Feb. 14, 2010

Regardless of what you might think on casual reflection, the African-American creative spirit wasn’t suddenly radicalized during the civil rights movement, when doors started to crack open for gifted black performers. For many decades, black recording artists were marginalized not only by the marketplace, with white taste-makers confining them to the ghetto of “race music,” but also by the relative damn-the-torpedoes nature of their records.

In the 1950s, even interested whites could be scared off by the raw sound and subject matter of many blues recordings, which were often enough to curdle the milk and burn the pot roast in the most liberal of neighborhoods. Think about it. In the sphere of aural friendliness, what could be more radical than recording music that the vast majority of your potential audience finds too frightening to contemplate?

Artists like Muddy Waters, Little Walter, or even Bo Diddley weren’t lowering themselves to sing “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?,” both because they weren’t interested in doing so, and, commercially speaking, there was absolutely no reason to bother. These guys couldn’t possibly get rich by pandering to the lowest common denominator. If whites decided what got played on the radio - and they very much did - African-American artists were free to go for broke in every conceivable way, with no concern for massive record sales. In the process, they created a strain of transcendent popular art that can still grab you by the collar and shake you to attention.

You do these performers a disservice by simply calling them “genuine,” as if they were the all-black Buddha-children who, even today, populate so many commercial kiss-ass movies (Sandra Bullock is currently benefitting from the latest visitation.) But there’s no denying that their lack of concern for the mass marketplace allowed them to dig deeper into themselves than the vast majority of commercially-oriented white performers.

In case you’ve never picked up on it, early blues singers actually invented rock & roll, which didn’t receive its official moniker until Elvis came along with his own black-inspired transcendent genius, and a white deejay was finally forced to come up with a name for it.

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George Clinton (on the far right in the above photo) started his career in the most commercial vein an African-American performer could imagine in the late 1950s, as the leader of a soul/doo-wop group known as The Parliaments...although Clinton’s rather off-the-wall lyrics allowed The Parliaments to stand out a bit from the pack. Clinton also served, for a time, as a songwriter in Motown’s musical assembly line, a factory system that somehow remained consistently brilliant throughout the 60s while growing just about as across-the-board marketable as McDonald’s or Burger King.

In 1967, after The Parliaments had a minor hit single for Motown, Clinton was forced to change the band’s name due to a bankruptcy proceeding involving his former record label. This upheaval served as an unexpected creative coup, as Clinton enlisted five smokin' funk instrumentalists, turned the Parliaments into backing vocalists, and re-christened his new rock-influenced vessel “Funkadelic.”

Within a couple of years, with Funkadelic taking off on the charts, Clinton would reform the Parliaments as a more outwardly groove-oriented group known simply as “Parliament,” with both groups being referred to as “P-Funk.” Funkadelic and Parliament, then, were comprised of the same performers, but recorded relatively divergent types of music for two different record labels!

But things were much, much, much crazier than that.

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You can’t discuss the P-Funk collective without considering the effect psychedelics had on Clinton and his street-hassled buddies. Ye olde lysergic took that perverse little twist that existed in the original Parliaments and moon-shot it into the roaring, sparkling stratosphere. As much as any popular musical group of an exceedingly druggy period, P-Funk had one foot, if not the whole of their shaking asses, on the astral plane, and they weren’t embarrassed to show it.

The Beatles got all touchy-feely with their acid experience, and that’s as legitimate a response to a good mind-blowing as any other. But, because they were The Beatles, this led thousands of less significant artists to start hugging the sun and kissing the butterflies, to little measurable effect.

Not so for P-Funk. There’s something vibrant to the point of frightening about their acid visions, a sort of (almost certainly well earned) internal frenzy being unleashed that sprouted album titles like “The Electric Spanking of War Babies” and “Gloryhallastoopid.” And they were virtually alone in allowing the specter of death to accompany many of their extended jams. It’s no mistake that the “i” in Funkadelic’s official logo was dotted by a human skull.

P-Funk's stage attire was also like something out of a sci-fi movie directed by a dosed Daffy Duck— gigantic head-dresses, sparkling eye and body makeup, shoes that looked like dragons, etc. At one point, Clinton even took to wearing nothing but a cartoonishly huge cloth diaper with a massive safety pin jammed through it! Although they were far more complex than the concept might initially imply, Funkadelic was KISS for the Black Panther Party…or just for parties in general. White kids were now getting down to this stuff, regardless of its bloodline.

By the early 70s, Clinton obviously banked on the fact that hip was hip. And if you have any sense of adventure, it pays to go to the source. That’s where you get the purest water.

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P-Funk (again, that would be both Parliament and Funkadelic) had a string of great records before things started to grow a bit too too, but Clinton is still out there today; I just noticed an ad a couple weeks ago saying that Parliament would soon be performing at B.B. King’s club down on 42nd St. However, if you want one example of what Clinton was up to at the peak of his creative powers, look no further than a 1971 album called “Maggot Brain.” And while you’re looking, note that it boasts one of the most evocative album covers of all time.

His space age uber-cajones on full display, Clinton chooses to open “Maggot Brain” with a 10-minute freak-out title track that’s basically nothing but an extended instrumental break by the band’s resident guitar wizard, Eddie Hazel…save for a spoken-word passage at the beginning that deals with Mother Earth’s third impregnation, and the unmistakable taste of maggots in the mind of the universe. Oh, yeah— there's also a vision of the narrator drowning in his own shit.

That’s what I said. Again, judging from their music’s content, Funkadelic’s band members were eating barbecue and acid in equal measure, both lyrically and musically, and they didn’t forget to leave room for completely-bananas pudding. If nothing else, “Maggot Brain”’s opening blast prepares you to roll with the utterly unexpected.

I think this initial slow-burn meanders a bit too much to be considered a song all by its lonesome, though, and it’s very lonesome, since Clinton stripped almost all of the backing instruments away during the mixing process, the better to focus solely on Hazel’s often terrifying fuzz and wail (due to studio microphone leakage, you can hear barely-audible remnants of the original instrumentation when you listen on headphones.) But there’s no way I’m discussing “Maggot Brain” without introducing you to this mind-fryer.

"Maggot Brain"

“Maggot Brain” is a spooky guitar hero trip when you’re in the right mood- or, you know, on the right trip - and it always manages to right itself when it begins to wander. But, for my money, the album’s wry, funky heart really starts beating on the second track, a kickin’ little breakup song called “Can You Get to That?” that’s as close to pleasantly disarming as Funkadelic would ever get.

“Can You Get to That?” is a rewrite of a tune by the original Parliaments, and, perhaps in a fit of nostalgia, Clinton arranges it in a manner that relies more on acoustic guitars and drum skins than electricity. But, man, this thing pounds away at the bottom end, a low, steady groove that's irresistible. If you can listen to "Can You Get to That?" without at least rocking your shoulders back and forth, you probably shouldn’t be wasting your time with this stuff. This is straight-up funk, a sort of citified, sidewalk-bound gospel at it’s most elemental. Somebody, it’s pretty clear, was also listening to Sly Stone.

"Can You Get to That?"

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I know some guitar aficionados will take me to task for downplaying Eddie Hazel’s work on “Maggot Brain”’s title track, but don’t for a second think I’m downplaying Hazel himself. I'm not. He's under-appreciated enough, to the degree that this...

…is about as decent a picture as I can find of him on the Internet, and it's a screen capture from a PBS documentary!

This guy is one of the true under-praised instrumental geniuses of the classic rock era, a guitarist so incendiary, his best runs are reminiscent of prime Jimi Hendrix. Pivotally, though, Hazel is a cleaner player than Hendrix; he's far less likely to wander away from the melody and start masturbating a solo the way Hendrix often did. Like all my favorite guitarists, Hazel can wig out with the best of them. But once he starts to move too far beyond the song structure, he always reminds himself to return to the power chords that drive great rock & roll.

Say what you want about “Maggot Brain,” but I think Hazel’s crowning achievement, and thus the crowning achievement of “Maggot Brain” the album, is this piece of screaming street terror called “Super Stupid,” which is about a guy who buys a bag of "coke" that turns out to be a bag of "skag." Upon snorting it, he turns out to be dead.

"Super Stupid"

Jesus Christ— there’s nothing stupid about that! It’s enough to make your ears burst into flames, and I’m sure George Clinton, who shepherded more than his share of terrific musicians, would be immensely pleased to find out that it did. I mean, really. What could be more purely Funkadelic than running around the living room with your ears spewing fire?!

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SPECIAL P-FUNKADOOBIEPSYCHOLICIOUS BONUS:

Here’s Parliament’s greatest hit, “Flash Light,” which was the single coolest thing being played on commercial radio when I was in high school back in 1980. It’s the funk that keeps on giving, and it never runs out of batteries.

"Flash Light"

Catchy in the extreme. And remember, gang— make your funk the P-Funk, if you want your funk uncut.

Download: “Maggot Brain” (1971) by Funkadelic— the entire album if you want a complete journey to the other side. And if you’re after a cross-section sampling of the whole Parliament soul food smorgasbord, there are lots of great collections out there. As for Funkadelic, you can get the key testaments with “Maggot Brain” and the self-titled album, “Funkadelic” (1970).

Paul Tatara