When Spike Lee needed funds for his new movie, he turned to his fans, friends and supporters who answered the call, raising over $1.2 million dollars via Kickstarter. Now the Father of the Funk, legendary bassist Bootsy Collins, wants you to do the same. He and his wife, Patti, are starting their own Kickstarter campaign to help fund a new tour bus and a new CD/DVD project. That tour will then help the Collins’ charity drive, the I Give A Funk Groovement, which will provide the homeless and other needy people with food and services during each tour stop.
“Back in the day, we used to have support as far as record companies, sponsors and that kind of thing to offset the tour costs,” Colllins told Skip Cheatham on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. “Other groups out there have sponsors. These groups don’t have to spend their own money. But we can’t get no support for the funk of it. This Kickstarter thing will help us get out to the cities that we haven’t been to. It’s not that we don’t want to go, it’s that it’s so expensive to get gas for the funkship.”
Midnight Star, Eddie Levert, Musiq Soulchild, Shirley Murdock Zapp, and Gladys Knight have all been recruited to potentially do a tour that will assist the Collins’ desire to see “Unity In the Community.” Instead of just doing a song, Collins sees this as a musical mission to bring his funkdafied brand of peace and love to the masses.
“We want this to actually happen and take this around the world,” says Collins. “We don’t just want a one-off. We want to set a trend because there are no positive movement where people who don’t have nothing. There’s only so much a government or a president can do. We want to start this thing where people are doing it for themselves and we want to show them out to do this.”
If you want to fund the funk, then head over to Bootsy’s official site where you can be directly connected to his Kickstarter campaign. Or check him out on Twitter @Bootsy_Collins where the #IGiveaFunk movement is in full swing.
