QLS Classic: George Clinton Part 1

George Clinton redefined and re-established Funk through his Parliment-Funkadelic collective. His impact can be heard throughout the evolution and maturation of Hip Hop, Pop and R&B music.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:05Speaker 00

  Questlove Supreme is a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Hey y'all, it's Unpaid Bill from Team Supreme. For this classic episode of Questlove Supreme, we are speaking with the incredible, the only, George Cliff, Parliment Funkadelic. In part one, George updates QLS on some things going on with his music while taking a look back at his incredible 65-year career. This was taped in mid-2020 during those early days of the pandemic. So Team Supreme was still lurking to get along virtually, but the quality of the conversation is amazing. I love this one. Hope you enjoy it.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Ladies and gentlemen, funk upon a time in a galaxy far away, in a land of cheesesteak utopia. Well, dwelled a five-year-old Afro-head, boy with dreams, aspirations, and power of creative abundance. And he wished upon a star one day that this youngin would utilize his talents so that one day he could bug and pester the bejesus out of his musical idols who raised him. And this is that moment, ladies and gentlemen. You know the show, you know the crew, you know Fonte, you know 6 Steve, Unpaid Bill, Laia.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Let us get into it. This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. My first real conversation with God Himself. George.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Oh shit.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. All of that, all of that. North Carolina's in the building.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  That sound like some shit I wanted to say to Smokey Robinson when I was growing up in Dadeville. I hear you, you know.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  No, man, this is a rare moment where, you know, I have access to somebody that has had major input on my, all of our creative juices. I mean, all of us are. Everybody. We all your sons and daughters.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  And daughters. Damn, illegitimate.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  All right, I'll try not to make it this like it's your eulogy, but you know, this is definitely a conundrum. Where are you right now?

• 3:33Speaker 04

  I'm at home. I'm in Tallahassee, Florida. I'm sitting back here kicking it, and I've been painting and shit. I've been chilling. This has been the restful part of my life.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Really? You look good, man.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  I ain't going nowhere. Good, good. Stay in that bubble wrap. No, I'm not cool.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Is this the first real rest that you've gotten?

• 3:57Speaker 04

  You know, since I was a teenager. I'll put it like that. We've been on the road, you know, since we was 22, when Testifac came out.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Okay. I had never left the road since then. We lived on the road and moved to city to city and, you know, raised kids, got married, moved country to city, you know? But this is probably the longest that we've been down and not doing anything.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  And you're not mad at it at all, are you?

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Oh, hell no, because I had to do it this time. So I take it like, I don't stress myself. If I can't do nothing about it, I do the best I can and funk it. You know, I got, I have a good excuse to paint. And we make music. Now, I mean, we send shit back and forth online to each other. Studio only about five miles from here, but I send this shit down there and back. I don't even chance that shit. But, I don't know, I have to go fishing.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I know you're big on fishing. Like, are you doing a lot of that now?

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Oh, hell yeah. That's the only thing, I sneak to the boat, get on the boat, we mask up. But I do a lot of that.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  I've been chilling for real, just, you know, luckily been chilling that, you know, ready for this time.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Because we got a lot of shit that's getting ready to come out when this thing go down.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  We was working on some bad shit, you know, with the group, the kids, they was killing them. We was getting ready to do some hell of our shit, but it's good because it gave us a chance to sit down and get it together and do it properly.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  That's good. That's good to hear.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  At the same time, you know, I just got a lot of my catalog back, you know. Congratulations.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I got it back now. I'm going, getting ready to go through some things to publicize it. You gonna see it, Ben Crump is my lawyer, you know, civil rights part of it.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Oh, Ben Crump's still working.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  What will this mean for Funkadelics everywhere? Like, are we going to?

• 6:05Speaker 04

  All of them. Matter of fact, I want everybody that has worked with us, that got a beat, you know, to contact Sheila Jackson Lee. We all doing this together. She want me to get all the people that has a beat together so we can make a one proper announcement. All those people get their copyrights back. They can get them back right now. They, you know, recapture their copyrights. You said Sheila Jackson Lee? Oh no, this is, I'm telling you, this is civil rights. This is gonna be a civil right, yeah. Like I said, yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  How long has this battle been happening?

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Well, I've been in the battle almost 30 years, but I've been, you know, fighting to get it to that level of, you know, get it to where the Congress, I was with John Conyers. He took it up for a long time, you know, couldn't get enough to pass. But now, you know, the copyright capture thing is over now. So I got a lot of minds in on time, and a lot of other people got theirs in, they just don't know it. And they're not telling them that they got, they're trying to make them think that they have to fight it someday. They don't have to fight it. It's theirs now. So we gonna make a big announcement, especially everybody with us, but not only us, but a lot of people that work with us, even the people that sample the music, they've been

• 7:27Speaker 04

  in it long enough now for some of their rights to be coming back to them.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  You know, Prince got his back, you know?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  So it's that, it's that time in this generational wealth is what it's about. Talk about it. You can't pass it on to your heirs if they tie you up, which is what they trying to do.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  You know, trying to make it, there's a whole new law thing going on that, you know, they tell you just how to do it. And we got to help, we got to write a report to Sheila Jackson Lee to explain all those things that needed done. So if you know anybody that's stuck, that's having a problem with their copyright recapture.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  They should definitely get in touch with Ben Crump and Sheila Jackson Lee and myself.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Wow. So does this mean that for the first time, your post-76 Funkadelic catalog will finally see the light of day?

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Like, we've not.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  One Nation.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  One Nation Under Groove, or Uncle Jam, or Hardcore Jollies.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  I got that album, that master back, Knee Deep, I got those back. I own those two.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  I was hesitant to put them out till I got them all off the market. People that was putting them out illegally, I had to clean it up first. So I got, I own those, been on those for a long time, but lawyers were keeping me from getting to them, you know? But I got those, especially Knee Deep and One Nation. That's why you hear so much about Atomic Dog.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Even your Capitol stuff?

• 9:02Speaker 04

  I got Atomic Dog, the computer game.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  So Loopzilla, all that stuff?

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, so now we put all of them in, and that's what we making sure that that whole catalog recapture thing is, you know, it's true for Elvis Presley and his family, it's true for John Lennon and his family, so it need to be true for everybody. That ain't got nothing to do with race.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  So what does this also mean for the Westbound catalog?

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Same thing.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Yo.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Same thing.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  So is Armin Belladian, is he still alive? Is he still alive?

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's still, he's still alive. He's still alive and, and all that, that, all that's gonna become a big issue. It's, it's gonna be a big issue because it's, you read the book, the book I put out?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  You read the Jane Peters thing in the back? That's what's that.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  You gotta explain to artists, and that's the thing.

• 10:00Speaker 05

  Y'all all does that recapture, so.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  I wanna treat, I'm gonna try to not ask such obscure questions because

• 10:07Speaker 05

  This is not just you and y'all.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  My level of knowledge might be, so I might have to break it down. Can you explain to them the, the situation? Right now, I'm so elated that, that you own this stuff now. I know you've been trying for the longest to own this.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I had the book, Brothers Be Your Like George, Ain't That Funky? Kinda hard on you. You know, that came out and it was out for a while and they, they took me to court on that book. So I'm still in court five years later.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Wait, even for the book?

• 10:35Speaker 04

  For the book.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  Why?

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the, the thing was to kill that informa, to kill the information in that book. They said defamation of Armin, because I told everything that was, he already said himself, you know, in deposition. But yeah, they got me in court right now. The main thing is to keep it slowed down to where I can make no moves. You know, long, I've been in court for the last 15 years with my lawyers and, and him, and Armin and, um, the, the major record companies. So all of that's coming to a head now because we, they gonna investigate the whole copyright recapture. We got ours back, but we need everybody to get out of the way to let us make those collections.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Cause it's still hard to collect from the different societies if, you know, if you ain't got just a powerful set of people behind you. And lawyers, you know, that's pretty hard for them because they got to be in business. They got business with the company, so they mess up their business trying to protect you, especially a catalog as big as ours. There's a lot, nobody don't, nobody wanna get at us, what they been dealing with that. You know, they, they, they go down fighting. That's a lot, you talking about a lot of years, a lot of careers of people that sampled those songs, used those songs, licensed those songs that we never, not only myself, but none of the band members. You hear them all, no, they didn't get their money.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  I agree with them, they didn't get it.

• 12:07Speaker 05

  So I'm sorry, just for clarification, you saying that you guys never received anything from any of these songs until?

• 12:13Speaker 04

  No, no, I ain't gonna say never received anything. I'm talking about that sampling and that licensing stuff. No, we don't, we're not, we done been participating in, in that at all. We, you know, we got Atomic Dog recently, in the last three years, okay? But, uh, no, no.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  I mean, the money to keep paid off of that alone.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Since, even since I got it, I've been fighting my own lawyers to, to get the money that's owed to me for it. The main thing was to get it out of my possession.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  And, you know, and they did that for a long while, but I bought it and I got it, I got it back, paid four million dollars to my own lawyer. He's supposed to protect that pay, I paid, I got it back.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Just to clarify, what I was gonna say is probably the most endearing thing about your personality is the fact, and your business acumen, was the fact that you were so open to working with rappers. Cause unlike your counterpart, and I use this word lightly. Of course, you know, people consider the, the pillars of soul music and funk, you and James Brown. James Brown's attitude towards it was, well, I hate samplers, sample, you know, rapper sampling my music and all that stuff. But really not seeing that that's gonna just bring it back and make it.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  And you called it early in an interview, like even in the mid eighties that, no, I, I like, they asked you like, what do you think about, you know, De La Soul taking, you know, Need It For Me, Myself And I? And you were so open to it. You're like, that's great, because what it will do is it'll lead a whole flock of people to my music and to my concerts and whatnot. Like you saw the vision of it. So it's not that you're anti-sampling and restructuring the music, but the fact that- Just pay me my money. Yeah, so many people have had their hands in the pot. Yeah. To, you know.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Copyright owners and whatnot.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  The sampling part of it, I welcome, I welcome the sampling part of it. You know, it, it, they got them too. Most of them didn't get paid either.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Oh dude, I, I've gotten bit by Armin a few times.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  And, and we never got anything that, and he was doing that on behalf of us, supposedly. We never got any of it, got any of it. So no, that's what's happening. And now that's getting it to be opened up and everybody will be able to see that nobody in the band got their money. All the other artists that had, you know, all the companies banned together on those sampling, because nobody wanna acknowledge it. So now it's gonna come out, because we didn't fade away, we didn't die off. We supposed to be out of here by now.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  But we said one nation under the groove, we meant that. We Uncle Jam's army, we was on the march then. And the clones, with the sampling to me was just the clones. You have to have DNA clones to make something new? That's what making the music, we say clones of Dr. Funkenstein? We meant that, that far back. We knew it wasn't gonna be music on television, how did they sell those K-Tale packages?

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  That was, you didn't have to worry about that no more, nobody got paid for that. The new thing was gonna be samples and they didn't know how far they was gonna get away with it. Not the artists that do it, kids gonna make music whatever way they can, whatever new way they have to, they gonna make music. And I'm welcome that, I just have to learn how to participate, how to hang in there. But the business people around that used us against each other. You know, he don't want you to sample it, he, he charging you. Most artists wouldn't even talk to me, they was scared to talk to me, because they thought I was mad about the samples. They told him, you know, and, and Armin was suing them.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was Armin, not you.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  So everybody knew that, but like I said, it's coming out now.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Well, that's beautiful.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  And, and they sued me for the book. In the book, you know, I'm the last one, in five years, everybody else that got sued with me got off, and I'm still there. You know, hoping I would go away. That's what I did, Shake, Shake The Gate and Medicaid Fraud Dog. I did those two albums just to reignite my energy, you know, to start to get the kids going. And, and that's how inspired I was, once I got the book out, I'm ready to make brand new music with whatever we going from here. This is a new generation.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  You know, I'm glad you mentioned that. Normally I start from the beginning, but I think for this particular one, I kinda wanted to start, go backwards. Definitely the, uh, the Medicaid Fraud Dog project. Can you, for one, what is your obsession? Or what is the, the ideology behind dogs? Being the main characters or?

• 17:16Speaker 04

  The meta, the metaphor.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Your metaphors for everything, but because that album in particular is such a clever outlet, like political commentary, but using dogs as your main characters. What, what was the genesis of that?

• 17:33Speaker 04

  Album I did called Dope Dogs.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Right. Yes, indeed.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  Okay, Dope Dogs, I have a whole story for that, that I wanted to do cartoons, animation and everything. But I never would give it to anybody, because I have all the characters. And so I tried to do as many, you know, dog related songs, just to keep that concept alive. So I use it in Medicaid Fraud Dog, because it was, um, based on laboratory studies on dogs, when they used to do studies on dogs for perfumes and shit like that. Remember, that's when the dope dogs come, but not only the drug dogs, but this time the dogs were sniffing out the political bullshit, the, in, in, um, um, Obamacare, you know, all the different names they wanna call it.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  Political care.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Uh, political drug scene, everything's about dope, everything's about drugs. The whole world is talking about how they gonna get their Medicaid. Okay, and so that whole thing, the dog just sniffing out that information. And most of us are being hooked on stuff, on medicine and creating new diseases with the drugs they give us. They giving a certain drugs and those drugs give you side effects, which would be a whole new flock of patients.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  Okay, now they do-

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Side effects be worse than the disease.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying, and it's designer, designer side effects, like designer drugs. That's the era we live in now, where we evolve into some, you know, between robots, androids, humans. That's just gonna be a blurred line in a minute. You know, it's, you know, and I've been waiting on this. So the dog, take a dog to sniff that out. The instincts of a dog is primal. You know, whether it's mating or whether it's sniffing out whatever you train it to sniff out.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  And if he's sniffing out the drugs, you get high from sniffing on drugs. So the dogs get a habit, they, so they have, you know, the dogs all doped up. So these are the dogs, the characters I got, this dope dog. They all got their own relationship to drugs. Whether it's a police dog or whether it's a dope dealer who like to make their dogs fight. And the dogs are like, shit, you know, you used to give me a reward, you know, you used to give me some joy to sniff a treat. You know, that's how they, that's how they train the dog. So now they only want to get a dog, no treat. You know, so these dogs get together and they got their own, like, you know, remember the Ninja Turtles?

• 20:11Speaker 04

  These dogs are like that, you know, kind of like Wu-Tang Clan.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  You know? And they, they got a thing on drugs. They, they don't, you know, they impartial to the political, you know, discrepancies. They just deal with drugs. So that's my part, my partiality to fucking with dogs and drugs. Atomic Dog makes sense now. We can hear the new one, you know?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  So you got more dogs for us?

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Oh, I got one that's coming, I got one that's coming out that's, that is gonna hurt you. Oh, man.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Really?

• 20:48Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oo dog. You, you know, it's gonna be, they gonna be stepping on it. You know, they be dancing to Atomic Dog.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  They gonna be stepping on this one?

• 20:59Speaker 04

  They gonna be stepping on this one. They gonna be stepping on, they gonna be stepping on this one. This one here is, I dare your booty not to move. Your butt, your butt, your butt will betray you.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  I love when that happens.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  I love it. You know what I'm saying? When one cheek shake by itself and you ain't got nothing involuntary.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  I do, sir.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  What's happening? This is Torquen.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Torquen.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  How, how long did it take to make the, uh, the Medicaid Fraud Dog album?

• 21:30Speaker 04

  You know, I, I used to.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I know it's thirty eight years, but since the last Parliament record, but.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  Well, between that one, Shake the Gate, and that, it took about three years. You know, but I had a couple of songs that I was holding on to that I done maybe five or six years ago. Then I just kept them, kept them till I got them right. I did them a thousand different ways. But Medicaid Fraud, when I got the concept together, I got Fred Wesley down there. I got, you know, Chris De Hayes. You know, I knew the people that I needed for that outside flavor to what we was doing now. And we were sampling our own self by now. We had learned, everybody else was sampling, and then everybody got scared to sample anymore. So we started sampling ourself.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  You're, I think you're your best sample source, so that's all we have.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  But you know, it, it still is, it's an art form to picking that shit out.

• 22:31Speaker 01

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• 23:02Speaker 06

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• 23:35Speaker 00

  How many reels do you reckon of just unused source material do you have?

• 23:44Speaker 04

  And can we have them?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Because for me, for me, like, my all-time favorite P-Funk song is New Spaceship, a song which musically was created twenty years before you even completed it in ninety-seven. So how many other, like, uncooked ideas do you have just sitting in the vault that could come out today and still work?

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Have you heard, have you heard the sample some of this and sample some of that?

• 24:15Speaker 00

  All right, I, I have a slight confessional.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  So check this out. I purchased sample some of this, sample some of that, never opened it. Because I think in my mind, I always thought, well, this probably throwaway stuff and, you know, I'm sure that all the prime P-Funk stuff is on actual P-Funk records. And so it wasn't until I talked to DJ Premier, this is about four or five years ago, and I asked him a question about a sample. It was a Nas sample. And he says, oh, yeah, these drums I got, because my favorite Premier sounding drums. I asked, like, where do you get these drums from? And he said, the George Clinton sample some of this, some of that, Pat.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Like, so Nas' Represent drums come from that. Practically all of the Hard to Earn album drums come from that. Some of Ja Rule's second album, Wrath of the Meth. It was mind-blown. And then when I went to it, I wanted to kick myself, because like, it took me fifteen, sixteen years to open up this record.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  And if I just had the patience and just sat down and listened to it, I could have been ahead of the game, but.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  You know, Eric Sermon used to use it a lot, too.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  I gave, I gave him a copy of it down at Dallas Austin's studio. And most people, like you say, you said, they didn't open because people, like, if you give it to them, then it's not interesting, they like to find it. So it took a lot of people a long time to even look at it. Because we were saying, here, now, what I was saying about that album is that most of where those samples came from, we have the whole tracks to those songs. Those are songs, a lot of them came out in the Family Series, but a lot of them never came out at all. So those, that's why a lot of those samples came from songs that weren't released, you know, except for maybe some of them was in the Family Series, which a lot of people don't know about those either.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Well, I was gonna say, even with the Family Series, okay, so there, there are some Captain Obvious questions I'm gonna ask you. The Juni Morrison song on that Family Series.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  Super Spirit?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Super Spirit. I think that's the most eccentric creative moment in, in a life that was always eccentric. Can you talk about Juni Morrison and how, like, what's his, what's the process of his creativity? At least, how did you?

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  How did you utilize it?

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Me and him, we did, like, prison myself. I do my part, and soon to you, you do your part and say it back. We didn't question either, whatever I did, okay, whatever he did, I knew, I just had to figure out what my part was. And that's to me, we started to doing, it's a song on that family, it's called Try You.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  That's when we actually was getting ready to actually come up with a concept. He thought I was weird, and I thought he was weird. So we got along really good on the weirdness part of it. And we couldn't get quite together, you know, because of the political stuff that was going on around us. Then we had no idea who was actually being orchestrated, you know? And that's a whole nother story that we could talk about later. But we could never get together, even when we were doing computer games. I was, you know, of course, you know, at that time, I was into my drug thing. But I always could manage to figure a way to work, to get the work done.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  But you can't get the work done and watch people that, you know, intentionally trying to keep you from getting the work done. That's a little more than you's bargaining for when you say, I'm, I'm getting fucked up. You don't realize when you get fucked up, you fuck up everything. Everything around you gets fucked up. You know, it takes you a minute to grow up, if, you know, to get out of that, if you, unless you can wiggle your ass out of it before you get too old. But that's what, the Juni and I had a lot of stuff we was, was gonna do. And even like a Medicaid Fraud Dog, I had to call him, get him out of retirement.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  You know? You know, he wasn't trying to do nothing, he was doing some electronic music, but he wasn't trying to deal with the business. But I got him, same thing when we did, um, when we did, um, Tapawphone. Got, got Bootsy.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  And then, you know, the Summer Swim, the Summer, Summer Swim song. I knew every time I do a song with him, it's gonna be a, a level of cleverness and real, and, you know, intentional. He know what he's doing. He can do what he wanted, you know, he do what he wants to do, once he analyzed what era we in. That's all we, we have to think about is what era is this? It's not our old days, it's new, what are they doing now? What is the feel? He analyzed it like that. And he used to come up with the range of whatever the kids, and we relate to kids. I think I said that before, I always try to relate to nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Them the ones you call bubble gum, they get on your nerve, everything they think about. But if you notice, that's the music that always comes back. The music that gets on your nerve, that you know, how could they get away with this? That's the way it was when we came out with bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. And what the hell are y'all talking about? That was doo-wah. Same thing come along.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  You know, kids take it back to elementary. And, and, and it meant to get on your nerve to get your OS out of the way. But if you pay attention to them, I'll dance with you as long as I can. But otherwise, I'm gonna recognize it and try to hang, but at least paying attention to what they do. I can spot a, a, a young artist even not knowing anything about it. I, I would have bet my life on, let's say Rihanna with SOS.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Cardi B as soon as I heard her. There's certain type of style that's meant to provoke him, but certain people have artistic thing about it.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Certain people can take like Frank Zappa.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  He could do, he could go all the way out with, but he was intelligent as hell with what he was doing. And he wasn't even doing drugs. That's, that's a really.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  That's the funny part.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  That's, that's really out there.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Was, was that always your theory because a lot of, I'll say that a lot of the themes of your initial wave of funkadelic, of P funk were.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Three blind mice.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, laced in nursery rhymes and limericks and.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  And me and Bernie, Bernie, myself, I always thought cartoons was, you know, cartoons use classical music. Okay.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  You know, so Bernie could play anything he wanted to play in him. And at the, the height of it, I don't care how intense and intellectual it get, he could still play Mary having little lamb in there. He, that's how comfortable he was, you know, in that jazz thing, he had, his time was impeccable. He was just free to do what he wanted to do. And at the same time, we had an Eddie Hazel and Billy Bass, who was probably the funkiest, rawest kids and then Gary Seider later on, David Church kid, they all went to church together. You know, Glenn Goins, the whole neighborhood was, and they was all fourteen, fifteen when I met him. I had a barbershop, they hung out and bought Billy his first guitar.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  Eddie is, Eddie had a guitar, but I bought Billy his first one. Okay.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Really? So. You brought Eddie Hazel his first guitar?

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Not Eddie's first, Eddie had one.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  He had the big Gibson, but he was like fifteen years old. I bought him his first rock and roll and he played the big Gibson for a long time.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Really?

• 32:34Speaker 04

  But when he, when he got to the studio, you know, yeah, I had to get all, we didn't know, we, we played with the vanilla fudge. And they had them big amps and, and they let us use that shit. And we heard what we sounded like, we went back to Manny's in New York and bought everything. Then we, we spent all the money we had and got the loudest, we were the loudest member of the band in, in all of the East Coast. I mean, we.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  I wanted, oh, I was, I said, I wanted to ask you, you had mentioned him in passing, Glenn Goins. He was like my favorite singer out of the, I mean, his voice was amazing and he died so young. What was his story kind of, what, what was his deal?

• 33:16Speaker 04

  He, him, Gary Seider, all, like I said, they all went to church together. He was a, um, a, a Rance Allen freak.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Really?

• 33:26Speaker 04

  He, he, yeah, oh man, that, he, him and, him and, uh, what's it, DJ Rogers. They saw the background, they saw the background for, for Bobby Womack.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  And they were showing out so much in the background, Bobby say, this is the Bobby, this is the Bobby. He showed, this is not your show. He fired both of them. That's when, that's when Glenn came with us, you know, Gary didn't say, you know, he was playing background with, you know, Bobby Womack. He say, um, but he go, he, he ain't got no job. And Gary and Eddie, and Eddie can sing his ass off and Eddie say somebody can sing. You really want to hear what they sound like.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Eddie Hazel could sing?

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  That's something, how come he didn't do that much singing though? That's him singing on California Dreaming, right?

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, he sang California Dream, he sang, uh, uh, up and a down stroke, um, he sang a lot of stuff with us. And you ever hear, oh Lord, why Lord?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Oh Lord, wow.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  And the what, oh Lord, why, not, no, I'm sorry to get back, Father, open our eyes.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's him singing backwards, okay. That's Eddie singing it?

• 34:37Speaker 04

  No, it's, it, it, you can, you can hear forward too. They got it forward. Yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, I know. So that, okay, cause, cause, well, I know that, uh, that's open our eyes backwards on, uh, not the Lord's Prayer.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  You, you like, you, you like, yeah, but have you heard it forward?

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I've heard the forward version, yes.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but so that, that group used to practice in my barbershop, they made the gospel clips. They from Newark, they used to practice in the barbershop. And so that's why we was partial, we was partial to that song, you know, uh, the gospel clips, they was, they was some mail. And, um, Eddie just, you know, we would jump from gospel to, you know, anything. That's what we did when we did Free Your Mind, Your Ass Will Follow. We was never gonna get caught in the position of having to follow up, I, I wanna testify. You know, forty five, trying to get another forty, but we went so far out. Cause I mean, remember that we was at Motown and that doing that time, so we know how to make a straight record.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  How to make a clean record and we knew what was, we intentionally, you know, got wrecked, got tripped out and just Free Your Mind, Your Ass Will Follow, you know, we just, we, you know, you got Martha Bambella singing in the background. I don't even know if she wanted.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  When?

• 35:58Speaker 04

  On Free Your Mind.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  What?

• 36:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, we was, I'm telling you, we had all of them doing that, they did, uh, what, what's his name? Um, Dennis Coffee.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Dennis Coffee, Scorpio, yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, he played on I Got a Thing, uh, I Got a Thing, yeah, I Got a Thing. He played on quite a few of the songs, you know, Dennis Coffee.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Really?

• 36:22Speaker 04

  The engineers didn't wanna have his name put on the, on the record of, of Maggie Brain. Cause we, you know, I was doing so much feedback and circling, you know, sound on sound.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  And I ain't know, I ain't know the fuck I was doing, I was just doing what sounded like Jimi Hendrix. You know, and, and as long as I kept it out of, kept it out of the red, you know, I was cool. And so I did, I did it and engineer wouldn't, wouldn't even put his name on the record.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  So.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  And years later, he, he's like.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  You were engineer's nightmare even back then, like.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Oh, hell yeah. I was really.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  They were dressing up in those lab coats and still trying to maintain levels and all those things and.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  Oh, they, they were trying to be, you know, keep it normal, but I, I mean, all we have to flashlight. I told them when we did the hand claps on flashlight, I want the, the hand claps to be so loud that if you ran your hand across the CD, you feel the bump in it.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  Wait, now I'm going all over the place. I'm going all over the place.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  This is, yo, this, bro.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Just let him talk.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  This is sixty years of music, bro, like, we not gonna get it. It's just rapid fire, like, it's too much.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Those are, those are the kind of, those are the kind of things that we, you know, the bassline, Bernie was imitating Larry Graham on a move. First of all, you had heard, you had heard no moves to never make sound effects, you heard them make sound effects, but you didn't know about it actually play the bassline, play like a bass. Bernie had so much interpretation of the mini move and the, the pro soloist. He could imitate anything, he could, Joey was something, they programmed it and write it out. And he'd be turning off while Bernie's playing. And he could play like a bass player, like on flashlight. And we made Bernie the lead instrument, the bass is the lead instrument on flashlight and the hand claps is the backup.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  And flashlight is just like you, Bernie and it's, who's playing guitar on it?

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Bootsy and his brother, Bootsy, Bootsy and his brother.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Catfish.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Bootsy told me that he's playing drums on flashlight, is that true?

• 38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's playing drums on flashlight.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  He played drums on quite a few, you know, and our, our, our bass player, Boogie, played drums on quite a few of his ballads, you know, um, the slow songs.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. And Gary Cooper, Gary Cooper, he played drums.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Okay, well, wait, you, you brought up Glenn Goins earlier and there's so many singers in the, the P funk sphere that we can name. But dare I ask you, of all of the singers represented in that army? And that means Gary, down to Felipe Win, to Junie.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  It's Dawn, yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Even to Ray Davis.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Lynn Mabry, yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  For your money.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Who is your, who's your Michael Jordan? Who is your, who is the singer? And this, this, everyone.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Singer, wow, that singer, it was gonna, it would be Gary and Junie. Cause of the creativity, not only the, the, you know, the, the singing voice, they could come up with parts. And, and Junie could come up with lyrics, parts a- a- and sing it. So, I mean, um, but then there's a, a lot of me, you, you can't take, wait, Lynn Mabry?

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Lynn Mabry, yeah, yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  I mean, she's, she's like excellent when the, and Gary Cooper. You put Gary, you get Gary, you get Gary, Peanut and Gary, them three together, you can do anything. We never got a chance to, we never got a chance to see all what Glenn was gonna do. He did everything in about two years that he did with us.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Were you involved in that Quasar album that he did?

• 40:31Speaker 04

  No, that's, that's when they, that's, he was, he had three months to live when he got with us. He was with us three years and then he left and they did the Quasar album, you know? And then they, um, I think they did Mutiny album. I, I didn't have anything to do with either one of those.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  And he died at twenty four, like, to me, still, it's like, when I hear, when I hear Glenn Goins's voice.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  He sounds grown, don't he?

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Like forty seven.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Somebody daddy.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying, he, he had that Rance Allen thing on him and he had completely controlled over any tone that come out of his mouth.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  You know?

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Back to, to, to Mabon. Gary, Gary, in my opinion, is your best animated voice sounding character.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  How, how are you able, cause you know, uh, most music fans don't even know that, uh, that Gary is the voice of, uh, the group Slidefox, uh, Let's Go All The Way.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Of which, you know, that was a big hit in 1985 and he's singing in his natural voice.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  But how are you able to convince, uh, your, your, your frontline army to adapt to these new voices? And the same for Bootsy Collins as well. Like, how are you able to tell them, like, adapt your voice to more of an animated tone? Because to me, like, my bone is, has one of the greatest animated voices ever.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Well, when we, when we was on the road, when, and when you've got momentum going for you, when you're on the road and you, in that zone, they call it. And we had the character of, um, Sturino's. We had the character of, uh,

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Mr. Wiggles?

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Mr. Wiggles, the, uh, and Cashford, the friendly ghost. You know, we, we was into making cartoon, Rhinestone, Rockstar, Monster of Adababy Baba. We was into making toy music, you know? So it was easy for Bone to go into it. Mr. Gucci, why your ass is like, Charles, Mr. Gucci? We had a thing, we was on, in that zone, we was writing cartoons then. That's why Motor Booty Affair is the motion picture underwater.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  You know?

• 42:58Speaker 03

  He did, yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  The rhythm, the rhythm it takes to, you know, they, oh, that's from, you know, that's when your boy Jaco.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Jaco, yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  From Philadelphia.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  You know, I, I get off of that and when I saw DJ was getting ready to be the thing, uh, and that's when we did Mothership Connection. I was entertaining Frank and Crocker and, and Jaco and all of them. So I could tell DJ was beginning to be the thing because they was cutting them off of the radio. They started to play five songs and no commercial. And you start missing, you start missing that DJ talking, dedicated song to your girl and da, da, da, all that. Uh, DJ started getting political, especially in Philly, Georgie Woods. That was my boy. You know, so we intentionally played our own record on our record. W E F U N K, Weepunk.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Hey, Weepunk.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  Chocolate coated freaky and having fun. That, that, that was all the shit that you heard on your favorite DJ. You wasn't hearing it on the radio no more. So, I mean, let me hear it for me. We love do funk, you, all of that was our version of DJ. And soon as we did that, they started having what you call DJ pools. You started taking your record to the DJs and they would tell you, they, record pools, they would tell you who records should get played. You know, radio was like, that's, and then no sooner than that, then hip hop came along and fuck it, we just DJ's own record and, and that's what it's that.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Mothership Connection, I, I have to, I, uh, have to ask, it sound like he got a three on it to me. What is, what does that mean?

• 44:39Speaker 04

  You know what that means.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  There's some, I had some Doobie Brothers, it was cool. But can you imagine Doobie in your phone? Yeah, yeah. Sound like he got a three on it to me.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  All that was, was the, what we called it, uh, trendy chemical substance. Whatever was trending at that time, whatever the chemical substance was happening, that's what we were at, you know? It was just that language that people was conveying with, in the street talk. And they do it nowadays too, it just seem harsher because they kids, they gonna make it worse than yours, they gonna do, outdo your ass, no matter how bad you did it, they gonna beat you to it. And I don't even say nothing to them, cause if you say something to them, you gonna make them do it worse, they know they got your attention. You know? So, but that's what it was, trendy chemical substance. I had a three on it. Funk would take a ten.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  It is. Is it true that for the, uh, for Maggot Brain, that you told Eddie Hazel to play like his mom had died? I, I always heard that story, but I never, was that, was that true?

• 45:42Speaker 04

  That was true. And he said, fuck you. And, yeah. But I knew, I knew that once I said it, he understood the intention, cause all it was was a, a regular three chord blues song. Ain't too much, but when you, if he played it psychedelically, like he could do it and with all the echoplexes we had on it, and he was beginning to, to manipulate the echoplex, and I was manipulating the echoplex in the studio on top of his. So it was just a vibe, he could play all of the blues and soul, like Jimmy was doing, all that he wanted and all those echoes on top of each other. Boy, that was some brilliant shit, especially when you took the instrument, other instruments

• 46:25Speaker 04

  out, take the bass and drums out, you ain't got nothing but a rhythm guitar in the lead, you could take up all the space with all those delays. And it worked pretty, it was real good with Eddie, cause he was so soulful. Any sound he made was, you felt it.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  You were born in North Carolina, correct? In Kannapolis, was it Kannapolis?

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Kannapolis, right outside of Charlotte, Kannapolis.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I'm from Greensboro, so I know.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  Oh, I got a whole bunch of family in Greensboro right now. I got a whole bunch of family. I got a whole bunch of family, sisters, nieces, brothers.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  You might be connected, Fonte.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  It might be. Yeah, man, that's home. How did you get from, go ahead, go ahead.

• 47:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, today, I was gonna say, you, you born in North Carolina, but I've been to Plainfield a lot, and that's all they talk about is y'all and you, so it's interesting, it's like, it's two different towns that got, that you the pride of.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  But, no, I came from North Carolina, probably about 10 years old, then to Virginia. Chase City, Virginia, at about 10, I went to Newark, New Jersey.

• 47:27Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  And that's where I went to school at, Newark. I went to, you know, Avon, that was South Side, same school, Shaq went to, to Mars. Okay, I went there, but I had a barbershop 10 miles outside of Newark, which is Plainfield. I never lived there, I just had the barbershop, I used to travel there every morning on the bus.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  And you the pride of Plainfield, that's so funny.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  And, and Plainfield was like suburbia, it was like, you know, for rich folks, you know, middle class people. And then they got a really funk, got a really funky in the, the late 60s and early 70s, you know, there, there riots and everything, but it was some soulful folk there.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  You, you, you know what? It just hit me, I worked with Nona Hendrix on a project of a couple, a couple of years, a few decades back. She told me that you were her original hairdresser, is that true?

• 48:21Speaker 04

  Hairdresser, I did.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  What you saying?

• 48:24Speaker 04

  I did her and Patty's.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  What you mean? You saying you know, you got a comb? What you saying?

• 48:28Speaker 04

  No, I used to, no, no, no, I used to wave here, they used to have, you know, waves close to the head.

• 48:34Speaker 05

  Oh, you used to make the finger waves, the finger waves?

• 48:36Speaker 04

  Finger waves, yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and she was, she's living, uh, Philly and Trenton. Yeah, they, yeah, I did both of them there. And I, you know, we, we, we worked together for years though, Nona, I didn't know Nona to say in Paris, you know, like years later, just for, for, you know, for magazine, you know, PR. But, um, her and Patty, Sarah, they were like neighborhood, they was funky a long time. Parliament started 56, I think they might have started in like 59.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Really? So you, that's crazy to me.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Let me ask you something.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Was, was your, was your family Leandro in the hearts?

• 49:19Speaker 00

  My father was Leandrew's, yes.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  Okay, I thought so, yeah. Now, yeah, I go that far back.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I, yeah, when I read that in the book, man, I was like, wow, this is, my dad would love this. Like, my dad gets mentioned in, in Divided Soul and George's book. Well, explain to me your, like, I know that the Parliament started off in, uh, as a doo op group, as typical for the day. Could you just explain like that, that, that, what that environment was like with trying to break into doo op and really, I wouldn't, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed with Ray Davis. For me, more than Melvin Franklin, more than Barry White, more than anyone with a deep voice, Ray Davis to me is the, the ultimate bass singer. How did you guys like form?

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Well, we formed like, you know, most kids in grade school, I had two or three other people in the band before them, but by the time we got to that lineup, we went out to Detroit, auditioned, didn't make it, but I ended up writing songs for them. Then I did a song called, I Wanna Testify. And I did that song with Ron Banks from the Dramatics.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  Pat, Pat Lewis from the Hot Butter and Soul, myself, and the guy named Eddie from the Holidays. That was the background, cause Parliament couldn't make it out to Detroit. We got a hit record on that song, and that was the beginning. That record carried us out into the world, I Wanna Testify. Like I said, we, Vanilla Fuzz, Lennon's their guitars, amps. That changed our life, we became funkadelic that night. We getting tied up with the record companies with the name Parliament, couldn't use the name, so we took our backup band, which was Billy, Eddie, and Bernie, them, made them funkadelic. We became their backup singers.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  That's why you see the five of them on the Funkadelic, first Funkadelic album.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  But that, that's how I did it with the record company. And when Parliament got his name back, we did a Parliament album called Osmium, with Holland Doja Holland. Stayed tied up there for years and ended up on Casablanca with Neil Bogart.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say, how did you, how did you meet Neil Bogart and how did you stay out of the disco fray? Because everything that Neil did was theater and disco, how did you stay out of it?

• 51:47Speaker 04

  Before that, before that Neil was the king of bubble gum. Remember Neil did, he had Buddha Records.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  He had Buddha Records and he had Gladys Knight and the Pips, he had the Stairsteps and Curtis Mayfield and all of that. Neil had that label first. Then he had Hot Wax with Holland Doja Holland, which was the, uh, Honey Cone. So he wanted us to be on his label when he had, when they had Hot Wax, mo, you know, Holland Doja Holland, but they put us on Invictus, so we missed Neil. Couple of years later, when we got off of Invictus, I looked Neil up and he had a new label called Casablanca. He took us and Kiss and Donna at the same time.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  We all went three different directions and he was so hot. They went to the disco thing and I wasn't going. And closest I got to disco was knee deep. That was my dad rescue dance music from the Vlog. You know, I like disco. I like disco, but I didn't want to do the same beat on every song. He, you know, there was silver convention. I was a silver convention free.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  Really? You like Get Up and Boogie?

• 53:09Speaker 04

  You know, but you can't, you can't do every song like that. That's what that was my own thing. They had measured your heartbeat. And when you start fucking with music like that, it, it, no, it gets, um, you know, the pack packs that shit in, you know?

• 53:26Speaker 00

  So is that, okay, because also probably the most notable thing about your, your, your concerts versus you're probably the only act I know that will do a song slower in concert than you do on the album. The, the, anytime I've ever seen Dr. Funkenstein performed in any of those, like those seventies concerts, you guys go half the speed of that and each song is like 14 minutes, like longer, way longer and way slower. Is there, like, were you?

• 54:06Speaker 04

  We got, we got that from, you ever see Phil Akute?

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  They used to do songs all day long.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  For, for an hour.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  One, one song.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  They, they, they start on a song, I mean, in the afternoon and be dust and they be still playing another version of that same song. All kind of, and we used to do that back in the sixty eight, sixty nine. When we first started Funkadelic, it was a groove, like a boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And we'd vamp that shit forever and people were so fucked up that they didn't just, we all fucked up. Everybody enjoyed the groove all, you know, and it took us a few years.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  We had reels of the same song.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  Red and D Chemicals.

• 54:53Speaker 05

  They're reels of the same song.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  Reels. We got, they put up another reel and we keep going.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  And you taped them shits together. It's just one long reel.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  We got, you know, they say they have 24 tracks. We have 72 tracks.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 55:15Speaker 02

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• 55:45Speaker 06

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• 56:19Speaker 00

  Ah, man, now we're doing rapid fire.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, it's, no other way to do this.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Can you explain how Pedro Bell comes into the system and?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Oh, that's good. That's good. When I moved to Toronto, he's, he's a, you know, fan, he used to write me letters. You know, the fan, and he would draw on the envelope. And on the envelope, it looked just like the album covers. The whole cartoon, whatever, he would draw, he would draw on the envelope. The postmaster general thought I was part of some kind of organization and they was getting upset with me, but, you know, was I, asking me was I part of some, and I told him, no, blah, blah. But then I said, I want this dude to do the album now. Says, it draws that much attention and it sounded so clever. He was right out of high school.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  I contacted him and he did, had him do Cosmic Slop.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  From then on, it was like I would have to tell him the story of what I'm talking about. And he would give me his interpretation of whatever that meant to him and his, and his own weird ass language.

• 57:35Speaker 04

  He could write his ass off, you know, but he did it intentionally. The same way he could draw, draw. He could paint a picture that looked like a photo, okay? But he was, he was fed up with that. He, he didn't like doing that. So he did his own Pedro Bell art and his own Pedro Bell language. And it was funny to him, and I got him, when I did an album called Some of My Best Jokes of Friends.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Some of my best jokes of friends, yes.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  I did that. He didn't want to talk about it. I'd say, you come up with what you think I think, what I think I'm talking about. That was the funniest one of all, because I didn't give him nothing to go on.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  He would do the commentary and, and all the, the mythology on it. Was that you or him?

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Me and him, I'd tell him what I'm, I'd tell him what I'm talking about, but he would interpret and put it in his language.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Speaking of Cosmic Slop, okay, a question I always wanted to know. The first time that I ever heard Cosmic Slop was in The Most Unlikely Platform. I first heard Cosmic Slop on The Cosby Show.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Of which.

• 58:48Speaker 05

  Which episode?

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Robert and Vanessa.

• 58:50Speaker 04

  I remember that.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Are doing their homework.

• 58:52Speaker 05

  Shout out.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  And I hear Cosmic Slop, and this is, you know, it's so weird because, you know, now.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Bill was a funketeer.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  I mean, he introduced us to a lot of music. Let's not get it twisted.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  He definitely was.

• 59:06Speaker 05

  Come on.

• 59:07Speaker 04

  He definitely was.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  He was a funketeer. Yes, he was.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  That's, that's one way we can describe it.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  That's one way.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  That was revenge. Okay, so the thing is. Yeah, and, you know, I let it, I didn't know what it was, but it was, it was during the era in which, like, VCRs like at first started infiltrating everyone's household and you record every show, so. And so I recorded and watched that episode like 42 times. So, uh, my history teacher tells me, yeah, that's Funkadelic, Cosmic Slop. And, you know, it really didn't hit me until I started digging in the crates. And then once I heard the, the lyric output, of course, you know, Cosmic Slop's about a sort of a regretful mother that's treated like a Jesse Bellman

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  because she has to turn tricks to feed her kids. And I'm like, how did this song wind up on The Cosby Show? Did you have any warning whatsoever that they used that song so prominently on that episode?

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  No, I wasn't surprised when I heard it too, but I knew he, I know he, he like, you know, he, he was in Detroit for a while himself with a record label. So he knew about, and then it, it didn't surprise me.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  So speaking of TV, while we're on the TV movie side, House Party, your, your, uh, your cameo on House Party as the DJ. How did, how was that like working with Kid and Play?

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  That was real fun. I still see Play out in Tallahassee. He comes here, I'm, fam, you. But Reggie Hudson, that was his, when he first got out of college.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  He is the biggest Funk fan ever, yes.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, he, he, his mother told me, he was like that when he was a kid, that he had posters and stuff. She thought I, you know, because that skirt I had on, on, um, one of those posters, she thinks in the wig, I had the wig on, she, she didn't know what was going to happen to him.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  And that's the same thing, same thing with Humpty. He had that same poster. His mother, she, he used to carry it around with him.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Oh, Shaq G's on Shaq G.

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  Shaq G, yeah, that's my boy.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  So seeing all those groups that you influenced, man, like, what was that like for you? Did you feel like inspired by? Did you feel like they were copied?

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  Being like, what was your relationship? You know, I love it, you know, you definitely, you gonna feel good as hell, you know, but it was always, I always liked it, wanted to be like Motown, you know, all the different artists that was around, that was family, that was a hell of a place. We used to just ride by there and watch them all in the front yard. So many stars, and that's the way we felt, you know, with Bootzine, Roger, a lot of people don't know, we did Roger more about to the ounce. You know, all of that.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  About making that record, like, how?

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  That was Funky Bounce, the song he had called Funky Bounce. We took the little snippet of the first part of that song and cut tape. We copied it, copied it, cut it with a tape, copied it, copied, cut it, and then taped tape and taped it together. Then we had thirty seconds. We sampled it. They didn't have a sampling machine yet. So we just didn't know, just looped it, just cut that little piece until we got like the, uh, ten seconds or something like that. And then we looped around a pencil, around the head of a two-track machine and just let it loop around it. And till we got ten minutes of it, the ten minutes and then put that on two, on the twenty-four track. And on that, and then call Roger back in, he hated it.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  But because, he hated, oh, he hated it.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  But we, that was the deal. We, we gave him the deal, yeah. That's why we, we got him his deal. That, it wasn't that, we had to use Zap as the name, because that's his younger brother. I told him, make up another, he didn't want it to be Roger.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  He said, make, I said, make up another name, you know, it, it, there's some money for you, this, we was waiting, his record was gonna be on Uncle Jam. Remember?

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, Uncle Jam records, right.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, his record was gonna be on there. So we made Zap just in the meantime, so he can get some money. We put it out and the record hit so big, they had to become Zap and he hated it.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  What was his circle back to you?

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  That's a hell of a throwaway.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  What was his circle back to you after that, like, after it hit? What was he, he was like?

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  They end up leaving. They were big, they were, they were so big, they were so big. And then we, then they put out, I did Grapevine.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  You did that?

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  The Grapevine, more about, um, and there's one more, uh, uh, Only Have Eyes For You.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, who's covered that, right?

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just, I just started them doing it. I didn't finish it with them, but, and there's one, uh, Wilson picking it up again, which was, I had a thing about.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Midnight Hour.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  Grapevine, Midnight Hour, and, and, um, I thought those songs you could always do and, and get, you know, get on the radio back at that time. And he ended up doing them all and they worked pretty good for him.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Did you work on the, the Roger solo album as well, or just the first Zap?

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  That was, that was, that was the, the album that was supposed to have been on Uncle Jam. That was Uncle Jam's album. We paid.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  So do it, Roger, do it, all that stuff is?

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  All that stuff was done for Uncle Jam. That's it.

• 1:04:43Speaker 05

  Wait, hold up. As you can see, we are just scratching the surface when it comes to the legendary and iconic George Clinton. So I'll tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna split this thing in two. Coming up next Wednesday, part two of George Clinton. And if you think you found out something in this episode, ha ha, wait until episode two, yeah, part two of our sit down with George Clinton, Questlove Supreme, Heart Radio, and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Questlove Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

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