The Authorized P-Funk Song Reference

Records/Books
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A very late reply, for which I apologize, but I finally put my hands on a copy of the book and first and foremost, I want to congratulate you @DannyBedrosian. Being a Prince discographer myself (https://sites.google.com/view/prince-discography/), I measure the amount of hard work, research and discipline such a project entails.

The “Criteria for canon” chapter is certainly enlightening when it comes to what was selected for inclusion (or not), but it raised more questions on my part. Please understand @DannyBedrosian that my purpose here isn’t to question or call out your approach, but more to try and make sense of my own perception—for what it’s worth—of what an official P-Funk discography could be, at least the way I envisioned it when I first asked about it and the discography on George’s official website on this board. Of course, you say yourself in the book that what consitutes canon may mean different things for different people, and I realize how true that is, but please bear with me.

The book has a clear approach: to include each and every project by past and present members of the P-Funk collective, unless they branch out way too far, stylistically speaking. Where it conflicts (or so I think) with my perception is in relation to the following premises, which I assume to be accurate (but this can, of course, be challenged).

1/ There is such a thing as a George Clinton-led entity/organization called the P-Funk collective.

2/ Various musicians have been members of this collective at different points in time (what may or may not make them “official” members at any given point in time is probably hard to define, though—IDK if there’s any kind of internal policy in that regard, but I assume it’s not that easy to draw the line there—but it is clear that at some points in time, certain members severed their ties with the organization).

3/ A P-Funk discography could include either any major project involving said members while they were part of the collective, and/or any major project sanctioned by George Clinton as being a side-project of his extended collective (this, for example, was rather clear with the late 70s spin-offs). I’m already rather confused about whether it should include both or only George Clinton sanctioned projects, because I don’t know whether a P-Funk member doing something completely on their own while they’re members makes a project qualify.

This last part is where the book, brilliant as it is (and it is), doesn’t provide a fully satisfactory answer to my initial question IMHO, because it includes some projects by P-Funk members that predate the moment they joined the collective (for example, House Guests, though on the other hand, I couldn’t find the Maceo and All the King’s Men albums from 70-72, so I’m not sure, maybe I’m mistaken and Bootsy and co. were already members when those House Guests records came out) and, most importantly, many projects by members after they formally left the collective (such as Quazar, Mutiny, all those projects by Maceo, Bootsy, etc.). I guess one way to explain this could be to say that once one is a P-Funk member once, they are for life whether they admit it or not, but one can see how this conflicts with my premises above.

So here we are. Please understand that I don’t have a more satisfactory answer to provide that would answer my own questions, I’m really mostly thinking out loud and, because I’m such a geek, looking for as objective as possible criterias that could allow us to define a more targeted P-Funk discography based on the premises above. Any insights and opinions by anyone is more than welcome to help me make sense of all of this, so many thanks @DannyBedrosian and other board members for any answer or idea you may be able to provide :slight_smile:

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Firstly, thank you so much for your post. I believe these types of posts challenging and helping establish historiographical edifices upon which we will be able to tread for generations to come is wholly important and vastly underestimated when it comes to intellectual discourse. I have to say that the second edition of this book (which is coming out in November from Bloomsbury and contains over 280 new pages of info) will more fully shed light on the “wholeness” (for lack of a better word) the discography at large represents. I had to abandon including certain albums when doing the first edition due to space issues, and the editors getting angry that I was adding too much. My goal was not to have the book sliced into two separate volumes, so that was one reason for some of the inclusion of certain parts of the Canon and lack thereof as mentioned before.

In addition, the only time that I did include pre-p-funk projects was when the number of members of said group was so high in terms of members that went on to be in P-Funk (such as the house guests for instance), that it constituted being included even though it predated their time in pfunk. The other reason I included some pre-p-funk was: if the person involved was so important to the P-Funk, like a Bootsy or a Bernie, I would include it. But for the most part I left the predated albums and groups out.

To answer your point about official members, this is actually not that difficult to define. There are essentially people that traveled on the road as the band, and they are officially the band. People that both traveled on the road and did the recordings were obviously members of the band. But people who only were on the recordings were not members of the group. They would be considered important contributors, but not official members unless they were out with the band. This groups touring tenure was so long and so high volume year by year that nothing else could quantify membership then that. This also helps explain why certain people were in certain spin-off bands and not in other ones etc etc.

I didn’t think that it needed to be only George Clinton sanction projects because so many people were so important to this thing and George himself always touts the spirit of interdependence in this group. Once they’ve been a member of the band they’re importance as a band member and their connection as P-Funk adjacent is forever solidified at least in this author’s mind. That’s why I always try to include as many projects from people’s post-p-funk career as possible, as well as the music they made during their tenure in the group proper.

Geek to Geek! Thanks for the queries! I hope you get to check out the new extended edition of the book which comes out in November because it is probably my proudest achievement to date. The amount of added material is enough to be its own book! So I’m very much looking forward to it. Thanks so much again for your post!

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Hey @DannyBedrosian, thank you so much for your quick reply. I must say it’s really priceless to have you here, as it’s rare members of a project interact so directly with the fans in order to provide insights, and it’s even rarer to have said members being archivists at the same time (artists are usually not the best at documenting their own work, but thankfully, you were a fan before you became a member!). Needless to say, I can’t wait to see the updated version of the book.

Thanks for your appreciation of the discussion and those explainations. I think, in essence, what you say there does finally provide a theoretical framework for me to establish the discography in the way I understand it—which isn’t in contradiction with, but complementary to the one you provide with your books, my approach being more focused, maybe, on the collective as an entity than on the members’ life work in its entirety.

If I understood correctly, the premises could then evolve to become:

1/ There is such a thing as an entity/organization called the P-Funk collective.

2/ Various musicians have been members of this collective at different points in time. Membership is defined by them being part of the touring band at any given time (including, I guess, at least for the late 70s, certain opening acts such as Rubberband, Brides, Parlet and Horny Horns).

3/ A P-Funk discography should include any major project involving said members while they were part of the collective.

With those premises, the list I would like to establish would be much easier to create, because we now have clear, objective criterias.

What I do not have, and I do not know if such a document exists—for all I know, it’ll be in your next book, or there’s already a thread about it on this very board—, is a definitive chronological list of who was in the touring band at any given time since the collective’s creation. Since I’m replying immediately, I didn’t take the time to do any Google research to find such a list, so please forgive me if it’s out there and easy to find, but I assume if it’s there somewhere, you or other board members would know. If it doesn’t exist yet, I’m not sure how it could be researched, but I’m sure there’s gotta be a way, and I’d certainly love to try if I ever have enough time on my hands to do the work with existing online resources.

So that’s really cool: now, at least, I guess I finally know how to approach the matter :slight_smile: Thanks a lot!!

As always, of course, insights, suggestions and feedback by you and any other board members are welcome :slight_smile:

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I’ve been wanting to do a book of lists for P-Funk for the longest time. In a lot of ways all of my original research was structured around that, as opposed to, say discographical information primarily or solely. I had created thousands of different lists with clear and specific criteria, and they were very fascinating. I still have all the old notebooks; it’s stuff that I collected since I was in grade school.
Additionally, there were several other lists that existed of the band lineups and how they shifted through the years. I do remember back in the 90s an ongoing list that existed on the One nation Board Room… there was a website that brought you to a database that had the different shifting lineups over the years, and people could add the information as personell changed.. I don’t know when that database ended, or where that is, if it still exists Etc. I did several lists like this in the past, but that was all before I was in the band, and obviously since then many personnel shifts have occurred.

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Thanks for those infos @DannyBedrosian. It’s possible some of that stuff is still online (the 90s seem so long ago now O_o), I’ll try and look into it someday. I see some links have been preserved on this thread, for example: The old One Nation Board Room

Maybe your next project should indeed be this line-up history, though: it’s a little insane if it doesn’t exist anywhere.

Back to the canon discography, come to think of it and based on what was said earlier, the discography on George’s website probably still is a good place to start. Whomever compiled it clearly chose not to include projects by members after they left the collective. There are omissions, including for example Godmoma (that one, as well as a few other similar cases, had made me assume there may some kind of “endorsed by George rule”—Bootsy was still in the collective at the time), some later George Clinton collabs (such as Ronkat or Aleon Craft), and obviously your own records @DannyBedrosian, so it’s far from complete, but at the end of the day it’s still a good place to start. I still would love to know who was given the task of making the webpage and what the criteria was.

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There are obvious canonical problems with omitting projects that an artist did after they left the collective. For one thing, where would projects land that were done by members as a side project while they were still in the collective? Far too many questions to ask and it doesn’t make canonical sense really. Whomever did that on the website was probably a group of people involved in the management and they just tried to include as many albums as they could think of. Honestly without tooting my own horn, I think the best place to start when it comes to compiled histories and discographies, is the Authorized P-Funk song reference. And honestly, I would wait till November to get the new edition, because there is an entire book worth of new information in there. I think most people’s questions that come back and forth about Canon could be mostly answered just with the additional pages in thd new edition alone.

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I think your project is essential because it’s all-inclusive and obviously any hardcore P-Funk fan like, I guess, most of us on this board, would love to hear every record by every member, regardless of whether they were in the collective at any given time. And given the vertiginous amount of material at hand, it’s crucial that a database such as your books exists. There are such databases for other ultra-prolific artists (Prince, Bill Laswell, Haruomi Hosono…), so it was about time someone did it for the P-Funk Allstars, and thankfully you did! I’m very curious to see that new book, and I’m sure I’ll make a fair amount of discoveries of things I didn’t even know exist (as I did with the first edition)!

Like I said earlier, my approach is simply different—not necessarily something as useful as yours because completists want everything, but more of a snapshot of what could be the collective’s canon as a collective (or band). My understanding is that Bootsy, Maceo, Bernie and many others went their way and, despite collaborating again with the collective here and there, essentially did something that became a thing of its own. Obviously that’s an external perception, a fan’s perspective—you obviously understand the collective’s dynamics and history way better than I do.

And indeed, there’s the matter of things that were done while people were in the collective, but released later (funnily enough, George’s website seems to make this dinstinction in certain cases, by crediting 90s releases by Bootsy or Eddie or Brides that were recorded earlier, but there’s other stuff like André Foxxe’s first album that’s omitted), and I guess that’s indeed a whole Pandora’s box of grey areas… Maybe my idea would ultimately lead nowhere that makes sense, I honestly don’t know.

Either way, my birthday is in November, so you book will be right on time for me to make myself a b-day present XD I’ll see then how it makes me reconsider the topic :slight_smile:

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In some ways, putting together the list that you describe would be essentially easy. At the ‘core’ level it makes sense canonically. But if there is only one period in question, it sort of negates the grandeur of the timeline narrative. If we were to only focus on, say, 1969-1981 (or where the cutoff would be, makes no difference to a discographer if it is, in fact, incomplete) you would have a sensible grouping of ‘core’ releases and albums, and the majority of the charting action was in this period only generally speaking, although serious exceptions can be made in the '60s, 80’s, 90’s, even the 00’s and the 10’s.

Again, this is where canonically I would disagree with the limiting of a timeline. However, if it were this simple, and only confined to what the ‘Thang’ itself was doing in this period minus other sessions, and non directly produced by GC Spinoffs, it would be, in my opinion:

The First 12 Funkadelic albums
The first 10 Parliament albums
The first 2 Ruth Copeland albums
The first 6 Bootsy/Rubber Band albums
The first 2 Horny Horns albums
The first 3 Parlet albums
The first 2 Brides albums
Eddie’s first solo album
Bernie’s first solo album
Phillipe’s album for Uncle Jam Records
And maybe the First Roger and Zapp albums

and thats pretty much it.

Because of more dogmatic criterion, even things like Fuzzy’s albums, Godmoma, Mutiny, Quazar, and James Wesley Jackson’s albums would omitted. But obviously altering criterion will either bloat or contract the list at large.

Either way, its all productive discourse, and I welcome and love it all.
As for the personnell timeline, I may recreate the one I did years ago, and just update the decades that hadn’t occurred yet in the archaic time that I wrote it :grinning_face:

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Oh yeah, no, I wouldn’t stop there, and I’m sorry if this is what was implied by my posts. The P-Funk saga continues to this day and as a fan of later eras (I love the 80s and 90s at least as much as the 70s), I certainly didn’t mean stopping in 1982. I just meant to keep the focus on George (obviously, the center of gravity of the whole project) and, as you suggested to define the collective, and I guess it makes sense, the touring bandmembers and their side-projects for as long as they were members, from the very beginning to now. Stuff like Jimmy G. and the Tackheads, Trey Lewd’s Drop The Line or Sativa’s Jersey Girl seem to belong, for example. This is where I’d draw the line, “geographically” (so to speak), not chronologically.

If you ever recreate and complete your timeline, it would anyway be a precious document in the absolute, and I mean regardless of the whole discography topic. Fans of most major solo act or band know who exactly was in the band at any given time (often, that can even be found on a band’s Wikipedia page). One can easily find out who was in Prince’s or David Bowie’s band at any given time. Rolling Stones fans know who was in the Rolling Stones at any given time. Sadly, because the P-Funk Allstars have such a long history, with such a massive rotating crew, and are IMHO sadly overlooked by music historians, this info isn’t widely available.

There’s a list of members on Wikipedia, IDK if it’s comprehensive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P-Funk_members), but it doesn’t say who was in the band when, and I’m under the impression that it mixes occasional studio collaborators and proper bandmembers, too. For example, I may be wrong, but I don’t know that Sly Stone was ever officially a bandmember.

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Sly was an official member for two separate tenures (1980-81, and 2007-2009), so he is actually a legit member of P-Funk…but there are a bunch of fakers on that wikipedia page too, people that have just arbitrarily added themselves. The more I think about it, the more important it seems to have an updated list like what we have been talking about.

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