What I had in mind was big: bigger than the Beatles at Shea, bigger than Tommy. There was nothing to compare it to at the time, and it would be years before bands like Boston came along with comparable arena-rock props. Ina Meibach, our lawyer, put us in touch with Jules Fisher, who was one of the premier lighting designers on Broadway. He had done Hair. He had done Jesus Christ Superstar. We explained the concept to him and he got it right away. He had the idea to add a little one. He wanted us to arrive in it. The idea was that the small one could fly over the audience, sort of like the Mother’s Finest firecracker, and I would be inside the big one, which would descend to the stage.
Even before Mothership Connection appeared in stores, I was already pushing ahead to the next album. That’s how we worked: overlapping recording schedules, ideas spilling into new ideas. We had to maintain cruising altitude and velocity.
In the fall of 1975 I was in Dallas, at the airport, following a show at the convention center. The system of shuttles between terminals had just opened, and I was the only one on the train that morning. Right there on the seat next to me there was a book called Clones. I picked it up and read the first sentences, which said something like, “Steve Swanson had docked spaceships on planets, but he could never get used to the train at the Dallas airport.” The book was fiction, but it was talking about the very same train that I was on. That was strange. Even stranger was the fact that when I got to Portland, Oregon, the first thing I saw in every magazine stand was the same Clones book. It was just being launched. But so was the Dallas inter-terminal shuttle system. How could a new book have a reference in it to an equally new train?
I had always liked science fiction because of how creative the ideas were, and this particular book seemed to be sending me a message. If it wasn’t fate, exactly, it was at least coincidence, and sometimes that was good enough. After I checked in to my hotel in Portland, I went to the public library, where I checked out H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and some other books about cloning. They summarized the thinking about genetics and what constitutes original life, though the librarian explained to me that if I wanted access to the actual experiments the government had conducted, I would need to go through the Freedom of Information Act. That intrigued me even more. I was always open to new concepts, and when I started reading around about cloning, it really resonated with me. In a way, that’s what I was doing. It was true in a narrow sense in the way that the Parliaments became Funkadelic became Parliament—we transplanted personnel and grew a new organism—but it was true in a broader sense of all art and all ideas. You take a piece and you replicate. That’s what we were doing back at the hula hoop factory, grabbing a strip of plastic, twisting it, and stapling it together. Each strip exactly resembled the one before it and the one after it. They were products that retained more than a shimmer of the original idea; they carried the entire idea, perfectly. Along with the commercial implications, there was a spiritual part of the equation. In one book, there was an anecdote about how a woman in a lab had created a hundred salamanders from a single cell. That seemed amazing and futuristic. But it also tied back into something I had been thinking about since Chariots of the Gods, which is that death can be defeated by science. If you’re in ancient Egypt and you’re embalming someone, keeping them in that state forever, that seems like a hope that you’ll see them living again one day. Cloning was cutting-edge science that answered age-old questions about mortality.
The resulting album, sparked by the book and the ideas that were circling around it in my mind, came together quickly. “Children of Production,” for example, looked at the beings that might result from a process like this.
“Do That Stuff,” which turned out to be the single, was a blazing funk song. “Gamin’ on Ya!” had that elastic Bootsy feel that we had perfected back on Chocolate City. But the title song was where I started to sketch the outlines of a more elaborate and internally consistent P-Funk mythology. On Mothership Connection, we had introduced Star Child, an interplanetary being who helped bring funk to Earth. (Decades later, there was an archaeology initiative called the Starchild Project that dealt with a prehistoric skull found in Mexico.) On Clones, we added Dr. Funkenstein, who was my alter ego. He was Star Child’s boss, a kind of emperor of intergalactic funk, and he introduced himself via song: “Call me the big pill, Dr. Funkenstein, the disco fiend with the monster sound.”
Dr. Funkenstein was me. I was Dr. Funkenstein. Expressing myself through characters was comfortable to me. More than that, it made good sense, creatively and financially. I had always liked cartoons, the anarchic humor and the clear lines and the redundant, almost archetypal plots. I always thought I connected to them on a deeper level, but I wasn’t sure how. One day, watching TV around the house, I saw a special on Mickey Mouse, and that’s when it hit me: I liked cartoons because they were some of the purest examples of characters, and characters were the closest that humanity came to immortality. People aged, but characters never did. You could work with them forever, adapt them to the time, reupholster them to reflect the changes in society. Once again, this tied back into the anxiety I had felt as far back as “Testify,” that we were just a guitarist, a drummer, and an old fool. Adopting psychedelic styles for Funkadelic temporarily took the edge off. But Parliament had put us back in the crosshairs of the popular imagination. We were on the chart, and that meant that we were in grave danger of slipping off the chart. Characters prevented that problem permanently.
Neil supported us through all of it. I’m not sure he understood the band very well at that point, but he had our back, both because he was a promotions man and because there was no arguing with success. It reminded me of the Beatles a little bit, and how they had such an easy time for their experiments. Once they got on a roll, once they were the Beatles with a capital B, everything they did mattered and every thought they had was valid. People were predisposed to listen to them: more than that, they felt left out if they didn’t listen. But before an artist is on that kind of roll, it’s a completely different story. If I had shown up at a label executive’s office in 1966 and announced that I wanted to do a funk concept album about clones, I would have been thrown right out the door. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have made it past the word funk.
The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein was recorded at United Sound, and most of it was recorded quickly. The template for the music was basic funk—a little more fundamental and straightforward than some of the other records from that time—although it’s also a high point for how we used the horns. Fred and Bernie went wild with the horn arrangements on that album. They would do the same song: one would do half, and the other the other half. Bernie hated to do stock arrangements. I would tell him to do it artsy-fartsy, jazzy. Fred was going to be funky no matter what he was going to do, based on his training. That gave the whole project real color, a chromatic diversity.
In keeping with the feel—fast, dirty ideas taking precedence over budgets—I designed the cover photo myself. I set up a doctor’s office and used tinfoil to get that space-alien look. It shows Dr. Funkenstein making another Dr. Funkenstein in the laboratory, and it’s supposed to be reminiscent of clone armies. The Boys from Brazil had come out that year, not the movie with Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier but the Ira Levin novel it was based on, and I was playing off that kind of thing.
If The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein was a shot in the arm for Parliament, there was still the matter of the broader P-Funk empire, and what other characters might rise out of the democratic murk of Funkadelic. How would the funk be cloned and cloned again? What were the productive mutations? One of the answers was right under my nose the whole time.
In the months after Chocolate City, Bootsy and I had started wearing rhinestones and studs in our jeans, dressing in the fashion of the times, though we made our clothes ourselves. Over the summer, we were in New York, going to see our lawyer Ina Meibach. Much of our day was spent walking up and down the avenues, looking at girls and buildings, maki
ng jokes and puns, and at some point I came up with a little lyrical hook: “Stretching out in a rubber band.” I didn’t think of it as a group name, a Rubber Band, but more as an image, an image of exploration and permissiveness. Bootsy picked up on it, and soon we had an expanded version, “Stretching out, kind of hanging loose, in a rubber band.” When Bootsy added his little flourish—“Hallelujah!”—we knew we had the foundation of a hit. When we left New York, we went straight back to Detroit and cut it at United Sound. The character was in place from the start, largely because of Bootsy’s vocals. But there was also a strong shift in the lyrics toward a kind of innocent sexuality, something that was childlike without being childish. Where Parliament was complex and cutting-edge, sometimes nerdy, sometimes sleazy, Bootsy was almost like a human cartoon, but with a true-believer kind of evangelism about the power of the funk. The very beginning of that very first song is a pretty straightforward manifesto.
Hallelujah! They call me Casper!
Not the friendly ghost but the holy ghost! Dig!
In that first phase of presenting Bootsy, there was another little nod to Mother’s Finest, just as there had been with the Mothership. They had a bass player named Jerry Seay who went by the name “Wyzard,” and he had such an outsize personality and look that it made sense for him to be out in front of the rest of the band. Bootsy took this to a new level. Since he was such a great live performer, I knew we would have to develop a character for him that could translate to the stage, a pose, an outfit, a style. Even back when he and Catfish had been in the House Guests, they had dressed like the most outré Funkadelics, so he had that sense of style: the on-the-edge outfits, the not-of-this-world affect. As it would turn out, the most important part of his costume was the star-shaped glasses. I got him those somewhere in New York. At first the lenses were littler, the size of John Lennon’s glasses but in the shape of stars. Later, we had a pair made with larger lenses, and they became his trademark, as important as Mickey Mouse’s ears or Popeye’s biceps.
Bootsy’s emergence as a solo artist was a long time coming. Ever since I first saw him in Cincinnati, when Mallia Franklin brought us around to meet the Collins boys, I knew there was a character in there waiting to get out. The concept was blurry at first, but it got clearer on Chocolate City (where he contributed Mu-tron-powered tracks like “Ride On”) and on Let’s Take It to the Stage (when he started doing that gentle, cartoony falsetto on “Be My Beach”). But Bootsy wasn’t just about Bootsy. As luck would have it, there actually was a Rubber Band, and they took center stage on that first record. They were basically Bootsy’s group from Cincinnati—him, Catfish, and Frank Waddy—and we added in lots of P-Funk personnel: Garry Shider and Glen Goins and Bernie and myself. Boogie, who played bass in the main group, switched over to drums on some of Bootsy’s recordings. It was a hell of a band. His singers were unbelievable: Robert “P-Nut” Johnson and Gary “Mudbone” Cooper. They brought the whole enterprise into the stratosphere. We had met them in Baltimore when they were touring with an R&B singing group, so we knew how perfectly Bone could do all the Sly and James Brown tricks and anything else that was happening in early-seventies R&B. Pat Lewis, who I had worked with since the Golden World years, was on to him at once. She saw how versatile he was, how committed he was to trying (and perfecting) new techniques. She was right to spot that trait in him, and she was right that it mattered. Shit was always evolving. You don’t want to be standing on a second when the clock moves. And Gary was the best there was at almost everything: he could sing, play, arrange, whatever. He had played with Shirley Caesar and lots of other gospel groups back in Jersey.
That first Rubber Band record came out in August 1976, at exactly the same time as Mothership Connection. I saw them both for the first time in Bimini, where I went with Bootsy. We were surprised as hell to see that Mothership was out, because we had just finished it a week before. The record was the culmination of lots of the experiments that we were doing. We used tons of novelty effects, voices that were sped up and slowed down, arrangements that shifted briefly to gospel and then returned to traditional R&B. We had been doing so much crazy shit with Funkadelic that this was almost straight by comparison, but it had a commercial clarity that Funkadelic didn’t. The songs we wrote for him worked out beautifully. The first single released was “I’d Rather Be with You,” a ballad with a bare minimum of the trickery, and radio took to it. Even though it was silly-serious, it was a love song, with a clear message. Then we released the title song, “Stretchin’ Out (in a Rubber Band),” an anthem that announced the new band’s arrival. There are also songs on there that are pretty far out there, like “Psychoticbumpschool,” the third single, which was pretty much a Funkadelic composition filtered through Bootsy’s band. Even though we had singles, we weren’t thinking in terms of singles. We were still thinking back toward artists like Jimi Hendrix. He sold albums, and Bootsy was doing the same thing, but with R&B as the foundation rather than the blues and a Mu-tron bass rather than the guitar. This album also marked the first time I truly understood what people like Neil and Dave Kapralik had been telling me: that art needed something bright to pop so the people could see it. For years, I had been saying that I understood it, but when I saw that picture of Bootsy on a motorcycle with a white suit and those star glasses, the force of it hit me all at once. It was iconic and breathtaking. It was easier to get your mind around than Funkadelic. I guess I was a slow learner. Right from the start, Bootsy brought in younger fans, who we started to call “geepies.” Fans liked his persona, the way he came on like a cross between a blaxploitation movie character and a Saturday-morning cartoon. He had a shy psychedelic cool that drove them wild, and that helped us inch closer to total demographic domination. Bootsy was bringing in the preteens while we maintained our hold on the rest: the teenagers who had jumped on during Chocolate City, the adults who had been with Funkadelic since Maggot Brain, and even the gray-hairs who remembered us when we were the Parliaments.
PUT A GLIDE IN YOUR STRIDE AND A DIP IN YOUR HIP AND COME ON UP TO THE MOTHERSHIP
We spent the fall of that bicentennial year up in Newburgh, New York, with the entire population of the P-Funk nation. We traveled with thirty or forty musicians then, plus our crew. We commandeered a local motel and set up shop. We were in Newburgh as a prelude to our fall tour, and we needed all the time we could get to prepare. We had a tremendous amount of material to rehearse: Clones, for starters, and Bootsy’s first record, but also Tales of Kidd Funkadelic, which would truly be our final Westbound album, and Hardcore Jollies, our Funkadelic debut for Warner Bros. But mostly we were there to figure how to play alongside the actual Mothership, the one that I had imagined, that Jules Fisher had built, and that sat smack in the middle of Hangar E at Stewart Airport in New Windsor, about fifteen miles west of Newburgh.
An airport hangar is a strange place to rehearse, even if you do have a spaceship. It was absolutely cavernous, to the point where Bootsy could be down at one end with his band and we could be at the other with the spaceship, and we could both be playing and we wouldn’t interfere with each other. Down on our end, we had basically built the stage out to look as it would on tour. The P-Funk stage equipment had come from Aerosmith, who had retired it in 1976. We had a kind of indirect history with them: Bernie had played with Joey Kramer in Chubby and the Turnpikes, and we ended up having the same manager for a minute. I saw them as a funk band, strangely enough—they played loose and with rhythm, which you can hear in a later song like “Rag Doll.” The only other rock band capable of that was Led Zeppelin, and only onstage: when they went into the studio they started tinkering with effects and complexity. And the ship—well, it was all I had hoped for and more. It looked like some kind of unholy cross between an American car from the late fifties and early sixties, a piece of equipment from a children’s playground, and a giant insect. It was awesome. I went into a black box, sort of like a magician’s cabinet, at the base of the ship, came up via an elevator, and then, as
smoke and lights went crazy, appeared at the top of the steps. It made for quite an entrance. Soul music had never seen anything like it—for that matter, neither had rock and roll. It was like a Broadway show in the most elaborate sense, or what Las Vegas would become decades later.
To pay off the stagecraft, we had to make sure that we were just as impressive musically. In Newburgh, we rehearsed with a degree of professionalism and commitment that was, at least in our history, unprecedented. After four Parliament albums and half a dozen Funkadelic albums, we were genuinely kaleidoscopic, capable of everything from doo-wop to heavy rock to jazzy horn arrangements. Luckily, we had Maceo Parker overseeing the band, and he’s one of the best in the world at that. He had done a superb job with James Brown’s band, and if you can make it there you can make it anywhere; to say that he was very good at organizing rehearsals and getting musicians to master new material would have been an understatement. You could go to him with a brand-new song that you had never played before, and within fifteen minutes he’d have everyone up on it. Down on the other end of the hangar, Bootsy was doing the same thing with his music, and he was almost as good as Maceo. He rehearsed his band until they all had music coming out of their nose.
Rehearsing P-Funk for the Mothership tour was like deploying an army. Because of all the equipment, all the lighting cues, and the complexity of the staging, it was important to hit certain spots in certain songs at exactly the right time. That stretch spent in Newburgh was really hard, both physically and creatively taxing. We had a tradition of thinking of our music as a living thing, an evolving conversation, and I tended to go off script and improvise while I was onstage. Our new approach cured me of that, quick. What we were doing was more like staging a play. You couldn’t be as crazy high as you used to be, in the psychedelic sense. You couldn’t get carried away. Because of the way the show was choreographed, we started to focus more attention on Garry Shider and Glen Goins. That was fine with me: they were photogenic and energetic, and Glen was particularly important for the Mothership—we needed his strong gospel vocals to call the ship down from the heavens to the stage. Once again we were emphasizing the young guys in the band, which proved to me that we were headed in the right direction. That’s how we kept our currency.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 14
