Funkadelic's 'Maggot Brain' At 50: R&B, Psychedelic Rock And A Black Guitarist's Aiming to make a record that fans would still listen to decades later, George Clinton and Funkadelic mixed R&B, psychedelic rock and a Black guitar hero's cry.
Funkadelic is the result of George Clinton flirting with psychedelic music, a style he describes as loud R&B. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images hide caption
They may be two of the most influential notes in funk-rock history: the soaring, plaintive start to guitarist Eddie Hazel's legendary solo in Funkadelic's Maggot Brain.
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The song, an audacious, emotive 10-minute-long bluesy ballad kicked off by a brief, eccentric poem from leader George Clinton, is centered on Hazel's expansive fretwork. Clinton pulls the bass guitar and drums mostly out of the mix, leaving the sonic field free for sparse backing chords on rhythm guitar and a fiery workout by Hazel fed through a boatload of echo effects.
Both the song and the album that shares its title were released 50 years ago, in July 1971. Clinton celebrates his own 80th birthday today, July 22.
And while there are many music fans out there who might not recognize the song or Hazel's name, artists ranging from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Widespread Panic and Childish Gambino have acknowledged how Funkadelic's magnum opus inspired their own artistic work.
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It's [an] indelible statement for the ages, says Vernon Reid, lead guitarist for Grammy-winning rockers Living Colour. It's a piece of music to evoke the ghosts of the past. It evokes the suffering. It evokes the joy. It's a masterwork.
Cultural critic and author Greg Tate, a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition, compares Maggot Brain to iconic jazz saxophonist John Coltrane's A Love Supreme: a towering artistic statement that had a significant impact on a generation of players.
Eddie has this thing that just comes out of his own kinda anguish and sorrow that he translates, Tate says. There's a cry in every note.
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Clinton, the great granddaddy of funk rock himself, says he told Hazel just before recording Maggot Brain to play as if someone had told him his mother died.
All of it is feeling, Clinton says. Eddie is playing all the feeling in the world. He's sensitive to no end... just a big ball of sensitivity. My mother used to call him 'Ol' Cryin' Eddie.' He could cry so good [on guitar], it was pretty.
Was all part of his plan; passing up pop singles to focus on creating a song and album that fans might return to decades later.
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But how did a group that started as a Motown-style R&B outfit unleash one of the most important guitar anthems of the decade?
Reaches back to 1967, when a different group led by Clinton called The Parliaments had a hit with an uptempo dance number called (I Wanna) Testify.
The Parliaments were a Temptations-style singing group; Testify was a typical midtempo groove about a man in love. But Clinton, who had enlisted a teenage Eddie Hazel to back the Parliaments on tour, was increasingly drawn to blending psychedelic rock sounds with funk grooves—especially when The Parliaments went on tour with hard rock bands.
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Vanilla Fudge was one of the groups we went out with, Clinton says. But we didn't have no instruments, so we borrowed the Vanilla Fudge's instruments. That stuff was so loud. But we realized, right then, this is what it is that made them sound like that.
He spoke about how it's the first time he met white people who were genuinely kind and genuinely nice, Reid recalls. He felt the people he met back then would literally give you the shirt off their backs.
Virtuoso rock star Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, leaving legions of guitarists – especially Black musicians like guitar phenom Eddie Hazel – wondering how to take up and extend his legacy.
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At the same time, R&B stars like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the Temptations were looking to break the straitjacket of their traditional approaches and experiment with new sounds.
As Funkadelic made its early records, Clinton noticed white rock bands – and their audiences — were focused on blues artists his mother liked from years ago. He reasoned: If he could take an old blues groove and modernize it, maybe he could create something audiences would also come back to 15 years later.
Clinton came up with a 10-minute ballad where he unleashed Hazel, who had been listening to records he gave him by Hendrix, Sly Stone and Cream. The whole band played with Hazel in the studio, but Clinton pulled most of the bass and drums out of the sound mix, leaving room to layer even more echo effects on the guitar.
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It was a movement, Greg Tate says. Basically, what everyone learned from Sly and Jimi was that you didn't have to have a lead singer. You just needed to have a great band.
DeWayne Blackbyrd McKnight joined Clinton's revolving door of P-Funk musicians and bands in 1978. He says when he heard Maggot Brain – well before he would wind up playing the song onstage with Eddie Hazel — it meant something to see a Black man stepping up as a rock guitar hero.
It was inspiring...a different form of rock 'n' roll that I was identifying with, McKnight adds. It gave me an avenue to go ahead and explore things I was already playing.
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Hazel died in 1992. And although funk-rock fans may know the guitarist's name, Reid says Black guitar heroes like Hazel and Ernie Isley from The Isley Brothers were often overlooked — left off the cover of music magazines by a white-dominated music establishment that didn't quite accept them.
They were denied their rightful place: no two ways about it, says Reid, who has landed on some of those magazine covers himself. I feel very grateful. I wouldn't exist without these brothers that did their thing. But it was wild to me... that guitar was such a polarized area.
We were too white for Black folks and too Black for white folks, he adds. But the people that really liked us, stayed with us forever. The Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic—all of us have the same kinds of fans. The grandparents would be there with their kids. It's like going to the circus.In the wake of the sudden and tragic passing of Jimi Hendrix at the age of 27 in September 1970 there was naturally a desire on the part of some to crown “the Next Hendrix”.
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Duane Allman, Ernie Isley, Robin Trower and Johnny Winter were among the skilled players deemed worthy by the culturati, but none produced the kind of searing, emotional, fuzz-punched performance that Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel accomplished on “Maggot Brain”, the first song on the Detroit group's groundbreaking 1971 album of the same name.
Born in Brooklyn on April 10, 1950, Hazel taught himself how to play on a guitar his brother had given him as a Christmas gift. He had been playing for years before settling into, first, the Parliaments—a successful Plainfield, New Jersey R&B act led by a young George Clinton—and later, Funkadelic.
But it wasn’t until he discovered Jimi Hendrix that Hazel truly found the sound so critical to Funkadelic's early albums. As the group's Bill “Billy Bass” Nelson recalled to author Yuval Taylor for Popmatters, “once Eddie started listening to Jimi Hendrix, he found his niche. Immediately, he was like, ‘Damn, Bill, I can do that! Can you play that bass shit, muthafucka?’ I was like, ‘Hey, man, I guess I’m gonna have to.”
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The self-titled Funkadelic debut dropped in 1970. As did Free Your Mind...and Your Ass Will Follow. Maggot Brain appeared in mid-July the following year.
Motown’s influence still reigned in the Motor City in the early ‘70s—in particular the visionary, socially conscious work of Marvin Gaye, who released What’s Goin’ On just weeks before Maggot Brain hit the shelves. But it was also a hotbed for brawny rock music, which was being banged out by the explosive Wayne Kramer and MC5, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and Ted Nugent’s Amboy Dukes. Funkadelic shared management with all three.
Randy Jacobs, guitarist with Detroit’s Was (Not Was), once opined to Guitar World that in Detroit “during the Seventies, there were a bunch of bands that were rock but funk, too. There were some serious guitarists in those bands, but they all wanted to be Eddie Hazel.”
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The album offered an eruption of psychedelic agit-funk that blended the increasingly bleak American story—urban decay, prime time body counts from an ongoing slog through Vietnam, and front page assassinations—with the sounds of Hendrix, Motown, James Brown, Cream, Sly Stone, Blue Cheer and Vanilla Fudge.
Maggot Brain may have captured the anxiety and confusion of the era better than any other album, and no song exemplified the album quite like the title track.
Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time For y’all have knocked her up I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe I was not offended For I knew I had to rise above it all Or drown in my own shit
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