INFORMATION ON THE LIST

The song list is broken down by band in chronological order. This follows each group through their discography in order of release before continuing with the next band to appear in the time line and so on. Rather than listing acts in alphabetical order, which I felt did not give the true scope of P-Funk’s canonical age, I wanted to list each group as they first appeared “on wax.” Each group will have a small introductory description of its inception and a brief overview of its history. In addition, each record label is listed with the exception of more postmodern independent or non-label albums that were left blank for obvious reasons. Most of the important albums are listed accordingly and chronologically with the accompanying songs contained therein.

Each song contains as much information as could be ascertained for said song, with noted exceptions. All the personnel (vocalists, musicians, and sometimes arrangers) are listed, but the writer credits and producer credits have been purposefully omitted. This is for several reasons.

First, with regard to writers, often this information has been quite well documented (as opposed to personnel credits) and therefore seemed redundant when such information can be garnered from the albums themselves as well as innumerable sites online. Also, many of these writing credits have been both the source of heated debate and the scourge of those who felt they were left off this or that writing credit due to the nature of the moment and the largesse of the collection of players and contributors. Indeed, the most often repeated comment I got from interviewees in the process was the line “I wrote that.” As true as that may be, remedying this according to everyone’s wishes would be an impossible task and also would take away from the accuracy of the writers’ credits as they contemporaneously appear. For those reasons, as well as the wave of legal red tape surrounding this issue, writers were omitted from the book’s contents.

Second, with regard to production, it is also a source of some debate across the various acts, as there are often coproducers who may or may not have gotten credit. To make things more confusing, in the case of the more modern era, the definition of a producer has changed, and the producer today often tangibly creates much of the track in question itself. In this way, the given producer(s) would have been credited therein as a big part of the personnel, giving them credit on the song regardless. It is no secret that the main producer of at least the bulk of the core material is George Clinton; only in specific spin-offs (and most of the additional solo acts) is the production more on a case-by-case basis, although even this facet has exceptions. Much like writers, the majority of production information has been provided in albums, whereas the specific musical and vocal personnel were not, and for that reason and all the previously mentioned ones, production was also (mostly) omitted from the list.

Additionally, engineers were for the most part left off the list. This is because in many cases, multiple engineers worked on the same tracks in different phases of said tracks’ inception. This causes chaos and controversy as to who may or may not have engineered the recording of the various sessions that make up any one song, with few ways of remedying the problem. Special mention needs to be made to engineers Jim Vitti, Jim Callon, Greg Reily, Greg Ward, Mike Iacapelli, Pete Bishop, John Jascz, Bob Dennis, Larry Alexander, Mike Hutchinson, Allen Zentz, Dave Baker, Richard Akor, John Bauer, Mike Davis, Mark and Jeff Bass, Michael Wilder, Chris Baker, Alvin Speights, Carl Robinson, Neal Pogue, Bob Bishop, Larry Ferguson, Sue Brooks, Gary Wright, Dwayne Dungey, Toby Donahue, Barry Epperson, Tyler Pelt, Ricky Tan, and numerous others who engineered the songs in question over the years. Given the vastness of the catalog, however, this is not the case universally. There are thousands of cases where a single engineer may have worked on only one song, adding to the mystery and ease with which errors would be created. For these reasons, engineers have been left off the list.

Finally, two other groups were included when it was deemed necessary or gave additional credence to the songs at hand within P-Funk canon and/or were omitted when it was too difficult to truly ascertain the correct credits. This is with regards to arrangers and hand clappers. In some cases, when the arranger is vital to the song but said arranger did not play or sing on it or if the arranger is involved only in that one song, they are usually included. The reasons they have been left off are mostly because of space issues (this book would be thousands of pages instead of hundreds with the addition of arrangers, producers, and all writers) and the controversy of possible miscredits, as this credit is second only to writers in its tendentious turbulence. Much like the previously mentioned categories, arrangers are very often listed in the album credits (although not always, certainly more often than the overall musical and vocal personnel on a song-by-song basis).

As many people are well aware, handclaps are a big part of the P-Funk sound. In many cases, there were so many hand clappers and so many sessions involving a rotating cast of hand clappers, numbering in the hundreds of individuals, that it seemed impossible to correctly list all of them. In some cases, however, when those credits were clearly defined and corroborated by many or if the inclusion of handclaps made the session stylistically definable as “P-Funk,” they were included. Special cases are made with reference to Carl “Butch” Small and his “handclap device,” which was sometimes used in tandem with human handclaps and sometimes as a replacement for them. These cases are also noted in the book.