What was different about Sly and the Family Stone?

Well what Sly did was take the funk innovations, that James Brown had made in terms of the interplay of drum, keyboard, guitar and of course bass and layer on top of them this very hooky, chant-like vocals as well as harmonies, ah, that were R and B based but also sort of not R and B based. He took this base building block, this new idea, this new way of hearing, of, of hearing dance music, James Brown had conceived and then put other layers on top of it. I mean Sly had been influenced as much by the hippies hanging out in San Francisco as he was by gospel, as he was by James Brown. And the blend of all these things was what was new and very fresh about his music.

The way they looked also, people compare them to James Brown. They looked completely different from Motown from James Brown.

Well I mean he celebrated freedom and R and B as defined by Motown and James Brown was a very processed music in the sense of what stage-wise: everyone moved on the same point, everyone dressed the same way, everyone, it was a very if you were militaristic, vaguely militaristic style. James Brown particularly was very militaristic in how he dealt with his musicians. Sly was very free form. I mean actually there was steps that they, they did do and there was movement, organized movement but at the same time there was a sense of personality, each person in the band, you know everybody's name in the band; Cynthia is on, you know Cynthia, Jerry, etc., etc.. There was a sense of they're individuals in a collective. It was very much in keeping with what was going on in rock music and very much going on in the San Francisco Bay Area where he was based. So he again was very much reflective and sensitive to his environment and he brought it on stage with him.

What his affect on young people?

Well I mean Sly, Sly was a guy, he wasn't, I mean when you talk about James Brown you talk about a person who is very much a product of and reflective of, of the black community at its time. Sly was someone who had always been around a multicultural thing or a multiracial thing. The Bay Area was always considered relatively more liberal than a lot of parts of the country. He had been around other kinds of rock music. Even before he started Sly he produced groups that weren't really rock and roll, I mean weren't R and B, he was involved in pop and so on. So he heard and saw the world in a different than James Brown. He was as much a perfectionist musically as James Brown but much more in a more open free form, free form is not the word, more open to new ideas. It was very structured what he did. Ahm, and the, the grooves of the records were very intense just like James Brown and very powerful but on top of that the horn charts, the vocals were very much more open for interpretation. He'd have voices that weren't traditional harmony voices. He had people singing sort of raspy and singing sort of wild, different kinds of harmony. These things weren't being done in R and B everything was very much to the point even James Brown his screams are very choreographed. You got the feeling sometimes it was organized anarchy with Sly. That is the music was organized but there was a level of play, much more playful big difference is it was much more playful. Sly was very playful music, sing a simple song. He did very nursery rhyme like lyrics often. They were very optimistic lyrics. Whereas James Brown sang about sex and the groove and relationships. Sly's tended to be more open ended, more embracing and as a result were more, you know, were accepted by a wider range of people.

Sly was almost like a Messiah they thought could bring everybody together.

He did for a while.

Sly his impact on young people, Messiah.

Well I mean Sly was a, Sly was a guy who brought, I mean he, he had the record at one point for the most sell outs at Madison Square Garden, ah, because he was a guy who tugged into a certain kind of new energy that had been unleashed after '68, ah, it was a multi-racial thing. It was much like if you want to reflected, much like the merging of the peace movement with the sort of civil rights movement. He was part of that thing and he epitomized it, had a multi-racial band, multi-gender band, had women musicians. It was very open, optimistic view of what America could be. And his music said that and his band said that. And that's what Sly tapped into and that's why he was so important to so many people. He was huge both musically and also commercially. He was really, what, whatever Prince became later and some other folks, Sly was there first.

Tell me about Sly.

Well the thing about, you know James Brown had had pop hits and had success to some degree with reaching white people but Sly was such a, across the board type of artist particularly because his melodies were so simple and so optimistic and so easy to grasp. And underneath that was some slamming tracks. So he had this ability to take the stuff that James Brown, that real harsh funk and which Larry Graham particularly is, is the underpinning of all that and his brother Freddie on guitar. And take the real raw stuff put a, put a nice layering on top of, put a nice little, cool, little fun package on top so it wasn't totally polyrhythmic like James Brown. It had rhythm and it had melody. And that, that's what really great pop music is, you know, and Sly was one of the greatest pop musicians because of this balance between sing a simple song, a simple kind of melodic, easy to hum, easy to remember me.., melody lines and these powerful beats underneath.

Larry Graham.

Well the thing, thing about Larry Graham is that Graham was a… the great showman; he could play bass and he was a great guy to watch so one of the first times in R and B where there it had always been about the performers that you actually watched the musicians particularly Graham 'cause he's a big guy, very dynamic. And just musically speaking he influenced Stanley Clark, Jacko Pastorios, obviously Bootsy Collins, so many musicians but I mean it's not just, because funk, think about funk as the, Larry Graham as a bass player right, funk wasn't just dance music. Funk, the ideas that he took about the, the bass being a lead instrument which is essentially what we're talking about, the way he mixes records when he had "Grand Central Station". They influenced across the board because the whole era of jazz, the whole jazz thing that came out of in the late seventies, the seventies was that kind of, he was a big influence on that as well. Stanley Clark, Jocko, Bootsy, they're all his children. They may have taken different streams but his sound, his idea of the bass as the dominant instrument was something that really was never done before in that way.

…talking about black artists talking about the world around them.

Like I tell you, you know everyone gives Marvin all, all this credit but you know Norman Whitfield was way ahead of him with the Temptations and Norman Whitfield was doing funk before, Marvin, I mean [interruption].

I'm ______ out of Sly and

Tell me about the conditions that Marvin was writing about, what his records sprang from.

Well I mean it was, the period from…

... time.

The period roughly from, I mean you got to understand that in the late sixties into early seventies you had major riots in almost every major American city with a black population. You had the first major influx of heroin coming into the black community in a way it never had before, I mean just mass marketing everywhere. Junkies sprang up on all the corners in all the countries, an underground economy based on drug dealing the one that we still have to this day started really in that time. Ah, the Vietnam War was going on and a disproportionate number of African American males were dying on the front lines of that war compared to the overall numbers of black, black soldiers in the war. Ah, you had black mayors coming in, ah, and the struggle between black power. What kind of black power will we have? Will we have street soldiers fighting? Will we have mainstream politicians? This is a real philosophical battle going on within the black community between the old civil rights world and the new nationalists. Ah, you had the, the idea of the ecology as a political construction that, that the pollution that was going on, had been going for years was something that needed to be spoken out upon. Ahm, you had interplay between the Black Panthers who had been espousing sort of a Marxist kind of philosophy, it was very different from again from the mainstream of what black thought had been to that point, ah. So you had all this plus the sexual revolution was going on. People were having more sex than they ever have, at least more openly at least. Ah, they were, you know all these things were going on. Marijuana was the, you know, the big drug of choice. There was such a evolution. I mean the assassinations were still very fresh of Doctor King, of Robert Kennedy. Nixon was President and bring a certain kind of energy into the country, a certain kind of paranoia. So all these things were going on and Marvin Gaye was one of the black artists who synthesized these things through his music into a statement.

What was the mood of the black community?

Well I mean I think there was a lot of turmoil, it was really a turning point I mean in terms of a lot of, a lot of fragmentation over what the right direction was. Up until Doctor King's death and even in the years before, just before his death there was a lot of dispute over what the way to go was because the civil rights movement, the, the protests, marching thing had really gone as far as it could go. We had gotten laws passed, equal rights amendments, you know voting rights amendments etc., etc..

What was so appealing about P-Funk to the young black folks?

Well I mean in a lot of ways, P-Funk number one was fun. I mean when I say fun I mean cartoon names, very elaborate stage show, it was sci-fi. I mean there were no real black cartoons, there were no real black sci-fi movies. And in a lot of ways P-Funk represented all of that. Every album was a journey they had a cartoon, you know drawings. There were different cosmologies. You know they, they used a lot of different techniques that really no black artist had really employed in terms of popular music.

P-Funk, cartoons.

Well I mean yeah, I mean the thing, I mean Doctor Funkenstein and then there was, you know, certain ___ devoid of funk. And, you know, there was a whole, every album had this whole thing about it. If the P-Funk album had the "Brides of Funkenstein" or whatever, funkadelic had these very elaborate album covers, you could spend all day deciphering the album cover, reading about the doo doo chasers. So there was a whole world of stuff that went along with it. The music was great but there's all this kind of fun stuff that, you know there weren't really black comic books then. You think about all that time there was none of these kind of things that we sometimes take for granted now in the nineties. So they really brought all that to it. If you had an imagination, if you were into something aside from the traditional R and B thing, P-Funk really gave you a whole ‘nother consciousness, a mean a way of, like they tapped into Egyptology, they tapped into a lot of different kind of moods going on. But ultimately all this came together to be fun, to be different from what everyone else was doing. And it definitely was an avant-garde move to be down with funkadelic. P-Funk, Parliament as a little bit more mainstream in terms of they were much more funk based. Funkadelic was actually for the real guys who were dropping acid or whatever. They, they were a little more for your progressive guy in the hood. But the com… combination of the two was, you know, just special and, and no one had ever done it quite like that before. They took what Sly had done and take it to another place.

P-Funk seemed to be going _____. Talk about their appeal?

Let's talk about P-Funk and their early part of evolution, they were picking stuff from rock groups.

Well, I mean, when they say P-Funk, you have to take Parliament and Funkadelic as two different entities. Funkadelic was the rock Hendrix part of George. It was the part that had watched, listened to, you know, Frank Zappa albums, the part that was into heavy, you know, convent slop literally, very guitar oriented, really wild, really much more rock based. The records he made as Parliament, they started 'cause Parliament started as a army vocal group, were much more vocally based, much more harmony based, much more sort of traditional street based. As time evolved the two concepts began to mesh together more particularly when they did these elaborate stage shows as the Mother Ship. So it was like Funkadelic was like George's art half, he, he may have been dropping acid when he made those records. And when he did the Parliament stuff he was smoking herb. And, and that's really the, the consciousness, the dual consciousness of the music. There were these two kinds of things and George was like this guy who was really walked both sides, you know, like coming out of Sly, very much like a guy who could walk on the rock side and understood that totally and understood Hendrix totally. At the same time understood James Brown, understood this, the, the funk part of Sly totally. So I see them as this duality of black consciousness that came together in the music.

Talk about ____.

Well in the, in the, you know in the mid sixties, in, in the mid seventies, you got to remember there was Star Wars, Close Encounters came out. Sci-fi had made a tremendous comeback but there was no black, I mean people would say, where are the black people in, in space? George gave you the black people in space. The, the Mother Ship literally landed and everyone waited for the Mother Ship to land, you know for Doctor Funkenstein to emerge and bring the funk. And there's something very special, I mean before videos before a lot of this other stuff that, you know, technology, they had a whole elaborate science fiction view of, of the future if you will that was very contemporary but also not like reality. It was reality but not reality. Everything came out of the street environment but it was heightened, it was taken to some place else, some place in the imagination, ah. I mean there was a, the amazing thing about that also is that he had so many musicians that literally people would, there would be a drummer playing in one part and a bass player playing in another part and then another guy would come in with another bass and begin playing the same part and another drummer would come up and pick up right on the beat where the other guy was. I mean it was like, it went on forever. Whatever the Grateful Dead was like in their day, I mean P-Funk is ___ to the black, the black Grateful Dead, ah, in the sense there was a million musicians, there was a million kinds of songs. They would play a Parliament thing. They would do a P-Funk thing. When Phillip… when Phillippe Wynne performed within the 1 point they were doing "Sadie". They would go from "Sadie" into some ____ slop back into something Bernie Worrell was doing I mean it was that diverse, very much the vocabulary of black music. Conceptually again, Uncle Jam's Army at one point everyone came out in army outfits. He was constantly playing with it so it wasn't just the music it was a whole, it was theater, it was really theater. And the only other people who really came close to them at that time was, was, was Earth, Wind and Fire and they were like the two kings of, of black music at that time because they had the best show.

Could you compare P-Funk to Earth, Wind and Fire?

Well Earth, Wind and Fire was the sweet, the sweet side of funk much more influenced by Latin music and more influenced, influenced by jazz than P-Funk. But P-Funk was more interested by, in., you know, more funk and rock, tend together funk, rock and army vocal harmonies. Earth, Wind and Fire was, army, army vocal harmonies, Latin, jazz and then funk So there was two different sides of, of the coin. P-Funk was much rawer than were Earth, Wind and Fire were much smoother. It's a difference between, you know like Motown and Stax almost. If you wanted to go that way. Earth, Wind and Fire was much more Motown, more likely to do a pop ballad like "After Love Has Gone" where George and those guys [horns] were more likely to do "Not Just Needy".

Did funk with George have a hard time crossing over than Earth, Wind and Fire?

Well in general, in general one of the reasons Earth, Wind and Fire had more success is they tend to be more pop oriented in their songwriting. Funk had a hard time I mean with white audiences I mean 'cause there's a bunch of other bands that you can mention Cameo and Confunction, Bar-Kays, Kool, of course they, they, they haven't figured it out but there's so many bands you know Parliament, Cameo, Bar-Kays who never really crossed over. Ah, ____ ____ and ___ to some degree did have some success but George, George was the biggest of all of the bands of that wing of, of black pop. And he had a hard time because, at that time there was very, a lot of segregation going on it wasn't like when Sly came up, when there was a lot more sense of, of everyone is together. Bl… radio had changed a lot. The forenting, the formatting of radio had changed. It had become much more conservative in terms of what they would play of different kinds of music. And so funk for, to a great degree, was not really heard for the most part by the mass audiences. I think funk is heard more in the nineties through rap now than it was actually in its heyday. Most people have discovered George. White, white audiences have discovered George after the facts. Where Earth, Wind and Fire was able because of their pop orientation, a kind of sweeter kind of sound able to find success, pop success, ah, much more consistently than George was or any of the other black mans playing funk at that time.

Talk about hip hop being a reaction to the larger ___.

Well I mean this hip hop [horn] came out of a time when access to going to concerts became a more expensive, less successful, a lot of black groups weren't perf… performing in the black community any more. P-Funk was so big now they played at Madison Square Garden not the Apollo. So, ah, the idea of, of DJs dancing over records had, had really become more and more popular as the technology, turntables and sound systems got better and the guys who started talking over the records were more or less party enhancers, you know, come out and dance, whatever, blah blah blah. Ahm, it was small, it was more compact, it was more accessible. The big bands and literally these were big bands in a classic sense became more unwieldy, they, they couldn't tour as much, it was very expensive. To have a hip hop group play at your club basically a guy and a couple of, a bunch of, the guy that carried the records in. So, ah, rap music very much benefited as the economies of scale, if you will. It was just more, less inexpensive way to have music in your club or your place. And over the time the DJs began knocking the bands up because there were all kinds of black bands all over the place that had played at clubs and parties. And the, the DJs, a turntable and a rapper took their jobs, basically put them out of commission for the most part in most of the major cities.

P-Funk got so large it fell under its own weight. Is that true?

Well I mean there's also George and [interruption] George didn't pay everybody. I mean George didn't pay people. [horns]. You know that's one reason those guys, and Bernie won't work, I mean I don't think Bernie has worked with him in years. Says George owes him too much money. [voice]. There's a drug component to that too. [voice] And, and it really is sort of central part of why the [voice] became unwieldy. I mean 'cause George is too busy snorting up to shoot, I mean, you know. [voice] And it really that had as much to do with it as anything. The music changed but that was, [voice] you know.

When we talked about funk earlier, I need the nitty-gritty definition or free association of what funk is.

Give me a free association, funk is?

Oh funk is sweat. Funk is groove.

Funk is sweat. Funk is groove. Funk is James Brown. Funk is Bootsy. Funk is two drummers at the same time. Funk is syncopation. Funk is percussion. Funk is horns. Funk is Cameo. Funk is bands. Funk is sound, is fat, fat, fat bass amplification and the great and intense interplay of rhythm sections [background traffic] with a, to the syncopation it is New Orleans a little bit and a little bit of uptown, I mean a little bit of the street, urban streets meets country boy. It's, it's a blend of all these different things, ah, and it's, but it's very much a product of though it's still current in the nineties, it's very much a product of a particular time which is the late sixties or early seventies, that's the root of it and if you want to be involved in funk in any kind of way you have to go back to that and deal with that on one level or another.

Free association.

Well I mean that funk to me honestly is a, is a part.

Funk for me is really a party in East New York in about 1973, playing "Fire" and "Jungle Boogie" and "Flashlight" and there's this girl with a really big butt who is, who is a daughter of a minister who is really dancing very, very provocatively in a corner. To me that's my funk memory because it had nothing but, it was nothing like fire, it was just like sweaty, funky. I'm in the corner with this girl, I'm a happy guy. And that, that's funk to me.

Personal experience with funk.

Okay, funk to me is a, is a house party in 1973. They're playing _____ ___ Fire. They're playing "Jungle Boogie". They're playing "Tear the Roof off the Sucker". No, that was later. "Flashlight". They were playing some other P-Funk stuff. It was just funky in there. I got this girl and she's the daughter of this minister and she's got a really big butt. She's in the corner all night long. She's just rubbing, doing the bump with me, bang, bang. And, you know, it was sweaty, drinking beer and it just was funky, and that was funk, that's my funk memory is that party 'cause she was funky, the music was funky, the whole bar was funky and what happened after the party was funky. So it was all good.

Okay, you asked me what funk is. To me funk will always this party I went to in 1973 or so, they play nothing but Cameo and P-Funk and Kool and the Gang, all that good stuff. And there's this girl, she's got a really big butt. We're in this corner, it's dark and we were doing the bunk all night long in this corner, it's very sweaty, we're drinking beer. To me that was funk.