Bob Schwartz

Yesterday I tried to find just the right music for today, January 20. I focused in on the blues, not because I am “blue” or others should be, but because the blues is in popular music, or maybe in all music, the most viscerally real to the human experience, and great listening. Years in Mississippi showed me how real things can be, and how that may lead to suffering, but doesn’t kill the human spirit, instead raising it to sublime artistic heights.

Listening to the blues led me to specific blues, particularly electric guitar blues. At first I focused on generations of classic blues players, moved over to contemporary players, landed on Jimi Hendrix, who was a move away from Funkadelic, led by George Clinton. The third Funkadelic album was Maggot Brain (1971). The album is considered one of the greats, though exactly what genre it belongs to is debated.

The first track, the title track, is legendary. Ten minutes of guitarist Eddie Hazel playing, a solo originally recorded with a backup band. But when George Clinton heard the playback, he stripped most of the other instruments and just processed the guitar. In the view of some, it is the greatest electric guitar solo ever, which given the competition—including Hendrix—is remarkable. Some have called it “one of the greatest solos of all time on any instrument.”

Here are excerpts from a music journalist explaining the making and meaning of Maggot Brain:

Funkadelic plunges into the dank throes of an existential quandary, as Clinton intones, “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.” Clinton really knew how to rivet attention and prep you for the journey of a lifetime.

The mythos surrounding this 10-minute epic is extraordinary. Clinton claimed that he and Hazel were tripping hard, and then the bandleader told his guitarist to play like his mother had died. Realizing that Eddie had executed a world-historical solo, Clinton decided to excise most of the other players’ contributions from the track and then “Echoplexed everything back on itself four or five times,” as he noted in Brothas. “I could see the guitar notes stretch out like a silver web.” (An alternate take with all the instruments intact appears as a bonus track on a 2005 CD reissue of Maggot Brain, and in retrospect, you can’t argue with Clinton’s decision. The keyboards, bass, and drums are fine, but they impinge enough on Hazel’s wizardry to be distracting.)

This solo—with its solarized, distraught wails, smooth dive bombs, and shattered-crystal grace notes—occupies the loftiest perch in the guitar-hero pantheon. How can something so mournful fill you with so much life? It was perverse of Clinton to place such an elegiac show-stopper at the beginning, but in the early ’70s, perversity was the man’s lifeblood. Conventional wisdom in those days involved starting albums with the most instantly appealing song; instead, Clinton opened with amplified and warped chewing sounds and a lysergic monologue about planetary impregnation and cranial infestation. Out of such grotesque imagery, Clinton and Hazel alchemized heavenly beauty.

Dave Segal, Pitchfork

So if you are feeling less than good about the day, or about days to come, listen to the “alchemized heavenly beauty” of Maggot Brain.

© 2025 by Bob M. Schwartz