George Clinton Is Building a Second Mothership

George Clinton performing.

The Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership is in a museum. Specifically, it is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is where important objects go to stop being used. George Clinton has decided to build another one.

A new version of the spacecraft is under construction at the Rock Lititz production campus in southeastern Pennsylvania. “We know it’s going to be crazy,” Vivian Scott Chew of Chew Entertainment told Billboard. “Dr. Funkenstein will be coming out of the Mothership again in a very new way.”

What the First One Did

The Mothership began as an idea on Parliament’s Mothership Connection — “We have returned to claim the pyramids / Partying on the mothership… Gettin’ down in 3D / Light year groovin'” — before Jules Fisher designed a physical version for the 1976 P-Funk Earth Tour.

It descended from the ceiling at the top of the show and Clinton climbed out of it as Dr. Funkenstein. David Libert, who booked him in the seventies after tour-managing Alice Cooper, remembers what that was worth: “It was spectacular. There was nothing like it at the time. The logistics around it were crazy, but any audience that saw it was just blown away.”

Clinton has always been direct about why a funk band needed a spaceship. “I was a big fan of Star Trek and all that. We were all about putting Black people in places nobody ever thought they’d be… like outer space, so that’s what we did.”

Rock Lititz is worth noting as the address. It is the campus where arena productions are built and rehearsed at full scale, which tells you the ambition here is a touring production rather than a prop — something that has to be rigged, flown and struck in a different building every few days.

Sold, Recovered, Then Retired

The original was sold in the early 1980s and later recovered and refurbished, reappearing for a P-Funk All Stars concert in Central Park in 1996 and at a handful of dates including Woodstock ’99, before it went to the Smithsonian.

Clinton’s reaction to backing up a museum piece with a working one is characteristically unbothered. “I’m loving the fact that it’s still that valid of a concept, and I’m still around to actually be part of this next journey. It’s a good thing; the first Mothership is in the Smithsonian, and here we are backing it up with a new version.”

Scott Chew expects dates announced shortly. “I think your first sighting will be next summer,” she said, adding that “George is going to take this thing around the world.”

The gap between those two states is the whole point. An object in a museum is preserved by being immobilised; a stage prop only exists when it is working. Backing up the Smithsonian copy with a functioning one is a refusal to let the preservation be the end of it.

The Album Behind the Spacecraft

Mothership Connection carried “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)”, reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum. In 2011 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

That is the institutional recognition an album gets when it stops being a record and becomes a document. Billboard has since named Parliament/Funkadelic among the fifty best rock bands of all time, which is its own kind of reclassification for a group that was never a rock band.

Clinton says more music is coming with the tour, and will not say what. “I’ve definitely got some fresh funk coming in and out of that, very soon. Very interesting stuff. I can’t talk about it now. It’s going to be interesting.”

An Orchestra at the Detroit Opera House

Before the new ship flies, Scott Chew presented “Symphonic PFunk: Celebrating the Music of Parliament Funkadelic” at the Detroit Opera House on 31 January, with arrangements by Ray Chew, who also conducted, and guests Nona Hendryx, Vernon Reid and Rahsaan Patterson.

Clinton’s view of it explains why the project matters to him more than a tribute usually would. “This was always my dream, to carry on to that point of respectability and to always try to prove that we were worthy of that. It is all worthy of that.”

Then he widens it, and the reference is not accidental in a Detroit opera house: “I go back to Motown itself… All that music needs to be classical, orchestrated and cataloged, curated for the next 100 years. I think we did our part in creating something that lives up to that. And we kept it going.”

It was billed as a tribute, though he reserved the right to interfere — he might, he said, “get up there and jam when I feel it”.

Putting P-Funk in an opera house is the same argument as the Smithsonian, approached from the other side. The institution confers seriousness; an orchestral arrangement proves the material can carry it. Both are answers to a question about whether this music counts, asked for fifty years.

The Fight Over the Catalogue

The curation argument has a legal shadow. Clinton is suing his former business associate Armen Boladian and his assorted music companies, seeking to regain ownership of his music and copyrights.

That is the unglamorous half of a legacy. Talking about music being catalogued for the next hundred years means very little if somebody else holds the paperwork, and a catalogue as heavily sampled as P-Funk’s is worth fighting over.

The honours have continued regardless: a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January, induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June, on top of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. He also exhibited his paintings in Paris last October.

Sampling is the reason the stakes are what they are. P-Funk records sit underneath an enormous amount of hip-hop, and a catalogue that generates licensing income decades after release is a very different asset from one that simply sold well at the time.

Farewell Tours, Plural

CBS San Francisco notes the pattern with some affection: Clinton announced his retirement from touring in 2018, played what was thought to be a final Bay Area show in 2019, and has come back repeatedly since, well past his eighty-second birthday.

His own framing has been consistent throughout. “It’s always been about the music and the band,” he said when the One Nation Under a Groove tour was announced. “That’s the real P-Funk legacy. They’ll still be funkin’ long after I stop.”

The numbers behind that band are substantial — more than forty R&B hit singles, three of them number ones, three platinum albums, and a peak in 1978 and 1979 when “Flash Light”, “Aqua Boogie” and “One Nation Under a Groove” all topped the R&B chart.

The band itself was always designed to outlive its leader. Clinton assembled P-Funk as a rotating collective rather than a fixed line-up, with veterans of thirty years standing alongside younger players including his own family, which is why the succession he keeps describing is plausible rather than sentimental.

Building a spaceship in Pennsylvania at this stage is not a retirement plan. It is the same instinct that keeps Mavis Staples on the road at eighty-six — a musician who has watched the institutions catch up deciding that being catalogued is not the same as being finished.

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Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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