Rising from the Sh!t

Amazing what a guitar solo can do for a record's reputation. I mean, when your friends ask you for the prototypical face-melting guitar solo, just put on Maggot Brain's title track. It's all set up by Clinton providing the necessary philosophical context, about rising from the sh!t of the earth. That's what rock can be, finding something celestial in the mundane. And Eddie Hazel's solo takes you on that trip: it starts off sad, despondent, a lamentation, and then, still in the same seam, about halfway through it elevates and becomes triumphant. It's a real spiritual thing, bringing tears to the stoned for decades, I'm sure.

I can talk about the solo for days. It's in the pantheon, Eddie Hazel the black Jimmy Page. The rest of the record... not so much. I mean, the second track is a funk hippie gospel rave-up structured around acoustic guitars (FUNKY acoustic guitars) and a rising girl chorus, and after tracks #1 and #2 you think this is going to be one of the best records of all time. Then things slow down. I mean, it stays funky and loose and far from uptight, but it is just a bit scattered, and it doesn't work quite as well.

So I guess we should talk about whether this deserves to be on a greatest list, and historical significance and whatnot. I mean, what makes Funkadelic so exciting? On this album, they seem like hippies to me. This is a committed, fried, acid-head psychedelic record, really, but with an exciting black twist. "Wars of Armageddon," the sound collage freak-out that ends the record, is really like a lot of other efforts, and not as good as those of the Beatles or the Deviants (not on this list... a tragedy) or others. I personally think that they're still finding their sound here, and that the later records really display Funkadelic at their Funkadelic-est. As an announcement of purpose, this must have been exciting, rawer and rock-bandier than Sly and the Family Stone, less ego-y than Hendrix, looser and funkier than Led Zeppelin, more blue collar than the Pink Floyd, more American than Black Sabbath. But they would get better...

... except for the guitar solo. Nothing would get better than that. In fact, when people talk about this record, they inevitably talk about the guitar solo, the story behind it (Clinton told Hazel to "play like your mother just died.") It's sort of like people always talk about tilting at windmills when they talk about Don Quixote - that happens in like the first 50 pages, which I suspect is all that people read. I think people listen to the first 2 tracks, and then they are just so blown away that the rest doesn't matter. Maybe that's the right reaction, really, but I want a little more for a rock canon.