Make My Funk the P-Funk Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Parliaments

George formed the group while he was in his teens working at a barbershop in New Jersey. I'm not entirely sure who he formed the group with, but the lineup which was to provide the core of P-Funk's vocalists in 1969 was comprised of Clinton, Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins, Grady Thomas, Calvin Simon and Ray Davis.

Answer: (I Wanna) Testify

"Testify" was the group's only major hit, a year or two before Funkadelic formed. All of the other songs were recorded by the Parliaments, Parliament (singular) or Funkadelic over the next few years.

Answer: Plainfield, NJ

Clinton relocated to Detroit in the 1960's to pursue a musical career. The Parliaments and then Funkadelic eventually followed suit, but up until about 1972 all of the core members hailed from Plainfield.

Answer: Motown

While he didn't write any hits, George was able to generate a steady income and even employed some of the Motown studio musicians on Funkadelic's early recordings, including "I'll Bet You".

Answer: The Jackson 5

The song was also released as a single by Funkadelic, and their version actually saw some chart action in 1969 - #22 R&B and #63 pop(US charts). Motown sessionmen Earl Van Dyke and Bob Babbitt played keyboards and bass respectively. The Jackson 5's version was not a single, but the Funkadelic rendition was P-Funk's first chart hit.

Answer: Eddie Hazel

Hampton, aka "Kidd Funkadelic," didn't join the Funk Mob until 1975, when a note-for-note rendition of Hazel's "Maggot Brain" prompted George to hire him immediately. Unbeknownst to many Funkateers, Eddie Hazel sang lead on a lot of Funkadelic's early singers, and in my opinion he was a significantly better singer than any of the original Parliaments.

After 1971 he left the group over money issues and an emerging addiction to heroin. Though he would play with P-Funk sporadically over the next 15 years, he didn't make any major contributions after 1975's "Let's Take it to the Stage" aside from the occasional earth-shaking solo, and the years of substance abuse finally took their toll when he died tragically from internal bleeding and liver failure in 1992.

Answer: James Brown

Bootsy joined James Brown's backing band along with his brother Phelps in early 1970 and left within a year. The Collins brothers played on "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "Soul Power," among other hits. They actually became his sidemen when James drafted Bootsy & Phelps' entire band, then known as the Pacesetters, after his old band bailed on him.

This group, which centered around the Collins brothers, was the first of Brown's backing bands to be dubbed the JB's.

Answer: Casablanca

Warner Bros. signed Funkadelic, not Parliament, in 1976. Other acts on the Casablanca label included Donna Summer and Kiss.

Answer: Parliament has a horn section

A lot of people don't know this, though Parliament and Funkadelic are otherwise essentially the same band signed to two different labels. Actually, a few Funkadelic songs have horns, but only Parliament has a regular line-up of horn players (also known as the Horny Horns). Several songs on "America Eats its Young" have horns, but the horn players were random sessionmen and not actual members of the group, and this was before Clinton resurrected Parliament as a JBs-type R&B act. Most of Funkadelic's albums don't have any horns at all, and all of the Parliament albums on Casablanca do.

The Horny Horns were actually led by refugees from James Brown's backing band (Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, and Richard "Kush" Griffith, none of whom played with the Collins brothers line up of Brown's band).

Answer: Bernie Worrell

If you don't know the answer to that question you shouldn't be playing this quiz. By the way, I said "founding" keyboard player because Walter "Junie" Morrison, also an important cog in the P-Funk machine, joined in 1978 and yet another keyboard player, David "Chong" Spradley, joined the crew the following year.

While Bernie was undoubtedly the most important of the three, a lot of P-Funk's best-known songs would never have been written without the latter two - "One Nation Under a Groove," "(not just) Knee Deep" and "Theme From the Black Hole" (Morrison) and the epochal "Atomic Dog" (Spradley).

Answer: Atomic Dog

"Flashlight" and "Knee Deep" are the runners up, but according to the-breaks.com, the biggest sampling database on the Internet, "Atomic Dog" has been sampled more often than any other P-Funk tune - 80 samples of the tune are listed (in comparison to 59 for "Flashlight"), including such hits as Snoop Dogg's "What's My Name?" (#8 US Pop) and Ice Cube's "My Summer Vacation".

Interestingly, "Atomic Dog" was the collective's last tune to hit #1 on the US R&B charts (their sixth overall). It was not performed by Parliament or Funkadelic but instead was a George Clinton "solo" single, though Funkateers should note that when Clinton signed a solo deal with Capitol Records in 1982, a year after he formally disbanded Parliament and Funkadelic, his solo career was only nominal; he used essentially the same musicians from P-Funk's latter days. Singer and guitarist Gary Shider, who'd been with P-Funk for a decade, arranged the backup vocals and sang on "Atomic Dog," and Bootsy, Junie and Fred Wesley all made significant contributions to Clinton's first couple "solo" records. Sadly, they're all out of print now, but you can find 'em pretty cheap used.

Answer: 3

Yes, P-Funk hit the top 40 of the pop charts three times; they weren't much of a crossover success, at least until white college students began to prick their ears up in the early nineties. "Give Up the Funk" hit #15 in 1976, their biggest pop hit even though it only made #5 R&B. Parliament's "Flashlight" hit #16 and Funkadelic's "One Nation Under a Groove" hit #28 in 1978, and that was it. (All chart stats U.S. only)

Answer: Sly Stone

Sly, down on his luck after troubles with drugs, the splintering of his band and run-ins with the law, decided for some reason to hook up with George Clinton around 1980 (his former group, Sly and the Family Stone, had far more popular success than P-Funk ever did, charting several top 40 hits and three #1s on the U.S. pop charts alone). People close to Clinton at the time have said that Sly helped to introduce a number of "evil habits" into the band which presumably hastened the group's dissolution. Considering Sly substance problems at the time, I'll bet a million bucks that he was the man who turned Clinton on to freebase cocaine, probably the major culprit in the P-Funk empire's demise. Sly, by the way, turned up on a couple songs on Funkadelic's great swan-song, "The Electric Spanking of War Babies", as well as the 1983 P-Funk All Stars album "Urban Dancefloor Guerillas," which is almost as good.

Answer: True

They were inducted in 1997. According to the R'n'R HOF website, the inductees were as follows: George Clinton, Eddie Hazel, Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Ray Davis, Bernie Worrell, Ramon "Tiki" Fulwood, William "Bootsy" Collins, Jerome "Bigfoot" Brailey, Gary Shider, Glenn Lamont Goins, Michael Hampton, Cordell "Boogie" Mosson, William "Billy Bass" Nelson, and Walter "Junie" Morrison. That's damn near everybody significant, though I would have jettisoned a couple of the Parliaments (whose role in the group, after the first LP or two at least, was minimal, with the exceptions of Ray Davis and, possibly, Fuzzy Haskins) and included Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker along with latter-day keyboard player David "Chong" Spradley, without whom most early 80's P-Funk -and "Atomic Dog" in particular - would have been inconceivable.

Answer: The Ohio Players

I believe Junie was only with the Players for one or two records, but he recorded "Funky Worm" virtually by himself, providing the Ohio Players with their first big hit and a million-seller. The eerie high synth of "Funky Worm" served, along with the P-Funk oevure, as the basis for the entire "G-Funk" sound, popularized by Dr. Dre's 1992 album "The Chronic".

When Junie joined the Funk Mob, many of his contributions would again be virtual solo performances, and he composed nearly half of Funkadelic's "One Nation Under A Groove" and Parliament's "Motor-Booty Affair" albums, both among the most popular P-Funk records ever and the latter being, in my opinion, the single greatest record P-Funk ever produced. Which means you need to go out and pick it up. Now.