Fifty Years Of Mothership Connection

Tiggerlion on Mothership Connection by Parliament released 15th December 1975

George Clinton set up The Parliaments in 1956 to sing doo-wop. After all, once upon a time he did run a barbership, The Silk Palace in Plainfield New Jersey. A very young church-going Bernie Worrell defied his mother to spend time there listening to the street jive of the staff and future group members, Fuzzy Haskins, Calvin Simon and Grady Thomas. They almost signed to Motown and Clinton was taken on as a staff songwriter for a brief period. He finally gave up the day job in 1967 when (I Wanna) Testify became a hit. He was able to put together a substantial touring group, five musicians and five vocalists, but their record label Revilot went bust and he lost the rights to the band name. Though consisting of the same personnel, Funkadelic was an entire change of brand: funk and psychedelic rock blended together, inspired by Are You Experienced, Sgt Pepper, We’re Only In It For The Money and A Whole New Thing. “Making art out of nonsense”, as in I Am The Walrus, was a particular fascination and LSD helped facilitate their imaginations. They had a strong, consistent rhythmic groove throughout their lengthy tracks. The vocals were tight. The immersive musical adventure came from the bass, keyboards and a horn section. Funkadelic had the remarkable Eddie Hazell whose rock guitar was both heavy and nimble, able to solo for a ten full minutes and still keep the audience enthralled, as best demonstrated on the title track of Maggot Brain. Funkadelic were happy to perform to largely white, rock audiences, gigging with MC5, Iggy & The Stooges and Ted Nugent, quickly establishing a reputation for psychedelic freak outs.

When Clinton had won back the rights to the name The Parliaments, he shortened it to Parliament and he had two bands with shared personnel, giving him the freedom to explore outlandish concepts. He started by imaging black people in unusual settings, such as The White House for the album Chocolate City. It wasn’t long before he conceived of afronauts and set off for outer space. According to Bootsy Collins, the concept came about when he and Clinton saw a UFO one night. “We were in the Bermuda triangle, we were fishing and getting high and the mothership concept came.” In the early seventies, there was a cynicism among Afro-Americans that the Apollo programme was consuming millions of dollars that should be spent on the disadvantaged, particularly black people, an idea expressed on Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey On The Moon in 1970. Elijah Mohammed of The Nation Of Islam drilled home the point in 1973. A black astronaut was unimaginable. Sun Ra thought of space as being the place where black people could unify in enjoying a utopia. Lonnie Liston Smith and his Cosmic Echoes merged jazz and funk to expand into inner and outer space in a spiritual quest. Clinton, however, took the ghetto, warts and all, with him. These were collective adventures, far from the solitary experience of a Major Tom.

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the cultural branch of the larger black power movement. Their purpose was to use art to enable black people to picture themselves beyond the dictates of white racism, and create a world in which black people had control over their own lives. Clinton came under pressure from both BAM and The Nation Of Islam to participate actively, but he never lost sight of the fact that his primary purpose was to entertain and he always wanted to appeal to the biggest audience possible, including white people. He created a mythology and an alternative black universe as BAM desired, but it was as lowbrow as it was highbrow, exploiting and mocking racial stereotypes. It was all about the party, and, somehow, that involved a souped up pimp emerging from a space ship as a glorious climax to a live show. The guitarist wore just an over-sized nappy. Day-glo hotpants, floor-length white fur coats and sunglasses were an essential part of Parliament and Funkadelic’s expression of identity, defiance, and creativity. As usual, there was method in Clinton’s madness. Not only was the mothership inspired by Star Trek but also Elijah Muhammad’s interpretations of the visions of Ezekiel and the chariot that carried him to heaven, symbolising the escape from oppression during the Civil Rights movement. In Clinton’s mythology, the Mothership is a science fiction version of the chariot, representing a shedding of earthly troubles and transporting us all, black and white, to the joy of dance.

The 1974 Parliament reboot refashioned funk as P-Funk, Pure Funk. However, this funk isn’t in the frenetic, sweaty, intense James Brown style. It’s sumptuous, laidback, bottom heavy and playful. Bass player Bootsy Collins was hired after leaving The J.Bs in 1972. He brought The One. The bass enters the body first. Bootsy was extraordinary, seemingly possessing four hands, one pair carrying the melody and the other bringing huge ballast. Clinton referred to him as Da Bomb with good reason. He could make the most solid concrete floor vibrate with dancers, never losing track of the rhythm no matter how much he improvised, always returning to The One. Clinton already had a legendary syncopatic drummer in Ramon Tiki Fulwood but Jerome “Big Foot” Brailey was an impressive new recruit who could also dig deep into the hollow secrets of a groove. Unlike Funkadelic, there are no guitar freak outs either. For Mothership Connection, long-term faithful Gary Shider is on guitar and vocals, and Michael Hampton and Glen Goins play additional guitar, as does Bootsy. The Brecker Brothers, Michael and Randy, join the former J.B.’s Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker, in what must be the richest, deepest, finest horn section ever to grace a non-jazz group. Bootsy plays drums, too, and Ray Cooper, who must have played with everyone in the seventies, adds his flamboyant percussion. The secret ingredient was Bernie Worrell, a fabulous keyboard player but also a skilled arranger. Add to that a vocal army that included original Parliaments doo-wop alumni Grady Thomas, Calvin Simon, Fuzzy Haskins, and Ray Davis and Clinton finally had the rhythm section, the band and the vocalists to realise his vision.

P-Funk is fuelled by the groove and can be seen as a rejection of harmonic linearity and resolution, turning away from the European white man’s music and embracing African rhythms. It is music to move the body, meant to be felt rather than heard. Everything happens below the waist. Free your ass and your mind will follow. These aren’t songs as such and deliberately so. Clinton referred to them as Jams. The melodies, such as there are, are simple and the choruses more like chants. In tune based songs, the interest is created by the flow of the melody, the variety of notes, verses and choruses, perhaps the drama of a key change. The human ear can easily forgive the odd dropped note or missed beat when carried along by an overall sense of narrative. However, the ass is acutely aware of the most minor error in a groove. The musicians have to be focussed and possess outstanding powers of concentration, yet appear utterly relaxed. Tight but loose. These arrangements are as taut as a pair of hot pants and the grooves’ repetition reveal their detailed intricacies, giving the impression of a rhythm that is constantly changing and evolving, when it mostly stays the same. Any changes are subtle and primarily intended to keep those bodies moving. A multitude add handclaps and other rhythmic noises. There are seventeen voices on Mothership Connection, weaved into a smooth, rich, deep blend, often acting as additional percussion. The musicians are so skilled, so wedded to the groove, the bass, the horns, the keyboards and individual vocalists can take turns in wild extemporisations and still keep on The One in perfect syncopation. Funk physically triggers the neurotransmitters in the brain. The effect on the dopamine response, oxytocin, serotonin and the release of endorphins make us feel no pain and in harmony with everybody else dancing. The rhythm takes over and you become one with the groove. It is all about individuals connecting with their bodies, connecting with each other and joining together, as a single entity, in dance. The result is similar to an orgasm or a rapture. Funk is physically and mentally transcendent. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

P-Funk (Wants To Gets Funked Up) sets out the stall, a statement of intent delivered by Clinton in out-of-this-world DJ mode, from a radio station on a different planet. Clinton claims, with justification, that funk can cure all ills, like arthritis and rheumatism (“Funk not only moves, it re-moves!”). Funk as a route to physical bliss. He also has a few cheeky digs at less-funky peers winning radio play at the time, such as Main Ingredient, Doobie Brothers, and David Bowie (pronounced Boo-eee). Bootsy’s thick basslines coil around the music, which is largely constructed by Worrell, deploying his classical training and alien, out-of-this-world synthesiser and keyboard atmospherics. “P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) was definitely classically influenced,” says Worrell. “I did the horn arrangements and played the strings on this record. See, my thing is mixing musical genres. It’s really something I love to do.” Musically, the song is relatively low-key as Clinton jives or the horns take a solo, then erupts into a full funk ensemble piece, played by the complete band backed by the drug-inflected chants of “Make my funk the P-Funk, I wants to get funked up” or “I want my funk uncut” that must have made little Bernie’s mom’s hair curl. 

Track two describes the holy Mothership’s arrival, piloted by the Star Child. Its melody is based on the spiritual Swing Low Sweet Chariot, specifically The Golden Gate Quartet’s irreverant version of it, taking us back to Clinton’s barbershop. Part of it is in a Medieval Phrygian mode, dating back to the early Catholic Church. However, the root notes are in unexpected places and without chords to anchor the listener, the melody floats. A second part is in a blues scale with a clear chord progression, a more conventional structure, giving strength to the singers at key moments. This combination and variation on church and blues was extraordinarily powerful to African Americans at the time. Most of the vocal is a rap, but the singing is carefully harmonised and individuals emerge from the choir to deliver a solo line, especially towards the last minute or so. Jerome Brailey introduces a slight but crucial variation in the rhythm. For the most part, he plays a 4/4 backbeat, as Bruno Mars deploys on Uptown Funk. Then, when the melody floats, he puts in a kick a fraction before the third beat. It’s a subtle change that your mind is not consciously aware of but your ass notices immediately. That little nudge changes the momentum giving your ass the impetus to keep dancing, taking all the vocals, keyboards, horns and bass with it. The overall effect is dreamy and out of this world, making Mothership Connection (Star Child) a consummate title track. Musically, rhythmically, spiritually, culturally, politically, conceptually, philosophically it is a quintessentially African American. Glenn Goins’ sweet-voiced gospel incantation: “Swing down sweet chariot and let…me…ride!” combines an intergalactic groove with a metaphysical revelation. Clinton’s reconstruction of Black traditions amounts to a revolution on this track alone.

Unfunky UFO is an unwelcome visit by aliens from a planet dying because it lacks funk. It’s the track closest to rock on the whole album. Naturally, the drumming and the bass are superlative and irresistibly funky despite the song’s title. The lead vocals are the best on the whole album, rotating through four different voices, Goins being the most distinctive, yearning desperately for the groove that will make us feel so much better. Funk is the best medicine. The choir’s response is beautiful and assertive. In the middle of the mayhem, the horns, guitar and keyboards remain remarkably disciplined, allowing the spotlight to remain on the outstanding singers.

Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication (The Bumps Bump) opens side two with a buoyant, springing groove, Worrell’s synthesiser turned up to maximum cheese, the bass in squelch mode, the percussionists playing with cartoon-noise instruments and Ray ‘Sting Ray’ Davies’s impossibly bass voice the main feature. “Throw down. Baby, do the throw down.” The chant is happy and celebratory, the rhythm light on its feet, the instrumentation quirky and the vocal weave mesmeric. “Give the people what they want and they wants it all the time.” It is possible to pick out individual vocal threads but this is unmistakenly a party, one that anyone can join, the audience as active a participant as the band or the singers. These types of chants are often heard in kirtans, where Hindu mantras are repeated over and over in a quest for enlightenment. “The chants are like church grooves that get you in that state where you’re receptive to opening up your mind and coming up with positive things,” Clinton told Songfacts. Funk is a mindful therapy that expands horizons, the chants acting as affirmations, utilising the power of manifestation to elevate people, to make them better. However, just as importantly, “We do a lot of nonsensical stuff that’s just fun.” This is Clinton’s vision, thematically and physically, in one simple song and it is ecstatic.

Clinton chose to follow a song of such joyful disinhibition with the album’s only misstep. Handcuffs is not the kind of song that would be released today, except, perhaps, by a rapper deliberately courting controversy. The titular handcuffs are used by a man to keep his woman under lock and key. His possessive control is unrelenting. Reference is made to keeping her barefoot and pregnant and victim-blaming: her creature-like lovin’ is at fault. It is largely written by 21 year old Goins, whose vocal is a tour de force, and Janet McLaughlin. At Motown, George Clinton wrote for many women in his early days, with sensitively and respect, both absent from Handcuffs. He was more than aware of the rise of Black feminism in the seventies, a movement that focussed on the unique challenges for Black women facing both racism and misogyny. P-Funk had two primary female led vocal groups, Parlet and Brides of Funkenstein, both of which launched in 1978, and are very much the similar and respective counterparts to Parliament and Funkadelic. Women led many more efforts within the P-Funk empire but Clinton had considerable difficulty in releasing control. The Handcuffs’ lyric does not fit with the party space alien theme and neither does the music, which is clunky and deeply unfunky. Its only redeeming feature, beside the quality lead vocal and some nice horn licks, is the length. It is the shortest on the album at just four minutes. If Clinton had removed Handcuffs and stretched the tracks either side of it by a good minute each, nobody would miss it.

Fortunately, Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker) is euphoric, the definitive P-Funk track. In the context of the Mothership Connection narrative, it represents the climax of an alien invasion where the aliens, desperate for funk, threaten to take it from Earth, Earth being the only source of funk in the universe. Funk is not just a genre of music but a unifying and liberating force that brings people together and transcends boundaries. Sting Ray’s bass is the only distinctive voice “Tear the roof off the sucker…” anchoring the rhythm for the whole track. In fact, it uses a jazz construction, beginning with three themes introduced and explored separately which are then woven together. Jerome Brailey has a composer credit because his drumming is so infectious and multi-faceted. “There’s a whole lot of rhythm going round,” indeed. He is absolutely precise and yet never rushed, doubling and tripling under the solos during the breakdown, where, this time, he is a fraction behind the beat, giving the momentum and flow a little push. The interplay between horns and keyboards is masterful and Bootsy lets rip at the halfway point. The vocal blend is utterly gorgeous, truly a thing of beauty. It is a performance designed purely to encourage listeners to dance, celebrate, and embrace the joy of music, an anthem for funk lovers everywhere.

Finally, the transformation is complete and everyone is funkified, up and high through the whole of The Night Of The Thumpasoras Peoples. The horns carry the melody, Tiki Fulwood keeps the rhythm ticking along, Bootsy’s bass is at its most wet and sloppy and Worrell has a ball, essentially soloing for almost the whole track without getting a writing credit. Instead, Gary Shider does, whose guitar is barely audible. Perhaps he came up with the lyric “Gaga googa ga ga googa.” The vocalists have fun with the nonsense lyric, calling and responding, as if the aliens are trying to talk to the humans in their own language. It’s a fittingly simple, upbeat and funky number to close the album.

As the LP was being recorded and the concept developed, Clinton knew he needed a spaceship for the cover. Manager Charlie Bassoline was despatched to a Los Angeles prop shop where he found the original spacehip from the 1951 sci-fi movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still. It looks great in the photo but it was never going to be adequate for the stage show. Clinton was determined to tour. He has never claimed to be some kind of guru, he just wanted to be the biggest and best. “The Who, David Bowie, Rolling Stones. I’d seen them all do those big shows, big productions, and I wanted to do one with funk music,” Clinton said. “I wanted to have a prop that not only was deeper than anything that any black group had done but bigger than any white group had done.”

In 1976, with Mothership Connection and its singles achieving platinum sales, The P-Funk Earth Tour had a budget of over $275,000, the largest ever for a black act. For set design he turned to Jules Fisher, a Tony Award-winning lighting designer whose work included Jesus Christ Superstar and Chicago and tours for KISS and The Rolling Stones. The set and props for Earth Tour included a fog-belching Mothership, a Rolls Royce, a pyramid, and a huge quantity of fireworks. The band also purchased Aerosmith’s sound equipment and had seven truckloads of costumes, lights, and animated props. They had to use KISS’s private rehearsal space, an aircraft hanger in Newburgh, New York, to practise for three weeks. The show demanded that the band, famous for its onstage looseness and improvisations that could stretch a four-minute studio song into a 20-minute jam, play and move with discipline. With large props moving around, the performers needed to be carefully choreographed and scripted. Clinton put Maceo Parker in charge. “Anybody from the James Brown bands,” Clinton said “…can pretty much run shit.”

On the first night of The Earth Tour, Oct. 26, 1976, at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans, they discovered that the show’s “script” was all wrong. The mothership landed at the start and it proved to be a premature climax. By the next show, the mothership landing came near the concert’s end. With that change, audience excitement and anticipation soared. Goins’ vocal pleading with the audience to join him in calling for the mothership during the gospel funk of Swing Down, Sweet Chariot transformed the live show into a spiritual awakening. The mothership lands, Brailey’s thumping foot on the bass drum, the audience clapping as one, then screams and Clinton as Dr. Funkenstein emerges from the spaceship. It was rapturous.

Mothership Connection and the P-Funk Earth Tour were the culmination of all of Clinton’s ideas, mythology, production techniques, complex vocal blends, superlative musicianship, intricate rhythms and cultural impact. Rickey Vincent, a lecturer in African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the 1996 book Funk The Music, The People, And the Rhythm of The One, put it succinctly; “George can say he was just clowning, but at the same time he understands the ethos of soul music, and that is to put black people in a better place. You don’t have to be an ethnomusicologist to understand a lot of underlying themes in black music into the ’70s was ‘We’re going to be free.’ You can’t get much freer than outer space and reclaiming the power that came with building pyramids in Africa.” In recognition of its cultural importance, a replica of the original mothership anchors the Musical Crossroads exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

It couldn’t last. Managing such a large number of disparate creatives proved too much. Many of them left Clinton in 1977 to form funk off-shoots of their own. Glenn Goins succumbed to Hodgkin’s Lymphoma aged 24. Nevertheless, Clinton’s empire continued to expand. Both Flashlight, P-Funk’s biggest hit, and One Nation Under A Groove, the only one to chart in the UK, were released in 1978. The One Nation/Anti-Tour show found its way to Europe and the Birmingham Odeon in December 1978. Their record company, Casablanca, collapsed and there were legal issues over the band names, however, The P-Funk All Stars Atomic Dog Tour in 1983 was probably live P-Funk at its best. Otherwise, Clinton continued to release solo albums accompanied by a decline in sales. He suffered the effects of financial disputes over royalties and song ownership. In the early nineties, the emergence of G-Funk, gangsta funk, a sub-genre of West Coast gangsta rap, meant he was finally getting paid for the samples they used of his music and he was old enough and sensible enough not to waste it. G-Funk also led him into numeous collaborations with the likes of Lil’ Kim, Tupac, Ice Cube, Outkast, Redman, Killah Priest, Wu Tang Clan, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus.

George Clinton achieved his goal, scoring a success as great as any Rock act on the planet, appealing to a white audience as much as a black one. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 and received the GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. In June 2025 Clinton was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Mothership Connection is the best realisation of his philosophy. For all its apparent madness, it is an album that is good for your health, relaxing the mind, energising the body, warming the heart and feeding the soul. Science proves that its funk is the best holistic method of improving wellbeing, giving a sense of total positivity, community, friendship, physicality with that dopamine rush. P-Funk feels like an extraordinary human experience, one of joy and celebration that we are lucky to be here at all. It reminds us why we are alive. Mothership Connection should be available on prescription.

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