Maggot Brain

The title track of the 1971 album runs over ten minutes and is little more than George Clinton's spoken introduction and a guitar solo by Eddie Hazel. According to the account Clinton gave, he was under the influence of LSD when he told Hazel to play as if he had learned his mother was dead, to picture that day and everything it would stir up. It was taken in one pass. Several other musicians played on it, but Clinton faded them in the mix to put Hazel in front. Hazel used fuzz and wah effects, inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and Clinton added delay in the mix, running the guitar back through an Echoplex several times for the eerie feel.

Rolling Stone ranked it number 60 on its list of the 100 greatest guitar songs, and the critic Greg Tate called it Funkadelic's A Love Supreme. Eddie Hazel played lead guitar, Tawl Ross rhythm guitar, Billy Bass Nelson bass, Bernie Worrell keyboards and Tiki Fulwood drums, with an uncredited percussionist. Between 1976 and 1995 the Cleveland disc jockey Bill Freeman played the full version on WMMS every Sunday morning at 1:30, a tradition other Cleveland hosts carried on.

Live and covers

Michael Hampton, Hazel's replacement, recorded his own live interpretation in 1978. It appeared on the bonus EP that came with One Nation Under a Groove, and Hampton has said he played the entire solo at an aftershow party at 17, and two weeks later was called to say Hazel had left. Mike Watt covered the song on his 1995 album Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, with J Mascis playing the solo and Worrell on organ. John Frusciante says it inspired his own Before the Beginning on the 2009 album The Empyrean.