It ain't funk without Clinton

When a 64-year-old man advises you to bring a spare booty to his concert, you know he's serious about funking you up. "You can expect to have your butt kicked," says George Clinton, the inventor of P-Funk and founder of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic.

As a reference point for P-Funk, think James Brown on stage with Jimi Hendrix, backed by a 25-piece band.

"You better bring two booties to the show," he says of his one-off concert at Auckland's St James on April 2.

But what possesses him to still tour the world and play four-hour shows?

He loves it. Yes. But the money helps to pay Clinton's legal fees in his neverending legal battle to secure copyright over his music from licensing company Bridgeport Music.

You see, Clinton's music - mostly notably the songs Flashlight by Parliament and Atomic Dog from 1982's Computer Games - have been pillaged by musicians who use the songs as samples.

Don't get Clinton wrong, he's a huge supporter of sampling.

"It ain't the band members that we have a problem with, it's the people who are collecting the money and not paying us," Clinton says.

"The old record companies that we record for is what we have a problem with.

"But it'll take care of itself because it ain't going anywhere and we got all the time in the world."

Estimates predict the amount Clinton could be owed from the use of his music as being as much as US$20 million ($27 million).

Clinton says "it's going to hit the fan" soon and become a very public issue, because sampling is such a wide spread phenomenon.

"A lot of careers of different people have been created by the music and it's not going to stop because we're still around.

"It's going to happen sooner or later because they're still collecting that money and we'll get it."

Those high-profile acts who have used Flashlight include Run DMC (Back From Hell), Public Enemy (Nighttrain), Ice T (Home Invasion), and one-hit wonders C&C Music Factory with Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm.

Clinton started out in music in the doo-wop group the Parliaments while at college. While there he met Bernie Worrell, who plays Hammond organ with Clinton to this day.

"Everybody knows, even back in the 50s, that music was the thing that impressed the girls and everybody had a group. But I fell in love with music and then Motown came along.

"Once I saw Motown getting ready to be left behind - you know, once they started going to Hollywood and making movies - I saw the English rock'n'roll coming through and I realised that Motown was the music that my mother used to like. So by that time I was doing my own thing.

"We picked the mid tempo R&B music, which was funk. Rock'n'roll was fast, blues was mostly real slow, but funk was that in-between music where they got drunk and danced, and got nasty.

"So we picked that music, and we saw how rock'n'roll music had been preserved and we said we were going to do the same with funk.

"Motown was the funky music in the beginning ... but instead of singing 'Reflections of ... '," he croons, "we just kept the mid-tempo and sung about booty."

Hip-hop before hip-hop?

"Exactly."

And P-Funk was born.

"A lot of people don't realise it, but hip-hop is what we were talking about when we made the record The Clones of Dr Funkenstein [from 1976]. Hip-hop is basically the clone. Hip-hop is what's keeping funk alive."

Clinton's first two bands, Funkadelic (which formed in 1968) and Parliament (formed in 1970) operated throughout the 70s at the same time. Funkadelic was more of a traditional band that played psychedelic rock'n'roll - with some extreme funk thrown in. Parliament was pure, unadulterated funk, and fun to boot, as song titles like Chocolate City and Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker) might suggest.

Funkadelic's One Nation Under a Groove from 1978 was the group's most commercially successful album but it was 1971's Maggot Brain that remains their finest work.

"I told Eddie [Hazel, the guitarist] we was going to do a song that was so sad that people would remember it forever," says Clinton of the 10-minute title track.

"I said, 'Let's think about Grace dying'. That was his mother.

"And he said, 'Oh man, that's stuffed up'.

"He forgot all about it, but when we started playing ...

"I took the bass and drums off it and he was playing with such feeling, and I wanted it to be different to anything else out there. And with the six remaining songs I tried to make them as funky as I could, and just rock'n'roll."

He struggles to remember the names of the songs on the album, apart from Maggot Brain, and asks me to name some of the songs.

Then he starts rattling off Super Stupid, Hit It and Quit It.

What about Can You Get To That?

"We haven't played that one in a while. I'm writing that one down. We comin' to funk you up Downunder."

The Parliament Funkadelic band still has some of the "old heads" like Worrell, Blackbird McKnight and Michael Hampton playing.

"There's a few new ones too but it still maintains all the essence of the years we've been together - there's about 25 of us.

"It's still going through a metamorphosis, it's always changing.

"But it's a good job. When all else has failed, it's a real good job."

Performance

*Who: George Clinton with the Parliament Funkadelic band
*Where and when: St James, April 2
*Key albums: Funkadelic - Maggot Brain (1971), Parliament - Mothership Connection (1976), Funkadelic - One Nation Under a Groove (1978), George Clinton - Computer Games (1982)