George Clinton and the Legend of Smoky Pete
How the P-Funk legend taught me never to judge a book by its cover
(Illustration by the great George Eckart)
It was the winter of 2019 or thereabouts. I was in Chicago, waiting for a train at the Lawrence El station. The open-air platform faces the backside of the Aragon Ballroom, a legendary music venue that’s been around since the 1920s. Depending on when you commute, you can catch a mini-concert for free, or at least glimpses of it as roadies drift in and out for fire escape smoke breaks.
On the night in question, George Clinton was in town, and the Aragon was rattling with funky bass lines.
I let a train pass, just so I could listen a little more. I’ve been a Funkadelic fan for decades, despite having discovered them and George Clinton in the most embarrassing way possible (i.e. white guy reads linear notes of Red Hot Chili Peppers record.)
And then I saw him, at the other end of the platform but staggering in my direction. He was loud and visibly drunk, his white beard a tangled mess of oily knots and his clothes comically tattered, like a community theater costume designer had gotten carried away with the scissors.
There were a dozen other people waiting on the platform—young and old, black and white, all of us (at least from first impressions) heading to somewhere with walls and a roof—and every pair of eyes tried to look occupied; studying their phones, immersed in a book, staring intently into the distance, anything so that subway King Lear wouldn't catch our gaze and wander over to either ask for change or babble incoherently (possibly both).
As he continued his death march down the platform, the old man noticed the music coming from the Aragon and yelled to the roadies, “Who’s playing in there?”
They shouted back, “P-Funk.”
His eyes lit up. “George Clinton’s in there? We’re old friends!”
The roadies smirked, but the old guy kept insisting he was telling the truth.
“Y’all go in there and tell George that Smoky Pete is out here!” he slur-shouted. “He’ll remember me.”
I exchanged pitying looks with the other passengers, and we were clearly all thinking the same thing: This poor guy doesn't know George Clinton. Or if he does, he met him once at a party decades ago, and they had a brief, awkward conversation. But Clinton made him feel special, like he had something worthwhile to share, because that’s what Dr. Funkenstein does. The ruse was so convincing that Smoky Pete believes that he and George are “old friends” with a history.
“Tell him Smoky Pete is here!” he kept yelling. “He'll know me!”
One of the roadies finished his cigarette and wandered inside, and Smoky Pete kept right on yelling. My fellow passengers and I were starting to get nervous, and we shared our anxiety with worried glances. There was no way this would end well. George Clinton obviously didn’t know this joker. And the longer it became apparent that Clinton wasn’t coming out, and Smoky Pete was left looking like a drunk old fool, what if he got violent? What if the bad chemicals that were commandeering his brain suddenly decided that it was time to lash out? What if he had a knife, or something worse? Please, please, please, we quietly muttered at our feet. Let my train be pulling up next.
Smoky Pete kept on shouting, and we kept on trying to ignore him, and then the strangest thing happened. The door to the fire escape swung open and FUCKING GEORGE CLINTON WALKED OUTSIDE!
He was in full P-Funk regalia, with his neon rainbow of polyester dreadlocks and funky space captain stage costume—like a peacock dressed up to get laid—and that huge, beaming smile on his face, like something out of Greek mythology.
“Smoky Pete,” he shouted at our el platform. “Is that you, motherfucker?”
Smoky Pete laughed and shouted back, “You’re damn right it’s me! Where you think I went, the motherfucking moon?”
They shouted back and forth like that, their voices thundering, repeating variations on the same theme—“I can’t believe it’s you!”—both amazed at the weird and wonderful coincidence that they’d both be in the same city at the same time, after all these years, and how beautiful life can be when two motherfuckers find each other again.
“Get your ass down here, Smoky,” George shouted before disappearing back into the theater.
When the stage door slammed, there was total silence. The city was eerily quiet, not even a police siren in the distance. Everyone on that platform was staring at Smoky, slack-jawed, utterly confused by what we’d just witnessed. But this time, it was Smoky Pete avoiding the gazes, as he sloooooowly strutted towards the exit, like a pimp in a ‘70s blaxploitation film, before disappearing into the city streets, and presumably the Aragon.
I think about that night all the time.
It’s jarring to realize, in real time, that you’re so fundamentally wrong about someone. We make those snap judgments all the time—you see somebody, you decide who they are based on the immediate empirical evidence, and then you move on. It’s how most of us exist in the world. And for the most part, it works. The downcast old guy sitting alone in a park, the Karen yelling at a Starbucks employee, the teen with pants barely clinging to the bottom of his buttcheeks, the red-faced schnook in a MAGA hat. We suss out their life story from a distance—their flaws and fears, their deepest beliefs and credit scores—and then we turn away, satisfied.
But Smoky Pete upended everything. If I could be so wrong about him, who’s to say I’m not wrong about everyone? It made me stop believing my own eyes. Because you don't know somebody's story, no matter how convincingly they’re presenting themselves as clichés. You can't glance at a stranger on the street and have any idea who they really are.
It was terrifying when I first figured it out. And then, kinda exhilarating. The world gets much more interesting when everyone is walking around with a secret in their back pocket. I used to go out of my way to avoid eye contact with strangers. But now, I feel like a background character in a thousand different short stories, and I just haven’t figured out their plots yet. Every room I walk into, every crowd or gathering of people I just barely know, it’s like a sea of Smoky Petes. I just don’t know how they’re Smoky Pete yet.
As George Clinton once sang, “Reality can be a-stiff sometimes/ But then again it can be flexible.” I think I understand what he means now. Of course, the rest of that verse is, “Depending on the angle of the dangle/ Increased by the heat of the meat.” So maybe I don’t know anything. Which, I guess, is the entire point.