“Y’all got to kinda bear with us,” apologizes Clinton at the onset of a loping intro to “I’ll Bet You.” “We got a new drummer here tonight… Tyrone. We gonna get it together anyhow, and go pee on your afro.” This show should have been a complete disaster, and almost was. One of the only non-bootleg recordings of the original early ’70s Westbound-era P-Funk — there are a couple other scraps on Live: “The Funkadelic Collection” Greatest Hits 1972-1993 — it happens to catch P-Funk with their pants down, and not the usual pants-down business that Clinton liked to get up to in concert when he was feeling streaky. Westbound owner and future sample-troll Armen Boladian figured he’d picked a good night to record the band for a potential future live LP release, overlooking the somewhat pertinent fact that drummer Tiki Fulwood and rhythm guitarist Tawl Ross jumped ship days before the concert and their replacements were in the process of being integrated into their new band. Stax sideman and guitarist Harold Beane, who’d stay with Funkadelic just long enough to contribute to America Eats Its Young before leaving, did all right. But Tyrone Lampkin, who’d stick around with P-Funk all the way through The Electric Spanking Of War Babies, had a problem. Fulwood was a strict on-the-one rhythm machine of a drummer, frequently powerful and prone to some heavy flourishes but otherwise rode right inside the pocket. Lampkin was an Apollo house band showman known for his jazz and big band “showtime” style. This conflict might have been possible to circumvent if these two new members had a chance to rehearse for the show. They hadn’t.

And yet somehow, they pulled it all together — not enough to overcome Boladian’s after-the-fact assessment that the recording wasn’t “commercial” enough, and not enough to convince Eddie Hazel and a particularly frustrated Billy Bass Nelson to stick around for the recording of Cosmic Slop (though Eddie’d return with a vengeance on Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On). But for a band that was maintaining a rep for out-of-control freakiness, the push-and-pull between Lampkin’s drumming and Nelson’s bass isn’t enough to torpedo a hell of a set, one that captures a transitory mutation of Funkadelic in a particularly rare configuration. “Alice In My Fantasies” makes for a thundering opener, Hazel revealing new twists and heights in a six-minute jam that had previously only been available in its 2 ½-minute Standing on the Verge studio version. And even if the backbeat on concert staple/cosmic out-of-body experience “Maggot Brain” is a little more upfront and flashy than usual, Lampkin’s measured intensity is a surer sign of things to come than the wild-hair-up-the-ass overplaying that temporarily derails “I Call My Baby Pussycat” completely. Things eventually start to gel the further the set goes on, with more opportunity to give the rest of the band — and the singers in particular in the intricately harmonizing “All Your Goodies Are Gone (The Loser’s Seat)” — some much-needed breathing room. By Cosmic Slop, Lampkin had gone from sticking out to standing out, and getting to hear him make his first steps towards becoming one of the great rhythmic backbones of a peerless rhythmic band makes this concert oddity a priceless document.