Bootsy Comes Out of His Artistic Funk : Funkadelia: Bassist Collins now concentrates more on the music than on the theatrics. He plays Sunday at the Coach House.

For William (Bootsy) Collins, the idea of playing a funky comicbook hero lost its appeal during the 1980s.

Now, more than a decade after his last tour as one of the key figures in Parliament-Funkadelic’s comically outrageous, larger-than-life stage extravaganzas of the 1970s, the flamboyant bass player has stars in his eyes again.

“I made up my mind I’ve been off long enough,” said Collins, 39, whose signature stage look still features the star-shaped sunglasses and star-shaped bass guitars he sported with Parliament-Funkadelic (commonly known as P-Funk). “I’m hungry for the crowd again. I’m hungry for that touch again. So I feel good about it.”

Collins, who plays Sunday night at the Coach House, was still a teen-ager when he became a member of James Brown’s backup band, the JB’s, where he served from 1969 to 1971. In 1972, Collins hooked up with George Clinton, the ringleader of Parliament-Funkadelic. Clinton’s offbeat musical conglomeration became, after the demise of Sly & the Family Stone, the ‘70s most adventurous manufacturer of rock-laced funk. Collins contributed deep-gulping bass lines, added his voice to P-Funk’s funny cartoon cacophony of chants and theatrical role-playing, and co-wrote a good deal of the group’s material, including the hits, “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)” and “Flash Light.”

Collins became a star in his own right in 1976 when Clinton promoted him to front man of Bootsy’s Rubber Band, one of the many spinoffs from the P-Funk “Mothership.” But by 1982, Parliament-Funkadelic and Collins’ solo fortunes both had ebbed. So had his zest for performing.

“All my fun turned into work,” Collins, an easy, amiable talker with a ready chuckle, recalled in a recent phone interview from his home in Mount Carmel, Ohio. “I was scared, ‘cause I didn’t know whether I wanted to do it (play live) or not again. The superstar role took me out of the reality of being with people, and it took a while to get that back again.”

Collins said he retreated to his 23-acre ranch outside his hometown of Cincinnati for two to three years in the early ‘80s and spent a lot of time hunting, fishing and playing with his seven dogs. “It was just a period I had to go through. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but I did a lot of stuff that didn’t have to do with music. I was running from it.”

He found a way back to active duty by concentrating on studio work. At first, Collins said, he was concerned that he’d always be perceived as Bootsy, the flashy guy with the stars in his eyes.

“People were making a real big deal out of (his stage persona) and it made me feel funny,” he said. “I would have to put on this big act and be the kind of person they felt I was. I got so far away from being a musician, and that was my desire--I wanted to be a musician again.”

Collins says some sessions he played with Malcolm McLaren, best known as the promotional Svengali behind the Sex Pistols, helped rekindle his enthusiasm. He also continued to back George Clinton on his solo albums. More recently, Collins has lent his bass or guitar to recordings by Keith Richards and the reggae duo of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. The old, comically chattering Bootsy persona can be heard adding lighthearted vocal interjections to Deee-Lite’s Top Five hit, “Groove Is in the Heart.”

In 1988, Collins released a comeback album, “What’s Bootsy Doin’?” which featured some true-to-type novelty numbers, plus some more sensitive fare. The album included a tender love song to his mother, and a ballad lamenting how men must suppress their insecurities and heartaches in order to keep up the cool, competent, masculine exterior that society expects.

“I’ve got that in me too,” Collins said of those more thoughtful songs, which take him far from the comic personas he created for himself in the ‘70s. “I know the concept people have got of me, and in most cases I’ll stick to that. But when I feel like it, I can say, ‘Here, I’ll show you, I can get like this too, if I really want to.’ I want to cut records as I hear and feel ‘em myself, and not pay much attention to what people feel I should be.”

Collins’ most recent release, “Jungle Bass,” was a pure shot of dance-oriented funk, with the emphasis on simple vocal chants and sharp musicianship. On stage, he said, he isn’t about to transform his old image.

“I would say it’s way out. I’ve got a few of the outfits I used to wear. I don’t think I ever want to just be bland,” he said. Collins, who returned to regular touring a few months ago, has several of his old P-Funk cronies with him, including guitarists Mike Hampton and Gary Schider, singer Gary (Mudbone) Cooper, and horn aces Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley. Collins said that Bernie Worrell, the P-Funk keyboards player who helped Talking Heads get funky during their “Stop Making Sense” period, is going to join the band when it resumes touring next year as opening act and backing group on an extensive tour with Deee-Lite.

Collins got his start in music by tagging along after his older brother, guitarist Phelps (Catfish) Collins. “I just kept bugging him and kept stealing his guitar when he went on his paper route. I always watched his band when they would rehearse at the house.” At 13, Collins--nicknamed Bootsy by his mother when he was a tot--was playing sessions in the studio of Cincinnati-based King Records, backing R&B; performers such as Hank Ballard and Bill Doggett. James Brown also recorded at King’s studio, and in 1969 he hired the Collins brothers and their drummer, Frank Waddy, into his band.

After a period of playing in Brown’s tightly disciplined format as the JB’s, the Collins brothers and Waddy went off on their own as the House Guests. They played the same circuit as George Clinton’s Funkadelic, a band that was following in Jimi Hendrix’s footsteps by combining psychedelic-guitar fireworks, R&B; grooves, ironic social commentary and hippie idealism. After a gig one night in Detroit, Collins said, a woman invited him to the house where Clinton was living.

Collins recalled his first glimpse of Funkadelic’s leader: “He looked like he had dropped maybe 10 tabs of acid. He was on the floor, barefoot, in a yogi sit. He was looking at the sky, and there wasn’t any sky in there. There was a ceiling. I knew that’s what I wanted to hook up with.” Clinton’s spacey trip “was right on time for me,” Collins said with a laugh. “That’s the way I wanted to be. Between my cartoon mind and George’s, we were both thinking the same thing. It was all a big joke. It was fun, and we just tried to get some laughs out of it. We were just having fun with these characters.”

Collins thinks his key musical contribution was to make Funkadelic truly funky.

“When I came from James Brown, that brought the serious funk. Before I came, people couldn’t dance to it. It was a little too crazy for ‘em. You take the same craziness and put it on a funky groove, and it’s a whole new thing.”

In P-Funk’s wild mythology, funk wasn’t merely a rhythmic concept, but a quasi-mystical principle, a source of transcendent power. Collins still can wax eloquent in discussing funk’s deeper meanings.

“The funk, to me, is actually the way we came up,” he said, an earnest tone edging into his voice. “It’s the hard edge of life, the rhythm of things to come. If you’ve got funk you’ve got style. True funk, you grow up with that. It’s not something you just learn.”

Collins is willing to be generous in defining the funk of others. For instance, he was asked, would the New Kids on the Block qualify as true funk?

“It’s their version of funk. There’s some truth in that,” Collins allowed. “For who they are, they’re funky.”

Collins thinks P-Funk’s demise after 1980 came from extending the conglomerate’s tentacles in too many directions. “We were doing so much. I think they call it burnout,” he said. But he also thinks the group’s arena-scale success had taken away some of that “hard edge of life.”

“We stopped really reaching for new ideas. The reason, I think, is that we got too satisfied with where we were and what we had created. I didn’t even have to carry my bass any more. It was so easy. Everybody was doing everything for us. And these things are essential to keep you starving and reaching for it. That happens to a lot of artists who become star-time.”

But P-Funk’s funk hasn’t really gone away. The band’s grooves and riffs, like James Brown’s and Sly & the Family Stone’s, have become common currency for rappers who build new music out of parts cannibalized from the R&B; warehouse.

The list of records sampling P-Funk material “goes on and on,” said Collins, who endorses the rap approach and professes no jealousy about supplying some of the raw material for newcomers’ hits at a time when he is trying to re-establish his own profile. “If you’re not with them, then you’re missing them. MC Hammer, we’re talking now about doing some stuff together. They know I’m down with it.”

Collins also sees the recent success of bands such as Living Colour, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More, all of whom blend funk music with hard rock, as an indication of the value of P-Funk’s legacy.

“That in itself is inspiring. It lets us know that we were doing something right,” he said. “I think that (combination) is going to be around for a long time.”

Bootsy Collins and the Limbomaniacs play Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $25. Information: (714) 496-8930.