Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up, but give it a rest. You're gonna die one day.

Hey everybody, sorry for the long delay since the last episode of Talking on My Ass. Truth be told, I've had this weird chest cold for over a month now.

And I keep every time I think about doing another episode, I just think about how horrible and disgusting my voice sounds.

And I don't want to be coughing in your ears. So I've been putting it off, plus I've been doing a lot of traveling and stuff. So all the usual excuses, plus trying to write this damn book.

But really it's the mucus that does it. Famous last words, blame it on the mucus. Anyway, it occurred to me, it's a rainy day here in Portland. And I thought, I can't put this off anymore. I'm gonna have to put something up.

So what I thought of is I've been thinking about doing some musical podcasts. People have been requesting them. And so I thought me, I'll put together some like a series, you know, interspersed among the other podcasts.

I'm talking about music. I've got some taste in music that is pretty eclectic, I think. So this episode I wanted to feature funk because I'm sure you know funk, everybody knows funk.

The guy that I traveled to Alaska with the second year, Mike, was a scholar of funk. And he had some amazing recordings that no one else has that are not available to the general public.

And he was always happy to have us over and listen to music at his place, but he never wanted to give anyone a copy of anything. And then one night he and I got into a disagreement about Edsel Ford. And this famous case of the car that Ford manufactured in nobody bought.

And I don't remember the substance of the disagreement, but I remember that I won the bet. And when we made the bet, I said, if I'm right, you will make me a cassette recording of my favorite funk songs from your collection. And he foolishly agreed to it, but honorably saw through the paid his debt.

Because in fact, I was right about whatever the hell we were arguing about. So I ended up with this cassette of rare funk songs, not all the songs I'm about to play for you are from that recording, but a couple of them are.

So you'll be able to find most of them if you look around on the internet, but some of them you won't. And that's why because they're from Mike's funk collection. Everything you're about to hear comes from some manifestation of the whole parliament, funk, a delic community at the center of that community is George Clinton.

But he and the people around him have changed over the years, changed their name, changed the configuration, the composition of the group, different people of common gone, Bootsy Collins, sort of maybe most famously among them.

For those of you who aren't that familiar with funk and particularly parliament of funk, a delic, they are, they are, you know, James Brown meets Jimmy Hendrix. They are what happens when you get a bunch of very talented, many self-taught, many rural dudes, black dudes from the south, bring them up north, get them high, turn them on to LSD.

And shit starts getting real weird, real fast. So to get into that, let's ask the question on everyone's mind. What is soul?

So is a ham hop in your corn, fleets.

So is the ring around your back, too.

So is a joint role in toilet paper.

Now you know what to say next time someone asks you, what is soul? Chitlin, who young? The ring around your bathtub. I mentioned that George Clinton had reconfigured himself over the years and he still put out records and he started in the late 50s, mid 50s sometime, give you a sense of the change, not till now, certainly, but between the late 50s and the late 60s.

I'm going to play two versions of a song by him. First, the, I'll play the whole, the whole versions. It's not a wide ranging the song. I just excerpted what is soul is like a nine or 10 minute, you know, crazy jam session. So I'm not going to play the whole thing. You can check it out if you like it. But I'm going to play the whole version, the whole, the whole recording of these two songs.

It's, I bet you is the first version from the 50s and the second version is, I'll bet you from the late 60s. Same song, same guy. Very different delivery is you'll hear.

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