The Run That Back series is a deep dive into some of music’s most popular or underrated projects. Whether it’s been 5 years or 50, there’s never a wrong time to ‘run that back.’
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37 minutes is all the time it takes to get to space.
Funkadelic released their otherworldly album Maggot Brain 50 years ago today and its impact continues to be felt to this date. With tinges of Psychedelia, Funk, R&B, Soul, Jazz, and pretty much every subgenre of Rock you can think of, Maggot Brain has influenced countless artists since its release.
The opening of the album is unconventional, then again, Funkadelic is anything but conventional. The album opens with “Maggot Brain,” a 10-minute mind-bending guitar solo that can best be described as an experience. It’s a haunting affair, swelling and receding with emotion and sound. You get lost in the echoes, immersed in the soundwaves.
The backstory behind the track is just as iconic as the song. Frontman George Clinton and guitarist Eddie Hazel were in the studio tripping on LSD. The duo were trying to focus on recording, when Clinton instructed Hazel how to play. "I told him to play like his mother had died,” Clinton recalled in his memoir. “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.”
On top of Hazel’s virtuosic playing, Clinton took a progressive approach with the production of the song. "I took all the other instruments off the track and then I Echoplexed it back on itself three or four times,” he says. “That gave the whole thing an eerie feel, both in the playing and in the sound effects.”
The next five tracks on the album, “Can You Get to That,” “Hit It and Quit It,” “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” “Super Stupid,” and “Back in Our Minds” all feature a more traditional song structure, but continue Funkadelic’s trademark genre-bending themes.
Each song flows brilliantly into one another as you can hear the groundwork of numerous different sounds being laid that future musicians would replicate. The record concludes with another nearly 10-minute psychedelic freakout, “Wars of Armageddon.”
The album clocks in at 37 minutes total with two 10-minute tracks bookending the record. It’s an album best listened to from front to back while you’re situated in a room free from distractions. As the band proclaimed on their previous record, “free your mind and,” well, you know the rest.
Maggot Brain also represented a transformative period in Funkadelic’s history as it was the final album recorded by the original lineup. After its release, only Clinton, Hazel, and the legendary keyboardist Bernie Worrell remained in the group. Guitarist Tawl Ross, bassist Billy Nelson, and drummer Tiki Fulwood departed shortly after its release.
There’s never a bad time to put on Maggot Brain, but as one of the most important albums in music turns 50, today is an especially great day to do so.
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