We are giving away a pair of tickets to Parliament Funkadelic Featuring George Clinton @ Crystal Ballroom on June 14. To win, comment below on this post why you’d like to attend. Winner will be drawn and emailed June 10.
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From our sponsors:
Dumpstaphunk
June 14, 2024
Doors 6:30PM, Show 8PM | $55-$65 ADV, $60-$70 Doors | 21+
More info: crystalballroompdx.com
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St, Portland, OR 97209
George Clinton is one of the foremost innovators of funk music, and was the mastermind behind the bands Parliament and Funkadelic. Clinton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 with 15 other members of Parliament-Funkadelic.
Clinton started his career with the Parliaments, a barbershop doo-wop ensemble, which scored a major hit with “I Wanna Testify” in 1967. Clinton then began experimenting with harmonies, melody, and rhythm, and taking cues from the psychedelic movement, forever setting himself apart from the Motown era.
By the early 1970s, the group’s tight songs evolved into sprawling jams around funky rhythms. They dropped the “s” from the band name and Parliament was born. Around the same time, Clinton spawned Funkadelic, a rock group which fused psychedelic guitar distortion, bizarre sound effects, and cosmological rants with danceable beats and booming bass lines. Funkadelic recorded a number of influential concept albums, including Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow, Maggot Brain, and America Eats Its Young.
Parliament and Funkadelic captured 40 hit R&B singles, including No. 1 hits “Flashlight,” “One Nation Under a Groove,” “Aqua Boogie,” and “(Not Just) Knee Deep.” Clinton’s collaborators included keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarist Eddie Hazel, bassist Bootsy Collins, saxophonist Maceo Parker, trombonist Fred Wesley. On stage, spectacle ruled the day, with an enormous mothership, outrageous costumes, and marathon performances.
In the 1980s, Clinton emerged as a successful solo artist. He released Computer Games with the No. 1 hit single “Atomic Dog,” produced the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ pioneering Freaky Styley, and signed with Prince’s Paisley Park label. He also began to experiment with the urban hip-hop music scene, as a generation of rappers reared on P-Funk began to name-check him.
Clinton has become recognized as the godfather of modern urban music. Beats, loops, and samples of P-Funk have appeared on albums by OutKast, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot, De La Soul, Fishbone, and many others. As Clinton has said, “funk is the DNA of hip-hop and rap.” In 1996, Clinton released the solo album The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership, which reunited him with Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins.