P-Funk Earth Tour

{{Short description|1976–77 concert tour by Parliament-Funkadelic}}

{{About|the concert tour|the Parliament album|Live: P-Funk Earth Tour}}

The P-Funk Earth Tour was a concert tour by Parliament-Funkadelic in 1976–1977, featuring absurd costumes, lavish staging and special effects, and music from both the Parliament and Funkadelic repertoires.

The P-Funk Earth Tour was ambitious from the start. Casablanca Records executive Neil Bogart gave George Clinton a $275,000 budget for production, the largest amount ever allocated for a Black music act to tour.{{cite book | last=Vincent | first=Rickey | title=Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One | publisher=St. Martin's Press | year=1996 | isbn=0-312-13499-1 | url=https://archive.org/details/funkmusicpeopler00vinc }} p. 245. Clinton hired Jules Fischer as set designer, who had previously worked on tours for The Rolling Stones, KISS, and other rock bands.{{cite book | last=Thompson | first=Dave | title=Funk | publisher=Backbeat Books | year=2001 | isbn=0-87930-629-7 | url=https://archive.org/details/funk00thom }} p. 90. Both the show's music and production elements were extensively rehearsed at an aircraft hangar in Newburgh, New York. The show required seven trucks to transport its equipment and scenery. With a broad range of themes embodied in the show's production, culminating in the Afrofuturist landing of the P-Funk Mothership, author Rickey Vincent states that the P-Funk Earth Tour "drew from the ribald, uncensored entirety of the Black tradition in mind-blowing ways no one had yet even attempted." Rolling Stone viewed the tour as embracing Clinton's "semiserious funk mythology" with "[a] mixture of tribal funk, elaborate stage props and the relentless assault on personal inhibition [that] resembled nothing so much as a Space Age Mardi Gras."{{cite book | last=McEwen | first=Joe | chapter=Funk | title=The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll | publisher=Random House/Rolling Stone Press | location=New York | year=1980 | isbn=0-394-73938-8}} p. 375. The New York Times described the tour as featuring "superbly silly, lavish costumes" and an "opulent Baroque ... stage show".{{cite news | url=https://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F40812F6355D167493C3A9178CD85F438785F9 | title=The Pop Life: A Secular Niche For Gospel and 'Jesus Rock' | author=John Rockwell | author-link=John Rockwell | work=The New York Times | date=1977-07-01 | access-date=2007-12-16}}

The tour began in April 1976 in Nashville.

The 1977 live album Live: P-Funk Earth Tour was recorded at two early 1977 concerts, January 19 at the Los Angeles Forum and January 21 at the Oakland Coliseum.

The tour drew to a close in mid-1977; its expenses were as high as its innovation level and it was losing money steadily;{{cite book | last=Kempton | first=Arthur | title=Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music | publisher=University of Michigan Press | year=2005 | isbn=0-472-03087-6}} pp. 380–381. indeed one tour assistant's job was "to tell the musicians why they weren't getting paid." Nevertheless, the tour served as valuable publicity and marketing for "the P-Funk brand", making reference to the greater Parliament-Funkadelic-Clinton enterprise of acts, records, side projects, spin-offs, andso forth.

In 1986, Capitol issued a recording of a late 1976 concert as Mothership Connection: Live From Houston, attributed to George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic.

class="wikitable"

!Date

!City

!Country

!Venue

April 16, 1976

|Nashville

| rowspan="23" |United States

|Nashville Municipal Auditorium

April 18, 1976

|Cleveland