Rest In Peace Pedro Bell aka Capt. Draw aka Sir Lleb, whose influential album covers for Funkadelic ignited the imaginations of music fans worldwide and helped cohere George Clinton’s Black Psychedelic vision into a powerful gestalt.
I hadn’t spoken to him in a bit, but I’ll always remember he was good to me when he didn’t have to be. As a young and clue-deficient whippersnapper, I sent him some 4-track cassette demos and asked him if he would make some art for a cassette release.
“I DON’T DO MICRO-PROJECTS SON, BUT KEEP SENDING ME STUFF,” came the reply via mail, complete with an elaborately decorated envelope.
After that, years of correspondence and support — once I started releasing music professionally he often turned people on to my albums and made sure I connected with key, like-minded folks. He also continued to send me custom art and cassettes of his own music (pictured below).
The legacy of his unique optics and slanguage — whipsmart, unapologetically Black, subversive— lives on in other art forms, detectable in Greg Tate’s writings, movies like “Sorry to Bother You”, thousands of indie music releases and more.
RIP Dro, and thank you.
By PC Muñoz
