‘Butt-to-Buttresuscitation’ opens Funkadelic’s Tales of Kidd Funkadelic (1976), an album named after Michael Hampton, who’d recently joined the band as a teenage prodigy. The song is characterised by Bernie Worrell’s distinct children’s-toy-meets-UFO synthesizer sound. In the first two choruses, Bernie finds little pockets between vocals to put synth bubbles and farts. George Clinton recalled Emerson, Lake and Palmer and King Crimson using the ARP Pro Soloist, and Funkadelic thinking, “it was time to put it in the funk.”
Daniel Bedrosian pointed out the ARP was all over the previous album, Let’s Take It To The Stage. On ‘Butt’, Bernie uses the ARP to harmonise with Hampton’s guitar solo. The latter plays freely and funkily throughout ‘Butt’, which isn’t in a strict song format so much as it is chorus-jam-chorus-jam.
Behind the looser jamming, and what sounds like complete improvisation from Bernie, Cordell Mosson drums are much more consistent. They’re a world away from those in Funkadelic’s ‘One Nation Under a Groove’, their first real single hit and immediately more danceable. Here, Mosson plays more like a jazz drummer.
There was a stark contrast between early funk drumming (in Funkadelic and other bands) and the later hammering in the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers. On the Broken Record podcast, longtime Peppers producer Rick Rubin discussed this topic with guitarist John Frusciante.
Rubin: “You think of James Brown’s drummers – they’re super groovy, but they played almost like jazz. Very subdued. Groovy, but not loud. And Chad [Smith]’s rocking like crazy, which is not your typical funk drum.”
Frusciante: “There’s this heaviness to it, but it’s still got this funk thing, but it’s also got this extra speed to it.”
Clinton said Hampton’s fellow guitarist, Eddie Hazel, built the foundation of ‘Butt’; the pair were joined by Mosson, Garry Shider on bass, and Worrell on organ and synths.
This was in an interesting era of Funkadelic in that there were influences from the original Parliaments (before Clinton’s doo-wop group dropped the ‘s’)—Grady Thomas and Ray Davis were part of “FUNKADELIC INVASION SQUAD” featured in the LP’s inner artwork (pictured above)—and simultaneously, Hampton and Worrell were having guitar-and-synth freakouts with little regard for anything doo-wop.
The big sustained note on the One (“IIIIII... wanna go back”) was a trick used on Parliament’s ‘Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)’, inspired by David Bowie’s ‘Fame’. The chorus of Kidd Funkadelic’s following track, ‘Let’s Take It To The People’, has the big “Ahhh, let’s take it to the people”. That song is closer to the original Parliaments. Hampton’s guitar is still at the forefront (or at least just behind the vocalists), but there’s much more structure.
The looseness of ‘Butt’ is part of the fun: if it was too rigid, you wouldn’t have Bernie’s near-earpiercing notes (1:29), Mosson’s swaggering bass fills (1:54), or the bluesier, ‘March To the Witch’s Castle’-esque interlude before the final chorus. Clinton wrote in his terrific memoir, “After four Parliament albums and half a dozen Funkadelic albums, we were genuinely kaleidoscopic”. Kidd Funkadelic had a ton of colours.
Top image from Discogs.