In the '70s, when George Clinton ruled a wide and grand popmusic kingdom, his hair was his own. He fronted two groups, Parliament and Funkadelic, oversaw numerous offshoot projects, and presided over a pioneering, deranged, irresistible, conceptheavy funk. For a while, it seemed he could do no wrong.
He added the hair extensions in 1983, a year after his last big hit, "Atomic Dog." Tied into his own blackandgray tufts are strands of…well, today I spot orange, white, crimson, red, yellow, blue, purple, and green, but there may be others tucked away. Over the years, pieces are replaced and colors change. Old locks fall out; new ones are knotted in. Clinton prefers to get his hair fid at a place he likes in Minneapolis, but sometimes he makes do with whatever is available. Right now he's carrying a few wisps of cheap stuff he picked up in Atlanta.
He has not been without color in his hair for a single day since he put in the extensions. At the time, he explained his rationale to his wife, Stephanie. "He said, until he had a hit record, he had to have a hit hairdo," she says, " 'so people don't forget about me.' " Clinton promised her that he would take them out when he had that hit—when people would know him once more for the hit and not the hair. That's a vow to which Stephanie plans to hold him. She is ever hopeful.
"Waiting on that," she says. "Waiting on that."
The first coherent thing George Clinton explains to me is that I should not expect much of him.
"I'm lazy offstage," he says. "I don't even go to clubs and shit. Because I end up going as the character, wearing all my clothes, dancing like I'm a fool. That's the only way I can stand it there, 'cause I know it's full of shit. When I walk into the building, a lot of people go, 'Hey, George!' and I go into character, pretend I'm high as hell. That way I ain't got to talk to one at a time. Because as soon as you talk to one straight, you got to talk to everybody else. If they rush you real fast, you go, 'Yeahgiveeverybodythehotdogmamadog…'—and once you start talking fast, they slow down. They can't keep up with you. I can do that shit all day long, nicest guy in the world. Other than that, I'm boring as fuck."
Though Clinton may plead convincingly in favor of his dullness (if perhaps too interestingly), it will soon become apparent that he is incapable of delivering on it. I am visiting him at the Burbank rental apartment in which he and Stephanie are staying for a couple of weeks in September 2005 while he prepares for a show at the Greek Theatre that's billed as his fiftieth anniversary as a performer. For much of the first hour I am there, he barely acknowledges me as he sits at a desk facing the wall, working on his latest artwork with children's crayons. The picture taking shape shows spangleglassed ParliamentFunkadelic bass player Bootsy Collins with a twisted Munchscream mouth, some UFOs looming in the background, and a figure who was once Clinton but has now taken on simian features. ("That's me metamorphizing into Planet of the Apes," he murmurs by way of explanation. "I'm trying not to let them see my human side… It's called shapeshifting…") He applies layer after layer of crayon onto the drawing until it gets muddier and muddier, then uses whiteout to lighten it again. "Pretty much like the music," he notes. "I put a lot of stuff on there, and then I edit it out till it feel like something."
Stephanie, who is cooking us red snapper for dinner, mentions that George had an art show in San Francisco a few years back.
"Sixtyeight thousand dollars, my share," he says.
He grabs crayon after crayon and hunches over his artwork. An androgynous shape with blue and orange hair begins to appear on the right of the picture. "I think it's going to be a person," he mutters. He works on the figure's multicolor curly ringlets. "What's that rock singer He have a girl's name."
"Marilyn Manson" I ask.
"Yeah. It be somebody like that."
I ask why Manson has blue and orange hair.
"I'm colorblind," he points out. "That's just light and dark to me. I end up with green people, they tell me."
This, I suppose, may explain a great deal.
I also inquire how he feels when he is doing these drawings.
"It keeps you busy," he says. "Instead of getting high, this is something to do."
After dinner, Clinton and his wife talk of grand government conspiracies, cloning, God, the Pyramids, DNA, artificial intelligence, unexplained murders, and underground UFO laboratories, and George shares the extraordinary information that he watches the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie when he wants to clear out his head. One of this evening's more convoluted trains of thought has him considering, I hope purely theoretically, the feelings of inanimate objects when you have sex with them.
"Oh, whatever, George," scolds Stephanie.
After a while, Stephanie tells George that he needs to put his legs up against the wall—he has waterretention problems—so he lies on his back and shuffles toward the wall until his legs are sticking up vertically. He lets out a series of slightly disconcerting oooohs and ummmmmms and exhales heavily.
"Oh, I feel good," he says.
He returns to a chair, and we have some cake.
"Any ice cream" he asks Stephanie.
"No, sorry, sweetie," she says. "We've been doing very well on the whole noteatingridiculously thing."
He grins. "I just wanted to check and see—"
"—how far we're going with that" she asks. "Not that far."
George Clinton was born the eldest of nine children sixtyfive years ago in North Carolina. He has always told it that he was born in an outhouse. "My mother thought she had the shits," he says. "For real." (He reluctantly concedes that when she realized her error, she returned to the main house and a midwife was called.) As a kid, he loved fishing, and he describes how he used to run across a local field, chased by the horse that lived in it, to get to the creek where the tadpoles could be found. When his father went into the armed forces ("He might of went to Korea—I'm not sure; he didn't talk about that too much"), they moved to D.C., where his mother worked as a cleaner in the Pentagon. Later, when he was 10, they moved to Jersey, where his father unloaded ships on the Port Newark docks until he retired. "He worked hard as hell," George says, "but he had a Cadillac every year until he died."
When George was 11, he heard Frankie Lymon and decided that he wanted to become a singer. Clinton never had much of a voice, but he was always the man who made things happen and put the groups together, and because of that he earned his places in them. By the end of his teens, he had his own doowop quintet, the Parliaments (named for Parliament cigarettes in emulation of the Chesterfields and the Larks), and his own barbershop. He didn't cut hair; he straightened it. There was more money in that. He talks of those times as innocent, in a way—his clients' flashy cars tripleparked outside and blocking the fire station next door—but also as not. There was a big heroin problem in the community. "We had a lot of friends that were shooting dope," he recalls, "and they were dying. The customers were dying every other day." He and his friends would joke about it—"Who died last night"—because that was all they could do.
Through the '60s, he hustled and tried to find his way. He made records, wrote for Motown's publishing division, and spent some time in the legendary Brill Building song factory. The Parliaments eventually managed one mediumsize hit, a soulful pop rush called "I Wanna Testify," but that was all. Then the culture changed, and Clinton found inspiration and opportunity. He now swears that he bought all the albums that transformed him on one single day: Cream's Disraeli Gears, Sly Stone's Dance to the Music and M'Lady, Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced, Vanilla Fudge's Vanilla Fudge. And then there were the drugs. "You know, when you take acid for the first time—I just thought it was heaven," he says.
The Parliaments became Parliament, and they became much weirder. By now they were based in Detroit. "We were the loudest group," he recalls. "They used to call us 'the Temptations on acid' or 'James Brown on angel dust.' " They'd play with the other groups coming out of the Detroit area—Iggy and the Stooges, MC5, Ted Nugent. Those were the days when he used to wear a diaper or a sheet or nothing onstage. "Naked was par for the course," he agrees. "I didn't have much to take off, anyway. Just had a sheet on."
I ask how people reacted.
"I don't know. Most of them used to run. I was out of my mind, anyway."
Still, he suggests that some of the stories that have followed him from those days are exaggerated. People sometimes say that he pissed on the audience, but he claims that can be easily explained—one time he poured some wine on his head, and after the wine had run down his body, it started dripping from his dick, so it looked like he was pissing. A common mistake.
He reminisces how he used to bump into Jimi Hendrix, before and after the spirit of the age infused Hendrix and then him. When they first met, Hendrix was shy and introverted, but Clinton thinks the acid brought Hendrix out of himself. "It was funny. The wind cries Mary, huh It was like you stuck your finger in the socket: 'Damn, what happened to you' And about two years later, he was like, 'What happened to you' My head was shaved with a cross and moons and shit on it. I told him I was trying to catch up."
You could argue that Clinton not only caught up but sped past. And that from then on, he never put his foot on the brakes.
_For the full article, pick up the February 2007 issue of _GQ.
LOST IN SPACE
A selection of George Clinton's weirdest and most wonderful recordings
By Chris Heath
"(I Wanna) Testify"
(The Parliaments, 1967)
With his first band, Clinton came up with this stirring soulgospel stomp about the promise and salvation of love—a subject he has always drifted back to with surprising sentimentality whenever his bizarre aspects have subsided (as with the touchingly sweet "Sexy Side of You," from his most recent album, 2005's How Late Do U Have to B B 4 U R Absent).
"Maggot Brain"
(Funkadelic, 1971)
An early example of Clinton's masterful role as an enabler: There is little more to "Maggot Brain" than a simple circular chord sequence, endlessly repeated arpeggios over which the late Eddie Hazel plays liquid, funkfree guitar. Clinton reputedly instructed Hazel to imagine the death of his mother; the beautiful, elegiac result is one of the greatest rock instrumentals of all time.
"Cosmic Slop"
(Funkadelic, 1973)
This is early Funkadelic's high point, in which the funk and the squalling rock guitars merged perfectly. The song tells the tale of a mother who turns tricks to feed her children; its hallmark is Garry Shider's increasingly agonized refrain: "I can hear my mother call… I can hear my mother call…"
"PFunk (Wants to Get Funked Up)"
(Parliament, 1975)
One of two classic funk chants from Parliament's finest album, Mothership Connection—"Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)" is the other—this opening tune displays Clinton's talent for fashioning allpurpose dance anthems that nevertheless contain an ocean of weirdness. The desired effect is what you get / When you improve your Interplanetary Funksmanship, it advises, helpfully.
"Chocolate City"
(Parliament 1975)
The track itself—which sounds as if Gil ScottHeron had wandered into a lost Isaac Hayes groove—doesn't completely gel, but it does mark where Clinton first hit his stride in melding surreality, Utopianism, provocation, and funk. Here, just a few months before the Mothership came to Earth, he visualized a U.S. government run by James Brown, Muhammad Ali, Ike Turner, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Richard Pryor.
"I'd Rather Be with You"
(Bootsy's Rubber Band, 1976)
In the ParliamentFunkadelic heyday there was little room for beautiful melodies and heartfelt youandme lyrics, but on Bootsy Collins's albums the rules were slightly different. This delightful song, cowritten and coproduced by Clinton, is the slinkiest and most elegant example.
"Bop Gun (Endangered Species)"
(Parliament, 1977)
There's no shortage of ParliamentFunkadelic songs in which the conceptual oddity fed, rather than obscured, great pop music: "Flash Light," "Star Child," "Dr. Funkenstein," "Children of Productions," "Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples," and this song are all examples. A "bop gun" is the weapon required to protect us from evil forces bent on removing funkiness from the world.
"Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk (Pay AttentionB3M)"
(Parliament, 1977)
It's a tribute to the potency of Clinton's worldview that by the late '70s he could have a song like this—concerning the bignosed nemesis of Dr. Funkenstein, beginning with overlapping alien voices discussing matters such as the "zone of zero funkativity"—that still seemed limber and natural. Within it are the two lines (on another day / chasing the noses away) and melodic twist that anchored the finest version of Ice Cube's landmark "It Was a Good Day."
"One Nation Under a Groove"
(Funkadelic, 1978)
Clinton's most universal recording strings together clichés, doggerel, and the occasional inspirational invocation (here's a chance to dance our way out of our constrictions) with a seamless sonic construction that melds disco, Clintonfunk, and James Brownfunk. It seems to both start and end in midsong, as if it were always playing and always will be.
"Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)"
(Parliament, 1978)
For Motor Booty Affair, Clinton moved his celestialfunk narrative underwater. On a few songs such as this one, the surreal and sometimes idiotic conceit works, but the album also contained the first signs that the concept was becoming exhausted and that ParliamentFunkadelic's inspiration was on the wane.
"(Not Just) Knee Deep"
(Funkadelic, 1979)
One of Clinton's splendid chantriff songs, "Knee Deep" hangs on two different hypnotic chants—one of which would supply the hook to De La Soul's "Me Myself and I" and the other to Snoop's "Who Am I (What's My Name)" The song itself, a sort of freaky sex hymn, stretches on for more than a quarter of an hour.
"U.S. Custom Coast Guard Dope Dog"
(George Clinton and Da PFunk Allstars, 1995)
A representatively messy lateperiod Clinton song, this is one of several that continue the dog obsession that began with 1983's bowwowwowyippieyoyippieyeah anthem, "Atomic Dog." It tells the story of a drugsniffing dog that intimately investigates smugglers' body cavities and ends up addicted. Like most of Clinton's more recent work, the song feels slapdash at times, but there's still enough smart, gleeful funk craziness to remind us why we care.