All Your Goodies Are Gone – The Parliaments


Everyone knows George Clinton. He’s Dr. Funkenstein, the eccentric genius with the rainbow streamers in his hair who started out as a hair dresser and went on to spearhead Parliament, Funkadelic and the whole P-Funk collective. He’s been making fantastic music since 1955 and his tunes have been sampled endlessly.

But before Parliament-Funkadelic, Clinton was the group leader and manager of The Parliaments, a doo-wop vocal crew out of Plainfield, New Jersey. The Parliaments included future P-Funk regulars like baritone singer Ray Davis, singer, songwriter and occasional guitarist Fuzzy Haskins, future Christian and Gospel singer Calvin Simon and vocalist Grady Thomas.

All of the original doo-wop members from The Parliaments would go on to be members of Parliament and Funkadelic. After some financial disputes with Clinton, Haskins, Simon and Thomas left the P-Funk crew in 1977. Four of the five founding members of The Parliaments (Davis, Haskins, Simon and Thomas) started performing under the name Original P in 1998.

When The Parliaments first started out, George Clinton ran the show. He managed the band and worked at (and eventually owned) the barber shop where the band would perform. The band released a bunch of commercially unsuccessful tracks on various labels like Hull, Flipp and Gold World Records. During this same period, Clinton actually got a gig as a producer and staff songwriter at Motown records, but he stayed on with The Parliaments.

In 1967, the band finally put out a hit record. “(I Wanna) Testify” hit No.3 on the R&B charts and was a Top 20 hit on the Billboard pop charts. The song was released on Revilot Records, a label owned by LeBaron Taylor. Taylor started out in Detroit and went on to have an interesting career as a DJ and producer in Philly (where he produced tracks with Bunny Sigler, Phil Hurtt and Tony Bell). He later became the first vice president of Black Music Marketing at CBS Records.

In 1968, Clinton and Taylor had a falling out. Clinton refused to record any more records on the Revilot label. Because The Parliaments were still under contract, they couldn’t record with any other label. So Clinton came up with the clever idea of reconstituting  the unsigned backup band into a new group called Funkadelic, with the original members of The Parliaments performing on their records as guest vocalists.Thus began a long and muddied evolution of different band names, group members, session players and so forth. That’s why there’s like over 100 people that were somehow part of this whole Parliament-Funkadelic thing. During the 1970s, this intertwined P-Funk collective would change the sound of music, incorporating soulful sounds with psych rock instrumentation, extra-funky licks, tripped-out concept albums, ridiculous lyrics and of course, over-the-top stage performances. But it all started with The Parliaments, and that core nucleus of doo-wop singers who would lay the foundation for everything to come.

With “All Your Goodies Are Gone” by The Parliaments, you can really enjoy the proto-funky sound of P-Funk’s future. The track is rooted in a heavy, Northern Soul vibe, but it’s just too damn funky for its time. And if you listen to the lyrics, it’s a trip. Here are a couple snippets:

Shame, shame on me
For thinking that I could possibly be
The exclusive one of your choice
In this world infested with boys

And the chorus:

Let you see how it feels (let you see how it feels)
To be un-for-real (to be un-for-real)
Without a love of your own (without a love of your own)
And all your goodies are gone (all your goodies are gone)
And all your goodies are gone (all your goodies are gone)

These aren’t the type of lyrics you’d expect from a more traditional Motown jam. This is something different. And the song just goes all over the place. It starts off with a yearning soulful intro that you’d expect from a Detroit track of that era, but it quickly switches gears into this bouncy, party track capable of filling floors in any decade. Following a quick chorus breakdown, a surprise splash of horns blasts through the tune. Follow all that with a strong finish, and you got the makings of a track that foreshadows more than a decade’s worth of fantastic, era-defining, funk-synthesizing music. Have a listen.


Staff

More than one editor and/or contributor was responsible for the completion of this piece on NAILED.

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