Podcast #36: George Clinton on Bad Ideas and Inspiration
The New York Public Library Podcast brings you the best of the Library's author talks, live events, and other bookish curiosities. In our most recent episode, we were lucky to be visited by George Clinton, a.k.a. Dr. Funkenstein himself. A pioneer of '70s funk, the creative mastermind has worked as a producer, writer, and performer. He spoke with us about rejected album cover concepts, Smokey Robinson, and inspiring Snoop Dogg. Most importantly, he urged, "Get off your ass and jam."
Clinton in many ways revolutionized music with his contributions to funk, but he also acknowledges those who inspired him. Of his hero Smokey Robinson, Clinton said:
"Smokey, when he wrote songs like 'My Girl,' 'It's Growing,' and all of that, it turned the whole industry around. Everybody had been writing bubble gum, you know, love songs. But he had lyrics and puns that you were like, 'How can anyone think of all of that?' And he would do it over and over... He was an artist artist."
As he reflected on several of his album covers, Clinton recalled the original idea for the Maggot Brain cover which was eventually rejected by the record company:
"Now if I told you what the original cover was going to look like, it was kind of nasty. But I can tell you. It was gonna be a pimp vampire, black vampire. You know, cape back, clean, fang with a diamond in it, a sparkling diamond. A glass of blood. Not biting nobody's neck. He was too cool to bite somebody's neck. He'd have a glass of blood with the fang, but when you look close to it, you saw a whole bunch of squeezed out tampons laying around."
Clinton's influence can be seen in the work of many artists, including Snoop Dogg. When asked how he felt hearing Snoop's "Who Am I," which features samples of Clinton's "Atomic Dog," Clinton was unequivocally pleased:
"I'm very proud hearing that. You know, I was actually on that record besides the samples. I actually did a live part on Snoop's record. I worked with Dre right from the very beginning on Tupac's 'You Can't See Me,' that record, and on quite a few of Dre's and Snoop's records. They were part of the P-Funk Mothership thing on the west coast. Dre had a company called Uncle Jam's Army, taken from one of our records, so we knew them before there was NWA. So by the time they got to do that, we was ready, you know, to be one nation under groove."
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