While Funkadelic were getting used to being in the Warner Bros. ranks, Parliament had found their association with Casablanca Records to be a gigantic windfall: all that KISS and Donna Summer money was enough to give them the freedom to do their own super-elaborate concert set-up, inspired in part by their face-painted labelmates and stadium-filling peers like Pink Floyd. What this meant, naturally, was a philosophy that if people were going to pay big bucks for a concert, they deserved more than a concert. The Casablanca higher-ups were fine with this, what with Clinton being more of an inspiration-filled, image-savvy idea man than just about anyone in the label’s marketing department. So they gave him a spaceship.

The Mothership became inseparable from the image of P-Funk, even if the original article wound up lost and/or sold for scrap. But its centerpiece presence in P-Funk shows — Clinton emerging from its massive structure through walls of dry ice as Dr. Funkenstein — doesn’t really translate in audio form. Neither do the interstitial animated cartoons, the costumes, the shiny plush limousine, or the dozens-strong crowd of musicians and singers flooding the stage. So to call Parliament’s ’77 live album Live (P.Funk Earth Tour) an incomplete experience is kind of a truism. Of course the legendary Earth Tour is even better seen than heard, which is thankfully a possibility if you can get ahold of the DVD, George Clinton: The Mothership Connection, that features a videotaped performance of an early tour stop in Houston on Halloween 1976. But that’s not what makes this live release feel a little out of joint.

The thing is that the Earth Tour was a Parliament-Funkadelic tour, which means putting it out as an album meant Casablanca had to stick solely to the Parliament bits. This set, pieced together from two January ’77 stops in Los Angeles and Oakland, does a decent job of it, at least. That owes to a quartet of giddy peaks: an opening slow burn to a lightning-strike powerful rendition of “P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up),” the Mothership sequence and its breath-snatching “Swing Down, Sweet Chariot” coda (cruelly split and put on separate sides), a deranged fifteen-minute extended vampathon version of “Dr. Funkenstein,” and the closing salvo pairing “Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)” and a revved-up “Night Of The Thumpasorus Peoples.” And the show as a whole — or at least the whole we get — is rousing from start to frequently-interrupted finish. But rough, Funkadelic-excising edits chop up the setlist’s flow, as does the insertion of a couple OK-ish studio cuts (“This Is The Way We Funk With You” and Invictus-era Parliament remake “Fantasy Is Reality). At least “The Landing (Of The Holy Mothership)” is a neat novelty if you’ve ever wanted to hear the classic Parliament catalogue in Dickie Goodman-style cut-up newscast form.