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Apr 21, 2025 By Arden Green

Five years into its radically ingenious musical career, freak-maestro George Clinton’s influential funk rock collective Parliament-Funkadelic had released nine consecutive albums—six as Funkadelic, three as Parliament—effectively bringing its refined, yet confrontational brand of innovatively extraterrestrial funk to the streets. From its inception as a New Jersey-founded doo-wop act known as The Parliaments to its artistic rebirth as a psychotically sludgy proto-metal/funk outfit a decade later in Detroit, Funkadelic’s musical evolution remains utterly intriguing, with the band going on to produce several of the finest albums of the ’70s, most notably 1971’s monumental Maggot Brain and 1973’s underrated Cosmic Slop. The group’s early air of demented, quasi-Satanic subversiveness—a sonic personification of the Nixon era’s boundless American hellscapes of urban blight and social unrest—informed each of its ’70s releases, even as Funkadelic’s sound gradually grew more polished and, dare one say, accessible. On the dazzling Let’s Take It to the Stage, P-Funk’s seventh studio release under the Funkadelic banner, Clinton and company follow up the previous year’s landmark Standing on the Verge of Getting It On with yet another round of guitar-heavy virtuosic funk-rock madness, rich with the group’s signature blend of Black Power politics, humorous vulgarity, and otherworldly devotions.

Opening cut “Good to Your Earhole,” an instant P-Funk classic, continues the band’s primary, career-long concern: that of liberation and eventual transcendence. From Clinton’s perspective, funk is less of a musical genre than an intellectual and spiritual pursuit, humankind’s singular link to the cosmos, and the groove-heavy “Good to Your Earhole” offers to take the listener there. “Mashing your brain like silly putty/Leaving you in a better frame of mind,” the funk heals, urges one toward purity. Funkadelic’s stellar musicianship is most evident on such tracks, the group’s golden era lineup—including the likes of Eddie Hazel, Garry Shider, Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins, Bernie Worrell, and Tiki Fulwood—prominently displayed. So much undeniable expertise and talent occupying a single space will likely produce sounds astoundingly inimitable and, yes, transcendent, a quality common on peak Funkadelic releases. This quality is certainly present on the Epicurean “Better By the Pound” and cosmic soul trip “Be My Beach,” the latter being a key cut.

Elsewhere, Clinton takes aim at the exploitative misogyny of the era’s concert scene on the crunchy “No Head, No Backstage Pass,” while the anthemic title track playfully takes to task various figures of the era’s popular culture, including Kool & the Gang; James Brown; Sly and the Family Stone; Earth, Wind & Fire; and disgraced former president Richard Nixon. Progressive soul number “Baby I Owe You Something Good” and wailing freakout “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” also lend Let’s Take It to the Stage much strength. The latter track, per P-Funk myth, was provided with its penetratingly anguished guitar solo by a young, white smackhead, who’d wandered into the band’s Detroit-area studio and recorded the part for $50, before leaving without offering his name. This anonymous guitarist was later identified as Paul Warren, better known for his work with Rod Stewart, Richard Marx, and Ray Manzarek’s Nite City. Libidinous funk rocker “Stuffs and Things” recalls the likes of Cosmic Slop, its artistic determination and raunchy sense of humor counterbalanced by the subsequent introspective musical love letter “The Song is Familiar.” Let’s Take It to the Stage concludes with the 7+ minute epic psychedelic Bach tribute “Atmosphere,” which boldly reminds the listener that Funkadelic is, first and foremost, a defiant artistic project, unafraid to experiment or subvert expectations.

Let’s Take It to the Stage helped to usher in an era of increased mainstream exposure and stylistic transition for P-Funk, which would officially begin with the release of Parliament’s groundbreaking Mothership Connection a mere eight months later. Though the demonic rustbelt grit and grime of the collective’s earlier work, written about and recorded in the decaying streets of urban Michigan, would be largely scrubbed from its subsequent output, P-Funk has remained a force of tremendous artistic rebellion and political radicalism, its devotion to the universal principle of funk much needed by the current generation, which faces its own state of decay and exploitation. Accordingly, Let’s Take It to the Stage is still so irresistibly empowering 50 years on.

www.georgeclinton.com

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