The Silent Boatman: In Praise of ParliaFunkadelicMent, Ruth Copeland and George Clinton
I have been wanting to write an article on ParliaFunkadelicMent for a long time. Of course, this week’s offering here could never do justice to the phenomenal output of George Clinton through his various guises, bands, line-ups and projects (far too numerous to mention all the innovative and decorative names here) across the past eight decades (yes, eight – The Parliaments outstanding doo wop-fuelled debut single ‘Poor Willie / Party Boys’ was released in 1959). Rather, this piece explores my personal way-in to the extraordinary world of George Clinton.
As my favourite artist across any genre (and George Clinton certainly spans many, despite his resounding anchorage in funk), it also seemed right to write this as my 100th article on the Rhythm Obscura Substack - and I would also like to say here a resounding thank you to you all for subscribing and reading the weekly RO articles.
Now, back to George Clinton.
George Clinton arrived in my life quite by accident (or so I thought) in 1986. I wandered into the living room and clocked a snippet of the video to ‘Do Fries Go With That Shake?’, a subversive take on the Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs synopsis. The striking visuals – both exactly of the time and yet otherworldly – acted as a preamble to a world I believed I had not even tasted yet. A few months later in the summer, John Peel played Salt ‘N Pepa’s ‘I’ll Take Your Man’, which I recorded and played indefinitely until I bought Serious Records’ compilation Upfront 2 (which it included on the rap side) and subsequently Salt ‘N Pepa’s Hot, Cool & Vicious. I adored ‘I’ll Take Your Man’, naïve in the knowledge that the opening music sequence is lifted in its entirety from Parliament’s 1977 single ‘Flashlight’. At six years old, it was never going to be likely that I would have heard ‘Flashlight’ upon its release, but again, back to 1986 and Club released a UK-only compilation album of 1970s Parliament funk jams which contained eight previously released songs, including ‘Flashlight’.
Although I had never heard any of the songs that comprised this curation, how could I resist when my fingertips fell on the top of the sleeve as I was digging one late-autumn Saturday in Our Price? As a head who was just beginning to discover the rich musicological histories of hip hop, a record with a dude fully clad in a cowboy getup, holding a boombox to his ear and surfing an azure and sapphire ocean on a pair of dolphins with the album title: ‘UNCUT FUNK – THE BOMB’ top left in electric orange as the front cover, well; it was coming home with me. Although I’ve upgraded, I still have the battered copy of ‘UNCUT FUNK – THE BOMB’ I bought in 1986. I took this copy with me to see Funkadelic at the Liverpool O2 in 2018, but alas, it remains unsigned.
The reason I said ‘or so I thought’ above, is that 1986 was not the earliest year I’d encountered George Clinton’s music. This experience had been in 1983, although I was unaware. Upon my discovery of Street Sounds Electro 1 (which I have written about in plenty of locations), I hadn’t realized that the nine-and-a-half-minute epic opener to side-2, ‘Dog Talk’ by K-9 Corp, was cowritten (along with Lane Strickland, Garry Shider, and David Spradley) by George Clinton who also executive produced the one-off K-9 Corp project. I realised this upon hearing ‘Atomic Dog’, again, sometime in late 1986, four years after its single release. Having become absorbed in the Street Sounds / Streetwave labels since first hearing Electro 1, the ParliaFunkadelicMent holes were gradually being filled and links were being drawn, all be them secondary or via proxy: from Masquerade’s cover of ‘One Nation Under A Groove’ (retitled ‘One Nation’) in 1985 to EPMD’s sampling of it in ‘So Wat Cha Sayin’’ in 1989, the mid to late eighties were peppered with ParliaFunkadelicMent.
However, it was not until the dawn of the new decade that the key pieces of a the most multifarious musicological puzzle of ParliaFunkadelicMent began to become apparent, when I heard the UK-only LP Rhenium (released in 1990 on HDH which was set up to reissue material from Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Invictus and Hot Wax labels), which somehow strikes a fat chord which resonates with the murky, narrative-driven psych rock of Funkadelic’s early work and Parliament’s later character-led story telling meanderings, with more than blatant hints of doo wop, rock, blues, country and folk. Although classed as a compilation album, Rhenium contains a similar track listing to Parliament’s original 1970 album Osmium. Purists may scowl here, but for me, Rhenium is a more successful curation – not least as it contains the superb ‘Come In Out Of The Rain’, but also employing ‘Breakdown’ as its launchpad (side note: I almost had a brain spasm when I ‘Little Ole Country Boy’ dropped and I thought I was listening to De La Soul’s ‘Potholes In My Lawn’).
Both sides of the LP end with complex songs of great poignancy and a real sense of temporality in the condition of life. Rhenium also invited me to understand the relationship between Parliament and Ruth Copeland (both signed to Invictus), whose leading interpolation of Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D Major’ and the Pop Tops’ cover result in the incredibly moving ‘Oh Lord, Why Lord/Prayer’ which concludes side-1 with perfection. Yet, it was the closing out of side-2 that filled me with an unquantifiable mix of emotion, for (again) the Ruth Copeland-penned ‘The Silent Boatman’ hits every possible level of impossibility. While both Copeland and Parliament recorded versions of ‘The Silent Boatman’, it is Parliament’s that, for me, resonates with the greatest depth. In essence, a funk folk reimagining where, at the end of one’s life, The Silent Boatman is brought to the listener through acoustic guitar and a framing of a powerful voice, who sings:
It is said that when we leave this world
It we have suffered we will be saved
So I’ll lift up my head whoever I am
What I cannot do here there’s a place that I can
I’m waiting for the silent boatman
To ferry me across the unknown waters
In this life though I’ve tried
Many things couldn’t be
Closed minds with faces looking down onto me
Parting means grief but only for those left
All men descend into earth at the very same depth
I'm waiting for the silent boatman
To ferry me across the unknown waters
I wonder if in death man at last can love man
Stripped of all life’s gifts to him
No ego to remain
When you reach Jordan’s banks there’s no money
Power or fame
No third or second class the fare is all the same
I'm waiting for The Silent Boatman
To ferry me across the unknown waters
Notwithstanding the strength in these lyrics, it is the adaptation of William Ross’ ‘Cuachag nan Craobh’ (‘Cuckoo of the Tree’, later reframed as ‘The Skye Boat Song’) which slices through the song via bagpipes; this is most unexpected yet sits as the ideal sonic within the metaphor of passing.
As the needle slid across the dead wax and quietly swooshed with each revolution of the record, I sat in an otherwise silent world, and imagined reaching the other shore. I could have died in that moment.
My understanding of funk was never the same again, and so began a mission – which still continues – to explore every piece of work that George Clinton has been involved in, from The Black Vampire to The Big Bump, from Dolby’s Cube to The Goombas, from ‘Lonely Island / (You Make Me Wanna) Cry’ to ‘Straight From #1 Bimini Road (Dancin’ Down)’.
When we talk about the funk greats that have shaped hip hop, we often leap straight to James Brown, but we can never underestimate the superhuman force that is George Clinton.