Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir

by George Clinton

  None of this meant that we weren’t trying for some kind of revolution, only that the revolution we had in mind was peaceful, hedonistic, and prone to winking at itself in the mirror. A record can overturn just by turning, can bring about revolution just by revolving. At its heart, Uncle Jam Wants You was a recruitment poster for music that was fighting for its life; we were trying to keep dance music alive without submitting entirely to disco. “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” the central track on that record, was made with an eye toward trying to identify and isolate the essence of P-Funk. There are sections in there where we stripped down the twenty-four tracks on the mix to one or two, pulled down everything but a few voices. That was a test, for us, and then for audiences: Could P-Funk be identified from a single second on a single song? My argument was that it could. Songs had DNA, which went all the way back to Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. Even if you only had a tiny particle, the rest of the sound was implied. Other songs on the album were reinforcements, in the mock-military sense: “Uncle Jam,” “Field Maneuvers,” “Foot Soldiers (Star Spangled Funky).” If One Nation Under a Groove had been our Declaration of Independence, this demonstrated our willingness to defend that independence.

  As it turned out, we were on war footing, at least where Warner Bros. was concerned. We knew that “(Not Just) Knee Deep” would be a huge single, but it became apparent from the jump that Warners wasn’t going to work the record hard at radio. That meant that we had to do it ourselves, and we took it to jocks like the Electrifying Mojo, who loved it. All of a sudden the song was all over the airwaves in Detroit, and not just in Detroit: in Richmond, and Los Angeles, and other places, too, spreading across the map like it’d been spilled on it. And still Warners was unhappy. I remember getting ready to go onstage and the Warner Bros. promotion man was right next to me, yelling in my ear: “It’s not going to go pop!” There I was, about to step out in front of forty thousand people, with the song hitting in a half dozen cities, and he wanted to talk about what the record wasn’t going to do.

  “Knee Deep” was only the center. Everything was whirling around us. The more funk bands we put out, the more other labels and other producers tried to create funk bands that sounded like us. That was all well and good—it was the sincerest form of flattery—but in fact we were going for something even more visionary. We were thinking in terms of shelf space. I remember conversations we had back then about getting funk separated from soul and R&B in the record store. Our concept was to break it out as a separate category and then fill that category.

  In that climate, as we tried to break categories and make categories, the record label’s primary interest seemed to be to limit our reach. They didn’t want another Motown springing up, and P-Funk was the leading candidate to cause that kind of trouble. There was a precedent for this kind of thinking. Back in the early seventies, the major labels had realized that the vast majority of their profit was coming from black music, and the Columbia Records Group had commissioned the Harvard Business School to do a study and figure out why all those profits were flowing to companies like Motown. That study circulated for years. It became the playbook for putting the freeze on black-music companies. Warners’ moves in those late years of Funkadelic smelled like the Harvard Study.

  Sometimes the Parliament-Funkadelic relationship felt like a seesaw, with the rise of one band coinciding with the decline of the other. Parliament had been riding high from Mothership Connection to Motor Booty Affair, at which point Funkadelic sprang up with One Nation Under a Groove. I was getting six or seven hundred thousand dollars as an advance for each Parliament album, comparable to what pop records were getting and more than most soul records. Even so, as we started work on our next one, I started to feel the tide receding. It was how the system worked. The record business operated on a principle of planned obsolescence. The same was true in other businesses. A suit is cool until it’s not. A pair of shoes is cool until it’s not. That’s how Western capitalism has always worked. Consumers get trained to think that the thing they possess doesn’t meet their needs anymore—even if your car is driving like a dream, you’ll run over every pothole in the world just to bust an axle and get yourself a new one. The only remedy is a new possession. In the record world, for a little while, that means a new album from your favorite band, but soon enough it means a new band.

  The album that emerged from that thinking was Gloryhallastoopid (or Pin the Tale on the Funky), a long title but one that made perfect sense. We were glad and a little surprised to still be around. How could we still be a dominant force in funk music? At the same time, we knew it couldn’t last forever, and we wanted to be in control of the wind-down the same way we had been in charge of the windup. Pinning the tale, or the tail, was a way of beginning to end the story. And in true Parliament fashion, the story we told wasn’t just about the band, but about the whole universe. The prologue summed it up.

  Quarks, gluons, red giants, white dwarfs, big bang

  There are eight billion tales in the naked universe

  It’s the outer-space version of the old joke that opinions are like assholes, because everyone has one, and we went back to cosmology and astronomy again and again. Gloryhallastoopid was our Carl Sagan record, with songs like “The Big Bang Theory” (a dense weave of brass, guitar, and synthesizers) and “Theme from the Black Hole” (which brought back Sir Nose). We were returning to the beginning of time, trying to figure out how existence (and funk) might have started in the first place. Our concerns weren’t all mental and philosophical, of course. “Party People” was a James Brown update: instead of getting on the good foot, we talked about foot funk. “May We Bang You?” has a triple meaning: science, sex, and music. And “Theme from the Black Hole” was all about the relationship between astronomy and ass. As the lyrics said, “a tale is nothing but a long booty,” and the song opened with “a toast to the booty,” then later shifted into a toast to the boogie: “Bottoms up.” The sound was heavy on horns and synthesizers, and much of the new energy, as always, came from new blood: Michael “Clip” Payne, who had started out working with Norman Whitfield at Motown and had been with us since Motor Booty Affair, took on an expanded role in the band, singing and playing keyboards.

  The set of songs was so coherent that we imagined it as a stage play called Popsicle Stick. We actually performed it at the Apollo Theater, the landmark institution in Harlem, which was in jeopardy of being closed down at the time. Artists pitched in, and for our part we played a three-week stand to help the place stay open. Those shows were billed as “George Clinton’s Production of Popsicle Stick,” and I only came onstage in major cities. Mostly, I was back in Detroit with Sly, getting deeper into studio production. The songs were not only theatrical, but were reflecting what was happening in the movies, the same way that Mothership Connection had paralleled Star Wars. A few weeks after Gloryhallastoopid came out, Disney released a science-fiction movie called The Black Hole and it starred, among other actors, Joseph Bottoms. Black hole, bottoms up.

  In addition to probing the mysteries of the universe, Gloryhallastoopid illustrated one of the strangest phenomena in our own little world, which was the way Overton Loyd’s illustrations had of angering people. Overton drew caricatures of everyone in the band, and while some people loved what he did, others couldn’t stand seeing themselves in his funhouse mirror. Roger Troutman, a keyboardist and songwriter who had been a childhood friend of Bootsy’s and joined us around that time, was violently angry at the way Overton made him look: cute, but with big eyebrows and a little devilish. Philippé Wynne tore his up. On Gloryhallastoopid, Overton drew the cover art, and to pay off the pun of the subtitle, he created a donkey character. We divided responsibilities, though, assigning the inside art to Pedro Bell, and in the course of making his Pedro puns, he lettered in something about the “Stone Shitty Band,” which was a takeoff on Rick James’s Stone City Band. Rick put two and two together, somehow got five, and became convinced that the donkey on the cover was supposed to be
him. I told him the donkey was too pretty to be him. It was clean.

  Within a year, Gloryhallastoopid turned true: the tale got pinned. In 1977, Neil had sold half of Casablanca to Polygram Records, and they would buy him out entirely in 1980. From the start, Polygram wasn’t happy about the way Neil spent money. To say that he didn’t run it like a bottom-line business was an understatement. He put nearly every penny of profit back into promotion, from stunts to parties to whatever else came to mind. On top of that, there was the matter of his sales figures. He pressed so many copies of each record and shipped so many that on the books it looked like he was selling a billion records. But somehow most of those records ended up coming back to him; people liked to say that Neil shipped gold and returned platinum. It was a good system for the Casablanca artists—we benefited from the inflated sales figures and from his lavish promotions—but it wasn’t as good for a corporation in for 50 percent. The tension between the label and the corporation escalated. Polygram sent out one accountant to check Neil’s numbers, but within a couple weeks he had been turned: he was driving around town in a Porsche with a coke spoon around his neck, and he didn’t seem too concerned about Casablanca’s finances. The second guy was German, and he hung in there long enough to find evidence that Neil had cooked the books. What was funny was that the only group that was truly in the black was Parliament. Even though he was spending tons of money to showcase us and promote us, the expenditure was minimal compared to what he was spending on acts like Donna Summer and Kiss. At any rate, after this German guy discovered proof of Neil’s creative accounting, Polygram decided to shut down Casablanca’s West Coast office and ship everything to New York by truck. The truck never made it. Somewhere in Ohio, it caught fire and all the records burned.

  Neil took the cash from the sale and started Boardwalk Records, which tried to set up a similar roster: rock and roll acts like Joan Jett, funk bands like the Ohio Players (relatively late in their career), pop groups like Get Wet. Except for Joan Jett, none of them reached the heights of the big Casablanca artists. During the Casablanca-to-Boardwalk transition, Neil had wanted us to come over with him to Boardwalk, though I didn’t learn about his desire for fifteen years. I’m not sure we would have gone, but it would have been nice to be able to factor that into our decision. And what was our decision? It was complicated. When Neil left Casablanca, we raised the possibility that we would leave, too, and take our masters with us. Casablanca said that they wanted us to stay, and that to prove their loyalty they would give us an imprint of our own, a label under the Casablanca banner we’d use to release P-Funk material. We called it Choza Negra, which translates as “black shack”: we were the little house out back behind the white house, which is what Casablanca meant. We had several projects in mind, including a record for Bernie Worrell and one for my son Tracey. The deal was complicated. We got control over masters, artwork, and publishing, but Polygram claimed that we still owed them a debt from past records, and to offset that, we gave them a portion of our publishing rights as a collateral loan.

  The negotiations were successful, but they also occurred under a cloud of bad feeling. We weren’t happy that Neil was gone. The label wasn’t happy with what we had asked for in the wake of his departure. And all the black acts in the company had been placed under the control of one executive, Bill Heywood, who had a grudge against us; he had been the man in charge of the Ohio Players when they were Mercury’s big act, and his acts were constantly stymied and prevented from climbing the charts by P-Funk’s records. There was one incident during that time that captures the flavor of the negotiations. Archie Ivy and Nene were in with Casablanca, explaining how Neil’s departure meant that we were free to go unless they got better terms for Parliament. One of the guys from Casablanca started banging on the table. “How can you complain?” he said. “We just signed a deal for your boy’s soundtrack work!” They didn’t know what he was saying—and, as it turned out, neither did he. Casablanca had signed a deal with a composer named George S. Clinton, who had scored some films.

  As a result of all of these issues, the first Parliament record to come out under the Casablanca/Choza Negra banner, Trombipulation, wasn’t aggressively backed by the label. It’s a shame because that record had a real good concept. Rather than go back to the beginning of the universe, we decided to go back to the beginning of our own universe, to transport Parliament to the time of the Parliaments. It was still P-Funk, but it was P-Funk with doo-wop in mind: there’s a song on there called “New Doo Review” that comes right out and makes the argument that funk is the “new doo.”

  But if going back to Plainfield in our minds meant going back to doo-wop, it also meant something just as important: going back to the barbershop. “New Doo Review” split the difference: doo was doo-wop and also hairdo.

  For that record’s cover, we didn’t use one of Overton’s illustrations. We had something else in mind: a photo that would show me in ancient Egypt, rising up among the pyramids and the Sphinx. But it wasn’t me as I looked in 1980. It was a version of me equipped with an elephant’s trunk—the nose beyond Sir Nose, the organ that was filled with funk rather than devoid of it—and an incredible wave in my hair. That was a demanding photo shoot, to say the least. For the trunk of funk, we went to one of the dudes who put extension dicks on people, and he built us a special prosthetic to fit over my nose. That shit was on so tight you could have picked me up by it.

  I had my hair done, and done right, by a guy I knew named June, a barber from Newark. He was the fucking best there was. He hadn’t done that kind of wave for twenty years, and he conked the shit out of it and made just a beautiful work of art there on the top of my head. That cover photo isn’t treated at all. That’s how my hair looked.

  Trombipulation was the flagship of another big idea, which was to start cross-promoting our records with real-life hair products. The same time it came out, Bootsy put out Ultra Wave, and we went to Johnson & Johnson and tried to sell them on a campaign. That was a blunder, as it turned out, because we didn’t have the kind of backing we had when Neil was running Casablanca. The corporations we were working with after Neil wanted things to be done a certain way, through certain channels, and the record label didn’t support our right to swim in open ocean. Things felt more locked up and constricting than they had in years. Bootsy brought some incredible tracks to those sessions, and songs like “Let’s Play House” were high-end examples of late Parliament, filled with horns, horniness, and humor. But I could feel the ice freezing.

  Around Christmas of 1979, midway between Gloryhallastoopid and Trombipulation, I bought a farm. There was a guy we all knew named Richard who provided things for rock stars. People with money wanted toys, and he was a kind of personal shopper. When he asked me what I wanted, I thought about it for a while, and told him that mainly I was interested in weed and blow. He laughed at me. “You have plenty of that,” he said, “and plenty of money to get more. Think higher.” He thought higher for me. He bought some paintings by Salvador Dalí, a letter Mick Jagger had sent that included handwritten lyrics, a William Burroughs manuscript. None of those were bad things, but none were perfect fits. Finally I sat down and really thought about it. I had been working straight for a decade, living mostly on the road. If I paused and took a measure of things, what did I want? “I know,” I told Richard. “I want a farm and some land with a lake on it.” I was born a country boy. I grew up running around in fields and fishing in creeks. As much as I had grown to love Detroit and Los Angeles, I loved being outside in nature, where there was peace and privacy. Richard went right out and found three or four properties in the country outside of Detroit, including one where they didn’t have a lake but were willing to build one. Monies changed hands, and just like that I was a gentleman farmer.

  The first day I was on my new farm, I sat in the main house and walked around the place. It was just what I had expected, and within hours I was already hearing new kinds of sounds—or maybe it was the absence of
certain old kinds of sounds. Either way, I was sure that it would be a place where I could recharge. Later that day, I wandered into the barn, which had everything you need to run a farm and also everything you would need to build a highway. The guy who had owned it had been contracted to build the interstate, and the house had been partly built with leftover materials from that job. But what caught my attention was a book sitting on top of a wooden box, facedown. I went over and turned the book so I could read the title. It was a history of Roswell, New Mexico, which had supposedly been the site of a UFO sighting in 1947, and an analysis of the government conspiracy to cover it up. Since I had been a little kid, I was always interested in the possibility of alien life. I was absolutely certain that man wasn’t alone in the universe. How could we be? To think that Earth was the only planet with life was the height of arrogance. The stories I invented for P-Funk—Star Child, Dr. Funkenstein, the landing of the Mothership—were my way of dealing with these questions. The Roswell book in the barn was like the book about clones in the Dallas airport train, another message being sent directly to me. Even in the country, in the middle of peaceful nothing, my obsessions were finding me.