The group that claimed to “play like Hendrix” and “record like Motown”
“I was crazy about Star Trek,” funk legend George Clinton said in 1996. “That and Mission: Impossible were the only reasons I ever watched television. Then in the ‘60s, I started reading stuff like 1984 and seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and tripping out at the same time.”
While Clinton doesn’t mention anything about playing or listening to music in that particular passage, it still weirdly communicates an awful lot about where his mind was as an artist in the late 1960s.
Still shy of his 30th birthday, Clinton was already a music industry veteran, having performed in a doo-wop / R&B group called The Parliaments before committing more of his time to a songwriting gig with Motown Records. Fate really intervened in 1967, though, when Clinton decided to jump ship to one of Motown’s lesser Detroit rivals, Revilot, which put out the first charting hit of the Parliaments’ career, ‘(I Wanna) Testify’.
Had Revilot stayed in business, the story might have played out very differently from there, but the label abruptly collapsed, leaving Clinton and his bandmates to start from scratch. That’s when George decided to take some of the sci-fi visions he’d been absorbing and use them as fuel for a completely different sort of rock ‘n’ roll experiment. In 1970, Funkadelic – a new group and its self-titled debut album – were delivered unto the world.
“We played like Jimi Hendrix and the rock ‘n’ rollers,” Clinton told the Arizona Republic in 2023, “But we was out of Motown. So we had Temptations ambitions and we knew how to record like Motown – straight, clean records, precise. And then we learned how to record loud, psychedelic feedback and just experiment.”
The Funkadelic album slotted in perfectly between Sly and the Family Stone’s Stand! and James Brown’s Sex Machine, which came out a few months later in 1970. Clinton had too many new ideas to contain in the Funkadelic box, however, and before 1970 was over, he regrouped with the same musicians to create a new version of his old band, now known as Parliament, which released their own record, Osmium, on the Invictus label.
Bassist Bootsy Collins was a musical and visual focal point in both Funkadelic and Parliament, and was playing in James Brown’s band, as well, making him the official groovemaster of the funk revolution. The main separator between Funkadelic and Parliament in these early days was that Bootsy had brought in two other James Brown band members, horn players Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker, to give Parliament more of a slick R&B sound. Because most of the musicians involved were part of both groups, however, Clinton organised their live tours jointly as Parliament-Funkadelic, creating one of the most unique and imaginative two-headed monsters in rock history.
And of course, true to Clinton’s original vision, outer space was never too far out of reach, as P-Funk made a habit of summoning a giant spaceship to the stage during their live shows; a prop that came to be known as “the Mothership.”
“P-Funk is the purest form of funk,” Clinton told a reporter in 1976, “It’s a vibe that is just there. You have to fall into it . . . and be sure that you never begin to believe you created it.”
