The only night the ship came first
Municipal Auditorium, New Orleans, 27 October 1976. The P-Funk Earth Tour opens, and with it a prop George Clinton had wanted to be more dynamic than Pink Floyd. Jules Fisher designed the ship. The cost, later reported around half a million dollars, was Neil Bogart’s gamble at Casablanca. A smaller craft was meant to sail over the heads on a wire. Then the Mothership itself, lights, smoke, disco balls, and Clinton at the top of the stairs as Dr. Funkenstein. Hugh Masekela played. Bootsy’s Rubber Band played. Then Parliament-Funkadelic, which in that year was less a group than a moving city: Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins, Garry Shider, and whoever the night required.
They landed the ship at the beginning. Archie Ivy, Clinton’s longtime manager, has described the room going, in his word, bananas. The problem was musical, not mechanical. You cannot follow your own apocalypse. The next night, in Baton Rouge, the landing moved to the end, and that is where it stayed. New Orleans is the only city that saw the original order: spaceship first, funk after, the myth told before the songs that were supposed to earn it. The songs, as it turned out, did not need the head start. Mothership Connection, Give Up the Funk, the cartoon cosmology of The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, just out. But the mistake is the document. A band learning, in public, that a climax is a place you arrive, not a place you depart.
The filmed landing most people know is Halloween in Houston, four nights later, same tour, same ship. It is the right machine and the revised script. The New Orleans night has fewer pictures and a better story. A seventeen-year-old Ivan Neville was in the building. He remembers a fur and a door opening. That is enough. Funk in 1976 was already a studio science. This was the night it insisted on being theatre, with a budget and a punchline that came too soon.
We get to New Orleans, and the show starts off and they do the prologue and the Mothership comes down and George comes out, and the place goes absolutely bananas.
(Archie Ivy, Gambit)
What the ship did, past the gag, was give a Black American dance music the same right to spectacle that rock had taken for granted. Lasers, screens, a bow on a guitar: Zeppelin would bring those to a field three years later. Clinton brought a spacecraft to a municipal hall and called it a funk opera. The word opera is not a stretch if you count the costumes, the plot, and the length. These shows could run for hours. The ship was the overture that, after one night, became the finale.
The prop eventually went to the Smithsonian, which is what a culture does when a joke turns out to have been architecture. On 27 October 1976 it was not an exhibit. It was a risk, lowered onto a stage in Tremé, and a singer in a costume the room was not ready to treat as costume. They screamed. He held the rail. The funk, after that, had to earn the right to follow itself.
