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

by George Clinton

  Sly stayed with them, a little stranded. In 2010 he got booked at the Coachella festival, and decided he was going to use the spotlight to air out some of his grievances. That might have seemed like a good idea on the face of it, but I advised against it: I told him that he wasn’t going to get the equipment he wanted, that the appearance wouldn’t be effective. He was pissed off and stubborn, like usual, and he wouldn’t listen. He went out there and launched into a big rant about how managers were stealing from him and he had effectively been kidnapped, and then he played some new music through an iPod. It wasn’t that he was wrong about things. I knew how much truth there was in it. But it fell on deaf ears.

  On one of my trips out West, Sly and I got some vials of drugs and smoked them. Within minutes, I knew that something was wrong. I started to feel unwell, and then worse than that. It was some nasty shit: crack hadn’t been real cocaine for years. It was always partly fake, with B-12 to give you a burst of energy and who knows what else. Some of that else got to me quick. “Fuck,” I said, “take me to the hospital.” I ended up staying there a week.

  The doctors judged that I had suffered a cardiac incident, and pointed to other factors, too: stress, exhaustion, a generally taxing lifestyle. I never like to say that something is a blessing in disguise. More trouble comes in disguise than anything else. But after that scare, I managed to kick crack. After twenty-nine years on the pipe, I got off it once and for all.

  I immediately noticed the physical effects of being clean. First of all, my voice came back to me. All that fire in the pipe fucks up your throat. I regained a vocal range and quality I hadn’t had in decades. I lost weight, also. In the early days of freebase, the coke was prepared using ether. But ether was in short supply in the eighties, when crack really took off, and people started using baking soda, which put a tremendous amount of sodium in the shit. I was pumping myself full of salt, which kept me full of water. I had edema in my legs. They were the size of trees. I was up close to three hundred pounds, but the minute I set the pipe down, twenty pounds just vanished. And then there was the insomnia. For decades, because of the drugs and whatever else, I wasn’t sleeping well. That puts a tax on your heart, darkens your mood, does a whole lot of other nasty shit. I got an apnea mask, which helped me get real sleep for the first time in years.

  It wasn’t hard to kick, exactly, though there were plenty of reminders of my old life. Now and then I would find drugs in my pocket. The first few times, I couldn’t see myself throwing the shit away, so I gave it to someone who wanted it. But soon I began to throw the stuff into the garbage.

  The physical changes were only part of the puzzle. Sitting there in the hospital bed, I realized that I had, by luck or by providence, arrived at a point where I could focus entirely on the legal battle: on telling the story of how Armen and Nene had robbed me of my songs, taken control of my catalog and taken away the money I was due, and how they had done it systematically, over the years, in collusion with record labels, rights-management firms, lawyers, and more. I knew that if I got off the pipe, I could get to the thieves and the cheaters and catch them off guard. No one was ready to deal with a clean George Clinton. When I was high, it was too easy for people to write me off as a ranter or rambler, a paranoid—a crackpot. I had seen the way that people reacted when I talked about things at length, or noticed that I only got a hearing in the press when I popped up after a drug bust. I understood their reaction. They were listening to crackhead talk, and they behaved accordingly. But everything I was saying was true, and that’s why I had to say it again, clearly, calmly, after I was through with crack. I had to set the record straight by setting the record, straight.

  And so when I came out of the hospital I had the same feeling I did in 1982, when I had kept that one unsmoked crack rock for the entire length of the Atomic Dog Tour. I set off to prove everything I already knew. We collected copies of all the relevant court documents. We found contracts, compared them. We verified whatever seemed legit and tore apart what was bogus. The process took years. I gave up my coke habit but now I had a lawyer habit.

  But the mountain of evidence wasn’t enough. It was the equivalent of a raw track that Bootsy brought to the studio. Just like with music, I needed to produce the information, organize it, and present it the same way I had done with songs and albums. A woman named Kathryn Griffin, a human-trafficking activist in Houston, heard the stories and passed them along to one of her compatriots, Phil Cenedella, also an activist and an advocate for any victim of injustice. He got so incensed that he set up a website, Flashlight2013.com, to house all the relevant documents. While GeorgeClinton.com remains the main headquarters for the band news, Flashlight2013.com is a headquarters for broadcasting the truth about Armen, Nene, and the rest, the same way we broadcast from WE-FUNK on Mothership Connection. We’re also planning to sell products: not only legal briefs, which are underwear with excerpts from the court documents printed on them, but also Who Stole the Soul Shoes (sneakers with the excerpts printed on the bottom) and Thinking Caps (matching hats). People say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But in this case, it’s flashlight. And soon enough, I’ll take the case back to court. In my mind, the documents prove indisputably that for years there has been a consistent and conscious pattern of behavior intended to defraud, engineered by people from all levels of the industry, including those who had been entrusted with fiduciary responsibility—managers, publishers, label executives, people at the copyright office. There are clearly fabricated documents indicating a transfer of copyrights that are being used to this day. Armen is still collecting on these rights even though my opinion is that his ownership is completely illegitimate. What we’ve found so far, I believe, qualifies as a RICO case, as racketeering, and since there’s no statute of limitations in a RICO case, there will be a filing one day. I can assure you of that.

  What do these documents bring into the light? Armen, for starters. Back in the mid-nineties, during the court fight between Armen and Nene, Armen’s former executive assistant Jane Peterer had been deposed, and she had discussed some of their crooked practices. By 2012, Jane was no longer working with Armen. She was living in Switzerland, retired, dealing with some health issues. We went to see her and asked her if she would be willing to discuss matters on the record. When she said yes, we took a statement from her in which she explained in great detail what Armen had been doing while she was in his office. Her testimony confirmed all my suspicions. Here’s one sample:

  In 1990, Mr. Boladian obtained a notary stamp on the March 4, 1982 dated agreement and then refiled the document with the U.S. Copyright Office himself and thereby placed 164 separate copyright registrations for musical works related to Mr. Clinton and his groups, Parliament and Funkadelic, Brides of Funkenstein, as well as Philippé Wynne, Glen Goins, and Eddie Hazel into the name of Bridgeport Music. I only later learned that Mr. Boladian fraudulently and materially altered this March 4, 1982 document and then recorded it with the U.S. Copyright Office to create a claim of ownership in these 164 separate copyright registrations in the name of Bridgeport Music.

  The passage is written in deposition language, but if you unpack it, you can see how much it weighs. The “March 4, 1982 document” that it refers to is the fraudulently backdated and altered agreement that claimed I had signed all my songs over to Armen, and that cost me my lawsuit in Florida. And the “registrations for musical works” aren’t minor or marginal songs. They include “One Nation Under a Groove,” “Atomic Dog,” “Flash Light,” “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker),” “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” and more. The monies are considerable, and then some, not just because they were hits in the seventies and early eighties but because they were the root of a whole new genre in the eighties and nineties. Rap artists from Dr. Dre to Kanye West, and hundreds in between, sampled them. Not only did Armen dishonestly take over the copyrights, but he inserted himself as a songwriter. Here’s Jane’s account of that practice:

  Mr. Boladian fal
sely demanded songwriter rights and credit for musical works before the U.S. Copyright Office that he did not actually author or create by adopting false names or pseudonyms for himself and listing these false names as songwriters on musical works actually written by others, all for the purpose of gaining a financial advantage for himself. Mr. Boladian would essentially create different pseudonyms for himself so that he could derive the revenue for the musical works as an author and/or songwriter even though he was neither an actual author or songwriter.

  You can read Jane’s full statement in this book, too, in Appendix C. If it was a gun, it would be smoking so much that it would have a cloud around its head.

  But Armen was only half of the story. Nene had falsified documents dating back years. He had claimed that as far back as the early eighties, I had assigned Uncle Jam rights over to Tercer Mundo. The truth was that Nene knew that Armen’s papers were invalid and false, so he made up invalid and false papers of his own to catch whatever copyrights fell out. They ended up fighting each other, but that may have been at least partly a smokescreen, a trumped-up conflict designed to ensure that one of them ended up with the copyrights. There’s a paper trail of them interacting that stretches back decades. Separately, they were running their own games: together, it seemed to me, they were running a big game, long-term, with disastrous consequences for me. Two halves made a hole, and I fell into it.

  For all the certain misdeeds of Armen and Nene, the truth is that the way P-Funk was picked clean doesn’t all come down to the deceit of a few individuals. The system is crooked, too. The P-Funk catalog was published through BMI, which was supposed to administer monies fairly and efficiently. But writing credits were reassigned, or payments went to other artists with similar names. The composer George S. Clinton, and the confusion between us, came back into play, though it wasn’t as funny as it had been in the seventies. Too many of my payments ended up sent out to him, and when they were returned, they went to Armen or Nene to straighten things out. At one point, my daughter Barbarella requested my book from BMI—that’s the full account of all the songs and payments—and they sent her his accidentally. What it showed was that he was being incorrectly paid for many of my songs. I may have been sent a few of his checks, but he was being sent hundreds of mine. It would have only been annoying rather than alarming if it hadn’t been for the fact that there seemed to be a major conflict of interest in legal representation. And Yale Lewis, the lawyer I had hired as a music-rights specialist, turned out to be more problem than solution. In my opinion, Yale did more than fall down on the job. He was put in charge of the masters to protect and collect on them. He collected one nine-thousand-dollar sample, from an Aaliyah song. As I’ve stated in various lawsuits, many of which are still going on, I paid him more than a million dollars and ended up owing him more than $1.6 million, and somehow he’s still listed as one of the parties on the masters at the U.S. Copyright Office.

  I started to speak about these matters to industry groups and even political committees. A few congresspeople, including Sheila Jackson Lee from Texas, Bobby Rush from Illinois, and John Conyers from Georgia, took a special interest in my situation. They helped me get my image together so that I could present in front of panels. I wasn’t good at talking to regular audiences about these matters—I could slip into my Dr. Funkenstein persona easily enough, and I could perform all day long, but dealing with people straightforwardly was more difficult. John Conyers would put me in a church setting, or drop me off at the NAACP and let me sink or float as a normal speaker talking to normal people.

  These are just the things I know for certain. The rest needs to be investigated. There are broader questions hovering nearby. Did Nene see an advantage in working with Armen, or vice versa? And who sent Nene to us in the first place? He threw money away as fast as he got it. It didn’t make sense for him to even play around with us. He had ties to real-scale gangster stuff, international matters. Who wanted him in the P-Funk camp?

  To this day, forces are still at work ensuring that people are keeping their distance. Recently, both ABC-TV in Detroit and the New York Times planned to write exposés, and both were curious enough to file motions to have documents pertaining to the bankruptcy and other trials unsealed. And we’re not talking just a few documents. There were more than five hundred in all. What’s in there that someone wants to keep out of sight? But after a short pursuit, both the Times and ABC quieted down. I want to make an issue out of that because to me it seemed like a cover-up coming from upstairs. If they thought it was important enough to unseal it, why back down? I have a theory. Jeffrey Thennisch, our Detroit lawyer, was working not only with us—and was a big part of the two exposés—but also with Barrett Strong and the estate of James Jamerson in a lawsuit against Motown. Giving Jeffrey any credence in our case would have given him momentum against Berry, who was just then staging a Motown musical that perpetuated this fiction that everything at the label was family. No one—not the Times, not ABC—wanted to see the underbelly of the industry, not in that way.

  By now the game has been played so long, and the rules changed so often, that it’s hard to imagine exactly how things will be solved. My main goal is to get everything out in the open. I want to show all that we’ve collected, and that it’s all connected. I especially want to educate the future—my children and grandchildren—so that they can keep fighting this fight. Otherwise, the people who have been taking from me will just wait me out. I won’t live forever. I have given my family a sense of history and strategy, prepared them for battle. And when I say family, I don’t just mean my kids and grandkids. There’s a new high school in Plainfield: the Barack Obama Green Charter High School on Watchung Avenue. Soon after it opened, I began speaking to the students there. They called the program music education, but really it was something more specific, a class in how to protect intellectual property, and what to do if others put their hands on your work. I talked to the students the same way I had talked to the kids in the barbershop a half century before, and I donated $10,000 and 25 percent of my money from the four Funkadelic masters to the school. The barbershop was a half century away, but also a minute away. Time cycles. One of those kids might be the next Billy, the next Eddie, the next Bernie. The story I’m telling has to reach them, the same way it has to reach everyone. In 2025, Mothership Connection moves into the copyright-recapture zone. I’ll be eighty-five then, and I look forward to seeing it brought back into the fold. At some point, it’s all going to blow up again—P-Funk, uncut funk, the Bomb—and when it does, I want it to explode in the right hands.

  In 2010, Garry Shider was very ill with brain cancer. After some time in the hospital in Houston, he went home to Maryland. One night, after a show in New Jersey, we found out that he had taken a turn for the worse. We drove down to see him and he was still being himself—energetic, clowning a bit—but at the same time, it was over. We could tell. I lay down in his bed, on one side of him, and Ronnie Ford lay down on the other side. We stayed there all night with him, the Garry who was dying and the memory of the Garry who had lived: the one who had come to the barbershop as a kid, who had played guitar with us and written songs with us and wore a diaper onstage to help lift the crowd higher into the joy and the power of P-Funk. In the morning, the hospice nurses came to bring food, and one of them told us that it was a matter of hours. And you know what? Up until the end, with his life shrinking to nothing, Garry was preoccupied with Armen, and what Armen had done. As Garry had told me many times over the years, instead of paying out royalties, Armen instead told Garry that he was paying off Garry’s house. He kept coming around to extend this unfair deal and withhold royalties, even with Garry on his deathbed. When I heard that, I knew what I had to do. I had to dedicate myself to bringing all this to light. The forces that have tried to separate all of us from our music have to be called to account. Investigate. Interrogate. Unseal. Reveal. If we don’t get this right, then they win.

  EPILOGUE: BROTHAS BE, YO LIKE GEORGE, AI
N’T THAT FUNKIN’ KINDA HARD ON YOU?

  So what happens now? Am I closer to the end or just farther from the beginning? I don’t know the answer to these questions. I don’t even know if they are questions of theology or if they’re just a paradox. The questions are too big, anyway. There are smaller questions inside of them, though, that I can more easily grasp. What’s a song I can reach out and touch today? What’s the music that I’m going to make tomorrow? For years, I caught hell trying to get myself back into the studio. I had to get rid of a habit. I had to change my image, not just for other people but for myself. When I started making music again, really creating, the main thing I remembered was how much fun it can be. I have a studio near my house in Tallahassee. When I’m in town, I try to go down there every day. There’s a new Funkadelic record nearly finished: thirty-three tracks to commemorate the thirty-three years since the last Funkadelic record. It’s called Shake the Gate, and I worked the way I did on Dope Dogs and T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M., sometimes making entirely new songs, sometimes unearthing old tracks from recording sessions—unused takes, abandoned starts—and growing new songs from them. Producers call these tracks stems, like stem cells, but I like to think of them as seeds.