The Funkadelic Album That Predicted the Future

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An aspect of that knowledge, of course, was Blackness: being Black—flamboyantly, psychedelically Black—in an America that, through the madly flexing prism of the ’60s, was only beginning to experience itself. The white rebel rock bands, as outré as they might have been, were not privy to this knowledge. So the MC5 could rave about revolution and mind expansion, but Funkadelic had a split-level reality—and the insights granted thereby—as their birthright.

Also, they were geniuses. George Clinton, the band’s front man, was mastermind, wizard, and chief storyteller of a prodigious musical collective that also included his old New Jersey barbershop quintet, the Parliaments. Clinton was better than an anarchist; he was an exploded formalist. He came out of Tin Pan Alley, having spent much of the ’60s doing production-line songwriting for Motown. He took so much acid, according to him, that it eventually stopped working. His head was selectively shaved in a proto-punk tonsure. His imagination was bottomless, his sense of humor grotesque. Another shard of apocrypha from the same era has Funkadelic plotting a joint album with the hard-rock dirge-mongers Iron Butterfly. It was to be called Heavy Funk, with a 400-pound white woman on the front cover and a 380-pound Black man on the back.

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The Funkadelics, wild as they appeared and sounded, drug-deranged as they undoubtedly were, were professionals: virtuosic session men, with serious musical profiles. Tradition was their secret weapon: Embedded in the Funkadelic freakout—parodically sometimes, spookily sometimes—were doo-wop harmonies, gospel calls, Temptations-style dance routines, writhings of soul. Eddie Hazel, on lead guitar, combined Hendrixian technique (and wah-wah pedal) with an electric fragility or exposure that was all his own. “He just felt everything,” Clinton said simply in an interview published in 1994, two years after the guitarist’s death.

Hazel played like he had conjured himself a nervous system out of deep feedback. He shivered. He howled. His weeping, melting flights were sustained, sponsored, guaranteed by the hulking funk undercarriage of Tawl Ross (rhythm guitar), “Billy Bass” Nelson, and Tiki Fulwood (soon to be pinched by Miles Davis) on drums. And then there were the keyboards of Bernie Worrell, who had come to Funkadelic via Juilliard and the New England Conservatory of Music. Of the Westbound albums, Free Your Mind belongs particularly to Worrell and his RMI Electra Piano. In the blisteringly distorted chords that he plays on the title track, and in the cracked-piano musings that he sprinkles over “Funky Dollar Bill,” the band seems to be dosing itself with blasts of European avant-gardism.