“Boston, Toronto and Detroit had the most to do with us changing,” says legendary bandleader George Clinton, in the new CBC Radio documentary, Funk Getting Ready To Roll.
Before Clinton, a Detroit native, became known for his outré aesthetic and blistering funk and rock arrangements, he and a few band members spent time in Toronto brewing creativity and recording.
P-Funk’s Toronto history isn’t a secret, but since it encompassed their pre-fame period there’s not much information out there. This makes Funk Getting Ready To Roll an important addition to Toronto’s weird and wonderful musical history, while also filling in a void in the wider canon of African-American music.
We asked the documentary’s producer David Dacks, a local groovologist, to share how this project came about. Funk Getting Ready To Roll airs this Sunday, August 12 at 3 PM and 9PM, on Radio 2. To celebrate, Dacks is throwing a psychedelic soul party at The Red Light on Thursday featuring DJs Jason Palma and Simmer Down.
When did you realize that Parliament-Funkadelic’s time in Toronto was more than just a footnote in the band’s history?
I knew there were a lot of stories floating around veterans of the Yonge Street strip, but it wasn’t until I started interviewing P Funk members that I discovered that this history was more significant than I’d realized for them – as opposed to just for the music history of this city. It was a really important transitional period for them as people as much as, or perhaps even more than, for the music.
Are there any other resources documenting their time in the city?
Not really, although a major inspiration for me was P-Funk: An Oral History, which became one of my favourite music books. It had about three pages (of 160!) about Toronto. It was written by (the late) David Mills, Aris Wilson, Larry Alexander and Thomas Stanley. I loved it for concentrating on the personal struggles of band members instead of going down the track-by-track liner note nerd path.
That’s the style of this documentary, which makes sense, considering it’ll be aired on CBC. It’s meant for a mass audience so I had to balance a lot of characters and trivia with a strong, linear story (told by only a few voices) to keep the non-fan interested. No doubt some people will be upset that I didn’t go the record nerd route.
Incidentally, David Mills (co-creator of Treme, head writer on The Wire, major hip hop journalist) was very encouraging about this doc when I first started work on it. I intended to interview him but he died suddenly. I never met him, but he was such a positive and encouraging guy online.
Without giving too much away, what can you tell me about why Clinton and his pals come to Toronto?
They came for several reasons. They were living around Detroit, and the music industry there had crashed after Motown decamped to L.A. in 1971. The Vietnam War draft was a factor, though none were specifically draft dodgers. The riots of the late ’60s made Detroit dangerous and they wanted a break from that. Plus, their management, Ron Scribner & Big Land Associates, were located in Toronto.
Rob Bowman does an exceptional job in the doc of comparing the situation here to other trends in black music: they had a generous budget to work with and full creative control, they made a double album (uncommon in black music outside of Isaac Hayes), and in Toronto they fully shed any regional (i.e. Detroit, post-Motown) identity they may have still had. So many other black artists were strongly identified with the cities where they lived and worked: Otis Redding, Al Green & Isaac Hayes (Memphis), James Brown (Augusta, GA), Marvin Gaye (Detroit), Curtis Mayfield (Chicago), but Funkadelic were more a traveling circus.
Was there anything surprising you learned about Toronto while making the doc?
Not much. I was already aware of Toronto’s unsung status as an R&B hotbed in the ’60s and early ’70s, especially having worked on a previous documentary about Jackie Shane. It was pretty funny to hear that the band members lived all over the place – Scarborough, Mississauga, North York – and not just around the club districts of the time. I was half-surprised at GC and company characterizing the city as a racism-free paradise, but I can see why they thought so, even if the view doesn’t hold up to a great deal of scrutiny by Toronto residents.
Did P Funk leave an imprint on the local scene in any way?
They didn’t have much of an impact. They weren’t Canadian, so they don’t figure into the official history of Yonge St. Also, the R&B/funk scene was starting to decline so they didn’t exactly move things forward. If America Eats Its Young had been a stone cold classic maybe more attention would have been paid to this story long ago.
