Funkadelic, arguably the greatest "black rock" band ever...Actually, strike that, they are far and away the best black rock band ever. In fact, screw everything, they're one of the greatest rock bands period, up there with any classic rock dinosaur you care to name. And though it's tempting to launch an essay on the racism of rock radio-- or rock journalism for that matter-- I'll stick to the band. Even as they're revered as legends and purveyors of the some of the best funk of the 70s, I've read relatively few accounts on their greatness as a pure rock band. But they had it all: great players, great singers, a great look, a great concept, actual hits, great albums, great drugs, freaky sex, disputes over money-- everything Led Zeppelin (or Spinal Tap) taught us was necessary to make the world's greatest rock music.
They started small, backing up ringleader George Clinton's Parliaments in the late 60s. When Clinton got into arguments with his label Revilot over money and rights, he decided to start recording his backup band instead, using the original Parliaments singers (Clinton, Ray Davis, Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins-- and come on, dude's name is "Fuzzy"-- Calvin Simon and Grady Thomas) as "guests." Guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, bassist Billy Nelson, drummer Tiki Fulwood, and eventually, master keyboardist Bernie Worrell were the band that would turn this fairly traditional soul group into the intense live act that wowed Detroit's Westbound Records head Armen Boladian. He signed them, and from the get-go, their music cut through genres and money bullshit like neither had ever existed. Never mind that half the band quit and came back again during recording sessions for their first record, Funkadelic was destined for greatness. Ace's reissues of the band's Westbound catalog is long overdue-- they sound a world better than the terribly mastered original CD pressings, and contain a wealth of bonus tracks, alternate mixes, and liner notes.
Funkadelic from 1970 was a bomb dropped all over rock and soul. No matter Hendrix, no matter James Brown, no matter the MC5, nobody had ever heard anything like this. This music was slower than sludge, dirtier than the "raw funk" Herb "Sparky" Sparkman talks about in "Music For My Mother". It was a great big fucking mess, and a lot of people didn't know what to make of it. I remember reading a Rolling Stone review from the time that ended with "who needs this shit?" and a writer from the Blues & Soul 'zine from a year later admitted, "Funkadelic has never been one of my favorite R&B; acts". Still, the record sold (peaking at #16 on the Soul LPs chart), and planted the seed of a cult worship that would balloon in the latter half of the decade, making the P-Funk enterprise the most successful soul act on the planet.
"Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?" started out with the sound of Clinton's wet mouth and the best ever opening line for an album: "If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions." When the beat hits with Hazel's guitar line, there can be no doubt that Funkadelic were without peer as far as this stuff was concerned. This stuff-- hell, tunes like "Mommy" and "Good Old Music" are slams to the gut as powerful as anything Zep ever did, and with beats to spare. "Music For My Mother" is like a Southern myth, detailing a loner's travels through "Keep Runnin' Mississippi", hearing music he thought long dead, yet getting trapped by its sticky black allure. "What Is Soul?" drops more classic lines ("soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes," "Soul is chitlins foo young," "soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper") in seven minutes than most bands muster up in a career. Bonus tracks like the tight instrumental "As Good As I Can Feel" and several single versions of album cuts make this album one of the most indispensable of all indispensable Funkadelic records.
Even as Funkadelic was an inspired statement, it wasn't exactly a coherent one, especially as most of the band had quit and come back again during the recording sessions. Their second record, 1971's Free Your Mind was the first (of only two) records done by the core unit from start to finish-- albeit, according to Clinton, one recorded in the span of a single day, while everyone was tripping. Compared to the debut, it's a lot more "rock" and a little less "soul." The opening track "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow" was like a Sly Stone jam gone haywire, with fuzzed out guitar and bass, distorto-organ, and spoken, chanted or otherwise freaked vox appearing all over the mix. "Friday Night, August 14th", "Funky Dollar Bill", and "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You" were a bit tighter, and a lot harder. "Funky Dollar Bill" features another down-home-on-a-porch-and-an-amp-with-probably-some-pot-and-other-things guitar riff from Hazel and Clinton and company sounding completely fucked up and screaming out at you from the depths of the stereo on lines like "you don't buy a life, you live a life, a father learns much too late-- HE WAS A-NEVER HOME!!" "Euology and Light" is like a lysergic Lord's Prayer, replete with backwards choir. The bonus track "Fish, Chips and Sweat" is again reminiscent of Sly, but in his "Dance to the Music" guise, and is suitably celebratory, even as the mix distorts the tape.
And then they got serious: Maggot Brain, released in the July of the same year, is the peak of the Funkadelic experience. The songs jam harder, the way out stuff is way fucking out there. Seriously, how many dimensions is Hazel traveling through on the instrumental title cut? His 10-minute guitar soliloquy is a spiraling model of the blues filtered through a psychedelic lens, and almost single-handedly places him in a realm with Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton as one of the great classic rock guitarists. But it got better: "Super Stupid" was the tale of a dumbass junkie set to a tune Black Sabbath would have been proud of; "Hit It And Quit It" is a funk anthem where keyboardist Worrell gets his licks in and the beat turns around a dozen times before we hit the chorus; "Can You Get to That" is honest-to-whoever pop that showed Funkadelic could be serious from time to time, especially when it came to social commentary (and also featured Isaac Hayes' female background singers, giving it a classic soul sheen), and "Wars of Armageddon" (recently, wisely used by Optimo on the Psyche Out mix) is a knock-out-drag-down fight to the death between the world's best rhythm section and paranoid, psychedelic sound effects and crowd sounds. Maggot Brain was an explosive record, bursting at the seams with exactly the kind of larger than life sound a band called Funkadelic should have made.
Too bad most of the band left afterwards. Tiki Fulwood was fired due to drugs getting in the way of his reliability as a band member; Tawl Ross reportedly got into an "acid eating contest, then snorting some raw speed, before completely flipping out," per Billy Nelson, and has not performed professionally since; Nelson himself quit over a money dispute with Clinton, leaving only Hazel and Worrell from the original Funkadelic lineup. Drummer Tyrone Lampkin replaced Fulwood, while guitarist Gary Shider (who'd already played with the band on parts of Maggot Brain) came aboard to fill out the sound. However, a lot of folks would look at former JBs like Phelps and William "Bootsy" Collins additions as the most significant. Certainly, Bootsy's mark on the whole Parliafunkadelicmint thang would eventually be almost as strong as Clinton's.
Nevertheless, 1972's America Eats Its Young is a disparate, schizophrenic record. Despite Clinton's efforts to produce a record that would have a better chance at crossover appeal than the first three Funkadelic records, like many double LPs, there's simply too much material, and too many conflicting directions to really make this seem anything other than a Frankenstein production. Of course, it has its classics: "Loose Booty" and "A Joyful Process" are the two of the best pure funk songs the band ever did, while "If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce the Cause", "Biological Speculation", "Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time", and "Miss Lucifer's Love" are great evidence of the band's strong pop bent even as their chosen subject matters could range from dark to disturbing to sci-fi. Tunes like "I Call My Baby Pussycat", "Balance", and "Philmore" even hark back to the more rock-oriented stuff of the first three records. However, it's hard to hear "We Hurt Too" (a maudlin ballad about the hidden tenderness of men) as anything but a joke, and the title track, similar to Maggot Brain's title cut, is a bit heavy on the huffing and panting. I think of this record as Funkadelic's White Album, containing too much great stuff to dismiss, but by almost anyone's standards, containing more than it needs.
From here on out, Funkadelic would devote increasingly more time to maintaining and expanding their appeal. Albums like Let's Take It to the Stage and Standing on the Verge of Getting It on (also reissued, along with Tales of Kidd Funkadelic) were considerably less freaked-out than the early stuff, but alongside Parliament's concurrent music, helped turn Clinton's empire into one of the biggest acts in music. Still, I'll always love their first records the most. Call me rockist if you will, there's just something undeniably awesome about a funk band blasting guitar jams and telling me about neurotic bitches who want to take over the universe.
