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The Authorized P-Funk Song Reference, page 1
THE AUTHORIZED P-FUNK
SONG REFERENCE
THE AUTHORIZED P-FUNK
SONG REFERENCE
OFFICIAL CANON OF PARLIAMENT-FUNKADELIC
1956 2023
DANIEL BEDROSIAN
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE
Copyright © 2024 by Daniel Bedrosian
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bedrosian, Daniel, 1981- author.
Title: The authorized P-Funk song reference : official canon of Parliament-Funkadelic, 1956-2023 / Daniel Bedrosian.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023028287 (print) | LCCN 2023028288 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538183427 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538183434 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: P-Funk All Stars—Discography. | Parliament (Musical group)—Discography. | Funkadelic (Musical group)—Discography. | Funk (Music)—Discography. | Clinton, George, 1940—Discography. | LCGFT: Discographies.
Classification: LCC ML156.7.P46 2023 (print) | LCC ML156.7.P46 2023 (ebook) | DDC 016.78242164—dc23/eng/20230621
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023028287
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023028288
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
CONTENTS
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
SOME NOTES ON PROCESS
SPECIAL THANKS
INTERVIEW LIST
INFORMATION ON THE LIST
CRITERIA FOR CANON
ERRATA
1 ARTISTS STARTING IN 1956–1966
2 ARTISTS STARTING IN 1967–1977
3 ARTISTS STARTING IN 1978–1988
4 ARTISTS STARTING IN 1989–1999
5 ARTISTS STARTING IN 2000–2010
6 ARTISTS STARTING IN 2011–2021
7 ARTISTS STARTING IN 2022–2023
8 LIVE RELEASES
OTHER IMPORTANT SOURCE MATERIAL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Guide
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
SOME NOTES ON PROCESS
SPECIAL THANKS
INTERVIEW LIST
INFORMATION ON THE LIST
CRITERIA FOR CANON
ERRATA
Start of Content
OTHER IMPORTANT SOURCE MATERIAL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
The Parliament-Funkadelic collective, spearheaded by the often-imitated-but-never-duplicated visionary mastermind George Clinton, is indeed an underappreciated musical entity, especially looking at it from a historical perspective. Coming from the seemingly unending creative spark that exploded out of the African diaspora in the Americas, P-Funk, even separate from all other “funk” music, became something far more representational of the storied artfulness of that diaspora, marrying music, artwork, production, business savvy, mythology, politics, social upheaval, science fiction, poetry, literature, concept, and even religion under the ever-expanding embodiment of the “Power of the One,” as often quoted in the annals of this long-running movement. The “P-Funk” camp’s production output, numbering well over 500 releases, represents the single largest discography of any one musical production family. In short, P-Funk and its satellites over the years have represented the longest-running popular musical group of all time. In addition, P-Funk’s personnel and roster have been ever changing, often growing, shrinking, ebbing, and flowing through the decades, with some members being there only a brief period, a sizable subset of members coming and going and coming back again, and a smaller dedicated cadre of band members staying for long tenures with the musical institution. To complicate matters further, one’s conscious effort in analyzing any single album from Clinton’s P-Funk camp can reveal representations of different sessions sometimes spanning years or even decades, with altering combinations of players and rhythm, horn, string and vocal sections numbering sometimes several dozen people, even on a single song. If that were not enough to boggle the musicologist’s mind, most albums have incomplete or vague liner notes, with no reference to personnel per song, and other albums have liner notes that have been completely mislabeled, with the wrong musicians erroneously listed on the song credits (according to some reports, sometimes “on purpose,” whether it be due to infighting, jealousy, or legalistic procedures of the day).
All of this confusion also lends itself to the often-repeated phrase of “organized chaos” with reference to Clinton’s funk machine. Indeed, anyone who has worked for George Clinton knows that there is actually a tightly woven patchwork of threads that keeps this organization running, and its vast 68-year history is attestation of that fact. However, the previously mentioned misunderstandings and misinformation with regard to “who played on what” is among the most notable defined qualifications of the “chaos” portion of the above statement. It has fueled debates, controversies, and mysteries revolving around the “P-Funk Thang,” cultivating a cultish if not wholly dedicated swath of fans worldwide, even among some of the band members themselves.
This topic segues into my involvement: Parliament-Funkadelic had been my favorite band since I was at least 11 years old. A classically trained pianist since age four, I am the son of concert pianists and music educators, and from a family firmly entrenched in the arts; music was in my veins. I dreamed from a very young age of being the keyboardist for P-Funk. And after a decade spent studying not only the technical and artistic aspects of the music of P-Funk itself but also the minutiae of the personnel from session to session to better understand the tones and styles of each cog in the machine, I eventually landed that very position that I had strived for all those years ago; the long-heralded keyboard chair in Parliament-Funkadelic. I have continued an unbroken 20-year tenure ever since, now proudly being the longest-tenured keyboardist in the live band’s history.
All along the way, I was making not only lists of musical charts and chords for each song for multiple instrumental parts but also lists of who played on each particular song or album. I spent years not only carefully studying the vocal phrasing and “character voices” that grace the very framework of this unique music but also figuring out and differentiating the different yet oddly well-blended coterie of singers who were a part of this groundbreaking singular genre in its own right. In a parallel vein, I knew from a very young age that P-Funk was something so special, almost a separate universe of musical thought from the other popular music forms, obviously indebted to the culture, history, and events happening around it yet extremely influential on all those said forms that came after it. It should not be forgotten that P-Funk is essentially the most sampled band on the planet, and it is not just hip-hop that owes a debt of gratitude to P-Funk’s several important musical innovations, deserving of a book all its own to properly describe. Indeed, rhythm and blues, rock, metal, electronica, techno, house, rap, modern gospel, world music, and other subgenres, going seemingly ad infinitum, owe a serious debt to Clinton’s world of still-expanding musical genius.
As a historian (a BA degree in history from the University of New Hampshire), my dedication to the spreading of knowledge about P-Funk’s understated influence on music the world over has been one of my longtime passion projects, and that said dedication has earned me the moniker from George Clinton himself as the “band musicologist.” Almost every day, as a result of publicizing the vastness of this music and the misinformation regarding personnel, I have received questions from fans all over the world about “who played on this song?,” “is it true that so-and-so didn’t actually play on this song?,” and so on. Fully understanding the near impossibility of this undertaking, something in me finally decided (possibly because no one other person would) to take it on myself to finally compile everything I had learned in terms of personnel listing for the hundreds of releases in the P-Funk camp’s history and put it to paper, so to speak. For the most debated and hardest-to-ascertain information, I began filling in the gaps with more than two dozen important interviews with key players—musicians, vocalists, and music business professionals—through each of the eight decades that span this music, including George Clinton himself, to most soundly obtain all the truth about the liner notes, often unlabeled or mislabeled, throughout this massive, organic, still-growing body of work.
After being in the band a few years, I felt a strong affinity with my bandmates, who had been mislabeled or left unmentioned multiple times in song listings by compilers, record labels, or others during their tenures with this legendary group. Some of these situations happened dozens of times over a period of up to 40 years or more. My understanding of these matters personalized when I too became one of the victims of this occurrence on several live albums released by a company in Europe in the early 2000s. On closer inspection, the albums in question not only mislabeled me as someone else but also had a completely incorrect band roster for the whole group on the recordings in question, with the compiler of the live album erroneously copying and pasting one of George’s rosters from not only a different year but also a different decade altogether. It is hard enough for the fans of this music to ascertain the realities of who was on which record or, even more specifically, which song, but these musicological mistakes were furthering the oddly compiled stack of misinformation plaguing this enormous group of musical innovators. Although being a victim of this situation was still not enough for me to finally plunge into the abyss of this undertaking, the one thing that finally persuaded me to do this was much more simple: the concept of time.
