Released Sept. 21, 1976, Tales of Kidd Funkadelic isn’t out here trying to be the best Funkadelic record. Nobody’s trying to put it up next to Let’s Take it to the Stage (discussed here) or Maggot Brain (discussed here) or the self-titled (discussed here), and the entire progression of George Clinton with both Funkadelic and Parliament had hit its arguable peak in 1975 with Parliament‘s Mothership Connection (discussed here). Coming right after that in the procession of releases, being the eighth full-length and the last one for Westbound Records, it’s somewhat easy for Tales of Kidd Funkadelic — named for guitarist Michael Hampton, who had the common misfortune of not being Eddie Hazel — to be pushed aside as an afterthought.

Too easy, maybe. Even some of its seven songs feel like the second in a series. To wit, “Let’s Take it to the People.” Well, you took it to the stage a bit ago, so I guess you would eventually want to take it somewhere else. Okay. “Undisco Kidd.” Well, Parliament had that “Unfunky UFO” to deal with, so that’s fair enough even with the mention of fish and chips. “Take Your Dead Ass Home” would presumably be what you do after you “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” You get the idea. It’s not every song, but even some of the music seems to pick on where Funkadelic have been on past records, with the taut vocals of “Butt-to-Buttresuscitation” calling to mind the title-track of Standing on the Verge of Getting it On (discussed here) as Funkadelic clown on disco and rock alike, long since sure of the potency of their own thing, and, as they put it on a different record, “doing it to the max.”

But just because it’s not the Funkadelic LP or Parliament‘s Osmium (discussed here) doesn’t mean Tales of Kidd Funkadelic has nothing to offer. At a bit under 13 minutes, the title-track “Tales of Kidd Funkadelic (Opusdelite Years)” presents itself as a post-guitar jam. It brings into emphasis the strong presence of keyboardist Bernie Worrell in the writing and arrangements, which the influence from classical music in “I’m Never Gonna Tell It” also reinforces. That’s nothing to complain about, of course, and “Tales of Kidd Funkadelic” feels prescient of electronic music and noise in its experimentalist second half, which doesn’t do a ton if you’re looking to dance but is a thing to appreciate about it just the same. And just because they’re standing on familiar ground doesn’t mean “Let’s Take it to the People” and “Undisco Kidd” aren’t effective songs. Following “Butt-to-Buttresuscitation” at the beginning of the album, “Let’s Take it to the People” has a nose-drugs intensity that feels like an inheritance from the weirdo ideology of earlier Funkadelic offerings, and the backbeat of closer “How Do Yeaw View You?” and the somewhat buried guitar solo near the end sound like a jam that could keep going another half-hour at least.

It’s not a landmark, and further to its being outshined by the work around it, a month later, Funkadelic would put out Hardcore Jollies as their debut for Warner Bros., giving Tales of Kidd Funkadelic a contractually-obligated feel. But the thing of it is, 50 years later, one is less concerned about what and where peak performances can be found than seeing that there’s as much of this as possible for future generations to enjoy. George Clinton is still alive. Parliament-Funkadelic still tours. During the course of this series, Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath passed away, as if to remind that none of the great genre-figureheads are immortal. Another generation from now — maybe in 20 years when I’m in my 60s and all the stonerblogs are run by AI — having as much of Clinton on tape as possible, along with familiar players from the stable like Garry Shider, Calvin Simon, Bootsy Collins, Ray Davis, Fuzzy Haskins, Grady Thomas, and so on, is going to be a boon, because there isn’t any more coming.

That’s an inherently sobering consideration, and so perhaps not in the spirit of Tales of Kidd Funkadelic itself, which is not only here to party, but to out-party everyone else in the room and anybody who might dare show up and enter the presence of P-Funk in all its high-grade funked-out tell-your-mom-I-said-hi glory. The truth is “Take Your Dead Ass Home,” while derivative, is a banger, and in its seven-minute reach a slick groove only grows slicker as it goes, and “I’m Never Gonna Tell It” seems to funk in the vocals all on their own, even before you get to the arrangement surrounding, where so much of what Funkadelic did during their initial era was born of blues, soul and R&B, this feels like the funk has come into itself as has the group making it, and of course that’s no coincidence.

This is where this series ends. I could keep going, do Hardcore Jollies or make my way up to Parliament‘s tellingly-specific 2018 album, Medicaid Fraud Dogg, and for sure there are some gems there, but it’s time to call it. My takeaway from the last however many weeks it’s been is, predictably, how crucial funk is to the pastiche if American popular culture, and that rock, from its foundations to every splinter-genre iteration to be found in Bandcamp’s nether-region tags, owes its whole ass to African-American music and culture. That’s nothing new.

Specifically, to me, these songs — whether we’re talking this epilogue or any other LP I’ve covered as part of this dig-in — sound like freedom. American freedom. The right to show up, do your thing in your way so long as you’re not hurting anybody, and be left alone. It is an ideal separate from the racism of the day that produced it (or modern racism, for that matter), and in a time when the country is forced to exist under a white christian nationalist doctrine, to my ears, Funkadelic represent everything good and worth preserving about the United States. It is a beautiful, vast thing, comprised of many voices acting to the betterment of all. On its best day, in theory, this is what the US could have been and now certainly will never be, either in my lifetime or yours. Nobody said it was going to be a funky ending.

All the more reason to be thankful these records exist. Someday, the archeologists will find them in the ruins and discover we weren’t all so terrible.

Thanks for reading.

—

At the ear doctor with the kid. A test of auditory processing before second grade. Nobody wants my dad joke about her hearing being fine and her listening being the problem. I feel accordingly like a wart grown on the finger of the situation.

She’s getting tested. She’s getting evaluated. Poked and prodded like the little alien wonder she is. Her hearing is fine, so is her sight. The test the other day of her intellect took two hours because she kept getting the questions right. I said that I hoped we could make it so she learned anything at school this year, because I didn’t think she actually got any new information last year. She’s spent the whole summer building robots. Got a Lego robotics set to start programming, and hell if she didn’t start programming. She’s seven.

I don’t think this is the last test before school, and then there’s a physical at some point, so I guess she won’t be short on ice cream as a reward, though that’s a pretty regular thing anyhow.

The week was a week. Another week this summer. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, but I managed to get through it without my head falling off, so I can only call it a win. We were in Connecticut last weekend at The Patient Mrs.’ mother’s place on the shore. My wife’s brother, who we don’t often get to see because he lives in Maryland, was up and her sister lives up there as well, so it was a whole thing. Her sister and her two kids, who are teenagers and wonderful, came down Tuesday into Wednesday so my niece could go with The Pecan to OT because she is thinking about being an OT as a career, so she went and observed. It was a good visit; it’s nice to have them all around, and The Pecan is head over heels in love with her cousins.

The modded Switch that I spent the whole post bitching about last week works. I got it to play the Tears of the Kingdom Randomizer mod last Friday afternoon, and that was it. My daughter took it, started a new game, and has been playing all week. I would still like to install Challenge Mode and Depths of the Kingdom, but I don’t want to mess up the Randomizer working and if my daughter is having fun with it, which she is, then I have to acknowledge that I’ve met my goal with the endeavor. The Patient Mrs. asked last night about Breath of the Wild mods, if there’s a randomizer for that. I said there was and I’d be glad to install it. Question there of course is if I can.

Life proceeds. There are a couple shows I want to see in the next week that I may or may not see. So it goes. Whatever you’re up to as summer starts to wind down, have fun, be safe and don’t forget to hydrate. I’m back Monday with I don’t even know what.

FRM.

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“There’s a good time waiting for you/Come on let’s get free,” says opening track “Good to Your Earhole” on Funkadelic‘s seventh full-length, Let’s Take it to the Stage (previously discussed here). They’re so close. That party is about to roll through and it’s getting glorious, and Let’s Take it to the Stage — issued April 21, 1975, just two weeks after Parliament‘s third album, Chocolate City (discussed here) — is a hard-funk masterpiece in its own right. The early soul, R&B and doo-wop thread in George Clinton‘s work was still there, even the psychedelia was still there in the guitars of Garry Shider and Michael Hampton — Eddie Hazel is listed as an “alumni,” along with Bootsy Collins and Billy “Bass” Nelson, and others, but it’s been five years and the plot has shifted.

Bernie Worrell takes a more prominent role on keys in the absence of Hazel‘s shred — the most obvious example would be the seven-minute finale, “Atmosphere,” which taps into Bach more than Hendrix, and songs like “Better by the Pound” and “Be My Beach” with a characteristic vocal from Collins continue the grounded, dance-ready funk rock of Funkadelic‘s prior outing, 1974’s Standing on the Verge of Getting it On (discussed here), pushing right to the cusp, right to the edge of realization but still rooted in the songwriting methodology of their early work. With vocal contributions from Calvin Simon, Garry Shider, Worrell, Boogie Mosson, Collins, Grady Thomas, Ray Davis and Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins (on ‘werewolf vocals’), among others Let’s Take it to the Stage is the first time Funkadelic have shown themselves willing to throw down. It’s the first time they’ve gotten confrontational.

There’s a competitive aspect to Let’s Take it to the Stage, as though ‘the stage’ is where one’s funk supremacy might be ultimately decided. The title-track follows “Be My Beach” and “No Head No Backstage Pass,” two almost woefully catchy joints picking up where “Jimmy’s Got a Bit of Bitch in Him” left off in the category of ‘songs that wouldn’t get made today and maybe that’s alright.’ Most of “Let’s Take it to the Stage” is spoken, enacting a mellower swing than the manic guitar twists of “No Head No Backstage Pass” just prior, and the song features direct callouts of James Brown, Earth, Wind and Fire, their own “Loose Booty” and other references, and Kool and the Gang, the latter of which feels like an indictment of the emergent disco as a whole.

But it’s impossible to ignore the shift in perspective. Five years earlier, Funkadelic were upstarts, the inheritors of the blues embarking on a new path for American Black music and pop more broadly, uniting worlds of rock and psych with soul and R&B. By 1975, they’re guarding the purity of their funk from the lesser interpretations of others. The world they’ve come from can still be heard in their songs — “Baby I Owe You Something Good” is epic, and it and “Good to Your Earhole” and “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” hit especially, pointedly hard — but at the same time, dance music was evolving in no small part because of the boundaries Funkadelic and Parliament were pushing.

The repetitive style of “Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” which basks in the hook “Shit/Goddamn/Get off your ass and jam,” comes across as born out of some of the same impulses that, at this point, had resulted in some of the group’s more vivid instrumental explorations — that is to say, when they dig into a thing, they really dig into it — but is a landmark in itself. As the forever-party of Parliament-Funkadelic as a touring entity continues to roll on, there isn’t a ton from this era one might hear them play live, but chances are before you get out of that room, somebody’s gonna lay out a, “Shit/Goddamn/Get off your ass and jam,” and surely you will follow that edict and know that you’re in good, professional hands.

It’s notable that George Clinton himself is less all-over Let’s Take it to the Stage than some prior Funkadelic outings, though he’s gleeful in the title-track callouts. More bandleader than lead singer, in other words. Still very much a part of the proceedings, but on a producer level as well, and able to step back and see with a bit of distance where the project is headed. As strong as Let’s Take it to the Stage is, the comedown from “Baby I Owe You Something Good” is real. “Stuffs and Things” is fun but essentially fluff. It toys with innuendo on a record that’s already laid out the terms of “No Head No Backstage Pass” and is accordingly somewhat awkward about it. The penultimate “The Song is Familiar” could have bridged “Baby I Owe You Something Good” and “Atmosphere” on its own, but “Stuffs and Things” lightens the mood after the heavy-landing crashes of “Baby I Owe You Something Good” and before the headier going of “Atmosphere” ends the record, so it’s not without purpose. Considering the no-dip-in-quality run through the first seven tracks, however, the last three that follow come through as more perfunctory.

“Put your hands together/Come on and stomp your feet,” the nailed-down chorus of “Good to Your Earhole,” might be the album’s biggest message. That or “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” But Funkadelic were hot shit circa 1975 and though the whole shebang was about to take a big turn before the year was out, they very obviously knew it and were ready to prove it to anybody fortunate enough to show up to the gig. Let’s Take it to the Stage isn’t the last Funkadelic record, or the last one with a guitar on it, but it is a marker of an era of the group that was coming to an end, a landmark in that, and one of the finest offerings of funk you’re likely to find from any source, be it produced by George Clinton or otherwise. The between-place it occupies isn’t a coincidence — it’s the lightning in a bottle of a transitional moment happening in the songs, which nonetheless are air-tight, and all the more special for that.

As always, I hope you enjoy. This mini-series on Parliament-Funkadelic wraps up next week, I think, unless something changes my mind between now and then. Thanks for reading.

—

It was another week of this summer. I had a lot of Hungarian homework to do. I’m in a hard place in terms of the language study. It’s difficult but satisfying in the way of using your brain.

I don’t really know when Monday started and if you told me today was Wednesday and I was way wrong on writing this whole thing to start with. I guess that means it’s summer. The days are pretty full. I’ve been writing in the morning while The Pecan watches videos and The Patient Mrs. does whatever it is she’s doing in that moment to keep our house afloat and/or make our lives better — surely something — and that’s worked reasonably well, but it doesn’t make reviewing stuff easy by any stretch. I’ve done a bit of listening in the afternoons though and that’s been fine. I feel pretty comfortable at this point knowing the world isn’t going to end if I don’t post an album review every five minutes here. The “nobody cares” mantra is in full effect.

Speaking of “nobody cares,” how about Palestine, huh? Anybody wanna do a general strike and enact some real change? No? Proceed with genocide? Great. I was hoping to have some overwhelming generational shame to carry for the rest of my life. You know, beyond having been raised Catholic.

Humans.

I don’t know about you, but a week and a half and one well-attended funeral later, my feed is still largely Ozzy Osbourne memories, photos and detritus. Not complaining about that, mind you. Beats ‘content.’

I need a shower, some more coffee, some breakfast. We’re going to Connecticut at some point today, I don’t know when, and will I guess be there for the weekend and then back up there at some point next week? No idea. I just go when they tell me.

This past week I mailed out my Nintendo Switch (the V1, not the OLED) to be modded, basically so I could install a bunch of add-ons for Tears of the Kingdom. Challenge Mode, Depths of the Kingdom, the randomizer, etc. That’s what they get for not doing DLC, I guess. It cost me $340, but the software is installed in addition to the hardware and everything is backed up, so provided it comes back and works, I will hopefully be able to use that for emulators and such in addition to the mods, not that I’m hurting for emulation between the Switch 2, the arcade that The Patient Mrs. bought me for my 40th, my phone, laptop, etc., but you know, the more the merrier. Hopefully that’ll be back this week, unless I get ripped off and the guy ghosts me. Always possible.

In my own game — Tears of the Kingdom, this is — I got 999 silver lynel horns, all by fighting. I triggered blood moons, but other than that each one of those is a monster I beat. The last 500 or so were in cycles of 10 zipping around the game map. It was a project I had when I started the game, and something I’ve concentrated on in I-have-15-minutes-lemme-do-this fashion. I don’t know how many hours I’ve played, but I’ve had the game going probably for about 15 months and have long since 100-percented the map and questlines. There’s stuff like armor upgrades that I’ve held back on doing on purpose, and they added voice memories for the Switch 2, which I’ll do eventually. I can see myself as an old man not knowing where I am but chasing down koroks on the Great Sky Island. Just put me somewhere in front of a Nintendo.

We also beat Donkey Kong Bananza this week and that was fun. And The Pecan started OT (yay) twice a week (yay) which Thursday couples with her Lego robotics class (yay), which rules. The Patient Mrs. has her signed up for kids track-and-field next week and that sounds more like a thing where we’ll get pulled aside and asked not to come back after one or two painful practice sessions. I was hoping social skills group would be the only boot we got this summer. The Patient Mrs. still wants to find her a sport. Individual focus and lower likelihood of brain trauma makes track a reasonable option. I can’t see this kid doing drills, though. Stand around and wait her turn while the coach works with someone else. Ugh. I think that’s next week. Could be three weeks from now. I barely know when it’s my night to do bedtime.

Whatever today is going to bring, I’m looking forward to it being over. That’s pretty much where I’m at.

Have a great and safe weekend. Make sure you hydrate, have fun and all that. It’s August this week, so if you’re starting your summer tour, I hope the travel’s easy. I’ll be around same as ever.

FRM.

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A masterpiece for the discography, and not the first or the last one in Funkadelic‘s reign. Standing on the Verge of Getting it On was issued on Westbound Records July 10, 1974, just one week after the second Parliament LP, Up for the Down Stroke (discussed here). Imagine putting out two records with two bands — mostly the same players; Eddie Hazel is back on guitar here, and of course makes his presence felt in the songwriting as well — a week apart. It’s like you’re your own scene, man. ‘Wild’ was the order of the day, but this moment in Funkadelic‘s overarching trajectory is a jump from one level to the next, and especially right after Up for the Down Stroke, Standing on the Verge of Getting it On reveals Funkadelic as a maturing entity.

No longer are they relating funk to blues in the lyrics, or feeling like they need to teach their audience what the music is about. After the spoken intro — which marks the first time in the Funkadelic catalog that women are referred to as “bitches,” prefacing the penultimate “Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him,” to say nothing of 50 years-plus of pop-cultural misogyny — “Red Hot Mama” opens and locks step with the best of Parliament‘s classic soul grooves. George Clinton and vocalists Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas and Ray Davis bring vocal-group energy to the lead cut, with Hazel having a say in the lead vocals as well. The groove is driving and welcoming, and even though the party just ended a week ago, there’s too much soloing in “Red Hot Mama” for it to be anything other than a good time.

“Alice in My Fantasies” hits harder. I don’t know if it’s Hazel or Garry Shider on guitar or both, but at two and a half dug-in, circular-riffed minutes, it’s probably the only Funkadelic song High on Fire could feasibly cover and make it work. I won’t take anything away from that comparative intensity or the decidedly quieter Hazel-led mostly-instrumental-save-for-slowed-down-spoken-word (at the start of the record, which is a purposefully-left-in interrupted take, the voices are sped up) exploration that closes, “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts,” but if we’re picking favorites, the smooth harmonies and groove throughout the seven-minute “I’ll Stay,” peppered with psych-ish soloing and steady movement from drummer Ramon “Tiki” Fulwood in the ensuing jam are hard to ignore. Like a lot of what surrounds, it’s a piece Funkadelic wouldn’t have been able to pull off four years earlier if they’d wanted to, but that manages to pull off being emotionally resonant in between “Alice in My Fantasies” and “Sexy Ways,” so is probably three-times the triumph it’s ever been given credit for being.

And “Sexy Ways” — the centerpiece, naturally — digs into that upbeat soul of “Red Hot Mama” with a more stretched-out hook but no less fun. It’s somewhat overshadowed by the title-track — “People! Whatcha doin’? Standing on the verge of getting it on, really getting it on,” and such — which splays brilliance with couch-flopping ease, communicates directly with its audience, has more of that sped-up speech, and is both air-tight in its structure and able to move, ready to swing loose, build to the next chorus and, in the middle, explode at 3:18 into a declarative payoff departure in the vocals for the lines, “Song out tonight/All my soul is out tonight/There’s a song out tonight, y’all, come on,” which are likewise inviting and engrossing in sound. They pull it back to the verse and the chorus to finish, but I’m pretty sure the only reason nobody ever called Funkadelic prog is racism. Even in this early, pre-P-Funk era, the growth in their craft is evident in the shifts from one record to the next and also between the songs. As a talented writer once told me, you have to know the rules to know which ones you want to break.

Curiously absent from Standing on the Verge of Getting it On is bassist/vocalist Bootsy Collins, who had appeared on Parliament‘s Up for the Down Stroke, but Cordell “Boogie” Mosson holds down the twists of the title-track and the jazz-lounge parody sound of “Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him.” The latter is hard to redeem, honestly. Given how forward-thinking Funkadelic were musically, the burgeoning Afro-futurist aesthetic and such, “Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him,” again with women categorized outright as bitches, and the title-character Jimmy portrayed as confused on some level of gender and/or sexuality. Lines like, “The bitch in him/Upsets the Jim” and “We’ll call it mixed emotions for now” aren’t unsympathetic, and that the resolution is “Play on, Jimmy” is refreshingly free of judgment, but the song still treats what might’ve been somebody’s struggles as a joke, and frankly it and the whole ‘bitches’ thing feels like punching down in a way that’s unkind and contradictory to the audience outreach and the better world Funkadelic envisioned. By no means was it alone in doing so, but it would help shape the attitudes of hip-hop, which a generation later would be liberally sampling Funkadelic beats and hooks.

Offered in the vein of the title-track to 1971’s Maggot Brain (discussed here), but of course not that, “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts” digs into Funkadelic lore in the spoken part, making references that go back to 1970’s self-titled debut (discussed here) and offering good advice like, “Change your mind, and you change your relation to time,” and “Good thoughts bring forth good fruit/Bullshit thoughts rot your meat.” It’s near-satanic in its push for self-realization, and the echoing guitar layers slow-swirl across an expanse to match, a hypnotic place to cap one of funk’s finest outings, period. It isn’t where Funkadelic would end up, let alone Parliament-Funkadelic, but in the pre-Mothership era, it’s a highlight among highlights and a meld of genres, ideas and instrumental fire that were largely untouched then and remain so now.

If you believe in albums, I don’t see getting around this as one of the best. As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

I had a good time at that Electric Citizen show last night. It was good to get out. I was bummed to miss that trip to Bear Stone, but there are some shows around the next few months that I want to see, so I’m going to try to get out a bit more. It’s good for my head. Even once a month. If Autodidact had shows every week, I’d be there.

Summer is about halfway over, which is fine. This week has been absurdly hot and humid, and that’s Jersey in July/August, but I guess after not being here last summer I’m a little less acclimated than I would otherwise be. Ready for school to start? Yeah, that’s part of it. The Pecan is a lot, needs-wise, and I just kind of suck as a parent. She had an eval this week for OT, so is going to go back to OT, which will be good. There are more evals to come, and they wanted us to get her tested for auditory and visual processing as well, so I guess that’ll be handled over the next month and a half. The Patient Mrs. makes those appointments, generally, and that is labor I appreciate.

We’re just kind of rolling through. Might go swimming today if the mood is there, but The Patient Mrs. has some business in Trenton she’s probably going to head out to later (that’s like a 90-minute drive, minimum), so it’ll be me and the kid, which is kind of how it goes. She’s got puzzles and builds to work on — big summer as regards ‘builds,’ whether that’s mecanum-wheel cars or whatever; peak interest in engineering, centered around ‘Battlebots’; last summer it was space and black holes and PBS documentaries in Budapest — and Hot Wheels to play with and so forth. She wants ice cream every day. She’s seven, very grown up in some ways, very much a kid in others, with her own challenges on top of that. As the OT place nailed it this week, she’s working harder than every other kid in the class just to sit still, and anytime a demand is put on her, she’s fight or flight, and she picks fight just about every time. Even if you know this intellectually, it can make her hard to deal with in the day-to-day.

Anyway, we’ll be fine and school will come with its own host of anxieties, evaluations, fights and hopefully some learning. I don’t think she picked up much new information in first grade last year other than “she’s bad” and “she doesn’t like school.” It would be nice to improve on that, if possible.

Have a great and safe weekend, whatever you’re up to. Have fun, hydrate, watch yourself out there, and thanks for reading, as always.

FRM.

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The second Parliament album, Up for the Down Stroke, was released on July 3, 1974 through Casablanca Records. And the date is significant because a week later, the also-George–Clinton-led Funkadelic would release Standing on the Verge of Getting it On, bringing the two concurrent projects into their closest alignment up that point, like galaxies starting to pull each other’s gravity before merging.

It’s a crucial moment for what eventually would become Parliament-Funkadelic, p-funk, Clinton and his cohort, players like keyboard/organist Bernie Worrell, a returned bassist Bootsy Collins, guitarist/vocalists Eddie Hazel and Garry Shider, Ramon “Tiki” Fulwood on drums, and singers Raymond Davis, Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins, Calvin Simon and Grady Thomas, as they continued to hammer out the definition of ‘funk’ as a genre through their songwriting. No, they were not at all alone in that endeavor by 1974 — Betty Davis‘ They Say I’m Different came out the same year; we’re talking peak-era for what it was at the time — but they were distinguished among practitioners in concept and execution, influential, and for Parliament on Up for the Down Stroke, they’d hit the moment where they figured out how to be in two simultaneously operating bands and how to carve an identity for each.

But it’s a party any way you go. And that’s the point.

A nigh-on-unparalleled-in-the-catalog trilogy of bangers launches Up for the Down Stroke, beginning with the title-track. Hazel and Clinton share lead vocals and the groove has definitely been to New York City to get slick and get its hair laid. Its hi-hat alone is funkier than the catalogs of entire bands trying to hit that mark. It, “Testify” and the mellow-groover “The Goose” — complete with a nine-minute jam that sounds like the skull from whence three-quarters of Brant Bjork‘s solo catalog sprang; that’s a compliment to Bjork and a cover I’d love to hear him do, though I’m not sure he’s taking requests — with a characteristically down-for-screwing vocal from Clinton nestled comfortably in the mix, and more psychedelic guitar flourish in its jam than even Funkadelic had shown since Maggot Brain (discussed here), which was three years, like four albums, and at least five lifetimes earlier.

“Testify,” with an absolute treasure of an ascending hook — borrowing from the gospel music it’s referencing, but it’s love that’s holy — had been around for years, and had been performed by Clinton with The Parliaments, the New Jersey-based doo-wop precursor to Funkadelic and Parliament, in a less funkified version. “The Goose” and the later “All Your Goodies are Gone” — which flows like a companion-piece for “The Goose,” but is on the other side of the relationship — had similar origins, and featuring here, one can only agree Clinton and the group were right to keep them in-pocket for as long as they did. The level of realization on those songs, or even just the guitar-led hard-funk strutter “I Can Move You (If You Let Me),” which wasn’t a The Parliaments tune, runs under three minutes and is given the arduous task of regrounding the proceedings after “The Goose,” though with “I Just Got Back (From the Fantasy; Ahead of Our Time in the Four Lands of Ellet)” subsequent, that grounding doesn’t last much longer than the track’s own 2:48.

And fair enough for the odd, lush and fantastic-in-the-fantasy sense bit of escapism. Clinton had already pioneered Afrofuturism as a post-psych path for Funkadelic, but “I Just Got Back,” with Peter Chase‘s whistling, the folkish storytelling of the lyrics, intricate acoustic guitar and instrumental meander, is quietly over-the-top. It forces one to ask the question of how long one human being ever needs to listen to another human being whistle — I’ll gladly posit less than in the song — and pairs with the Hazel-fronted key-and-bass shuffle highlight closer “Presence of a Brain,” which is basically Parliament calling the entire world morons without any ability to connect with each other in a meaningful way. So yes, relevant.

Before that finale, though, comes “Whatever Makes My Baby Feel Good,” tucked in after “All Your Goodies Are Gone” has smoothed-soul’ed you with its piano-driven title-line repetitions, and again finding Worrell banging away on piano keys. In arrangement terms, “Whatever Makes My Baby Feel Good” is more about its highlight bluesy guitar solo and the somewhat saccharine fluidity of its lovey-dovey vocal line — it is cloying in a way that feels like parody — but its the harmonized vocals that sell it, not just in following “All Your Goodies Are Gone,” but as its own dug-in statement as well. It’s a jam by the finish, which ends in another fade as they transition to the weirdo, more sci-fi groove of “Presence of a Brain,” and the sound is somewhat akin to the mirror-flip of prog rock’s enduring fascination with funk, given the technical nuance of the capper’s rhythm. It’s not surprising that Parliament could nail it, as these players had long since shown a propensity for doing, but it’s not always something they reinforce either.

In that way, Up for the Down Stroke is prescient of the next couple years and albums Parliament and Funkadelic would put together. How I generally think about it is that this is the moment P-funk, as a collective, figured out it was hot shit and decided it was time the world found out about it. Not that they were ever short on swagger, but saying and showing are two different things, and this record continues to show a lot about who and what Parliament/Funkadelic were becoming, that ongoing process, while also serving as a landmark for its songs, from the nascent, repetition-based dance modus in the second half of “Up for the Down Stroke” through the intertwining voices fading out as “Presence of a Brain” comes down. A stride was being hit.

It’s hard, as someone who wasn’t there, to appreciate how much momentum might have been on their side at this point, but hindsight is a gift in understanding the project Parliament were undertaking and its conversation between soul, rock, and the funk of its own making. If you believe fun can be beautiful, it’s an argument in your favor.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

How ’bout that Quarterly Review, huh? It was a busier week for writing than for posting, of course, but remarkably easy to get through. The music was good. That’s always the thing.

My plan was to be in Croatia today, this weekend, for Bear Stone Festival. That was my plan pretty much since I left Slunj last year thinking it was an event I never wanted to miss again. I’ll be staying off social media as much as possible the next few days. Which is to say not staying off at all and just being sad at the pictures of good bands and gorgeous Croatian countryside, the video, lights, etc. Maybe next year, if I’m lucky.

We were in Connecticut the last few days, came back last night to host family today for a mellow fourth of July, celebrating the fuck knows what about this shithole country. Its founding, I guess. Saw fireworks. Going to see more fireworks. Hooray for fireworks. Hooray for everything. Beat me in the head with a hammer.

A lot of news to catch up on for Monday and a video I wanted to post this week and didn’t get to, so that’ll be there as well. I’ve got a Cosmic Reaper premiere booked and I want to review the Electric Citizen before they come through my very own hometown to play in like a week and a half. Very much looking forward to not having to drive to and most especially home from Brooklyn to actually see a gig. It’s been I think since Freedom Hawk came through Jersey with The Atomic Bitchwax, and this is closer to my house than that.

Haven’t done a Zelda update in a while so here’s one: I finished with The Wind Waker, which I very much enjoyed. I was thinking of starting Ocarina of Time on my phone or trying to mod it on the PC for various quality-of-life facilitations — which is to say, cheats — but haven’t really had time. Going to and from Freak Valley, I had the Switch with me on the plane and played Tears of the Kingdom pretty much the whole flight both ways, so I guess I’m back in that, but it’s been a few days at this point. The Switch 2 has older games in its online catalog for streaming. I’ve enjoyed The Minish Cap before, and there’s always the original NES game, though if I’m honest there’s no way I’m playing that for much more than the music.

Which, if you want to talk about the songs that shaped your life, Zelda music. Mario music. The theme to Street Fighter II. No question I’ve listened to that music more than Black Sabbath, Kyuss and Sleep and anyone else you want to namedrop put together. Strange that the sound is so incidental to the experience, compared to everywhere else in my life where my brain is like “WHY ARE YOU NOT LISTENING TO A RECORD RIGHT NOW YOU SHOULD BE.”

Gonna punch out and wish you a great and safe weekend. Tonight, fireworks. Tomorrow, surely more horrors in this age of them. Be as well as you can. It’s pretty much all we’ve got, and it’s going to keep getting worse out there. The boot on your neck forever, and such.

FRM.

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On the scale of Funkadelic records, July 1973’s Cosmic Slop might be a rare favorite. It doesn’t have any real hits, and the sopping-wet psychedelia of the group’s earliest fare has largely evaporated from their sound, and this is the first Funkadelic outing to not feature Eddie Hazel on guitar. Garry Shider (returning) and Ron Bykowski hold it down, both playing lead and rhythm, while Cordell “Boogie” Mosson handles bass and Tiki Fulwood is again in on drums, with Bernie Worrell — whose ‘woo’ at this point is well under development — on keys and Tyrone Lampkin on percussion. George Clinton, Ray Davis the aforementioned Shider, Ben Edwards and Mallia Franklin and Debbie Wright contribute vocals, the latter two backing. And that’s it. There are 10 songs. It’s 39 minutes long.

Could hardly be more straightforward, right? No 10-minute sad solos starting off party records here. No sucking of souls or licking of funky emotions. And compared to the sprawling 1972 double-album, America Eats its Young (discussed here), that preceded, Cosmic Slop feels decidedly unslopped. Hindsight and the records that follow show it as a transitional moment in the band as ideas from their first four albums (not to mention the years in soul groups prior) codify into something new. The easy swing of “Nappy Dugout” at the outset reminds of any number of bluesy strutters, but is telling in its jam of the band’s emerging willingness to make instrumental sections in their songs specifically for dancing. “Wars of Armageddon” from 1971’s Maggot Brain (discussed here) was an earlier example of this, but the intent is clearer and elements like whistles and group vocals would become staples soon enough of Funkadelic operating in this mode.

The conversation with Parliament‘s 1970 debut, Osmium (discussed here) is vivid in “You Can’t Miss What You Can’t Measure” and the later stretch through “This Broken Heart” and “Trash-a-Go-Go,” the latter of which is really just a snippet of a captured percussion jam but that does well to separate “This Broken Heart” (with strings by Worrell) and the closer “Can’t Stand the Strain” (with a more vocals-centered rollout), coming off the guitar-solo-in-background nostalgia of “No Compute,” familiar in its storytelling not in such a way like “March to the Witch’s Castle” a short time earlier, with the slowed-down spoken word narrative over militaristic psych (!) buildup and a reference from Worrell to “Battle Hymn of the Republic” thrown in for good measure. At six minutes, with due instrumental takeoff, “March to the Witch’s Castle” is the longest song here, and while Hazel‘s presence is missed throughout Cosmic Slop, the guitar is still able to get the point across, to be sure.

I’ve jumped around a bit in the tracklisting between the front and back of the LP, and you can do that listening digitally or if you’ve got the CD (mine’s in storage, like most of my collection; I cannot see a time in my life when I’ll open those boxes and live with those records again, sadly). The front-to-back flow is certainly bolstered by the rampant base-level groove that permeates this period of Funkadelic‘s work, which is to say that while these songs go different places, the going is fluid and that makes the jumps between them in sound, mood, etc., easier to make. Cosmic Slop isn’t America Eats its Young and it isn’t Standing on the Verge of Getting it On, which would arrive the next year, but it helps bridge the gap between the ultimate reach of the album before it — the absolute plunge into an aural and stylistic Yet-Unknown, a band looking for hits even sacrificing accessibility in favor of exploration; admirably weird, if also somewhat confused in trade — and the self-aware, figured-it-out divulge of what comes next.

Part of it no doubt is the end of the psychedelic era. The music was changing, pop was changing, and the rock that had underscored Funkadelic‘s early going was becoming something else as the next decade unfolded. In some ways, they were keeping up with the times, but the way in which they did was also innovative. “Let’s Make it Last” is a crooner with familiar swagger, and in the title-track, Cosmic Slop finds both its crescendo and signature hook. In its acid-guitar flourish, it harkens back, and in its outward focus on dance — the “Cosmic Slop” itself is a dance, in the lyrics — it’s prescient of things yet to manifest in Funkadelic‘s sound. By and large, the songwriting throughout Cosmic Slop is moving toward a tighter rein on structure, but there’s no shortage of ‘go’ in the tracks regardless. Reality remains tweaked.

But they were figuring it out. Had figured a few things out. Were continuing to learn as they went. Who should be doing what, making what noise, how to speak to their audience, what the frame of their material would be. Cosmic Slop didn’t launch the Mothership, but by holding onto a ’60s-inherited aspect of space theme, they would go on to pioneer a style of Afrofuturism that remains relevant 50 years after the fact. A rare echelon of radness.

If you heard Cosmic Slop after America Eats its Young, though, and thought Funkadelic had lost the plot in 1973, would you have been right? It’s hard to say, but maybe. They were different after this record than they were before it, in terms of intention, and their hold on their songwriting grew tighter without giving up either the fun or the experimentation. Cosmic Slop ends up in a sweet-spot between the various sides of Funkadelic‘s approach, and while it’s missing the conceptual aspect that their work would foster as the mid-’70s turned late, the foundations of that are beginning to emerge from their sound here. It’s not really their most cosmic, it’s certainly not the most slop in the pejorative sense, but Cosmic Slop is a landing point in Funkadelic‘s evolution and documents the changes and codifications happening in their sound at the time. Thankfully its appeal goes well beyond such academics.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

I have other writing to do. A bio project that I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about, but for which I need to get a draft done. I’m keeping this short accordingly.

Next week I was supposed to go to Croatia for Bear Stone. That isn’t happening. It’s on me. I’m doing a Quarterly Review instead. I haven’t told The Patient Mrs. that yet, but I figure if I just do the QR — nothing is double-booked, which given how the rest of June went for me scheduling-wise, unto the two full-album streams in a single day I did this week, feels like a miracle; nothing I know of is double-booked, anyhow — and the one or two news announcements that come in that I feel like will need to be posted, I can get through even though it’s summer and the house wakes up at like 6AM. Fuck it. If I could manage a QR last summer, I can do one this summer.

Look for that, I guess.

I got asked this week about a fest in August in Germany, but I don’t know if anything’s going to happen there. As of now, I don’t have a trip scheduled until January. If that’s how it plays out, so be it. No one ever said back-and-forthing to Eurofests was going to be my life, least of all me.

So, busy. Look for busy. Head down, keep working. I’m gonna go do that.

Great and safe weekend. If you’re celebrating the 4th of July next week, what the fuck for? Don’t blow off any fingers. Be safe, hydrate and all that and I’ll be back Monday.

FRM.

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Those who defend Funkadelic‘s America Eats its Young, their 1972 fourth album and the follow-up to the impossible-to-follow-up 1971 third LP, Maggot Brain (discussed here), often call it a lesson on the history of African American music, delivered by George Clinton and a massive swath of collaborators, from the by-now familiar likes of Eddie Hazel and Bernie Worrell, Ray Davis, Garry Shider and Calvin Simon, to five trumpeters, four violinists, four percussionists and no fewer than 18 contributing vocalists, including the aforementioned.

No question America Eats its Young is ambitious, and it may well have been Clinton‘s intent to show any white people who happened to be listening what it was all about — certainly Funkadelic‘s 1970 self-titled debut (discussed here) had its instructional aspects — but little comes through on the record to actually indicate that, and the sprawling, 69-minute runtime could hardly be said to be prioritizing direct communication with its audience in pieces like “Everybody is Going to Make it This Time” or the redux jam on “I Call My Baby Pussycat” that picks up a highlight cut from Parliament’s 1971 debut, Osmium (discussed here), slows it down and sexes it up accordingly at the start of the second LP.

In that track and others like the string-laced “If You Don’t Like the Effects, Don’t Produce the Cause,” Funkadelic are absolutely on-fire performance-wise. Recorded between Toronto and London, you get the taut persona showcase for Bootsy in “Philmore,” the classic shenanigans of “Loose Booty,” and the weirded-up ’60s-style soul of “That Was My Girl,” which indeed Clinton had recorded in 1965. But the thing with America Eats its Young is that there’s too much of it, and too much going on in it, for most listeners to properly appreciate in one sitting.

This is the story of double-albums of any era, and like records from The Beatles‘ White Album to Nine Inch Nails‘ The Fragile to opuses grand and unheralded, people get lost and music that should be appreciated isn’t, or is less so, because of the glut of material surrounding it. And like many other 2LPs and extended-edition whathaveyous, it’s actually to the benefit of everybody on a museum level that Funkadelic documented as much of this time period as they did. What I’m saying is that, especially these 54 years after the fact, the fact that America Eats its Young is too long is balanced out by the gratitude one might feel that there’s as much of it as there is. Like all times, it’s not a time that will come again.

Knowing that, however, doesn’t do much for the process of making one’s way through America Eats its Young front-to-back, and as with nearly all double-albums, there are songs that could easily have been held back either for other releases or just left on the cutting room floor, but the fact that Funkadelic pushed through with a work like this speaks to an outfit who were coming to realize the power they held in their hands, and starting to look to the future in terms of forming a point of view and, from there, extrapolating the Afro-futurist aesthetic that would come to typify P-funk once Parliament launched its Mothership and Funkadelic started to move closer in line after its initial, more rock-based era subsided.

But the horrible secret here, and I think it’s the part I’m not supposed to say, is that regardless of how the record was made or intended on the part of the artist/artists in question, you can listen to it however you want. There is a part of my brain to which this feels like utter blasphemy, I admit, but there’s no real counterargument to the assertion that, if you wanted to, you could put on the first half of America Eats its Young, listen, stop it, come back the next day and finish. You could do a couple songs at a time. You could do one. You could sit for 69 minutes and chart every single change from “You Hit the Nail on the Head” at the start to “Miss Lucifer’s Love” and “Wake Up” at the end. The choice is entirely up to you, and the options are a gamut.

That’s not to say that every record has the potential to speak to every person who hears it, or that you have to put yourself out in terms of time and place to find something to which to connect, but it seems to me an easier path than to hyperintellectualize yourself into roundabout liking a thing on some tertiary cultural level (not that I’ve never done so), not the least when Funkadelic have already done the thing you’re asserting they’re doing here. What are you even doing with your time if you look at the 69 minutes of a record like this as a mountain to climb rather than a world you’re fortunate enough to visit.

If you want to know, I broke America Eats its Young in half for this revisit, and I’ll tell you outright I vastly prefer the second half. I’m not taking away from the statement some of the earlier tracks are making — and I’d even include “We Hurt Too” in that for the might-be-even-more-relevant-now discourse on masculinity — but “Balance” hits on hard funk in a way that Funkadelic would soon enough refine to perfection and the title-track is a bizarre psych jam with a spoken word part that feels like a tie to the self-titled even as “Biological Speculation” opens up a sunny-day groove that seems to wash it all away before the sweet pop of “That Was My Girl” hits to refresh, “Balance” gives it crunch and low-end presence, “Miss Lucifer’s Love” reminds how much shred was a part of Funkadelic in this era and “Wake Up” is a fitting summary that gives over to oddball screwing around in its fade, so in other words as suitable an ending as one could ask.

That was my path on this one. Maybe you’ll find one and maybe you won’t, but there’s enough to choose your own adventure either way, and it’s my sincere hope that you find a path that, after the fact, was worth your taking. Thanks for reading.

—

We’re almost there. Almost to the end of the school year. Crawling across the finish line of first grade. And I’m talking about me, never mind the kid.

She’s had a good week, it seems. The switch last weekend to Adderall was bumpy and that had me nervous going into Monday, but she’s held her own. She doesn’t need a midday dose with this, unlike the Ritalin, but I’ve still been going to the school anyway with a banana at noon to give it to her, because at least that way I know she’s eaten something and I get to check in midday with the para and see how she’s doing. I don’t know that I’ll continue to do so in second grade. If I need to, I will, but I kind of hope not, and for more than my own operational convenience.

But I think about my nephew who is very much on the autism spectrum, far more than The Pecan would be characterized as if we had pushed for that diagnosis, and he was about her age when we started to see how it was going to be. I think maybe school and her growing up is just going to be a series of moving targets. It’s not going to be smooth. It’s not going to be easy. Despite being academically brilliant to this point, she’s going to have challenges along the way that she’s already begun to see and that, at least for now, we as parents have to help steer her through. We had a couple really good months at the start of this year, and I honestly thought we might just get through like that, at least for first grade. That didn’t happen.

Barring disaster between this Friday morning and the three half-days next week that end the school year, she’ll have made it, though, and that’s a thing to celebrate. It’s not about adjusting your expectations — yes it is to some degree — but more in framing and being able to recognize achievements when they’re there. She’s worked unbelievably hard this year, and she has to work harder than every other kid in that class of 26 just to sit still long enough to do a fucking math problem. She is a warrior in this regard, and deserves any and all honors accordingly.

This evening is a Girl Scouts moving-up ceremony, where she goes from being a Daisy to a Brownie. I’m sure it’ll be fine, but I’d probably prefer not to be around that many normal people.

Next week is Freak Valley, which snuck up on me again this year. Good lineup, will be a good time as always. I didn’t do any writing for the program this year, but I look forward to getting back and seeing friends and killer sets. My Sleeping Karma play the first night and I’m thinking of it as a life event after wanting to see them for so long.

I have some stuff slated for before I go, of course, so stay tuned next week and all that good stuff. In the meantime, I wish you a great and safe weekend. If you’re protesting, stay safe. If you’re hanging out, listen to good music. Either way, don’t forget to hydrate.

FRM.

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Osmium begins the other side of the journey through the 1970s that would eventually see Parliament and Funkadelic unite. The latter made their self-titled debut (discussed here) in Feb. 1970 (Black Sabbath debuted the same month) and followed it that same July with the even-more-experimental Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow (discussed here). Parliament‘s first full-length, with 10 songs and a 45-minute runtime, came out the same month as the second Funkadelic, July 1970. It was the third George Clinton-led LP in five months.

Such a burst of creativity and such a definitive arrival — it wouldn’t be the last, what with the Mothership and all — makes for nice storytelling, but the two groups had separate beginnings, and Parliament was there first, Clinton having put an early version of the group together in New Jersey before taking the show on the road. In the early records, the lineups are listed as Funkadelic, which is the backing band, and The Parliaments, which are the singers, Clinton, Fuzzy Haskins, Ray Davis, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, etc. Guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, both on the Funkadelic records as well, appear here, as does Bernie Worrell‘s organ, Billy Bass Nelson‘s bass and Tiki Fulwood‘s drumming.

Familiar players in an adjusted context. Parliament have some things in common with Funkadelic. They’re fun. They’re weird. They tap blues and gospel influences. And so on. But they’re not the same groups and at least at the outset, they each worked toward their own ends. If Funkadelic is funky psych-rock on those early records, Parliament is more psych-soul inspired. The Temptations put out Psychedelic Shack in 1970 as well, Norman Whitfield was out there producing albums for Motown; it wasn’t unheard of to blend trippy sounds and soul music. Osmium — which is sometimes sold under the titles of Rhenium or First Thangs — complements the work Funkadelic were doing, and tells another side of the story of how Parliament-Funkadelic became a thing.

It’s not that the willingness to screw around with sounds and songwriting that made Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow so abidingly odd (also groovy) is absent here, but pieces like “Put Love in Your Life,” “Oh Lord Why Lord/Prayer” and the closer “The Silent Boatman” are more directly in conversation with soul and gospel music, and where Funkadelic‘s self-titled posited the blues as the roots of funk, Osmium tells a different story of the experience. In some ways it’s more cohesive — certainly the opener “I Call My Baby Pussycat” has a mission in mind to hook its audience — and in others it comes across as less clearheaded about its path forward. Parliament make it a party, rest assured, in “Little Old Country Boy” and “Moonshine Heather” and the later shredder “Livin’ the Life,” to say nothing of the showcase Worrell puts on alongside the oh-hell0-there operatic vocals by producer Ruth Copeland in “Oh Lord Why Lord/Prayer” — that song feels like its dwelling with a five-minute runtime and progression kinda-derived from Pachelbel’s Canon, but is memorable either way — or the boogie jam that takes hold in “Put Love in Your Life.”

But that party comes through as more structured, more purposeful in its shifts — maybe more commercial at the time? — and songs like “My Automobile” uses its off-the-cuff working-out-the-vocal harmony to give the impression of spontaneity without losing the feeling of intent behind the structure. As noted, they jam in “Put Love in Your Life,” and if the entire album was just the playfully naughty hook from “I Call My Baby Pussycat” on endless repeat for 45 minutes, living up to the suggestion for every single “Say it again!” along the way, I wouldn’t complain, but the real ripper is “There is Nothing Before Me But Thang.” Even that keeps its R&B edge in the trades between lead vocalists, but there’s no mistaking the push of the drums or driving jangle in the guitar. Repetitions of the title line become like the repetitive chug of a steam engine, and as they back it with “Funky Woman,” it’s arguably the hardest-hitting stretch of Osmium.

The caveat there, obviously, is that not all of Osmium is trying to hit hard. The swing of “Moonshine Heather” is one thing, but “Little Old Country Boy” does indeed toy with country music — “For nothing is good unless you play with it,” as per “What is Soul” from the self-titled Funkadelic — and though it feels somewhat like satire, “Oh Lord Why Lord/Prayer” and “The Silent Boatman” are both too long at more than five minutes and too dug-in to be entirely tongue-in-cheek, however much the handclaps in the finale argue otherwise. In any case, they don’t need to be in order to be subversive, and while it would be four years before Parliament put out another album and when they did, it would have something of a different persona, the swagger that defines the group’s later work is evident here, if in a somewhat nebulous form. On this first record, Parliament are by no means lacking for confidence in their approach — they were right about all of it and they knew it — but they were a less arrogant band sound-wise than Funkadelic out of the gate. You wouldn’t call either outfit humble.

Ultimately, Parliament would find its own way forward, and though Funkadelic started off stronger, the moment would change. The rise of disco in the mid-1970s and a fascination with dance music over rock-based styles, in part driven by records like Parliament‘s Mothership Connection (1975) and The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (1976), would reshape the pop landscape, and Clinton was readier than many. He has the influence on hip-hop and the enduring legacy to show for it. Parliament‘s debut being less full-on heavy, psychedelic and rocking than Funkadelic‘s has given Osmium somewhat of a less iconographic status, but if you make it past “I Call My Baby Pussycat” without getting on board, it’s one of those situations where you probably want to call your doctor and tell them you died.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

It was a week. Yesterday was kind of a week on its own. First of all, I’ve started another Hungarian class. I now take lessons three times a week. Monday (30 min.), Wednesday (90 min.) and Thursday (30 min.). That’s a lot of magyarul tanulok but I’m doing my best.

Yesterday was also the release day for Switch 2, which my mother wanted to buy for The Pecan. Great, right? That’s a $500 investment in screen-time I don’t need to make and couldn’t really if I wanted to, so thanks Gram Pam.

The thing was, The Patient Mrs. and I also had THE meeting at The Pecan’s school yesterday to talk about next year. They want to put her in spec-ed part-time, which I don’t think we’re going to go for. A month ago they said it wasn’t the right call and the only thing that’s changed is the BCBA went on mat-leave. I don’t trust the school therapist and I don’t think she has the best interests of my kid at heart over her own operational convenience. That is, tuck my kid in a room so she doesn’t have to deal with her. I would call that less likely than how it’s probably going to go.

So the morning was 5:45 wakeup with The Pecan banging on the wall at the top of the stairs — I hate that; she does it every day; I remind myself it won’t always be what it is now — and breakfast and get ready and all that, then school dropoff, went and grabbed a cup of coffee, had the awful meeting until about 10:15, then picked up my mom and went to Costco, which reportedly had the Switch 2 in stock.

Great. We got there around 11 and immediately there was some drama about the Costco account and was my mom on my sister’s account and whatever the fuck god Costco is a nightmare with that shit. I had to go. At noon, I needed to be at the school giving The Pecan her meds for the afternoon. I needed to go home and mash up a pill in a banana. So I did. I left my mother and wife at Costco to handle the thing and went to the school to be there at noon.

The trick was that Hungarian was at 12:30. The school’s three minutes away, so that’s no problem, but Costco is about 10, so it was tighter. I left the school and hightailed it down Rt. 10 and met them at the door, they got in the car, we dropped my mom off at her house and The Patient Mrs. — who also had a 12:30 — and I both made our appointments. By 1PM, however, I was ready for the day to be over.

Fortunately, The Pecan had a new video game system to play with. Sup, Mario Kart. They should’ve called it Super Switch. Missed opportunity since that’s basically what it is. It’s the Super Nintendo of the Switch. It does the same basic thing, but with a new generation’s hardware.

The Patient Mrs. had a schoolboard meeting, so The Pecan and I were on our own. The bundle came with Mario Kart World — fun to drive around, looks great, runs well, not enough to be a flagship launch title on first blush, but Nintendo has always blundered launches somehow — and a subscription to Nintendo Switch Online, which has a bunch of older systems’ games. Much Zelda, but no Twilight Princess. The Wind Waker is on there, but having finished the second quest on my laptop, I’m not dying to jump back into the Great Sea. I’ve got A Link to the Past going on my phone in no-rush fashion — I did the first Dark World dungeon the other night, beat Helmasaur King, etc., and then apparently was too stoned to save the game, so I need to start that over — and I’m looking forward to Donkey Kong Whathaveyou coming out next month. Bananza, it’s called. Because bananas.

Anyhow, we played Mario Kart for a while and upgraded Tears of the Kingdom — the family save, not mine from the other Switch; I’ve had that game going for a year now — to the Switch 2 edition, which runs well, looks good. I’ll still keep my other game on the regular Switch (1) for now, but might transfer to the OLED if The Patient Mrs. puts her Breath of the Wild on the Switch 2, which would at least mean more battery life and the nicer screen.

But compared to yesterday, today is bound to be mellower and that’s good, though The Patient Mrs. just came in and asked if I wanted to go buy masonry glue for the steps outside and a handle for the bathroom window, so maybe my next hour and a half of sitting on ass has been redirected. So it goes. Often.

I wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head, stay cool and all that. I’m back Monday with a Goya review that should’ve gone up two days ago and much more.

FRM.

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“Freedom is free of the need to be free.” – Funkadelic

Even by the rather significant standard of funkadelia, this is a weird one. Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow was released in July 1970, which put it at four months’ remove from Funkadelic‘s self-titled debut (discussed here). Unsurprisingly, a lot of the same players show up. Guitarist Eddie Hazel steps into a more significant role vocally, handling leads on four songs to the prior album’s one, and in addition to George Clinton as the presiding visionary producer and preaching that the kingdom of heaven is within like a satanic shaman in the 10-minute pan-this-way-no-wait-now-that-way leadoff title-track, the likes of Calvin Simon, Ray Davis, Grady Thomas and Fuzzy Haskins are back on vocals, and guitarist Lucius “Tawl” Ross (who plays and also sings on “Funky Dollar Bill”), bassist Billy Nelson, drummer Tiki Fulwood and keymaster Bernie Worrell return as the backing band. Three uncredited women appear on the album: Martha Reeves, Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent, the latter two known as Dawn.

So, less than half a year after putting out one record, Funkadelic belt out a follow-up, and while the first album had its share of strange and quirky moments — it does begin the band’s career by asking you to suck its soul, just as an example — Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow departs the narrative impulse that set the band’s forward-looking psychedelic heavy funk rock as an inheritance from the blues, aligned it directly to African American culture and music, and engaged with the social issues of its day. Lore has it that the sophomore LP was ‘composed’ as much as it was and recorded completely on acid, but whether or not that’s true — surely no one still alive who was there would be able to remember — and regardless of the chemical compounds involved in its making, Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow manifests its yearning for release in the Clinton-delivered mantra throughout the title-track’s ultra-freakout, which at 10 minutes takes up a third of the total 30-minute runtime.

The extended opener, a fluid, exploratory, probably-largely-improvised jam with an avant-ripper of a solo from Hazel as a backdrop to much of it, loops, vague echoes, even some groove once the second half gets going before the keys eat it. That’s somewhat different from the inevitably more straightforward “Friday Night, August 14th,” which readily swings around the repetitions of its titular hook until the drums take boogie flight on their own, delay adding to the trippery at hand. Comparatively, the clarity and forward placement of the riff at the outset of “Funky Dollar Bill,” with its wacky keyboard line, dug-in verse and what’s-the-point-of-that-dayjob-anyway lyrical stance unfolding from there, feels like another step away from the severity of the opener’s declarations. Worrell shines, and Ross leads the chorus in a finish that underscores the notion that, however far-out they went in terms of the album’s making, somebody was still thinking of putting out singles.

They’re not done with experimentalism, mind you. It’s a defining feature of this era of Funkadelic, and within “I Wanna Know if It’s Good to You” and “Some More” and extra-gone capper “Eulogy and Light” as side B unfolds following “Funky Dollar Bill,” there’s no shortage, but until that finale, they continue to work in balance between accessibility — funk as a music for people, to enjoy, to engage with, to dance to, to be part of — and the more high-minded artistry and willful boundary pushing. “I Wanna Know if It’s Good to You,” just under six minutes with a lead vocal from Hazel that presages some of the work he’d do in 1977 on his lone solo album, Games, Dames and Guitar Thangs (briefly discussed here), albeit with a more lysergic affect. It’s some form of pop, but it refuses to compromise the sharper corners of its tones, and the malleability of the mix once again becomes a part of the character in its jam, which is allowed to organically come apart at the end before the bluesy bump of “Some More” quickly takes hold.

Here, again, Worrell makes his presence felt. An easy swing accompanies and a watery effect on Clinton‘s vocal is the element that keeps “Some More” in line with the freakery surrounding. It’s like the normal version of the thing, but not. Prescient of rap, indebted to theatrical rock as much as blues for its over-the-top chorus, and smooth into its fade thanks in no small part to the keys out in front, it gives over to the swirl at the start of “Eulogy and Light,” which I’m pretty sure samples tracks from the self-titled amid its roiling melting pot of audio, which is topped with Clinton doing a spoken preach with the uncredited backing vocalists and Hazel (the latter backmasked) complementing the anti-greed treatise, echoing into a space left initially empty of instrumentation. It is peak weird, sneakily on-theme with “Funky Dollar Bill,” and transgressive in a way that if it came out today would probably result in death-threats owing to the various unhinged stupidities of the times.

While it wins outright in terms of titles, Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow has neither the legacy of Funkadelic nor of 1971’s Maggot Brain (discussed here). Compared to the former, it’s more insular in its approach — the first record tells you what funk is, the second immediately sets about pushing back on its own definitions; seemingly for fun, which is rad — but there’s still enough here to make you move, and considering it surfaced so soon after the debut, thinking of it as a complement to that offering isn’t a bad way to go, adding as it does to what the band had done months prior and finding new ground to cover on an nearly-impossible quick at the behest of Clinton as producer and the landmark group with which he’d surrounded himself.

Concurrent to the release of Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow, in July 1970, Parliament‘s first full-length, Osmium, was issued through Invictus Records, beginning the trajectory that would gradually bring the two projects together as Parliament-Funkadelic and lay out a cross-genre influence that continues to expand across multiple generations in exponential reach. I think we might hit that one up next week as this informal, unannounced, ultra-casual Friday Full-Length mini-series continues.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

Another week. We’re coming down to the end of the school year, which is good. The Patient Mrs.’ semester is over, which is good. Freak Valley is in a couple weeks, which I’m looking forward to.

The Pecan’s had two days of school so far this week, since she was off Monday and Tuesday for Memorial Day and a give-back snow day. We had family over for Memorial Day, set up a little tent in the driveway with the tables and I grilled burgers and hot dogs. Americana. Still eating leftover cheeseburgers, which is probably more red meat than I’ve had in my system in 20 years. Shrug. Life’s pointless anyway. Let it sit in my colon forever.

We were also in Connecticut last weekend and such as the kid was actually off for five days, so we had plenty of time. Her two days in school have been good by all reports, but we still got a notice from the principal this week that the team wants to discuss “other options” for next year, which I think means we need a lawyer. I asked my sister to put some feelers out yesterday since she, you know, talks to and knows humans, and sure enough she had someone to reach out to. We’ll see how that comes together and how the whole thing plays out.

It’s pretty clear the school she’s in can’t handle her when she loses her cool — and I get it — but it would be hard to frame getting kicked out of elementary school after first grade as a win on the day it happens, whatever better-for-her situation she might end up in eventually as a result. She has 25 kids in her class this year and there looks to be no relief in that regard coming. If the town wants to pay to send my daughter to private school from now through 12th grade where the classes will be half that and she’ll get a more personalized curriculum, well, I don’t think that’ll hurt her in the long run. But it’s not necessarily how you want to set out on the path to get there.

The last few months — like more than three at this point — have been pretty hard and intense for her. I lost it the other night and was yelling, just tired of being hit and scratched and the throwing things and whatnot. Not my best moment, but we actually sat and talked for a few minutes after that and it was okay. She had been fucking with my computer basically just to spite me after I told her not to, and I did the full “how dare you who do you think you are” rigamarole. I was pissed and I made sure she knew it.

I said I felt hurt and disrespected, that I don’t take orders from her, and like she didn’t care and that she treated me like garbage. All of which are true to some extent — I am the less-preferred parent and it can be a low rung sometimes — and which prompted the response from her, “I don’t want to.” We sat for a couple minutes and talked. I told her I loved her. She said I know. I wept tears of joy. We hugged. She and I will continue to butt heads, I expect, for the rest of my life. It was nice to have a moment that felt even like a sliver of resolution. She walked across the room to hug me. I never get that. Then I went and did the ‘calming yoga’ that she had disrupted the start of before the argument began, trying to control the wheres and whens of her mother, who was joining me in the practice. The rest of the evening was pleasant in the moderate way of things.

In about an hour and a half, I’ll go to the school to give her her meds bump. We’ll pick her up at 3 at the door to avoid issues at dismissal with the other kids — that’s definitely my job and not the school’s, right? — and then bring her home. Try to get some food in her before we have to go to the high school because tonight, wonder of wonders, is the elementary school talent show. Following up on her 2024 performance doing math-themed standup, my adorable little weirdo will be doing a science experiment with a compound known colloquially as ‘elephant’s toothpaste,’ having learned about it from obsessively watching Mark Rober videos on YouTube. We’ve done more practice concoctions than I can count and can’t quite get the vertical shoot-up we wanted, but the rehearsal looked good the other day, she’ll have fun up there, and since she goes fifth out of 30-someodd acts, I’ll get to leave early after to bring my mother home. Last year I stayed for three and a half hours and it was a special kind of hell.

To completely redirect, here’s a Zelda update: I finished a first playthrough of The Wind Waker and accidentally saved over the game with the start of a second quest. The game tells you not to. I was stoned, it was dumb. Give me a break. Frustrated, I decided to actually do the second playthrough (you get to keep the lobster shirt and there are some other light differences), and I’m back to having done all the dungeons except for the last one where you go fight all the bosses again before Ganondorf. I like it. There are some tedious parts and I’ve never been able to get 25 letters in the post-office mini-game, which is sad, but for something I wrote off 20-however-many years ago as a very dignified, self-serious 20-year-old, it’s a lot of fun, even though I accidentally left the Savage Labyrinth last night with just 20 levels to go before I got the last heart-piece in the game (not that I’ve gotten them all). Dumbass.

I’ve also started a playthrough of A Link to the Past on my phone on an emulator (can connect the Switch controller to that as well), and after doing the first two dungeons, I decided to use Game Genie codes to unlock everything. I piled on a bunch of items and abilities to basically make an open world version of the game where, at the start as I am, I’d otherwise still be really limited in where I went. Kind of a nerdy boink of a way to play, but I can check in for like 10 minutes when I’m bored and roam around and do whatever. I will probably bumble into progressing the story eventually.

I played a little Tears of the Kingdom with the older son of family friends who had a question about his game this past weekend — he brought the Switch over to ask how to get up to fight the monsters poking out of Death Mountain in the Goron main quest — and I was crazy rusty, which was kind of fun in itself considering how much time I’ve spent with that game over the last year and a half. Switch 2 comes out next week. I eventually hope to get one and import my TOTK game to it.

Next week at some point I’m going to review the Dwellers record. That’s my only goal. There will be more than that, obviously, but I’ll figure out what probably tomorrow morning with my coffee.

Thanks for reading. Apparently I felt like writing, so if you’re here, I appreciate it. Have a great and safe weekend and I’ll be back Monday.

FRM.

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