Songfacts®:

• Bootsy Collins goes low and slow on "I'd Rather Be With You," a funk ballad from 1976 that has been widely sampled and interpolated, most famously by Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) on his 2016 track "Redbone." It also shows up in the 1995 Adina Howard song "Freak Like Me" and was borrowed by Beyoncé for her 2003 song "Be With You."
• Bootsy Collins was part of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic collective when he released this song on his debut album, Stretchin' Out in Bootsy's Rubber Band. Clinton helped him secure a record deal and worked with him on the album, which included many Parliament-Funkadelic players as well. Clinton didn't make romantic songs with P-Funk, so Bootsy's Rubber Band was a good outlet for a song like "I'd Rather Be With You," where Bootsy wants nothing more than to spend time with his lady.
• Collins wrote the song with George Clinton and Gary "Mudbone" Cooper, a P-Funk mainstay who sings on the track along with Robert "Peanut" Johnson. Bootsy's vocals are peppered in throughout the song, and then at the end he delivers a spoken-word section.
• That squiggly sound is a wah-wah guitar played by Bootsy, who played the bass on the track as well. The other musicians were members of the P-Funk family:
  
  Bernie Worrell: melodica, keyboards
  Garry Shider: guitar
  Cordell "Boogie" Mosson: drums
• Bootsy had some wild times in the '70s and '80s on the road with P-Funk, but he settled down in 1996 when he married his wife Patti. In a Songfacts interview, he talked about how he'd rather be with her: "Music is why you're out there, but what you're chasing is totally different."