Our father which art on Wall Street, honored be thy buck
Thy kingdom came, this be thy year, from sea to shining sea
For the backing melody, we used “Father, Open Our Eyes,” a song from the mid-fifties by the Gospel Clefs, a group that used to practice in our barbershop in Jersey. It was one of my favorite songs, and the fact that they were locals only strengthened our connection to it. But it was an inside joke rather than an outward gesture. When we used gospel songs, it just confused people further: were we mocking divine music, suggesting some alternative system, or directing it toward sincere ends? Legitimate soul musicians might have had some right to draw upon gospel, but did freaked-out, psychedelically wrecked black rock and rollers? I liked to play with those references because I had no answers. And the monologue that accompanied the music was a parody of the Lord’s Prayer, which tangled things even further. When you parody something, you have to pay attention. When you pay attention, you’re taking something seriously. So isn’t parody the most serious form of imitation?
Right around the time that Free Your Mind came out, Jimi Hendrix died. That was the end of an era as certainly as anything else was. He had come up to Toronto in May of 1969 and gotten busted. They had opened his luggage and found drugs right there. I just assumed that it had been planted. Why would he be so stupid as to leave it right on top like that? And so when I heard that he had died, I took it for granted that he had been killed. To me, the music he was making was far too great a threat to the establishment. It was generating questions that no one wanted to answer, and the only other way you can quiet a question is by quieting the questioner.
During the mid-sixties, at Golden World, I got comfortable in the studio, but it was a comfort of its time, with certain limits to what a studio could do and what a label could release. With records like Free Your Mind, studio technology had caught up to the sounds in my mind, and I was finally able to make records that were heavy, warped, and weird. We weren’t getting paid very much for the records, but we were making enough from them that Armen left us alone in the studio. I was using it as a creative laboratory, trying to capture all the energy of the psychedelic era. 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 toward the end of 1970 when we went back to United Sound in Detroit to record the third Funkadelic record, Maggot Brain.
The leadoff track, which is also the title track, was one of the first things we got down on tape. It opens with a spoken-word piece:
Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For you all have knocked her up
What did it mean to taste the maggots in the mind of the universe? Well, it meant all of it: the lack of self-knowledge outlined in “Free Your Mind,” the consumerism and short-sightedness in “Eulogy and Light.” It was writing that moved away from prose and even poetry into a kind of sloganeering. That made it compact, mysterious, and memorable. But the song’s immortality came from Eddie Hazel’s guitar solo, which occupied most of the rest of the ten-minute track. I remember recording the solo, of course. It’s possible I’ll never forget. Eddie and I were in the studio, tripping like crazy but also trying to focus our emotions. There was a band jam going, a slow groove I knew he could get into, and we were trying to launch his solo. Before he started, 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. Eddie was the kind of player who rose to a challenge. If you gave him instructions or a prompt, he’d come around to it. And when he started playing, I knew immediately that he understood what I meant. I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web. When we 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. 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.
But there’s a science behind the art. It’s one thing to hear that kind of performance in the studio, and another thing to communicate it on a record. We had other engineers with us, people with more training than I had, people who had been doing it longer and had better professional credentials, but I was the one who knew that things needed to be different. When Eddie played originally, it was over a more traditional slow band jam. I took all the other instruments off the track and then I Echoplexed everything back on itself four or five times. That gave the whole thing an eerie feel, both in the playing and in the sound effects. There’s a noise at the beginning of the song that’s a chattering or chewing, and people sometimes ask if it’s the sound of maggots feasting on the brain. I can’t say that it was. I was just trying for something fucked-up and novel. Many groundbreaking effects happened that way. Sly and the Family Stone had recorded a song called “Sex Machine” a few years before, and it sounds like Sly’s vocals are electronically processed. In fact, he was singing through a toilet paper roll covered with paper and feeding that through a wah-wah pedal. Back at Motown, they used to stomp on Coke boxes to get percussion noises. I was doing that with the mixing board, and all along trying to monitor how it was making things feel.
Throughout the production of that song, the other engineers who were working there with us, the professionals, stood down—or rather, they got up from the board. They heard things through professional ears, how in some places it would just overload and crack. They weren’t willing to say it would work, but they also wouldn’t say that it wouldn’t, and they weren’t all thrilled about having their names on it. “Maggot Brain” didn’t necessarily seem like something you’d want on your résumé. As it turns out, though, it’s been durable and then some. More than forty years later, I was in New York, playing at B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill with the 2013 version of P-Funk. We didn’t play “Maggot Brain” at that show, which was more of a party atmosphere. But that same night, just across the river, there was an electronic music event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music organized by Questlove of the Roots. They had a two-act program that mixed piped-in music with live performance, and it covered some of the giants of European and American composition: Pierre Schaffer, John Cage, Raymond Scott. There was a Stevie Wonder song, “Look Around,” which he recorded for Where I’m Coming From. And then, closing the first act, there was “Maggot Brain.” Since the show was about electronic music, they cut and pasted my opening monologue, sped it up, leaned heavy on the bass. Then that gave way to the guitar solo, Eddie’s eternal solo, which was played by Kirk Douglas, the Roots’ guitarist. The song’s essence—that sense of loss and powerlessness, that spirituality of despair, the slight surge of hope when your feet touch the bottom of the ocean—came clearly across the decades, undimmed.
For the rest of the album, I tried to keep the same sense of scale. My first drafts were usually about personal matters—a romantic injury from a woman, my own feelings of inadequacy or fear. But before I put songs on a record, I tried to transform them into something universal or philosophical. On the one hand, I wanted Funkadelic to reach upward and outward. That was the band’s charter. But I didn’t want to go for something small and 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. That’s what helped shape a song like “Can You Get to That,” which was a reworking of a Parliaments song called “What You Been Growing.” The original was a fairly straightforward love song in the Northern Soul mode. For the Maggot Brain recording, I fed it through a kind of philosophical filter, adding a descending acoustic guitar line that put it roughly in the company of soul-folk songs like “For What It’s Worth” and emphasizing the universal meaning in the lyrics:
I once had a life, or rather, life had me
I was one among many or at least I seemed to be
Later on in the song, there’s a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech that borrowed the metaphor of the checkbook, of—in a social or romantic relationship—writing a check promising love or devotion or freedom that would come back stamped “insufficient funds.” The idea of social progress came to the fore. The idea of romantic vows receded. That gave the whole song the feel of a manifesto about civil rights and civil justice.
At that time the band was basically Eddie and myself, at least for the process of figuring out the hooks, and then Billy and Eddie would flesh out the music as I worked on the lyrics. I had gotten the band into all-out psychedelia over the years, and what had been an implication before was now a master plan. On “Super Stupid,” we were trying to write a new kind of rock and roll song that kept the bass foundation of soul music while absorbing some of Hendrix’s innovations. “You and Your Folks” was built around a stage chant that was actually a nursery rhyme I had picked up from my mother. “Back in Our Minds,” which I did with Tawl Ross, was our imitation of the English rock groups of the period. And “Wars of Armageddon,” the closing track, was a sonic collage with elements of free jazz, though we didn’t think of it as jazz in that sense. When Miles Davis heard the drumming on the track, he loved it so much that he came and took Tiki from us to drum with his band for a little while. That’s one of Tiki’s claims to fame. The other is that his drum part from “Good Old Music” is the second-most-sampled break in the hip-hop era, trailing only Clyde Stubblefield’s work in James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.”
Maggot Brain also has what might be our most notable early album cover. The first Funkadelic album had a kaleidoscopic portrait of the band. Free Your Mind had a woman praying, and then when you opened it up you saw that she was naked. Maggot Brain was going 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 sixties had completely evaporated. One of the first ideas we came up with was a picture of a vampire with pearl fangs and a glass of blood. When you looked closer you could see that the blood in the glass came from squeezed-out tampons. That turned out to be too extreme, even for us. And so we compromised on the final image, the screaming face on the front that turned into the skull on the back. That’s the version of the idea that we thought was more acceptable. Can you get to that?
WOULD YOU LIKE TO DANCE WITH ME? WE’RE DOING THE COSMIC SLOP
One night in Cincinnati, Mallia Franklin, one of the vocalists with Funkadelic, told us that we had to go see some young musicians. She said they looked like us, with the same style and the same attitude. We played that night at a club called Graveyard, kind of a hippie place, and after that we went with her to check out these young guys.
The two musicians she wanted us to see were a bassist named William Collins and his brother, a guitarist named Phelps Collins. William, who people called Bootsy, and Phelps, who people called Catfish, had been in a local group called the Pacemakers, and they had done sessions with various stars, including James Brown. One night in Jacksonville, James got in a dispute with his band, the Famous Flames. They thought that monies were owed. James disagreed. Rather than negotiate, he got on the phone with his management and extended an offer to the Pacemakers, who quickly became his new band, the J.B.s. They recorded and performed with James during the lightning-in-a-bottle year of 1970, which produced songs like “Sex Machine,” “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing,” and “Superbad,” not to mention one of the most towering funk instrumentals of all time, “The Grunt.” But the relationship with James didn’t last: he was still the same authoritarian bandleader, and money was still a problem, and the Pacemakers were evolving personally. The Collins brothers left James and started a new group called the House Guests that released a pair of funk singles, one called “What So Never the Dance” and the other called “My Mind Set Me Free.” They were moving in the same thematic circles that we were, fully aware of the counterculture and psychedelic styles.
That first night we met Bootsy, I recognized that kindred spirit, though it wasn’t much more than a recognition. We didn’t talk that much—I acknowledged him and he acknowledged me. Then a little later, someone brought him around in Detroit, and we had a more involved conversation. At right about that same time, some of the younger players in Funkadelic were leaving the band for other projects: Eddie and Billy went off to go work with the Temptations, and Tawl was in and out as a result of his issues with drugs. We had outbound musicians, and the Collins brothers were inbound traffic, so we brought them on. By that point, the widening group of musicians around us also included Garry Shider and Boogie Mosson, from United Soul, both of whom would be instrumental to our growth over the coming decade. Funkadelic had always been a hybrid of other things—at first, of the original Parliaments and the psychedelic rock that was happening all around it—and the second wave of musicians reaffirmed my belief in the way to grow. Absorb youth and you will be absorbed by youth. Take on new influences without fear and you need not fear what is new. Change the people around you by changing the people around you.
Funkadelic kept barnstorming. We pretty much lived out on the road, because it didn’t pay for us to bounce from city to city for one-night stands. Instead we did ten days in Detroit at the 20 Grand, ten days in Boston at the Sugar Shack, ten days in New York at the Apollo and other theaters. Bigger stages meant bigger backstages, with more access to girls and drugs. I was funny about the girls, or rather they were funny about me. I had such a dark image from Funkadelic that they were scared of me more than anything, and in those rare cases when women would want to be with me . . . well, I was scared of those women. One night we were out on the road, and I was tripping my ass off, with crazy paint all over my face. A girl walked right into the room and announced, to no one in particular, “I’m going to fuck a Funkadelic.” Then she looked over at me and said, “But not you.” Bootsy and Catfish started calling me Prez, as in the president of the no-pussy-getting club. And I guess it was a role I relished. My favorite thing to do, frankly, was to chase people out of the club with bizarre noises or makeup. That let them preserve the idea they had of me and let me get back to recording and writing.
Drugs were everywhere. They were part of the time, part of youth culture, and part of the musician’s life, and we were at the intersection of all three. It was mostly weed; cocaine was a little pricey, though sometimes someone would bring it around, a guy from a record company or a dealer looking for new customers. Whatever the drug of choice, everyone in the band was using acid all the time, still. It cleaned everything up. When you were tripping, you didn’t do coke or even drink.
Most of us were users rather than abusers. After 1970, sometimes there would be a bad trip that resulted in a man-down situation. Once Eddie passed me a sherm, a joint laced with angel dust. Angel dust is a pitiful, morbid drug, and that didn’t work for me at all. I was so out of it that we played the whole show and then, at the end, took a bow and went right back to the beginning. The band was so high that they didn’t notice either. We did two and a half more songs and then I crumpled to the ground, out cold. When I came to, everyone else was standing over me, making sure I was okay. Everybody had one or two episodes like that, but they weren’t horror stories, for the most part. The exception was Tiki, who didn’t know much about psychedelics or how to control intake; he would fall out high in some corner of a city where we couldn’t find him. At times he couldn’t work with the band at all and we hired Tyrone Lampkin, a trained jazz player who had a group called Gutbucket in Connecticut. Tyrone was tremendous; he came right in and helped remake the band’s sound: louder, both looser and tighter, depending on the song, funkier. Tiki and Tyrone alternated for a few years, traded places in and out of the band.
America Eats Its Young, the double album that Funkadelic released in 1972, is one of the richest stews we ever made. It has the emotional-male anthem “We Hurt Too,” the s
traight funk anthem “Loose Booty,” and even “That Was My Girl,” another remake of an old Parliaments song. The title track was the third in the trilogy that had started back with “Free Your Mind . . . and Your Ass Will Follow”; like “Maggot Brain,” it was a kind of sermon that worried that people were getting out of touch with human rhythms (“A luscious bitch / It’s true / It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”). “A Joyful Process” offered an unromantic look at black life in America. “Biological Speculation” pointed forward to sci-fi concept albums like Mothership Connection and Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. And then there was “Pussy,” which we had recorded before as “I Call My Baby Pussycat” on Osmium. That more profane title lasted through some of the vinyl pressing, but then Westbound backed down and put the long title back.
As a writer, I was digging deeper into puns and wordplay. I had done it before, but on America Eats Its Young, I was doing it all over the place, compulsively. There’s a song called “If You Don’t Like the Effects, Don’t Produce the Cause” that, even in its title, reverses cause and effect. It was a way of bending people’s minds and showing them that what they took for granted might not be the truth at all. In other words, it was classic psychedelic thinking, in the sense that you didn’t take no—or yes—for an answer, instead tunneling down a little bit to see what else might be there beyond the binary. Most of all, that kind of punning was in keeping with the temper of the times: slang was increasingly popular because of drugs and Black Power and inner-city talk. Smokey Robinson had achieved precision in his writing. He wrote the way that Shakespeare had, with occasional detours into Ogden Nash. The stars of the early seventies took it in another direction. Listening to Sly Stone was like taking a master class in brilliant nonsense. You could talk to that motherfucker for twenty minutes and not understand a word of what he was saying, though you also understood that he was saying everything. Sly, of course, was building on an old tradition of hepcats and jazz speak, going all the way back to Cab Calloway and continuing through Lord Buckley, but he was doing it in the early seventies, when black America was onstage in a different way. When Sly went on Dick Cavett and acted too cool for school, when he clowned the white establishment by mumbling, that was power politics in the purest sense. Smokey was “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” but Sly was slippery.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 10
