Customer Reviews

For the Record 5: George Clinton & P-Funkadelic

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Being that I am a hardcore Parliament-Funkadelic fan, I found this book to be a bit of a dissapointment. It was hard to keep up with what year the editor was going into. The book reads very fast and seems crammed. Each chapter covered at least 5 years at a time. However, being that there has never been a book written about George Clinton and P-Funk, this book is definitely entertaining, informing and revealing. It was good to read what other members takes are on P-Funk. Interesting insights were the introduction of George to Bootsy, quarrels within the band, the competition between the Brides of Funkenstein and Parlet, and how the band broke up. I personally would have liked to know more about the relationships between the musicians, especially clinton/collins/worrell, and Lynn Mabry, an original bride, seems to be absent from the book. I also would have liked to know how George and the other members of the band to talk about how they wrote and formed some of their biggest hits. I especially would have liked them to comment on the concepts of hits like "P-Funk (Wants to get funked up)" "Dr. Funkenstein" and "Sir Nose D'Voiddoffunk". All-n-all, this book should be read by all HARDCORE P-Funk fans until something better comes along.

Peace El-715

loved this book loys of info aboput the band, but my fault was i wanted more details about about the group, and what made them inspire to write the p-funk hits, how george really felt about his material being sampled. what are plans for the mob. george was interesting, bootsy was,nt given enough space. but not a bad place for those who want to learn about p-funk. but will leave funkateers craving more knowledge.this book really needs to be updated. it seems some stuff was left out.

I thought the book gave a brief but to the point over view of how the funk mob got started. It was ok but it left out the names of some of the players of the funk ie.. Sheila Horn,Jessica Cleaves Steve Washington,Mickey Atkins to name a few. The funk is long deep and wide.

What you get with this slim book is mostly paragraph-long chunks of oral history interviews with 50 or so of the personalities associated with the P-Funk crew. These chunks are arranged in a loose chronological order, and the only other contextual information you get is chapter titles made out of song lyrics and some black and white photos. The photos often have no relation to the nearby text, and are mostly from a frustratingly small window of time in the late 70s.

There's surprisingly few documentary products about Parliament-Funkadelic, and those that exist are sometimes hard to find, so if you're interested in their story, you have to read this book. I certainly have a better understanding of the Funk Mob now, more so than I was getting from what you can find on the web. Some of the stories are hilarious, and the interviewees are often insightful and seem to be pretty honest. This is an important, minimalist, self-reflexive record of the groups' histories, without much author bias (you get editor bias - the selection and arrangement of quotes).

That said, a more comprehensive P-Funk biography would greatly benefit from a more coherent voice from a single author and from the kind of details that a diligent researcher would use to contextualize the group members' quotes. As noted by other reviewers, there are big gaps in the narrative (the "Electric Spanking..." album isn't mentioned at all, for instance).

Going into the book, I was particularly interested in the musical mechanics of the band. I mean, these guys cut more than 20 albums in about a decade, plus touring! That's an insane work ethic, and seemingly impossible if you consider the amount of drugs that were being consumed. What I was really hoping for was more of a cut-by-cut, album-by-album, tour-by-tour explanation of how that incredible output was realized, with details about songwriting and arranging and tour managing. That's not what you get with this book. What you get mostly is how people got involved, how they left (or stayed), who they liked, and who they didn't. And then a Clinton quote is inserted to summarize something.

For a quick ride on the Mothership, find a cheap used copy of this book, and devour it on a weekend beach trip. Enjoy it for what it is, but keep your expectations low...