Happy 50th Anniversary to Funkadelic’s eponymous debut album Funkadelic, originally released February 24, 1970.
Nearly seven minutes into “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?,” the leadoff track on Funkadelic’s self-titled debut album, George Clinton sums up how the group came into being. “I recall, when I left a little town in North Carolina, I tried to escape this music,” he drawls “I said it was for the old country folks. I went to New York, got slick, got my hair laid. I was cool. I was cool. But I had no groove.”
These sentiments represented what made Funkadelic unique when they burst on the scene 50 years ago with their inaugural LP. Clinton had tried his hand at recording what was thought of as Black music during the mid to late 1960s, but it wasn’t working for him and his crew. The polished, immaculately produced and sequenced music might have worked for some, but for Clinton’s group of misfits, it was a poor fit. They needed funk. They needed groove.
Groove is much of what made Funkadelic Funkadelic. And what separated The Parliaments, in its original incarnation at least, from Funkadelic. Funkadelic was a departure from what was played on the radio as Black Music at the time. Before Funkadelic was released, Motown artists dominated the genres of R&B and soul. In terms of image, these groups and singers were well-packaged: they wore suits, had coordinated stage sets, and were tight in terms of execution.
This was even truer with the music of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul himself. Brown notoriously ran an extremely tight ship; everything was regimented down to the last detail. Band members were frequently docked for showing up late or making mistakes during recordings or performances. It wore on the members of Brown’s vast collective, but it resulted in genre-defining music.
Clinton originally fashioned his music in the straightforward mold. Originally from North Carolina, he relocated to New Jersey in the ’60s. There in a barbershop where he worked by day, he formed the Parliaments, a doo-wop styled group. The group eventually made their way over to Detroit, where Clinton did some song writing for Motown Records, and the Parliaments signed with Revilot Records. They recorded and released a slew of 45 RPMs for the label.
The Parliaments had a hit single at the time, “I Wanna Testify.” It sounded, in the words of future Funkadelic collaborator Overton Lloyd, like a drunken version of the Temptations. It was still fairly slick, but it had an edge.
Things changed for The Parliaments as their relationship with Revilot soured, and the group refused to record more material for the label. Eventually Revilot folded, but due to the label’s various lingering legal issues, Clinton was prevented from using the name “The Parliaments” as the group continued to pursue their music career.
Freed from Revilot, Clinton and crew changed their whole style. They became “hippies,” went from Doo-Wop to Rock, signed with the Detroit-based Westbound Records as the psychedelic soul/rock band Funkadelic. The core members of Funkadelic had originally been The Parliaments’ backing band. Now, the roles reversed, with the band moving to the forefront, and the Parliaments becoming their back-up singers.
Funkadelic fused Clinton and The Parliaments’ traditional Motown Soul background with other popular music at the time, including Sly and the Family Stone, MC5, and Jimi Hendrix. Members of Funkadelic have also maintained that Vanilla Fudge greatly influenced their approach. One night Funkadelic were opening for the prog rock group and found themselves without their sound equipment. Vanilla Fudge lent Funkadelic their sound-system, and it resulted in the fledgling group finding its niche. Specifically, it led Funkadelic to discover Marshall Amps, which became a fixture of their live shows and studio sessions.
As the ‘60s were turning to the ’70s, the country was still caught in the turmoil of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Clinton, who knew that the group were late-adopters to the psychedelic movement, felt it was important to take some risks. “Since we were late doing it, I’m going to have to make it so radical that it seems like we’re on time,” he said in the documentary Tales of Dr. Funkenstein.
During its earliest years, Funkadelic was fueled distortion, feedback, and LOTS of LSD. According to Rickey Vincent, author of Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of The One, the drug experience was “as integral to P-Funk as perspiration.” Psychedelic drugs influenced how Clinton heard music. He and the group dropped acid for the first time before a performance in Boston (the next show after their experience opening for Vanilla Fudge) and “went completely out of our minds,” Clinton said.
The drug use led to a sense of anarchy at live shows, which could last three to four hours every night. The band would create a wall of sound and distortion on stage, making it difficult for the audience to discern what was being played. This was a part of Clinton’s design. “The vibe was more important than them actually hearing us,” he said.
Funkadelic’s initial offering remains legendary. Like the group’s live shows, there was a lot of anarchy involved in those early recording sessions, which led to a lot of turmoil. Some of the chaos came from the drug use, and some of it came from a lack of organization. At one point, the entire rhythm section of the band quit mid-session; later lead guitarist Eddie Hazel left as well.
Everyone eventually rejoined the group, but the fluctuating lineup created a lot of opportunity for many of the session musicians. It’s one of the reasons why a definitive lineup of who played what on Funkadelic is essentially impossible to find, and may be lost to time. The only musicians credited on the album are Hazel on guitar, Bill Nelson on bass/vocals, Tawl Ross on rhythm guitar, Tiki Fulwood on drums, and Mickey Atkins on the organ.
Regardless, the group took its “raggedy” approach to recording and turned it into something groundbreaking. It hit with the force of a dirty bomb.
In the aforementioned “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?,” Clinton and crew tie the funk (and the meaning of Funkadelic) to what would prove to be one of the group’s favorite subject matters: sex. Low down, nasty, raw sex to be exact. The type of sex that you might think about the next day and wonder how things got so strange, but you still know it was out of this world and it’ll cause you to seek out that same feeling again.
Distorted guitar and a wailing harmonica power the nine-minute track. Clinton doesn’t sing throughout the song, instead adding classic riffing as his back-up vocalists croon. His introductory vocals of “If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions” still resonate. Later, Clinton implores that listener to “let me slide a yard of tongue down your throat; there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Many of the compositions on Funkadelic sound like extended psychedelic jam sessions. Which they were. One of the best of these was “I Got A Thing, You Got A Thing, Everybody's Got A Thing,” which became a mainstay of the group’s concerts. The song is best known for the blistering guitar solos that Ray Monette, future Rare Earth guitarist, contributes throughout the song. It is Funkadelic at its most cacophonous, lending the song a sense of urgency.
In contrast, “Music For My Mother” is practically reserved. While the guitar is prominent, (presumably) Nelson’s work on bass carries the tune. (Presumably) Hazel contributes lead vocals to the song, detailing his moves through the area of “Keep Runnin, Mississippi,” and so overwhelmed by the power of “raw funk,” that he’s moved to set by the railroad tracks and play the harmonica. The group explicitly relates funk back to the “old” traditions, viewing the genre as a natural extension of what Black music used to be during its genesis. The repeated chants that fill the song also add to its haunting ambiance.
Funkadelic occasionally gets close to creating songs with traditional structure on Funkadelic. Most notable are the two cover tracks that appear on the album. Clinton had a penchant for recreating and updating old songs by The Parliaments, and Funkadelic features the first of these efforts. They transform the slightly left-of-center three-minute doo-wop track “Good Ole Music” into a hulking, eight-minute undertaking. The first half plays like what would come to be known as a traditional psychedelic funk song, while the back half serves as a showcase for Hazel and Atkins to really get loose.
“I’ll Bet You” (sometimes listed as “I Bet You” on some of the album’s pressings), the album’s other cover song, is also part of Clinton’s lineage. He wrote it for Detroit-area resident Theresa Lindsey, who recorded “I’ll Bet You” as a Motown-styled soul jam in 1966. Funkadelic had a much different interpretation of the song, utilizing overlapping guitar-work and echoing, shimmering keys to create a cavernous, almost creepy atmosphere.
“Qualify and Satisfy” at first sounds like it’s going to be a traditional blues number. However, after going through two short verses in about a minute, the song morphs into an exhibition in free-flowing musicianship, with the guitars and organ continuously playing off of each other, low-key dueling across the song.
The album-closing “What Is Soul?” is another high point, a companion piece to “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” It bookends the album by further elucidating the ethos of the group. In the midst of spacey sounds and whistles, Clinton introduces himself as “Funkadelic,” proclaiming “I am not of your world. But fear me not I will do you no harm.” These sentences established the mythology the would guide Funkadelic (and by extension, the revamped Parliament) for the remainder of their careers. It introduced the concept that Funkadelic were a benevolent force from outer space here on Earth to free the minds of humanity.
The rest of the nearly eight-minute song is far more minimalistic than much of the rest of Funkadelic, but it ends the album on a perfect note. Over another solid guitar groove and more atmospheric keys, the group mostly chants, “La La La, La La La,” occasionally injecting hilarious “definitions” of soul (which is a stand-in for “funk”). For these keeping track, soul is “a ham-hock in your cornflakes,” “rusty ankles and ashy knee-caps,” and “a joint rolled in toilet paper,” just to name a few examples. Again, it reinforces that ideal music is prickly and just slightly imperfect.
In Clinton’s view, soul and funk were always meant to be gritty, messy, and imperfect. Through this mess, Clinton and Funkadelic would build their empire. The music became slightly more structured as the years went on, as late in 1970 they would release another album, the bizarre but successful Free Your Mind.
However, Funkadelic’s music never lost the sense of fun and bedlam that was at the core of its invention. Even though Funkadelic were indeed “late” to the party, they’re the ones that made it memorable, and one of the biggest reasons people still talk about it today.
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