Mommy, What's an Eddie Hazel?

EDDIE HAZEL - Games, Dames & Guitar Thangs

"Play like your Mama just died," is how George Clinton told a then barely 21-year old Eddie Hazel to attack the soloing to "Maggot Brain." You should know the rest of the story-- the end product became not only Eddie's signature piece, but Funkadelic's as well: ten minutes of electrified exploration into the entire spectrum of human emotion... achingly beautiful licks wrung out from the very pit of a young man's soul. It has also become his legacy as he was dismissed from the band for his ever-increasing drug abuse shortly after its release. He would work as a session player for the Temptations, Commodores, Marvin Gaye and Bonnie Pointer before returning to P-Funk in a much diminished role. In 1977, Clinton secured a one-album deal with Warners for this, his lone solo LP.

Backed by a sizable chunk of the P-Funk Mob-- Billy "Bass" Nelson, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Cordell Mosson, Jerome Brailey, Tiki Fulwood and the Brides of Funkenstein (Dawn Silva and Lynn Mabry), much of this album is initially disappointing-- Hazel's interstellar axework held in check by George Clinton's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to its production. However, repeated listenings reveal a veritable smörgåsbord of on-the-edge solos and near-perfect, "in the hip pocket" rhythm vamps. If you're new to Thee Legend, I suggest tackling this opus as a middle-period Funkadelic album with Hazel as erstwhile frontman, which in a way, is exactly what it is.

It is two covers "California Dreamin'" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," that best showcase Mr. Maggot Brain's mindblowingly inventive flailing-- they barely resemble their original incarnations and are utilized as loose jams for Eddie to lay down vocalese lines made even more compelling by his use of a Cry Baby Wah-- you've heard the cliché "he could make his guitar talk"? In Eddie's case, that's exactly whatcha get-- the man makes that ol' Les Paul positively fucking sing. Like so many men possessed of genius, Hazel was unafraid to walk as far out to the edge of the precipice as possible-- mistakes be damned. It is this fearlessness that separates the wheat from the chaff. I'll take Eddie's fudged notes and wildly inconsistent oeuvre over insert wanker of the week here. He died in 1992 of liver failure. He was 42 years old.

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