William "Bootsy" Collins was born in Cincinnati on October 26, 1951. His older brother, guitarist Phelps "Catfish" Collins, was an early musical influence. In a 2011 interview, Collins recalled beginning to play guitar at nine and working toward the chance to join his brother's band. The brothers played together in Cincinnati groups, and Collins was working as a session musician in the city when James Brown recruited him.
Brown plucked the young bassist from relative obscurity in the late 1960s, and Collins joined Brown's band in 1970, at eighteen, as the bassist in the J.B.'s, the group Brown assembled that year after members of his previous band walked out. He stayed through 1971, bringing his bass playing to the tightly coordinated performances and recordings of one of funk's defining bands. Recalling "Sex Machine," he described a shared creative process involving Brown, Bobby Byrd, Catfish and himself.
After leaving Brown, Collins joined the Parliament-Funkadelic collective and became a central part of its sound. In 1978, his group Bootsy's Rubber Band topped the Billboard R&B chart with "Bootzilla," the lead single from the album Bootsy? Player of the Year, released that January on Warner Bros. Records, and the song that it displaced at number one, Parliament's "Flash Light," was one he had played on. His career connected the rhythmic discipline of Brown's band with the expansive sound of the P-Funk collective and his own group.
In 1997, Collins entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame alongside George Clinton and fifteen other members of Parliament-Funkadelic. Cincinnati honored him in turn: he was among the inaugural inductees of the city's Black Music Walk of Fame. In the same 2011 interview, he described learning through rehearsal, listening and the challenge of playing with other musicians. Collaboration sat at the center of how he learned, from his brother's band onward.
