Hole-ee-shit… There’s really not all that much footage in existence of the early years of Funkadelic, but what there is tends to be pretty fucking amazing. And so it’s my pleasure to whip this one on you, dear Dangerous Minds reader, because this short promo film was a totally new one on me as of this early AM. Not only that, it’s for one of my very top favorite Funkadelic tracks, “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks.”
 

 
The lead vocalist here is William “Billy Bass” Nelson the original bassist for Funkadelic, and also the first band member to get pissed off enough about money—or lack of it making it into his pocket—to tell George Clinton where to stick it (the first of many, of course). Nelson was originally going to be the group’s guitarist, but opted for the bass post instead when his pal the amazing Eddie Hazel came aboard the Mothership.

According to the Maggot Brain Wikipedia page, the class conscious lyrics of “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” one of the album’s singles, might’ve been inspired by an old folk rhyme first published in Thomas W. Talley’s book Negro Folk Rhymes (Wise or Otherwise) in 1922:

If you and your folks love me and my folks
Like me and my folks love you and your folks
If there ever was folks
That ever ever was poor.

 

 
One of the YouTube commenters speculates that this was shot in Bermuda and mentions something about the band causing a stir there by performing naked onstage!
 

 
As an added bonus—because I love you, I really, really love you—there are some other primo examples of early Funkadelic on video after the jump…

Artwork for the 1979 Funkadelic album, ‘Uncle Jam Wants You’ by Pedro Bell
 
Artist Pedro Bell is probably best known for the album art, cartoons and strange sexed-up illustrations that have appeared on and inside albums for Funkadelic and Funkadelic frontman, George Clinton. In 2009, the Chicago native was in pretty rough shape—he was losing his sight, required dialysis treatments for his failing kidneys, and was almost evicted from his apartment. Thankfully, things have improved for Bell since then and I’m happy to report that he’s got several projects in progress that will hopefully help bring more recognition to his massive, mind-bending body of work.
 

Funkadelic’s “The Electric Spanking of War Babies” by Pedro Bell
 

Gatefold view of the 1978 Funkadelic album, ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ by Pedro Bell.
 

Enlarged image of a cartoon inside ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ taking a jab at Mick Jagger.
 

Album artwork for the 1974 Funkadelic album, ‘Standing on the Verge of Getting It On’
 
I remember being at the library when I was a kid (you know, that place where they used to have all the books?), and being absolutely fascinated with Bell’s images on albums like The Electric Spanking of War Babies (with the giant phallus masquerading as a spaceship and a naked woman inside), or the curiously cool cartoons inside the gatefold sleeve of 1978’s One Nation Under a Groove.

It should also be noted that not only did Bell create images that helped build the mystique of Funkadelic as an entity, he also contributed to the band’s, well-known groovy lexicon. On George Clinton’s official website, Bell is affectionately referred to as an artist who “inverted psychedelia through the ghetto like an urban Hieronymus Bosch”—a statement that could not more perfectly describe Bell’s trippy illustrations and artwork.

Much more Pedro Bell after the jump, plus a short cartoon featuring Bell’s artwork in motion…

“Sometimes you have to lose your mind to gain your soul”: a magazine ad for America Eats Its Young
 
One of the most enigmatic aspects of Funkadelic’s career is the group’s short-lived association with the Process Church of the Final Judgment. The occult organization, which provided the liner notes to Funkadelic’s third and fourth albums, achieved notoriety after Ed Sanders devoted a chapter to it in The Family, tying the Process to Charles Manson. The Process sued Sanders’ publisher and succeeded in having the offending chapter removed from subsequent editions of The Family, but the lawsuit seems only to have intensified suspicions that the Process was hiding something about its relationship with Manson.
 

 
So not everyone thought the Process was groovy in 1972. Critic Robert Christgau slammed Funkadelic for their association with the Process in his review of America Eats Its Young:

[Funkadelic’s] racial hostility is much preferable to the brotherhood bromides of that other Detroit label, but their taste in white people is suspect: it’s one thing to put down those who “picket this and protest that” from their “semi-first-class seat,” another to let the Process Church of the Final Judgment provide liner notes on two successive albums. I overlooked it on Maggot Brain because the music was so difficult to resist, but here the strings (told you about their taste in white people), long-windedness (another double-LP that should be a single), and programmatic lyrics (“Miss Lucifer’s Love” inspires me to mention that while satanism is a great antinomian metaphor it often leads to murder, rape, etc.) leave me free to exercise my prejudices.

 
More after the jump…

 
Anyone who’s ever given Ween’s 1991 album The Pod a good listen is aware that Dean Ween (real name: Mickey Melchiondo) is willing to try pretty much anything on the guitar, a quality that has permitted him to craft some of the most inventive and startling guitar solos of the last twenty-five years. Ween is famous for moving all over the musical map in their songs, and Dean Ween’s evidently endless ability to transform is a good part of the reason why.

Earlier this year Dean Ween appeared on the Internet show Guitar Moves, hosted by Matt Sweeney, and rapped for a while about his influences and revealed a key penis-related trick to being a good guitarist.

Before getting to all the intricacies of major seventh chords and minor sevenths and “F-sharp thirteenths” (!)—this in the process of explaining how he came up with the bed for “Mister Would You Please Help My Pony,” off of 1993’s Chocolate and Cheese—Dean copped to returning to two classic 1970s songs for inspiration over and over again: the Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky” (guitarist: Dickey Betts) from their 1972 album Eat a Peach and the title song off of Funkadelic’s 1971 album Maggot Brain (guitarist: Eddie Hazel).
 
Allman Brothers Band, “Blue Sky”:

 
Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain”:

 
Ween fans will remember that Dean and Gene Ween (real name: Aaron Freeman) paid tribute to Funkadelic on Chocolate and Cheese in the form of the album’s fifth song, “A Tear for Eddie”—the “Eddie” in question being Eddie Hazel. In the episode of Guitar Moves, Dean also relates the experience of sharing an elevator with Dickey Betts when he was twelve years old—“it was like being in an elevator with Sonny Barger or something, from the Hells Angels, except worse, he was like green and pockmarked….”

For the most part, Ween made its reputation off its first three or four albums and then settled into a comfortable cult status for the last decade or so of its existence (the duo broke up in 2012). As a band that ventured dangerously close to “novelty act,” Ween was cannily able to secure a modicum of creative independence despite delivering five albums to major label Elektra over eight years, but they never quite garnered their critical due as a major contemporary act that produced literally dozens of jaw-dropping ditties.

There’s also a vague feeling that the quality of Ween’s output may have dropped off somewhat after their 1997 genius concept album The Mollusk, but I for one don’t agree. There are loads of gems to be found on White Pepper, Quebec, Shinola Vol. 1, and La Cucaracha.
 
Guitar Moves, episode 6:

 
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.