It’s Eddie Hazel’s solo on “Maggot Brain” that gets stuck in everybody’s acid-fried dreams. Eddie Hazel – Game, Dames and Guitar Thangs Here are some albums that owe a debt to that all encompassing 50 year old slice of wizard-like sorcery.ġ977 Warner Bros. When the band would perform a three-song tribute to Jimi Hendrix, The Ohio Players, The Isley Brothers, Earth Wind and Fire (and mind you in between tributes the musicians are switching instruments) there is no greater statement of mastery. During the Parliament-Funkadelic revival in the ’90s, spurred by Clinton allowing hip-hop to sample the discography for free, knowing it would revive interest in the original catalogue, that band would do mini-tributes during those two-to-four-hour concert performances. The concoction presents itself as this unparalleled “otherness.” A state that is identifiable, but indescribable. While they kindly borrowed from the blues, funk (“the blues sped up” according to Clinton), psychedelic rock, and gospel. The brainchild of George Clinton, Funkadelic was the wildest concoction of a punk DIY ethos and rebel attitude that an all-black rock band had ever showcased in 1971. Funkadelic might have gotten turned down at the Harlem Cultural Festival too. But the onions, the swag, the transparency, behind that statement? Spot on. “We were too black for white and too white for black.”Īnd yes, that is a cherished quote Clinton has used for decades. Performing sometimes in sheets or just plain naked. Many years ago when I interviewed George Clinton-he told me to call him “George” and for almost two hours, I sure did-he described the early years with Funkadelic as very fertile with creativity, but at times too far out for the pedestrian listener to comprehend. George Clinton, a former doo-wop singer and hairstylist from New Jersey, and his deep bench of instrumental genius continued forth with Hendrix’s Black rock dynamism, hit the hyperactive drive on Maggot Brain, released on July 12, 1971, and the whole world has been trying to catch up since. “So he disbanded his group, got an all-Black group-the Band of Gypsys-and asked, ‘Can we perform? We want to do a blues set.’ And they said no.” “He got to a point where he got tired of being the freak-show darling of the industry,” said Amir “Questlove” Thompson, director of Summer of Soul, the documentary about those performances at The Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, recently in Pitchfork. Granted, Hendrix would cement his legacy that same summer at Woodstock, about 100 miles away. Remember, Jimi Hendrix was the only artist who asked to be a part of The Harlem Cultural Festival. Maggot Brain, the optimum amalgam of Blackness put to record, dove deeper into the pool of funk, blues, rock, gospel, metal, soul, fuzz and pop he presented to the world, maybe a bit too early for mass consumption when it arrived less than a year after Hendrix’s death.
0 kommentar(er)
