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Friday Funk #37 – ‘The Goose’ by Parliament
Friday Funk #37 – ‘The Goose’ by Parliament
Friday Funk #37 – ‘The Goose’ by Parliament
This year marked the 50th anniversary of Parliament’s second album, Up for the Down Stroke.
George Clinton’s first foray into the music biz was with The Parliaments, a doo-woop vocal group formed in 1955 and named after a cigarette brand. They released their debut album, 1970’s Osmium, under the simplified Parliament name; by that time the singers were Clinton, Ray Davis, Fuzzy Haskins, Calvin Simon, and Grady Thomas. You could still hear the doo-wop in Osmium, but it was tinged with the psychedelic influences of records like The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, particularly beloved by Clinton.
Clinton has spoken of The Parliaments’ records like they were dreams he had not quite captured upon waking. Studio technology eventually caught up with the sounds in his head, the pool of world-class musicians around him grew, and Clinton recorded revolutionary, spacier albums like Funkadelic’s Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow and Parliament’s Mothership Connection.
The Parliaments had had a single called ‘The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg)’. In his memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, Clinton wrote that in 1967, “If there was an overall plot, it was that we were moving slightly toward rock and slightly away from conventional R&B."
Around the time of recording Osmium, Parliament’s naming rights were tangled up in record label confusion, so their backing band stepped up front and the group signed a deal as Funkadelic. They packed stages with big amps and shifted further away from doo-wop towards Hendrix-indebted funk rock.
Clinton also wrote of how Vanilla Fudge showed the power of slowing things down and playing at “a glacial pace.” Fudge did covers of R&B songs like The Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’ and the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’. The Parliaments were listening, and after starting with ‘Testify’, they recorded 'All Your Goodies Are Gone' and ‘Goose’, before getting slower with ‘Good Old Funky Music’.
“We had covered quite a bit of ground, from doo-wop through Motown to the brink of this unexplored land. But we also knew that if you’re going to call on something to change, then you’re going to have to change what you call that thing.”
“Somewhere along the way it became clear to me that we had a strong young group of players who were, to us, what the Funk Brothers were to Motown, and because we were so deep into psychedelic rock we started adding the -delic to it.”
And Funkadelic was born.
George wrote of the Vanilla Fudge revelation: “If you could hold a song at that slower tempo without getting monotonous, the result was amazing.” Funkadelic’s first song, ‘Music for My Mother’ was slow, dirty, “raw funk”. The album, released in the same year as Parliament's Osmium, was one of the clearest representations of Funkadelic's name: funk mixed with psychedelic rock.
Four years later, Parliament, having recovered their naming rights, released their second album, Up for the Down Stroke. (Funkadelic released five albums before ’74.) It wasn’t a concept album with the larger-than-life characters that came to characterise Parliament, but it was a step towards the styles and structures that differentiated them from Funkadelic. “In the Osmium era,” Clinton wrote, “Parliament had been an outlet for the Motown side of our personality, the place where more traditional material went”, but with a fresh Parliament era starting, Clinton’s vision was crystallising. “I wanted to do a record in the style of the Beatles—horns, strings, complex arrangements—but also aim straight for radio R&B. It was like jazzy James Brown, or a pop Pink Floyd.”
Clinton later said: “No psychedelic guitars for Parliament and no horns on Funkadelic. We broke those rules a couple of times, but for the most part, that was the main difference. Funkadelic was the rock & roll band, with guitars dominating, the crazy stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Parliament was going to be as close to structure as we could get. I later used a lot of Funkadelic theory to do Parliament, but it was more structured. There were melodies, real songs, a straightforward message.”
Songs like ‘The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg)’ were remade “with our new sound in mind”. 'The Goose' is updated into a funkier, more rhythm-focused song with fewer chord changes. It still doesn't hide its Motown influences: the “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet” could slot right in to a Four Tops or Temptations hit. (Although would Motown have based an entire song around goose lyrics? Probably not. Were they a mere step on the way to far weirder Clinton lyrics? You’d better believe it!) The chord changes are also Motown-esque, with more melancholy than later P-Funk.
The song is built off a subtle, groovy bassline and an addictive guitar progression that finishes on an upstroke, unresolved and teasing. But the teasing’s alright, because the next bar you’re back into the groove, and often that equally addictive “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet”. The band slow it down, you feel each hit of the snare more, and there’s more space for George’s unique vocal tones to shine. He could make words like “monkey” sound as otherworldly as anyone before him, or anyone since.
And can anyone write lyrics like George Clinton? “Now I’m as happy as a monkey with a peanut machine / Since I found you / Just imagine a monkey with a peanut machine / It’s a dream come true / Oh, but I don’t need no nut machine / Because I’m nuts all over you.”
After the warped cry of “Hey, babe!” at 1:54, you might expect a Funkadelic-esque freakout and the next seven minutes to be an acid-drenched jam, but there are only a few bars without vocals before an energising drum roll and George coming back in. The loosey-goosey jam does follow, but after more singing and chants of “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet”. Bernie Worrell’s keyboards hint at the space travel that was to come, and Eddie Hazel’s guitar has room to wander in the closing half of the song.
This year marked the 50th anniversary of Parliament’s second album, Up for the Down Stroke.
George Clinton’s first foray into the music biz was with The Parliaments, a doo-woop vocal group formed in 1955 and named after a cigarette brand. They released their debut album, 1970’s Osmium, under the simplified Parliament name; by that time the singers were Clinton, Ray Davis, Fuzzy Haskins, Calvin Simon, and Grady Thomas. You could still hear the doo-wop in Osmium, but it was tinged with the psychedelic influences of records like The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, particularly beloved by Clinton.
Clinton has spoken of The Parliaments’ records like they were dreams he had not quite captured upon waking. Studio technology eventually caught up with the sounds in his head, the pool of world-class musicians around him grew, and Clinton recorded revolutionary, spacier albums like Funkadelic’s Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow and Parliament’s Mothership Connection.
The Parliaments had had a single called ‘The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg)’. In his memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, Clinton wrote that in 1967, “If there was an overall plot, it was that we were moving slightly toward rock and slightly away from conventional R&B."
Around the time of recording Osmium, Parliament’s naming rights were tangled up in record label confusion, so their backing band stepped up front and the group signed a deal as Funkadelic. They packed stages with big amps and shifted further away from doo-wop towards Hendrix-indebted funk rock.
Clinton also wrote of how Vanilla Fudge showed the power of slowing things down and playing at “a glacial pace.” Fudge did covers of R&B songs like The Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’ and the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’. The Parliaments were listening, and after starting with ‘Testify’, they recorded 'All Your Goodies Are Gone' and ‘Goose’, before getting slower with ‘Good Old Funky Music’.
“We had covered quite a bit of ground, from doo-wop through Motown to the brink of this unexplored land. But we also knew that if you’re going to call on something to change, then you’re going to have to change what you call that thing.”
“Somewhere along the way it became clear to me that we had a strong young group of players who were, to us, what the Funk Brothers were to Motown, and because we were so deep into psychedelic rock we started adding the -delic to it.”
And Funkadelic was born.
George wrote of the Vanilla Fudge revelation: “If you could hold a song at that slower tempo without getting monotonous, the result was amazing.” Funkadelic’s first song, ‘Music for My Mother’ was slow, dirty, “raw funk”. The album, released in the same year as Parliament's Osmium, was one of the clearest representations of Funkadelic's name: funk mixed with psychedelic rock.
Four years later, Parliament, having recovered their naming rights, released their second album, Up for the Down Stroke. (Funkadelic released five albums before ’74.) It wasn’t a concept album with the larger-than-life characters that came to characterise Parliament, but it was a step towards the styles and structures that differentiated them from Funkadelic. “In the Osmium era,” Clinton wrote, “Parliament had been an outlet for the Motown side of our personality, the place where more traditional material went”, but with a fresh Parliament era starting, Clinton’s vision was crystallising. “I wanted to do a record in the style of the Beatles—horns, strings, complex arrangements—but also aim straight for radio R&B. It was like jazzy James Brown, or a pop Pink Floyd.”
Clinton later said: “No psychedelic guitars for Parliament and no horns on Funkadelic. We broke those rules a couple of times, but for the most part, that was the main difference. Funkadelic was the rock & roll band, with guitars dominating, the crazy stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Parliament was going to be as close to structure as we could get. I later used a lot of Funkadelic theory to do Parliament, but it was more structured. There were melodies, real songs, a straightforward message.”
Songs like ‘The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg)’ were remade “with our new sound in mind”. 'The Goose' is updated into a funkier, more rhythm-focused song with fewer chord changes. It still doesn't hide its Motown influences: the “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet” could slot right in to a Four Tops or Temptations hit. (Although would Motown have based an entire song around goose lyrics? Probably not. Were they a mere step on the way to far weirder Clinton lyrics? You’d better believe it!) The chord changes are also Motown-esque, with more melancholy than later P-Funk.
The song is built off a subtle, groovy bassline and an addictive guitar progression that finishes on an upstroke, unresolved and teasing. But the teasing’s alright, because the next bar you’re back into the groove, and often that equally addictive “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet”. The band slow it down, you feel each hit of the snare more, and there’s more space for George’s unique vocal tones to shine. He could make words like “monkey” sound as otherworldly as anyone before him, or anyone since.
And can anyone write lyrics like George Clinton? “Now I’m as happy as a monkey with a peanut machine / Since I found you / Just imagine a monkey with a peanut machine / It’s a dream come true / Oh, but I don’t need no nut machine / Because I’m nuts all over you.”
After the warped cry of “Hey, babe!” at 1:54, you might expect a Funkadelic-esque freakout and the next seven minutes to be an acid-drenched jam, but there are only a few bars without vocals before an energising drum roll and George coming back in. The loosey-goosey jam does follow, but after more singing and chants of “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet”. Bernie Worrell’s keyboards hint at the space travel that was to come, and Eddie Hazel’s guitar has room to wander in the closing half of the song.
This year marked the 50th anniversary of Parliament’s second album, Up for the Down Stroke.
George Clinton’s first foray into the music biz was with The Parliaments, a doo-woop vocal group formed in 1955 and named after a cigarette brand. They released their debut album, 1970’s Osmium, under the simplified Parliament name; by that time the singers were Clinton, Ray Davis, Fuzzy Haskins, Calvin Simon, and Grady Thomas. You could still hear the doo-wop in Osmium, but it was tinged with the psychedelic influences of records like The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, particularly beloved by Clinton.
Clinton has spoken of The Parliaments’ records like they were dreams he had not quite captured upon waking. Studio technology eventually caught up with the sounds in his head, the pool of world-class musicians around him grew, and Clinton recorded revolutionary, spacier albums like Funkadelic’s Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow and Parliament’s Mothership Connection.
The Parliaments had had a single called ‘The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg)’. In his memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, Clinton wrote that in 1967, “If there was an overall plot, it was that we were moving slightly toward rock and slightly away from conventional R&B."
Around the time of recording Osmium, Parliament’s naming rights were tangled up in record label confusion, so their backing band stepped up front and the group signed a deal as Funkadelic. They packed stages with big amps and shifted further away from doo-wop towards Hendrix-indebted funk rock.
Clinton also wrote of how Vanilla Fudge showed the power of slowing things down and playing at “a glacial pace.” Fudge did covers of R&B songs like The Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’ and the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’. The Parliaments were listening, and after starting with ‘Testify’, they recorded 'All Your Goodies Are Gone' and ‘Goose’, before getting slower with ‘Good Old Funky Music’.
“We had covered quite a bit of ground, from doo-wop through Motown to the brink of this unexplored land. But we also knew that if you’re going to call on something to change, then you’re going to have to change what you call that thing.”
“Somewhere along the way it became clear to me that we had a strong young group of players who were, to us, what the Funk Brothers were to Motown, and because we were so deep into psychedelic rock we started adding the -delic to it.”
And Funkadelic was born.
George wrote of the Vanilla Fudge revelation: “If you could hold a song at that slower tempo without getting monotonous, the result was amazing.” Funkadelic’s first song, ‘Music for My Mother’ was slow, dirty, “raw funk”. The album, released in the same year as Parliament's Osmium, was one of the clearest representations of Funkadelic's name: funk mixed with psychedelic rock.
Four years later, Parliament, having recovered their naming rights, released their second album, Up for the Down Stroke. (Funkadelic released five albums before ’74.) It wasn’t a concept album with the larger-than-life characters that came to characterise Parliament, but it was a step towards the styles and structures that differentiated them from Funkadelic. “In the Osmium era,” Clinton wrote, “Parliament had been an outlet for the Motown side of our personality, the place where more traditional material went”, but with a fresh Parliament era starting, Clinton’s vision was crystallising. “I wanted to do a record in the style of the Beatles—horns, strings, complex arrangements—but also aim straight for radio R&B. It was like jazzy James Brown, or a pop Pink Floyd.”
Clinton later said: “No psychedelic guitars for Parliament and no horns on Funkadelic. We broke those rules a couple of times, but for the most part, that was the main difference. Funkadelic was the rock & roll band, with guitars dominating, the crazy stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Parliament was going to be as close to structure as we could get. I later used a lot of Funkadelic theory to do Parliament, but it was more structured. There were melodies, real songs, a straightforward message.”
Songs like ‘The Goose (That Laid the Golden Egg)’ were remade “with our new sound in mind”. 'The Goose' is updated into a funkier, more rhythm-focused song with fewer chord changes. It still doesn't hide its Motown influences: the “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet” could slot right in to a Four Tops or Temptations hit. (Although would Motown have based an entire song around goose lyrics? Probably not. Were they a mere step on the way to far weirder Clinton lyrics? You’d better believe it!) The chord changes are also Motown-esque, with more melancholy than later P-Funk.
The song is built off a subtle, groovy bassline and an addictive guitar progression that finishes on an upstroke, unresolved and teasing. But the teasing’s alright, because the next bar you’re back into the groove, and often that equally addictive “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet”. The band slow it down, you feel each hit of the snare more, and there’s more space for George’s unique vocal tones to shine. He could make words like “monkey” sound as otherworldly as anyone before him, or anyone since.
And can anyone write lyrics like George Clinton? “Now I’m as happy as a monkey with a peanut machine / Since I found you / Just imagine a monkey with a peanut machine / It’s a dream come true / Oh, but I don’t need no nut machine / Because I’m nuts all over you.”
After the warped cry of “Hey, babe!” at 1:54, you might expect a Funkadelic-esque freakout and the next seven minutes to be an acid-drenched jam, but there are only a few bars without vocals before an energising drum roll and George coming back in. The loosey-goosey jam does follow, but after more singing and chants of “Ooh, aah, yeah, you’re so sweet”. Bernie Worrell’s keyboards hint at the space travel that was to come, and Eddie Hazel’s guitar has room to wander in the closing half of the song.