“I told him to play like his mother had died”: The emotive command behind one of the greatest guitar solos in history
There are rumours that George Clinton might not be of this world; he’s helped to circulate them himself. While the jury is out on his planetary origin, it seems certain that, at the very least, he is not of this plain. As his own lore decrees, he is a man who emerged from the “mothership” destined to never muddy his mind with the banality of bills or emanate on any frequency other than the buzz of ethereal particulates of ‘the party’. With ‘Maggot Brain’, he may well have orchestrated his masterpiece.
The title track to the best funk record ever made, this swaggering beast delves into the mind like a parasite with an honours degree in therapy. It is an album that boldly begins with the opening lines: “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.” And it never loses sight of its profound and earthy purpose thereafter.
Despite the absurdity of that opening stanza, there is an underlining satire to it all that the last sentiment crystalises. It was the summer of 1971, and the world was descending into dystopia. You had to seek exultation beyond the faeces-throwing carnage of racism, inequity, the Vietnam War, the Manson massacres, assassinations and every other element of the atrocity alumni that had circled around in an age where a brutalist concrete sprawl confirmed the post-Woodstock prelapsarian death of the 1960s and its pipedream of peace.
The opening lines might hint at that in a pitchy sort of way. But for the next nine minutes, the title track delivers that exultation, that fateful rise above the festering ways of reality, with the sort of guitar solo that could even squeeze a Sumo wrestler down the tightest of philosophical rabbit holes towards something more freeing. It is a weightless piece of music—and it’s as heavy as it gets.
So, how exactly do you get your guitarist to capture both the tragedy of this world and the deliverance of music in one fell swoop? With a head full of acid, Clinton turned to the legendary Eddie Hazel and told him to play as though he had just been told that his mother had died. It’s certainly a daunting instruction, but it is somehow mystically wrung out in the playing when you pry over it.
“Eddie and I were in the studio, tripping like crazy but also trying to focus our emotions.” Clinton recalls in his psychedelic memoir. The pair were high on LSD, but they had taken it as a mental aid, hoping it would unearth something in the music rather than throw them off course. Things seemed to be going awry all the same, so Clinton searched deep into his soul for the right words.
“I told him to play like his mother had died, to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside him and let it out through his guitar,” he fatefully recalled. That’s a heady scene to place into a mind squirming from the effects of acid.
Hazel squinted the tragic scenario into focus. His whole being seemed to change. As Clinton poetically continues: “I knew immediately that he understood what I meant. 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.”
It is, in my humble opinion, quite possibly the greatest guitar solos ever put to tape. The whole ten-minute track unfurled in one take. The shimmering result sees no space come between guitar and instrumentalist as though notes were mere vessels for an illuminated mind. It’s the sound of a guitar playing itself. How barmy is it that a sentiment as mad as ‘Maggot Brain’ can be so perfectly elucidated and rendered meaningful with one searing solo? That’s the magic of Hazel and the rarified particles that Clinton was always trying to harness from the ether.
