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. p. 245. Clinton hired Jules Fischer as set designer, who had previously worked on tours for The Rolling Stones, KISS, and other rock bands. 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." p. 375. The New York Times described the tour as featuring "superbly silly, lavish costumes" and an "opulent Baroque ... stage show".
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; 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.
Date 	City 	Country 	Venue
April 16, 1976 	Nashville 	United States	Nashville Municipal Auditorium
April 18, 1976 	Cleveland 	United States	Allen Theatre
April 24, 1976 	Richmond 	United States	Richmond Coliseum
May 14, 1976 	Cincinnati 	United States	Riverfront Coliseum
May 15, 1976 	Pittsburgh 	United States	Civic Arena
May 29, 1976 	Philadelphia	United States	Spectrum
June 11, 1976 	Tulsa 	United States	Tulsa Assembly Center
June 20, 1976 	Detroit 	United States	Masonic Temple
July 13, 1976 	Orlando 	United States	Orlando Sports Stadium
July 18, 1976 	Nashville 	United States	Nashville Municipal Auditorium
August 12, 1976 	Seattle 	United States	Paramount Theatre
August 14, 1976 	Los Angeles 	United States	Shrine Auditorium
September 26, 1976	Newburgh 	United States	Stewart International Airport
October 2, 1976 	Providence 	United States	Providence Civic Center
October 27, 1976 	New Orleans 	United States	Municipal Auditorium
October 28, 1976 	Baton Rouge 	United States	LSU Assembly Center
October 29, 1976 	Jackson 	United States	Mississippi Coliseum
October 30, 1976 	Lake Charles	United States	Lake Charles Civic Center
October 31, 1976 	Houston 	United States	The Summit
November 3, 1976 	San Antonio 	United States	HemisFair Arena
November 5, 1976 	Dallas 	United States	Dallas Convention Center
November 6, 1976 	Norman 	United States	Lloyd Noble Center
November 7, 1976 	Tulsa 	United States	Tulsa Assembly Center
==References==
==External links==
* P-Funk Tour List
Earth Tour
Category:1976 concert tours
Category:1977 concert tours