Parliament’s Mothership Connection – One Giant Leap for Mankind: EUR VIDEO THROWBACK

*On this day in 1975, Parliament blasted “Mothership Connection” into the stratosphere, and the intergalactic-themed concept album boldly carried the liberation-through-funk banner where not even James Brown’s funk had gone before.

“Mothership Connection” was Parliament’s first album to include horn players Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, fresh from Brown’s band, The J.B.’s. Front man George Clinton told Clevescene.com in 2013 that he deliberately infused the album with “James Brown-type grooves, but with street talk and ghetto slang.”

Parliament would eventually fuse with Clinton’s touring band, Funkadelic, and be christened Parliament-Funkadelic, or P-Funk for short.

The group’s outer space motif was introduced on the title track, which also birthed Clinton’s alter-ego character Star Child (sent from the heavens to bring funk to the people of Earth) and nemesis Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk. Casablanca Records went so far as to feature Sir Nose in a promo ad for the group’s 1979 album “Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome,” which also featured their character Dr. Funkenstein.

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Clinton wrote the “Mothership Connection” track with his keyboard player Bernie Worrell and bass player Bootsy Collins, another alum from James Brown’s band. While giving a masterclass to ACM students in 2014, Clinton explained the logic behind creating characters for the “Mothership Connection” album. He also spoke about humming his idea for the title track’s main groove to Collins and Worrell, and how the entire band filled in “all the coloring around it.”

While Clinton is the architect of the “Mothership Connection” groove and performed the song’s spoken parts (like “Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip”), it was the group’s vocalist and guitarist Glenn Goins who sang lead on the track. Watch below.

On their 1976 tour to promote “Mothership Connection,” the group introduced what would become its signature prop – a spacecraft that would descend to the stage while they performed this song. The machinery has become so symbolic of all that Parliament stood for, including blasting beyond musical boundaries and expectations, that a replica of the ship sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“Mothership Connection” became Parliament’s first album to be certified gold and later platinum. In 1997, Parliament-Funkadelic was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by none other than Prince …

And the Library of Congress’ got on the mothership in 2011 when it added the album to its National Recording Registry, declaring “The album has had an enormous influence on jazz, rock and dance music.”

Of course Parliament-Funkadelic tracks are inextricably woven through hip hop, with too many sampled tracks to count. But Dr. Dre’s 1992 album “The Chronic,” released 20 years ago today, offered the most fertile ground for those P-Funk samples to grow, and eventually define a whole new genre of hip hop: The G-Funk Era.

Below, “Mothership Connection” fuels Dre’s “The Chronic” track, “Let Me Ride.”

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