It seems like a Hollywood story.... Young boy travels to a distant city, wanders into a small music store and picks up his first guitar. Cut to ten years later and the boy as a teenager returns to the same town making his debut performance before a sold out crowd. That's how the story went for Parliament Funkadelic Guitarist Mike Kidd Funkadelic Hampton. When Mike wandered into that store three doors down from his aunts house in Landover Maryland he didnt have any idea of being a guitar player. He just picked it up for fun. The first two years,he taught himself, creating stuff on a toy piano and then, figuring it out on guitar, "It just came natural." Mike would play along to songs on the radio. I didnt matter what it was. Wes Montgomery, Jimi Hendrix, Sly, Queen, Pop. Soul, Blues, Rock n Roll. "Some things you feel inside, it just grabs you." Listening and playing to other people's records brought out something special. "Its like when you get closer and closer to playing someone's lines, you can feel where they were coming from and you put yourself in their space." By the time Mike hit high school, even his friends knew he was something special. One of his best friends picked up an amp from the music department and carried it out of the school on his shoulder and brought it to Mikes house declaring "This is Mikes Amp." Another friend turned Mike onto Funkadelic. "You gotta hear this...", later that year Mike's band won a local battle of the bands contest by performing Hocus Pocus by Focus. "The other bands may have had better equipment but we won on the material we performed." Back in the day the only way to prove to people you could play was to play somebody elses songs. Thats how he came to the attention of P-funk members, Garry Shider and Cordell Boogie Mosson. P-Funk was in town and Mike and his band was playing at an after party where Garry and Boogie were hanging out. Ed Spark (the guy throwing the party) asked Mike to play Maggot Brain. "The Kidd" performed it note for note, leaving the Funkadelics with a "WoW" on their faces. A few weeks after graduating high school at 17 a call came from the Funkadelic camp. Lead guitarist Eddie Hazel had gotten into some legal trouble and the band needed another lead guitar player. The next day, Michael flew into Landover Maryland and jumped on stage in front of 20,000 screaming fans at the Capital Centre and blew them all away with his rendition of Maggot Brain. The Legend of "Kidd Funkadelic" was born."I didn't pick the guitar, the guitar picked me" Hampton says with a smile.
