(1978, Warner Brothers Records)
When I was a young teenage boy reading Hit Parader and RIP magazine like a little dork, there was some company based in Brooklyn that I can't remember at all, but basically you sent them money and a list of bands you liked and they mailed you records back. It was something like 4 LPs for $10, 9 for $20, 25 for $50, and 60 for $100. I never did those bigger ones, but I remember saving up poker money to do the 9 LP thing a few times. Everything you got was still shrink-wrapped, but it was all cutouts, meaning records sent back to the labels from record stores (called cutout because the corner was cut off, or had a hole punched in it), so a lot of it was variations on things you listed, and often times not that great. I think I got every Rossington-Collins Band album ever made, for example. Although I did get Neil Young's Trans, which sucked and I sold while in college, and of course now is some uber-genius Neil Young dabbles in electronica must-have and probably worth a billion dork dollars (which usually averages around $23 on ebay). So most of the stuff I got wasn't that stellar.
I did, however, get my first actual in-the-flesh taste of P-Funk, by getting this One Nation Under a Groove album, by the Funkadelic branch of P-Funk (the superior arm of their attack on lame whitey sensibilities, in my opinion). I mean, I knew of George Clinton, but rap music was still too busy looting James Brown's music to have gotten deep into the P-Funk pillage yet. But this album taught me about things I take for granted now. Wacky gatefold art, for example, which was, as I'm sure you've probably heard some fag on VH1 talk about by now, was an integral part of the P-Funk LP experience. But really, you could be high (or sober) and read that motherfucker for hours. Makes me wonder what great artistic treasures were lost from this American world by black people not doing enough psychedelic drugs.
As for the music itself, you know, a lot of funk - even P-Funk funk - is repetitive and kinda gay. But I did dig "Groovallegiance" a lot. And more importantly than the actual LP itself was the bonus 7", which included a live version of "Maggot Brain". People, especially inside the internets but without academic backing, tend to overanalyze music to try and explain how something can be emotionally great to us in such unexplainable ways. We are more scientist than religious and need everything figured out. I say all this because the live version of "Maggot Brain" is one of the greatest musical things ever and a perfect example of drug music as high art, because now that it has made such multi-molecular sense to me under the influence of various drugs, the guitar solo plucks at your brain and actually sounds like you are under the influence of thangs, somehow. There is no college professor who can teach you how to do this, and the internet is full of drug- and alcohol-free individuals who feel themselves an expert on this or that who will try to lay such things out for you in an understandable and self-important way. But you can't. I can tell you right now, I don't claim to know shit about shit. I probably should've googled this shit to make sure I had the songs spelled right or that it was actually a live version of "Maggot Brain" and not an alternate studio version or some shit. But I don't give a fuck. I knows what I knows, and I knows that this "Maggot Brain" contained therein this LP on that little bonus chunk of vinyl is one of the greatest goddamned things ever. And you can download it probably, but it won't come in the shitty ghetto comic book art-covered gatefold LP you could cut the seeds and stems out your reefer bag upon, nor will you give it the same chance, because you know of George Clinton and you just read what I just wroted about all this. That shit blind-sided me as a naive, unsuspecting kid, hip to the metal and punk and angsty whiteboy musics of the time, but not so much music made by black people above the age of 30 at that time. This album probably opened me up to where I ended up wanting to go to college, as opposed to going to the Winn Dixie to shoplift Mad Dog 20/20. It didn't really, but wouldn't a normal internet fag write some shit about how "This LP changed my life!"
A great sidenote to this is George Clinton's barely concealed crack addiction. I know of two situations (second-hand) where young fanboy people saw Clinton doing crack, personally. One time, this dude who was attending to extra details for James Madison had to go pick up Clinton and others from the airport to drive them to the campus for a college concert. Clinton asks the kid, "You mind if I smoke?" Kid says no, but roll the window down it's a campus vehicle. So Clinton rolls the window down, riding through a small town, and fires up a crack pipe, right there in the JMU ride. The other time, this goofy kid who was like the only artsy kid at shitty private Hampden-Sydney College where tomorrow's white overlords lord over grades today, he got to design the outfit Clinton wore to another college concert (Clinton obviously knows how to keep his hustle going, and where the money is at for drugged-out meandering black hippie music), and he got to take the outfit to Clinton at the Comfort Inn, which at the time was the nicest hotel in Farmville, Virginia. Going into the "suite", the college kid, all stoked to meet an idol and give him a carefully created outfit, basically just had to drop it on the bed while Clinton and others sat around the table smoking crack rather obviously. These stories fill me with joy, because white kids (myself included when I was one) are naive as fuck, and crack is always seen as such a debilitating downtrodden drug. It's nice to hear about examples of successful people, financially artistically and otherwise, enjoying that hardened chemical form of cocaine which is mostly demonized by the lame ass media.
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