Detroit, 1982. George Clinton, aka Dr Funkenstein, founder of the sprawling P-Funk collective, is recording new material. He is relaxing at a hotel across the road from United Sound Studios while his right-hand man Garry Shider, keyboardist David Spradley and studio engineers come up with a backing track. They have a drum track but the stroke of genius is to turn the tape upside down so that it plays backwards. This is the foundation on which “Atomic Dog”is built. (Later, another, conventional, drum track is added, giving a sense that the beat is moving forwards and backwards at the same time.)
When it’s time for Clinton to record his vocal, he is brought into the studio in an unsteady state (“I was out of my head,” he later said). He has to be shown to the microphone and supported in case he sways out of range. He has in his head the word “dog”, and little else, but he improvises. In two takes, his contribution is complete, extemporising dexterously on a dog’s compulsive need to “chase the cat”. Basses, more vocals and synths are added. People in the studio add panting noises until their mouths are dry. All of this results in an irresistibly danceable, monstrously heavy track which, in its extended version, lasts for almost 10 minutes.
“Atomic Dog” was a seismic moment whose reverberations are still felt today. And it launched Clinton’s comeback after a fallow period.
If James Brown invented funk in the 1960s, it was Clinton — a one-time Motown songwriter — who took it to another level in the 1970s, bringing a psychedelic, spacey, druggy, cartoonish glee to the charts with songs such as Parliament’s “Give up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)”(1976) and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove”(1978). Extravagant live shows reflected P-Funk’s multifarious mythology and featured spectacular (for the time) props such as the Mothership, which would land on the stage and disgorge Clinton clad in outrageous robes (or sometimes naked). Clinton’s shows not only transcended time and space; they transcended the divide between black and white audiences.
But by 1982 he was beset by legal problems and P-Funk had effectively ceased to exist. Clinton was working as a solo artist with a new label, Capitol (though with many of the same musicians). Around this time, many black American musicians were enthralled by the electronic music coming out of Europe. Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force released the groundbreaking and massively influential “Planet Rock”in 1982, sampling Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express”. Capitol encouraged Clinton to experiment along similar lines. “Atomic Dog” was one of the results.
In December 1982 it was the second single to be released from Clinton’s Computer Games album, knocking Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” off the top of the Billboard R&B chart. The video, using a mix of live action and animation and tapping into the new medium of video games, was hailed for its invention.
A decade or so later, the commercial growth of hip-hop had led to an explosion in sampling, and acts seized on “Atomic Dog”. It was sliced and diced, filleted and chopped for its groove, its chorus and its doggy sounds. Dr Dre’s groundbreaking 1992 album The Chronic introduced the world to “G-Funk”, which heavily sampled the grooves of Clinton’s P-Funk. One track, “Fuck wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’)”,featured a segment from “Atomic Dog” delivered by Snoop Dogg. The following year, Snoop’s debut solo single, “What’s My Name”,was founded on samples from “Atomic Dog”, as was much of the music — and the artwork — from his first album, Doggystyle. Hundreds more followed Dogg’s lead. Ice Cube sampled the song seven times.
“Atomic Dog”’s deep-throated chant of “Bow-wow-wow, yippy-oh, yippy-ay”became hard-wired into western musical consciousness. The song sparked a legal challenge when the copyright owners, Bridgeport Music, successfully claimed an infringement by the hip-hop group Public Announcement with their 1998 song “D.O.G. in Me”.It’s always amusing when pop music is expressed in legalistic language, and this judgment was no exception, finding that “repetition of the word ‘dog’ in a low tone of voice at regular intervals and the sound of rhythmic panting” infringed copyright. Clinton himself had nothing to do with the case, nor did he benefit from the award of damages.
Though widely sampled, there have been only a handful of actual cover versions of “Atomic Dog”, two of which featured in a somewhat neutered form in animated family movies. Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010) has a lightweight version by The DeeKompressors (from the same stable that gave us Alvin and the Chipmunks). And this year’s Trolls World Tour featured a remix with Anderson Paak and Mary J Blige,tapping into Clinton’s psychedelic roots with dizzying animation.
A more grown-up version came on American singer and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2018 covers album Ventriloquism. Her “Atomic Dog 2017”is a slow-burning, melancholy reimagining. She brings new tricks to Clinton’s old dog.
What are your memories of ‘Atomic Dog’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Universal; UMC — Mercury; Charly; DBK WORKS; Death Row; A&M Records; RCA; Naïve
Picture credit: Alamy