Asked if, at the age of 67, he still likes to get “funked up,” George Clinton responded as if it was the craziest question he’d ever heard.

“Well hell yeah! That’s for sure,” the funk legend replied. “That’s the number one reason we’re doing it. Got to get funked up.”

Clinton and his P-Funk entourage are in the final leg of a summer tour that will bring them to the Red Hook Brewery in Portsmouth on Saturday, Sept. 8. Clinton, who turned 67 in July, recently spoke to The Wire by phone from a hotel room in Philadelphia as he took a break between shows around the country. After close to half a century playing music, he says he’s as energized as ever. “I’m just getting started,” he said with a laugh.

The funk-master and musical visionary has a lot on his plate. In addition to a summer tour with 36 dates, he has a new CD slated for release early next year, to be accompanied by a winter tour with Wu Tang Clan. He is also making a video for his last studio album, 2005’s “How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?” The title—and the two-year gap between its original release and the video—refer to the trend of P-Funk albums becoming successful only after they have aged on the CD rack for awhile.
Clinton started his own record label, C Kunspyruhzy, in 2005, and has released solo work by many of his P-Funk band mates.

On top of all that, he is starring in an upcoming reality TV show, which will be aired on Black Entertainment Television, featuring a slew of hip-hop artists who have been influenced by his work, including Snoop Dogg, Flava Flav and Scarface.
“The first couple episodes will be a royalty statement party,” Clinton said, explaining that artists will determine how much money they’ve raked in by sampling his work. “Everybody that sampled our music is gonna be there with their royalty statements.”

Clinton is also in the process of sifting through extensive archives of live material to put together volumes of work for release to the public. Recent tours have convinced him that his audiences, especially younger fans who never got to see him perform in the 1960s and ’70s, are thirsty for more live recordings. 

“I didn’t realize how serious it was until we went to Amsterdam, which is a predominantly live music country. Most of the stuff on the radio over there is live,” he said. “The Grateful Dead and Phish and all them, most of their stuff was traded among fans, and so we’re gonna put out a low-budget series of those type of songs.”

Choosing what music to release could prove to be a daunting challenge. Growing up in New Jersey, Clinton formed The Parliaments in the late 1950s and began recording doo-wop sides. It was almost a decade later that the band broke through with the R&B hit “(I Just Wanna) Testify,” in 1967. The following year, Clinton started a new band, Funkadelic, which crashed through musical barriers to combine acid rock with R&B. He later renamed the band Parliament and signed them to Casablanca Records, while Funkadelic remained intact and signed with Warner Brothers. Clinton was suddenly at the helm of two bands—consisting of the same members—signed to two different labels.

Since then, Clinton has continued recording and performing through the decades with his touring act, the P-Funk All Stars. He is considered an icon in several musical genres, inspiring acts from Ice Cube and Outkast to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Asked if he sees any modern acts carrying the torch of his pioneering musical vision, Clinton pointed primarily to the hip-hop arena. He noted that more and more hip-hop artists are forming bands that can stretch out onstage instead of relying on computer technology to lay down beats. As the music continues to evolve, Clinton predicts an ultimate merger between hip-hop and rock. He espoused some of his wisdom with an industry forecast.

“You’re gonna find that a lot of (hip-hop) acts are gonna switch up to bands and merge with rock ’n’ roll. Hip-hop and rock ’n’ roll are destined to become merged together. One needs aggression and the other needs subject matter. There’s nobody I hear doing political stuff, per se. Rock music needs to do that, and hip-hop needs new subject matter to be aggressive on. So, like Rage Against the Machine, you’ll probably get a bunch of new versions of that concept, but a different style of music. Anthrax and Public Enemy was, to me, one of the best things I’ve ever seen,” he said.

As for P-Funk, the band is focused on doing the same thing it’s been doing for years—letting loose the funkiest shit in the history of funk. The touring act includes more than 20 musicians and dancers, with Clinton listed as lead vocalist and “referee.”

“That’s always been my gig,” the guru said. “Since we’re a loose band, we start out tight and then they just take off, so the only thing we’ve got to control them is a referee, as opposed to a conductor.”

Throughout the summer tour, Clinton has been playing a spectrum of songs from throughout his nearly 50-year career. He has found it difficult to keep up with the different ways contemporary musicians have fed off his work. It was not until The Red Hot Chili Peppers started playing tracks off of the psychedelic 1970 album “Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow,” for example, that he realized his music had a punk following. Various hip-hop samples keep him up to date on other musical trends that are rooted in his work. “To me, the only way to keep up with what’s going on is when I hear parents and older musicians say ‘I hate that music,’ that’s the music I go looking for,” he said with a chuckle.

Today, he is reaching back further than ever into his repertoire. “Matter of fact, we started going back further than the dates of songs that people even know about, before ‘Testify’ even,” he said. “We’ve got some of the doo-wop songs that we used to do in the ’50s and early ’60s. People are actually quite responsive to that.”

Clinton’s voice is raspy and his thick beard is speckled gray. But he is still one of the most stylish musicians in show business, sporting multi-colored dreadlocks, puffy reggae hats and colorful clothing. Despite the fact that he is colorblind, he said his style of dress has always come naturally—a natural extension of his revolutionary musical style. 

P-Funk audiences draw from a number of backgrounds, including hip-hop, jam band and middle-aged crowds. Clinton’s songs are still played in college dorm rooms and at dance parties around the world, and he enjoys exposing his music to new generations of fans. “That’s always good when you start seeing young kids in the audience who are down with P-Funk,” he said. 

George Clinton is one of those rare musicians with widespread and lasting appeal who seems to find acceptance among almost every musical preference, from hip-hop to doo-wop, rock to reggae, punk to funk. No matter what changes take place in the music industry, P-Funk stays popular. The key to his success?

“Well, like I say, I look for music that parents hate,” he said. “The minute I see it, I can get to it quicker—so quick that it looks like we’ve been right there as the change takes place.”

He may have passed the typical workingman’s retirement age, but Clinton said he has no plans of slowing down. “Hell no. I get tired if I slow down,” he said.

The Godfather of Funk will be at the Red Hook Brewery on Saturday, Sept. 8. Doors open at 1 p.m., with music from 2-7:30 p.m., including special guests The Press Project and Bad News Brown. Tickets are $25 in advance, $30 day of show.