Happy Friday POU!
Here are a few anecdotes about the one and only George Clinton that he shared in his memoirs.
Funky Dollar Bills
During a 2018 interview with HAPPY, the music icon recalled his time working at a barbershop and making music when two white kids came in wanting to get rid of some counterfeit money they had. Clinton ended up paying them $2000 for the fake money. There was about $1.2 million in fake 20-dollar bills. Clinton bought it and used the money to refurnish the Silk Palace and to pay for recording studio time: “I told the musicians it was counterfeit but instead of $200 I would pay them $1,000. They didn’t seem to mind. Belief in the federal green is strong, even when it’s not real.”
“…we were using it everywhere,” Clinton said while noting that he mainly used it on recording sessions.
“We were using it so much in that town, that it started coming back to the barbershop. We were saying ‘we can’t take this…it’s no good.’”
How did he use the money to pay for recording sessions? George explained: “I’d say ‘I’ll give you a couple of hundred dollars for the session, or a thousand dollars in counterfeit money,’ and most of ’em took the counterfeit money.”
He says he eventually encountered an undercover cop who warned him about the counterfeit money. “He wasn’t looking for the money, he was looking for drugs,” he said. “And we were always teaching kids music at the neighborhood center, so he kind of felt sorry for us, and he gave us a warning. He said, ‘if I was ya’ll, I’d be getting rid of that money.’ That was all he had to say to me.”
As noted in his autobiography, Clinton used the money to record music for The Parliaments. Shortly after getting rid of the fake money, they had their first major single released, “(I Wanna) Testify.”
Super Stupid
The most memorable stage crasher in Clinton’s career? The woman in overalls who jumped up while smoking a joint. She dropped her pants, “stuck the joint up her butt and blew three smoke rings. Every time we tried to start the next song, people were laughing so hard that we had to stop.” Clinton got her on the phone about 20 years later to ask her about the incident, and her response was, “Did I really do that?” Clinton dryly notes, “It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget.”
Paint the White House Black
When Bill Clinton was elected, George Clinton enjoyed the coincidence of having a president with the same last name. When Chelsea Clinton came backstage with a coterie of Secret Service agents, she joked with the funkmaster about having a food fight. He dissuaded her, not wanting to get shot down by an overeager fed. While posing for a photo with Chelsea, George realized at the last moment that he should probably conceal the crack pipe he was holding, so he just made a fist around it: “It was hot as a motherfucker, burning my hand up, but it worked – the picture, without a crack pipe in sight, was in People magazine.”