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Seventeen country miles
Away from Newark
And The Uptown Tonsorial Parlor,
Where he worked as a teenager
To support his high
School habit: harmonizing,
George Clinton was well-known
As The Man with the Manic Fingers.
His specialty was the finger wave,
Making old heads shine like helmets,
Protection, brand new shoes.
He could doo-wop anywhere;
Auditioned Fuzzy in the shop,
Conked Grady in the back of a truck.
Seven-year-old Billy Nelson
Swept the floor for fifty cents,
Entertaining customers, singing,
Dancing and passing the hat.
Bernie's mother wasn't having it.
Eddie's either. In 1964, George gave
Billy a job putting petroleum jelly
And mineral water in hair prior
To the application of the process,
So the scalps wouldn't burn.
A year earlier, George White,
The man who hired Clinton, died
And Ernie Harris bought
A fifty-percent share in the shop.
Together they wrote "Little Oovy Groovy
Ten Cent Movie" for Billy to sing.
Revilot issued "(I Wanna) Testify"
In the summer of 1967, featuring
George with Motown session singers—
The rest of the group couldn't afford
The trip. Grady was delivering records,
Ray working at his sister's Cleaners.
Calvin? America ate Calvin because
He was the youngest, it shaved
His head, gave him camouflage,
Dog tags and a number, taught
Him to kill or be killed, then marched
Him straight to the witch's castle.
The Afro was only one of Black
America's responses to Vietnam,
Bleeding the blues psychedelic was another
With a #3 R&B and #20 Pop hit
On their hands, The Parliaments quit
Their jobs, George sold The Silk
And moved everybody to Detroit.
Parliament/ Funkadelic,
Houston Summit (1976)
Notice! Stop! Help Save the Youth of America!
Don't Buy NEGRO RECORDS. The screaming,
idiotic words, and savage music of these records
are undermining the morals of our white youth
in America. Call the advertisers of the radio stations
that play this type of music and complain to them!
Don't let your children buy, or listen to these
Negro records.
–from a poster reproduced
in front of the Parliament Tour Book
The eye
Atop the
Pyramid
Means
Peek-
a-boo,
Means
I've been
Watching
You,
On guard,
Defend
Yourself,
Means
We shall
Overcome,
Means
You go
Tell it,
We've
Already
Been to
The moun-
taintop,
No need
To reinvent
The hump,
Means
We paid
For the fly-
ing saucers,
Extra-
terrestrials
& maggots
Our god-
damn selves,
Not an
Album cover
Penny from
Casablanca,
Not a fold-
ed dollar
Bill from
Westbound,
Means
Pay attention,
Means
IN FUNK
WE TRUST
NO ONE
Except
THE ONE.
Photograph of Dr. Funkenstein I
After Christian Witkin
A crazy evil grin, eyelids flipped
Inside out, red hot and pink as pork.
The tongue slipping out the mouth
Suggests fellatio, a pussy taunting dogs.
He is arrested, in custody,
MOST WANTED, an atomic shaman
With a scratch-and-sniff beard. I'll bet you he
Was dreaming of Venus, about to say something nasty
When the photographer bopped him
With a nickel bag of light into a permanent-
Type nod, sizzaleenmean, somewhere
Between a mug shot and maximumisness.
Judging from the shirt and tie,
He's well hung and may have been
About to make a house call (reach
Way up and give Sir Nose a splanking
Or photosynthesize, a dandy lion)
When the booty snatchers slapped him
With a warrant, shoving him, handcuffed,
Onto a death row of commodes,
A zone of zero funkativity,
Violating his right to hold
His own thang, his right to pee.
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