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George Clinton remembers pivotal Parliament album
By the end of 1973, George Clinton's Funkadelic had a handful of albums and a batch of chart singles to its credit.
As for Parliament, Funkadelic's sister group, its output and success paled in comparison - one mixed-bag album and a entry on Billboard's R&B singles chart.
After signing with Casablanca, though, Parliament closed the gap with the release of Up for the Down Stroke. More importantly, the album, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year, established the unmistakable funk sound that typified Parliament's output for the remainder of the decade.
Up for the Down Stroke "... is one of the better albums that we did as a band," Clinton recalls. "All of the songs on there tend to be straight."
He adds with a laugh, "I didn't get off into the crazy things [like I did later]."
Rarely does a musician develop or even realize his strengths overnight, and in Clinton's case, his rise to funk trailblazer and orchestrator was many years in the making. Around 1956 while in Newark, N.J., he founded The Parliaments, a vocal group modeled after some of his doowop favorites at the time, which included Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Dells and The Heartbeats.
The Parliaments' sound changed with the times, and in 1967, the group scored its first and only Top 20 pop hit, ?(I Wanna) Testify." Credited to The Parliaments, the recording actually featured Clinton singing with a group called The Holidays, according to Parliaments singer Ray Davis' recollection in the book "For the Record: George Clinton and P-Funk - An Oral History."
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