George Clinton may have been the ringmaster of the musical circus that as Parliament-Funkadelic made some of the most inventive and invigorating black American music of the past 40 years. But the musical director of this sprawling collective for much of its existence was the guitarist Garry Shider.
On groundbreaking albums such as Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove and Parliament’s Mothership Connection, Shider’s role was not so much to keep Clinton’s riotous vision in check as to give it focus and mould its wilder aspects into a coherent musical shape. It was a task he accomplished with no little skill and considerable dash, cutting an onstage figure almost as outrageous as Clinton himself, dressed in various exhibitionist accessories over a loincloth, which earned him the nickname “Diaper Man”. He also co-wrote many of Parliament-Funkadelic’s best-known songs and after those bands were wound up in the early 1980s, he continued to work regularly with Clinton in the P-Funk All-Stars.
Garry Marshall Shider was born in 1953 in Plainfield, New Jersey. He grew up singing gospel music and from a young age sang back-up to some of the biggest names in the genre, including Shirley Caesar, the Five Blind Boys and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. He also learnt to play the guitar and got to know George Clinton, who ran a local barbershop and sung with a doo-wop group called the Parliaments. In the late 1960s Clinton moved to Detroit, where he worked for Berry Gordy at Motown as a producer and songwriter and began to evolve the Parliaments into a more experimental, Afro-wearing psychedelic soul act.
Shider soon followed Clinton’s example, escaping not to Detroit but to Toronto, Canada, where he moved at the age of 16 in 1969. Together with his friend, Cordell “Boogie” Mosson, he formed United Soul, a soul-funk band with a crossover rock edge.
The band soon came to the attention of Clinton, who remembered Shider, and in 1971 went into the studio to produce what should have been their debut album. By this time, Clinton had formed Funkadelic and, on albums such as Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow and Maggot Brain, had begun to formulate a wild fusion of soul and freaked-out rock music on songs about mind-expanding drugs, sexual liberation and political freedom.
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Two of the tracks recorded with Shider and Mosson appeared as a 1971 single credited to “US Music with Funkadelic”, but the album was shelved when Shider and Mosson both joined Funkadelic in 1972, in an expanded line-up that also involved the recruitment of Bootsy Collins from James Brown’s backing band, the JBs.
The first Funkadelic album on which Shider played was 1972’s America Eats Its Young, a savage satire on American mores. Cosmic Slop the following year found Shider playing an expanded role as both a songwriter and lead singer on the title track, about a single mother forced to resort to prostitution to support her five children.
By 1974 Clinton had re-established the distinction between Funkadelic and Parliament and Shider played a key part on Up for the Down Stroke, the first album under the Parliament moniker since 1970. It was followed by two 1975 albums, Chocolate City and Mothership Connection, the latter giving Parliament their commercial breakthrough with the hit single Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker).
Over the next four years Clinton and members of his ensemble released 23 albums on five labels under various guises — Parliament, Funkadelic, Brides of Frankenstein, the Horny Horns and others — and Shider played on all of them. Perhaps the most significant release was Funkadelic’s 1978 album One Nation Under a Groove, on which Shider co-wrote and sang the anthemic title song, a track which went on to influence a generation of black American acts from Prince and the Gap Band to the pioneers of the hip-hop and rap scenes.
Yet within three years Clinton had been forced by legal wrangling to drop the names of both bands. Shider played on Clinton’s 1982 solo album Computer Games and continued to support him in his new band, the P-Funk All-Stars.
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In later years Shider contributed songs to a number of Hollywood film soundtracks. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 alongside other leading members of the Parliament-Funkadelic collective.
He is survived by Linda, his wife of 32 years.
Garry Shider, musician, was born on July 24, 1953. He died of cancer on June 16, 2010, aged 56