Tuesday, 27 March 2012

Freak-When-See 101: Part 1 – Maggot Brain (1971)


As someone who is a die-hard music fan the most difficult (and often most common) question I get asked is “What sort of music do you like?” I try to listen to a bit of everything but I can’t just say “everything” and expect to be taken seriously as a fan. Sure I enjoy metal, funk, blues, jazz, rock, hip-hop, prog, dub and much more but just spouting off a bunch of genres is not much good to anyone. No, I look for a certain feeling in music. It has to be adventurous, dangerous, powerful, and preferably freaky. To this end I have coined the term “Freak Music”. Since it is damned hard term to define I intend to demonstrate what Freak Music is by exploring the music that shaped the idea. Freak-When-See 101 is my love letter to the great, bizarre albums of the world that helped inform my taste in the unusual. Part 1 sees me confronting one of my all-time favourite records: Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain.


“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”

With those ominous words one of the greatest psychedelic trips known to man begins. The year was 1971 and funk master George Clinton’s Funkadelic outfit had released their third album, Maggot Brain. It was a record that dug deeper into the trippy territory explored on their previous records and took another stab at what people were calling “funk”. As a piece of music terminology funk was still a new concept and many people were scrambling to define it. Sly & The Family Stone defined it as soul with guitars but that just wasn’t funky enough for Clinton and co. His idea was to smash James Brown and Frank Zappa together to make something fun, energetic, and trippy as hell. And thus, Maggot Brain was born.

Naturally when one thinks of Maggot Brain the legendary title track leaps to mind. Aside from the spoken word passage at the beginning what you have is ten minutes of sprawling, emotive guitar solo. Even today, a mere 41 years after its recording, it still sends a chill up my spine. There are conflicting stories about how the song came to fruition which adds to the overall mystique. The one is subscribe to is that it was performed under a copious amount of LSD when guitarist Eddie Hazel was told to imagine that his mother had died. If this is how you play while tripping and grieving then I suggest some more musicians should give it a go1. Speaking of Hazel, he pulls his weight and a half all across the whole record. His molten solos on ‘Super Stupid’ is easily enough to put him at Hendrix-ian levels of awesomeness, let alone the vocal performance. As far as I am concerned Eddie Hazel is one of the world’s great unheralded guitar heroes even though he may not have lived up his full potential. Outside of his dabbling in the origins of P-Funk he had only one album that wasn’t released posthumously2.


The song draws you so deep into its funk – to use the word in another way – that the arrival of ‘Can You Get To That’ is unexpectedly jubilant. Big sing-along verses, tight drums and Ray Davis’ almighty baritone and all of that is followed by the whacked-out ‘Hit It And Quit It’. This one-two hit is Clinton’s brand of funk in full flight. Picture the craziest 70s party imaginable; bizarre costumes, dancing girls, alien motherships descending from the skies. Funkadelic might melt your brain but they still wanna make you dance. The only problem you get with an experimental album made under the influence of early 70s drug culture is that it must have been hard to tell when you had gone too far. Case in point is the nonsensical ‘Wars of Armageddon’. It is a long, rambling jam filled with garbled voices, sounds of a domestic disturbance, and thoroughly pointless lyrics (the key lyrical motif is “More power to the people / More pussy to the power / More pussy to the people / More power to the pussy”.


Sure, Maggot Brain was not their first album (that honor goes to their 1970 self-titled album) nor is it their most diverse (that would be 1970’s Osmium, released under the name Parliament). As the years went by the Parliament-style good time music would eclipse Funkadelic’s unstable psychedelia and open the way for Clinton’s solo electro-funk recordings. Maggot Brain represents a high-water mark and the band at their potent mind-opening best and in my opinion reigns as one of the greatest records of the golden age of psychedelic rock. Have you tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe?


1 This is clearly a joke.
2 Check out Games, Dames, And Guitar Thangs from 1977. It includes a stellar cover of The Beatle’s ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’

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