It’s not just a figure of speech to say that writing a book with George Clinton was a dream come true. When I was a teen-ager in suburban Miami, often bored out of my mind and propelled by desperation into books and music, I bought a cassette of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Greatest Hits” and wore it to death in my auto-reverse Walkman. That album sent me in several directions at once: into late-sixties rock, into early-seventies soul, and, most importantly, into mid- to late-seventies funk, including Rick James, Cameo, Ohio Players, and, especially, Parliament-Funkadelic.

P-Funk was the best fit for me: the music was playful, expansive, both philosophically inclined and deeply profane, and ranged from psychedelic explorations of inner space to socioeconomic satires in outer space. You could marvel at the candy-colored brilliance of Parliament records like “Motor Booty Affair,” or lose yourself in the abstruse marginalia of Pedro Bell’s cover art for “Cosmic Slop” and other Funkadelic records. Either way, you were entering a fantastical world that was also fully recognizable. As one Parliament song had it, “Fantasy Is Reality.”

Here’s the literal dream: I was at a record store, looking at a new Rick James album. It was called “Top Shelf,” and, as a gimmick, that’s the only place the store was putting it. I pulled over a stepladder and climbed up to get a copy of the record. When I came back down, George Clinton was there. He didn’t look like he actually looked—the dream George Clinton was taller and skinnier than the real-life one—but I knew it was him from his goggle glasses and headpiece (this was during the “Atomic Dog” era). He held out his hand as if he wanted to borrow the record. When I gave it to him, he tucked it under his arm and walked away, laughing. He never said a word. Whenever I have told this story (not very often—people don’t like to hear about dreams), I have focussed mainly on the Rick James album, because it was so vivid. The last movement of the dream, the part where I met George Clinton, was intimate and hazy. Even bringing it up now is uncomfortable, like I’m endangering something personal and fragile.

I raise this dream because of something dreamlike that happened in real life. In 2012, I stepped into an office in midtown Manhattan, and, a few minutes later, George Clinton stepped into the same office. He didn’t look the way he had looked in my dream, or the way he had looked in most of the videos and concerts I’d seen in the intervening years—there was no rainbow-colored hair, no philosopher-clown aura. The George Clinton who came into the office was a dapper older man in a suit and hat and snakeskin shoes. He sat down on the other side of the table and spoke to me for a while. In the wake of that meeting, I was offered the opportunity to co-write his memoir, the Funkadelically titled “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?” Fantasy is reality.

We ended up working on the book for two years, mixing structured question-and-answer sessions with unstructured conversations. At one point, I went down to Tallahassee to see how a seventy-something funk-rock pioneer lived when he was off the road. We ended up at a family reunion that was also a celebration of George’s birthday. The time not spent celebrating was spent fishing. George went. His childhood friend Ronnie Ford went, as did his longtime personal manager and confidant, Archie Ivy. Their wives went. To say that the fishing trip was surreal is an understatement, and yet it was also comfortably real: we were out near the Apalachee Bay, catching fish (and, in Archie’s case, a turtle), talking through stories I had heard and stories that I hadn’t yet heard. Another night, we went to a roadhouse near our bed and breakfast, where a band of skinny white guys played classic rock songs. George sat and sang along, pumping his fist when there were songs he especially liked. The family reunion was happily chaotic; I was introduced to children and grandchildren. There was cake. George’s band played and the guy who owned the bed and breakfast, I think, sat in with them. We all stayed up late and I tried to take notes without looking too obtrusive.

Collaborating on a memoir is a strange thing. It’s the story of a life told by the person who lived that life, with all subjectivity and perspective intact. It isn’t a reporting job in the traditional sense. It’s a process of translating thoughts and memories into written language. When I first signed on to do the book, there were people in the music and literary worlds who expressed doubt. They worried that years of drug use had taken a toll on George’s memory. That worry was unfounded, and then some. We could be talking about the interpenetration of jazz and soul music, and George would mention that the bassist Milt Hinton played on “Mr. Lee,” a late-fifties hit by the Bobbettes. That would turn out to be true. But then he would get stuck. “What was their name originally?” he’d say. I didn’t know. Whoever else was around didn’t know. It didn’t matter. We’d go on talking about the complex relationship between jazz and soul, and how Wayne Shorter grew up near George in Newark, and how George and all his friends thought that Shorter’s sax sounded strange, like it was broken or something. Fifteen minutes later, George might slap the table. “The Harlem Queens,” he’d say. “The Bobbettes started out as the Harlem Queens.” That would turn out to be true, too.

George’s life has been a long one, primarily musical, and he steered the P-Funk ship through most of the important labels, genres, and movements of the second half of the past century. He foundered more than once: financially, pharmaceutically, interpersonally. But, through it all, his creative drive remained undiminished. At one point, in the early eighties, at a time when George had burned out a bit on drugs and faced opposition from record labels, he and Bootsy Collins were offered a chance to produce a record for an Ohio band named Xavier. The song they made, “Work That Sucker to Death,” was a hit. “I knew we still had our fingers on the pulse,” he said, though his tone when he said it was anything but certain. It was remarkable to watch him relive that moment of doubt, and to shift quickly to the moment when his confidence was restored.

People come to George Clinton for stories, and there are plenty of them in the book. Tripping on acid in late-sixties Boston. Bringing a pet pig to London and watching as it shat on the steps of the Albert Memorial. Encountering zombies in the middle of the night and lighting hotel rooms on fire with crack-pipe-ignited, nasally launched tissue paper. As good as he is with stories, George is even better with characters, beginning with his own. As a kid, he said, he was quiet, amazed by how huge the world seemed and determined to soak up enough of it to begin making sense of things. The personalities that appealed to him were creative impresarios, people who not only had ideas but worked to create the infrastructure that would promote and extend those ideas: Berry Gordy, at Motown, obviously, but also Phil Spector, and P. T. Barnum, and Walt Disney. Disney had a special significance, because he taught George something else: that “characters were the closest humanity came to immortality.” Walt Disney would eventually die, but Mickey Mouse would live forever.