As Funkadelic went under a groove, Parliament went under the water. I had been fishing my whole life, from the time I was a little boy. I loved the peacefulness, the way it took you away from the rest of the world. Starting in the mid-seventies, I started visiting Miami and chartering boats, sometimes to take us all the way out to Bimini. We were on the same boat, the Sea Spirit, for years until they took it out of commission and used it for Miami Vice: it was where the alligator lived. I started to notice that there was an entire genre of fishing signs, these cheesy, friendly, sometimes almost cartoonish posters and cards hawking bait and explaining etiquette. There was a lure named Mr. Wiggles with a funny little worm drawing. There was a place named Number One Bimini Road. That world became the basis for the next Parliament project. We had been in the ghetto, electing a black government. We had been in the lab, making clones. We had been in space. Now we decided to make a concept album about raising Atlantis in the name of the funk: Motor Booty Affair. The title is a layered pun: “motor booty” instead of motor boat, and also instead of Motor City—it was an illustration of the way that the Detroit sound had evolved since Motown. I wrote about regular dolphins and card sharks, made celebrity puns along aquatic lines (that album has the immortal Howard Codsell). I had fish jokes for days, so many that I saved some of them for a later solo record, You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish.
The album also expanded the P-Funk character gallery. Star Child had come along for Mothership Connection. Sir Nose showed up on Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. For Motor Booty Affair, the new character came directly from the signs I had seen at bait shops. It was Mr. Wiggles, the worm. We populated the ocean of Motor Booty Affair with mermaids and fish and everything you’d expect to see, but also with tribes from Africa who left the plains and went into the ocean. Mr. Wiggles was another clone of Dr. Funkenstein who had decided to become an underwater emissary for the funk. He was the one who threw the party.
I’m Mr. Wiggles the worm
These are my ladies Giggle and Squirm
There wasn’t much filler on any of the Parliament albums, but Motor Booty Affair was particularly consistent. “Mr. Wiggles” phased right into “Rumpofsteelskin,” a variation on the butt-centricity (and self-empowerment) of the album title:
Rumpofsteelskin, he don’t rust and he don’t bend
He’s got dynamite sticks by the megatons in his butt
“(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” was a lush love song left over from my Hawaii writing session. “Liquid Sunshine” was a pop song, almost psychedelic, the kind of thing you might have heard back in 1968, but with a funk twist. And “Deep,” which runs more than nine minutes, poked into pretty much every remaining corner: political organization, NIMBYism, and raising Atlantis to the top.
The biggest song on the album, though, was “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” which came together in the same way as other signature Parliament songs like “Give Up the Funk” and “Flash Light.” It has a burbling bass line that Bernie translated from a classical cello part, and crazy bird calls that I was doing (from the old Tarzan movies—they all had the same bird). “Aqua Boogie” is about Sir Nose refusing to swim; even though it’s pleasurable, he sees it as another form of dancing, something that interferes with his perpetual cool. “Ahh, let go of my leg,” he says, almost screaming. “I hate water.” “Aqua Boogie” went up to number one on the R&B chart and parked there for a month. “Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop” dwarfed “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis.” Was it the longest word ever in a hit song title? Not quite, since it’s exactly the same length as “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” from Mary Poppins, and “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” from Isaac Hayes. Great minds think alike, and think along.
Musically, Motor Booty Affair was an extension of Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome: funk as we had designed and refined it, but with an even greater sense of its own status as entertainment. Richard “Kush” Griffith and Junie did some of the arrangements, and they took them to the edge of what was acceptable for pop music. We had cabaret styles, Vegas-type arrangements. We had fanfares, like we were announcing a horse race. Junie had done some of that when he was with the Ohio Players, but on Motor Booty Affair he ran wild with it. That kind of thing might have sounded corny in another environment, but we were already so far out there that we weren’t interested in coming back. Other bands kept their distance from anything that smacked of pure entertainment: they wanted to be serious, or spiritual, or Afro-cultural. In some cases, they even worried that we were making a mockery of what black pop music was becoming, somehow risking its legitimacy. “Man,” they said, “don’t mess it up.” But we weren’t messing anything up. We were moving into territory that I associated mainly with the Beatles. Even though it was more than a decade old at that point, I was still fucked up from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It had so many styles, from avant-garde rock and roll to song craft that was almost like Rodgers and Hammerstein, that it became a style all its own. Motor Booty Affair is, for me, our Beatles peak: it’s the most ambitious record, the most layered, the one that’s most ripe for rediscovery.
That feeling extends beyond the music. We had always known that there was a strong visual element to the record: it says so right on it, “A Motion Picture Underwater.” And Overton went all-out with his illustration, starting with the way he incorporated little butts into the capital letters on the title: the M, the B, and the A. And he drew an incredible inside piece, a full gatefold mural of the world he had imagined. To this day, it’s one of my favorite moments in the history of P-Funk art. Everything about that album was fun. Everyone fell into the concept willingly, enthusiastically. Maybe the Beatles analogy needs a little fine-tuning. Maybe it’s not just that the record was ambitious sonically, or that it was stylistically diverse, but that it had a sense of humor that extended over the whole project, a kind of comic self-awareness. And maybe, then, in Beatle-speak, it’s not our Sgt. Pepper’s, but our Yellow Submarine. For me, that movie changed the game completely, as much as any Beatles record. It was a perfect monument of nonsense, a way to take grown-up topics and statements and play them off as kid stuff. There’s a monster in that movie that starts to suck fish out of the sea, and then it sucks up the entire sea floor, and then it sucks itself up. That’s the kind of creature that populates Motor Booty Affair, too: a playful darkness. For that record, we all lived in our own Yellow Submarine.
One Nation came out in September, and Motor Booty followed in November. That meant that we had to promote with Warners first, though that was a less-than-ideal situation. Warners was dealing with lots of shit stacked in layers. Someone over there had gotten it in their head that we were going to unite a bunch of groups, take over black music, and then make a run at the pop charts. But we had no interest in uniting Sly and Chaka and Cameo and the rest. If I was going to try new things, it would be with newer, younger acts. I wasn’t going to fuck with people who had already established themselves. Their fear may not have been rational, but it was real, and the result was that they didn’t promote as inventively or as energetically as Neil. He promoted the fuck out of the radio to get a hit, and they were content just to trail along behind, drafting in the wake he was creating.
Neil sent us to Europe to work Motor Booty Affair. Our first stop was London, and early on in that trip someone arranged for us to take a tour of the House of Lords. I went, listened to the tour guide, tried to take it all in, and toward the end of the trip ducked into the bathroom to do some coke. While I was snorting it up, the toilet flushed, and a lord walked out of the stall. He had his wig in his hand. He looked me up and down and said, finally, “I’m sure you’re not the first.” I was scared then a motherfucker. I didn’t know what to say. Plus, it was hard to say anything—my mouth was frozen from the blow. So I resorted to Logic. Logic was this little stuffed animal I carried with me everywhere. When I got in situations that were too sticky to slide out of, I let Logic do the talkin
g. I held him up and the guy actually started talking to him.
About a week later, I was at a club getting drunk with the two promotions guys who had been assigned to me: Lothar, a German guy, and Mike, a Jewish American. They were trying to one-up each other by telling the grossest concentration-camp jokes they could think of. I didn’t think it was funny at all. It was some tedious shit. I collected my stuff and headed back to the hotel. It’s good I did: they got drunker and drunker, got in a fight at the club, and ended up stumbling up to my room and stealing my minibar. When we were checking out, the hotel clerk ran his finger over the bill. “Mr. Lothar,” he said. “It seems like you had quite a night.” They had thrown my minibar out of the window, and then thrown their own. When they got clear enough of their hangover, they told me the good news: that while they were in the club, they heard “One Nation Under a Groove,” and that the place was going crazy for it. Here we were, promoting Parliament, and our Funkadelic record was taking off under our noses.
After London, “One Nation” was rocket propelled. When we got to Luxembourg it was number one already, and the same thing happened in Germany. It went all around the world, taking over, and we followed it.
And so that was the end of Anti-Touring. From the start, we knew that the Motor Booty stage show was going to be a motherfucker. We were fully into the Broadway mentality. We had fish costumes for everyone in the band. We had giant, brightly colored coral. There was even a thought early on of putting a tank of water on the stage and performing behind it, though we decided on something more theatrical and simpler: fans laying flat and crepe paper blowing up like seaweed. Nene suggested building huge dolphin statues and suspending them over the crowd; he even had some friends in Mexico make them out of cement. As nervous as I had been during the Mothership tour when the little ship was out over the audience, I definitely wasn’t putting no motherfucking five-hundred-pound dolphin above people’s heads.
The Motor Booty Tour was scheduled to open at Madison Square Garden at the beginning of 1979, but somebody filed the wrong paper or made the wrong call, and the trucks with all the equipment got sent ahead to Milwaukee. We arrived at the Garden to find that we had no props. Many of the band members wanted to cancel, and some of them even went ahead to Milwaukee, but canceling was one of my hang-ups: when people paid to see us, I thought, we had to deliver. We had the Brides with us, along with some of Bootsy’s musicians, and we cobbled together a group that could play the Motor Booty material. I was scared to death about how the crowd would react. We had tiny little amps that couldn’t communicate the power of the band. We had promised water and couldn’t deliver it. I made opening remarks to the crowd: “Most people wouldn’t perform under these circumstances but we’re going to perform anyway,” I said. “The only water’s going to be if you sweat. If you want your money back, ask.” It ended up being one of the best shows we ever did. Only seven people asked for refunds.
The tour became a monster. In Washington, D.C., we were the headliners at RFK Stadium for a bill that included a bunch of go-go bands. People in D.C. love their go-go, and they stretched out their sets. The whole show was supposed to be finished by 9:30 P.M., but it was already 10:30 by the time Bootsy went on. He played a tighter set than usual, but we didn’t take the stage until eleven. There were curfew laws in effect, union restrictions, and we were told in no uncertain terms that it would cost $10,000 every thirty minutes. Tiger Flower, Darryll and Carol, were freaking out. They had dreams of boats and houses and cars, and as it got closer to overtime it became clearer that they were going to have to pay penalties. “George has to go on,” Archie said. “He’s the headliner.” They said that it was either Parliament-Funkadelic or Bootsy, but that it couldn’t be both. Archie kept insisting, and Tiger Flower stormed out.
A few minutes later, Archie got a call from our booking agent at the time, David Libert. He was frantic. “Archie,” he said. “George can’t go on. They have me in a van with a gun to my head. I do believe that they’re going to kill me.”
Archie laughed. “David,” he said. “These people aren’t killers.” There were some people he would have worried about, but Tiger Flower weren’t among them. “Besides,” Archie said, “if George doesn’t go on, there’s going to be a riot, and who knows how many people will be killed or hurt then.”
We went on. Penalties were assessed. As a result of the penalties, Tiger Flower didn’t pay the sound company, which meant that the next night, at the Richmond Coliseum, the sound company stiffed us. They didn’t show up with our equipment. We didn’t panic. We banded together with the other groups on the bill—L.T.D. and the Bar-Kays and Evelyn “Champagne” King—took everyone’s equipment, and built a sound wall. Nobody thought that it would work, and everyone was afraid to try. Finally, Evelyn stepped up. She was the youngest of the bunch. “Show got to go on,” she said. We all played with that sound wall, and it worked perfectly. At the show, we had a huge One Nation flag, big enough to cover a portion of the football field, and it wasn’t until we were packing up after the show that we noticed that the flag had disappeared. It must have taken thirty people to carry it off, but we haven’t seen it since.
That year was like ten years all in one: it was heady and dizzying and liberating. Along with the main records, we were putting out extra records at a clip: the Brides, Parlet, Bootsy, a second record from the Horny Horns. Bernie Worrell’s solo record, All the Woo in the World, came out right around then, too, and that ended up being one of my favorite P-Funk side projects. It had one set band and an excellent sound, very tight, very artsy-fartsy. This was also one of the rare times that Bernie came forward into the spotlight. He majored in accompanying in music school and that’s what he does best, and what he does most. He’ll step up behind you and make you sound like the best thing in the world. But All the Woo in the World proved that there was also magic when he was at the center of things.
The new wave of side projects brought us in contact with a whole new crop of artists and musicians. The Parlet and Horny Horns records featured artwork by Ronald Edwards, who went by the name Stozo the Clown. Stozo was like a junior Overton; when we played Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., he used to come up to us and show pictures he had drawn of me, Sly Stone, and James Brown. And we acquired another P-Funk guitar hero: Blackbyrd McKnight. Blackbyrd was an old friend of Archie’s. He used to jam with Archie’s college band in Archie’s garage, and he had gone on to play with Herbie Hancock’s band, the Headhunters. As we were putting the Brides together, he came to us as a lead player, and we quickly brought him into the main P-Funk fold. From the start, he brought an incredible mix of professionalism and invention; he was one of the most profound guitar players we had ever worked with, almost at the level of Eddie Hazel. Eddie had so much more feeling than anyone else, but Blackbyrd was versatile in ways that you had to see and hear to believe. He could just pick up a guitar and play a classical piece note-for-note without studying sheet music. That meant that we could try things with him that we wouldn’t have even bothered trying before. We had so many ideas about where P-Funk might go. We were going to do records where the artists were our lawyers, records where the roadies played and sang. They were all citizens of the nation we were founding, and the sky wasn’t even the limit. We had been in space.
There were some sad notes, of course. At times reality descended. Glen Goins had left, along with Jerome Brailey, to start a band called Quazar. They recorded an album for Arista, but before the record could come out, Glen passed. He had Hodgkin’s disease, had been sick in fact as long as we had known him. When he first got with us, they told him he only had two or three months to live. He ended up surviving another three years. Tiki Fulwood also passed, from stomach cancer. We were all young men then—I wasn’t yet forty—so to lose friends and bandmates to illness wasn’t anything that made sense.
Another source of pain seemed like a pleasure at first. Near the end of the year, I was doing coke with a limo driver, a girl, and she turned to
me and said, “You’ve got to try this.” Right there in her hand was a freebase pipe. I took it. I tried it. The first motherfucking hit off the pipe, I thought I had found acid again. It was so good and powerful that it was like busting a nut. When that first high finally passed, I knew I had to have it again, as soon as I could. What I didn’t know at the time—what I couldn’t have known—is how long I would spend trying to find my way back to that initial surge of good feeling, and what the cost would be.
NEVER MISSIN’ A BEAT
One Nation Under a Groove created a new idea for the next Funkadelic record, Uncle Jam Wants You. We had toyed with a kind of new funk patriotism, and we took that one step further, along with bringing some of the Afrocentric elements of the music into the light. For the first time since America Eats Its Young, we didn’t use a piece of Pedro’s art for the cover. Instead, there’s a photo that shows me sitting in a wicker chair, in a parody of the famous Huey Newton portrait. Some people read the image as threatening, or paramilitary, but they were only looking at the surface. I was never a huge fan of the Black Power movement. I admired their aims, but I was more about dogs than dogma. I wasn’t likely to get into a shootout with Black Panthers and Simba Wachanga, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to get caught in the crossfire. Just as disconcerting, though, were the White Panthers. They were a presence in Detroit in the late sixties and early seventies. I supported the general idea of John Sinclair’s freedom, but his followers made a habit of going around to black men and saying, “Hey, brother, are you on our side?” This sounded strange to me, like words that were losing aim as they traveled. They weren’t brothers in blackness. Were they brothers in humanity? If so, why were they doing something strange with the word, moving it into this space where it sounded like SDS-type shit? In my mind, the message was always snarled when you had people pointing at a power structure and condemning it as they went about installing themselves at the head of a new one. I was more strategically naïve, trying to get to the best of times through the jest of times. Military icons and symbols had been considered a central part of revolution, but to me they were also a central part of comedy, and that’s how I ended up there in the Huey Newton chair, sitting in the middle of a Funkadelic cover with the One Nation flag and two Parliament props, the Bop Gun and the flashlight.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 19
