called “Time,” which was a lean, midtempo, Motown-style track about a man who loses everything and has only time left. “Time” was very much in the spirit of the other Parliaments records. “Good Old Music,” though, was entirely different. It opened with a hard drum part and then an organ line, and the first words I sang were about the music I was singing.
Everybody’s getting funky
In the days when the funk was gone
I recall not long ago
When the funk was going strong
“Good Old Music” was a manifesto, a legitimate new beginning, and the record became a smash in stores almost immediately. But LeBaron had put it out just as he was leaving town, and there was nobody around to work it with the radio stations. We were in the strange position of having a hit on our hands—a revolutionary hit—but also standing in a cul-de-sac. Our identity as Parliament was evolving, but it was also evaporating.
Much of our inspiration came from our further absorption of rock and roll, and especially the black acts who were changing the face of the genre. The biggest one, of course, was Jimi Hendrix. He was a huge influence on me and on Eddie, and later on Bootsy. Shit, he was a huge influence on everyone. I had heard him first when he played with Curtis Knight and worked with King Curtis—he had been on a Ray Sharpe single called “Help Me” that had caught my ear—but when he went off to Europe, I lost track of him. Most people did. Then he reappeared and I saw that he had changed, that he had absorbed everything that he had seen, some of which I had seen, too. The Who had these Marshall stacks, towers of amps, and Jimi came back playing with a rig like that. I knew that if he had figured that one out, it was only the tip of the iceberg; and when I bought his first album, it was titanic. That shit was all the way over. There was a visionary quality to it that’s hard to fully process even now, forty-seven years later. It just seemed like a transmission being beamed in from outer space. Though we never got a chance to play with Jimi, I met him once a little later. Buddy Miles had invited our band up to the Chambers Brothers’ place in New York. Jimi was just there at the party, minding his own business, mostly, getting high like everyone else was. Still, we were in awe. He was shy and soulful, very compelling in an understated way.
If Jimi was the first thunderclap, the second was Sly Stone. Dave Kapralik, who was the president of Epic Records, had worked with Ernie Harris, my old friend from the barbershop, and one afternoon Dave invited us into New York to a listening session. The record he played for us was the very first Sly and the Family Stone record, and as he put the album on, he explained that he was quitting his job at Epic to manage Sly. It seemed crazy to be leaving a comfortable record-business job to be a manager. Crazy, that is, until I heard the record. Sly did so many things so well that he turned my head all the way around. He could create polished R&B that sounded like it came from an act that had gigged at clubs for years, and then in the next breath he could be as psychedelic as the heaviest rock band. While Hendrix discovered his new sound in London, Sly was doing it in San Francisco, which had the most adventurous music scene around, with the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Charlatans, and a thousand other bands who were playing around in the space between folk, blues, psychedelia, and hard rock. There was so much to absorb, and he was capable of absorbing it all. He was the only other act who could do what the Beatles were doing. But there were four of them—there was only one of him. In those early years, Sly was a massive influence on me. He stayed that way for years and then, later, became a collaborator and a partner in crime.
Those were the leading lights, but there was a constellation around them. To be alive and paying attention in 1967 was to get a crash course in all this and more. The first Jimi Hendrix record came out in May. Sgt. Pepper’s followed in June. Cream’s Disraeli Gears came along in November. And then there were major records from Tim Buckley, Aretha Franklin, the Kinks, Buffalo Springfield. One of the most interesting groups working the seam between soul and hard rock was Vanilla Fudge, a group of Long Island musicians who played covers of popular songs at a glacial pace. Shadow Morton, who was best known for his work with girl groups like the Shangri-Las, produced them with heavy guitars and slowed-down vibrato. On their debut record, which came out right in the middle of that glory period, they did great Beatles covers, “Ticket to Ride” and “Eleanor Rigby,” but the stuff I liked the best was the R&B material, Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” and the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On.” I could really get into that. Most rock and roll was loud and fast. That’s how we played at first. Turn everything up as a surefire way to get attention. But when you brought the pace way down, that required more discipline. If you could hold a song at that slower tempo without getting monotonous, the result was amazing.
All of these bands were cracking open something new, and we were receptive to it. We had gone through “Testify,” moved on to “Goodies” and “Goose,” and ended up with “Good Old Funky Music.” We had covered quite a bit of ground, from doo-wop through Motown to the brink of this unexplored land. But we also knew that if you’re going to call on something to change, then you’re going to have to change what you call that thing.
SOUND A LITTLE SOMETHING LIKE RAW FUNK TO ME
Armen Boladian had been big on the Detroit scene since the early sixties. He and his partner Bernie Mendelson handled promotion and distribution for many of the smaller labels: not just Revilot, but Ric-Tic, Thelma, and others. Armen liked me, especially the way I interacted with radio stations, and he liked taking me around for promotional purposes. We would meet with jocks, help with char
ity events, and so on: there was a big annual show for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, for example, which was associated with the comedian Danny Thomas and his daughter Marlo. As the Parliaments ran their course with LeBaron and Revilot, we needed someone to put out our next record. We already had plans for a label of our own, Funkadelic Records, and it was starting to buzz. Armen had similar ideas for something called Westbound. One of his early artists was the R&B singer Denise LaSalle, who would have a huge hit with “Trapped by a Thing Called Love.” Her success brought more visibility to the Westbound side of the equation, which swallowed up Funkadelic Records in the partnership.
But the first Westbound record was our record. And what was our next record? What was our next sound? We were still into Motown, still very much responding to their movements, either in imitation or in opposition. We were all huge fans of the Funk Brothers, the group of musicians (including James Jamerson, Earl Van Dyke, and Pistol Allen) who were responsible for the instrumental part of the Motown sound. Somewhere along the way it became clear to me that we had a strong young group of players who were, to us, what the Funk Brothers were to Motown, and because we were so deep into psychedelic rock we started adding the -delic to it. The result was Funkadelic. I think I had the idea for the name first, but you’ll probably get a debate from two or three others. Everyone knew that it felt right, though. White rock groups had done the blues, and we wanted to head back in the other direction, to be a black rock group playing the loudest, funkiest combination of psychedelic rock and thunderous R&B.
The music scene was ready for us. In the fifties and early sixties, as we were bringing the Parliaments up from Plainfield, soul music and in fact pop music in general were all about singing and showmanship. At some point, pop started to move toward musicianship. There were always players. Jerry Lee Lewis was a hell of a piano player. Chuck Berry could play guitar. But they were in the service of songs and in the service of singing, in the most efficient way possible. And then there was a sea change. I would go to the record store and see Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” or these Grateful Dead records that relaxed the limits of song length and went on for twenty minutes. Rock and roll was becoming like jazz had been twenty years earlier, with solos and complex compositions and virtuosos, and all of a sudden kids wanted to know who the guitar player was, who the keyboard player was, who the drummer was. When that happened in rock, it happened mostly only in rock. The major exception was James Brown. People say that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” back in 1965, was the birth of funk, though it’s much more complicated than that: there was barrelhouse piano and Texas blues guitar and the New Orleans sound and a hundred other things that came together, came apart, and came together again. But “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” did start the ball rolling on pushing musicians to the forefront. James would call out to his musicians during songs, make them visible as soloists. But James was the exception. Motown didn’t even list its session musicians until 1971, so the Funk Brothers, who were central to the label’s success in every way, were also completely anonymous. Motown had been so good at staying ahead of the curve until suddenly they found themselves behind it. If they had recognized that the Funk Brothers were the Eric Claptons and Jimmy Pages of soul music, they could have secured themselves five more years of relevance.
Our shift happened along similar lines. We were already Funkadelic, in a sense, during the last few months of the Parliaments, and especially on “Good Old Music,” but we formalized the evolution on our first official Funkadelic single. It wasn’t as if we had weeks and weeks to sit around and debate the change, like we were in a think tank or something. “Good Old Music” had broken big—bigger than “Testify,” in fact—in Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago. There was a demand for new music. We got a song together and got it right out, and that song was “Music for My Mother,” which some of us also called “Whoa Ha Hey” after the distinctive chant in the chorus. We were already doing that chant live and we built the rest of the song around it. It started with a slinky bass line, with guitar laid over the top, and then opened up into a chant with a rap on it that I said “sound[ed] a little something like raw funk to me.”
The song was startling, even to us: it seemed to go back to something before Motown, to hipster jazz or country blues, and also it stretched ahead to something that hadn’t happened yet. Tempos were slower, arrangements were deeper, sentiments were more abstract. When you went to parties, someone would put on Cream’s “White Room” or Pink Floyd’s “A Saucerful of Secrets” and then you would do acid, and when you came back from your trip, the same record would be playing. It was the new jazz and also a kind of dance music for the mind.
When we released “Music for My Mother,” we wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose the fans we had made with “Good Old Music,” let alone the ones who came aboard for “Testify.” We had to draw a line between Parliament and Funkadelic, and so we made sure that all the record and concert posters said “A Parliafunkadelicment Thang.” The effect was immediate. “Music for My Mother” became the national anthem of Detroit, and it got so big so fast that Armen couldn’t keep up with demand. Our second Funkadelic single, “I’ll Bet You,” reached all the way back into the Golden World years; it was a reupholstered version of the song that Mr. Wingate had asked us to write around Martha Jean the Queen’s catchphrase. Theresa’s version had opened with hand claps and an up-tempo horn arrangement. We replaced that with thundering drums and a pealing guitar line, and the Motown-style vocals gave way to a multipart lead that was similar to what Sly was doing at that time. On that song, the B-side was “Open Our Eyes,” a traditional gospel song in the style of a romantic ballad, though you could still hear the acid guitar buried back there in the mix.
If we were doing our part in remaking soul music, Armen was doing his part taking me around to all the radio jocks. We did all the same events as before, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and the others. It’s one of the trade secrets of the record business that promotion is everything. Without it, you can have the best record in the world, but you’ll have it in cold dead space. Mickey Stevenson was the key to Motown because he got all the records played. He had the key to the jocks. He beat them at pool, brought them some girls. He was so successful that he even got a percentage of the producers’ fees. By the time Funkadelic started out at Westbound, Armen was already a veteran at that kind of thing, and soon enough the new band and the new sound was known all over the Midwest and the Northeast.
Devotion to the road helped us capitalize on the momentum of Funkadelic. We signed with Diversified Management, a booking agency from Ann Arbor that handled Detroit-area rock acts like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Once we shared management with them, we got booked everywhere, both on the soul circuit we had already visited with “Testify” and in the rock and roll venues that were uncharted territory. Among black acts, nobody was doing what we were doing. Acts like the Chambers Brothers had a chart presence—they had a big hit with “Time Has Come Today” in the fall of 1968—but they were ultra pop. War, which formed in the late sixties with a post-Animals Eric Burdon and then went on without him, had a great sound, but it wasn’t exactly straight rock: there was Latin music in there, and even jazz. Even Sly, a genius, was basically running a pop game, aiming straight for the charts much of the time.
We went directly into rock, and we flourished. Right from the beginning, we had a crazy stage act. Before Funkadelic’s first flowering, we were starting to dress in that West Village style, a mod look with bell-bottoms that you might find at a shop on West Fourth Street in the Village. When we went on the road after “Music for My Mother,” it was all the way out there, and the sillier the better. We went to a prop store and bought duck feet and rooster heads. There were big floppy Amish-style hats. I started wearing a diaper onstage, sometimes made from hotel towels, and sometimes even from an American flag. And the thing that was most extreme about it is t
hat not everyone in the band dressed that way. Some would, but others, like Calvin, were still in suits. So when you looked at us from the audience, you saw everything colliding all at once, every look imaginable, and even some that you couldn’t imagine.
Audiences were in awe. We had two or three guitar players who could go loud like Hendrix and we had Bernie adding in his classical colorings like we were King Crimson. Even up in Canada, where audiences tended to be a little more sophisticated, we got over like a motherfucker. We expanded our base by playing with anyone—old-fashioned R&B bands from the chitlin circuit, new rock acts, whoever had a big pop record. If we were the supporting act, we made it a point to get out there, play our set, and give the stage to the headliner. If we were slated for an hour, we got off in fifty-nine minutes. Because we were so catholic in our bookings, we started to learn how to cater to different styles of audience. If it was a teenybopper crowd interested in the latest dances, we could deliver songs at the appropriate tempo. If we were opening up for Jackie Wilson or Chuck Jackson in front of a mostly black crowd that hadn’t yet come around to our new way of thinking, we could keep the songs radio length, or go back to “Testify” and our covers of “Gypsy Woman” and “Knock on Wood.” If we were playing a venue like the Fillmore, we might be performing for a crowd that was filled with musicians, and so then we could let Eddie or Bernie show off their chops with solos. The most forgiving audiences were what today you’d call jam-band audiences, kids who were following the Grateful Dead and similar bands. They were musically open-minded and didn’t put much stock in costumes or stagecraft. So long as we played with passion, it didn’t matter if we were up there in plain white T-shirts.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 7
