If James Brown is the Godfather then George Clinton has to be the Papa Progenitor of funk. Few musicians have had a bigger impact across multiple genres than Clinton. The dealer of funky music, uncut funk, P. Funk, and The Bomb, was born today in 1941 in Kannapolis, North Carolina but he grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey.
As a teenager he started a doo wop group called The Parliaments. The band would congregate at a barber shop Clinton owned and the barber shop became the de facto hang out joint for musicians in the area. This led to Clinton getting to know many of the future members of his two most famous bands, Parliament and Funkadelic.
The Parliaments never had much success and in the 60s Clinton moved to Detroit and became a staff songwriter at the Motown record label. Clinton didn't particularly have much success at Motown, either, and Clinton went to start another band in 1968. Early in his career Clinton wasn't a very savvy businessman and he had lost the rights to the name The Parliaments, so he named his new band Funkadelic. Funkadelic was a group of five musicians and Clinton brought in the former singers from The Parliaments to round out the group.
Funkadelic released their eponymous debut in 1970. Gone was the doo wop sound, replaced by a heavier blend of rock, soul, and funk, a la Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. At the same time, Clinton launched another band called Parliament and Parliament released their debut "Osmium" in 1970 as well. More a marketing gimmick than a true differentiation between the bands, Funkadelic was heavier funk while Parliament was more psychedelic, at least at first. The lines between the bands were blurred from the beginning as both bands shared multiple members.
Things got even more confusing with the creation of the P-Funk All Stars, but we'll save that for another day. Funkadelic would release 16 albums and Parliament would release 10, and both of their stage shows were legendary. Inspired by the funk mythology contained in their lyrics, there was a flying saucer dubbed "The Mothership", a shirtless guitarist wearing only a diaper, a bass player wearing star-shaped sunglasses (you know exactly who I am talking about), outlandish costumes, and George Clinton's parade of wigs.
Their stage shows were so legendary I once rode in the back of a pickup truck in a rainstorm to see them at The World Famous Cleveland Agora. I was soaked but had plenty of time to dry off because, if there was one constancy to a P-Funk show, it was they never took the stage on time. Many cities have rules about how late a band can play and P-Funk simply didn't give a shit. Once they finally took the stage they would often play for over three hours, like a funky Bruce Springsteen, and send their audiences home well after the bars closed. Another hallmark of a P-Funk show was its multi-culturalism before that term was even a thing. College aged whites, older blacks, and every stripe in between came to get funked up.
Clinton would go on to record 10 solo albums and became an inspiration to a legion of rap artists. I don't know who holds the record for most sampled artist but, if it's not James Brown, it's got to be George Clinton. Clinton, along with 15 other members of Parliament-Funkadelic were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.
