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The album Urban Dancefloor Guerillas was reissued on CD by CBS records in 1989, and then by Westbound Records in 1995 under the title Hydraulic Funk (CDSEWD 097). Hydraulic Funk includes the original album plus the 12″ remix versions of “Generator Pop” and “Hydraulic Pump”.

“I heard that [outhouse legend], soon as I could remember anything,” says George, now seventy-seven and on his final Parliament-Funkadelic tour. “About the midwives, how they delivered babies. That story is one of my first childhood memories. She was going to the bathroom and had me.”

Overton Loyd, the illustrator who designed a pop-up Atlantis for Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair,once described Clinton as a cross between Malcolm X, Rod Serling, and Walt Disney. In a career noted for its anti-Nixon movements (with the contributions of hundreds of musicians), the outhouse legend could be easily flown headlong into Clinton’s P-fantasia, joining a revolution disguised in potty humor: the images of spanked war babies, guitar players in bedsheet diapers (loomed by Cannon?), George’s jumbo rubber chicken feet that Bootsy Collins spotted poking out of a toilet stall in D.C., the “Maggot Brain” prologue about drowning in your own shit/business. It all gets brought down to earth, to a concrete slab at the edge of the woods in a small cotton mill town, where the nearest segregated hospital was miles away but the closest midwife was family. Funk was a condition, a transformative property of existence born from a landscape of human capital.

George’s mother, Julious, once sang her child “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” a 1922 Thomas Talley poem that Funkadelic would turn into an Echoplex for equality in 1971. The refrain could’ve been a back-and-forth between eras. As if it were George’s mother urging “Can you get to that?” to hip-hop’s future generations, looped into the already now. No time to sit around admiring a sample for its timeless consequence.

“I’m dreaming of a new idiom,” says George’s younger cousin Manualynn Stowe Faison, on the phone from Myrtle Beach. “We need to harness that deep down P-Funk energy. Don’t tell him I told you, but George has that Alice in Wonderlandmind. Doesn’t take much to get it pumpin’.”

“Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” was not on Soul Train,but rather good acid. Recorded in Detroit in 1970, this nine-minute response begins with licking chops on reverb. Through distortion and shimmer, George reflects on leaving “a little town in North Carolina” while headed for the Black Soap Palace, the New Jersey barbershop where the Parliaments formed. Virginia gets bypassed, along with the Philip Morris Plant that manufactured the Parliaments’ namesake, as well as George’s gigs throwing papers and caddying for Ben Hogan. By the fade, Kannapolis has long evaporated into flange and steam, raising suspicions that the song never left Detroit to begin with.

Dale Earnhardt Boulevard runs near the old Freak Palace space in Kannapolis, across 85 South into Concord, by a clock repair shop/ record store where I bought the Funkadelic 45 “Music for My Mother.” Concord is the former home of WPEG, the station that once kindly broadcast “Atomic Dog” twenty-five miles south to the atomic dogwoods of Charlotte. I grew up in Charlotte and first met George at an in-store at Shazada Records, when I was thirteen. I remember kaleidoscopic braids, long nails, and a ten-minute blind-dog rap called “Dog Talk.” (“If I mistake you for a tree to pee, I hope you understand.”)

Talking to the Charlotte Postin 1979, George promised to submerge the Coliseum with Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair Tour. He called the show “20,000 Mugs Under the P,” having been inspired by a fishing trip in the Bermuda Triangle. See you in Planktonia. George, who claims he can hear fish, once shot a catfish with a bow and arrow from the shore, advancing the state of leisure sport in tie-dyed pants and Cazals.

The farm in Michigan where this actually happened is also where George’s little brother James “Jimmy G” Keaton authored the bassline to “Hydraulic Pump” in 1982. That moon-cycle lapping at the shore, post-wake, was actually handclaps, congregated inside a drum machine and processed through reefer. Either way, “Hydraulic Pump” can turn a party into a bodily function. “I wanted it to be syncopated with the lights on a flying saucer,” says Jimmy G, on the phone from Greensboro. “That’s genetics.”

Prince once said that after seeing Parliament he went into the studio the same night and did “Erotic City.” We only managed to hit up a Krispy Kreme in Raleigh.

Thanks to satellite GPS, the former Clinton address is now visible from outer space. I visit on a wet-aired August afternoon and find a guy changing out the locks on the front porch. I ask if I can poke around out back, flashing my copy of “Music for My Mother.” As if that would certify everything. An officer at the Cabarrus County Jail, Scott Cagler first heard “Hydraulic Pump” while posted at a Clear Air Force Station Base in central Alaska. Apparently, MWR (Morale, Welfare and Recreation) kept the missile defense library stocked with P-Funk records. “The Space Command Squadron had a tapedeck in the library—so that’s what I was doing.”

I look up Lowe Avenue, past the corner on E C Street where a pump once supplied George Washington Carver High with drinking water. The Palace barbershop is still operational, but the Palace Theatre, where Manualynn Stowe Faison would go to monster movies and “hug up,” is now a funeral home.

The last time Manualynn saw her cousin George, he was gliding across the stage in an office chair in Myrtle Beach. Air-pumped on pneumatic shocks, in a white suit and size-thirteen Gaturs. “George Clinton’s cut his locks,” she laughs. “I didn’t recognize him, and my husband had to point him out. I said, ‘Which one is George?’ He said, ‘Sanford and Son.’ Who would’ve known he would go from locks to Fred G. Sanford? That’s a trip in itself. The second half of the show, he got in his roller derby chair, pumped it up ’til he couldn’t pump no more.” Reflecting on her extended funk genes, she adds, “George’s gettin’ old but don’t let nothing stop him. He just roll right on. I said to myself, ‘Well, that’s where I get it from.’ That makes you feel strong, gives you courage to carry on. It’s a good feeling to have it confirmed in the P-Funk. We need the funk.”

Check out these 1983 released tracks from the masters of funk! George Clinton and the Parliament / Funkadelic crew came together to create pure dance floor electronic funk!