Funkadelic The Whole Funk And Nothing But The Funk 2 CD

Cat. No.:METRDCD548

Title: Funkadelic - The Whole Funk And Nothing But The Funk
Subtitle: Definitive Funkadelic 1976-1981
Artist: Funkadelic    
Format: Double CD
Barcode: 698458704825
Playing Time:CD1: 73:29 CD2:63:22


 
Metro Doubles present a superb new package covering the late ‘70s output of George Clinton’s ground-breaking funk powerhouse, Funkadelic. Clinton had started his P-Funk odyssey in Detroit in 1970, creating an all-new extended, psychedelic funk formula complete with cosmic Bacofoil outfits, Pedro Bell’s raw cartoon album graphics and a large helping of funky philosophy. When Clinton took his mothership to a new major label home in ’76, the band began embracing more expansive jazz and fusion influences through new guitarist Mike Hampton and soon scored P Funk’s first ever crossover hit with ‘One Nation Under A Groove’, spawning a fertile four-album run. See Reviews

Track List

    CD1

1     One Nation Under A Groove
2     Cholly (Funk Gettin’ Ready To Roll)
3     Smokey
4     Comin’ Round The Mountain
5     (Not Just) Knee Deep, Pt. 1
6     You Scared The Lovin’ Outta Me
7     Cosmic Slop (live)
8     Brettino’s Bounce
9     Into You
10     Maggot Brain (live)
11     Holly Wants To Go To California

    CD2

1     Electric Spanking Of War Babies
2     If You Got Funk, You Got Style
3     Freak Of The Week
4     Funk Gets Stronger (Killer Millimeter Longer Version)
5     Soul Mate
6     Who Says A Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!
7     Oh, I
8     Electro-Cuties
9     Promentalshitbackwashhipsychosisenema Squad (The Doodoo Chasers)
10     One Nation Under A Groove (Instrumental version)
11     Electric Spanking Of War Babies (Instrumental version)
     
 
       
STAND BACK AND LOOK AT FUNKADELIC’S WARNER BROS YEARS – the half a decade between Hardcore Jollies to The Electric Spanking Of War Babies – as an entire canvass rather than simply focussing on different parts of it, and what you’ll see is probably the most complete and interesting (completely interesting?) of all P Funk periods. The problem is though, when what happened during that time included the signing of America’s most leftfield black act to an absolutely straight-laced mainstream label, a million selling album, a worldwide hit single and an extremely acrimonious departure from said label, it’s far easier to look at these years as a series of individual incidents rather than one bona fide era. Which would be to greatly miss the point. To concentrate on the finger is to miss the glory of the moon, or so Bruce Lee told us in Enter The Dragon.

Which is why a selective set such as this was so overdue. A collection that brings together the absolute best from those four albums, plus a couple of items you might not have expected, then presents them in an order that pulls each project in to a centred foundation rather than sets them apart. And it’s as much for those of you who already own the Warner Bros albums as it is for the less-enlightened, because it forces a reassessment of what went on back then, building up the feeling of a proper P Funk epoch. One as vital to The One as Parliament’s Funkenstein fables, Bootsy’s lurrrrve epics or even Funkadelic themselves from Free Your Mind to America Eats Its Young.

Taken as a whole, the five years from 1976 to 1981 are Funkadelic in microcosm, a one-stop shop to capture the band once it had evolved beyond the initial anger and statement-making, to use its internal tensions for the forces of good. These songs are virtually the house journal of an articulate, informed, witty, street-corner intellectualism moving from mere rebellion into fully-fledged revolution, while the musical masterminds come to terms with exactly how far they can take it. When it increased so exponentially they probably surprised themselves.

HARDCORE JOLLIES WAS, BACK THEN, AN ALBUM that had a lot of us worried: Funkadelic and a major label was, surely, a contradiction in terms … Why leave Westbound, a label that clearly respected their vision? … Weren’t Funkadelic supposed to be about something higher than just taking the corporate dollar? … Or was America Eats It Young a pack of lies? In retrospect this was a distinctly fifth form reaction, but at the time it was of genuine concern, especially as the last Funkadelic album, Tales Of Kidd Funkadelic, had been their weakest. Of course, when it came out we had nothing to worry about, and as it became part of a context that went from there to the end of the decade it became one of the band’s most important LPs – it was the bridge between the old style Funkadelic and what was yet to come.

Most of that transition came in the presence of Mike Hampton. Although, technically, he was there for the previous album – indeed, aged only eighteen, to many he was Kidd Funkadelic – it was his sizzling take on Cosmic Slop that truly announced him as a new line of attack. Nobody could fill in for Eddie Hazel, and, sensibly, nobody in the Funkadelic camp, not least Hampton himself, expected him to even try. That wasn’t what he was there for. It was his sly Zappa-isms, acknowledging jazz, classical, fusion and more conventional soul, that took the band beyond his predecessor’s more Hendrix-influenced approach, and in doing so did a great deal to move them towards One Nation and Knee Deep without disconnecting from their modern day blues roots. Executing this shift through a Funkadelic landmark like Cosmic Slop was about the best possible way to sell us such a crucial line-up change, and to do it as a extended live take was generous in the extreme as it gave the youngster plenty of room to show off.

This live version is also a vivid mark of how far Funkadelic had come as part of the P Funk whole. It was recorded at a tour rehearsal in 1976, Newburg, upstate New York, in Hangar E at the Stewart Airfield. It needed a building of that size to accommodate what became the P Funk Earth Tour.

Such a situation isn’t merely incidental either. Whereas such a significant proportion of Hardcore Jollies looked forward, it was the couple of years in between that and One Nation Under A Groove that provided the catalyst for that next statement. During that time, P Funk had stretched out to a point at which it had gone beyond redefining its genre to become a genre by itself. Parliament had gone from strength to strength with Funkentelechy vs The Placebo Syndrome and The Clones Of Dr. Funkenstein, with The Motor Booty Affair waiting in the wings. Bootsy had established his notions of funkiness with two huge albums, while The Horny Horns (A Blow For Me And A Toot For You) and Eddie Hazel (Game Dames And Guitar Thangs) had expanded things in other directions. By 1978, everybody within it was fully aware of what The Funk, as opposed from just plain ol’ funk, could achieve without sacrificing any of what it was about – in fact, as is the case with so much of Parliament’s stuff, the P-er the better.

It was obvious there was a huge, world-dominating hit on the cards, and for sentimental reasons as much as anything else George Clinton decided it should be Funkadelic’s. It was time to put the broader concepts that had been hinted at on Hardcore Jollies together with the understanding of what makes a hit in late-1970s black America gained from Parliament’s and Bootsy’s successes, and hitch all of that to the momentum P Funk had been building up. It was time for One Nation Under A Groove.

ACCORDING TO GEORGE CLINTON, THE SONG ITSELF had been knocking around for a couple of years, he always knew it had big hit potential and by then Parliament’s Flashlight, their first attempt to deliberately cut a hit single, had showed them what they needed to do. But this was to be a Funkadelic song – George wanted to give it to that group because that was where it all started as a movement and not just a pop group – and originally it was going to be a much rawer proposition and far more overtly political. It had to be brought into the mainstream without losing that edge, or sounding remotely corny, and with that group the corny threshold was a lot lower than it might have been. Indeed George Clinton will admit to the group themselves being so undecided about the song’s direction at one point the chorus vocals went “Corny or not, here I come …”

They needn’t have worried though. The song was mixed down to become an essence of Funkadelic at that time, simply with enough obvious hooks to make it truly accessible, while the instrumental version puts the Funk Fan better in touch with the nucleus of that tune. But not that anybody worried at the time. That Funkadelic was in the charts, on regular dancefloors and even on Top Of The Pops was a bit like having your unfancied team win the FA Cup – now everybody had to acknowledge what you’d known for years. And besides, the album as a whole was hardcore Funkadelic, even mildly sending up its mainstream success with the arch Who Says A Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!

To a large degree, Uncle Jam Wants You was more of the same: a consolidation of how funk and The Funk can come together in a way that keeps more or less everybody happy. And at the same time be confident and aware enough acknowledge what’s going on in the world around it, take from it, reshape it and then ship it back – (Not Just) Knee Deep is the Funk Mob do disco, a little over a quarter of an hour of sublime, subtly-layered, instantly-rhythmic nonsense. It represents the absolute zenith of the Funkadelic-as-part-of-P Funk’s-wide-spread-success cycle, how high they could fly with it as hinted on Hardcore Jollies.

Regardless of how triumphant this phase had been, The Electric Spanking Of War Babies came out under a cloud that seemed to prove everything we had thought about Funkadelic going to a major label was justified. Due to a dispute between George Clinton and Warner Bros over two side project bands – Zapp and Roger, since you ask – and the music business attention span giving up on P Funk, the company caused an unprecedented amount of trouble around this album. They censored the sleeve art – the inside picture is the one that should have been on the outside; they wouldn’t let them put out a double album at a single album price, even though Funkadelic offered to make up the difference; they wouldn’t put out a double album at a double album price; and they told the group they were only going to press 90,000. This last point is the most remarkable as the band’s previous two albums had sold two million between them in the US alone. It was at this point George Clinton realised his relationship with Warner Bros was at an end and they opted to make an old style Funkadelic album, with scant regard for any wider commercial prospects.

The result is a set of songs that connect perfectly Funk before Hardcore Jollies as Electro Cuties, Funk Gets Stronger and the title track conjure up the spirit of Maggot Brain and Free Your Ass. One for the fans? Not quite. Ask George and he’ll tell you it was one for themselves. They knew they were going out and wanted to do it like they used to when they played and sang to impress each other, laughing at each other’s jokes, imitating each other, trying to out do each other … having the best fun. Where it became one for the fans too was that there was never too much difference between those on the stage and those in the audience.

After scaling the heights as they did with One Nation and Uncle Jam, it was particularly fitting that Funkadelic should sign off this way, and just as appropriate that it should be at the end of this particular phase.

TO COLLECT THESE TUNES TOGETHER TO ILLUSTRATE how Funkadelic functioned at a time when they were frequently overshadowed by Parliament and Bootsy is a wise move. To fit them around each to make as much sense as this is beyond wise and into the realms of inspired, but then Funk always was its own reward.




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