Happy 50th Anniversary to Funkadelic’s third studio album Maggot Brain, originally released July 12, 1971.
In the last year-and-a-half or so, I’ve been fortunate to write about some of the historically great album runs by legendary artists. I’ve paid tribute to Bob Dylan’s mid 1960s trilogy of albums that he released in a 13-month span and celebrated how they shifted the scope of rock music. Funkadelic’s initial three-album, 16-month run might not be as heralded, but it’s pretty damn impressive and served as the cornerstone of the eclectic group’s artistic movement.
Funkadelic (1970) and Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow (1970) were careening romps, explosive mixes of soul, rock, and blues that would become known as Funk. They emerged out of LSD-fueled sessions marked by their musical and interpersonal anarchy. The songs featured tales of the tragically destitute and forgotten, scrapping for ways to survive. Though players in the band seemed to come and go, the core of the group was made up of mastermind George Clinton, lead guitarist Eddie Hazel, bassist Billy Nelson, rhythm guitarist Lucious “Tawl” Ross, and drummer Ramon “Tiki” Fulwood.
With their third album, Maggot Brain, released 50 years ago, the group reached its then zenith. The project was a logical progression of everything that came before. The training wheels were off, and the group greeted the concepts of fear and decay of the mind with full-on musical assault. In One Nation Under a Groove, a PBS documentary about the collective, funk historian Rickey Vincent described it as “probably the most polished and most frightening Funkadelic album to come out.” For all of its drug-riddled insanity, the refined edges added to the music’s timeless quality.
Maggot Brain’s legend is built mostly on its bookends. The mammoth first and last tracks run 20 minutes combined and comprise more than half of the album’s length. Like entries on their previous albums, they’re occasionally bizarre and vaguely disturbing at times, and they could have only come from the minds of the members of the collective.
The album opens with its mega-opus of a title track. Aside from a brief, appropriately tripped-out, spoken word intro by Clinton, the track is essentially a 10-minute-long guitar solo by Hazel. The story goes before recording the take, Clinton, almost certainly under the influence of LSD, told Hazel to play like he had just found out that his mother had died. Then Clinton surrounded him with Marshall amps (the group’s weapon of choice) and told him to just play.
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Hazel was famously an emotional guy with “superior technique that took a lot of acid.” As a result, the song is, as future Funkadelic guitarist Garry Shider put it, “a brotha crying his soul out.” Hazel’s work is revelatory, mournful, and intricate, never a note wasted. And considering that he was likely tripping balls at the time, even more impressive.
Clinton understood the power of what Hazel was unleashing, writing in his autobiography, “I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web. When he played the solo back, I knew that it was good beyond good, not only a virtuoso display of musicianship but also an almost unprecedented moment of emotion in pop music."
This is likely why Clinton chose to go the unorthodox route when mixing down the song. He isolated Hazel’s guitar work, fading the drums, keyboards, and bass completely to the background, so that they are barely the faintest of whispers. He then “Echoplexed it back on itself three or four times” to make it feel even more eerie. Clinton’s instincts proved correct: the expanded reissue of Maggot Brain features a mix of the song in which you can hear Hazel’s support, and it’s not nearly as powerful.
The epic “Wars of Armageddon” is Maggot Brain’s closing anthem. It’s a nearly 10-minute exhibition in musical chaos. Rather than Hazel’s guitar work, Fulwood’s virtuoso drumming and percussion are what drives “Armageddon.” Well, that and the sound effects and crowd noise. The song thunders along like a wrecking ball, as clips of protests and angry shouts play. Eventually, things devolve to where you can hear cuckoo clocks, jarring animal noises, and sounds of flatulence and defecation. Mock chants by Clinton and crew send things further into absurdity, as they yell “More pussy to the power!” and “More peter to the eater!”
Though Hazel’s work on “Maggot Brain” has received the most attention, he’s close to as masterful on “Super Stupid.” Hazel sings lead on the track, wailing two short verses about a mixed-up drug user (possibly himself) snorting copious amounts of heroin, believing it to be cocaine. Hazel delivers his guitar solos in multiple bursts, each broken up by brief organ interludes. The song is every bit as “metal” as groups like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin embodied and would soon release (Masters of Reality would hit shelves a little over a week after Maggot Brain, while IV would be available later in November).
Worrell gets his time to shine on “Hit It and Quit It,” belting out sexually suggestive innuendo over his own complex organ playing. He later lays a pounding and menacing piano riff on “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” backed by cacophonous distorted drums. Traditional songwriting is hard to come by on Maggot Brain, but “You and Your Folks” is not only an effective plea for unity between races, but also a declaration of empowerment for the poor and working class. “But if in our fears, we don't learn to trust each other,” Nelson sings. “And if in our tears, we don't learn to share with your brother / You know that hate is gonna keep on multiplying / And you know that man is gonna keep right on dying.”
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Even with all the bombast and bedlam that permeates Maggot Brain, the album’s most (relatively) subdued entry is its best. “Can You Get to That” is not only my favorite song on the album, but it’s also in my top three Funkadelic songs ever recorded. Clinton had a penchant for re-working his early recordings on the first few Funkadelic albums, and “Can You Get to That” is a re-imagination of Parliament’s “What You Been Growing.” Originally a slightly left-of-center Motown-esque soul track, Funkadelic here infuse it with strains of blues and gospel. He also brought in Isaac Hayes’ backup singers to provide vocals to the track, adding to the classic soul vibe.
Though Clinton retooled some of the lyrics, their delivery makes this one of the group’s best songs about the bitterness that comes with the loss of love. “I recollect with mixed emotions all the good times we used to have,” the group harmonizes. “But you were making preparations for the coming separation and you blew everything we had.”
Maggot Brain served as the end of Funkadelic’s beginning. Afterwards, much of the core dissolved. There are no universally accepted explanations as to why roughly half the group departed, but financial disagreements and personality conflicts with Clinton are frequently referenced.
Nelson has explicitly said he left because he felt he wasn’t getting paid what he was owed. Some report Clinton fired Fulwood due to excessive drug use (which would be an impressive feat for any band in early 1970s, much less Funkadelic), while other says he was poached by Miles Davis, who was so impressed by what he heard on “Wars of Armageddon” that he wanted to make use of his talents. Ross apparently had an extremely bad experience with drugs, either ingesting massive quantities of acid or snorting a large amount of raw speed; it’s possible that it was both. He disappeared from the public eye for years, only to resurface nearly a quarter of a century later to release a solo album.
Of course, Funkadelic persevered. Clinton enlisted a few refugees of the JBs, including William & Phelps Collins and Frankie Waddy, and made Shider a full-time contributor. I’ve paid tribute to a few of the post-Maggot Brain, pre-One Nation Under A Groove (1978) albums, and while it’s inaccurate to say that the group got more accessible through the early to mid-1970s, their albums were conceptual and structured.
Maggot Brain was an essential bridge to that next phase of Funkadelic’s career. Moving forward, Funkadelic’s output remained dark and unsettling, but the anarchy was more controlled. But as audio nightmare fuel, the album is a singular undertaking.
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