The House Guests Meet the Complete Strangers and Bootsy, Phelps & Gary - My Mind Set Me Free LP (signed copy), 2019

After splitting with James Brown, the core of Bootsy’s old band the Pacemakers —Bootsy, his guitarist brother Phelps “Catfish” Collins and drummer Frank “Kash” Waddy—returned to Cincinnati in 1971, where they reformed under a new name: the House Guests. With local James acolyte Rufus Allen on vocals and Clayton “Chicken” Gunnels and Robert “Chopper” McCullough on horns, the band gigged around the Midwest and cut epic funk jams “My Mind Set Me Free” and “What So Never The Dance” before George Clinton recruited the group, sans Allen, to join him in Funkadelic. This unit would, meanwhile, continue to record together independently of George, before coalescing into Bootsy’s Rubber Band in 1976.

This 2019 compilation from Shake It Records, the in-house label of the long-running Cincinnati record shop by the same name, gathers nine rare recordings from this period, recorded under three different monikers: the House Guests, the Complete Strangers, and Bootsy, Phelps & Gary.