‘Make my funk the p-funk!’

By Jerry Fink

Friday, Feb. 15, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Legendary funk artist George Clinton doesn’t always follow a direct path when he talks. His dialogue meanders, following its own course, much as his music has done for more than 50 years.

His voice is tight, squeezing out his words as he discusses his life in the business and how, at age 67, he has stayed on top of music dominated by youthful fans.

“I’m going to clone myself again,” he says from Tempe, Ariz., where he was performing a concert. “I’ve started all over.”

He started in the mid-’50s, singing with doo-wop groups in New Jersey. Things changed after a breakthrough hit in 1967 — “(I Wanna) Testify” — with Motown. It launched his career, and the native of Kannapolis, N.C., evolved into an icon of funk with rainbow-colored hair and a counterculture wardrobe.

Clinton and his group, Parliament/Funkadelic (same band members, two different names and two different styles of playing), will be rocking The Joint at the Hard Rock on Saturday.

“We’ve got more than 20 musicians up there onstage,” he says. “When we play, it’s like a tag team.”

Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic invented “p-funk,” revolutionizing R&B by giving a funky sound to the music of Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, and along the way garnering 40 hit singles and three platinum albums. In 1978 and 1979, they had four No. 1 hits — “Flash Light,” “One Nation Under a Groove,” Aqua Boogie” and “(Not Just) Knee Deep.”

Clinton tours most of the time. His most recent album was “How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?” in 2005. But he’s working on two more — including one with Santana and Sly Stone — that could be released this year.

“I almost never come off the road,” Clinton says.

When he does, he has homes in Tallahassee, Fla. (where he also has a recording studio) and in the Detroit area.

What was your background before becoming the grandfather of funk?

We started as a doo-wop group, doing basically doo-wop songs back in ’57 or ’56, around then.

How did your music evolve?

In ’66 we had our first hit with Motown. I had worked for Motown for a while. We got there around the time the British invasion started. It was time for some change, from the rock ’n’ roll style, so we went to funk as opposed to blues and rock ’n’ roll, which was fast-tempo and real slow-tempo blues. We went to that midtempo of, you know, nasty, “get out of my life woman” New Orleans type. Motown was basically that, so we just made it into loud funk music, like Funkadelic. That’s when we started emphasizing funk as opposed to R&B and rock ’n’ roll because rock ’n’ roll had changed its identity to basically heavy rock ’n’ roll. We said we was going to do that with funk and make sure it stayed with that concept of funk music, which could be anything that it needed to be at any given time. We’ve taken funk seriously and made sure it maintained its identity.

What are you working on, outside of touring?

Right now we’re doing an album of doo-wop, which is the funkiest you could possibly get. We’re not doing it as nostalgia, but really a celebration of doo-wop music with a funky edge on it, doing it our own way. We’re also doing an album of Motown music, which is probably the funkiest you can get as a company, even though it got real pop. The music itself was the funkiest as it could be because of the bass. The brand-new album of Motown music will have Santana on it, and Sly Stone. I was with Sly the last three weeks recording, just left him. There are quite a few people on this one, which should be out in April.

The music business has changed dramatically since you broke onto the scene in the ’50s. Do you like the changes?

It’s a technical world nowadays. That’s probably good for the musicians ’cause now they’ll have a lot of control over their own careers. You’ll be able to upload and download music from the entire planet. Musicians don’t need to worry about people downloading it for free ’cause now they have access to the whole world. That offsets any worry about how many people download it. It probably gives record companies a big pain, but for individual artists, they weren’t getting paid from the record companies anyway. We’ll have an upload version of our albums. And probably have a ghetto version of the records, CDs and plastic.

What do you think of the new directions music has taken over the decades?

I found you have to embrace wherever it goes, otherwise you’re going to get old and out of here anyways. I mean, the more you hate something the bigger it gets, especially with kids. I look at the music the parents and old musicians hate. When you find that music, that’s going to be the next music. When hip-hop came along I related it to rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s. People hated rock ’n’ roll and it became the religion. By the time you get to Woodstock, it was the mountaintop. So hip-hop, to me, was like the brand-new version of funk. It was probably the best music for race relations there ever was. Even though they try to give it a stigma of being hard core, it’s basically not hard core.

What can fans expect at your Hard Rock concert?

Tell them to bring two booties with them. We wear out one booty.