BOOTSY: Ththumping To P-Funk’s Bumping

United Sound is one of Detroit's most famous studios, the place where many early Motown sessions were cut, where just about every one of the major Motor City acts recorded one time or another; but to the unwary, it's just another large house in a row of frat houses by the edge of Wayne State University. Now, there may be some scary shit going on in some of the science labs at Wayne State, recombinant DNA research or shellfish toxin research or even motivational programming research for all I know, but I know for certain that there is a monster in United Sound. Oh, not all the time, but most of the time that George Clinton, maggot overlord of Funkadelia, is down in his special P-Funk Lab at United Sound, there's a monster.

Naturally, visitors have to be protected—even P-Funk insurance has its restrictive clauses—so while I was in the room, I could see nothing of the monster, who was ensconced behind thick one-way glass in a padded booth over a hundred feet across the studio. We were further protected by similar insulation shielding us from the studio room, but even so, we could hear the monster: THUMP THUMPTHTHUMP BUMP. Clinton, resembling Dr. Funkenstein, hunched over the control panel a bit more, then picked up an oblong microphone of a sort I haven't seen since high school French language lab, and crooned into it. The thumping stopped. There was a pause. The monster was about to speak. The monster spoke:

"Uhh, hit me wit thuh track. [long pause] Jack."

"Here goes," said Clinton, pushing a button. Funk filled the room, and everyone except George stopped what they were doing. There's the monster, right up top, thumping and bumping with the tunk, doin' it to death, with a force that's enough to scare the hell out of lesser funkateers.

It ended after about seven minutes. Clinton pressed the rewind button. The monster spoke again: "Hit me wit thuh track, Jack!" George picked up the oblong mike: "Naw, come in here and listen to it first." A buzz of conversation overtook the spectators. The door of the booth opened and out stepped the monster, a tall, gangly black guy with a toothy grin and straight, but wavy hair. This is a monster? This is Bootzilla?

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Or how about a monster's mother? Nettie Collins is a kindly-looking woman in early middle age, not even old enough to be called grandmotherly, and she looked perfectly at ease in*the company of her sons and their freaky co-workers. "I can laugh about it now," she told a reporter, "but don't think it was easy raisin' two boys and a girl, especially those two boys!" Those two boys are William, known to all as Bootsy, and his older brother, Phelps, known to some as Catfish, but to Mrs. Collins as Sonny. "I kept in mind that they'd do something, but I didn't know it would turn out like this. I helped them buy their instruments. First I bought Sonny a guitar, and after that I didn't have the money to get Bootsy anything, but I told him I would when I had the money. Two days later, he was pestering me, ‘Mama, you got the money yet?' So finally I went down to Willis Music and got him a guitar. He hadn't had that guitar two weeks when he was on me again: ‘Mama, I want a bass.' Well, he couldn't have one, that was that, so he put bass strings on that guitar. I mean to tell you, it sounded like hell." She cracked up just remembering. "Oh yes, I can laugh about it now."

Their sister remembered it a bit differently. "Oh, it wasn't that bad," smiled Mrs. Brenda Holloway (no, not that Brenda Holloway). Did you take part in the family jam? "No, they played and I danced." That couldn't have been too hard. "It sure wasn't," she giggled. Because, you see, we're not just talking about some kids who like to play in their basement—we're talking about a pair of brothers who walked out of their living room in Cincinnati, Ohio, and right into the James Brown Band. And, when they walked out of that, they took most of the band with them, including its famous horn section.

That's getting ahead of things. Bootsy was only 16 in 1969 when Brown picked him to anchor his rhythm section with drummer Frankie "Kash" Waddy, and considering the stories in circulation about the Godfather of Soul, it could have been a brutal awakening into the realities of the music business and the sordid, seamy lives some of its inhabitants lead. Ah, but James Brown is a far more complex person than his detractors give him credit for, and this man with a rep for firing musicians at the drop of an eighth-note took a paternal attitude towards Bootsy. Others may tell tacky James Brown stories, but all you'U'get from Bootsy is "He was very good to me. He took me under his wing."

Good thing he did, too: Bootsy and the JB's of the early 70's helped revive James' career once again, with such classics as "Super Bad," "Sex Machine" and "Ain't It Funky Now." In return, Bootsy got some much-needed stage experience working night after night with the whole James Brown Revue.

Who knows why James Brown fires his bands? Probably not even James himself. But in 1971, he did it again, and Bootsy and Catfish were back on their own. They played around Cincinnati, and soon Bootsy fell under the influence of another giant, George Clinton. Clinton eagerly accepted the young bassist's offer of recording help, and Bootsy joined Funkadelic, the only active portion of P-Funk at the time, contributing madness and occasional compositions like "Philmore," a 1972 cut included on Westbound's recent Best Of The Early Years Funkadelic album.

It was a start. "I didn't know exactly what it was," he says today, "but I knew I had to do something, and then the ideas started cornin' when I started workin' with George. The first things that came about were the songs, and I would like crack jokes to George usin' this silly voice thang that I got, and he thought that was funny. I wasthinkin'of singin' in a different type of way, but George thought the other was what should be on tape. So when I recorded ‘Be My Beach' by Funkadelic [in 1974], that was the first time I used that voice, that rappability thang. George thought it was a smash, and I kind of liked it myself, so we tried it on Stretchin' Out, and it worked."

All during this time, the Rubber Band was touring as the opening act for the Parliament/Funkadelic show, thereby making the package one of the most exciting musical presentations anybody could ask for. The band itself combined childhood friends of the Collins brothers like vocalist Gary "Mudd-Bone" Cooper and Robert "P-Nut" Johnson with alumni of the James Brown Band like Frankie "Kash" Waddy and Bootsy's brother, Catfish. In addition, it featured the Horny Homs, who were Brown's old horn section: Fred Wesley , Richard "Kush" Griffith, Rick Gardner, and the inimitable Maceo Parker, who emcees the show, stalks around in his red cape like a demented funk Blacula, and plays the same hot alto sax that used to make James Brown scream, "Maceo! Maceo!"

But after "I'd Rather Be With You" scorched up the top ten, it wasn't practical to have both Bootsy and P-Funk on the same show. There just weren't halls big enough for something like that. So Bootsy headlined his own tours, and rumors of a split from the P-Funk family started makirg the rounds, totally ridiculous rumors, of the P-Funk guys muttering that George seemed to be spending too much time with Bootsy . They also kept playing on each other's albums, so things were still all right. And the upshot came this year, when we got to watch Bootsy and Parliament doing the bump with each other for the tops of the charts: when you're that high up, doing that well, shit, you can't harbor resentment very long.

So there I was, up in a midtownManhattan hotel room on the afternoon of Bootsy's sold-out Felt Forum appearance, in the middle of an interview with The Player himself, when the phone rang and I was suddenly eavesdropping on a conversation that seemed to indicate that Bootsy might be meeting the President. "That's gonna be some funkafied funk,'' Bootsy grinned. Yeah, I agree. I bet Amy's a fan of yours. "Well, if she's not, she will be!" (As it turned out, they just couldn't make the connection, but they took a tour of the White House anyway, and Bootsy started a miniriot when he was recognized and wound up signing autographs on the White House lawn.)

Amy Carter, in fact, is in one way typical of Bootsy's fans: she's very young. Bootsy's appeal has always been to what he calls geepies (hard "g," as in Godzilla) and, as someone who's old enough to be a geepie three times over, I decided to ask him about it: Why is it that you communicate so well with young kids? "I think it's really just understanding where they're comin from, cuz I've been there." Yeah, but we all have. "But I've never really grown outtathat. I was so young when I was with James that I could see where the older people were cornin' from and I already knew where I was cornin' from, and that put me in the frame of where I am today. It's like, you hit 21, and you say, well, I'm 21 now, and later for all that kid thang. But I've realized that it's not really later for the kid thang, because we're still there if we want to be, and we gotta realize that."

Okay, so you communicate with kids, but there sure seems to be a lot of sex in your work: "Munchies For Your Love," the elaborate strip-tease on stage, the part in "Roto Rooter" where you say "It's just my snake—are there any lady snake-charmers in thehouse?" Do you think kids should be exposed to all that? "I think it's just growin' up in the world. It's not an overall sexual thing, that's not my thang, it's just a growin' thang. If they're old enough to get it, they'll get it, and even if they're not, they can wonder about it, like wow, that type of thing. And there's just a little, here and there." And it prepares them for the harder-core P-Funk stuff, too. "Yeah, P-Funk is our overall concept, and as far as Bootzilla and all the different characters, it's like the Funk League of America, Superman and Captain America and all them mothers, combined."

Ah yes, cartoons. More than anything, I'd say that's where Bootsy's really at, and he agreed. His music is nothing more (or less) than cartoons for the ears, and you don't even have to get up early Saturday morning and sit through countless sugar-cereal and toy ads to dig 'em either. He's already got a six-minute cartoon opening his show, done by that remarkable funk cartoonist Overton Lloyd, which shows the metamorphosis of little Bootsy into Bootzilla, purveyor of Monster Rock, Player Of The Year. It also stars the beginnings of a galaxy of funky cartoon character based around members of the Rubber Band.

Meanwhile, there's more studio work with the P-Funk complex, with the idea for the next album ("Everybody should have their skin-divin' suits, because I'm gonna be playin' music for the deep!") swimming around Bootsy's head. A total plan for world domination? Maybe, but without any of the bad shit that implies. After all, Bootsy's the one who coined the word "nicety." A fairylaind fantasy? Sure, but/unky fairytales. The basic concept? Bootsy: "Supersonicspaceronicstereophonicsynthesizedsensurroundbionicboomboomsoundcoundownwave."

Uhhh, funk, that is., 'w.