The Greatest Songs Ever! One Nation Under a Groove

It was the summer of 1978, and the sun was rising over the broad sweep of the United Nations building in New York. As dawn’s first light banished the long shadows of night, Funkadelic’s George Clinton was standing in United Nations Plaza, watching the daily ceremony of the raising of the flags of all nations. Inspired by this awesome symbol of planetary unity, Clinton turned to one of his girlfriends and asked how she felt about it. “One nation under a groove,” she replied, sparking to life one of the most influential funk hits of all time.

At least, that’s how it happened according to the normally reliable Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, which got its information from Tom Vickers, former “minister of information” for funkmeister Clinton.

Ask the infamously acid-fried Clinton today, though, and he’ll spin an entirely different yarn. It was 1976. “We had been booked onto two shows at one time,” he explains in his lazy North Carolina–meets-Detroit drawl. “We were playing at the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, D.C., and we were not informed that we’d been booked on another gig in Maryland, somewhere between Baltimore and D.C. All the local crews, the Soul Searchers and the rest, were down at this other show in Maryland at the beach, and they had been announcing that we were going to be there.

“Later, we saw these friends of ours who had been there, and they said, ‘You know, they waited for you all day long.’ We asked them how the gig had been, and they said that it was like one nation under a groove.”

Ask Clinton tomorrow, and he might offer yet another variation, but today’s version does seem more believable than Tom Vickers’s fanciful tale.

Garry Shider, Funkadelic guitarist and Clinton’s second in command, seems to confirm his bandleader’s recollection when he says that the phrase one nation under a groove was around the Funkadelic camp for about two years before the group recorded a track under that name. “We’d just come off the road in 1978,” Shider recalls, “so we were in Detroit, at United Sounds studio, which is where we did a lot of our records. I had a guitar line that was like a banjo-picking thing. I went in and recorded it; then Junie [Morrison] came in with the keyboard part. We didn’t even use any drums on it when we first cut it. George was up in the control room with a little microphone, hollering his lyrics in our ears.”

“We kind of just ad-libbed the lead vocal parts,” Clinton says. “I didn’t have anything but ‘one nation under a groove’ — that was the only part I had. The rest I just sang off the top of my head.”

What came off the top of Clinton’s remarkable head was an invitation to form a nation united by music, spiced up with potent lyrical and melodic reminders of the rich heritage of black music — from the gospel protest of “We Shall Not Be Moved” through James Brown’s proto-funk and the Jacksons’ Motown soul hits.

It was no more than an hour from the moment Shider started playing his distinctive guitar lick to the second the stop button was pressed on the completed tape that formed the basis of the final song. Funkadelic added the finishing touches the following day. “Because my guitar part sounded like a banjo,” Shider says, “we put a banjo with that to enhance the sound, but then we took the banjo out again. We called in Michael Hampton to play the lead guitar solo; then the girls came in to sing.”

For most bands, even in the late ’70s, it was standard to cut a rough demo version before attempting a finished track, but Funkadelic simply didn’t work that way. “There was no demo for the song,” Clinton explains. “The cassette we cut after the background had been added — that was actually what was released. We tried to mix it, but none of [the mixes] was ever as good as the tape we made that day. By mixing it, all we were doing was losing the spontaneity of it.”

The completed track, unfortunately, ran more than seven minutes, commercial suicide for a single. Someone would have to hack it back to a length radio programmers could deal with, but not George Clinton. “Basically, I make music for myself, and if it happens to sell, then fine,” he says. “I make my own ego versions and take them home with me, but as far as the single, I trusted the engineer. I didn’t miss what he edited out, other than the solo part. I don’t really worry about commercial stuff.”

On November 4, “One Nation Under a Groove” entered the Billboard Top 40, peaking at a disappointing number 28. More significant to Clinton, though, were the six weeks the song spent at number 1 on the R&B charts, starting September 30.

While there, it permeated deep into the consciousness of nearly every funkified kid in America, to such an extent that a decade and a half later, hits as diverse as rapper Ice Cube’s “Bop Gun” (1994) and Kirk Franklin’s gospel-powered “Stomp” (1997) heavily sampled “One Nation Under a Groove” to achieve success. And when then up-and-comers the Red Hot Chili Peppers were looking for a way to fuse funk with their punky rock, they chose George Clinton as their producer. And everyone knows where that led.