There are plenty of names in the credits of Funkadelic’s epic 1975 album, Let’s Take It To The Stage, but one name is missing not only from the credits but also from the historical record entirely.
The album feels like a melting pot of all the great funk, rhythm and blues, and soul that came before it. ‘Good To Your Earhole’ sounds like a psychedelic Sly & The Family Stone. At times, the backing vocals on ‘Better By the Pound’ recall The Staples Singers, while the guitar underscoring the opening of ‘Be My Beach’ has a real B.B. King feel about it. In fact, there are great guitar lines all over the album, supplied by Eddie Hazel, Michael Hampton and Garry Shider, but the most famous guitar part on the album wasn’t played by any of them.
‘Get Off Your Ass and Jam’ opens with a screaming guitar sound which quickly fades away to be replaced by the locked-in rhythm section of R Tiki Fulwood’s drums and C. Boogie Mosson on bass. “Shit, God-damn. Get off your feet and jam!” chant the Funkadelic choir – putting all the P-Funk into the line they can muster – and then that guitar comes roaring back in.
A scintillating solo of break-neck blues licks that never lets up for a second. The guitar player slices through all the Funkadelic rhythms and grooves and works its way around the whole fretboard, pushing ever higher and faster and looser as the song progresses. When the track fades out a breathless two and a half minutes later, the guitar is still blazing away with incredible speed and precision. The track has, rightly, become one of the most well-known and enduring numbers from the album.
The guitar’s playing and tone sound incredibly similar to some of the scorching solos fired off by Michael Bloomfield when playing with The Electric Flag, Al Kooper or Muddy Waters. The combination of such a rocking guitar solo with a funky rhythm working away underneath may very well have informed Bloomfield’s own ‘Love Walk’, the opening track from his Count Talent and the Originals record, which came out three years later. But exactly who was playing that incredible solo on ‘Get Off Your Ass and Jam’? Well, nobody knows. Not even Funkadelic founder George Clinton.
Writing in his excellently named memoir Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?, Clinton recounts the night they recorded ‘Get Off Your Ass and Jam’, “We finished one take, took a smoke break or something, and noticed that a white kid had wandered into the studio, a smack addict. We didn’t know him at all, but he said he played a little guitar, and he wanted to know if he could play with us and pick up a little cash in the process.”
Adding, “We set him up, started the track, and he just started to play like he was possessed. He did all the rock ‘n’ roll that hadn’t been heard for a few years, and he did it for the entirety of the track. Even when the song ended, he didn’t stop. All of us were up there goggle-eyed, saying, ‘Damn.’ We had agreed on 25 bucks, but I gave him 50 because I loved it.”
The guitar player from ‘Get Off Your Ass and Jam’ wasn’t the only complete unknown to get a shot at playing with a huge star in 1975, either. While driving through Greenwich Village one night, Bob Dylan spotted a woman walking along the street with a violin case on her back. Pulling over to ask if she could play, Dylan invited her to jam with him that night – at Muddy Waters’s home – and eventually invited her to join him on the road on his legendary Rolling Thunder Revue.
Whilst Scarlet Riviera got a consistent gig with Dylan that year and into 1976, featuring heavily on his album Desire, George Clinton couldn’t ever find his mystery guitar player again: “I tried to find the guy and put him on another song, but he was gone. He never resurfaced. We never heard from him. He’s not credited on the record because we have no idea who he was.”
