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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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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“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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If you think of the ‘album era’ as something that began in the 1950s with the adoption of the 33 rpm 12″ LP as the standard format, and let’s just say right up to whatever it is that came out today, I don’t think you can get around Funkadelic‘s Funkadelic (previously discussed here) as one of the best albums ever made. In early 1970, it was late to the party on psychedelia, but it didn’t matter what time they showed up, the truth is psychedelia learned how to party in no small part from this band at this time.

I could run down the list of players on here, from George Clinton belting out “What is Soul” and “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” — the opening line of the record, “If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions,” still as weird and someone off-putting as ever — to Eddie Hazel running a thread of guitar brilliance through “Good Old Music” that already by then isn’t the first jam he’s driven, Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins doing a futuristic version of classic soul on “I Bet You,” lighthearted like a Motown single from 1959, but shimmering in sound in a way that pushed acid rock and soul music both to new places. Creating a sound that’s largely inimitable and a legacy and influence that continues to resonate across a multi-generational listenership, Funkadelic‘s self-titled debut is in a class of its own and represented a next step forward from the psych rock of the later 1960s.

And the future was part of the character of the group at the time as well. Using ‘we’re weirdo aliens’ as a vehicle for discussions of racism and the hope for a better world — “Man, I was in a place one time called Keep Running, Mississippi,” Haskins croons on “Good Old Music” — Funkadelic never feel heavy-handed so much as, in the way a first album might be naive, hippies on their way to being Afrofuturists, experimental in the studio as they’d continue to be for years but largely tied to the rock and soul arrangements of the time — guitar, bass, Hammond on the bluesy “Qualify and Satisfy” with Calvin Simon‘s ultra-swaggering lead vocal, and so on — with vocal flourish inherited from the soul group The Parliaments started as.

It’s a winning combination the same way you think of oceans as wet. That jam in “Good Old Music” building on the work the handclaps do in anchoring the sway of “I Got a Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody Got a Thing,” or “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”‘s immediate attempt to both immerse and confuse, not just with that opening line noted above, but with the sweet tone of the guitar and bass, a landmark vocal hook, and lyrics about being from another planet and being surprised at how uptight hoo-mans are. It is not every song, not every LP, that can get away with a line like, “Let me shove a yard of tongue down your throat” and still come out on the other end making any sense whatsoever, but as a whole work collecting individual pieces, Funkadelic puts the listener where it wants them to be for each of its seven original component tracks — various reissues have various bonus cuts — and makes staying there worthwhile.

“Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” and “What is Soul?,” both questions worth asking, bookend the proceedings in a way that feels purposeful and the lyrics to the latter reinforce, and in combination with “Music for My Mother” and its positioning of funk as something “ancient,” the opener and closer bring the audience into the world of Funkadelic‘s making. They tell you how to listen to it, how to frame it, but are never overbearing in that. A notion as complicated as the soul becomes “a hamhock in your cornflakes” or “rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps,” and funk and soul both become tied to the history of American Black music, rooted in folk-blues traditions and also from a different planet and here for both your ass and party drugs. All of them? Yes, all of them. And your whole ass? You betcha.

The opener being the longest song on the album (immediate points), “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” runs nine minutes and meanders and jams and lets itself get lost a bit. “I’ll Bet You” takes that hypnotic aspect and pushes it forward, but is shorter, where “Good Old Music,” in embodying funk and introducing it to listeners, makes movement an essential part of its own extended jam. After the back-door-man slick lyric of “Qualify and Satisfy” — “Just tell the square to get his hat,” etc. — having “What is Soul?” to reinforce Funkadelic as something outside, something other, something “not of your world” as the album ends demonstrates how much individualism was the goal. The band basically spends 45 minutes of the album beating you over the head with the idea that you’ve never heard anything like this before but it’s always existed. The record better be good if you’re going to pull off that kind of thing.

It’s difficult to divorce Funkadelic from the progression it would set in motion. Coupled with Parliament‘s first album, Osmium, released in July 1970, it portrays a blossoming, singular creative voice that would continue to evolve for decades, even as it gives space to a number of actual voices and bases part of its freshness around the shifts between them. But the focus is always the future, always progress, always moving forward, and it’s hopeful in a way that, especially at this moment in history, comes across as daring.

The bottom line here is Funkadelic‘s Funkadelic exists in a space that makes it a perfect take-on for heavy rock heads. It’s trippy, it’s psychedelic, it’s got enough groove for six lifetimes, and it’s from 1970. What more could you ask? Even before you get to funk’s impact on the development of hip-hop and rap, Funkadelic is one of the best rock records ever produced. Beatles, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, whoever you want to put next to it, it stands up and it stands on its own.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading

—

Another week down. By Monday afternoon I was daydreaming of Thursday. The Pecan’s behavioral struggles continue at school. I’ve been running over there at noon and giving her a meds bump to get through the afternoon, and that was working for a couple days last week but I’m not sure as to the long-term efficacy in letting her stay balanced through the end of her day. When I got there yesterday, she came into the office where I was and started throwing herself into a door, pacing back and forth, and I just decided to sign her out and take her home. The school’s been really good to us and I mostly like the team — the behaviorist, school therapist, etc., though there have been a few changes over the last year that have me less stoked than I was this time in 2024 — but I’m starting to wonder if they can handle her or if she’s too much for them and we need to figure something else out.

Because right now, mostly it’s just miserable. Every day, I dread going to drop-off, dread doing that meds bump, and dread pickup. What’s the story going to be today, about how she didn’t get to win some game and ran across the room to punch somebody? Kicked her para in the shins after not earning the right to watch Mark Rober videos in the afternoon? It’s been something else every day for the last three months and it’s no way to live. I’m glad school is done in a couple weeks, and will spend a decent portion of the summer hoping that second grade can be a reset. What sucks is that going into first grade what I most hoped for was to continue the momentum from the end of kindergarten, when she was doing so well.

This is big in my mind. I’m distracted a lot of the day. Burnt out. I don’t know what to do and all the school seems to have in its arsenal is another behavioral chart that’s going to get nowhere because all of them get nowhere. Oh but this one has buy-in! Screw you for how many times I’ve sat in that meeting.

I’m double-booked next Thursday. Full album streams for Grin and Hexecutioner. That’s what I get for getting stoned and answering email. I’m going to review Witchcraft at some point in the week and Dwellers too if I can. I don’t know. It’ll be a week. I’ll fret about getting shit done but shit will get done. I’ll feel anxious about when am I gonna do Hungarian, but it’ll get done. It doesn’t matter.

Long weekend. Today, Monday and Tuesday, no school. We’re in Connecticut for at least today, at The Patient Mrs.’ mom’s place. We’re hosting Monday, grilling burgers, low key. Not really into the Memorial Day thing, what with the jingoism and such, but I’ll take a couple hours with family not doing other stuff.

I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to hydrate. I hear summer’s coming.

FRM.

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“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time,
For y’all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggot in the mind of the universe.
I was not offended, for I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit.” – “Maggot Brain”

No, I don’t honestly think I’m going to present any new or remarkable insight on one of the most opined-about guitar solos of all time — that being Eddie Hazel‘s melancholic soul-tear on the title-track — but honestly, it was the hook of the subsequent “Can You Get to That” that brought the album to mind, one of those things where you hear, say, think of a phrase and it associates to the song in your head. I’ve come to understand in recent years that’s an ADHD thing. For me it’s always been a lifestyle (therefore determining ‘my deathstyle’; see how this works?).

The emotional labor involved in its title-track notwithstanding — and I’m not taking anything away from it; it’s one of the best performances of rock guitar ever captured on tape and I’d sooner listen to it one thousand times than hear anything by the likes of Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page or whichever ’60s/’70s guitar hero you want to name who isn’t Tony Iommi — the bulk of Maggot Brain is much breezier, starting with “Can You Get to That” and moving into “Hit it and Quit It” and “You and Your Folks and Me and My Folks” before “Super Stupid” and “Back in Our Minds” ignite the party-rock vibe and “Wars of Armageddon,” though dark in its voice and mood, builds on the title-cut from Funkadelic’s second album, 1970’s Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow, and helps lay the foundation for Funkadelic excursions into longform instrumental dance music that would become part of the bedrock beats beneath hip-hop. That’s an influence inarguably still felt today, and something the George Clinton-led troupe would refine as they moved closer over the course of the 1970s to uniting the two projects Funkadelic and Parliament into the p-funk they’d become, out of the psychedelic comedown, through the disco years and into the arrival of keyboard-driven dance music, less emphasis on guitar and more on movement.

Of course, “Maggot Brain” remains the album’s defining moment as well as its longest track, and it’s right there at the front (immediate points), disorienting the listener with its slow tempo but this-needs-to-be-first creative urgency and human expression. Opening a funk record with a drifting improv navelgaze epic instrumental is counterintuitive — which is not to say brave — but this was Funkadelic‘s third album and they were no strangers by then to shirking expectations or genre boundaries. Preceded in 1970 by their self-titled debut (discussed here) and the aforementioned Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow, Maggot Brain follows the folk-funk-blues patterns of the first Parliament LP or some of the more easy-swinging material on Funkadelic, lysergic as that record was on balance. You can’t really argue that Maggot Brain is straightforward with the title-track up front pushing the limits of where pop can go and what it can do, but once you’re past that, the acoustic twang on “Can You Get to That” feels like a willful redirect, ditto the vocal arrangement, and it’s casual vibes and/or sing-alongs from there on until “Wars of Armageddon.”

Some of the psychedelia is still there, in “Maggot Brain” and the instrumental “Super Stupid,” but the latter is so much more about the swagger and shred in Eddie Hazel‘s guitar, the ringout of the organ and the gauntlet being thrown down by that solo, and after the gloriously riffy “Hit it and Quit It” and the centerpiece shuffle of “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” which brings in a little Stevie Wonder-type piano and dares toward advocating for social justice, which perhaps feels more like a risk now than it might have in 1971. “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks” ties in with “Can You Get to That,” and “Super Stupid” gives space between the middle cut and the sillier “Back in Our Minds” again, a bouncy jam with the title-line repeated, “We are back in our minds again” before they move into a verse. It’s under three minutes long and kind of goofy with what I think is a triangle, but well within this era of Funkadelic‘s weirdo wheelhouse, and after the freakout in “Super Stupid,” it’s another effective reorientation of the listener before “Wars of Armageddon” starts its strange litany of noises, samples, spoken parts, shouts and such over a dancey backbeat and instrumental jam.

And one could go on at length about the development of dance music from out of something like “Wars of Armageddon” being performed in a Washington D.C. club in the early 1970s to somehow it being reasonable to watch a person stand in front of a laptop and a couple turntables and mix live, but frankly that’s fodder for an entirely different discussion. Funkadelic‘s early period, from 1970-1975, is largely untouchable. In that span of five years and amid touring and lineup changes, legendary partying, etc., Funkadelic put out seven records and Parliament put out four, the last of which is the ultra-seminal Mothership Connection, so as runs go, there are few in pop or rock music that can compare, and that’s before you get into bringing the two sides together as Parliament-Funkadelic and affecting music such that here we are five decades later and the party is still going. Parliament-Funkadelic is on tour this month, going coast-to-coast before hitting Australia in September. Train doesn’t stop.

So maybe Maggot Brain is willfully uneven. In its title-track, it stands on the strength of Hazel‘s performance — which, again, is plenty — and for the rest takes on a brighter persona. The fact of the matter is Funkadelic were a good enough band at this point in time not only to make that leap from the opener to the rest of the LP, but to carry it off like it’s no big deal, with a super-easy, we-do-this-all-the-time-usually-on-Tuesdays groove. To acknowledge it as one of the best LPs ever made feels like calling the sky blue.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

Did you catch the Funkadelic reference in that Quasars of Destiny review that went up this morning? I said something in that post about “if you can get to…” whatever it was and my head immediately went to Maggot Brain. I wasn’t actually going to close the week with anything. I started writing that Quasars review yesterday and didn’t get to finish before I ran out of time in the day so I figured I’d wrap it this (Friday) morning and then just not close out the week, maybe put up a little post in case anyone came looking. Once I checked and saw I hadn’t already closed a week with Maggot Brain, it was a no-brainer.

There’s a lesson in there for me about rigidity though. I generally work a day ahead precisely so that when something like a day where I don’t have as much time comes up, I can still have some flexibility. I just so rarely use that flexibility that it took me a bit to recognize it for what it was this morning. Don’t get so stuck in a way of doing a thing that you miss out on something cool. In my case, that’s spending a morning listening to Funkadelic, which I can assure you has only had a positive impact on my mood broadly, even more so now that I’ve finished writing about it.

Limited time was kind of the theme this week, if you couldn’t tell by a few lighter-on-posts days. Three posts a day isn’t nothing. Four is kind of my standard these days — today was five — but I’m not willing to either half-ass some filler news post so there can be ‘content’ to feel some imaginary need for it or break my brain to the point where I don’t want to be on the laptop anymore. I’m working with what I’ve got in terms of faculties, and with The Pecan having trouble in school these past weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of early pickups and juggling various therapy appointments — she got kicked out on Monday for hitting a para who touched her and had to be evaluated before they’d let her back in the building, today is the psychiatrist virtual appointment that I’ll have to drag her off the playground after school to go to, I’ve been going in at noon to give her a bumper dose of ritalin to get through the afternoon (which helped the other day, it seemed), and so on — and it’s generally been hands-on-deck really since before I left for Roadburn. Which let me appreciate all the more being able to go.

Speaking of travel, this coming week is Desertfest Oslo, and I’m going to that. So Friday and Saturday look out for coverage. Before that, I’ve got streams and such lined up. Tuesday is a full premiere for the new Madmess record, Wednesday is a Northern Heretic track premiere (they’re playing with Paradise Lost and Trouble in NYC, you know) and Thursday is a fully for Cavern Deep.

I wouldn’t mind reviewing Clamfight, Witchcraft or Turtle Skull before I go, but it’s probably pick-one-and-make-it-happen with the rest of the schedule booked and, again, limited time. I’ll do my best, even if my best kind of sucks.

Zelda update: I still like The Wind Waker. I have the un-upgraded Master Sword and will enter the Earth Temple next time I play. In the meantime though, The Patient Mrs. both rented Super Smash Bros. Ultimate from the library — I destroyed The Pecan yesterday; we were told to stop letting her win games so she can get used to it with peers — and bought me a copy of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, which I’ve been sweating since I played the original game on NES as a kid. It will come with me to Norway, for sure, as will The Wind Waker, since it’s on my laptop with the mods and such.

Oh, and I’ve been trying to build the habit since I got back from Roadburn of doing yoga every day. If you have a killer video you know of, drop the link. The more sympathetic, the better. Yoga for sore back, sore knees, etc., or “Hey I’m really sorry to hear about your ongoing existential crisis. Let’s do some cat-cows.” I like the comforting aspect before I get my ass kicked by stretching.

Thanks for reading and have a great and safe weekend. I’m gonna go change over the laundry, empty the dishwasher, and maybe peel an orange before I need to run to the school. The weather’s good, so have fun.

FRM. There’s no merch up right now, but if Brooklyn Dave’s got something up, support his ass anyway just to support it.

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