Brought to you by FUNKNSTUFF.NET and hosted by Scott Goldfine — musicologist and author of “Everything Is on THE ONE: The First Guide of Funk” ― “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” is the interview show that gets DEEP into the pocket with contemporary music’s foremost masters of the groove.
Featured in this two-part series: Music consultant and career coach Tom Vickers, who among many other things served as George Clinton’s Minister of Information during the peak 1976-1980 years of the Parliament-Funkadelic empire. Not long after college he left a short stint at Rolling Stone to accept Clinton’s personal invitation to take on a role that included coordinating placement of publication articles, serving as liaison to five labels the good Dr. Funkenstein had acts signed to, and overseeing artwork and marketing.
Subsequent to that Vickers has staked a long and productive music career in PR and A&R for major record labels like A&M, Capitol and Mercury Records. Among likely in excess of the 100 artists he has been connected with are The Police, Whitney Houston, James Brown, Al Green, Phoebe Snow, B.B. King, Def Leppard, Jonny Lang, ZZ Top and so many others.
Having spent parts of five decades behind the scenes of an industry that has undergone major changes during that time and encountering just about every mover, shaker, charlatan, up-and-comer, superstar, overnight sensation, wanna-be, fly-by-night and has-been along the way, Vickers’ is a repository  of record business history.
Just head, we’ll see what knowledge he can drop on us with an especially deep dive into the glorious and chaotic P-Funk years. His stories about George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell and the rest of the U.S. Funk Mob camp are like none other.
Recorded December 2017