Funkadelic - Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On

Released - April 1974

Genre - Funk

Producer - George Clinton

Selected Personnel - Bernie Worrell (Keyboards/Vocals); Calvin Simon (Vocals/Percussion); Boogie Mosson (Bass/Vocals); Eddie Hazel (Guitar/Vocals); Garry Shider (Guitar/Vocals); George Clinton (Vocals); Tiki Fulwood (Percussion/Vocals); Ron Bykowski (Guitar/Vocals); Gary Bronson (Drums); Jimmy Calhoun (Bass); Leon Patillo (Piano); Ty Lampkin (Percussion)

Standout Track - Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts

So, back to my ongoing funk odyssey for the first time in a while (although, Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On being a 1974 release, this post does at least finally tie my newfound funk obsession with this blog's vague chronology). As I explained back in my review for Funkadelic's 1971 classic Maggot Brain, at the start of the year I decided to try and get into classic funk a bit more off the back of my love of the glossy disco funk of Chic and the swaggering pop-rock funk of Prince. After listening to Isaac Hayes' Shaft soundtrack, this developed into a concurrent interest in classic soul but, while that separate interest led me to discover some truly great albums, it's funk that has the real mesmeric hold over me at the moment. It's perhaps significant that my interest in the genre has coincided with an ongoing interest in New Age spiritualism that I'm still trying to get my head around (essentially, I don't know whether I can convince myself to really believe in energy channelling and the like, but I feel hugely inspired and motivated by the ideals of positive attitude and constructive mental states at the heart of a lot of New Ageism), and oddly I've found that the two interests have really played off each other and inspired one another immensely.

Essentially, so much music aspires either to be artistically ambitiously and pompously theatrical, or to be more minimalist and therefore more emotionally sincere. Funk music, particularly as exemplified by George Clinton's twin Parliament-Funkadelic projects, seems to be able to bridge this gap. The "P-Funk Mythology," an entire complex mystical philosophy surrounding the very music the collective created combines bizarre imaginative cartoon flights of fancy (essentially, the Mighty Boosh's inspired spoof about "The Funk" being an alien being that squirted black milk at Parliament that gave them powers isn't half as weird as Parliament's own backstory for how their music works) with genuinely insightful exercises in positive thinking and spiritual sensitivity, and the message at the heart of both extremes seems to be a rare and genuine belief in the power of music to communicate directly with someone's soul and channel a strong and pure emotion. Whether that's communicating party vibes via the cartoonish imagery of Parliament, or a harrowing exploration of grief as explored on "Maggot Brain," that feels to me to be what's at the heart of Clinton's music, and why it's come to mean a huge amount to me in a short time. The sheer faith and conviction in the power of music, and the ability to explore that both with sincerity and with his tongue firmly in his cheek, marks him out as a mind that gels so strongly with my own world view that it's genuinely come to fascinate me.

Of the P-Funk albums I've heard so far, perhaps the one that encapsulates that revelation best for me (while perhaps not necessarily the best) is 1974's Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On, thanks largely to the incredible effect the song "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts" has had on me since I first heard it. It's nowhere near as fun an album as Parliament's later classics, or even Funkadelic's more politically charged 1978 classic One Nation Under A Groove, nor quite as surprising and consistent as Maggot Brain, and it's probable that without that one song it might not make this list, but there's still plenty to enjoy here either way.

The albums recorded after the immense success of Maggot Brain generally seem to be regarded as something of a letdown, and I've not yet listened to them to be able to judge just how far that's true, but seeing as Standing On The Verge... is considered to be a return to form and also marks the return of guitarist Eddie Hazel, it might be fair to assume that his departure due to financial concerns hurt the band somewhat and left them wondering quite where to go next. Certainly, Hazel had been hugely instrumental in the success of that album, being the man behind the iconic title track itself (his replacement was Catfish Collins, whose brother Bootsy also joined to replace outgoing bassist Billy Bass Nelson. Bootsy Collins would go on to be a hugely significant figure in the P-Funk stable, although most of his more influential work would be on Parliament records, where he would experiment with treatments and effects on his bass contributions that saw him heralded as the Hendrix of the instrument.)

But in 1974, after a spell in prison for drug possession and assault, Hazel returned to Funkadelic for one more outing with them (not technically his last, but the last album to which he would be a significant creative contributor). Indeed, given that both Parliament and Funkadelic usually see limited musical contributions from band leader George Clinton himself and it's occasionally difficult to work out exactly to what extent he's calling the shots, here it feels very much like this is Hazel's record. Every song is a co-write by Clinton and Hazel (with keyboardist Bernie Worrell also co-writing on opener "Red Hot Mama,") while the entire album is built around Hazel's searing, incendiary guitar and red hot riffing. Worrell's keyboards, whose bouncy, swirling, squelchy sound would become a defining element of Parliament's sound, are very much relegated to the background for the most part, while the bass (here played mostly by Boogie Mosson and Jimmy Calhoun), while it anchors and propulsively drives the music, is far from the showstopping centre of attention Bootsy Collins would make it on Clinton's later records.

Essentially, for most of the album we are just listening to Hazel cut loose with a variety of ferocious riffs and jams, but he's a guitarist of such talent that it's hard to complain. Clinton is also able to demonstrate the band's sheer range even within such a relatively limited framework, showcasing not just their profundity and beauty and their ability to rock out fearsomely, but thirdly, also their wicked buffoonish sense of humour. In the nonsensical sped-up and slowed-down spoken word vocal that kicks off "Red Hot Mama," or the further sped-up vocals at the start of the title track (inanely reciting the mantra "Hey lady, I'll be your tree and you can be my dog and you can pee on me,") show that Clinton is one who feels no compulsion to take music seriously and can have a lot of fun with it. But when the riff of "Red Hot Mama" kicks in, things get angry and seriously cool very quickly in one of Funkadelic's finest aggressive jams. "Alice In My Fantasies" is a similar piece, albeit even more frenetic and propulsive, after which the sultry and slow groove of "I'll Stay" drops the pace a bit, with its breezy, swooning choral vocals.

Two of the weaker tracks on offer here are actually two of the songs that try to take a different approach to the generally hard rocking, guitar riff-driven nature of much of the album. "Sexy Ways" is a sort of coy, eyelash-batting piece of upbeat pop, while "Jimmy's Got A Little Bit Of Bitch Of Him" is slight and forgettable despite the best intentions of its bouncy melody. The title track is another fearsome jam in the mould of the opening two tracks, and perhaps the most convincing and exciting of the three. And then, rounding things off in magnificent style is "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts," a song that I first heard a couple of months ago while trying to wrestle with a couple of significant problems that were causing me a fair bit of emotional distress at the time. The first time I heard it, I broke down crying and ended up walking round the park in the rain listening to it on repeat (all twelve minutes of it about five times through) until I felt that I truly understood what it was saying. Even before the slowed-down vocals kick in halfway through, it's already a breathtakingly and transformatively beautiful piece of music, Hazel slowly and meticulously improvising on his guitar, effortlessly turning out beautiful, languid twists and turns of melody, an atmosphere so blissfully reposed and calm that one can't help but stop what you're doing and be transported by it the first time you hear it. It's admittedly a close retread of the formula for "Maggot Brain," but this time it feels like Hazel is channelling bliss rather than grief and horror, exploring the instrument in the same way but letting it communicate all his feelings of relief and gratitude and love rather than his fears.

The vocals themselves have been some of the most enormously powerful and important words I've heard in a long time, and stopped me dead in my tracks when I first heard them as they so closely mirrored a lot of that New Age thought I've been reading into over the last year that's helped change so much of my attitude to love, life, my friends and family, the way I work creatively and so much else. To stumble across an obscure song from 1974 that perfectly articulated everything I'd been struggling to understand for a whole year was a genuinely humbling and powerful experience, and there are ideas within this monologue that I've been obsessively turning over in my mind ever since, most notably the beautiful line "Your life is yours, it fits you like your skin" or the reflections on being careful what "thought seeds you plant in the garden of your mind, for seeds grow after their kind." I'm currently working on a comedy show in which I'm trying very hard to articulate the idea that one can accept that, as Clinton puts it, "life is an endless unfoldment" and can accept the flaws and contradictions within their nature as long as they also accept the fact that they are always changing and improving, and that their life and future is entirely open to them provided they approach it with the right mindset and the right attitude to their thoughts. To hear Clinton sum up some of the philosophies I was toying with so perfectly was a wonderful thing, and has just helped me further to find more conviction in what I do and to care all the more about the people I love since I first heard it.

So there we have it - a piece of music that, if listened to in the right mindset, is genuinely truly transformational and groundbreaking, and a collection of great, fearsome funk jams, and altogether we have an album that showcases the profundity, the humour and the effortless cool of this group of talented musicians. That it also manages to make an important point about music's ability to inspire emotional purity is all the better. At this stage, Funkadelic was still the single band Clinton was leading, but in 1974 he would reform his old doo-wop band the Parliaments under the simplified name Parliament, consisting of largely the same musicians as Funkadelic. Over subsequent years he would run both together as a unified group but as two separate entities, with Parliament driving for a more commercial, horns and keyboard oriented funk approach and Funkadelic pursuing the more guitar-based psychedelic rock routes they had already started down. With Funkadelic Clinton had already explored ideas of emotional sincerity and hard rock stylings. Parliament now provided him with an opportunity to really have fun and push some of his more flamboyant ideas to the forefront, and 1976's Mothership Connection would enable him to do that to an extreme.

Track Listing:

1. Red Hot Mama (Bernie Worrell; George Clinton & Eddie Hazel)

2. Alice In My Fantasies (George Clinton & Eddie Hazel)

3. I'll Stay (George Clinton & Eddie Hazel)

4. Sexy Ways (George Clinton & Eddie Hazel)

5. Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On (George Clinton & Eddie Hazel)

6. Jimmy's Got A Little Bit Of Bitch In Him (George Clinton & Eddie Hazel)

7. Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts (George Clinton & Eddie Hazel)