Can You Get to That? The Cosmology of P-Funk

Slow Jams

Note: This piece was originally written for Pagan Kennedy’s book Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 70s but was most read at Scot Hacker’s Birdhouse Archives from 1994-2011 before moving to Stuck Between Stations. Dead links have been updated or removed and images/video have been refreshed, but I’ve otherwise refrained from editing the original.

For the religiously inclined, P-Funk [1] offered up an array of minor gods, an intangible and omnipotent metaphysical reality (the funk itself), and a whole flotilla of ministers (actually a loose-fitting assemblage of crack musicians and crackpots dedicated to the administration of an entire cosmology). The roots of this church lay deep in the African polyrhythmic pantheon; its disciples (“Maggotbrains” or “Funkateers”) consisted of anyone who sought a quasi- cohesive view of a universe which included a god who danced, and who knew that having a loose booty to shake was as crucial to the keeping of the faith as the rosary was for the Catholic.

While their ministers were many — a constantly evolving line- up guaranteed the elasticity of the band — it is undeniable that high pope George Clinton wore the mitre. From the cryptic, ridiculously bent versifying of the liner notes to the album sleeve art production (which narrated the genesis and mission of the band in a series of ongoing, albeit disjointed cartoons) to the inception and direction of the outrageous stage production — a black sci-fi extravaganza / space party that could cost upwards of $350,000 [2] — Clinton wielded the scepter of Funkentelechy, and wore the righteous robes of the Afronaut (actually Holiday Inn bedsheets covered with Crayola scribbles).

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Practice in Front of a Bush: Stuck on Beefheart

Rants and Raves

The black paper between the mirror breaks my heart that I can’t go.
Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow.

The good Cap’n has passed (through mirror paper?), evidence that the sun ain’t stable? If he wasn’t already, Don van Vliet is now having the neon meate dream of a octafish. Forever. Finally lost his battle with muscular sclerosis at age 69. His Trout Mask Replica was Number 58 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In a 1969 review, Lester Bangs called Beefheart “the only true dadaist in rock” and Trout Mask “a total success, a brilliant, stunning enlargement and clarification of his art.” Tom Waits spent a lot of time on the phone with Beefheart in his post-music years:

“He was like the scout on a wagon train,” Waits wrote in an e-mail Friday. “He was the one who goes ahead and shows the way. He was a demanding bandleader, a transcendental composer (with emphasis on the dental), up there with Ornette [Coleman], Sun Ra and Miles [Davis]. He drew in the air with a burnt stick. He described the indescribable. He’s an underground stream and a big yellow blimp.

Sure ’nuff ‘n yes I do


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Woke Up In Another Lifetime

Diatribes

When I started writing about music back in the Paleozoic Era, I used to spend more time defining my tastes in distinction to what I supposedly opposed. As a bookish student with a penchant for streetwise urban blues and working-class British punk, I found the rootless, complacent self-absorption of Seventies-era singer-songwriters and pop stars a convenient target. The few singer-songwriters that escaped my bop gun–Warren Zevon and Randy Newman, or later, Nick Lowe and Graham Parker–tended to be so arch and acerbic that I could wink along with them, imagining they had more in common with my favorite short story writers.

At the time, James Taylor seemed to sum up all that was rootless and complacent. I snickered when I first read Lester Bangs’ essay James Taylor Marked for Death.  In that rant, which mainly praises the primitive beats of the Troggs as an alternative to Dostoyevskian despair (his comparison), Bangs goes gonzo on JT, fantasizing that if he heard one more number about “Jesus walking the boys and girls down a Carolina path while the dilemma of existence crashes like a slab of hod” on the singer’s shoulders, he was ready to manhandle the mellow one until he expired in a “spasm of adenoidal poesy.” But that was in another country, and besides, Bangs is dead.
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4’33” and the Copyright Cops

Quick Shots

John Cage’s seminal work 4’33” changed the world of music when its 1952 performance by David Tudor shocked audiences and critics into a new appreciation of avante garde composition techniques. The work was admired for its groundbreaking incorporation of audience noises such as shuffling chairs and blown noses, not to mention the creak of the piano lid as it opened at the start of the piece, and its thudding close at the end.

Unfortunately, like so much of the world’s great music, 4’33” has been copied to YouTube by copyright-disrespecting pirates, and millions of internet users can now listen to the piece in its entirety without paying a dime to the artist or label for the privilege. Fortunately, YouTube builds in protection mechanisms against copyright theft, so that content owners can cause the audio to be stripped from infringing videos without taking down the post entirely.

Here at Stuck Between Stations, we believe that strict copyright enforcement is the cornerstone of a rich musical economy, and we applaud the vigilance of Warner Music Group in ensuring that the audio track of this illegal posting of one of Cage’s most important works has been removed.

If you believe 4’33” deserves more respect than ever this year, please consider supporting the Facebook campaign to make it Christmas number one for 2010, just as ‘Killing In The Name’ was in 2009.

Let’s Get It On (Ukulele Style)

Quick Shots

On the last day of this summer’s family Kauai trek, at the base of the road leading up to Waimea Canyon, stopped with my crew at a shave ice joint on the South Shore called Jo Jo’s, and sat on the side porch in the hot sun, enjoying our last licks. A few days later, after returning home with my new prize Kamaka pineapple ukulele, sat down to try and learn some of the licks from the masters at ukuleleunderground.com, starting with Seals and Croft’s not-quite-forgotten gem, Summer Breeze.

Jaw hit the floor when I realized that instructor Aldrine Guerrero was teaching the lesson from the very same bench at Jo Jo’s where we had just been sitting a few days ago. Of all the bazillion lat/long coords on earth, how could these two come into perfect alignment? Kismet, baby. My rendition of Summer Breeze didn’t turn out anything like Aldrine’s of course, but I did make pretty quick progress on the track. But the more I learned about Guerrero, the more I realized this was someone I definitely wanted to watch. Such a laid-back guy, totally living the Aloha thing, who seems to want little more than to help others learn great ukulele technique.
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Zorn in the USA: My Top Three John Zorn Moments

Playlists, Rants and Raves

Saxophonist and composer John Zorn was found dead last night in his Manhattan apartment, a victim of his own success. Zorn rode into town on a white horse, his yarmulke flapping in the breeze. He didn’t know why he came back. He didn’t know how he’d gotten roped into another war with desperadoes. The day was hot. A gun was in his hand.

Joshua Cohen, from Last Man Standing, reviewing John Brackett’s John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression (2008)

Yes, he’s alive. Is John Zorn the hardest avant-squawker in the ruggedly bookish tradition of revolutionary downtown geek-skronk, or just last night’s reason for a three-alarm headache? There’s no easy answer. Last weekend, most of us enjoyed Zorn’s live collaboration at Yoshi’s San Francisco with the Bay Area’s Rova Saxophone Quartet, whose fellow travelers (especially Larry Ochs) seemed Zorny as hell the whole evening. Zorn isn’t for everyone, and others wished for earplugs. I could rave about the saxophonist’s marriage of hermeneutics and harmolodics, his duck-like squawk while dipping his reed in a water glass, or his contribution to the sales figures for camouflage pants. But since that would probably put even me to sleep, I’ll simply count down my favorite John Zorn moments. And I bet he just hates lists.
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How the Cedars Invaded the Land of Blue Pajamas

Heavy Rotation, Rants and Raves

At a nightclub years ago, while overpraising some now-forgotten musical discovery, I found myself upstaged by a stranger who was raving about something even more obscure he claimed to have heard in London. Articulate but thoroughly lubricated, he raved about a legendary late-sixties Israeli garage band called the Seders. The band, he claimed, were what the late-sixties Beatles and Kinks would have sounded like if they had thoroughly devoured Eastern rhythms rather than politely nibbling. Two beers later, when he was explaining how the Seders also inspired a dance craze in Turkey, I stopped listening and filed those thoughts in the part of my brain that stores Apocryphal Rantings of Drunk Guys at Concerts.

Earlier this month, a quickie post on “the Sea-ders” at the Aquarium Drunkard website made me drop my burrito. For your information, the drunk guy at the long-ago show was telling the truth, except for botching one crucial detail. The awkwardly hyphenated band, later renamed the Cedars, were Lebanese rock pioneers from prewar Beirut who got signed to Decca and made a minor splash in London in 1967 before calling it a day. The band’s hard-charging debut single, “Thanks a Lot,” could pass for an outtake from the Beatles’ Revolver, fusing a slightly sugar-coated pop melody with beguiling swirls of rhythm flying miles higher than “Eight Miles High,” and sounding more like tomorrow than “Tomorrow Never Knows.” “I Don’t Know Why” vaguely resembles the Kinks’ Ray Davies having an identity crisis on a Mediterranean adventure.
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Music From a Bonsai

Quick Shots

In the tradition of Harry Partch, whose microtonal scales played on gorgeous one-of-a-kind instruments my son once described as sounding like “space chimps driving a broken car,” Diego Stocco bought a bonsai tree and went at it with piano hammers, bows of various sizes, and a paint brush. And a MacBook Pro. The result is haunting and beautiful.

See also: A Welsh Onion Flute for Trying Times

I always liked bonsai trees, and I was curious to try the approach I used for “Music from a Tree” on a smaller scale, so I bought a bonsai and recorded this little experimental piece.

To determine the key I used the lowest note I could play and recorded the rest around it.
Besides playing the leaves, I used bows of different sizes, a piano hammer and a paint brush.
As far as microphones I used my Røde NT6, a customized stethoscope and tiny MEAS piezo transducers.

I played all the sounds and rhythms only with the bonsai, I didn’t use any synthesizer or samplers to create or modify the sounds. I hope you’ll like it.

More of Stocco’s sessions here.

My Imaginary Back Pages

Diatribes, Slow Jams

Rock Fans Outraged as Bob Dylan Goes Electronica: Audience members at the Newport Rock Festival were “outraged” Monday when rock icon Bob Dylan followed up such classic hits as “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Maggie’s Farm” with an electronica set composed of atonal drones, hyperactive drumbeats, and the repeated mechanized lyric “Dance to the club life!”

The Onion, July 12, 2010

This week marks the 45th anniversary of one of the defining moments in American musical history, except there’s one little catch. Most of it probably never happened. This much we know is true: at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan “went electric” for the first time in a live performance, leaving some folk traditionalists like Pete Seeger less than impressed. But the legend goes way beyond that, implying that the shock of Dylan’s new sound provoked near-riotous anger along the lines of what Igor Stravinsky encountered at the 1913 Armory Show debut of The Rite of Spring. Todd Haynes’ 2007 movie of Dylan’s multiple personalities, I’m Not There, builds up the tallest parts of the tale, showing Jude Quinn, the Cate Blanchett character based on the too-cool-for-school electric Dylan circa 1965, enduring loud boos as the band machine-guns its way through a short electric set. The mild-mannered Seeger suddenly goes ballistic and tries to cut the amp wires with an ax.
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