Maggot Brain

Lately, all I've wanted to hear is P-Funk.

It seems to happen to me once a decade or so. Back in 1982-83, when I was Guarding Freedom's Frontier with the Air Force in Korea, the National Anthem for the people I was with might as well have been "Atomic Dog" from George Clinton's Computer Games album (well, that or Grandmaster Flash's "The Message"). Funk seemed to be in the air in Korea, and not just from the "night soil" that local farmers used for fertlizer. I could devote a whole treatise to the reasons why so many funkateers wound up as military enlistees at the dawn of the Reagan era, but not here, not now. Suffice to say, there were three GI bands on my base; one of 'em (the white one, actually) used to play Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain." I remember being shocked to hear AFKN radio playing "Standing On the Verge of Getting It On" in the chow hall one day. And "back in the world," I was almost as surprised to hear Dallas radio playing both "Quickie" (from You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish, Clinton's follow-up to Computer Games) and "Pumpin' It Up" (from Urban Dancefloor Guerillas, the album he released with the P-Funk All-Stars around the same time). Since my future ex-wife didn't dig jazz, funk was pretty much all I listened to for a couple of years.

I dug George Clinton's music in the same way as I did Frank Zappa's: the complex, detailed arrangements seemed to give up new delights with each listening. Its effect on me was, well, like a narcotic. Still is. Like Zappa, Clinton synthesized a bunch of diverse musical strains (in particular, classic doo-wop, the R&B innovations of Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, the fonky Meters, and the Temptations during their Norman Whitfield-Dennis Edwards phase, not to mention a general vibe and bits of stage business from jazz space-weirdo Sun Ra) to come up with something startlingly original. Clinton started out running a barbershop in Plainfield, NJ, cutting sides like "(I Wanna) Testify" with his vocal group the Parliaments, and traveling to Detroit to pitch songs to Berry Gordy at Motown (the Jackson Five actually recorded "I'll Bet You," later recorded by Funkadelic) before he scoped out some of the local Motor City rock talent like the MC5 (from whom he probably inherited the Sun Ra influence), the Stooges, and the Amboy Dukes and realized just how much he could get away with in terms of outrage (or expression, depending how you look at it). To my feedback-scorched ears, the albums he cut with Funkadelic in the early '70s -- particularly the self-titled debut, Maggot Brain itself, and Standing On the Verge of Getting It On -- hold up better than most rock records from the period. But I digress.

A decade, more or less, after my Korean sojourn, I was living in an apartment complex I used to call "Hell" and listening a lot to Music for Your Mother, a two-CD compilation of all the Funkadelic singles issued by the Detroit-based Westbound label between 1970 and 1976, and Live At the Beverly Theatre, another double CD recorded in Hollywood in 1983. Unfortunately, since then, I've had to unload both of those sets to keep the lights on at home. (For years, my arrival at Half Price Books was treated by the employees like the coming of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Camel Guy put together.) So, a couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to stumble upon Motor City Madness, which has nothing to do with Ted Nugent like you might suspect but rather, is yet another two-CD compilation of Funkadelic material on Westbound. For my money, it trumps Music for Your Mother for the inclusion of some longer tracks like "Maggot Brain," "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow," and "Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?", as well as its non-chronological sequencing, which lets me hear songs I associate with different albums bumping into each other in new ways. (The reviewer on allmusic.com complained about that, but I like it.) Luckily, Kat likes it, too; she listened to P-Funk as a tiny teen in the weedgrown wilds of New Jersey, and even got me to burn some songs for a co-worker who said that she and her husband courted to Funkadelic music back in the day.

So anyway, for the last couple of weeks I've been going to sleep at night listening to "Maggot Brain." (Listening to CDs as I cross the threshold into the Land of Nod is a habit I picked up from my daughter.) Featuring the great Eddie Hazel (RIP) going off on guitar after Clinton told him to imagine his mother had died, it's maybe the greatest blues statement of the Rawk Era, navigating the emotional terrain from a scream to a whisper and back again in just over ten minutes. Eddie had his ups and downs over the years, mainly due to drugs -- when my friend Geoff saw him play a club in Philly not long before he checked out in 1992, Hazel's road crew was canvassing the crowd to see if anybody had any crack they wanted to share with the artiste. In his place, P-Funk has employed some superior technicians on guitar (particularly Mike Hampton and Blackbyrd McKnight), but no one has ever bested Eddie in terms of pure feeling. (I just read that Rhino Handmade released his ultra-rare 1977 solo record Dames, Games and Guitar Thangs on CD last year.)

Before scoring Motor City Madness, the last time I'd heard "Maggot Brain" was one night at the Wreck Room last spring, when I went to hear Dave Karnes play drums with Lee Allen, a mad-scientist looking guy who lives in Austin but used to host an open jam at the Wreck a few years ago. They played a set of all cover material like Hendrix' "Manic Depression" and the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows." When they launched into "Maggot Brain," a collective gasp arose from the crowd. The AlternaKids at the Wreck all knew the tune, possibly from Mike Watt's version (with J. Mascis on guitar) from his 1994 "wrestling record," Ball-Hog or Tugboat. (I kinda like the idea of having music I can share with both middle-aged black couples and the crew at the Wreck.) Not everybody was impressed, though. Jon Teague from Yeti was working door that night, and he kept muttering, "There are no drums on 'Maggot Brain.' There are no drums on 'Maggot Brain!' "

And there aren't on the original record -- George mixed them out. Which means, I suppose, that when I used to play 30-minute, three-guitar versions of the song with my Reserve buddy Pete and his teenage son Nick as a way of teaching Nick to solo (which he, Green Day-loving lad that he was, did in a style that was midway between Harvey Mandel and Neil Young), we were playing it correctly. (Another Karnes-related story: Last January, I saw Pete and Nick when I was in Shreveport with Karnes and Nathan Brown, playing for drinks at some shit-dive down the road from the Air Force base. They came out to see us play and Nick gave me pictures from hs wedding and a copy of a CD he'd just recorded in his dad's home studio. His playing sounded exactly like mine would if I played Christian death-metal. Thanks, Nick!) Again, I digress.

Then this weekend, I found a dub of Dope Dogs -- Clinton's sprawling 1995 fusion of funk and hiphop that, for some reason, was never released in the U.S. -- and some dynamite P-Funk Allstars live stuff that Phil Overeem (aka the Rev. Wayne Coomers from the First Church of Holy Rock and Roll) had sent me eons ago, sitting under a pile of tapes at home. And a trip to Half Price Books unearthed a copy of Blacktronic Science, a '93 release from P-Funk's Juillard/New England Conservatory-trained keyboard maestro Bernie Worrell that somehow manages to encompass classical music and jazz (with Tony Williams on drums, no less) as well as funk. All in all, not a bad coupla weeks. (Besides rediscovering old music I love, there's nothing I like as much as finding music I never heard of by people I dig.)

All of which leads me to think that maybe, the next time George comes around, I oughtta pony up the bucks and go see him (which I never have, not even when he played at Caravan). He turns 64 this July.