We were starting to rotate in our new members. Bootsy and Catfish, along with the rest of the House Guests—Chicken Gunnels on trumpet, Rob McCullough on tenor sax, and Kash Waddy on percussion—appeared on “Philmore,” which Bootsy sang in a more traditional style than he’d later become known for. It’s uptempo funk rock, with a little bit of James Brown in the precision, and a lyric (“Everybody’s got a problem but you don’t even give a damn”) that was either about scorned love or social awareness or both.
The cover is an illustration of a (funky) dollar bill that showed America as it really was: corrupt and debauched, consuming resources in a way that benefited the rich at the expense of the poor. The liner notes were equally philosophical. There was a group called the Process Church that had been founded by a British couple as an offshoot of Scientology, and in the late sixties they started hanging out with the band, mainly in Boston. They would feed the kids in Boston Common and they ran what was basically the first day-care center that I can remember, offering to watch children when mothers went to work. We ended up excerpting some of their thinking in the Maggot Brain liner notes, which seemed fine at the time—it was a form of self-actualization, not an uncommon or unpopular philosophy at the time. We did the same thing for America Eats Its Young, but with far different results. In the summer of 1969, a career criminal (and part-time songwriter) named Charles Manson led a band of followers on a killing spree in upscale residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles, murdering a number of people, including Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate. The killers were under the influence of a crazy-quilt mythology that somehow tied together the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” race war, and Satan worship. There was some thought that Manson had drawn on some of the writings of the Process Church. I thought there was a difference—he talked about something called the Final Church of Judgment, and the group hanging around with us was the Church of Final Judgment—but this was probably too fine a distinction for a public still trying to get a handle on a killing spree. Rolling Stone gave us a hard time for the association in their review.
There were real-life consequences, too. Right around the time we finished up this record, we were out in California. Half of the band must have gotten the same pussy, so one by one they went off to the clinic. Fuzzy Haskins had a bad reaction to the shot, and having heard on the radio all day about the Family murders, he started rambling about the band right there in the clinic, explaining how we weren’t connected to Manson at all but somehow, in his not-entirely-coherent monologue, making it seem like maybe we were. We were strangers in California at that time. People didn’t know shit about us. We looked weird, and we had weird ideas. The notion that we had anything to do with Manson caused a tremendous problem for a little while.
California was a rarity. For the most part, we were back East and in the Midwest, touring hard as always. One night, Calvin was driving and I dozed off. When I woke up, the grass was parting in front of us and trees were whizzing by on the left. Calvin was still in the driver’s seat, but with his head down on one shoulder, snoring lightly. I couldn’t reach the wheel, so I started to whisper to him so he wouldn’t wake up alarmed. He resurfaced with a look in his eyes that was so calm that it must have been desperate, took the car up the embankment, fishtailing like a motherfucker the whole way. Fuzzy and Grady woke up, too, and they cheered him on: “You got it, Calvin.” Heads were hitting the ceiling of the car, but we ended up right back on the highway, like we had never left.
A little later on, we hired a girl named Sharon to drive us from show to show. One evening she lost control of the vehicle. “Uh-oh,” she said. And then just like that, the car rolled over three times, amusement-park style, and landed right back on its wheels. She turned to face the rest of us, not fazed in the least. “You all fine?” she said. She was something else, Sharon. We all thought she was corny and lame. We used to mock her behind her back and maybe a little bit to her face. “I know you all don’t think I know anything,” she said. “Why don’t you come to a party with me?” She took us to a party with Bobby Orr of the Boston Bruins. It was a hell of a thing. Someone took a Pepsi-Cola bottle and pushed it up inside this girl and then the girl couldn’t get it out and no one else could either. The suction was keeping it in there. They had to find a metal rod and smack down on the bottle, which was hanging out from between this girl’s legs. Right after the bottle broke, I looked over at the other guys from the band and raised my eyebrows. They knew what I was thinking: Damn, Sharon may be lame, but she has some hardcore friends.
Out on the road, we were still playing with a wide range of groups, extending our reach by meeting new audiences. We didn’t have any trouble, for the most part, as a black band playing to largely white crowds. The only time I can remember any problem at all was during a show where we opened for Black Oak Arkansas. They were popular at the time, and we knew that meant we’d have to prepare for a certain amount of heckling that had nothing to do with race—if you go on before the Stones, you have to know that you’re delaying a crowd’s access to the Stones. But this crowd got dark quick. They started singing “Dixie” and wouldn’t stop. Bernie bailed us out. He was on the organ and he played a version of the song that was epic—it wove through classical music, rock and roll, the roaring twenties, even Gregorian chants. He took those motherfuckers on an expedition. By the end, they were laughing. He just wore them out.
When we’d come off the road and go home to Canada, we’d check our fan mail. Some of it was negative—people who still wanted to worry about the Process Church, people who thought black musicians should leave rock to the white musicians—but much of it was supportive, and many of those letters were from like-minded fans who were themselves artists. Around 1972 or so, we started to get letters from a young artist in Chicago named Pedro Bell. He doodled these intricate, wild worlds, filled with crazy hypersexual characters and strange slogans. After a few months of delivering Pedro’s letters to us, the Postmaster General wanted to know if I was involved in some kind of subversive organization, because he was certain that these marginal drawings couldn’t be part of conventional society.
Pedro’s correspondence gave me an idea for how we could move Funkadelic up a notch, how we could take what we were doing musically, and onstage, and capture some of that anarchic energy in the album packages. Up until that moment I had done the gatefolds myself—I had worked with photographers on Maggot Brain and Free Your Mind, and with illustrators on America Eats Its Young—but when I looked at Pedro’s letters I started writing him back, and then calling him, to discuss the ideas that were circulating through the band, this idea of highlighting certain problematic aspects of American society but doing it with a sense of humor. They were crystallizing into our next record, which we were calling Cosmic Slop after its title track, which was a deep, funky song about a woman who turns to prostitution to support her family. Lots of soul and rock acts were engaging in social commentary at that time, as the hangover of Vietnam changed the way the nation thought about itself. A song like Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” while brilliant, was more digestible by the mainstream: Motown artists were staying more or less in the soul pocket, coming out slightly to the contemporary rock crowd with a wah-wah pedal. We were accustomed to ranging so far and wide that we couldn’t see the place where we had started from, and even if “Cosmic Slop” couldn’t possibly be as extreme as “Free Your Mind,” it wasn’t as conventional as “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” either. We wanted both the chromatics of Jimi Hendrix and a realistic shot at the radio.
I talked through the title song with Pedro on the telephone, and his mind translated it into a strange vision, told in a half-visual and half-verbal language. When he sent us his interpretation, I was blown away—it included pimps and hos, some of which were drawn as aliens with little worms coming out of them. It was nightmarish and funny and beautiful, a perfect fit for the music we were making, and it became the cover art for Cosmic Slop. Even then, Pedro didn’t really want to take too much
in the way of payment. He had a day job at a bank in Chicago, though he doodled constantly on his clothes. His mother used to tell me, “George, will you explain to him that this is reality, that this is life?” He saw the bank as a way of earning wages and the art as a way of expressing himself, and in his mind there was no overlap.
To this day, Pedro’s covers are many people’s point of entry for Funkadelic albums. When people talk about Cosmic Slop, for example, they talk as much about the cover art as anything else: the way that the screaming face is inset into the woman’s Afro, her vampire fangs, the map on one nipple and the stereo dial on the other, the strange yellow bug off to the right of the woman with Pedro’s signature along its body. Or at least I think it’s yellow. I’m color-blind, and many of his finest drawings are so close together value-wise that I can’t really make them out. I’ve had them described to me a thousand times by fans and other band members, and maybe that’s no substitute for the original art, but as another song from Cosmic Slop explains, “You can’t miss what you can’t measure.”
The rest of that album worked within the tone set by the title song—in strangeness, in style, in broad scope and gallows humor and visionary imagination. There’s “Nappy Dugout,” a vicious, low groove that Boogie brought us wedded to a lyrical idea I got from something a girl said to me about pussy: “You’re just trying to get some nappy dugout.” Lots of ideas arrive along that route, from what you hear somebody say or what you think you hear them say. Boogie’s track was so funky that I didn’t have to add too many words to it; my job was to make my point and get out of the way. The final step was to let Bernie take his shot at it, add his keyboard parts around the bass. Bernie, like Sly, liked Bach quite a bit, and both of them used his theory of counterpoint, which is about setting melodies up on top of one another to create something larger. Bernie’s understanding was a bit more classical than Sly’s, but both had a way of making different parts that wove in and out of each other.
Cosmic Slop also included one of our most direct protest songs, “March to the Witch’s Castle,” which dealt with the plight of soldiers returning from Vietnam. It was structured like a sermon, or a news report followed by a benediction.
We were hippies, sure, and we were opposed to the war—most of youth culture was—but we never had anything against the soldiers. They did the bravest thing imaginable, and we had known some of them. “March to the Witch’s Castle” was a song that reflected the headlines—the album came out only months after the start of Operation Homecoming, which brought back the first POWs—but also one that reached far back into pop-music history. In 1959, a soul singer named Dee Clark released a song called “Hey Little Girl (in the High School Sweater)” on Abner Records, which was a sublabel of Vee-Jay. The B-side was a ballad, “It Wasn’t for Love,” with a high, keening melody, and I used it for “March to the Witch’s Castle.” But when you take something, you have to treat it right. We had a guitarist in Funkadelic named Ron Bykowski who had started as a roadie but learned to play on a Les Paul guitar, which has what guitar players call sustain—once you get a note, you can hold it forever. When I brought around “It Wasn’t for Love,” he took it right up and turned it into something completely new. He’s also on another song on the record, “No Head, No Backstage Pass,” where he has an amazing solo. He played it forward but it sounds backward. That one has become a hip-hop staple: Public Enemy sampled it and Rakim did, too.
Cosmic Slop was an example of how we could only get to political songwriting through outré songwriting. Straightforward political messages came with risks: risks of being ejected from the pop realm, risks of resistance, and so on. Marvin Gaye largely backed off of protest songs after “What’s Going On.” Curtis Mayfield remained topical but detoured into film soundtracks. There was one principal exception to that rule, and he was a principal exception to every rule: Stevie Wonder. If you were Stevie Wonder, you could do anything you wanted. He had started young enough to be able to absorb lessons from everyone else: Marvin, Smokey, Ray Charles, James Brown, and so on. He could do a soul cover of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” when he was a teenager, and then start to write his own socially conscious material, never losing sight of the pop market.
As we evolved, other black music icons were in transition. It was a strange time for James Brown. He was still doing it like he did, but he was mostly about singles, which were a dying market. The only consistently impressive thing he put out during that period was the 1972 live Apollo record. Onstage he was that motherfucker still, even in his forties, and I saw plenty of bands who spent their entire careers trying to tap into that same energy. Other bands were regional stars: Dyke and the Blazers in Buffalo, Chuck Brown in D.C., the Meters in New Orleans. I kept track of all those bands, but because of my interest in reaching a broader audience, I was thinking as much about rock acts like Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. Jimi was on my mind constantly during the time we were recording Cosmic Slop. I thought about where he started from and how far out he had gone. He had gone so far out, in fact, that he had to come back to earth a bit, first with Electric Ladyland and then with Band of Gypsies, which was a hell of a record but was more conservative, his take on contemporary R&B. Jimi wasn’t the only one. Eric Clapton came back from Cream and started making traditional rock and roll, which turned into roots music. Sly went out there, but he couldn’t stay out there long. We got out there, nearly, with Cosmic Slop, and the view was breathtaking, but the air was thin. So we came back, too, following Isaac Newton’s most basic principle: for every upstroke there is an equal and opposite downstroke.
EVERYBODY GET UP FOR THE DOWN STROKE
Neil Bogart was an East Coast guy like me, and like me he had drifted into the Midwest during the sixties. He was a singer at first, and he recorded a few singles that made the chart, including one called “Bobby,” but a few singles didn’t make for a career, and Neil stayed in the record business by becoming a big shot on the business side. He ran the Midwestern offices of the Cameo-Parkway label before the feds shut it down for stock fraud, and then he went back to New York to head up Buddah Records, where he was a master of radio pop. With bands like the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, he practically invented bubblegum. In Detroit, we knew each other around town, liked each other in style and substance both. When Jeffrey Bowen had called me about the record that became Osmium, I had dreams of pairing with Neil, who was distributing Hot Wax, but we ended up at Invictus instead.
Soon after Funkadelic released America Eats Its Young, I heard that Neil was putting together a new label with the backing of Warner Bros. He wanted to call it Casablanca, which was a typical Neil move. It had always been his favorite movie because of his last name, but it was also opportunistic because the movie rights resided with Warner Bros., which meant he could use the name without fear of legal repercussions. He always had a vision, and his plan for Casablanca involved complete radio dominance. Interestingly, though, he imagined that it would happen through bands who were making types of music that weren’t quite on the radio yet. He signed Kiss (they came on at the same time as we did) and Donna Summer (she arrived a few years later), and within a few years Casablanca dominated seventies radio in multiple categories: heavy metal, disco, and, of course, funk.
But what was funk? More to the point, what was P-Funk? After the Osmium record, and Invictus’s mishandling of it, the Parliament name drifted back to us. At the very least, Invictus was in no position to do anything if we started using it again—they had more or less fallen apart as a label. I was ready to restart Parliament for Casablanca, though this time around I had a different idea about what the band would sound like. In the Osmium era, Parliament had been an outlet for the Motown side of our personality, the place where more traditional material went, and Funkadelic had been our chance to stretch out—in length of songs, in subject matter, in philosophy and image. But the message got a little muddled by the weaker production style. From the start, the second-generation Parliam
ent was conceived as something a little different. I wanted to do a record in the style of the Beatles—horns, strings, complex arrangements—but also aim straight for radio R&B. It was like jazzy James Brown, or a pop Pink Floyd. We had a huge stable of musicians at this point and we were learning to use everyone properly, figuring out who could contribute riffs, who was best at decorating existing songs, who could come up with the best slogans.
When I brought the idea to Neil, he was excited, but he had one major stipulation. If we were going to move forward with Parliament, we needed a more traditional front man. He was as clear about this as Dave Kapralik had been in the Osmium days. Though this was an extremely conventional model, it was radical for us. Funkadelic was a band that was sprawling and democratic. We moved out in all directions, stylistically and otherwise. We used the wings of the stage. Now we were being told that if Parliament was to be reborn on Casablanca, it would need a clear focal point. I agreed, somewhat reluctantly. I didn’t necessarily see things the same way as Neil. But I also knew that Neil was the only record man who could get on board with our ideas, and even advance them. He was that energetic, that innovative, that committed to his artists. The trick, then, was to find a front man. Bootsy was still a few years away from being able to do that for us. He was a Bootsy-in-waiting, really: a William still. So the responsibility fell to me.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 11
