As the great Mike Jagger and the London Bach Choir have been telling us for all these years, you can’t always get what you want. In the case of tonight’s headliner, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, those words rung surprisingly true.
As I wrote in my earlier, borderline hyperbolic, blogs, I totally expected to get exactly what I wanted out of tonight’s show, namely a killer flood of classic funk music delivered by one of the genre’s most influential artists. After attending the show, I, and apparently many of the people I spoke with, didn’t get at all what we wanted.
It’s not that the show was bad, just not at all what I was expecting.
I think Clinton’s vocals were quite rough, but perhaps that’s to be expected after 55 years of singing, a career that’s garnered numerous much-deserved accolades, including induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Maybe Clinton was tired. Maybe he was distraught over the death yesterday of his friend, guitarist Garry “Diaperman” Shider, which would be totally understandable. Whatever the reason, he didn’t so much sing as bark at us. Perhaps that’s an unfair observation to make about a 69-year-old whose vocals obviously outstrip my own by so much that it’s not even worth analogizing the comparison, but there you have it.