Home > Author > George Clinton
1 " Think...it ain't illegal...yet. "
― George Clinton , Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir
2 " Lots of people tried to be like Sly. Take Rick James: more than half of the shit he did was in direct imitation. But there were only two people who were capable of that kind of cool: Miles Davis and Sly. I didn’t know Miles as well, but watching Sly was a strange experience, both educational and disorienting. To me, crazy is a prerequisite for greatness. But it doesn’t have to be actual craziness. I play crazy, when in reality, I’m pretty close to sane. Sly wasn’t playing. He believed in his own abilities, but he also believed in his own legend. And while he was a real nice guy in most ways, he wouldn’t hesitate to misuse you when it came to money and drugs. Of course, he was so ahead of the game that he wouldn’t try to trick you. He’d come right out and ask you if he could misuse you. "
3 " Another time, he blew up his house in Bel Air. Someone was doing drugs there and they left the ether open. The fumes are like wavy cartoon lines; they find fire and then the fire follows the fumes back to the source and explodes. When it’s going critical, you can hear it go up in a whistle. Sly was back in a corner of his house, in a bathroom, and the ether had drifted from the kitchen. When he lit the pipe, it blew up the part of the house he was in—it was an addition, and it separated from the rest of the structure. When the smoke cleared, the bathroom had fallen clean off. He was standing on the edge of the house as cars drove by. He was standing on a ledge about six inches wide, with the door heading into the kitchen right next to him. He slid back into the house, closed the door, and stayed like that for more than a year. "
4 " Free your mind... and your ass will follow. "
― George Clinton
5 " Fuck it; put it in a bucket, and take it to the stage! "
6 " I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe; I was not offended, for I knew I had to rise above it all or drown in my own shit... "
7 " Style is whatever you want to do, if you can do it with confidence. "
8 " He affected an authority that came off as arrogant. It never bothered me too much, because we were rebels anyway. I knew that his high-toned ways were a strategy for existing, just like our psychedelic ways. You learned that at the barbershop, when people came to you for a new style, for a way of presenting themselves to the outside world. We designed people’s looks back at the Silk Palace, and we designed our own looks as Funkadelic. In truth, underneath the image, I was a much more reserved, centered, circumspect person. In fact, that’s why I was able to carry off those crazy looks. It was freedom generated by misdirection, and it allowed me to focus on my real self, the identity I was nurturing away from any kind of spotlight. "
9 " There was a band jam going, a slow groove I knew he could get into, and we were trying to launch his solo. Before he started, I told him to play like his mother had died, to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside him and let it out through his guitar. Eddie was the kind of player who rose to a challenge. If you gave him instructions or a prompt, he’d come around to it. And when he started playing, I knew immediately that he understood what I meant. I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web. When we played the solo back, I knew that it was good beyond good, not only a virtuoso display of musicianship but also an almost unprecedented moment of emotion in pop music. That was the missing ingredient that arrived in time for that song; it was maybe the first time that our emotional ability as artists matched our technical ability as players. "
10 " See, you're a damn fool if you see somebody starving and poor and you think they should just stay starving and poor and not take care of them.... And if I got some little bit of money and I ain't making sure that you got some, I'm a damn fool if I don't expect you to come and try to take it. It's not as easy as each person is responsible for being in their predicament. "
