Rock Fans Long Thought This Iconic Prop Ended Up on the Route 1 Corridor

It’s one of the most iconic stage props in music history: The Mothership.

Starting in 1976, the seminal funk band Parliament-Funkadelic brought a massive 1,200-pound aluminum spaceship on stage with them as part of an elaborate futuristic mythology in their music.

Earlier this month, George Clinton and members of the band went on tour with a new version of the Mothership to mark its 50th anniversary. A replica sits in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C.

But for many years, fans speculated that the original ended up right here on the Route 1 corridor. Here’s why.

In 1982 , Parliament-Funkadelic was facing internal turmoil and mounting debt. D.C. promoter Darryll Brooks began selling their instruments, costumes and other props in storage to pay the band’s debts, but no one wanted the Mothership.

Brooks put it in his mother’s garage in Clinton, Md., but after six months, she told him to get rid of it. Unable to get in touch with the band, he sent it to a junkyard somewhere in Prince George’s County.

For many years, that’s all that was known. Everyone from amateur rock historians to Smithsonian staff tried to figure out what happened next, and many speculated that it might have ended up on the Route 1 corridor, a short drive up the Beltway from Clinton.

At the time, the area was a major location for warehouses, scrap metal recycling and auto-salvage businesses, including a core area in Hyattsville, Riverdale Park and Edmonston and another in Bladensburg and Brentwood. One of them, Prince George’s Scrap, is still operating today.

In 2010, Washington Post reporter Chris Richards came the closest to finding its final resting place, writing after extensive interviews that it was dropped off in the woods behind a junkyard in Seat Pleasant, though he didn’t actually find it.

A former owner thought maybe it burned, but the author of a P-Funk oral history claimed that it was never destroyed and that he’s seen the wreckage of it. If it were sold for scrap, it still might have made its way to Route 1, where the more industrial salvage yards would have had better equipment to take it apart.

In many ways, it’s a fitting end for a piece of music history as legendary and mythic as the Mothership that no one actually knows where it ended up.

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