Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow is the second album from funk innovators Funkadelic. Arriving in 1970 mere months after their trailblazing debut, the record saw the band honing their songcraft, while still allowing plenty of space for mind-bending exploratory jams. The album’s origin story famously involved a single marathon session on LSD. It marked the official introduction of legendary keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and would go on to chart at No. 92 on Billboard’s Pop chart.
Factoring George Clinton’s surprise at hearing the voice of Martha Reeves during a retrospective playback of the ten-minute title track, there’s reason to doubt the Parliament-Funkadelic leader’s memory in his claim that Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow was recorded in a day.
Tag Archive: Funkadelic
Funkadelic‘s self-titled 1970 debut is one of the group’s best early- to mid-’70s albums. Not only is it laden with great songs – “I’ll Bet You” and “I Got a Thing…” are obvious highlights – but it retains perhaps a greater sense of classic ’60s soul and R&B than any successive George Clinton-affiliated album. Recording for the Detroit-based Westbound label, at the time Funkadelic were in the same boat as psychedelic soul groups such as the Temptations, who had just recorded their landmark Cloud Nine album across town at Motown, and other similar groups. Yet no group had managed to effectively balance big, gnarly rock guitars with crooning, heartfelt soul at this point in time quite like Funkadelic. Clinton’s songs are essentially conventional soul songs in the spirit…