As Chris Richards of the Washington Post once wrote, Parliament’s Mothership stage element “might be the most awe-inspiring stage prop in the history of American music.”

The Mothership made its first appearance on the cover of Parliament’s 1975 album Mothership Connection, although the stage element didn’t much resemble the UFO object on the album cover, as you can see.
 

 
On WNYC’s show “Soundcheck” recently, Clinton reminisced about the Mothership:
 

When I told him [Dave Kapralik] after we got the hit record, you don’t get paid for records in the tail end anyway but you can get help with promotion. I said, “buy me this spaceship,” and I didn’t have to finish the sentence. He went and got me a loan from the bank for a million dollars. Jules Fisher built the spaceship, did all the costuming. I told him we wanted to be able to land it on the stage…It was a funk opera.

We landed the spaceship at five o’clock in the morning right in Times Square, right in front of the Coca Cola sign. With no permit in ‘77. The only person who came out was Murray the K, the DJ. He was ripped, he was drunk. He said, “Dr. Funkenstein, welcome to planet Earth. I am Murray the K, the fifth Beatle.” It transported us for 10 years all the way up to “Atomic Dog.”

 
Jules Fisher had been David Bowie’s tour producer and was also responsible for the stage concept for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 tour. He designed the Mothership, which was 20 feet in diameter. His designs for the Mothership currently reside at the Rock Hall’s Library and Archives, which is located at the Tommy LiPuma Center for Creative Arts on Cuyahoga Community College’s Metropolitan Campus in Cleveland, Ohio. Fisher graciously agreed to grant Dangerous Minds permission to reproduce these original sketches for the Mothership.

The first appearance of the Mothership was in New Orleans on October 27, 1976—but they made a basic mistake by using it at the start of the show instead of in its natural spot as a show-ender. Nothing could follow the Mothership. They soon made the necessary adjustments. The Mothership’s lifespan as a stage element lasted five years, with its last appearance occurring at the last Parliament-Funkadelic show in Detroit in 1981. (According to this listing of P-Funk concerts, at a 1981 gig in Washington, George Clinton emerged from the Mothership naked! Can anyone confirm this?)

Click on any of the images for a larger view.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
The “Bop Gun” was an imaginary weapon, theorized by George Clinton, leader of Parliment, on their 1977 album, Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome”. The “Bop Gun” would fill the being of the soulless automatons moving robotically through modern life with FUNK and dancing would be inevitable.

You’ll note that I wrote that it “was” an imaginary weapon. Now someone’s gone and built a real “Bop Gun”—it can yours for a mere $1200:

Finally the conundrum of the universes’ missing funk has an answer: BOP GUN.

5 mixed squarewave oscillators allow for rapid phase matching and total funky collapse of even the most complex wave functions!

LFO modulates filter! All oscillators, LFO and filter are controlled by global attack/decay functions at the pull of a trigger! INVERT function allows for continuous function for those situations requiring fancy long-term funkic interventions. Funkify traffic! Passers-by! Bar Mitzvahs! The sky!

LED feedback ring at the business end reacts to funk levels, providing photonic enhancement in attractive aqua green tones. Extra-sweet readout panel provides incomprehensible feedback from selected functions. Audio output jack included, and batteries fit in the handle.

 
Below, Glen Goins, the Parliament singer famous for “calling in the Mothership” during their elaborate concerts, explains the “Bop Gun” concept to this Houston crowd during a 1977 performance:
 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
Sad news from Cincy is that Bootsy’s older brother Phelps Collins has lost his battle with cancer. This comes shortly after the equally bumming news of fellow Funkadelic guitarist Gary Shider’s passing.

The always-smiling rhythm guitarist started a band called the Pacemakers in 1968 and were soon scouted and picked up by James Brown to back him up. The brothers would record such classics as “Super Bad,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine,” “Soul Power,” and “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” before it became too much to deal with the Godfather. Then it was on to a wonderful decade with Parliament-Funkadelic and Bootsy’s Rubber Band, lacing masterpieces like “Flashlight” with his brightly sparking chikka-chikka. Phelps spent most of the past 20 years away from music, surfacing occasionally to play with groups like Deeee-lite and on soundtracks like Superbad.

He got some here at the famous L’Olympia with the JB’s in 1971, just before he and Bootsy said bye-bye to the Hardest Working Man…
 

 
After the jump: the bad-ass sounds of Phelps and Bootsy in ‘71 in between their tenures with the JBs and Parliament-Funkadelic!!
 

 
It’s with heavy hearts that we come upon news of the death at 56 years too-young of Funkadelic guitarist, writer and arranger Garry “Diaper Man” Shider.

As a teen in the late ‘60s, Shider first linked up with the visionary funkateer George Clinton at a barber shop in his native Plainfield, NJ where Clinton rehearsed his doo-wop group the Parliaments. He joined Clinton’s guitar section in 1971 and ended up writing and performing on some of Parliament Funkadelic’s classics, including “One Nation Under a Groove” and “Cosmic Slop.” Unlike many of his peers, Shider was able to smoothly navigate his bluesy, psychedelic style over the insistent thump of most of the Funkadelic repertoire.

He’s also the guitarist who’s stuck with Funkadelic’s exhausting touring schedule the longest.

Let us remember him in his 20-year-old glory here in a promo for his best-known composition (on which he sang lead), dressed in trademark diaper and Roman centurion-style cape with feathered shoulder shells.  

 
Before records labels like Slash and Dangerhouse came along to consume my youth, there was, of course, Casablanca Records.  With KISS, Meatloaf, Parliament and Donna Summer under its roof, the label straddled a number of seemingly incongruous musical worlds.

But as the LA Weekly’s Gustavo Turner points out in his review of Larry Harris’ new book And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records, these worlds were all linked, albeit tenuously at times, by Casablanca’s visionary-in-chief (and Harris’ cousin), Neil Bogart.  A genius at both label promotion and self-indulgence, Bogart passed away from cancer in ‘82, but not before becoming one of the defining figures of the ‘70s.  Here’s a snip from Turner’s review:

They struck gold, big-time ?