Once, on the way to a show, we were on the same airplane as the MC5, who were Detroit’s loudest and most aggressive political rock band—Rob Tyner was their singer, and they had two great guitarists, Fred “Sonic” Smith and Wayne Kramer. We used to call them the white niggers, because they were legitimately countercultural in their thinking, not interested at all in playing along with the rules. On the plane, everybody was smoking weed, but we were doing it subtly and politely and they were loud and obnoxious. We kept telling them to shut the fuck up. “If the police come on this plane,” we said, “they’re going to get us because we’re niggers.” When the plane landed, sure enough, some cops showed up, and during the course of searching Billy and Tiki, found weed in their drawers. This gave them probable cause to search everyone, which was an unnecessary nuisance, especially given that it was the MC5 who was raising all the hell in the first place.
We were kindred spirits with the rock bands in more important ways. We loved the feel of rock and roll, the style. Creem magazine accepted us as one of their own: at one point, they wrote an article about how Iggy Pop and I were getting married. That was a sign of respect. Creem was like a cross between Rolling Stone and Mad; they covered music but with a satirical edge, and when they liked you, they wrote something strange about you. Rock and roll was individualistic but also democratic, and we adopted that idea: we were like a tribe or a nation. The idea was off-putting to some people. I remember a conversation I had with Dave Kapralik. When he looked at Funkadelic, he felt something lacking: a leader, a center of attention. He thought we needed a bigger, brighter character smack in the middle of things. He said it just like that. I resisted that for various reasons, some political, some personal. It’s hard to come to the forefront of a band in such an aggressive way, to run the show like that, unless you’re a Quincy Jones or a James Brown. They had the energy of a motherfucker, from sheer physical exertion on down. I was looking more at models like the Beatles, where everyone could be close to the core, where the whole only existed because everyone played their part perfectly.
For years in the sixties I talked about getting a pig or a skunk. I loved farm animals, pigs and rabbits and that kind of thing. Maybe it was because I was a country boy at heart; if I closed my eyes I could still feel the Virginia ground under my bare feet. People around me vetoed the skunk, and because of that I got more and more serious about the pig. Sometime in 1968, Jeffrey Bowen, who was a producer at Motown, bought me one. It was just a little thing, a piglet, and I named it Officer Dibbles, after the character on the Top Cat cartoon. Dibbles went everywhere with us. He was an official band mascot. He would curtsy and show people the diamond bracelet around his neck. Dibbles got treated better than any pig ever had. We kept him on a good diet regimen and scolded people when they tried to feed him scraps. We took him on airplanes when we toured, and even though airline rules required that we check him, like a dog, he was so cute that when we were at the ticket counter the ladies would just tell us to carry him through.
As Funkadelic’s reputation spread, it went west and it went east, and some of it went across the ocean. We got booked to play at the Royal Albert Hall in London. For me, that was a dream. I hadn’t been to England, but my mind had been there for a year or two, following the music. Just before we got there, they switched our show around. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention had played the Albert Hall, and it had been a crazy scene. His fans tore the place up, and the band desecrated the pipe organ, which dated back to the nineteenth century, by playing “Louie Louie” on it. As a result, the venue wasn’t receptive to the idea of rock bands, and our concerts were switched over to the Lyceum. That didn’t seem fair, to punish Funkadelic for the sins of the Mothers, so we cooked up a protest stunt. I’m not sure where we found a place to rent us a donkey in London, but we did, and we decided to ride the donkey up to the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens as a way of making an ass of the Royal Albert Hall. We went out there in the afternoon, our whole group trailed by reporters and photographers from Melody Maker and New Musical Express, and we rode up to the statue as planned. There was only one wrinkle: on the way up there, the donkey took a regal shit on the steps. Everyone laughed, and when that happened, Dibbles ran into the middle of the crowd and tried to get attention. He was like a little baby. In the middle of all the commotion, he got excited, or ate something someone threw to him, and he ended up taking a shit, too, a watery bit of skeet. Shutters were going off all around us, and the music papers ended up with pictures of Dibbles and the donkey both shitting right next to the statue.
All through that week in London, I was just like Dibbles, happy as a pig in shit. We played the Lyceum and also played a little club one night, along the way meeting everyone from David Bowie to Rod Stewart to Jimmy Page. We also went around the country a bit, and I was the most taken with Liverpool, where I was like any other Beatles fan. We went to the Cavern Club on Mathew Street, where Paul McCartney’s uncle carpentered the stage. We went to Mendips, John Lennon’s childhood home on Menlove Avenue. This was less than a year after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so there wasn’t the same sense of distant nostalgia there is now. There was a real energy around those sites, because the band was still a going concern.
We reconnected with my old friend Jimmy Miller, who was working with the Stones, and we even managed to get in some recording: we went to Olympic Studios and recorded “Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time” with Ginger Baker’s equipment. He wasn’t in town, but we asked if we could use the drums, someone went off and made a phone call, and they came back and gave us the green light.
My love affair with British rock followed me back to the States; soon after we returned, I found myself in Boston, tripping my ass off, watching a double bill. Jethro Tull opened the show, and Ian Anderson’s flute was a transformative experience. All the good bands from England were starting to experiment with classical elements: Procol Harum, the Moody Blues, and especially the Beatles, through George Martin’s production. And the headliner, Led Zeppelin, was as loud as anything I had ever heard but with subtle details, too, a sledgehammer with a filigreed handle. They were taking black American music and feeding it through a white heavy-metal filter. They had great songs and a legitimately dangerous energy. And even though they weren’t exactly using classical sounds yet, they had ancient elements that gave their music historical scope. Jimmy Page was playing a thousand-year-old folk song, the same way that Cream was playing off of Greek mythology. My vision of the future sharpened.
All the new energy reflected back on the old responsibilities, not always favorably. Back in Newark, my wife Carol was holding down the home front with the three kids—Donna, George, and Darryl—and a new baby, Shawn, on the way, but our marriage had been through changes. I had toured for too long, worked in too many other places, been distracted and at times unfaithful. I had grown into a different person than I had been when we got together in the late fifties. Carol and I stayed together and maintained our family until we finally got divorced in the early seventies, and I still stayed with them whenever I was there. I loved being with the kids, talking to them about their lives, helping them with their schoolwork. Donna was in her last years of elementary school then, and George right behind her, and both of them attended Catholic school. When I was young, I had noticed that the kids who stayed on the straight and narrow, or at least the straighter and narrower, were Catholic school kids. Carol agreed with me, and we were determined to give our kids that same best chance. Even Catholic schools, though, were subject to the shifts in culture. In the late sixties, there was also a surge of interest in the Nation of Islam and Muslim culture in general. Muhammad Ali had taken his new name in 1964, explaining that Cassius Clay had been his slave name. Lew Alcindor converted in 1968 and became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a few years after that. Political consciousness was on the rise, along with the beginnings of what would become the Black Power movement. So there was a strange landscape there in Newark, black American kids get
ting a Catholic education and becoming increasingly interested in Islam.
Not that it had any effect on pop-music tastes, really. My kids were still listening to the same music as their friends, which meant mostly that they were interested in whatever was topping the charts, whether it was the Fifth Dimension or Stevie Wonder or the Archies. I was going the other direction, moving Funkadelic toward the edge, where I could make sense of where soul was going and where rock was coming from. I listened to radio, because that was still the best way to pick up the pulse of the culture—not just Top Forty radio but college radio, underground radio. And I kept current with all the trade publications. I was a big Cashbox and Billboard freak, especially. Wherever we were, whether we were home or on tour, I would find a newsstand with the new issues and study them like they were a mix of textbook, sports program, and self-help guide. You could tell by the way records were advertised how much money was being spent on them, whether they were a commercial product or an art project. You could predict the hits for the next month or so, and that gave you an idea of the trends.
When the first Funkadelic singles started to appear, we were a problem for critics and other so-called tastemakers. What it came down to, I think, was race, or how we fit into the narrow ideas of race in music. We were too white for black folks and too black for white folks. We were a source of confusion. And that’s exactly how we wanted it. Even if we were sacrificing a mainstream magazine cover or a coveted radio spot, we were staking out ground of our own and making sure we had a stronger bond with the fans who found their way to the band. The people who wanted to see us came no matter what. And the college circuit, which is where we did most of our touring, was perfect for us. The crowd changed every year, and there were always new students who were brave enough to explore music that deviated slightly from whatever was on the charts and responded to our sense of adventure and sense of humor. And they were determined not to rely on the tired old categories: black band is a soul act, white band is a rock act.
One of the companies that had tested those categories earlier in the decade, and in fact remade them, was flailing a little bit. As the world changed, Motown didn’t know exactly what to do with itself. For starters, pop music was becoming much more intellectual, in a legitimate way. We were jokesters about it, but there was an undercurrent of philosophy in our music: ideas of self-expression, of rebelling against received norms, that kind of thing. We were also increasingly aware of the world around us, of war and urban poverty and the plight of the black man in America. Motown had built its empire on love songs, with a little bit of self-empowerment thrown in there for good measure, and they didn’t want to mess with social change or social issues. And yet there were examples popping up all over the place that testified to the benefits of this new direction. Sly was all the way out there, with San Francisco being in the lead of the peace movement and bands like Jefferson Airplane making it a dominant topic in his community. What ended up happening was that Sly learned to present a polished, funky version of all the intellectual discussion that was bubbling up in Berkeley.
Motown wasn’t equipped for change. For starters, Holland-Dozier-Holland, who were among their most forward-thinking producers, left in 1968 to start their own labels, Invictus and Hot Wax. And even though the top Motown artists were starting to grope toward new styles and new substance—Stevie Wonder was, and Marvin Gaye was—it didn’t really break through into Berry’s consciousness. The politician in him seemed to balk at any thought of fucking with the reality around him.
Without Berry’s commitment to pushing the company forward, Motown couldn’t really understand either social change or the growth of rock and roll. I gave Sly’s records to Norman Whitfield and that resulted in a change for the Temptations, who started to record songs like “Psychedelic Shack” and “Cloud Nine.” It was still the Temps, so it sounded fantastic, but anyone who knew what was happening in the world could spot it as synthetic, as jumping onto the path that had been cleared by Sly, or by us. And when Motown tried to break into rock and roll by signing a group called Rare Earth, it ended up sounding like a Motown record. It was really a lesson in limits, and the way in which there were geniuses like Sly, who absorbed everything, and geniuses like Berry, who progressed to a certain point but couldn’t see beyond what he had made. Add to that the fact that Berry was starting to pursue a career as a movie producer. He had Diana Ross interested in doing Lady Sings the Blues, the Billie Holiday story, which would eventually spur him to move the entire Motown operation out to Los Angeles. The reins of the record label got handed over to the Corporation—to Alphonzo Mizell, Freddie Perren, and Deke Richards—who were writing for the Jackson 5, mainly, and that became Motown’s identity. They would have stayed at the top longer if they had understood the importance of getting a little dirt on their hands.
Against that backdrop, Funkadelic became the darlings of the changing culture. In Detroit, we were even hotter than Sly. We were like the Beatles there, the hip thing everyone knew was coming. When we’d play the 20 Grand, we’d see plenty of Motown people in the audience, dressed in their jeans and minks. I might be wearing a sheet with nothing on underneath it, and I would clown them by walking straight off the stage onto their table and pouring one of their drinks over my head, which was shaved bald and decorated with drawings of dicks and stars. They were amused, like kings with jesters. There was a rumor going around that I peed on Berry and Diana at a performance, but that was just the wine running down my bald head and coming off the sheet.
We were hip because we were hippies, and part of that was connected to our understanding of the changing economics of the business. In Sam Cooke’s day, the greatest aspiration for an R&B singer was to play the Copacabana or one of the big rooms in Las Vegas. That was the height of all you could imagine. But there were all these rock bands filling Madison Square Garden. Why couldn’t we be the Rolling Stones? Why couldn’t we be Cream? If it was just the color of our skin, that wasn’t going to stop us, not when we had the tightest songs and the loudest guitars and the best singers. Our first album as Funkadelic, which was self-titled, came out with Westbound in 1970, and it was mostly a collection of the singles we had released, a record of our evolution from the Parliaments, along with some longer jams. “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” was a founding document, both a declaration of our independence from other forms of music and a kind of Bill of Rights for our fans.
We talked about being not of this world and being good to whoever listened. We were seducing this new audience. We were declaring their readiness along with ours. And while that first record didn’t do much nationally, it was a big hit all across the Midwest. Funkadelic was on the launch pad.
When you establish an anti-establishment position that starts to pay dividends, the establishment positions itself near you for a new investment. Jeffrey Bowen, the producer who had bought me Officer Dibbles, had been at Motown with Holland-Dozier-Holland, and he had left with them when they went off to start Hot Wax and Invictus. Right after the Funkadelic singles started to hit—they were number one in Detroit and the surrounding area—Jeffrey contacted me. “Let’s restart the Parliaments and do a pop album,” he said. He appreciated where we were headed with Funkadelic, but he felt that there was a version of the music that was more radio friendly, more in line with the tradition Motown had established. That made sense to me, though I wanted to be on Hot Wax rather than Invictus, because Hot Wax was run by Neil Bogart, one of the most inventive executives in the business. I was sure that if we cast our lot with him, we’d be a hit act. But Invictus was distributed by Capitol, who had plenty of white rock acts and was hot for a black pop band. So we were placed on Invictus. Almost immediately, we changed our name to Parliament. Back in the doo-wop days, all the names were plural, from the Cadillacs to the Orioles to the Moonglows. But British rock, at least past the Beatles and the Stones, was moving into a phase of singular names that were strong concepts: Cream, the Who, Pink Floyd. Jeffrey was married to a woman na
med Ruth Copeland, a white British singer, and he understood the importance of being allied with that scene. Parliament was the perfect fit.
The album that came together around that new identity was Osmium, which would be released in 1970. We went for the Beatles edge of soul, and tried to keep enough guitar in it to make it sound like American rock and roll. There were songs like “I Call My Baby Pussycat,” which was a mildly risqué love song that played off a double entendre. It had two songs that Ruth wrote, “Little Ole Country Boy” and “The Silent Boatman,” and another song, “Oh Lord, Why Lord,” that she adapted from Pachelbel’s Canon.
Making that record at that time, at Invictus, was a comedy of its own. At Motown, Berry’s comings and goings had been announced over the company loudspeaker like the weather report; when he came to work, they made an announcement: “The Chairman is in the building.” Holland-Dozier-Holland had been Motown’s golden boys, and when they left, they set themselves up as untouchables, with Eddie Holland playing the Berry Gordy role. If you were in the room with him and he wanted to tell you something, he would turn to Jeffrey instead and instruct him to talk to you. He affected an authority that came off as arrogant. It never bothered me too much, because we were rebels anyway. I knew that his high-toned ways were a strategy for existing, just like our psychedelic ways. You learned that at the barbershop, when people came to you for a new style, for a way of presenting themselves to the outside world. We designed people’s looks back at the Silk Palace, and we designed our own looks as Funkadelic. In truth, underneath the image, I was a much more reserved, centered, circumspect person. In fact, that’s why I was able to carry off those crazy looks. It was freedom generated by misdirection, and it allowed me to focus on my real self, the identity I was nurturing away from any kind of spotlight.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 8
