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

by George Clinton

  The album that really upped the ante on the sampling question was Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, which took over the world in 1992; its biggest songs, its main singles, were powered by P-Funk. More specifically, they were fueled by a certain type of P-Funk sample. There was a scatter plot of P-Funk samples in hip-hop; they differed by region. The East Coast had more interest in the early Funkadelic records. Rakim sampled “No Head, No Backstage Pass.” Public Enemy sampled “Undisco Kidd.” But East Coast producers cut and sliced and rearranged, while West Coast groups tended to take them wholesale. Dr. Dre went right for the biggest Parliament hits, the ones with the fat synthesizer and horn lines that could hold up an entire song. “Let Me Ride” took “Mothership Connection” almost wholesale, and in the video there’s even a scene of Dre being invited to a Parliament concert.

  I knew Dre all the way back from N.W.A, though that was a group I wasn’t sure about. They acted hard, but the ghetto out there is like our suburbs. I couldn’t believe that the police went crazy when they said “fuck tha police.” That wouldn’t have been a big deal back in New York. As it turned out, that controversy was the best thing that ever happened to them. It got them noticed by the FBI, put them on magazine covers. When they came to Detroit the police department came and lined up, out of uniform. They had five hundred officers there. The police actually asked me to go talk to the group, as a kind of ambassador, to see if I could get them to forgo playing “Fuck tha Police.” Dre was scared as hell. Cube didn’t want to be talked into any shit. The D.O.C. was there, with his scratchy voice, saying that N.W.A was going to do whatever the fuck they wanted. They ended up not playing it.

  In the wake of The Chronic, other West Coast artists started to build their sound on our samples. Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle came out the next year, Warren G’s “Regulate” the year after that. I did a duet with Ice Cube on his own version of “Bop Gun,” which was on his Lethal Injection album. That’s how P-Funk fathered G-Funk. It also fathered another round of Armen’s sue-and-settle strategy. If the hip-hop song got too close to anything in the P-Funk back catalog, Armen would sue, and the artists would settle just to keep from going to court. He also started to design a legal strategy based on the principle of interpolation. Under this theory, a hip-hop artist not only couldn’t sample a record, but couldn’t even have someone come in and play any part of the song: the bass line, the horn line. If a West Coast rapper had a keyboardist in who played a keyboard figure that was similar to something in “Flash Light,” Armen felt justified suing them. This was a foolish way of approaching things, and it had a chilling effect, not only because Armen sued over everything, but because he wasn’t honest when it came to disclosing settlements. Nene opposed Armen, but Nene wasn’t being honest about what he owned, either, and the two of them started warring in court about who controlled the catalog.

  Meanwhile I tried to settle things the only way I knew, which was through music, and in 1993 I released a three-disc set called Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of DAT. The record had hundreds of keyboard figures, horn parts, guitar riffs, and drum breaks, all taken from P-Funk records. It was basically a sampling kit that bypassed publishing fees. If you let us know that you wanted to use one of the samples, we’d charge you for it according to a scale we had worked out. Armen was infuriated by this, because it was threatening his revenue stream, and he tried to get Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of DAT treated the same way as any hip-hop record, arguing that it was basically an anthology of unauthorized samples. We weren’t the only band to do that: Prince released a set later called the New Funk Sampling Series that had the same idea.

  All in all, I have mixed feelings about the way that hip-hop affected P-Funk. It brought P-Funk’s music back into the public eye and ear. There’s no doubt about that. But it also put a price tag on everything again, which meant that the people who had a vested interest in ripping me off were back in strength. The new money coming in over hip-hop was like blood in the water for sharks. And every time I hired a lawyer to look into it, that same lawyer ended up on the other side, waving back at me. Could I have kept the train on the rails if it wasn’t for the drugs? I’m not sure. Plenty of stone-cold-sober people get ripped off, too.

  To this day, the record companies haven’t paid me fairly. But the problem isn’t a rapper problem. They’re artists, and I love their work, whether it’s Ice Cube or Humpty or Too $hort or EPMD or Public Enemy. When there are artists who have remained true to the P-Funk philosophy, I love them even more. Early on, I told Snoop Dogg he was the pick of the litter, and he used that phrase until he became Snoop Lion (though he’s still doggin’ and lyin’). I love artists like Mystikal, for the way he updated Joe Tex and used those second-line New Orleans rhythms. And, of course, Eminem was a star from the word go. He wrote like Smokey Robinson, with hooks and metaphors and real ideas that were sharpened and elevated by his obsession with structure. All of the rappers know that I never came after them personally and that I never will. Artists aren’t allowed the luxury of fighting with each other. The lawyers and record executives fight over you and around you, for their own reasons. Those people went to school to beat you for your shit.

  Two of my favorite records from the extended P-Funk family came out during that period: Trey Lewd’s Drop the Line and Bernie Worrell’s Blacktronic Science. Trey Lewd was my son Tracey Lewis, whose mother was my old writing partner Vivian Lewis, and Drop the Line was a perfect encapsulation of his aesthetic: funky, danceable, a little raunchy, and funny as a motherfucker. I cowrote a song called “Rooster,” and there are also collaborations between Tracey and “Clip” Payne (“Wipe of the Week”), Tracey and Andre Williams (“Duck and Cover”), and Tracey and Cecil Womack Jr. (“I’ll Be Good to You”). One of my favorite songs was a collaboration between Tracey and Amp Fiddler, a dirty nursery rhyme called “Yank My Doodle.” Warners released the record but supported it weakly at best, which wasn’t especially surprising at that point. Because of it, Tracey got a reputation as a musician’s musician, which is usually a way of saying that you’re brilliant but you have some hitch that prevents you from reaching a larger audience. Prince was crazy about Tracey from a writing point of view, but I think that there was a sense that Tracey, at that point, was too much to handle as a human being: wild, bursting with ideas, impossible to regulate.

  Blacktronic Science was also filled with great material: songs like “Time Was (Events in the Elsewhere)” and “Dissinfordollars” had monster grooves and philosophical lyrics. And the method was sound: Bernie kept the spirit of old Parliament alive by playing classical keyboard over funky beats. But the record also illustrated how things had shifted since the seventies. Bernie was operating more or less as a jazz musician, on a jazz label (Gramavision put that record out), and to my ear, it didn’t have enough bottom. It didn’t sound like United Sound. It should have been a proper Parliament record, for purposes of heft.

  At right around the same time, I started another anthology project: the Family Series, five volumes of rarities and outtakes. The first, which came out in 1992, was called Go Fer Yer Funk; the second, Plush Funk, came out later that same year; and we went all the way on through A Fifth of Funk the following year. Those records let me highlight some of the odds and ends that didn’t make it onto records over the years: songs like “Funkin’ for My Mama’s Rent” by Gary Fabulous and Black Slack, “These Feets Are Made for Dancing” by Ron Dunbar, “I Really Envy the Sunshine” by Jessica Cleaves, along with tracks by the Brides of Funkenstein, Junie Morrison, and Sly Stone. The Family Series records are uneven, but in the best way, moving from artist to artist, tone to tone, similar only in that they are all presided over by the funk.

  Because of the legal snarls, things were getting harder, especially on the financial front. There was music everywhere but at times money got too tight to mention, not just for me but for everyone around me. Ronnie Ford, who had been my best friend from when we were kids, had come to Detroit to be a barber and ended up working with P
-Funk on a number of songs. He wrote “Wizard of Finance” from the Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome album. At some point in the early nineties, Ronnie had decided that he had given too much of his life to drugs and bad living, and he and his wife, Lydia, left Detroit for work in California. But the job that had been promised to him somehow got unpromised once they arrived, and Ron and Lydia and their kids ended up homeless. Homelessness meant street living at first, and then it meant spending every night in a motel that wouldn’t even let them leave their stuff there for days on end—they’d have to check out every day and then check back in when Ron showed up with the money he earned from collecting cans. The poorest people pay the most for things, relatively, because they have no credit, no collateral, and no leverage. During that period, Ronnie went to Armen to see if there was any money floating around. Armen wouldn’t even give him fifty dollars, even though songs Ronnie had worked on had found their way into some of the West Coast rap, N.W.A and Snoop Dogg. So Ronnie and Lydia were right there in Los Angeles, listening to their songs go by them in passing cars. Even worse, Armen sent out word that he had given me the money to give to Ronnie, which made me look like the bad guy. Even when Ronnie ended up getting a little money out of Armen, maybe two thousand, I advised him not to cash the check. When you cash a check from Armen, you’re agreeing to some other shit, like giving up your rights to the song for the rest of your life. Nothing that comes from him comes without strings.

  These hard times came during a period when lots of the Funkadelic family were in the woods, not just as a result of financial crises, but addiction, disease, or other problems. Some of them never got out of the woods. Eddie Hazel died in 1992. Drinking got him. Drink is the most dangerous, in the final analysis. Many of the guys who developed heroin problems kicked it only to go back into the bottle, which is always the endgame.

  Old friends, old problems, old ways, but sometimes new wrinkles in the fabric. In April of 1993, I inducted Sly Stone into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sly and I hadn’t been talking much, but the organizers assumed that he would most likely show up to the induction if I was there, and that he probably wouldn’t show under any other circumstance. He wasn’t someone you set your clock by. The day of the ceremony, I came for sound check, and people were buzzing about Sly. The rest of the Family Stone was there, but all everyone wanted to know was whether Sly would really appear. As it turns out, he was there already, hiding out in the kitchen, though only two of us knew that, me and his mother, Alpha. Everyone else was speculating, maybe even making side bets. Clive Davis couldn’t talk about anything else. He wanted to see Sly so badly because Sly had been his favorite person back in the early days. He missed him. When the ceremony started, I gave some introductory remarks, and then Freddie Stone stepped up to the microphone. He assumed, like everyone else, that Sly wasn’t there. Just as Freddie started speaking, Sly came out from under the curtain right behind us. He looked up at me. “Hi,” he said. “Those mothers thought I wasn’t going to show.” Even though Sly didn’t perform with the band, it was a great night. Eddie Vedder inducted the Doors. And Cream was inducted, which was a kind of brain twist: I got to watch two of my most important influences and think about the way that I had built Funkadelic on the intersection between their two bands. Jimi Hendrix had it right when he said that Cream was quitting just as everybody else was getting started. I also got to watch how a band acted when they put old rivalries and infighting behind them. A few weeks before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, I was on my way up to the Apollo Theater to give an award to Lisa Lisa, and I saw Bernie Worrell walking with Jack Bruce. I came up right behind them and heard Jack bitching about the induction, and how hard it was going to be to see Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker again, and how they didn’t have any goodwill left. I stepped into their conversation and told Jack that it wouldn’t take them any more than twenty-five minutes to patch things up. The night of the induction, Jack was sitting right near me, and he leaned back and told me that it had only taken fifteen. I’m sure that after that they went right back to being at each other’s throats, but for that one moment, you have to let bands be family again.

  As soon as I signed to do Cinderella Theory with Paisley Park, I knew that I wanted to do a second album with the label, too. And the second time around, I wanted more Prince. During the first record, he had been so respectful—maybe a little too respectful. I understood why. Of all the people who had tried to help save P-Funk along the way, of all the people who had taken it upon themselves to help reupholster us for a new generation, Prince behaved the way I would have behaved if I had been entrusted with a comeback record by Sly Stone, say. I wouldn’t have interfered. I wouldn’t have presumed to know what the fuck he was doing. I would have been very reluctant to tell him what to do. But as we worked on the album, I was thinking that if there was anyone I wanted to have input, it was him. He had such a broad understanding of music, of the intersection between rock and pop and funk. I encouraged him to work with me: I told him, “I’ll send you the tapes, you P on them, and send them back to me,” and after Cinderella Theory, we collaborated on one song for Graffiti Bridge called “We Can Funk”—I performed it in the movie—and maybe that made him a little more receptive to the idea of working with us. Whether it was him directly or his intermediaries, he was much more of a presence the second time around. He weighed in on things. He added textures and colors where he previously hadn’t. We even had a proper collaboration on “The Big Pump,” a funk-celebrates-funk song in the tradition of “Pumpin’ It Up.”

  As luck would have it, Prince was in a strange position with Warner Bros. in 1993. The second Paisley Park record, Hey Man . . . Smell My Finger, came out at a time when Prince was squarely in the corporate crosshairs. He had started down a dangerous road with his second movie, Under the Cherry Moon, which the company assumed would be a straightforward commercial success like Purple Rain. But Under the Cherry Moon was a black-and-white romance in the style of old studio films, not an autobiographical rock opera with a half hour of killer live footage. Prince further alienated the company by killing off the main character, Christopher Tracy, at the end of the movie. These kinds of unorthodox creative decisions hurt the sales of Parade, the soundtrack for Cherry Moon, even though one of the songs on the album, “Kiss,” was among his biggest and best hits. He had gone on with Warner Bros. after that and made them plenty of money with albums like Sign O’ the Times and LoveSexy. You would have thought they could have gotten over their petulance and resentment. But by the time we were doing the second record with him, the relationship had cooled to the point where the R&B promotions man didn’t even come to the premiere of Graffiti Bridge. When I asked them why, they got sarcastic with me. “We have more records to be worked,” they said.

  The lead single, which was also one of the last songs we did, was “Paint the White House Black,” a topical record that played off the fact that there was a President Clinton in the Oval Office (not to mention folding in a little joke about Casablanca and Choza Negra). When Bill Clinton first emerged onto the national political scene, people used to ask me if I was related to him—I don’t know if they were joking or if they hadn’t seen pictures of him (or, maybe, of me), but they asked anyway. And then, after his election, there was this idea that because he was a southerner who came from a modest background and seemed to have a sense of social justice, he was America’s first black president. That pointed back to Chocolate City and Mayor Gibson in Newark, and it opened up into the idea of “Paint the White House Black.” At the beginning of the song, Dr. Dre makes a fake phone call. “What’s boppin’?” he says. “Could I speak to the president? Yeah, just tell him he was smokin’ last night at the club. You know what I’m saying? What? He don’t inhale? Well, I know I got the wrong motherfuckin’ house.”

  There’s a raft of rappers on that song: Ice Cube, Public Enemy, Yo-Yo, Kam, MC Breed. Getting them all together in one place was important at that time, which was right in the middle of
the East Coast/West Coast rivalry. The song updates “Chocolate City” but also “One Nation Under a Groove”; the idea was that unity had to come from the people, not from the government.

  And let the love shine from the right house

  Be it the black, red, or white house

  Another song, “Rhythm and Rhyme,” had the same dense lyrical style, though it was more overtly a tribute to hip-hop acts like Eric B.& Rakim—metaphor stacked on metaphor, tight turns in the verses, a chorus that was like a steel band tight around the whole song. I was so energized by what I heard from the best rappers. I felt like I was back in the late fifties or early sixties, in awe of Frankie Lymon and Smokey Robinson again.