The Ohio Players (featuring original drummer Diamond Williams & guitarist Chet Willis) started their set around 9:00pm, with "Skin Tight"...the biggest problem with this song was the somewhat sloppiness of the horns--TIGHTEN UP A LITTLE, FELLAS! The next song "Funky Worm" was even worse...it just sounded so out-of-tune that I didn't even recognize the song at first (actually, I don't know if these guys should be doing this song, because they really would need Junie Morrison to pull off his trademark high-pitched synthesizer sounds). They performed a love ballad with Diamond stopping midway to introduce the band members...the earthquaking funk bass and the keyboardist's soulful vocalizing afterwards were da bomb! "Love Rollercoaster" and "O-H-I-O" were pretty funky. "Fire" was the encore performance, featuring Diamond doing a speech on throwing terrorism (referring to everything since the 9-11-01 NYC/DC bombings), racism and other bad "isms" into the "fire". The band was playing this bass-driven groove for about 4 minutes, before going into the actual song...the one criticism I had was the fact that the guitar solo seemed to suffer from being too low in the mix (every other instrument seemed to drown out the guitar). The Ohio Players set ended at 9:30pm.
The P-Funk Allstars started at 9:50pm with the funky "Bop Gun
(Endangered Species)", which was followed by "Undisco Kidd" and
Belita Woods's "The Way She Moves". "Cosmic Slop" featured some
good rhythm guitaring by Cordell "Boogie" Mosson and some nasty lead
guitar slaying by the one and only......MICHAEL "KIDD FUNKADELIC"
HAMPTON!!! George Clinton came out and joined in on vocals on "Tear the
Roof Off the Sucka" and "Up For the Down Stroke" (which featured
profane chants from "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" and the crowd favorite
"To the window, to the balls...") After Belita did a few lines from
the Jimmy G & the Tackheads gem "Slingshot", PooPoo Man came out and
did a little of the James Brown classic "Payback" to the groove of
"Down Stroke".