“Maggot Brain” is one of the greatest guitar performances ever recorded, but that wasn’t always the consensus. When Funkadelic put the title track out in the summer of 1971, it failed to chart and saw little radio airplay.
It took more than 50 years for the song to finally get the recognition it deserved.
Going into their third album, which would turn out to be the last with the original lineup, George Clinton was on a mission to “capture all the energy of the psychedelic era.” And he wasn't short on inspiration.
“There was lots of weather outside – the souring of hippie culture, inner-city rot, both legitimate and illegitimate mind expansion – and lots of weather inside, and it all came together,” he recalled in his 2014 memoir, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?
For Clinton, Maggot Brain was about figuring out what it really meant to "taste the maggots in the mind of the universe." That was the feeling he wanted guitarist Eddie Hazel to convey on the album's 10-minute track.
To pull that out of him, Clinton gave Hazel an unusual task. “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… And when he started playing I knew immediately that he understood what I meant,” he wrote.
Listening to the recording, Clinton realized the group had tapped into something deeper. “That was the missing ingredient that arrived in time for that song; it was maybe the first time that our emotional ability as artists matched our technical ability as players.”
Not everyone in the studio understood what Clinton was doing. He was experimenting at the mixing desk and using props to pull sounds out of nowhere. The engineers were confused, but Clinton knew what he was building and saw it through.
“I wanted Funkadelic to reach upward and outward,” he continued. “That was the band's charter. But I didn't want to go for something small and all finely observed, because that meant that I'd be going head-to-head with the kinds of songs that Smokey Robinson had written, and I knew that was a battle that I’d lose.”
When Maggot Brain dropped in July 1971, it missed the Billboard Top LPs chart and struggled to find a mainstream audience.
Regardless, Clinton always believed it took Funkadelic somewhere new, into "places that Black groups hadn't gone, into questions … about whether America was still on the right path or whether the promise of the late '60s had completely evaporated."
More than five decades later, Rolling Stone gave Hazel's solo its due, placing it at No. 9 on their "Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time" list. The album was also officially inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in May 2026.
The recognition, however, came long after the original lineup had gone their separate ways. Not long after Maggot Brain came out, the band fell apart.
Financial disputes and drug use pushed guitarist Tawl Ross, bassist Billy Nelson and drummer Tiki Fulwood out of the group.
Clinton, Hazel and keyboardist Bernie Worrell eventually assembled a new lineup for 1972's America Eats Its Young, but it was a fundamentally different Funkadelic.
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