While Funakdelic were a powerful fusion of rock and soul on wax, they were near-nonentities on radio — college and freeform FM rock stations dug ‘em, but they weren’t reaching all the audiences that Clinton had hoped. He wanted pop and R&B airwaves, too, and once he got the Parliament name back from crumbling former home Invictus, he used that as his ticket to the top ten. A fortuitous meeting with Neil Bogart of Casablanca Records gave them a home, a few old-school Parliaments singles reworked to more ambitious standards gave them a kick-start, and Up For The Down Stroke put them in record stores, a new branch of the expanding George Clinton artistic empire that would bring Funkadelic’s creative nucleus straight into a Top 40 spotlight. It was something of a paradigm shift, but its success hinged on the kinds of things they’d already been doing; all they had to do was shine it up nice, dial back the freakout stuff, and drop in some horns.

Which kind of understates just what they pulled off with Up For The Down Stroke. Of those three re-recordings, one of them, “Testify,” stands as a particularly joyous highlight, a revamp of the band’s harmonic roots that put their ensemble of voices front and center. (At least for the early pressings; later versions revealed somebody must’ve caught on to how potent that clavinet/horn section exchange was and pushed it up in the mix, whittling it down to a Clinton solo vocal on the verses.) The other two, the slinky, sizzling Tiki Fulwood-vs.-drum machine tour de force “The Goose” and the whispery, piano-driven head-nodder “All Your Goodies Are Gone,” pull off the same feat of making the still-strong originals feel like redundant first drafts. Then, of course, there’s the title track, a top 10 R&B hit that gave P-Funk their first notable brush with the charts since (ironically enough) “(I Wanna) Testify” in 1967; in a year when bottom-heavy, slogan-chanting funk jams were flooding the airwaves from MFSB to B.T. Express, Parliament went above and beyond with their own; the way the song turns on the “when you’re hot, you’re hot” bridge and the horn section soars into the stratosphere is the kind of controlled-launch euphoria that hadn’t been possible with Funkadelic’s sprawling, guitar-driven sound. There were a lot of other chances for Parliament to infiltrate the pop consciousness further down the road; this was just the one filled with the most possibility.