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| Bootsy Collins |
I've been watching a documentary on P-Funk, and there's a big section on the influence of the group on other groups that makes me think of their influence on us in this project.
I think P-Funk, Frank Zappa, and Devo were the first major bands in my life that made me love high-concept in music. I've seen P-Funk and its different permutations more than any other group in my life. The best show I ever saw was Bootsy's New Rubber Band at Industry in Pontiac. I was in the front row, and Bootsy saw I was so into it, he came down off of the stage mid-song and hugged me, then hopped back on stage. I was baptized in Bootsy sweat. At one point, he told us all he was going to run around the room and and hug everybody. He said his security guards said you can't do that--you need protection. He said this is Detroit. These are my people. They're all the protection I need. At the end of the show, they shut off all the instruments and led us in a chant of "Keep the funk alive." All the members of the band came off the stage and gave the women in the audience roses. They left in darkness. There was no encore--we wanted one, but we also knew there was no way to add to what they already put on stage.
I think that story plays into our desire in the project to bring everybody into it...to turn people into characters in the drama. So much of the framework of P-Funk is rooted in this idea that artists must draw people into a total environment (visual art, music, ritual, writing, etc.) that incessantly shines a flashlight on the falsity of the world we live in and guides people toward the transcendent. Allegory, myth-making, and ritual draw people into the mothership that guides people toward the transcendent...they meet people in both places that we all live and make us look at both...the earthly and the heavenly. I think my desire to take on a character is rooted to some extent in Starchild and Sir Nose. Will is largely a Sir Nose character, and Will and Arthur's story is sort of an inversion of the story of Sir Nose and Starchild...through much of the story, instead of Starchild curing Sir Nose by hitting him with the Bop Gun, our Sir Nose zaps our Starchild with electroconvulsive therapy after years of trying to keep him from swimming. But the two stories will end up the same...our Sir Nose is eventually horrified by his actions and repents and tries to follow the lead of the mangled Starchild.
I was listening to "The Doo Doo Chasers" this morning, and it is interesting to me how in Funkadelian terms, our project is a bit constipated. Free your mind and your ass will follow, but in our case, it seems like we let our minds wander really, really free, and as I've mentioned before, they too frequently detach from our asses. There's something in George Clinton's model where he just constantly was in motion, writing music, recording performing...and then within all of that action, the ideas came together and grew around the action. Our action tends to follow the thought, but our thought to action ratio is very high to very low--or the thought is the action, in the case of the blog. I'm really excited for the album. I really liked the last show, too--it had that atmosphere of total involvement, or close to total involvement for the people who didn't leave after Iceland! Even that is a type of involvement, though...the first show didn't have that as much, and the open mic was kind of a spectacle--sit back and watch the weirdos until the next acoustic guitar act comes up (which was also super fun--don't get me wrong!). I think that idea of Arthur White vacation tours makes a ton of sense. I also wonder about how most of our medium is the Internet and small stage rather than the radio, record player, and concert hall.
I should get to work. There's more to think about, though.
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