George Clinton
Music as we know it would look a lot different (and less colorful) without the contributions of George Clinton. From his early musical beginnings in doo-wop and as a songwriter at Motown, the hugely prolific Clinton went on to form the bands Parliament and Funkadelic, two of the most important groups of the 1970s. With Clinton at the helm of their Mothership, they uprooted funk from its earthly origins, sending it into outer space. Having made P-Funk a household name, Clinton went on to build an impressive solo discography, all the while inspiring a legion of West Coast rap artists and holding the reins of a sensational band called the P-Funk All Stars.
As part of the 2015 Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York, Clinton sat down on the lecture couch for a rare, intimate chat about his momentous life and career, and touched on everything from Maggot Brain to sampling.
Hosted by Jeff “Chairman” Mao So without further ado, please welcome Mr. George Clinton. [applause] George Clinton How y’all doing? Jeff “Chairman” Mao How are you doing? George Clinton Fine! I love being in New York. Especially Brooklyn. [applause] Yeah, just bring back old memories, from the ’50s when doo-wop was happening. The Fort Greene Projects. We used to come over here and doo-wop our ass off. [laughter] Jeff “Chairman” Mao You’d make the trek over here from Newark? Or Plainfield? George Clinton Yeah, from Newark, we used to take the 118 to Public Service and then the train ran on over here. Jeff “Chairman” Mao I want to ask you just because — obviously we’re going to talk about Parliament-Funkadelic, we’re going to talk about the Parliaments, we’re going to talk about these classic recordings. But why do you think it is that you’ve been able to enjoy such great longevity? It’s not just about those recordings, it’s about things you’ve done recently, as well. George Clinton It’s probably paying attention to the next youngest ones behind us. If you pay attention to the ones that’s getting ready to kick you out — if you can pay attention to them, you’ll learn what’s getting ready to happen. So you can stay there. You can’t hate on them, because the minute you hate on them, you actually make them more popular. I used to take the example of anything parents hate, or old musicians hate, that’s the next shit. [laughter] Jeff “Chairman” Mao How do you resist that urge to be jaded? I talk to people who are music fans, who are younger than me and they sound so jaded already. George Clinton You can’t be corny. You corny if you start hating on them. I just keep that in my mind so I feel young, just by using the word corny. [laughter] So I just don’t want to be that in the eyes of the young kids. Not my peers, because they getting old like me. If I stay down with the ones coming up next — matter of fact I look for my great-grandkids to tell me what’s on YouTube, what’s happening. That’s how I can find out about a Chief Keef — “that’s that shit I don’t like / That’s that shit I don’t like.” It keeps you up on shit that I would ordinarily be hating on and laughing at. Once I get past that, I actually see they sound just like what we were doing when we were saying, “Shit, goddamn, get off your ass and jam.” Jeff “Chairman” Mao Somebody you worked with recently, Kendrick Lamar, how did that... George Clinton I told everybody he was getting ready to drop that doo-doo. Nobody didn’t believe me, and I didn’t hear but one record by him, but the shit he was talking. I was like, “If you write songs like that, that’s going to be the shit.” He did a whole album full of it. I love everything on that album. I’m really proud to be a part of it. Matter of fact, he just did one with me, on my album. He’s the one right now. He reminds me when Pac was with Digital Underground and was making that change. You could see it or feel it, can’t put no interpretation on it. I can’t in words, but they use a term nowadays, “Do you feel me?” “Can you feel me?” Well, all you can do is feel him. I feel the positiveness in him. I have no idea how to explain what he’s talking about, but he just feel good. If your intentions are correct, that’s all that matters. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Were you guys together, physically in the room, working together? George Clinton Yes! He came to Tallahassee, out in the country and hung out. Which I thought, somebody that young, that would be pretty boring. But he came, he hung out, he engaged in conversations that he had no business even knowing anything about. He’s evidently been talking to some people that kept him up on things, or at least have some other kind of interpretation from other than what he’s getting in his environment. Plus he’s got that too. He’s got street. But he’s definitely got a lot of information that didn’t come from his era. Jeff “Chairman” Mao So he’s kind of an old soul, in a way? George Clinton Old soul, but he’s working in a futuristic way. He’s putting his own things together. Whatever information he’s using, he’s coming up with his own thing. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Did he explain the concept of the song that was released on... George Clinton I could feel him, just the things he was talking about doing. A lot of people say “We going to be doing the funk.” “We want to save the funk.” “We want to be part of the funk.”. That’s cool, but the shit he was talking about, if you say that or, you know, just certain words — like I said, I have no idea what he was talking about. But I could feel that his intentions were positive. Not my understanding, it was probably my age difference. I’ll probably learn the slang later. But I can feel that what he was saying was symbolic to the same things we were saying in an abstract way in ‘68, ‘69. Plus we had help. We was high as hell. [laughter] We were out there. But he, whatever his vibe is, he’s out there in that same space. Jeff “Chairman” Mao You once posed the question, “What is soul?” George Clinton Soul? Jeff “Chairman” Mao Right. I don’t know. George Clinton [gestures at someone in audience] Go ahead, brother! And he’s from the vanilla suburbs. [laughter] He knows what it is. Jeff “Chairman” Mao He got the right answer though. George Clinton A ring around your bathtub. A joint rolled in toilet paper. Whoa. Chitlin’ foo yung. [addressing someone in audience] Damn, you listened real good, didn’t you? Jeff “Chairman” Mao So if that’s soul, what is funk? George Clinton Funk is anything it needs to be to save your life at that time. [applause] In other words, do the best you can, and then funk it. Once you’ve done the best you can in any situation, ain’t nothing else you can do. So you have to be able to say funk it without guilt, without anything. I’ve done the best I can, so now let’s get down. That’s the way it applied to music. You look at old blues players, they walk in, what key is this in? Monkey. It doesn’t matter, just get on in and join. Once you do that and let go, you just do the best you can, usually end up in a pocket, in a groove. What keys and what arrangement? It’s not that deep, let’s just get down. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Do you remember when you first heard the world used to describe a genre of music? Was it blues or jazz or something else? George Clinton I don’t think I heard it as a genre of music. Maybe James Brown might have said it, early on. I think as a concept for a genre, we wanted to make it special. It wasn’t blues, jazz or rock & roll. It was something you heard in a lot of records. Jazz musicians used it. Blues musicians used it. But nobody said “We gon’ play the funk.” I think that’s why I intentionally wanted to say that because I saw how rock & roll had been changed so thoroughly from Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Muddy Waters to where black people didn’t even know it was theirs. That’s white music. Because white stations were playing that version of rock & roll, and we just gave it away. If it wasn’t for Jimi Hendrix we wouldn’t have no claim to it. He actually singehandedly took the shit back. [laughter] I mean, he really took it back, and we felt like we got another version of that same thing. We did “Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow.” Again, we were tripping our asses off, turned the shit up as loud as we could, had all the amps in the world in there, and just went off. Because I knew how to make straight records. I worked at Motown, and theirs was completely clean and straight. We knew how to do that, but it was time to change. Jeff “Chairman” Mao It’s funny you mention Jobete and Motown and your early stuff because I’m actually a really big fan of your early stuff as well. Because anybody who knew all the funk stuff, once you hear the straighter stuff, the soul stuff, the R&B stuff that you start out with, it’s like, oh my god, it’s the same thing but they freaked it later. George Clinton It’s loud. We used to call our version of funk Motown Loud. I bet you it was just a straight Motown song played on Marshall amps. People had all kinds of terminologies for us. Temptations on acid, James Brown on PCP. That was the image we gave off was probably deeper than we really were, because we were really lame. At the concept of being out there like that. But we were learning fast. We probably would have been convinced of our Motown ability to be a Motown act. Which actually ended — not ended — but ended the way we knew Motown to be, the only thing that kept them alive was the Jackson 5, and Ashford & Simpson when they came along to stretch it out. But Motown as we knew it started to end around ‘67. It was a different thing then. They were doing the lady singing the blues by then. They were moving out of Detroit, so we felt like we could take over Detroit and do our version of the next generation of Motown stuff. Those songs like “Party Boys” and all the doo-wop stuff we had done, we just knew we had to change. We changed that going into Motown, because Motown actually changed the doo-wop stuff. That song right there that you just played, we been playing over here at the Brooklyn Paramount. Murray the K, Swingin’ Soiree. Some of y’all may be that old. Nobody? You used to bring all the shows to Brooklyn. Jeff “Chairman” Mao What was Plainfield, New Jersey like? Because that’s kind of where you settled after leaving Newark. George Clinton Well, I didn’t actually leave Newark. I used to catch the 49 bus over to Plainfield every morning and work at my barber shop. Or we sang, and then I’d catch the last bus, 11:30, back to Newark. So I never actually lived in Plainfield, but for years that’s where my barber shop was. That’s where the musicians, Eddie Hazel, “Billy Bass” Nelson, Bernie Worrell, Ramon Fulwood — Tiki — they all were from Plainfield. So the band was from Plainfield. Jeff “Chairman” Mao It’s kind of mind-blowing to me that all these musicians — all the ones you just mentioned — were all just kids, hanging out in the barber shop. Were they all aspiring to be musicians at that point, or were they just kids hanging out? George Clinton This was actually before they even... Billy was nine years old. Actually eight years old. He used to run around there smacking kids off their bikes. He was just a little bad kid. And they hung around the barber shop, cleaning up and trying be a help. They would hear us singing and stuff. I don’t think he got the idea of actually playing an instrument to just prior to us doing “(I Wanna) Testify.” Billy was the first musician, and all he could do was strum it. He couldn’t make any notes and he could never tune it. He had enough vibe that he could strum it for that verse, “I just want to testify,” which we loved. We probably sang that for 12 hours without stopping. Once they got it together I knew it was a hit record and I got on the plane went back to Detroit. Ron Banks from the Dramatics, Pat Louis, who’s one of the Andantes, who’s on everybody’s record from Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul to all the Motown records and all of our records. We actually did the record, “I just wanna testify,” came back, got the fellows from New York, got the rehearsals. The record came out in about a month. We didn’t even know it was out. Smash hit. We were ready for it. We went out on the road doing the doo wop thing. We got there and the Beetles had Sgt. Pepper. That changed the world. We immediately had to get rid of our suits. The hair do’s weren’t together anyway. We could never keep ties alike. We were going to do what they was calling hippies. Now, we knew how to be poor. [laughter] That was easy. We were trying to wear suits a lot and have them tailor made. Hippies became hip. Jeans with holes in them, patches said “Fuck you.” We knew how to do that one! We majored in making people look cool. We worked in the barbershop. We knew what cool was like. We had the Sam Cookes, the Jackie Wilsons. Everybody came to the shop to get their hair done. We knew what that was like. You mean it’s easier to do this!? I took the Holiday Inn towel, made a diaper out of it. I took the bed sheet, poured ink or whatever on it, put it over my head, nothing under it. We just begin to turn the music up. Everybody basically was from the church in the band. So that feeling of soulfulness was really what Jimi did with the version he had. It was seriously R&B. With us it was seriously funky, and everybody was tripping like us so we all was probably in some place. We all agreed that we wanted to be there and it was always positive. The ugliest person in the world was beautiful. That was the way you felt in those days. I mean, it changed, like everything. Nothing stayed nice. So when it changed, somebody said, “Bye, Bye American Pie.” They meant that; it was over. Some of us didn’t hear that. I didn’t hear it for 35 years later. But I’m glad that I did hear it, and I’m here and I don’t regret shit. Jeff “Chairman” Mao How did the other Parliaments sort of interact with the younger dudes in Funkadelic when they became a band? George Clinton Well, actually they’re like big brothers. They grew up with them but they could have killed them, because they was a pain in the ass. They had basically been our little brothers, and in order for me to keep recording, I and couldn’t use the Parliament name for a minute. I had to rely on them. I made them the stars and we became their backup singers. I was still in charge of it, but you couldn’t tell the older ones that they weren’t still their boss. But you couldn’t be their boss because now they face is the one on the album and ours wasn’t. So they’re telling us, “You’re getting old. Go home.” That would really bug the older guys. But it still was a family. Their parents actually put us in charge of them when we went on the road. They didn’t hesitate wanting to put a foot in their ass. You actually couldn’t, but you sure got tested. Jeff “Chairman” Mao How would you describe the Detroit environment. The late ’60s, early ’70s Detroit, these bands at the time, MC5, the Stooges, Amboy Dukes, all these different groups. Were you embraced by that community? George Clinton We were all. All the ones you just named Ted Nugent and Amboy Dukes, Iggy Pop, the Stooges, MC5, John Sinclair, Parliament-Funkadelic. And weird as it sounds, Stevie Wonder, because he was just getting started. We were called the Bad Boys of Ann Arbor. John Sinclair got locked up for two joints; I think they gave him something like 20 years. We had to picket and lobby for almost a year and a half to get him out of jail. We used to have smoke ins on the weekend in the park in Ann Arbor. The whole school would just come up to the park and light up. There wasn’t nothing that you could do about it and we would play all trying to get John Sinclair out of jail. We did that for a period of time. Then John Lennon and Yoko came and we finally got enough people together. Like I said, we were called the Bad Boys of Ann Arbor, because MC5 almost got us locked up. We used to call them the White Niggas, because they was real deep. We were cool compared to them, but we would always tell them, “Look, y’all go home. If we do that shit with y’all we’re going to jail.” We knew better then to try the shit they was doing. Sure enough they would light up on the plane. And when the police would come on the plane when the plane landed, passed everybody and came all the way to the back where we were at, and they’re getting off laughing. Like I said, we had the same diversified management. Was all our agent. We all had the same agent. Jeff “Chairman” Mao What were the audiences like at your shows at that time? George Clinton Eight to 80. Blind, crippled, crazy. We’ve always had audience, from young to older then us at that time. But with them they had the hippies. We would draw that, you call them pimps, hoes, and hippies. We’d draw them from Detroit. They would mesh together because at those days everybody would go to the shows anyway. There wasn’t no separation. Not yet. Not until ’69, ’70. That’s when rock & roll started going its own way. Underground stations, rock stations and R&B stations. Before that, it was just pop music, anything that made it. The audience back then was, like I said, everything. The same as it is with us today. It’s like going to the circus. All the generations. When you go to the circus, grandparents, parents and the kids go. Thanks to hip-hop that has happened for us. The samples took us into the next generation. The Snoops and the Dres and the Tupacs and all that. Now, it’s into the next generation, the Kendrick Lamars and all them, and the electronic music. Funk is everywhere it needs to be, because funk is the DNA for booty-moving music. Right now I just did a record with Soul Clap and Louie Vega and with my new album I just got the version back with Kendrick Lamar on the Louie Vega version of “Brothers Be Like George.” We got the barrels of the guns aiming at everybody. We aren’t stopping; we want the planet. One planet under a groove. [applause] Jeff “Chairman” Mao When younger musicians meet you, I would imagine they really geek out, right? You’ve worked with Prince over the years. I can’t imagine Prince being anything but super chill and cool. Was he nerding out? Asking you a bunch of questions about your music process back in the day? George Clinton He would. It would be like holding class when I would go there, cause he’s real soft-spoken. He would call me up in the middle of the night after the show was over. Now, he knows I’m in the hotel doing wrong. He’d call me up saying, “Hey, come on over. I want to talk.” I’m like, “Man.” He’d say, “It’s okay,” and I’m not going to be disrespectful. I know he doesn’t get out so I hate to keep getting up and going to the bathroom and all that. He was like, “Just come on over, it ain’t like I don’t know thangs.” I would go over there and he’d forever ask me about political conspiracy. I was into that big time. I would carry my Behold a Pale Horse under my arm. I was gone with that. It was like holding class. He would ask stuff like that. But that’s my man. Fuck. Jeff “Chairman” Mao He’s doing a lot of good now, too. When did the stage show really get expansive? We know Parliament-Funkadelic, P-Funk All Stars as doing these marathon shows. When did that become the thing for you guys to do these really extended versions of song? The 25 minute songs? All that stuff? George Clinton We started as soon as we broke away from the Motown thing. We established that with “Free Your Mind.” We were going to do whatever we wanted to do. We weren’t going to be in a bag, that’s what that whole album was about. We wasn’t trying to get a hit single. It was just going to be where we don’t have to compete with nobody. Because that was allowed, ’67 on. You could go left, right, whatever you wanted to do. We had already done straight songs with strings and horns. We know how to do that. We got a hit record called “Good Old Music,” which was a fluke. The company was going out of business as soon as the record hit. We realized this is it, so we came back with another straight champ, “Music for My Mother,” because that’s what it reminded me of. We did the whole album in one day. Just went in the studio and started doing all the vamps that we did on stage that we knew worked. Talked a lot of shit. We listened to “Free Your Mind… Your Ass Will Follow” and realized Martha and the Vandellas is on that record with us. It surprised me, I forgot she was there. She was a friend of the group. At the time she was like, “What y’all got me saying?” Free your mind, your ass will follow! And that’s all we did. We were always joking, but you get serious when the groove hits you, so you do the jokes serious. Jeff “Chairman” Mao What song did Martha sing? George Clinton “Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow.” She’s the one to say, “Your Ass!” Jeff “Chairman” Mao Wow. You mention Eddie Hazel. Maggot Brain, obviously his masterpiece. What did you tell him? What was the instruction for Eddie before he went in and recorded that? George Clinton I’ll tell you what. You said it’s a masterpiece, you couldn’t tell the engineers that when they did it. They didn’t want their names on the record. Because I’m over there fucking with the knobs, turning the drums off and this up, and right while the record was being mixed. They didn’t really want nothing to do with it. But Eddie had responded so well to what I had said. I set him in a mood and he said it jokingly. It was such a groovy soulful song, I told him, “imagine Hazel” — that’s his mother. I said, “Imagine Hazel just died.” He said, “Fuck you man. That’s fucked up.” I just walked away, but I knew it was planted. When he start it the rest of the band is playing with him. You can hear the drums and the bass in the beginning of it, but he was so far gone from that first note that to leave them in at that moment, it would have just been a nice instrumental. Taking them out of there and playing with the echoes, about five different times. Five different echoes. What you hear on the record is basically the second echo. The source is very rarely used on the record. Most of that is the echoes, and there’s a lot of them because he had an Echoplex on his guitar. Plus we did what we call a slapback echo in the studio, so you got echoes slapping back on another echo. That record, all you get is the feeling of what he was playing and it’s like, it’s what I thought it was when I heard it. The reason I did it like that, I was trying to be deep but I knew that his feeling works, I don’t care — him or Bernie Worrell. Bernie Worrell worked in classical, knowing what he’s doing. Eddie feels what he’s doing and you can count on it. You ain’t got to know shit about it. Bootsy, rhythmically, knows what he’s doing. I don’t even ask what it is. Give me a track, I don’t care what it is. I just got to find my part. You can’t figure that shit out. I saw him actually trying to play Bernie’s part. No, you can’t play Bernie’s part because now you got to think, and you don’t think. Your fingers know exactly where to go. You don’t think. That’s got nothing to do with you. That’s your relationship between you and your instrument. It’s hard to think of that stuff ahead of time when it’s that good. That’s why I like hip-hop when they came out with free styling. That’s a hell of a thought. I love some of the people that did that real good. Jeff “Chairman” Mao I want to ask you about a couple of your other collaborators Garry Shider. George Clinton Starchild. Garry Shider, along with Eddie, Dillon, and all them. They all went to church together. They were the second string after Eddie, Billy and them got started up and going. Motown moved them out the picture for a minute. Never forever, but just for a minute. And we took Gary, Boogie [Mosson], and Tawl [Ross], we took them to Toronto. If you played in Plainfield you was going to be a junkie. Straight up. Everyone from 12 years to 70 at that particular time, so we took them up there cause we were leaving and stashed them up there until 72. We did America Eats Its Young with Garry Shider and Boogie. That’s when the new version of Funkadelic came out. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Wow. Then how did Gary become the heir to the diaper? George Clinton I think I stopped doing it and started going to the sheet. When he came into it he had to do something. I think him and Tawl both used to do it. Tawl was probably too normal doing it. It looked like it fit him to right. Gary could pull it off pretty good, because when he would take it he was still a cool dude. When Towel would do it he looked like he should keep it on. He was the original Iggy pop. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Glenn Goins. George Clinton Whoa. Glenn was un-be-liev-able. To this day there’s nothing that I’ve seen. I mean you’ve got the gospel singers, the Red Salmons. It’s hard to put that together. If you look at that video and see him call in the Mothership. When he called in the Mothership you can bet you gon’ visualize it. He gon’ make you see it, he gon’ make it appear. He was the youngest in the group at the time. Him along with Eddie. Eddie is another one who sings. He’ll make himself cry when he sings. But Glenn could do anything he wanted to with his voice. Could you imagine Glenn going to D. J. Rogers singing background for Bobby Womack? When he came with us he had just been fired by Bobby. Bobby told him and Dion, “This is the Bobby Womack show.” Glenn and them, they was just singing in the back so much that D. J. Rogers said, “No. Hell no. Y’all get your own show.” That was always a joke between us. “They’re singing more than I’m singing!” Jeff “Chairman” Mao George Clinton Damn. I guess we had some bad motherfuckers in the group. Jeff “Chairman” Mao He was later, though. He was later. George Clinton Matter of fact I just said something to Vivian just now. We were going to hire him to come rehearse us for the new Mothership we’re getting ready to put together now. Oh yeah, oh yeah. We’re getting ready to do that. We’re getting ready to do some serious stuff but we’ll talk about that later. Junie from the Ohio Players they’re the ones that started them off in that direction. He came with us “One Nation Under a Groove” was the first record he did with us. The second one he came to me — I used to sing a song. I used to hum it to myself when I was fishing. He would say [in high voice], “Hey man. Hey, why don’t you record that, man?” I would say, “Part of it is in 3/4. You can’t dance to that. Round and round we go / we’re dancing our love.” I was just humming it. He said, “It can be a range, man. It can be a range.” A couple of days later he come into the studio, he said, “Just do it the way that you would regularly do it.” [sings beat] I sung it just like I singed it ordinarily, and didn’t have to change, the “round and round” worked. And when that worked, we must have had 50 people in there. Everybody was on that record. But it was so tight that it sounded like it was just one or two people. That’s one of the best records. Junie is unbelievable. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Junie said that Bootsy actually played the drums on “Knee Deep.” He said that he played the drums on “One Nation Under a Groove.” George Clinton Who said that? Jeff “Chairman” Mao Junie said that. George Clinton That who played it? Jeff “Chairman” Mao That Bootsy played the drums on “Knee Deep” and “One Nation Under a Groove.” Is that possible? George Clinton That’s possible, yeah. That’s possible. Jeff “Chairman” Mao I’m just going for official confirmation. George Clinton If they sound confident like that, then fuck it. If I was successful at that time, I was fucked up. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I know everything that went down then. That’s bullshit. It’s much easier to [say], “Yeah, that’s what happened. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Fair enough. You mentioned the Mothership. What’s the status of the Mothership right now? Where is the mother ship? George Clinton The Smithsonian. They’re building a new wing of the Smithsonian. The African-American section of the Smithsonian. They have the Tuskegee Airmen’s plane. Some Oprah stuff. Jeff “Chairman” Mao All the important stuff. George Clinton Yeah, so the Mothership is going to be in the lobby of the new building. They got it already I seen online where they were actually polishing it up. At the end of the year, at the beginning of next year. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Are you going to bring it back? George Clinton They’re going to start showing it. We’re getting a brand new one. Am I right? [applause] We got that in the works right now. Jeff “Chairman” Mao You got a good deal on a new Mothership? George Clinton There’s going to be a new Mothership on tour around the world. The one that everybody’s been waiting on. Jeff “Chairman” Mao How crazy was it? What was the reaction of Casablanca [Records] at the time when you said, “Hey, we need some money to build this Mothership”? What was the process of actually getting that done? George Clinton We had a hit record at the time. The record Mothership [Connection] was already a hit, so I know you don’t get no back-end out of a record deal. All you’re going to get is up front and don’t wait. Don’t worry about the royalties. Neal is the promotion man. He worked at Buddha. He was the king of bubble gum, so he knew what I meant when I said, “Get the spaceship for me. You ain’t got to give me those royalties that you ain’t going to give me anyway.” It’s much easier in his mind to pay for a spaceship that’s going to help promote the record instead of them giving me the money. I know once I get the spaceship. The only problem is not only Parliament is going to be on there, but Funkadelic is going to be on there, and they don’t want us. Bootsy is going to be on there and he doesn’t want us. Brian’s on Atlantic. Parliament? We’ll take them to Casablanca too. Neil [Bogart, founder of Casablanca Records] got two things out of it, but he didn’t care because the royalties. He got me a loan from the bank. He didn’t even give me the royalties. He got me a loan from the bank and the royalties from the company paid the bank back. It wasn’t no thing for him to say yes to that. He knew it was a win-win situation. He knew that with a spaceship, that what was going to promote some records. That was a man who used to run around New York at Buddha in July with gorilla suits on. Going to the radio station with the record in their hand to get it played. He’d do anything to get a record played. He knew what promotion was and I did too because I’d done that quite a bit in Detroit. When I said spaceship he was down with it, the only thing he wanted to do is... He hadn’t married her yet, but Joyce was the name he landed in the ghetto. I said, “Hell no. This has got to be a world thing. It’s got to save everybody.” R&B budgets are small. If you start talking about just the ghetto, it’s going to be a small budget. They’re not going to spend no money on no R&B product just for the ghetto. Once it became a pop record, which is today “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker,” it’s still that record. Jeff “Chairman” Mao You just mentioned the different acts that were on different labels. How did that come about? Was that just bidding wars for different groups? What was the situation with that? Was it premeditated that way? George Clinton Anytime a group get a hit record, the vultures be out there picking the carcass of everybody in the band until they find out who’s doing what. When we got the hit record, I did it before they got to us. “Don’t worry, you can have Eddie. We got him on tour, we can break the record for you.” Funkadelic was already on Warner’s. Take Eddie too. Parliament is on Casablanca. He wanted a girl group. I took him to Brides first, he thought that was too dark. Brides of Funkenstein. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Right, yeah. George Clinton But I did the record already because I didn’t wait. We did it with Julia Phillips, who did Close Encounters [of the Third Kind]. She wanted a soundtrack for Close Encounters. That’s what wore Toshawn on the Brides of Funkinstein album. That album was done for her, but she wanted to buy it cheap so I sold it to Atlantic. It happened accidentally but I just started before people started picking the group apart. They still did it; they got the rest of them later on. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Yeah. George Clinton You start seeing mutiny on the Mothership. Had me walking the plank. One thing about the funk is it always comes back together. Ain’t nowhere else for it to go! The funk is always going to be here. I’ll help you. We’ll help you. I told Junie, he was giving people contracts and I said, “Where my contract? I’m going too!” I don’t need to be the boss. That ain’t no fun. We were with each other, no matter what happens. Sometimes that ain’t cool, but you still have to do it. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Yes, I mean, I can only imagine. We’re talking dozens and dozens of people. George Clinton About 70. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Yes, 70 people. What would your advice be to somebody in a group — maybe a slightly smaller group? To politically keep things together? For a band, with all these different sections and stuff like that, it’s quite a bit. George Clinton I mean, you look at Wu-Tang did the same thing. They did the same thing. RZA had the Wu-Tang deal, then each one of them had deals. It’s the same thing. If you’re going to do that, there is no formula to making that work, because everybody is their own person. Everybody want to do their thing at their pace when they want to do it. The best you can do is just do what y’all do and funk it. You know? Stay with each other even if you’re apart. Allow yourself to still work together even if you can’t stand each other. That pretty much works, because that’s — the music deserves to be out there. It’s going to be. You might have to wait until you get broke to come back and feel something and do it. My thing is, show me a studio. I don’t care who you is, I ain’t got nothing else to do most of the time. I like it like that; I ain’t trying to be no goodie-goodie. Sometimes you look to put your foot in somebody’s ass, but that ain’t getting no music made. Jeff “Chairman” Mao I know you worked with RZA at different points. Did you guys ever talk about...? George Clinton We did. As a matter of fact, we did something that’s just getting ready to come out now. Him and Shavo [Odadjian], System of a Down, we did a thing. Matter of fact, they just asked for paperwork the other day. That’s pretty interesting too. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Did he pick your brain about that whole thing as well? All the different labels and different off-shoots of the groups? Because that’s basically what you’re saying... George Clinton He did a good job himself. I’m ready to pick his brain on how he’s doing in this day and time. I think it was pretty well understood that when you get — especially in something like hip-hop — everybody is a different personality anyway. The best way to keep that is just get a different deal like jazz musicians used to do it, you know? Miles has a certain set of people, Herban Hancock and all them. As soon as you get a record, then next time Herbie Hancock has a deal, Miles play on it. It’s always accepted like that in jazz. It’s actually the same thing as jazz basically. Jeff “Chairman” Mao You mentioned just Maggot Brain and really going wild in the studio using the studio as an instrument, I guess, to some degree. What are the mistakes, things that maybe we take for granted from the records listening to them? Are there things that you remember that sound the way the sound on these songs because something went wrong or because there was an accident or something? George Clinton A lot of it is parts get missing, parts get erased, wrong versions get put out. You get all of that. And there is so much with our stuff that you didn’t notice it until the record was out. Sometimes they actually fool you. Somebody do a mix, and they want their mix on the record. At the last minute they change it and send the tape out. That fucks you up too. Sometimes you don’t even notice it for years, because — “I sound good, I sound good!” Then you say, “What a minute! This was the one I told them to put out!” Hey girl! Kendra Foster, y’all. Over there with D’Angelo. Hey I saw Charlie already. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Where do you think you got your knack for wordplay? That’s one of your trademarks. George Clinton Say that again? Jeff “Chairman” Mao Your knack for wordplay. So many different catchphrases, turns of phrases that you’ve made famous over the years. George Clinton Style-wise, I’m biting off of Smokey Robinson. He was the king of puns. He could just flip things around. A lot of it was school stories that he would flip. Two lovers and both of them are you. You know, I learned it from him. By the time we were doing Funkadelic, I was doing things absurdly. Not just simple wordplay, but ridiculously wordplay. Using words that sounded like, homonyms, using them as though they were the same word. Just flip it any kind of way. Sometimes it would get so stupid that we’d do it to the point of laughter. You get a concept, throw it up in the air, and people just threw puns at it. Ain’t that punny? You get stupid, but you’re high enough to say, “I’m good.” A lot of that actually worked, because, “If you would suck my soul, I would lick your funky motion.” I had to be out of mind at that time. It just probably flipped off trying to be deep. You know who I love is already out there. Jeff “Chairman” Mao That’s kind of deep, though. I mean, it is. George Clinton When I heard it later on, and people started making their interpretation to what it meant, of course I meant that! If I can, I’m going be deep. Jeff “Chairman” Mao So there is no deeper meaning behind some of these. George Clinton Not for the most part. I’m not going to give you all the secrets now. Can’t tell you which ones was real and which ones ain’t. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Really? Even what about, “Hey lady, won’t you be my dog and I’ll be your tree, and you can pee on me.” Is there a deeper meaning to that? George Clinton I got away with that one for years. I would write that on my autograph to girls. Then my granddaughter, she’s probably five, five or six, she says, “Granddad, girl dogs don’t pee on trees.” I’m like, “Oh, shit.” Now I can’t say it with any kind of conviction. I’ve been getting away with it that long. That’s on Dope Dogs. Oh yeah, you know I had to bite on my own lines. That’s my granddaughter right there, Tennishi. [points to audience / applause] They were six years old. They were six years old when I got them to do that on Dope Dogs record. Now they’re in the group on the new record, and they got their own group. I got an older daughter out there somewhere, I can’t say how old she is. They’re all in the band right now. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Sly Stone, somebody that inspired you obviously, and also became a friend. George Clinton That’s my motherfucker. He’s my mother fucker, for real. You know what I’m saying? Sly Stone, is that mother fucker you all. I don’t give a fuck. He got it like that. That mother fucker could play this shit, write this shit, and he didn’t let nobody hear it. I mean, it’s crazy to me, but when he finally pulled it out it’d be like, “What the fuck are you sitting on this for?” [imitates Sly Stone voice] “It ain’t right.” The fuck you ain’t bought no record in 40 years, how would you know what’s right! Just let it come out, get rid of it! He actually gave me some songs to put on this last album that I don’t think nobody could get. Jeff “Chairman” Mao What’s your most memorable experience hanging out with Sly Stone? George Clinton Statute of limitation ain’t up yet. I can give, well no, everybody heard that shit. No, he’s cool, he’s cool. Last funny story, is probably Overton over there, who drew all the Parliament albums, Overton Loyd. He and myself and somebody, I forgot who else it was, we painted Sly’s motor home he was living in. We worked on it and it was beautiful, it was a masterpiece. Three days later, he hawked it. But it’s right around the corner from him; we can get it anytime we want it, he said. Truth is, somebody bought him a new one, and he didn’t realize, hey, damn. I could have at least sold that. He’s like that, he’s cool. It didn’t hawk it for drugs, y’all. He just got a new one. Jeff “Chairman” Mao You talk very frankly about addiction, about drugs in your book. George Clinton Shit, I was fucked up, shit. Everybody knew that. We got busted enough, you know? But when I got ready to change, I did that. I changed. I got married. That’s my wife sitting over there, Caroline. I made an album with 33 songs on it. I did a book on my life, and I’m just getting started. I have a lot of time on my hands nowadays. Believe me, doing that took up a lot of time. Doing nothing, sitting around getting high, you spend a lot of money and a lot of time. I thought, “Damn. If I spent this kind of time and money on anything, I should really make money.” That’s what I did. I started to work on the book, on the album. Because it had to make a statement, it had to be like, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You? I ain’t crying. I’m going to be hard when I get through. I need something to piss me off to make me go there. It was just like, “I can’t get my drugs, I’m pissed off.” I got to get a new thing to get me interested in doing, and take up that time. I mean, I didn’t even want to do that, but I wanted to make sure that at least it’s as interesting as fucking doing drugs. I think what I’m doing now is very interesting. I’m already doing a new Parliament album. Jeff “Chairman” Mao So what’s a typical day like for you with this clean lifestyle? Do you meditate? Do you.. No, seriously! What sort of things do you do? George Clinton It’s corny as hell. I go out and feed the birds and shit. I watch the squirrels in the backyard. It’s cool, you know, I’ve always done that, but, man, now I’m aware of it. [laughter] Before, it was just something to do. But damn nigga, you’re sitting up here looking at squirrels and shit! Then, to the studio, you know. I get with a bunch of kids that are the same as it was in the barber shop. We do tracks; they call it making beats. We call it doing arrangements, so we do both of it. Arrange some of the beats. Put guitars over some of the tracks they come up with. You know, I’m down for ProTools, but I got to get some noise on that shit, live. I’ve got to get some analog in there somewhere. We combine all of it. I let them influence me and I influence them and it’s back and forth. Like I said, it keeps you on a fresh path, coming up with new shit. I still called Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis to come down there, and this is going to sound weird to a lot of people, because they are playing with a lot of ease, and loops and tracks, but you got that serious James Brown horn on there, but it’s brand new. Ain’t nothing to compare it to. And it’s funky, so it ain’t going to be too much problem. Jeff “Chairman” Mao At the time when James Brown, all the groups were going at it, did you look at it as competitive? Fred and those guys eventually joined you guys. Bootsy was with James. He left James, eventually ended up with you guys. George Clinton Basically we knew James was the baddest thing, we saw that at the Apollo years before. Being at Motown, you thought of that like I thought of my mother’s music. He’s got a groove and it’s cool, but he ain’t writing lyrics, that’s the way we thought of it. We thought we was something special. The stories that Motown wrote, that was the shit. When it came time to sample that shit, the first thing they said was [imitates James Brown grunt]. Let me know he must have been saying something. It had to be a lot of message in that tone that let me know I had to go back and reevaluate what we thought about James. We just thought he could dance and had a tight band, but ain’t shit after that. Once you got that, ain’t too much more to want. Put a little bit of story in there, if you can. So we got hold of Bootsy and them, we took what he was doing, put a little story in there, a little silliness, some solos other than horns and we had what we called P-Funk. We didn’t have enough sense to realize that he was, “Papa Got a Brand New Bag,” he meant that shit. It ain’t nothing like that yet. It’s going to be a while before that shit happens. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Do you remember the first time you realized you had been sampled? George Clinton De La Soul came up and gave us $100,000. I swear to God, we didn’t even know what to call it. They weren’t saying samples of what, I didn’t know if it was for the song, or the record. It was actually the record, but we didn’t know we owned it at the time. Nobody told us. The court had already given it to us but we didn’t know for a long time. We weren’t paying attention. But they gave us $100,000. That should have put us on notice, but we were running, spending the $100,000. Took us a long time to figure this shit out. Yeah, but after that, every time you turned around, there was a sample. I had seen it in the clubs, when he start it off [imitates DJ] and go to another record. That’s a hip segue, that’s a hip way to keep people on the dance floor. But to hear it on a record? It’s like, what do you call this? Then I started hearing Rakim. It’s speeded up a little bit, but I know that line. Public Enemy. Yeah, ““No Head, No Backstage Pass,” they used those samples, those licks. I recognize that. To me, I’m flattered. I’m glad they doing it, because the only time you hear your shit anyways is going to be on K-tel packages on TV. With ten other records, you don’t get shit from that. At least if they’re sampling it, I’m going to figure a way to get in this. I’m not going to go out here hating and screaming, because there’s something in here for me. The thing was, just be down with them. Hang with them until you figure out what it is you’re supposed to get. They aren’t giving it to you easy — not talking about the artist, the companies. They going to get both of us. It took 20 years for us to figure out that there was even a concept of paying for the record. You know you can get something for the songwriting, but they kept that hid so thoroughly that you are supposed to get paid for them using your master. We didn’t know that. We just now finding that out, and it’s costing me a fortune right now to have found that out, because now I’m dedicated to fighting that as much as I am to making music. I’m dedicated to getting copyrights on the up and up. The way it’s done now is corruption. I mean, at a high level. It’s going to take the Federal Government to investigate this the same way they did banks, because copyrights are that powerful now. You can use them in bundles to get millions of dollar loans, and that’s what they’re doing with copyrights. It’s infected the copyright office, it’s infected all of the DMIs and ASCAPS and everything. It’s affected everybody to the point that you get a blurred line, and make it seem like they had the baseline copy written — which, Motown, I doubt it. I could be wrong. We had something we called “lead sheets,” which meant you had the lead melody on the paper on a sheet of music. Not the arrangement, not the drums, the bass, the guitar. That would have cost a fortune to do that to every rock & roll or blues or R&B song you did. Companies wouldn’t spend that kind of money, so they did a lead sheet with the lead voice. If that bass line is on that lead sheet, then they bit off something that was copy-written, but I don’t think it was. Matter of fact, they had my song in that same suit. They had one of my songs, “Sexy Ways,” and they was getting ready — the wife is telling me don’t say this, but I’m saying it. The same firm was suing on behalf of me. I went on TMZ and told them, “I don’t hear my song in there.” Because they was bullshitting; they would have used that to get twice as much as they got from him. They would have gotten it from Marvin Gaye’s family and they would have gotten it from me. I wasn’t going to stand by. Not just because I wasn’t getting paid out of it, I wouldn’t have done that anyway. What’s going to happen with reggae or go-go, which every beat is basically the same? If you’re going to say the beat is copy-writable, then it’s going to end a lot of them. They really blurred the line, for real. Jeff “Chairman” Mao You mentioned Rakim a few moments ago — George Clinton That’s my other motherfucker. Excuse me cutting you off, but when it comes to hip-hop, that’s the one. [takes his hat off] He is that motherfucker. There has been a lot of other ones, like my other motherfucker is Eminem. I watched him as a baby. I watched him grow up, and believe me, you don’t want him talking about you. Under no circumstances. He ain’t the one you want to have that discussion with. As far as the ability to be what hip-hop is supposed to be — cool, flowing — Rakim is all of that. He don’t have to dance, he don’t have to do shit but just talk. That shit hurts. You don’t want to follow him. You know Follow the Leader, you don’t want him to be the one you have to follow. Jeff “Chairman” Mao I think it’s awesome, remarkable that you have this appreciation for the artistry of hip-hop because it’s in your book — if anybody’s read the book, and if you haven’t yet you should. You say basically you feel like you hadn’t accomplished anything. George Clinton Every time I hear someone with that intensity of talent, I feel like I want to start all over again, like I ain’t done shit. When you hear that, it’s like, “Whoa, I wish I’d have said that.” I can’t even listen to Eminem, because he don’t ever stop. He do it all the time. You have to give yourself up to be able to say, “Shit, I wish I had done that. I haven’t done shit.” Even Kendrick Lamar, when I hear that record I have to keep listening. I like it, because I just feel what he is doing. But there’s something in there I got to learn what the fuck it is he’s doing. Because everybody likes it like that. And most the people don’t know what the fuck he talking about, you just know he’s saying key metaphors that feels good. Because if you start trying to get him to explain it, it’s probably going to be let down. I’m sure that he felt it, not necessarily thought about it intellectually — what the fuck this mean? Because words mean so many different things to people. It’s hard to come to consensus on what a word means, so you just basically have to... “Do you feel me?” That’s what I mean with that. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Do you have an album, a recording, a song that you’ve written that you feel is your greatest accomplishment? Is there a top few? George Clinton Oh, you mean the ones we did? Jeff “Chairman” Mao Yeah, from your career. George Clinton Oh, “Atomic Dog.” “Knee Deep.” And “One Nation”. Those three, because they’re commercial and they’re really good, artsy-fartsy records, too. A lot of the other ones, we call Our Father, like “We Want the Funk,” I was biting off David Bowie. [singing melody] I would be sued like hell. If they owned “Fame” I’d be in trouble, because the beat is the feel. I didn’t copy the melody, which is the sin. You copy seven notes of the melody, that’s what copyright law is. But the feel, on the one, like James Brown, he [sings] he just didn’t finish it. I just added the silent parts that he didn’t say. But it’s the same feel. Bowie definitely got funky. If you don’t know that, he definitely got funky. You do not be Stardust and not be funky. You might not be funky of your era, but he is definitely not mainstream. Jeff “Chairman” Mao [in response to inaudible comment from audience] Kind of dissed the Doobie Brothers there. We’re going to open things up for questions in just a moment, but I do want to ask you — you’ve said that you didn’t want to be pegged as a political artist, yet your music really is, I think, some of the greatest music, is about the human condition. Or it is about political issues, or topical issues. There’s anti-war songs, there’s songs about brotherhood, there’s songs about all sorts of things. George Clinton Well, I bring up the topics for people to think about. I don’t try to give them no answers. Food for thought. I just say things because I know they should make you think, or you’re going to think, “What the fuck is he talking about?” Or, “Why did he say that?” I bring up things that a lot of people won’t say, or make a statement like “America eats its young.” You couldn’t say that nowadays. They would be all over your ass if you tried to say that nowadays. But at that moment, I could say those things because that needed to be said from somewhere in my head. Because that’s what I was hearing from all the other artists and the kids that was around us. That’s the kind of thoughts it was provoking in me. At any given time, I probably was political. Just to look at the group was political. It’s one thing to have Jimi Hendrix up there by himself with two white boys doing that, but to have ten of us up there doing that, loud as we were doing it, that’s a whole ’nother thing for everybody to see. We was too black for white folks, and we was too white for black folks. But the people that liked us kept multiplying, day after day after day. When we flipped it and did Chocolate City, it was hip to be black. Even with white folks, vanilla suburbs, it was hip to be black. James Brown said, “I’m black and I’m proud.” We saw it coming. We did “One Nation Under a Groove.” We had the first black mayor in Newark, so I knew eventually there was going to be a black president. So we rode that all the way to outer space. You saw blacks on the spaceship. Where my bitches at? Uhura on Star Trek was the only black you saw in outer space. She needed company. Jeff “Chairman” Mao I think that’s why this music is timeless, because it was so ahead of its time. At the time when it was released, it was prophetic in so many different ways. “Chocolate City,” obviously was very prophetic. “Eulogy and Light” addressing greed. “Our Father, which art on Wall Street,” all of these things. “Come In Out of the Rain,” about let’s leave this war. “March to the Witch’s Castle.” George Clinton That’s when I started believing my own bullshit. When I started hearing them like that, all those things that we was saying in the frame of mind we were saying them in, and they come to pass, damn it do look like I know some shit. I ain’t claiming that shit, that’s as much a surprise to me as it is to anybody else. I felt a flowing, it must be what they call stream of consciousness, it just come through you; you open your mouth and let it come out and that’s funk. Don’t edit it, you trust yourself. Have to figure out what I said and make something out of it later. Sometimes I do songs, just do the whole song, talk a whole bunch then come back and take out what don’t make sense. What I almost said, what I was just about ready to say but didn’t have it right, go back and put it right. Do that a lot. But I pretty much trust myself on records, just to be able to mess up. You got to be able to mess up to come up with something new, and I don’t mind fucking up. I can do that and the rest of the musicians be like, “You know that’s the wrong note.” I ain’t trying to know, I’m just letting shit come out. Then when it come out, if I don’t get it quite right, I can go back. They correct me, there’s enough good singers in the band. I got one, called Peanut, he’s been with us forever. Peanut say, “If you start on this note and you endin’ here, you really meant to do that, that flows right. But if you change this first note, it ain’t going to end right there.” He could analyze it like that, “What am I trying to do Peanut?” Because I keep doing it, he say, “Well, you did it three or four times. That’ll make land right there.” Other than that he ain’t going to say shit, until you ask him something. Just say, that’s my motherfucker. Jeff “Chairman” Mao Wow. That’s incredible. I don’t know what else to say except thank you to Mr. George Clinton.