June is Junie Month here on Edge of the Line. Each Friday, we’re paying tribute to funk legend Walter “Junie” Morrison.

In 1977, Junie Morrison would join Parliament-Funkadelic and sing about uniting the nation under a groove, contemporary politics, race, NIMBYism, and Atlantis (in fact, much of that came on one 1978 song: Parliament’s ‘Deep’), and in his solo material over the previous few years he’d addressed drugs, groupies, and abortion. But Junie also sang about cookies.

‘Cookies Will Get You’ was the second track on Freeze (1975), Morrison’s second solo LP. It truly was a solo LP (not counting Ron Capone’s engineering efforts): Junie played every single instrument, including fretless bass and clavinet. But on ‘Cookies’, it’s the drums and synth solo that are most prevalent – along with Junie’s voice, which wails about getting crumbs on bedsheets. (‘Cookies’ was cut almost in half from its six-plus minutes for the 1994 compilation, The Westbound Years.)

Junie told Red Bull Music Academy that in the ’70s there was a focus on “stress and strife”, but that wasn’t the only thing the world had to offer. He saw funk as “an excellent platform for moving or removing the ills that may be present in our lives.” And ‘Cookies’ funks: from the simple “Woah, woah, woah, yeah” hook, with the first word arriving on the first beat, and the stabbed keyboard chord every other bar, to the array of drum fills during the synth solo (2:11), with Junie flipping between more freeform expression and a kick-and-cymbal combination on the One.

Despite – or because of – that “Woah” hook being about the simplest thing Junie could manage musically, with the three “Woah”s being on the first, second, and third beats, it holds up about two-thirds of the song. Then Junie has room for the synth freakery and to finish the track by screaming – perhaps in excitement about his own playing, or perhaps in desire for more cookies.  

Top image from Discogs.