Whatever you’re watching, this is better.
Whatever you’re listening to, this is better.
Whatever you’re masturbating to, this is better.
Those that doubt me are devoid of funk, and will never dance.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: p-funk (Page 4 of 4)
It’s a website that calculates a song’s Beats Per Minute; you just tap tap tap along and you can learn, for example, that the version of Dr. Funkenstein from the Live Earth Tour album is a slinky and slow 81 BPM.
So, um, there you go.
One of my very first posts was about P-Funk, and their relation to the Dead (none at all except what I make up), and I hate to quote myself but no one else does: P-Funk and the Dead are different answers to the same question – What if we gave these [REDACTED] kids way too much acid and amplification? Put “working-class black kids from Jersey raised on soul and church music” in the brackets, and you get P-Funk. Substitute “middle-class white kids from Marin raised on jazz, bluegrass, and classical” and you get the Dead.
The Dead formed in a music store; The Parliaments (the group that would mutate into P-Funk) formed in a barber shop. Context is everything.
Otherwise: four-hour shows with twenty-minute songs blending into one another; nineteen people on stage; money stolen constantly.
Let’s see if I can do the history of P-Funk in one sentence: George Clinton and some guys, two of whom were named Fuzzy and Grady, got a doo-wop group together, but found little success at Motown and got their name stolen via some legal bullshittery, which George got around by naming the backup touring band for the vocalists Funkadelic–they were funky and psychedelic, y’see–and releasing a bunch of raw and acid-soaked records that sounded like Black Sabbath (with an emphasis on the black part); after winning the name Parliament back, George started putting out more soul and vocal-based stuff under that name (but only sort of: there’s guitars on Parliament records and ballads and harmonies on Funkadelic albums), and then Bootsy Collins showed up, and then George Clinton discovered crack and lawyers.
Ta-da.
P-Funk is better thought of as “P-Funk”: besides the two main groups–which both had rather fluid lineups, anyway–there was Bootsy’s Rubber Band, and the Brides of Funkenstein, and The Horny Horns, and solo albums aplenty: it was all the same shit. It was the good shit: hell, it was the bomb, but everything had the same sound; it’s tough not to when everything is on The One.
And that’s where the philosophies of P-Funk and the Dead cannot be reconciled. “Everything is on The One” and “The One is wherever you think it is” can’t work together; it’s like quantum mechanics vs. classical physics: you have to choose one or another. (Although an argument could be made that it deliberately avoiding the downbeat, it’s emphasized just as much as playing it.)
Another point of diametric opposition is the singing: Parliament started as a doo-wop group, and most of the instrumentalists could sing their asses off, and the Brides were always around; there were easily a dozen people on a P-Funk stage who were the best singer you’ve ever heard. There were elaborate harmony lines that got passed around and call-and-responsed and counterpointed, and the vocals would slide up against the horn section nice and smooth; it was the bomb. In the Dead, Phil sang the high harmonies while the other two forgot the words. Later on, Mrs. Donna Jean would sing the high harmonies while the other two forgot the words. (I could write this sentence two more times.)
P-Funk only had about ten good years, and there won’t be a stadium-sized reunion for the 50th; the Mothership was left to rot in a scrap yard in Maryland. Nothings gonna bring them back.
Bernie’s not gone, yet; give him and his friends a listen tonight.
Spaceships, and costumes, and elaborate mythology: P-Funk could be written off as Black KISS, but for the fact that they could actually play their instruments and write songs. (Though a great deal of their material is George Clinton chanting gibberish over a bass ostinato, P-Funk has a lot more “songs” than you’d think, and they’re well-crafted and solid.)
This is the ’76 band on the Mothership Tour. The song from Maggot Brain I posted? This band only has George Clinton and Bernie Worrell in common with the lineup that recorded the classic album from just five years prior; you can tell, obviously, but the sound is still recognizably P-Funk. This is because, among his many other talents, George Clinton could find talent: he couldn’t particularly sing–especially when compared to literally any other vocalist sharing the stage with him–and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him play anything, but he was the Jascha Heifetz of hiring drummers.
Check out Bernie on the squiqqly-wiggly solo at 31 minutes in. He looks like this:
Bernie is less blurry in the video, and–presumably–in real life.
You learned how to take screen shots, huh?
Only took six years with an Apple.
And you won an internet slapfight.
Been a good day.
Sure, slugger.
Enthusiasts, I am a licensed and bonded Funkateer, but this one’s new to me, too. Technically, it’s a Bernie Worrell solo album, but it was the same bunch of guys making the Parliament and Funkadelic records.
Check this out. It’s the same song as Aquaboogie, or Funkentelechy, or any other over-ten minute jam from P-Funk, but those are all very good songs, so another one won’t hurt.
Man cannot live on Dead alone, and this P-Funk Rockpalast show from ’85 is the best kind of change.
George Clinton and P-Funk’s best days were in the 70’s (shocker) and George’s only memories of the 80’s are baseball-sized rocks of cocaine and people stealing his royalties. Doesn’t really matter what state George was in, though, when you have a band like this: Michael Hampton and (a sadly faded) Eddie Hazel on guitar, plus the tsunamic Dennis Chambers on the drums.
Everything is on The One.
MCA died today. Well, not MCA: I doubt MCA had been around for a year or so. Cancer strops that whimsical shit out of you, toot sweet. The horror, on its face, of cancer is the multiplying, the duplication, the encroachment. But it is a zero-sum game, there is only so much space in a person and every day there’s not even that space anymore. As the cancer takes over, you dissipate: ain’t you no more, that’s cancer where you used to be. The King is dead, long live the King.
So, Adam Yauch died today, and I realize all of our “how did you find out” stories are going to suck from now on: “Well, I opened my browser and there it was.”
When Garcia died, people told each other, or it was on the radio. We still played those out in the street, especially in August. My RA from my freshman year called me. It was noon, so I was still in bed and I remember listening to the message he was leaving on my machine with a strange equivocation. I had seen them 5 times in the last year and hung a big Stealie flag by my bed, listened to the few tapes I had constantly (although I was developing an obsession with P-Funk, mostly the Eddie Hazel band version), and dated more than one full-on Hippie Chick. I was, you might say, a duck.
But no tears, nothing like that. Nor for when Freddie Mercury died, and there was no bigger fan in the greater suburban Essex County area then me. (A friend of mine has long been spreading a myth of some sort of “armband” in some sort of color, possibly “black” being worn by a certain bloggist after the death of Mr. Mercury, but that so-called friend is a filthy-minded prevaricator and scofflaw. A penniless, poisonous, cretinous cur of a fool of an abolitionist of a suffragette of a communist of a fool. Double fool and a pox upon his tiny, tiny dishwasher-less apartment in Little Mozambique. I say this about him: His drawers are wet and his blade is dry.)
47 is young, let’s not lie. Too young, although a 97-year-old would cane-whack you for suggesting that any age is the right age to go. Now, for certain occupations: not young at all. I am looking at a certain piano bench that has claimed far more lives than the Hope Diamond.
Thanks, Adam.
Bill Graham used to introduce the band by saying, “Not only are they THE BEST at what they do, they’re also THE ONLY ONES who do what they do: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Grateful Dead.” Which was elegant and eloquent but not quite true.
Miles Davis’ 70’s bands were doing the same thing as the Dead, except without any first set niceties. Miles and the Dead shared a San Francisco stage right after Miles’ masterpiece (that should probably read “right after one of the many, many masterpieces he produced), Bitches Brew came out. Miles had been working with an electric bass player since about the moment he decided, “I must destroy this concept of the song. There is no Song! Songs were invented by white devils! I’m just going to find a bunch of musicians and freak out for 60 minutes at a time.”
Miles, as usual, is not telling you the whole story. That “bunch of musicians” has to include Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter or the entire plan falls apart. Plus, Miles’ bands are sometimes mired in the jazz tradition of laying back while someone solos, instead of the full-band improvisational composition that the Dead do. You know what I’m talking about: the stuff that’s worth sitting through all the nonsense and noodling for. When the boys flow from one song through another and back and you never realize what they’ve done until you’re already amazed; it’s a musical magical trick when they do it right.
Miles was sometimes accused of cynicism: that his ’70’s electric period was not purely a musical journey, just an excuse to go from his usual clubs to playing the much larger (and therefore more lucrative) halls and theaters that the bands on the rock circuit did. This might have been one reason, sure, but you can never discount the possibility that Miles just didn’t want to rehearse anymore, as it took time away from driving a Lamborghini packed with white women through city streets at 100 mph, then accusing the officer that pulled him over of being–dependent on the situation–“a racist cracker-ass cracker,” or “an Uncle Tom motherfucker.” Miles was a real piece of work.
There was another band criss-crossing the country in the 1970’s trying to Reconnect with The Holy through playing really loud and long: P-Funk. Whatever the hell George Clinton was calling whichever group of guys were in the room when they made the record: Parliament, Funkadelic, the P-Funk All-Stars, Funk-isyahu and the Klezmer Kids, whatever.
P-Funk was the answer to the question, “What if we gave poor black kids in Jersey and middle-class white kids in San Francisco the exact same drugs and massive amplifiers?’
And, of course: the leaders of all three of these groups are dead. I know George Clinton thinks he is still alive, but he died three years ago–trust me on this one.
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