And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records by Harris Larry & Gooch Curt & Suhs Jeff

Author:Harris, Larry & Gooch, Curt & Suhs, Jeff [Harris, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781617748745
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 2009-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

13 The Mothership Arrives

Flying saucer dudes—The Group with No Name—

Long John Baldry—The casbah grows again—The Disco

Forum—Welcome, Mr. Guber—Casablanca Record &

FilmWorks—The Deep—The Alexander Calder art

gallery—Rock and Roll Over

September 1976

Hangar E

Stewart International Airport

Newburgh, New York

“You want to land a what?”

The conversation between George Clinton and me had been surreal. Then again, most of our conversations were strange. And the few that weren’t strange were incredibly strange. This was one of the latter.

“Wait a second, George—you want to land a what? A mothership? Onstage?”

Through a haze of pot smoke, Clinton’s unmistakable head was nodding up and down. I could have argued. I could have listed a hundred reasons, starting with the fact that it defied common sense, why landing a life-sized spaceship onstage on a nightly basis was not going to work. I could have quoted numbers and margins and returns on investment. I could have, but I didn’t. I’d learned not to bother trying to talk George Clinton out of something when he had his mind set on it. Hell, George always recognized his own absurdity: “Larry, when you’re funky, you don’t make any sense,” was something I’d heard a dozen times. And, considering the success his creative inspirations had brought Casablanca so far, maybe choosing not to argue was the smart move.

That was months ago and three thousand miles away. Now George and the boys were on an air force base in upstate New York, in a big, echoing hangar, watching a life-sized spaceship (that cost two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to construct) landing on a massive stage set. Wow. They were in production rehearsals for an upcoming tour. The facility was owned by Theatre Techniques, the stage construction company that had built the set. Both the Rolling Stones and KISS had rehearsed here, KISS as recently as three months before. The KISS connection did not stop there, as the Parliament stage and production had been designed by the Jules Fischer Organization, the company that had provided a similar service for KISS’s new tour.

Parliament’s concerts were out of this world, even without the expensive mothership production. The show revolved around the history of funk on our planet. Funk had been brought to Earth by aliens aboard UFOs and stored in the great Egyptian pyramids. About halfway through the set, during “Mothership Connection,” guitarist Glenn Goins would repeatedly sing the line, “I think I see the mothership comin’.” The other band members would point toward the back of the house, just as pyro ignited. Then the silver mothership would begin flying over the arena floor above the lighting rig.

The mothership was shaped more or less like a flying saucer—round if you looked at it from below, from the audience’s perspective, and tapering to a point like a pyramid if you looked at it in profile. There were lighting cans circling the perimeter of the mothership’s base. As the saucer flew overhead, the lights would glow, a torrent of sparks (from Roman-candle-like effects called gerbs) would arc downward, and plumes of dry ice would flow into the air; all of this combined to create the illusion of exhaust and flight.

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