Five years after setting forth with the swirling swamp mists of Funkadelic‘s self-titled debut (discussed here), Parliament dropped the bomb. Mothership Connection is the fourth Parliament LP, but, crucially, the first for Casablanca Records. Its Dec. 15 release puts it just shy of eight months after Funkadelic‘s Let’s Take it to the Stage (discussed here), and its taut, seven-song/38-minute course is the defining statement of parliament-funkadelicness. Not only does it announce “P-funk” as a concept, an ideology — a ‘brand’ prescient of Instagrammability, if one wants to think of it in the awful, corporatist context of our times — and not only does that concept serve as a nexus of Afrofuturism that’s still influential a literal half-century later in sound and thought, but it’s a nigh-on-unmatched collection of dance-ready hooks and the kind of record that, if you listen to it and don’t feel cooler afterward than you did going in, regardless of whether or not you’ve taken George–Clinton-as-Star–Child‘s advice and put on your sunglasses.

A landmark. One of the best albums made in any genre, at any time in the 20th or 21st centuries’ history of recorded music. Is classic, should be considered classical in the eras to come, which will only be improved by remembering it. Rest assured, any hyperbole you can throw at Mothership Connection, it can stand up. It isn’t shy about it’s commercial ambitions, as 7:41 opener and longest track (immediate points) “P.Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” ignites the party while also framed as a radio broadcast — nothing gets the attention of radio like acknowledging radio’s existence, and 50 years ago, being on the radio mattered for an up and coming group looking to make a splash with their first record for a major label.

About that. I don’t know how much being on Casablanca Records affected the band’s processes. They’d been gradually de-emphasizing guitar leading up to this, with keyboardist Bernie Worrell stepping forward alongside Bootsy Collins (bass, guitar, percussion, etc.) in the arrangements, and Mothership Connection brings a horn section inherited in part from James Brown‘s backing band, so yes, they would sound tight. Familiar vocalists from the Clinton oeuvre including Ray Davis, Grady Thomas, Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins and Calvin Simon feature, along with Glenn Goins‘ taking lead on “Unfunky UFO” and sharing with guitarist Garry Shider on “Handcuffs.” Eddie Hazel, who made such a mark on guitar across Funkadelic‘s early records, most notably 1971’s Maggot Brain (discussed here), is absent from the ultragrooving proceedings, but he’d be back through the next year with Funkadelic on their own major label debut, Hardcore Jollies.

Even without Hazel, and while speaking to a mid-’70s pop realm consumed by disco, songs like “Mothership Connection (Star Child)” — referenced in the opener in passing; always fun if you catch it — “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker),” the aforementioned leadoff “P.Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” and “Unfunky UFO” are unreal. They sound beamed in from a better tomorrow that never happened. With Clinton as ever acting as producer, Mothership Connection realizes the vision that both Parliament and Funkadelic had been driving toward up to that point. The two would still exist as separate entities after — something something they still do; time is a construct and past present and future exist simultaneously; especially while you’re lost in the Worrell-led jam “Night of the Thumpasaurus Peoples” — but the convergence of ideologies and sound in this material is a peak for ’70s funk, for hard funk, and most importantly, for Clinton and the somewhat amorphous group of players and singers around him.

That balance, between the spontaneous sense that a cosmic circus has just rolled into your earholes and the underlying vision that has manifested same in an accessible pop songwriting context, is what makes Mothership Connection connect. Across the three Parliament and seven Funkadelic records, Clinton and company took on the troubled waters of the psychedelic comedown and found a way to thrive. In the disco era, no question “P.Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” or “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)” would’ve been out on the dance floor — that was the idea, and they still are — but Parliament inherited some of the impact of their own earlier work, and where other funk or soul offerings from the period have the songs, character and presence to hold up, Parliament remain the standard to which they’re upheld. Few records were ever so able to, “Give the people what they want when they want, and they wants it all the time.”

Admittedly, the label jump, and especially Parliament becoming part of a 1970s music industry machine and working with the A&R of the day, make for a convenient narrative to explain the leap in sound and the firmness of direction so resonant throughout Mothership Connection — that sense that Parliament had ‘figured it out,’ ‘come into their own,’ and all those other clichés that get thrown around to talk about artists discovering their voice. This discounts the agency of Clinton as a producer and is rooted in colonial thinking; further, I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. As I said, it’s convenient. The truth, invariably muddier, is that however Parliament were able to realize such an unmitigated, genius-level stroke of craft, they did it as the crescendo for a creative evolution the influence of which continues to ripple outward today in rock, rap and pop, filtered through the output of subsequent generations.

Listening now, perhaps the most important message Mothership Connection sends is of empowerment. This derives from the history of African-American music — it’s why you hear a reference to “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” in “Mothership Connection (Star Child)” — and is summarized in the chorus line from “Unfunky UFO” that sweetly assures, “You’ve got all that’s really needed/To save this dying world from its funkless self.” There’s no cynicism about it, no questioning, no doubt. You can make a better tomorrow. You’re special. You have a voice and you matter. Like much of the album around it, this idea is singularly fun and beautiful.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

So. Last week, I paid a dude in Illinois $340 (it was north of $350 with shipping) to install a modchip on my V1 Nintendo Switch. I’ve been reading and watching videos about modding the system for about a year, have always had an interest in modding, emulating games, and so on, but I have no technical ability or software-programming know-how, so I am almost entirely ignorant of the processes involved in installing custom firmware on a system, let alone soddering a chip or installing mods for games, and so on, which is what I wanted to do.

If you keep up with Friday posts, you know I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom more than the last year, daily for much of that time. My goal in modding the Switch was/is to install mods for the game like the Randomizer or Depths of the Kingdom by Waikuteru, or ‘Challenge Mode,’ which introduces new enemies and takes the place of the ‘Master Mode’ that might’ve otherwise come with official DLC for the game. I just wanted to have more game to play. My daughter has been watching videos of the mods, and we play together, and it was something cool I was trying to do that I thought would be fun for me and my family and extend my enjoyment of this game.

Six hours I spent yesterday in the Tears of the Kingdom Mod Manager (TKMM) trying to get it to work on this system. I learned a bit about how to navigate the firmware, the homebrew OS that it’s using, but got absolutely nowhere trying to install mods from the included online installer. I had files on a flash drive the guy who put the chip in gave me — “gave,” rest assured they were paid for; I had sent the mods I wanted installed over; would’ve been nice — with paths to install them, so I’ve tried doing that as well, just dragging and dropping folders to the SD card following the instructions of a YouTube video that made it sound stupid easy without actually calling me stupid. No luck there either.

In fact, with dragging the files, I couldn’t even get the game to open anymore. Like it won’t load, period. Now what I need to do is go back into the directory on the SD card, pull out the folders I put there for the mod — “exefs” and “romfs,” if you’re curious — and see if the game will load at all, even unmodified. If it does, at least I know what I’m doing is making a difference. If not, I don’t really know what my next steps are because it would mean the entire game probably needs to be reinstalled on the system. And do I need to run a Switch emulator on a Switch to apply the mod to the game?

The entire experience has led to a lot of very familiar, very negative self-talk. I’ve gotten in over my head. I’m incompetent. I don’t know how to do anything even mildly useful and I’m so stupid that I keep trying anyway. The truth of me is one of talentless hackery and no resilience. I can neither figure a thing out nor remain uncrumbled in the face of even the most minor adversities. There are greater moral failings than blowing $350 when money is tight — the financial implications were discussed — on something that’s at least part- if not all-the-way-selfish, but I’m disappointing myself in addition to disappointing my kid, and it seems like a lot of cash to shell out for that.

I don’t know that I’ll get it working. I expect probably not. And maybe in a few years, I’ll figure out some way to do it on a computer like I modded The Wind Waker a couple months ago and had a lot of fun with that. In the meantime, as I load up the SD card again to pull out those folders and see if the game functions at all, I feel sad and stupid. Again, familiar.

At least the weather’s nice, or something.

Great and safe weekend. Next week is packed. Probably too much, so if it’s light on news or if I’m three days behind that’s why. Oddly enough it’s harder to keep up with writing when you don’t have a six-hour school-day giving respite.

[UPDATE: c.2PM: Got one mod working. Limping into a win is still a win.]

FRM.

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“We didn’t get our 40 acres and a mule, but we did get you, CC,” says George Clinton in the mostly-spoken verse of the leadoff title-track of the third Parliament album, Chocolate City. The reference there, to General William Sherman’s order during the Civil War to give families of freed slaves 40 acres and a mule to farm on, is made lightheartedly, but weighs heavy as unfulfilled. Clinton in the same ode to Washington D.C., in the same super-casual-cool delivery, runs down a list of ‘chocolate’ — meaning majority African-American — cities around the US. He shouts out Newark, New Jersey, which eight years prior had seen race riots after the beating of a Black taxi driver by white police (now that shit just goes on TikTok), as well as Gary, Indiana, and says “we’re working on Atlanta.”

The framing of “we” in “Chocolate City” is interesting specifically in light of the progression of the Parliament and Funkadelic catalogs because it is a shift in the frame. Obviously, the “we” in “Chocolate City” means Black folks in the United States; even more specifically, the descendants of enslaved people. The times were changing.

Released April 8, 1975, Chocolate City was the group’s second LP for Casablanca Records behind the year prior’s Up for the Down Stroke (discussed here), and it pushed into new territory in sound. By ’75, the psychedelic age and its comedown were both over. Vietnam was over. Ford had pardoned Nixon. Cocaine was sprinkled on cookies in bakery windows. Disco was emerging accordingly. African-American visibility in popular culture had changed. It was a new, different era.

Parliament would still feature the guitar work of Eddie Hazel, Lucius “Tawl” Ross and Garry Shider across the nine inclusions, and a lot of the players and singers throughout are familiar from past appearances — singers Clinton, Hazel (who takes lead vocal on “Let Me Be”), Ray Davis, Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Gary “Mudbone” Cooper, Mallia Franklin and Debbie Wright — but in addition to Ramon “Tiki” Fulwood, Tyrone Lampkin and someone credited as Man in the Box handle drums, and Bootsy Collins (who also plays guitar and drums) is one of three bassists. Still just Bernie Worrell on keys/synth though, which is really all you need.

Soul music had changed too. Parliament had its roots in Clinton‘s ’60s-era vocal outfit The Parliaments, which featured Clinton, Davis, Haskins, Simon and Thomas, from which Funkadelic also emerged, and Chocolate City harnesses some of that spirit as did Up for the Down Stroke. Where their debut, 1970’s Osmium (review here), seemed to envision funk as an organic outgrowth of hippie blues, a kind of new folk-for-folks, Chocolate City‘s ambitions are more direct. It’s speaking to its audience. The arrangements are more grounded, and the hooks of highlights “Ride On,” “Together” and the horn-infused “Side Effects” speak to more commercial aspirations. An established act, they’re writing songs to meet expectations other than their own, not for the first time, but on an adjusted balance.

Even unto Worrell‘s layers of piano banging away and keyboard on “Let Me Be,” Chocolate City reins in the jams and some of the (party-) chaos that what had not yet become P-Funk had already wrought over the half-decade prior. And as funk became its own thing, thanks to Parliament and the generational vanguard of which they were part, they needed correspondingly less to lean on rock influences. There are no 10-minute guitar solos on Chocolate City. The penultimate “I Misjudged You” calls out to classic forlorn soul, and on either side of it, one finds the two-minute “If it Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It),” the album version of which feels like it almost wants to be an extended dig-in and might’ve been a year or two earlier, and closer “Big Footin’,” which offers one more dance groove and a bit of they’re-so-crazy vocal arrangement for a good time.

Is Chocolate City the moment when Parliament went pro? It can feel that way, but Up for the Down Stroke set in motion a lot of what is manifest in “What Comes Funky” or “Ride On,” and if you’re looking for ‘moments,’ Chocolate City is outright overshadowed by the band’s fourth album, which they’d release in Dec. 1975 and remains a landmark in American musical culture, period, but no question it’s a step on the way there. And though five years seems quick for it to have happened, this is the ninth full-length steered by Clinton during that time, and so it doesn’t feel ridiculous to think of the project as mature at this point, though clearly they were still growing as well, and Parliament and Funkadelic were still years off from being thought of as the single-entity Parliament-Funkadelic, let alone touring as such. There was more change to come.

Despite the nakedly political framing at the outset — Washington D.C. being the country’s capitol and a center of the US’ slave trade, it’s hard to talk about it without bringing politics in, and the cover art bears that out as well — Chocolate City is more about the love of the place than social commentary, but that’s there too as cited above and elsewhere. The priority is dance, the vibe has shifted, is shifting in the songs, and there’s progression toward an ideal that moved away from Funkadelic‘s guitar-as-feature ethic and toward synthesizer, keyboard and more futuristic sounds, balanced with the melodies throughout. Like everything they’ve done up to this point either as Parliament or Funkadelic, it feels transitory both in the sense of movement and its own evolution in style and craft.

Some 50 years after its release, Chocolate City comes across as optimistic and its songs are engaging, each on their own level as a composition, as well as taken all at once. It might not be the moment they ‘went pro,’ but that definitely had happened by this point, and though management conflicts, disbanding, more chaos, more drugs and a full reset were ahead of them, Parliament-Funkadelic was finding the shape of funk to come, and this is a celebration of that prospect.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

The Patient Mrs. is away, in Minnesota, for a wedding. She left Wednesday and I think comes back tomorrow night, but she was saying something about catching an earlier flight if she could, so I don’t know. I expect by the time I leave to pick her up at the airport I’ll be duly informed.

So it’s been me and The Pecan, which I honestly don’t think either of us was looking forward to, but it’s been fine. We’d had a bumpy start to the week — she’s in a super-rigid, control-everything mode, because her brain is fight-or-flight all the time and she’s trying to make it make sense — with some arguing, and I think it was Tuesday a fallout over Donkey Kong Bananza put us in a sour place, but after the airport dropoff she was alright and the last couple days have been easier for the two of us.

She and I regularly bump heads on small stuff — I had to tell her yesterday she wouldn’t get to go to her Lego Robotics class if she didn’t eat lunch, because refusing food is a thing she thinks she can control; she comes by that with tragic honesty considering one’s own history of eating disorders; so many red flags — but she did eat her slice of pizza eventually, so it worked out. We’ve been doing a shaped wooden jigsaw puzzle, which is hard so she can’t blow through it like she did the last 1,000-piecer we did, and I bought her (another) robot and a neat Hot Wheels launcher to put together for her Summer of Builds, and I’m pretty sure she’s had ice cream and I’m definitely sure she’s stayed up late two days in a row. I expect if you asked her, she would say it was torture and she wanted Mommy home “right now!,” in that specific commanding tone of hers, but actually it’s been fine. My hope is that today she’ll get a bath, which means we’ll bicker about it later this morning and she’ll probably get in the tub tomorrow.

You should just know that I do not love anything without also considering it a pain in the ass. That goes for music too.

I woke up at 3:15 this morning. Call it less than preferred. I tried for an hour and 20 minutes to go back to sleep, tossing, turning, gradually working up to cursing any and all gods, fates and circumstances, at which point I realized there was no getting away from consciousness. I got up and started working, which at least will let me focus on hanging out when she wakes up (it’s after six now, so that’ll be soon), and if I’m feeling it by tonight, well, big change. I’ve fallen asleep two nights in a row during bedtime and woken up in the middle of the night to go downstairs to bed. That’s a pattern I don’t like, as she comes downstairs in the middle of the night when The Patient Mrs. is home and gets ‘taken back to bed’ and at this point can’t fall asleep without someone there, which I feel like is undoing years of very purposeful sleep training. Which sucks. Like a lot of parenting. Not that there aren’t upsides too. That’s real life. Take the bad with the good, and so on.

I’m not going to go on a rant here about fascism, because honestly I don’t have the energy for it, but it is fucking shameful living in this country right now. I’m not out protesting, and if we’re honest, I don’t really believe in protesting a dictatorship, because if a dictator cared about the protest, they wouldn’t be a dictator — not to mention thoughts of protecting my family — but things are awful and not getting better here. People are dying and more will die. The only place this goes is to genocide, and the US already has one ongoing in Palestine as it tries to bring some of that flavor home. I am disgusted to have been born here, and to think of this place as my home makes me sadder than it ever has. Slavery will forever be America’s greatest shame, not to mention that other genocide of the indigenous population at the hands of ‘manifest destiny,’ but we’re adding another one to the list right now, and the country I was born in will not be the same country I die in, even if the name is consistent. And I was born under Reagan. Hardly utopian.

Okay. So much for no rant. Time to punch out.

Thanks again for reading, and I hope you have a great weekend. Stay safe out there. Hydrate. Enjoy your time. I’ll be back Monday. Fuck the ICE gestapo and all fascists who support them.

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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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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When in Rome, you do as the Romans. When in Cali, you get your ass to Amoeba Music. An Amoeba haul is a special thing. It had been five years — half a decade! — since the last time I set foot in Amoeba‘s San Francisco store, right on Haight Street, more or less the birthplace of American counterculture, or at very least where it moved to from the Midwest because it was okay to be weird there. It is a shop we must remember we are fortunate to still have in existence. Places like Sound Garden in Baltimore, Vintage Vinyl in my beloved Garden State, and the three Amoebas in San Fran, Berkeley and L.A. are treasures. Landmarks. Their preservation may not be government-sanctioned, but they’re no less essential as living monuments of our age.

I’d gotten in after two in the morning. My flight from Boston to SFO was delayed… by five and a half hours. Something about a flat tire on the plane that then wound up requiring an entirely different aircraft altogether. Oh, we sat, and sat. Supposed to be a 5PM flight, took off just after 10:30. What a shitter, but at least it took off at all. I slept about 20 minutes on the plane — remember, with the time zone shift, a 2AM West Coast arrival is still 5AM to my very red East Coast eyes — and then crashed at the hotel, woke up this morning and spent the bulk of they day shaking hands at the convention that brought me out here, trading business cards and the like. All the while, lurking at the back of my mind was Amoeba Music, its call resonating like a dogwhistle nobody else around me could hear. I could’ve cried when I got out of the cab and it was there, just like I remembered.

Seems likely there was more vinyl around than five years ago, though I wouldn’t commit to that 100 percent, not really remembering one way or the other, but in any case, I still found plenty in the CD racks; the notion of traveling with LPs, the general expenditure and desire to actually listen to the music keeping me to the more compressed format, and no regrets. Here’s what I grabbed, alphabetically:

Acid King, Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere
Black Rainbows, Carmina Diabolo
Electric Wizard, Time to Die
Horsehunter, Caged in Flesh
Monolord, Vaenir
Parliament, Motor Booty Affair
Stoneburner, Caged in Flesh
SubRosa, More Constant than the Gods
Swans, To be Kind
Tekhton, Alluvial
Wino & Conny Ochs, Latitudes
Wovenhand, Refractory Obdurate

Of those, it turns out the Black Rainbows was a double. I suspected as much, but I spotted it at the front of the clearance section and it was a dollar, so I figured even if I had it, another wouldn’t hurt. Getting stuff like the Acid King and Monolord was nigh on mandatory, the former because it’s San Francisco and that album is incredible and the latter because it’s a RidingEasy Records release and while I’m pretty sure that label is headquartered south of here, you don’t find that stuff every day on the Eastern Seaboard.

Conversely, I was looking for a bunch of stuff from Tee Pee — Mirror Queen, The Atomic Bitchwax, Death Alley — that was seemingly nowhere to be found, and I wondered if geographic distance between myself and the NY-based label didn’t have something to do with it. The rule is you take what you can get, and I was happy to do that. The Horsehunter was also absurdly cheap, I’m not really sure why. Between that and the Black Rainbows, it was much easier to justify paying upwards of $14 for new discs and $20 for the Labour of Love Latitudes session from Wino & Conny Ochs. I was on the phone griping to The Patient Mrs. as I walked around the store that somehow even though compact discs are “out of fashion” prices haven’t come down on them and she reminded me to think of it as a premium for being in a place so awesome. She was, of course, 100 percent right. Issue resolved.

Parliament‘s Motor Booty Affair to feed my continued funk addiction, and Stoneburner mostly because it was there, it’s Neurot and I don’t already have it. The Swans is the three-disc special edition of last year’s To be Kind (review here) that also comes with a live DVD as a bonus. Can’t imagine I’ll ever watch the thing, but it’s nice to have. Speaking of stuff I won’t actually put on, I know for a fact I haven’t listened to the Electric Wizard since I reviewed it (the promo was digital), but I heard something about them having a spat with Spinefarm over money or some such and that the album was subsequently out of print, so I figured better now than five years from now on eBay or Amazon. It will likely stay wrapped, but at least it’ll be in the library.

It’s been six years and I still recall enjoying Tekhton‘s first album, Summon the Core (review here), so to find a copy of the 2009 follow-up to that 2007 debut was cool enough to drive me toward the purchase, and Wovenhand are Wovenhand, which is all the justification that one needs. Speaking of bands who played Roadburn this year, as Wovenhand did, I nabbed 2013’s More Constant than the Gods by SubRosa mostly because I missed them at that festival and they’ve continued to haunt me ever since. I’m not sure if playing the record or having paid for it — like a church bribe — will exorcise that demon, but it seemed worth a shot. I’m sure I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tomorrow is more work stuff, starting bright and early and ending less-bright and late. I may or may not make it to Aquarius Records, as had been my hope, but if this turns out to be all the shopping I get to do on this trip, I can’t really complain. And of course, if you’re in SF, get your ass to Amoeba Music.

SubRosa, More Constant than the Gods (2013)

Amoeba Music

Amoeba San Francisco on Thee Facebooks

It’s an album not of your world, but fear it not. I guess sometimes you just get into a groove on something, but I must’ve listened to the Funkadelic self-titled debut like six different times over the course of this week. Oh, my office was jammin’. Maybe not. Still fun though, and as much as anything’s ever been a classic, this is. Rocking this and the new Clutch record (review here) back-to-back, you really get to hear the Dan Maines blueprint in some of these songs. I also had Humble Pie‘s Smokin’ on in the car before. There’s some of that in there too.

Anyway, I couldn’t think of a better way to end a long, spaced-out week than this 1970 wonder, also long, also spaced-out. It’s a ham hock in your corn flakes. What part of the evening I didn’t spend wolfing down a calzone, I’ve spent watching Star Trek and feeling worn out. Two shows I missed tonight. Usually, I’ll miss one. Tonight, two. Mighty High played with White Dynomite, and Samothrace played with Bezoar and Pilgrim, both shows in a Brooklyn too far. A long, discouraging day at work that began with a $1,700 mechanic bill, and I’m broke, beat and ready to give it another go tomorrow. That Samothrace tour rolls into Philly for Saturday night. Think I might do the same if I can. Gotta put that new front suspension to work on something, might as well be I-95.

Yo.

Thanks to everyone who checked in this week. I haven’t looked at the February numbers yet, but it seemed like things got a pretty good response in terms of people spreading around links if not necessarily comments on everything. So it goes. I guess I’m too wordy most of the time, by the time someone finishes (if they finish), they probably feel like too much has been said already. I can dig it. Sometimes I don’t have much to say either.

If I do wind up at that Samothrace show in Philly, look out for a review of that. Eggnogg‘s also got a gig somewhereabouts next Wednesday that I might try to hit up because I like those guys. Live reviews are a shit-ton of work — though I just bought a fancypants new lens for my camera last week and that adds to the fun — and when something lands as flat as did that Enslaved/Pallbearer review did, can be kind of a bummer. That one would’ve made a thud had anyone been paying enough attention to hear it. So it goes. They can’t all be gold, or Acid King, which the band was kind enough to share on Thee Facebooks. Acid King has been stuck in my head all week too. Not a complaint.

This week, I’ll also be reviewing The Ultra Electric Mega Galactic‘s new record and posting that Endless Boogie interview I alluded to last week or whenever that was. If you’re not familiar, that review is here and that record is awesome. I kinda got annoyed at the hierarchy of industry cool involved in chasing down track streams with labels and PR, so I’ve all but cut that out, but maybe I’ll try and get something going anyway, just for kicks. Not that we’re exactly lacking music around here anyway. Media blitz and shit.

Wherever you are and whatever you end up doing over the next couple days, I hope you have a great and safe weekend. See you on the forum if that’s your thing, which I hope it is. The Patient Mrs. and I are waiting to hear back on an offer we put in on a house in Massachusetts, so maybe one of these days I’ll have some good news to post that doesn’t involve somebody’s next record or European tour. If you’ll pardon me now though, I’m gonna uncross my fingers before I go to sleep. Okay.

There’s always something special about a basement record store, so I was only too glad to descend the flight of stairs leading to Boston’s Armageddon Shop during my recent trip there to see Black Pyramid, Gozu and Infernal Overdrive at Radio in Somerville. I’d been to the Providence location before, and found it much to my liking, so the Boston one seemed an obvious choice to pass some time before the show.

From what I understand, it’s relatively new, and it looks it. The walls, but for a large cork bulletin board overflowing with flyers, were painted bright white — very neo-black metal — and the floor was clean and unscuffed, kind of emphasizing a minimalist look. It wasn’t cramped, as a lot of record stores are, and the entire right side of the store and most of the left as well was devoted to well-spaced bins of vinyl. A shelf directly across from the entrance had some tapes on it, so I went there first.

It doesn’t appear in the picture above, but that’s only because I’ve been so unwilling to remove it from my car since I made the purchase. For $3.99, I got a cassette of C.O.C.‘s Wiseblood, and of all the money I spent that night, that was hands-down some of the best. CDs took up a whole section of the back wall (there were some dollar boxes as well that I glanced through) with the discs positioned sideways so you had to crane your head even as you bent down to look at the bottom rows.

Turned out to be worth the effort. I bought The Body‘s Anthology, because hey, it’s New England, and Paracletus, by Deathspell Omega, because I figured I’d want it eventually and I might as well spend the money there rather than give it to Amazon or whoever. There was a cheapy copy of last year’s Aphotic by Novembers Doom, and I’ll probably never listen to it, but I got that anyway, just to have it, and a used version of The Late Great Planet Earth by Mos Generator that I figured (rightly) would do my rockin’ soul some good.

The finds of the trip, though, were an original CD issue of Parliament‘s Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome — which fucking rules — and the first Witch Mountain record, Come the Mountain. I’m sure I could find all kinds of reissues of Funkentelechy if I wanted to, but it was cool to hear a first-run pressing (cooler still because it too was $3.99) and Cordell Mosson‘s bass and Bernie Worrell‘s keys make the whole thing. And the Witch Mountain I just figured I’d missed the boat on and would never find, what with it being released over a decade ago, the label Rage of Achilles being defunct and the band being on the other side of the country.

I guess you never know what you’ll find, which is probably the reason I keep going to these places even as they seemingly all start to phase out CDs in favor of vinyl. General compulsion you could consider as a secondary factor, but either way, I was glad I had the chance to hit up this Armageddon Shop, because like the other one in Providence, it was a cause definitely worth supporting. Check out their website here.