June is Junie Month here on Edge of the Line. Each Friday, we’re paying tribute to funk legend Walter “Junie” Morrison.
Gloryhallastoopid (or Pin the Tale on the Funky) (1979) was neither Parliament’s most glorious or funkiest album, but it did include a gem starring Junie.
‘Colour Me Funky’ is the only track on Glory to feature Morrison. He plays guitar, drums, synth bass, and keyboards. It’s one of several examples of his capability to do everything, although he does share mic duties (in typical Parliament fashion) with George Clinton and Garry Shider.
Backup singers repeat in the outro, “Uncle Jam’s coming, coming for you”, referencing the Funkadelic album released two months earlier. The Authorized P-Funk Song Reference lists Lynn Mabry, Jeanette Washington, Mallia Franklin, Shirley Hayden, and Jeanette MacGruder as backing vocalists (not as an extensive a group as for ‘Theme from the Black Hole’, which had 13 vocalists behind the three leads.)
As well as references to the P-Funk universe, Glory was full of references to space. On ‘Black Hole’, the highest-charting single, the One is personified—“My name is the One / Some people call me the funk”—and we learn that funk finds vacant rumps, then humps to please.
The rest of the record, which Junie played no part in, lacks some of his offbeat charm evident on ‘Colour’ (curiously spelt the British way): the surprising melancholy of his guitar, his freaky voices, the little “In the pocket!” additions. The album’s a little straight, a little too mechanical to reach the heights of Parliament-Funkadelic. Perhaps the excellent Motherpage was right when it theorised that Clinton’s refrain of “Nothing has changed / Even the bang remains the same” is the P-Funk leader “defending himself against his critics”.
Clinton only dedicated a couple of pages to the making of Gloryhallastoopid in his thoroughly entertaining memoir. He recalled “the tide receding” on Parliament’s success:
“That’s how Western capitalism has always worked. Consumers get trained to think that the thing they possess doesn’t meet their needs anymore—even if your car is driving like a dream, you’ll run over every pot-hole in the world just to bust an axle and get yourself a new one.”
The only remedy, Clinton wrote, is a new possession. In music, that’s a new album from your favourite band – and soon enough a new favourite band. Parliament were on the decline, but that inspired the album’s concept: the band would pin “the tale, or the tail” in the way of their choosing, and while they did it, they’d tell the story of the universe – a funkified version, of course.
Top image from Discogs.