Bootsy Collins – one of the greatest bass players of all time – has a new record out soon, the modestly-titled Album Of The Year Number 1 Funkateer, and has been speaking about his time playing with two titans of funk: James Brown and George Clinton.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Collins, now 73, talked about The Godfather of Funk's policy of fining band members who missed a note and suggests that it was a positive thing.
“James felt the fines would make you work harder. He was using that reverse psychology on us, and we didn’t understand at the time. ‘Why was he saying we wasn’t happening? Why would he have to fine us?’ And so I learned from that experience with him. When we got there, he just stopped fining us.”
Bootsy later graduated to George Clinton’s band where he became an integral member of the Parliament/Funkadelic lineup; the man with the star-shaped bass.
Collins remembers how he managed to get that iconic instrument made: “I found the guy to make the ‘Space Bass’ in 1974 in Warren, Michigan, and his name was Larry Pless, and he worked in an accordion shop. I had been going all the way up and down 48th Street in New York, and nobody would say yes to making it.
"Everybody had all of these things that wasn’t going to work: ‘The wood is not shaped right. It ain’t going to sound right.’”
“When I asked the guy who owned the accordion shop if he could build the bass, he said, ‘Well, why would you come into an accordion shop?’ To me, it was just a music store, and you just never know what’s going to be happening.
"And sure enough, he said, ‘Oh, wait a minute, there’s a guitar player in the back room that works on the accordions, but he also makes guitars.’ And I said, ‘Well, can I meet him?’ He introduced me to him, and then it was on from there.”
Collins and Clinton were estranged for years, but the two icons of P-Funk are now reconciled and a collaboration is in the offing. Collins reveals it was actually Kamala Harris who brought the two men back together: “What happened was I seen Kamala on TV saying, ‘I found a George Clinton doll. And I love Bootsy Collins.’
"For some reason, that touched me. Like, ‘He’s still your friend. No matter what happened, you got to be the one to take the high road.’ So I called him up and said, ‘Let’s do this track together.’ And he was all over it.
"So we’re going to carry on and see where we go, because when you’re dealing with the funk, you never know what the funk’s going to happen.”
