copyright 1995, Nick Cooper

Printed 1992 Houston Press

"Jimi was forced into basic atoms; Sly was co-opted into a jester monolith and only seedling George remained!"

-- P-Funk, Standin' on the Verge of Getting it On

He hasn't just remained, he's thrived, doo-woping through the early sixties, out-funking the seventies, and laying the sampled groove for current rappers.

Clinton segregated his funk. Parliament recorded the horn section stuff, dance music with disco appeal, while Funkadelic put out the eclectic, psychedelic hard rock. P-Funk is all of it combined, which is what you'll see next Sunday at the Coliseum.

The recent death of Eddie Hazel, one of the P-Funk guitarists, follows years of defying the advice of doctors and friends. He kept drinking until his liver gave up, and kept touring until he died. He typified the permanent commitment of many of these guys to a project that's lasted longer than many of their fans' lifetimes. During Eddie's funeral service, Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" filled the church as his mother cried out for her baby.

"We are just a biological speculation, sitting here vibratin' and we don't know what we're vibratin' about. And the animal instinct in me makes me want to defend me, makes me want to live when it's time to die."

- P-Funk, Maggot Brain

P-Funk hasn't produced much of note in the past few years, so expect the same old 70's tunes at the show. But their veterans now, and they have escalated their funk to a jazzy and jam filled production. Dope Dog, a new Parliament/Funkadelic CD and movie will be out soon, an extensive project that will try to bring P-Funk back to the charts. Recently I interviewed George Clinton on the phone from his home in Michigan.

Nick Cooper: Alot of rappers are worried about getting sued, and alot of people have sampled you over the years. I've heard you've been working on making it easier for people to sample. How do you feel about the legal and business concerns over sampling?

George Clinton: Well, first of all, I suspect that the industry again is trying to do to rap what they tried to do to funk, and that's kill it because it's got to much information, and spreading of information. So what we've done to keep them from all this stupidity, like trying to sue, or saying that I'm suing people, is to put out a record called "Sample Some of Disc and Sample Some of Dat" - just samples from alot of the old songs, because I have some of the demos of those songs, which is not what the record company owns, so I can license those to be sampled. We have a pay schedule that's really easy to deal with - if they sell records, they pay, if they don't they can try again... We got to make sure that rap survives, because it's our only means of communication that gets past the gatekeepers.

NC: Do you think there are some other artists, like James [Brown] that are adding to the problems and starting law suits?

GC: No, it's the record companies. As long as the artists was dealing with each other, everybody was doing it. I mean James Brown's samples was in the cartridges of your keyboard. When you bought it you found "Ow, good God" in there. And it was kind of weird that he went to jail right after the same time that shit started happening. But they're making it look like the artist was being jumped on by other artists, trying to make the artists pay. And we all know that the artist don't get paid in the first place. I think everybody should share if they make some money, but I don't think there should be all that expensive suing and shit. And, as an artist I wouldn't sue nobody artist-wise. We have to stick together because ain't none of us got nothing, and I don't see no broke motherfucker suing another broke motherfucker. We did a thing with Hammer, I mean, he did "Turn this Mother Out" and it made alot of money. I'm still cool with it, but I have yet to hear how it's taken care of. Whether he's taking care of it through someone who's supposedly representing me, I don't know, they haven't told me. I ain't gonna jump in and start suing him, but I haven't actually heard from him who did he pay if anybody. You know, where I don't say nothing about alot of things, I still have to make sure that the artists that wrote stuff with me get theirs. For instance, we can't scream too loud about Bobby Brown, but that's also too close to come and not acknowledge the writers. If they got that kind of money, they should think about the twenty people that did work hard on P-Funk that ain't got nothing. I know how to get paid, even if I don't get it from them, the shit is so hot, they're hooked on the funk, now they got to have more, so I can provide that. But there's alot of people who did P-Funk with us who don't have the ability to do that anymore.

NC: You mentioned that the record companies were trying to mess with funk back in the seventies... I know you guys were making a definite statement about rescuing dance music from the blahs, but something happened to James around that time where he got pushed too far and they almost made him into a disco star.

GC: They tried their best to. They tried to make disco because it was easy. Now I don't say nothing about the disco artists, 'cause I'm glad for them. But they were brand new, they didn't know what to ask for, and they just brought them in like a commodities. They started being generic, the covers didn't even have no faces on them. They thought they was going to do the same thing with rap, but it grew too fast - 'cause rap is the children of production, the clones of funk. Now, as long as they were talking about sucker mc's, talking about each other, it was o.k. But the minute P.E. started saying Malcolm, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King was killed by inside jobs, then that's too much information, even if it ain't nothing but dialogue. And then they realized that the white kids wanted to hear that stuff more than anybody, because just like the 60's they can feel when they're being lied to.

NC: Yeah. So tell me George, are you going to be selling any more Tacos? I think I saw you on a Taco Bell commercial, didn't I.

GC: Burger King (laughs.)

NC: Oh, Burger King, o.k.

GC: Hey, you know, I do whatever it takes, whatever the body calls for. It depends how hungry I am, what I'm hungry for. I ain't say I wouldn't, at any moment, when I'm being human, I just hope I can be forgiven.

NC: Well, your always forgiven right here.

GC: You know what I'm saying. But yeah, I did stuff for Burger King. But I try not to eat the shit. (we laugh.) Like Michael says, you can sell the shit and still say 'I don't drink the motherfucker.' Y'all make up your own mind. I always say "think it ain't illegal yet." And people ain't really have to do it just because you saw them sayin' it. You know, they got paid for it.

NC: They set you up like Colonel Sanders... Anyway, alot of us who have listened to P-Funk for a long time are still thinking over the death of Eddie Hazel. I know that he was still going on the road when he was sick, and he knew what was coming. I'll miss him and I never even met him...

GC: Well, the way I feel, I just try to keep a positive groove. He made beautiful music for so long, he was such a sensitive person. A month before this happened he was with us on the road, and we had to send him home. We had let him play four or five dates and then we were going overseas, and we get scared when we going that far. We told him he had to have the doctor's thing and he went home to get it and that was the last time I seen him.

NC: I read that during the services, they played "Maggot Brain" in the church. That made me think about the song as the spiritual that it is.

GC: Oh yeah, it really is a cosmic song. When we first did it, the whole band played on it, but I just didn't use nothing but him and the other guitars. All I had to do was tell him to think of something sad. He said, oh man motherfuck this, why don't you think of something sad. So I was just suggesting anything stupid thing that was totally horrible... Well, he was feelin' it, wow. His singing and his playing was so emotional, I could very seldom use his singing because he would make himself cry. We could be singing the stupidest song in the world but he'd do it so soulful and emotional that he ends up having everyone crying. But his guitar playing, he was always using it basically to get pussy.

NC: Well that's what it's for, you know?

GC: That's what I'm saying.