WATERTOWN — Armenian-American musician Daniel “Danny” Peter Bedrosian, member of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic collective, finally has completed a project which took several decades of work: The Authorized P-Funk Song Reference: Official Canon of Parliament-Funkadelic, 1956-2023 (Rowan and Littlefield Publishers). This is an encyclopedic 504-page catalog of all the albums, projects, songs, and collaborations of all musical groups founded and produced by Clinton from 1956 to 2023.
Bedrosian said, “The Parliament-Funkadelic canon is the largest single discography of any music collective in the history of music of the world essentially. It is the longest running popular music band in world history as well with a 68-year unbroken tenure of time of work. It is also personnel-wise the largest band of all time, with somewhere around 200 full-time touring members. With that in mind, this [publication] was a daunting task, to say the least.”
The discography encapsulates somewhere around 850 releases, the vast majority of which are albums, so that means somewhere over 10,000 songs.
The newly published book contains full details of who played and sang on all songs of the groups connected with Clinton, along with rare photos. The precocious Bedrosian said that he began compiling information in notebooks on Clinton’s work back when he was in middle school. Later, “when I got into the band,” he said, “I started asking all of my bandmates many tedious questions about the minutiae of personnel and obtained those from the primary sources themselves over an 18-year period.” Many of those individuals are no longer alive.
The Covid pandemic provided Bedrosian the opportunity to set aside the time necessary to bring the book to fruition. Previously, he said that he was on the road as a keyboardist with Clinton for 280 to 320 days a year, along with his classical music residency which had him working the rest of his free time.
First, however, he had to take care of health issues. He had a little health scare right before Covid, which led him to lose 85 pounds and get into what he called the best shape of his life. Nonetheless, he said, “Alpha Covid was really, really bad on me. I was hospitalized three times. I almost didn’t make it.” After recovering he moved into the countryside in Florida where he lives now, and started running every day and exercising, as well as perfecting classical music pieces, like some of his favorite Khachaturian segments, that he had never had the time to devote to previously.
