PARLIAMENT - UP FOR THE DOWN STROKE @ 50

 

Celebrating its golden jubilee at 50 years old is the sophomore album from George Clinton's Parliament, Up for the Down Stroke, which was released on July 3rd, 1974. While the band had released a debut LP in 1970, Osmium, classic Parliament really begins with this album, which was their first release on Neil Bogart's freshly minted Casablanca Records. Along with KISS, Parliament would help bring that label to unprecedented heights of success in the later half of the decade, with Parliament's massive stage show positioning them as the black music equivalent of their makeup masked heavy metal peers on that label.

The album's title track was released as a single and helped begin the group's rise to stardom, remaining one of the most iconic and recognizable tunes from the entire P-Funk discography. The album also proved to be a pivotal reunion with bass master, Bootsy Collins, who'd taken a two year hiatus away from the P-Funk collective prior to recording this album. His return to the fold would solidify his position in the group and he would remain an integral contributor throughout the band's entire residency with Casablanca. Parliament would run their career in tandem with Funkadelic, along with numerous other side projects, throughout the decade, building a massive P-funk network of performers and products.

PARLIAMENT - FUNKENTELECHY VS. THE PLACEBO SYNDROME @ 45

Marking it’s 45th anniversary today is the 6th LP, under the Parliament banner, from George Clinton’s P-Funk collective. It's Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, which was released on November 28th, 1977. It is arguably the most hit loaded jam to come from Parliament during their peak. While merely 6 songs take up its track listing, it still boasts some of the gang’s most infectious grooves and one of its biggest hits.

The LP is a loose concept album continuing the story of Starchild’s battle against the Placebo Syndrome and Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk. The narrative is effectively Clinton’s comment on the emergence of disco music in the late ‘70s, which he saw as a “dumb’d down” version of dance music for undiscriminating masses. The original vinyl release contained a 22″×33″ poster of the character Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk, as well as an 8-page comic book that explains the concept behind the LP. Both the poster and the comic book were illustrated by Overton Loyd.

The album is near wall to wall with foot stompin' funk, kicked off with Bop Gun (Endangered Species), about a weapon which makes anything it shoots funky, and then heading straight into another killer, Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk (Pay Attention – B3M). Side two features the singles, Funkentelechy and, what has to be the standout centerpiece of the LP, Flashlight. The latter features a booty bustin’ baseline played on Mini-Moog by Bernie Worrell, who creates an unstoppable groove that defines one of the P-Funk gang’s most iconic songs.

Flashlight was the first P-Funk related single to hit #1 on the R&B chart and peaked at #16 on the pop charts. The song’s distinctive baseline was originally intended for Bootsy, but he turned it down and opted to play drums instead. Worrell decided to take it on by reportedly chaining together three MOOG synths, which he layered to create the bass sound. The song began as a loose jam and eventually evolved through layers of recording, with up to 50 voices being overdubbed to create the complex layers of chanting and choruses.

The song ended up having a legacy far outside its original recording as various members of the P-Funk collective recycled elements of it in future recordings. Outside of the group, it seeped into the collective consciousness of hip-hop culture where it was sampled, quoted and referenced over and over again throughout the ensuing decades. Its message of light radiating from every individual makes this song shine with its own illumination as it inspires generation after generation.

The album was a significant hit, becoming the group’s fourth consecutive gold LP and second platinum, reaching #2 on the R&B charts and #13 on the Billboard top 200. It’s definitely the most consistently thumpin’ dance album from the Parliament Mothership to land on this funky planet.

GEORGE CLINTON - COMPUTER GAMES @ 40

 

Marking its 40th anniversary today is the debut solo album from Funkadelic/Parliament founder, George Clinton, with Computer Games being released on November 5th, 1982. After dominating the R&B scene throughout the previous decade with the monster P-Funk collective in all its variations and manifestations, Things were starting to get dicey for Clinton in the 1980s. Computer Games was a brief commercial rally for Clinton before he’d be beset by grinding legal battles, personal struggles and lack of label support through the remainder of the decade. The album was conceived of as a response to the burgeoning electronic music scene which was rapidly infiltrating the funk/R&B/soul/disco dance music scenes. Rather than reject the insurgence, Clinton chose to embrace it and integrate it into his own methods of production. Though the album was listed as a solo work, the personnel for the project was largely the same musicians he’d been working with on the most recent Parliament and Fundadelic albums.

The centerpiece of the album is the epic Atomic Dog. Released as a single, it was created almost by accident by virtue of an inadvertently backwards drum machine recording in something of a drug addled miasma when Clinton stumbled into the studio one day in the middle of a blizzard. He could barely stand, but mumbled some incoherent instructions and then improvised his vocals, leaving the folks in the studio with the task of making some sense of it all. Miraculously, not only did they make sense of it, they turned it into pure dance floor gold. More than that, the song has become a template for countless grooves in the ensuing decades, which repeatedly sampled to the track’s riff to build upon as a foundation. It has become part of the DNA of hip-hop on the deepest possible level.

PARLIAMENT - THE CLONES OF DR. FUNKENSTEIN @ 45

 

July 20th marks the 45th anniversary of the release of Parliament’s fifth album (their fourth with Casablanca Records), The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, which was issued this day in 1976.

The album is the 2nd in a series of releases which built out the “Funkenstein” mythology that was begun on the previous album, Mothership Connection, and would continue through the remainder of Parliament’s output up until 1980’s Trombipulation. These albums would lay out the epic tales of space funk and the battles of Starchild to bring the groove to the groove-less, thwarting the unfunky machinations of the dastardly Sir Nose'd D'Voidoffunk! They represent the P-Funk gang at the peak of their powers during the heyday of the ’70s, when massive funk bands roamed the land like great prehistoric beasts.

The album’s creative core consisted of George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Garry Shider & former James Brown horn man, Fred Wesley, handling the brass arrangements. Together, they fashioned some of the great funk albums of the era and the P-Funk axis. They were firing on all cylinders at this point and were benefiting from the financial support of their label, which sought to put the same kind of epic showmanship into them as had proved so successful with label mates KISS. You can see the influence in terms of the elaborate costuming and makeup on the cover and the massive stage show they’d been touring with, complete with an actual spaceship for George Clinton to emerge from during the intro to their sets. These were the glory days of the record industry when money seemed to be no object and the sky was literally the limit!

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - PARLIAMENT, TEAR THE ROOF OFF

Though I'd heard the odd track here and there and knew some standouts that I'd always perk up to when they hit the speakers, it wasn't until sometime in the early 1990s when I came across a 2nd hand copy of Parliament's "Tear the Roof Off" best of compilation that the floodgates of P-Funk fandom fully opened and gushed forth the groove into my musical life.  As I say, Clinton & crew had been on my radar for some time and I even had a couple of pieces of vinyl in my stash, but this compilation managed to put the scope of what they were doing out there for me to appreciate in some breadth, enough for me to eventually start assimilating anything to my collection that had the "P-F" stamp of approval. 

What fascinated me the more I started to dig into the Clinton canon was the mythology he'd built into his works.  It wasn't just a bunch of music to dance to.  It was stories and fables and allegories and there were messages of struggle and triumph and spirit overcoming oppression.  And it was all laid atop some of the fiercest grooves in the kingdom of funk.  Back in the 1970s, it was sort of a magical time for this genre as massive ensembles roamed the touring landscape, bringing the beat to the masses.  These groups were as majestic as dinosaurs and they've become just as extinct in the world of DJs and digitization.  None were more spectacular than Parliament/Funkadelic, The P-Funk All-Stars.  This amorphous array of aliens would descend from the heavens to impart their syncopated sermons of sublime funkitude. 

What was happening during the peak of their activities in the 1970s and 1980s was totally inspiring in that Clinton had assembled this free-wheeling circus of virtuoso musicians and dazzling performers who could reconfigure themselves like Transformers from one musical incarnation to another.  One minute they were Parliament, then they were Funkadelic, next a fragment would break off and become Parlet or The Brides of Funkenstein or someone would shoot out into orbit for a solo like the incomparable Bootsy Collins.  It wasn't fixed, it was trans-dimensional and transcendental.  This kind of flexibility would be a key guiding principal in several projects I'd undertake over the years. 

I wish I could point out one of their original albums for this, but I just can't narrow it down when there are so many great ones and they all deserve some level of acknowledgement, which is why I felt this "greatest hits" package would be appropriate as an umbrella to cover them all.  As the song says, "I like my funk uncut" and you ain't gonna find none more pure than the "P".