Since my favourite musician of all time, George Clinton, is on tour again with Parliament/Funkadelic outside of Germany, I’m posting an English translation of my home story as well.(I wrote this when I was working as a music journalist here is the original German version( ) .) The remaining tour dates of George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic:Monday, Sept. 1: Oslo( )Tuesday/Wednesday, Sept. 2⁄3: Amsterdam( )Thursday, Sept. 4: Tilburg( )Friday, Sept. 5: Århus( )Saturday, Sept, 6: Warsaw( )Sunday, Sept. 7: Newport( ) ******* Funky FarmerPhoto link: morning at 5 a.m. on the funky farm: sputter sputter zang boom crash. Strange sounds are emanating from the hall. A few minutes later George Clinton stands in the living room: «Damn, not even 4000 points! When I’m that bad, I know that it’s time to quit. Good night!» A last disappointed look at the Galaxian video game, and Clinton disappears into the bedroom. In the neighborhood the first cocks are crowing. A few hours earlier at Detroit airport: When George Clinton picks me up in the arrival hall, quite a few people are turning their heads. Somehow he doesn’t fit in here, into the crowd of bustling briefcase types and suitcase-dragging tourists. What the airport folks think of him doesn’t matter to Clinton. That’s because he doesn’t play a role, he is the way he looks — what you see is what you get. George Clinton is funk music’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: About 50 miles out of Detroit a metamorphosis happens — Dr. Funkenstein, the workaholic who is busy in three Detroit studios at the same time, changes into George, the playful link: starts to get restless when he thinks about all the adventures that are waiting for him at home on the farm: The Galaxian game invites to thrilling battles with invaders from outer space, races can be held on the floor with a fleet of toy cars, and when it gets too confined in the inside at one in the morning, he can work off his energies on a cross-country ride on the Honda link: just have a cartoon brain,” says Clinton who approaches his music with the same witty playfulness. His albums are like Cracker-Jack boxes: You never know what you’ll get, but you can be sure that there are going to be only very few disappointments and all the more nice surprises. «Inspired madman or complete jackass?», an English music paper once asked. Does he actually want to be taken seriously? A deep drag from one of the ever-present special cigarettes, and he replies: «I don’t care. If you approach something too seriously people can figure you out too easily, and soon they’re not interested in you anymore. At this point you’re over the hill. I prefer to be a constant creative nuisance!» Clinton is controversial and commercial at the same time. His current hit album R&B SKELETONSINTHECLOSET puts a finger on several sore spots of the black music scene. In the title song Clinton turns against certain black crossover artists who take their bleached sounds so far into pop music that they can’t return to their roots any more(«They’re crossing over and can’t get black»). Which of course will never happen to the heavy funk of our man from Detroit. With suggestive hints at hamburger commercials, freaked-out backwards bass, hot trumpet blasts and a mighty computer beat the recent single«Do Fries Go With That Shake» became a hit in the USA. The result: Clinton is heavily in demand as producer again. But the record companies and acts who wanted a piece of the ’86 P-Funk pie(«p» as in «pure») suddenly encountered Dr. Funkenstein — who couldn’t wait to change back into the farmer Mr. Clinton again. One day he just stepped onto a plane and flew back to Detroit. Back to the farm — which consists of wide-spread lands, some of which Clinton leases to a farmer for corn growing, two fish-ponds which provide dinner from time to time, and a large private wood with a winding cross-country course which is perfect for nightly bike runs. And then there’s the spacious house where Clinton has been living for seven years — together with his wife Stephanie to whom he has been married for ten years, cat Tommy, and lots of stuffed link:
