Short and "focused": George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic at The Canopy Club

Note: Photos by Erica Magda.

Clocking in at three hours, Thursday night's P-Funk show was a short set...for them.

I'm not exaggerating. George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic can play up to four, four-and-a-half hours. Three hours is nothing to them.

Yet at the same time, the version of P-Funk I saw on Thursday at The Canopy Club was more focused than it had been any time I had seen them in the past. They jammed, but it usually led to something new. The singers and performers seemed more organized, and Clinton...well...instead of just kind of wandering around, he took an active role in making music (even though it was not a very large role).

This is the fourth time I have seen the band in some incarnation, and by now I know what to expect. The band, minus Clinton, starts playing to warm the crowd up as "the Mothership has just landed." As they play, a pimp-esque character named Sir Nose comes out and makes fun of the funk. He is then thwarted by Clinton, who shows him the way of the funk. Sir Nose starts to dance, and Clinton and the Mothership keeps on funkin'.

This has been done for a few years now, with very little variation. The only switch-ups come night to night, as the band switches out songs.

And the setlist was pretty good, with good but sloppy versions of "Cosmic Slop" (no pun intended), "Atomic Dog" and "Flashlight." But the undeniable highlight, though, was Michael Hampton, a.k.a. Kidd Funkadelic, and his full reading of the guitar epic "Maggot Brain."

It was done in its full form, and Hampton's playing (minus a cord getting unplugged) was flawless and a sight to see him go up and down the fretboard. The 10-minute-plus song provided something the show can lack at times: real emotion. His guitar had emotion, whereas so much more of the music can be reduced to a joke or a chant.

The rest of the music fared much better than in the past as well, with more vocal performances instead of pointless jamming (even though there were six guitarists on stage at one point). Since Clinton himself can't really sing anymore, he relies on a group of performers to carry on for him, including Garry Shider (original P-Funk member), Belita Woods, Kendra Foster and Kim Manning (a.k.a. "Peaches" from the reality show Flavor of Love). All of them are good singers, even if some of them are too y0ung to have understood the band in their heyday.

Still, the real star ended up being Gene "Poo Poo Man" Anderson, a soul singer who has been around for quite some time. His faux-James Brown moves and vocal performance provided a real boost of energy when it was needed.

And Clinton himself did not come even close to matching that energy. He was content looking into the audience, waving his hands around a few times and maybe shouting along to a song (remember how I said he contributed more this time? Well, that was his contribution).

Even though this has all been done before, there is no indication that these guys are phoning it in. In the 70s, this kind of music and clothing (outlandish, with a man in a diaper, a lot of colors and weird suits) was akin to a minstrel show, parodying the old stereotypes of blacks.

Today though, the attire is accepted, but not as a parody, and nobody is looking to break any new ground. They are jamming on whatever idea comes to their heads, and it can make for some great ideas in a show that rarely drags. For a bunch of old funkateers, they can still pull it off.

The band knew they had to get their show done though (again, because they have been doing the same show for so many years), and they pulled it off, albeit in a shorter window. Maybe this was because of a curfew, or maybe it was because they had their act together.

I don't know, and I guess I'll have to see how it turns out next time.



Note: A very bizarre thing happened to photograher Erica Magda and I when we were getting into the show, which led to us meeting Clinton right before the show started. I may or may not write up something for that story, since it left me confused yet delighted at the same time. Maybe that was the point, because that's how the show feels at times as well.