George Clinton: Doctor Atomic
George Clinton, whenever he’s not on the road, likes to spend at least a portion of each day at his Tallahassee, Florida, recording studio. It’s nothing fancy, a former PC repair shop on an unremarkable commercial strip. In the rehearsal room, padded seats pulled from the backs of vans make do for benches. A framed concert photograph of Clinton, snapped during his Seventies prime, offers a striking profile — fuchsia mohawk, feather boa draped over some kind of unitard. Most arresting, perhaps, is the fact that you can actually see his face (sweaty, intense, but also smiling), which, in most other photos from the period, winds up covered by, say, a pair of oversize shades, or a blond wig. Did any other pop star of the era, with the possible exception of David Bowie, spend so much time hiding in plain sight behind his own elaborate mythology?
The present-day version of George Clinton is sitting a few feet away, watching some singers from his touring band harmonize to a prerecorded backing track. At 73, Clinton looks, unsurprisingly, nothing like the old photos on the wall. He’s stouter, with a round, impish face, a trim, gray beard, eyes tending toward half-mast. Having reached retirement age, he’s also adopted a new style: sharply tailored suits, this one a handsome plaid, accessorized with perfectly folded pocket squares and wide, low-slung neckties, his shirt collars starched and pressed into planks you could chop onions on. He looks like he could have stepped out of a Blue Note album cover from the Fifties. His brown fedora has a little feather in the brim.
Among the album covers Clinton is actually responsible for, the most memorable, Maggot Brain, depicts the howling face of a flamboyantly Afro’d woman buried to her neck in dirt. Those were the kinds of records Clinton was making in Detroit in the Seventies with his two bands, Parliament and Funkadelic, when he essentially created, alongside James Brown and Sly Stone, an entire genre, funk — only Clinton’s version remains so singular, it really stands as its own impossibly cosmic subgenre. Clinton would expand the boundaries of the music to include all of his loves: Star Trek, cartoonish voices, nine-minute guitar solos, underground comics, bawdy jump blues, late-Beatles studio tricks, irreligious snatches of gospel, Moog synthesizers played as bass lines, rap before it had a name. And lots of jokes.
No other major artist during that decade was more prolific than Clinton, who, beginning in 1970, recorded 19 studio albums (11 by Funkadelic, eight by Parliament, a number of them undisputed classics). P-Funk concerts became legend. On any given night, there might be upwards of 30 musicians onstage, black hippie freaks wearing turbans, top hats, sombreros, face paint, S&M gear, fencing masks, space-pimp platform shoes, prosthetic Pinocchio noses, dashikis, chaps, starry-lensed sunglasses and (in the case of guitarist Garry Shider) nothing but a diaper. Clinton himself emerged from a giant flying saucer. They called him Dr. Funkenstein.
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