In George Clinton’s World, Everyone Feels Funky : Pop: Rappers and rockers have embraced his musical approach. He and his comrades will play at the Coach House on Wednesday.

At a time when American society seems to grow ever more fractious and factional, George Clinton hasn’t given up on his ideal of “One Nation Under a Groove.”

One of pop’s great aphorists and sloganeers, the funk-music hero first declared his “One Nation” vision on a hit 1978 album that championed funk as a liberating and unifying principle.

During the ‘70s, Clinton and an array of musical comrades were known collectively as P-Funk (short for Parliament-Funkadelic, the names of Clinton’s two key bands). They became famous for spinning out seriocomic concept albums and staging wildly theatrical, costume-extravaganza concerts founded on a freaky internal mythology wherein that redeeming essence known as “the funk” might be attacked, jeopardized or hidden away, but always somehow prevailed.

With Clinton serving as producer and setting the conceptual framework for musicians including bassist Bootsy Collins, keyboards player Bernie Worrell and saxophonist Maceo Parker, P-Funk championed a mix-and-match, genre-bending approach to music-making.

That approach has been taken successfully to heart by rappers (who continually use old P-Funk samples as building blocks for new grooves) as well as such pop and rock acts as Talking Heads, Prince, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Living Colour and Fishbone, whose funk/rock mergers picked up where P-Funk left off when it disbanded in the early ‘80s. (The commercially hot Chili Peppers were just a punk-funk cult band when they called on Clinton to produce their 1985 album, “Freaky Styley.”)

Speaking over the phone recently from a tour stop in Dayton, Ohio, the 52-year-old Clinton, who will bring his P-Funk All Stars to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Wednesday, was upbeat and animated.

He spoke of such long-nourished projects as a sci-fi film based on the 1975 concept album, “Mothership Connection,” and a hoped-for sequel to the elaborately staged tours that P-Funk played during the 1970s. For now, Clinton said, he and a band that includes such P-Funk stalwarts as Collins, singer Garry Shider, guitarists Michael Hampton, DeWayne (Blackbird) McKnight and Eddie Hazel, and whatever other alumni decide to pop in, are playing in a stripped-down, no-props format “just to get in sync. Every once in a while we go out and just re-up the band.”

Clinton isn’t so sanguine about the immediate prospects of America turning into “One Nation Under a Groove.”

“I don’t think racial (divisions) are as big as they used to be,” Clinton said, but only because society seems to have so many other fault lines along which to fracture. “Men and women are at each other’s throats the way the ethnic groups get at each other. Men and women could go to war any day.” Factor in contention over gay rights, abortion rights, European nationalism and banking scandals, and you’ve got a real ball of confusion, says this one-time staff songwriter for the Motown-controlled Jobete Music.

As his ‘70s albums make clear, Clinton is quite willing to entertain conspiracy theories to explain all this upheaval.

“I think there’s a real conscious effort to make the situation so bad they can call (for) martial law,” he said--”they,” in his reckoning, being international powers behind the apparatus of world finance and state security.

But Clinton maintains ultimate faith in the funk: “We will become one nation under a groove because of what’s happening,” he said. “We’ll be forced to rise above it, and we can. It’s something that’s got to be reached. . . . Now we’ve got to do it, or we could be like the dinosaurs.”

In keeping with these musings, Clinton said, there will be more social commentary on upcoming album releases than could be found on his last solo album, “The Cinderella Theory,” which was released in 1989.

“I did ‘Cinderella Theory’ basically the way Warners wanted it,” said Clinton, who records for Paisley Park Records, the Warner Bros.’ subsidiary controlled by Prince. “They wanted to get a pop record.”

Clinton says he has just finished work on his next Paisley Park release, to be entitled “Hey Man, Smell My Finger” (Clinton said it is his ribald answer to the question, “Are you still funky?”).

“This time I did it pretty much the way I wanted to,” Clinton said, although he adds that Warners vetoed his idea of having the artwork done by Pedro Bell, whose satiric cartooning was featured on the covers of several Funkadelic and Clinton solo albums.

Parts of “The Cinderella Theory” bore a Prince-like stamp, although Prince wasn’t mentioned in the album credits. This time, Clinton said, “He did a lot. He’s singing and playing quite a bit. He’s on four cuts out of 15 songs.”

Clinton, who stands as an important link in the historical chain of funk that goes from James Brown to Sly Stone to P-Funk to Prince, draws distinctions between his approach and Prince’s.

“He has a different way of funkin’, but he’s definitely funky. We’re more into bottom and low-end than him. Ours is almost like street music. His is basically geared for a pop market.”

At the height of P-Funk’s output in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Clinton simultaneously took a hand in writing and producing records not only by Parliament and Funkadelic, but by such offshoots as the Brides of Funkenstein, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Parlet and Zapp. Now he’s back to juggling several projects at once.

Besides his Warner’s effort, Clinton said, he is readying “Sample Some of Disk, Sample Some of Dat,” an album of old P-Funk outtakes, horn riffs and rhythm grooves, with the idea of providing a ready-made source of material for rap producers and dance-club deejays. He disowns the efforts of some former business associates who recently sued an array of rappers and record labels, seeking royalty payments for the use of P-Funk samples on rap records.

“To me it seems to be an effort to harm hip-hop,” said Clinton, who has incorporated rap in his own music and featured Public Enemy on both “The Cinderella Theory” and the new Paisley Park album, which is due out next year.

“I’m not suing any artists or record companies. It seems they’re more interested in pitting funk against hip-hop.” Clinton said that he has received payments derived from rappers’ recycling of his old material, a financial boost that helped him out of a bind with the Internal Revenue Service. The tax debt “was a lot of money and it’s pretty much paid off now,” he said. “I’m safely out of trouble there.” Clinton said he is taking steps on his own to secure royalties from past P-Funk releases that he believes are due to himself and others in the P-Funk songwriting stable.

Since it’s a presidential election year, and since his full name is on the ballot (albeit split half-and-half between the Republican and Democratic tickets), it seemed appropriate to ask Clinton whether he detects traces of “the funk” in either of his political namesakes.

“Uh uh,” he said. “Somebody asked Bill Clinton on television, did he know George Clinton, and he said, ‘No.’ ” Nevertheless, funketeer Clinton said he plans to vote for candidate Clinton as “the lesser of two evils.” As for Bush, “Everybody has a little funk somewhere in him. But I think Bush had to get rid of all his. He’d rather not have it.”

Clinton said he’s happy that all those “Clinton for President” banners and buttons don’t apply to him.

“I wouldn’t want the gig. People own you when you have that gig. These candidates have to do what the people who pay for (their campaigns) say to do.” Free and independent action can be as hard to come by in the music business as it is in politics. To that end, Clinton says, he has formed his own label, One Nation Records, to release a new concept album called “U.S. Customs Coast Guard Dope Dogs.”

“That way, I have total control,” Clinton said, over what sounds, from his explanation, like one of his most bizarre social commentaries yet. Clinton, whose fascination for funky canines resulted in the 1983 hit, “Atomic Dog,” says he got the idea for this one from a public-radio report on the treatment of laboratory dogs used in drug testing.

“They got ‘em strung out, crazy, nervous and everything. I thought it was the sickest thing I ever heard,” Clinton said. In the album’s central conceit, a band of lab-addicted dogs, needing a fix, go to work for the government, which tries to sic them on ghetto cocaine users.

The satiric point, Clinton said, is that, contrary to stereotype, the real drug threat stems not from the ghetto poor, but from the insulated rich who control drug distribution, but are much harder for narcotics agents to target.

“There are the dogs, saying they don’t want to go in the inner city to chase the drugs down, because they know that’s not where the drugs are. (In the ghetto) they get to smell somebody’s behind for half a gram, plus they get shot at.”

Clearly, Clinton has come a long way from singing doo-wop in a barbershop. During his scuffling days in the 1950s and early ‘60s, Clinton put together a vocal group called the Parliaments while he supported himself cutting hair in a Newark-area barbershop called the Silk Palace, because “we used to (make) the hair silky.” The clientele, he said, “was mainly singers and band members and pimps, and we did women’s hair. I used to do Patti LaBelle and Nona Hendryx’s hair.”

The Parliaments moved to Detroit, hoping for a record deal with Motown. The label was already full-up with male vocal groups like the Temptations and the Contours, Clinton said, so they were turned down. In 1967, though, the Parliaments broke through with a major R & B hit, “(I Wanna) Testify.”

After riding that hit’s success for a couple of years, Clinton said, “it was time to do something different or play little places and starve to death.”

He says he got the idea for “something different” when the Parliaments were sharing a bill with the Vanilla Fudge in New York.

“They had all these Marshall amps. We’d never seen nothing like that. We thought it was the P.A. for the club. They let us use their equipment, and we saw how it moved the people.”

Along with pursuing a rock/funk blend, Clinton took cues from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in working up a theatrical stage show with wigs and psychedelic garb. Soon, Clinton was exploring the psychedelic mentality, as well.

“I started throwing what I called this ‘metafoolish’ stuff in there. We were just spacin’ and trippin,’ and we weren’t even takin’ acid yet. We were fakin’ that we were, and later we did.”

“I read ‘The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran, (Robert A. Heinlein’s) ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’--all the stuff the hippies were reading,” Clinton recalled, his aim at first being to impress women rather than to find themes for songs. “But after a while, with the war in Vietnam, I was beginning to feel it for real.” That led to the philosophizing, protest and phrasemaking of such early ‘70s songs-turned-slogans as “America Eats Its Young.”

P-Funk’s big commercial breakthrough came with the 1975 album, “Mothership Connection.”

“By that time, I knew what I wanted to do--a funk opera. So I took all the money from (the album’s sales) and bought the spaceship”--an elaborate prop that was the focus for a circus-like stage show.

Clinton could play the seer or philosopher in a song like “Maggot Brain,” a Hendrix-inspired guitar elegy that began with him intoning:

I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe.

I was not offended.

But Clinton said it was important to balance the philosophic with the outrageous and the silly--which P-Funk managed to do with its array of props, wigs, glitter and costumery. “I hate to be preaching,” Clinton said. “I like a party. We went back and forth between” the serious and the lighthearted. “I’d like to be like a lot of my songs. I’d like to rise above a lot of it. But I don’t claim to be no guru.”

George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars, with special guest Bootsy Collins, play Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $25. (714) 496-8930.