Funkadelic, Hardcore Jollies (1976)

Funkadelic, Hardcore Jollies (1976)

Behold: the rare example of a band leaving a regional indie for a massive corporate record label and somehow not missing a step. Well, not a big step, anyways — precursor Let’s Take It To The Stage is a damn sight wilder, and the first Funkadelic LP on Warner Bros., Hardcore Jollies, is light on both politics and raunch. Don’t go in looking for a conceptual hook, a surplus of scandalous slogans, or a great leap sideways into a new and revolutionary way of twisting your head around — it’s just a pretty good funk album with most of the core ’73-’75 personnel. But considering what Funkadelic wound turn into nearly two years later, it’s good to think of this last blast of original-flavor style as a high note. Even if it is fairly slick.

But there’s grime beneath the gloss, and if songs like “Comin’ Round The Mountain” and “Smokey” get a little Sloofus with it, the heart of the album (or the butt, if you will) has a spring-loaded motion. With the de-emphasis on heavy lyrics — “You Scared The Lovin’ Outta Me” and its “eat this for me” innuendo are as out-there as it gets — the real draw of Hardcore Jollies is in the musical technique. Sometimes that means in a vocal sense, like when the repetitive chants of “Comin’ Round The Mountain” gradually and wonderfully spill out into freewheeling vamps. But this one’s really for the guitar fiends — the record is dedicated, simply enough, to “the guitar players of the world” — with Michael Hampton in charge of what the credits refer to as “Superhyperbolic Definite Guitar Spastics.” That’s one way of putting it — and probably the best way, really; getting a live redux of the then-still-recent “Cosmic Slop,” filler in any other context, is gloriously justified by its elaborately Hampton-ized guitar-shred turbocharging. The keening Hampton-Worrell guitar-synth duel on “Adolescent Funk” is all the message its wordless structure needs, and the title track instrumental is Exhibit A for justifying all the weedly-weedly-wow noodling you want just so long as you channel real euphoria through it and there’s a heavy motor of a beat to back it up (take a bow, Bigfoot Brailey). And to think the kids went for Ace Frehley instead.