Dr Funkenstein has no shoes. Onstage at the YouTube Theater in Inglewood, Los Angeles, 81-year-old funk trailblazer George Clinton looks so comfortable strolling around in bare feet that he could be in his living room at home. The rest of his outfit is considerably less understated: a sea captain’s hat covered in pearls and bedazzled robes give him the appearance of a human glitter ball, which isn’t entirely inaccurate.
It’s now 66 years since Clinton formed doo-wop group The Parliaments in the back room of a barber shop in Plainfield, New Jersey. After a spell as a staff songwriter for Motown in the Sixties, Clinton went on to give the sound of funk a revolutionary, acid-drenched makeover in the Seventies with his twin groups Parliament and Funkadelic. Incorporating psychedelic jazz, Detroit punk and Jimi Hendrix-style guitar pyrotechnics, Clinton’s brand of P-Funk produced a string of huge hits that continue to be heavily sampled by pop and hip-hop producers to this day. Meanwhile, his bands’ theatrical, science fiction-influenced live shows became the stuff of legend. The P-Funk Mothership, a UFO stage prop used in stadium concerts during the Seventies, is now preserved for posterity at Washington DC’s Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
