The year was 1975.
Watergate had shaken the nation. Gerald Ford was completing the third year of what would have been Richard Nixon’s second presidential term, had he not resigned in disgrace. The Vietnam War was finally over — but it was not pretty. And George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic unleashed a trio of albums that pushed music, Black culture, and American culture into new territories.
“Chocolate City” imagined a funk-filled White House led by Black icons. “Let’s Take It to the Stage” captured their raw, live energy. “Mothership Connection” launched the whole thing into outer space.
Daniel Bedrosian, New England native and longtime keyboardist for George Clinton and P-Funk, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss his new book, “Make My Funk the P-Funk,” which chronicles that meteoric year in the band’s history. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I’m so excited to talk about this because, as I was saying before we started, [I am a] huge lifelong P-Funk fan. There is so much information in this book for the die-hards like me, and, as you say, for the newbies as well.
I’ve got to say, reading the book — it’s amazing that more hasn’t been written about George Clinton and this amazing group. As you do in the introduction and in previous works, give us a sense of the scale of what’s been produced over the last eight decades.
Daniel Bedrosian: Yeah, so, just to give you a little bit of information, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic are quite easily considered the longest-running popular music group of all time. This year is our 70th anniversary as a band.
Rath: 1955?
Bedrosian: 1955 was when George Clinton started the group as The Parliaments. Essentially, this is an unbroken chain, so this is a continuous historical musical entity.
Rath: And there’s no other group that spans that amount of time, continuously — is there?
Bedrosian: You could say the Sun Ra Arkestra or the Count Basie Orchestra, but both of those groups have been without their band leader for several decades, if not longer. The only other example would be The Blind Boys of Alabama, the famous gospel group. However, all of the original members of that group have long since been deceased, so this is really the longest-running continuous popular music band of all time.
Rath: George Clinton at the helm the whole time.
Bedrosian: With the band leader at the helm, exactly. It’s the largest discography of any group of all time as well, given the huge amount of years. The first book I had published was “The Authorized P-Funk Song Reference,” which detailed all the songs in the canon, what can be considered canonical P-Funk, and who played and sang on those songs. Essentially, that’s all it is — a giant reference book about the history of this band.
Rath: That’s amazing. You have to go to different genres, like classical conductors, to find somebody like George Clinton.
Bedrosian: Yes, exactly. It really does bridge all the different genres. It goes through so many different movements and different eras of time that the genre had to change. It’s really interesting.
Rath: This book takes us through the early years, all the way up to this pivotal year of 1975, and then breaks down these albums. We’re gonna break up this interview so we can get to all of it, so first, tell us about that period — the early years of the band, how there came to be both a Parliament and a Funkadelic, these two different bands under George Clinton.
Bedrosian: Right. So, in the book, I do a chapter dealing with the first 20 years of the band’s history. Most bands don’t even have 20 years of history, so I go through it in a fairly cursory way, just to kind of give the audience an understanding that there’s this great background that happens.
It essentially begins in 1955 with George Clinton — a young, aspiring doo-wopper in New Jersey — founding The Parliaments, and really trying to model it after his favorite groups at the time, which would have been like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Shirrelles and groups like that.
That first little period occupies a time of acetates, of early recordings, of fledgling labels, and it probably ends somewhere around the early 1960s, when you can say it bridges into what we call the “Northern Soul” period. That period is when George was spending all his money riding from New Jersey to Detroit to try his hand as a songwriter and to get The Parliaments signed to Motown, which was the label everybody wanted to be on.
Unfortunately, The Parliaments were not able to be signed to Motown, mostly because there’s something of an oddity in that a lot of the singing groups, everybody had to be the same height and kind of look the same. The Parliaments were all different heights, so they never really made it past the audition, even though the people at Motown liked what they did, realized they were very unique and original, and also realized George’s very unique songwriting style. It was the songwriting they picked up on first, and so George did end up writing several tunes for groups like The Supremes, The Jackson 5, and so on and so forth during that period of the early to mid-1960s.
The third period, you can consider sort of the psychedelic period. It’s also how P-Funk ties into Boston in an interesting way because the Funkadelic guys were in Boston a lot at that time.
Rath: We actually talked to George Clinton about the show they did here on GBH — well, WGBH then — and he mentioned that he was tripping on acid at the time of the performance.
George Clinton: LSD — that was our first time, and we were live on TV doing that show.
Rath: You telling me you were tripping during that performance?
Clinton: I was tripping my butt off!
Bedrosian: Right, yep.
Rath: That was through Timothy Leary, the renegade Harvard professor.
Bedrosian: Yes, and what they called the acid tests at the colleges at that time, at Harvard and other places. And then that leads directly into the early to mid-70s when the group started moving into a more album-oriented rock phase, where the albums started becoming more important than the singles, which, at the time, weren’t charting very much. That leads us right into 1975, essentially.
Rath: Something that was fascinating that you wrote about [was] the albums that are albums — that stand like that. Well, first off, they’re coming very directly out of the Vietnam War, and even some of them [were] directed towards Vietnam veterans.
Bedrosian: Yes, yes. In fact, a lot of people talk about how Funkadelic was one of those groups that was speaking directly to the soldiers fighting in Vietnam — that instead of being just a soundtrack for the back of their minds, essentially, this was right at the forefront, speaking not only to the political and social upheavals that were going on, but really speaking to the heart of the soldier himself.
There’s a really good Funkadelic song, “March to the Witch’s Castle” from the 1973 “Cosmic Slop” album that deals with the Americans leaving Vietnam, going back home, and the nightmare of readjustment, as it were. So yeah, they were very much talking to the soldier at that period of time.
It’s no wonder as well, the year before that, Funkadelic themselves had to kind of escape to Canada to dodge the draft, and that’s when they recorded “America Eats Its Young,” their 1972 political opus. At that time, the albums were really important, and the social and political messaging was very important in the band’s movement.
Rath: Let’s run through these albums in order, starting with “Chocolate City.” Take us back, if you will, a little bit to Washington, D.C. in 1975, and what it was like for the Black community to be hearing something like this.
Bedrosian: Right. So, when I talked to George about this album, he had mentioned that someone had spoken to him about “the theory,” as he puts it — the theory that African Americans made up at least a plurality, if not a majority, of Washington D.C.’s population, and how, at that time, that seemed unbelievable to the Black populace itself.
The catalyst for “Chocolate City” as a song was kind of that ideal — that there were these chocolate cities in America that aren’t talked about much. He mentions Newark, New Jersey; Gary, Indiana; and then he says, “Somebody told me we got LA and we’re working on Atlanta.”
It was really about these Black population centers and Black excellence at a time when that really wasn’t being talked about much. It definitely touched on some things that had never been touched on before, talking about essentially putting Black people in the White House — something that wouldn’t really happen, we wouldn’t see a Black president til Barack Obama many decades later.
In a lot of ways, George was very much ahead of his time with this album that dropped in April of 1975. It was really just kind of an unheard-of thing.
He’s also speaking the whole song — another thing you weren’t really hearing on R&B radio. You’d hear the DJs do that, and George based this persona on the Black radio DJs who, as he put it, were just too cool. So, he kind of created that persona almost as if you were listening to the station breaks in between the songs, but it is a song.
It also has a very early version of a drum machine called the “man in the box,” and all this stuff is just way ahead of its time, before rap, before all of that.
Rath: If I’ve got to decide — and I guess I do — to talk about one other track on the album, I’d pick “Let Me Be.”
Bedrosian: Oh, yeah.
Rath: Because musically, this thing is just nuts. It’s like Baroque music. There’s like fugues, and it’s gospel-y.
Bedrosian: Yeah, and there are only three people on the whole record. Bernie Worrell, who was my mentor, the original keyboard player of the band, who was classically trained and went to the New England Conservatory, by the way. And Eddie Hazel, who is the lead guitarist, but sang lead on this song, who has a gorgeous voice. And Ray Davis, the bass singer, who sang backup.
George wrote this with another singer, Vivian Lewis. At the time, they were very much into “Godspell,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” … George was very close friends with the original cast of “Hair,” so he was very close with all these people making this kind of “Godspell” music and was very influenced by the theater of it, essentially. The really theatrical elements, the idea of kind of over-emoting on purpose and being extra emotional. He was really into all that kind of stuff, and it really plays into his later funk operas.
It’s really giving you the beginnings of that ideal, and is also just an amazing fusion of classical music and rhythm and blues in a way that’s really never been done before or since.
Rath: “Chocolate City” would have been more than enough for a year or two years, but let’s talk about the other two. First off, “Let’s Take It to the Stage,” which really does capture the feel of going to one of those shows.
Bedrosian: Yes. I feel like that album thematically was very self-referential. I think that they were trying to really kind of fuel themselves in the shoes, the big shoes that they were filling as becoming the darlings of the underground, the darlings of the Chitlin’ Circuit, if you will.
They had been in the Chitlin’ Circuit for several years by this time and had basically begun this great reputation of being the live band that you don’t mess with, the live band you don’t choose to have open for you, because they kind of knock your socks off. And then, when it is your turn to play, you really have to do something special, or you’re going to get booed off the stage. Funkadelic had developed this great live reputation, and I think “Let’s Take It to the Stage” is kind of the beginning of fueling that reputation on record.
You know, the title track … I talk about it in the book as probably legitimately the very first diss record of all time, because George goes hard after all the other funk bands — you know, James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Kool and the Gang, Earth Wind and Fire, Rufus — and just attacks them all in a very satirical way, but still nonetheless just as scathing as you can be.
It’s also my favorite album of all time, not just P-Funk, of any album, so being able to talk about that album was like a love letter for me. I had to hold back a lot of the fanboy-isms to really express the importance of it.
It’s really cool too that both “Chocolate City” by Parliament and “Let’s Take It to the Stage” by Funkadelic are released in April of 1975. They’re released in the same month, and it’s really a testimony to both the fact that these bands are one band and the fact that they really sound so different that your average layperson doesn’t even know they’re the same band.
That was all very much done on purpose by George. He had them on different labels. He had different people in the band take on different roles based on if it was a Funkadelic record or a Parliament record. And then, he had the stylistic shift; Parliament was very much more James Brown, Kool and the Gang-type of funk with horns, keyboards and vocals — more dominant, more party, more fun. And if it was any overt social or political stuff, it was couched in humor to kind of soften it, or at least allow it to pass through and cross over without any problems. Whereas Funkadelic was kind of in-your-face on purpose — political, social upheaval, crazy loud rock guitars, psychedelic. It’s really interesting how he was doing that.
Rath: And then, for another shift of sounds, let’s take us to another personality: Starchild. We have the “Mothership Connection,” which was the first record I got to know, and I think probably for a lot of other people too, because every song on it, every note on it, is just perfect.
Bedrosian: Yeah, that was their first platinum album as well. I talk about in the book how 1975 is sort of a big paradigm shift for the band and how they went from these still very important albums to this massively charting platinum success at the end of the year. That album, “Mothership Connection,” would be the beginning of their parlaying into sci-fi, into even more characters, like you said, Starchild, and that introduces us to another huge cast of characters as time goes on.
And then, the P-Funk Earth Tour, where they actually land the spaceship on stage, which is followed by number one hit after number one hit. If it weren’t for “Mothership Connection,” the trajectory and the history of P-Funk would have been much different. Who knows how much longer they would have stayed together as a band if it hadn’t been for this massive success.
