April
14th marks the 40th anniversary for the album, The Electric Spanking of
War Babies by Funkadelic, released on this day in 1981. It was their
13th studio album and the last album to be officially released under
this imprint until 2007’s By Way of the Drum.
By 1981, George
Clinton’s “Mothership” was looking pretty disconnected. Dissatisfied
factions of the P-Funk gang were splitting off to form rival projects,
like a competing version of “Funkadelic” and the aptly titled “Mutiny”.
These creative woes were only symptoms of the legal ones as the web of
side projects and contracts began to ensnare the entire operation in a
morass of constraints and conflicts. All this business of trying to
keep so many creative plates spinning was taking its tole on Clinton and
his crew, resulting in some antagonistic attitudes towards him and his
leadership. As these conflicts began to fester, the effect on the
products released by the P-Funk organization began to show in the form
of less than stellar albums that lacked the focus and consistency of
what they’d put out at their peak. Yet with all this chaos and
confusion going on, somehow War Babies turned out to be one of the
strongest P-Funk releases in years.
By the time this album was
recorded, the original 1970 Funkadelic lineup had dwindled down to only
Clinton, Ray Davis and Eddie Hazel. But they did have the benefit of
Zapp main man, Roger Troutman chipping in for these sessions, his only
appearance on a Fundadelic album. Babies would also be the last album
to feature P-Funk mainstays Garry Shider, Junie Morrison, Mallia
Franklin, and Jessica Cleaves. The album also features numerous
contributions from Sly Stone & Bootsy Collins. Although a lot of
the old guard were soon to depart, the album did include numerous new
faces who would become regular contributors throughout the coming years.
War Babies was originally conceived as a double album, so
there was a lot of material recorded for the release, but Warner Bros
balked at the idea and insisted it be trimmed down to a single disc.
This resulted in a number of recordings being shelved, though some, like
Atomic Dog, would find their way onto Clinton’s first “solo” release
the following year, Computer Games, which would become a major hit. But
it wasn’t only the size of the LP that the label took issue with. The
cover by Pedro Bell, longtime artist for the P-Funk bands, set the
executives into panic mode with it’s obviously phallic spaceship housing
a barely clad, bare bottomed lady being paddled by robotic armaments.
They refused to release it and the album ended up using a heavily
censored version where all the “naughty bits” were covered over with
concealing graphics. The title was an allusion to the Vietnam war and
the “boomer” generation who were victimized by it.
Though this
LP represented a kind of end point for the Funkadelic manifestation of
the P-Funk crew, it was by no means the end of the line overall as they
would morph into George’s backing band as well as transition into the
P-Funk All-Stars for other releases. The mercurial nature of this
collection of players always meant that they were too big to fit under
one hat or even an oversized umbrella and the world would always have to
pay attention to keep up with their next guise. This album marks the
end of one era and does so by bringing things back up from the slump
they’d been in and sets them on course for the decade to come.
