Bernie and Clinton

With the Democratic presidential race getting heated, it is surprising to note another, entirely separate Bernie/Clinton feud. The Bernie in question here is Bernie Worrell, keyboardist and songwriter in Parliament and Funkadelic. The Clinton in question is George Clinton, lead singer of same.

Together with bassist Bootsy Collins, these men made up the songwriting core of the two groups for most of the 1970s and early 1980s. Their accomplishments are of course legion and not worth discussing here at length. Suffice to say that while Parliament and Funkadelic had dozens of members, those three men (plus Eddie Hazel) were the most restless sonic innovators.

Today, Clinton still tours and performs often with a Bootsy and Bernie-free version of Parliament/Funkadelic (now just a single band). He still records music fairly often (most recently this collaborationwith Kendrick Lamar and Ice Cube) and enjoys his status in many documentaries and awards shows as an elder funk statesman. Even more recently, he has become a crusader for musicians’ rights and digital rights protection.

Worrell, by contrast, has lived the last decade in relative obscurity and bankruptcy. In January of this year, his wife Judie wrote on Facebook that Worrell was suffering from fourth-stage lung cancer. The note mentioned that he was rejecting chemotherapy and going on an expensive treatment plan, but seemed hopeful that Worrell was in good spirits and still able to play occasional gigs.

As usually happens with the deteriorating health of older legends, the music press ignored the news until celebrities rallied to the cause. So it was that on April 4, Pitchfork and Stereogum reported on the news of a benefit at Manhattan’s Webster Hall. Bernie attended, and in addition to the Black Rock Coalition house band, guests included Rick Springfield, Paul Shaffer, Meters guitarist Leo Nocentelli, Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison and David Byrne, and P-Funk head Meryl Streep.

Also attending and playing were George Clinton and Bootsy Collins. Clinton and Collins came on stage together, Collins presenting Worrell with a psychedelic melodica present while Clinton hugged the keyboardist. They played through a weird jam version of “I’d Rather Be With You” with Bootsy on drums, then continued with “Flashlight” (always one of the best showcases for Worrell’s playing). A general spirit of conviviality and joy, in spite of Worrell’s illness, seemed to be the main feeling in the crowd.

So it was odd for me to see that night, posted just hours before the concert began, this Facebook note:

The note (not written by Worrell, but by his wife) makes a number of claims that go against Clinton’s persona as a crusader for musicians’ rights. The first claim is that Clinton called Worrell’s bankruptcy claims “fictitious.” This seems odd for someone who fought so valiantly for musicians instead of labels to own the rights to their music. I searched Google for “Bernie worrell bankruptcy” and found nothing (it is here that I might humbly defer to my esteemed colleague, who is an actual journalist and might know how to look up these things). I see no evidence of Clinton denying or dismissing Worrell's legacy or contributions in any interview.

The other main claim is Clinton’s “outright theft of everyone’s royalties.” If true, this outright theft isn’t mentioned by other surviving members of the P-Funk clan, including Bootsy, Michael Hampton, and others. We know a large portion of their catalog is credited to “Clinton/Collins/Worrell,” and we also know that Clinton has had a long legal battle with the firm Hendricks & Lewis, maintaining that his signature was forged on various agreements that gave up copyrights to his songs. Has Clinton since negotiated a new deal with the owners of his catalog that gives him more money and rights than his former partners?

There doesn’t seem to be clear information on the Internet about this either. It is downright mysterious. Judie then responded to a fan accusing him of “appearing on stage with him and ripping [Clinton] apart in a fbook post.” She responded:

Judie Worrell’s description of the moment (where Worrell did his best to ignore Clinton) does seem contradict actual footage that shows the men, well, hugging each other. Maybe Worrell was hugging back out of politeness, but the genuine camaraderie between Collins, Clinton, and Worrell at that moment seemed real (at least, according to eyewitness accounts). There is nothing more sad than the spectacle of musicians who clearly hate each other doing the reunion racket (Hey, Slash and Axl Coachella 2016). Think about any time David Gilmour and Roger Waters step on a stage together. This…didn’t look like that.

So what is going on? Judie promises that Bernie’s upcoming autobiography will tell all. Does it have something to do with the fact that George Clinton goes on the road as “George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic”? Is it because George Clinton is a more well-known and beloved musician today? What caused the rift between the two men, and why? Neither seems willing to acknowledge a problem exists.

If we had an actual music press, they might want to consider asking: is George Clinton really shortchanging his bandmates? If so, how? And why is no one reporting on it? Professing on one hand to battle for the rights of musicians, while at the same time diminishing the accomplishments of one’s band members, is the kind of two-faced move one might expect of a very different Clinton. Let us hope it is not true.

Beyond "Maggot Brain": Eddie Hazel's Other Greatest Solos

December 23, 2012 marks 20 years since the death of legendary Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel. Many years ago, I wrote this about the still-incendiary "Maggot Brain," an extended guitar solo off Funkadelic's third album that ranks among the best solos ever recorded:

For the ten minutes and eighteen seconds that constitute this track, Eddie Hazel attacks, commands, and distorts one's emotions in a way only few artists can claim to do. Throughout the rest of his recording career, going through his solo album Games, Dames, & Guitar Things (which I recommend if you can get a copy from Rhino), he would contribute uniformly excellent guitar leads, alternately dazzling in their technical ability and emotionally taxing, yet in the end it all comes down to "Maggot Brain." Few artists have been so defined by one book, or one painting, or one movie, let alone one ten-minute electric guitar solo. It is his ultimate triumph and, considering his later output, his tragedy.

While Hazel is still defined mostly as the instrumental powerhouse behind "Maggot Brain" (and to a lesser extent, as a primary songwriter in the early days of Parliament and Funkadelic), this has unfortunately led fans of Hazel, including myself, to ignore his many other accomplishments as a guitarist and recording artist. Hazel is a clear factor on Funkadelic's first three albums Funkadelic, Free Your Mind... and Maggot Brain, and along with his solo work and collaborations with other artists in the P-Funk aegis, he has recorded a body of work that is at least as large as, say, Hendrix's. With this in mind, I wanted to provide any curious Hazel fans with a list of what to check out next, after "Maggot Brain." Here are five of my choices.

Eddie Hazel, "Lampoc Boogie," Jams From the Heart EP

This extended instrumental guitar boogie, originally available on Hazel's 1994 EP Jams From the Heart, clocks in at even longer than "Maggot Brain" (11:55) but the tone of these two solos could not be more different. Though they both pay tribute in different ways to Hendrix, a bottomless well of guitar inspiration for so many, "Lampoc Boogie"  is limber and boisterous where "Maggot Brain" was portentous and elegiacal. Hazel's guitar melodies, played with such dexterity and breathtaking imagination, rumble and roar along to a simple bass-drum gallop that is just as astonishing for its simple, steady nature. In the grand tradition of other Hazel guitar jams, there's a fake fadeout, too.

Axiom Funk, "Pray My Soul," Funkcronomicon

This track, which comes from a compilation of various P-Funk contributions curated by Bill Laswell called Funkcronomicon, shows Hazel at his most reverent and austere. Once again taking his cue over a crisp four-chord rhythm guitar progression ("Maggot Brain" was also four chords), Hazel makes the most of the song's five minutes--he swoops and circles around simple blues chord patterns, bending the strings on his guitar like they represented a gateway to higher expression. "Pray My Soul" is a song that shows Hazel as the type of artist who values emotion and ingenuity over proficiency and skill, always.

Funkadelic, "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts," Standing On the Verge of Getting It On

By the time George Clinton and co. started recording Standing On the Verge of Getting It On, Hazel's influence on Funkadelic began to lessen. This would continue to be the case later into the 70s, especially as additional P-Funk guitarists Garry Shider and Michael Hampton began to pick up some of the slack for an increasingly-absent Hazel. And yet I ultimately think of this album as ultimately Hazel's, as much as that classic first three LP punch. Part of the reason for this is the album's final track "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts," a nine-minute slow burner that acts as the ultimate elegy to Funkadelic's early, most brilliant stage. Even with extremely talented instrumentalists like Shider and Hampton demonstrating their ample chops on future records, there was still something about Eddie's playing that could not be improved upon, or duplicated.

Funkadelic, "Miss Lucifer's Love," America Eats Its Young

This song, a tribute to the Beatles' harmonies at their most psychedelic, showcases Hazel's bizarre, unpredictable side, especially beginning at 2:43. Hazel lays down a thick, wah-heavy riff, spitting out bits of amazingly sculpted mini-melodies that distinguish themselves even over backing vocals that take much higher prominence in the mix. Drugs took their toll on Hazel's creativity and health, but it is hard to deny that, when he was on, few could match his escapes into the deepest recesses of guitar psychedelia, and he may not have reached those initial creative heights without drugs to provide the gateway. This is possibly another reason why his talent marked him for tragedy from a young age.

Parliament, "I Call My Baby Pussycat," Osmium

Hazel definitely had less of an influence on the Parliament sound than he would on Funkadelic, but he was definitely at his best on Parliament's forgotten 1970 debut, Osmium. Over one of Clinton's least subtle innuendos ever, Hazel taps on his fretboard like he's playing morse code, churning out a short but memorable solo in between the process of laying out a more standard wah groove. "I Call My Baby Pussycat" also showcases Eddie Hazel's best rhythm guitar playing, a mode for which he was always unappreciated. As he was in so many ways, and probably will continue to be, for a long time to come.

Great Guitar Solos #1: Funkadelic, "Maggot Brain" (Eddie Hazel)

In an effort to both consolidate my writing and add more content to this blog, I'm going to occasionally copy blog posts from a different project I was working on that involved talking about guitar solos I liked a lot. I think it's legal, since I wrote it in the first place. Over the next couple of weeks I'll unload what I have so far, and hopefully in the future I will keep this as a recurring feature (unless it is of interest to no one).

My first post was on "Maggot Brain." You'll excuse the length--the writing here was culled from a longer piece written my freshman year of college when I had this idea to write a full-length biography of Eddie Hazel. Didn't get past the prognosticating stage but I did end up writing a lot of stuff, some of which is below.

By the way, Eddie's mother Grace Cook died a few months ago. One can't help but play "Maggot Brain" in a different light now.
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Available on: Maggot Brain (1971)

Solo Bits: 1:15-10:19

Making "Maggot Brain" my inaugural choice, my candidate for solo par excellence, was not as hard a decision as I thought it might be. In actuality, it was the only logical place I could start, for several reasons. First and primary among them is that I know this song (as well as the rest of the album) inside and out as a result of a failed attempt at writing a biography of Eddie Hazel a few years back. Also, it is a very long and intense solo that's well-regarded by guitarists of all stripes, particularly by Hendrix acolytes, 80's indie rockers (it was once covered by J. Mascis & The Fog with Mike Watt), and alternative jam bands (Ween wrote a tribute to Hazel entitled "A Tear For Eddie," that did a decent job of imitating the hypnotic qualities of Hazel's playing). It's also probably singlehandedly responsible for Hazel's reputation, which is unfair considering his playing was always excellent, but at least it's the kind of thing that gets Funkadelic noticed in outlets like Rolling Stone. And what's more, the song is nothing more than extended guitar solo, bookended by brief monologues from George Clinton.

It's kind of a famous story in P-funk lore, and, for once, the evidence shows that the incident in question probably happened: after working out the basic idea for the track, George Clinton told Eddie Hazel to "play like your mama just died," and he did exactly that. For the ten minutes and eighteen seconds that constitute this track, Eddie Hazel attacks, commands, and distorts one's emotions in a way only few artists can claim to do. Throughout the rest of his recording career, going through his solo album Games, Dames, & Guitar Things (which I recommend if you can get a copy from Rhino), he would contribute uniformly excellent guitar leads, alternately dazzling in their technical ability and emotionally taxing, yet in the end it all comes down to "Maggot Brain." Few artists have been so defined by one book, or one painting, or one movie, let alone one ten-minute electric guitar solo. It is his ultimate triumph and, considering his later output, his tragedy.

The only instruments heard on this song, other than guitar, are a muted keyboard and an occasional, reverb-heavy snare hit. As far as I know, it is as austere a recording as had been yet attempted by George Clinton, a far cry from the sort of work he would do later, with 40+ members on stage at any given time, including the guy that works the flashlight. When Eddie's guitar comes in at 1:14, it sounds tired, dismissive. He plays small clusters of notes, leaving gaps where one recognizes how empty the recording sounds without his guitar front and center. He starts playing faster, slowly piling on the effects. Within the next five minutes he goes through all the stages of grieving for his lost mother: anger, denial, helplessness, acceptance. His guitar sounds, at different times, like it's crying, screaming, talking, laughing. At points he starts playing incredibly fast clusters of notes, as if losing control of his mind or his ability to live, but then pulls back, anchoring what few notes he plays in a wash of reverb. Like Hendrix, Hazel's playing runs counter to the notion of masturbatory satisfaction that came to typify guitarists of succeeding decades (even the good ones). It sounds like a genuine attempt at exorcism.

The little echoes you hear (or at least think you hear), make you feel things long after they have actually been played, but then at a certain point the other instruments drop out completely. Eddie keeps playing, employing more of what would stereotypically be called "funk" playing (palm-muting, rigorous rhythyms), which is funny given that he has no rhythm section to work off of. The result is an emotional lull. He's not hitting the high notes he normally hits, which means maybe he's in the middle of pondering something, or maybe he's in denial. In any case, in a jarring move, the back instruments come back, and Eddie is back where he started.

During the early reign of Funkadelic, this would be Eddie's solo showcase onstage, where he would emerge from a manufactured purple fog dressed in some garish pimp's outfit with a Les Paul guitar, letting all the manufactured pain bubble for the crowd to drink up. He would look intently at his guitar and move his head, cringing and bobbing along with what he was playing. Who knows what was going through his head when he played it? I was never able to see him play the song live, so I will never know firsthand what sort of reactions he could wring out of people by playing certain notes, but I know he could make people cry, and there's a short list of guitarists who could do that.

Critics of popular music tend to throw around the word "virtuoso" pretty liberally when referring to musical artists of a particular expressive power. Certainly Eddie Hazel is often tagged with this admittedly well-intentioned compliment, but doing so does a disservice to the amount of craft and imagination he was able to put into his playing. Eddie Hazel was no "virtuoso," at least not by the terms that virtuosity is often defined (like most rhythm & blues guitarists of the time, he was not one to notate his music, nor was he likely to play lightning fast scalar solos or indulge in fret-tapping)--he was simply a blues guitarist, and the more one looks at the Steve Vais and Joe Satrianis of the world, the more it becomes abundantly clear that blues playing has nothing to do with virtuosity. I don't think I'm generalizing when I say that electric blues playing has never been about playing fast or effortlessly--on the contrary, it's about striving, sweating, desperately searching for some sort of truth or happiness in the form of a well-placed note, upon which the blues player realizes that this note is far from perfect, and the journey must continue. The tone of melancholy that pervade 99% of guitar blues is, at its basest level, the guitarist struggling to achieve transcendence, possibly as a way of communicating with his or her audience, possibly as a way of keeping the hell hound temporarily off the trail.

I run the risk of not being sufficiently specific. On a purely technical level, and Hazel is as perfect an example as one can think of, blues guitarists often use fairly simple patterns and often involve the same notes played over and over again. What gives the guitar a special edge over many blues instruments is that, as a string instrument, it allows the player to bend the string and therefore slightly change the pitch, which simultaneously provides the player with two advantages: first, it can give the note a more interesting "crying" tone, moving the pitch back and forth as if it was a weeping baby, and second, it allows the guitarist to cover up for any mistake by bending the note to a more pleasing pitch. From the earliest delta blues records to Led Zeppelin, even untrained ears can pick up moments on studio albums where the guitarist flubs a note and quickly covers it up by bending it or moving it back to the original note.

Professional musicians wouldn't like to admit it, but it's pretty easy for even a novice guitarist to play a convincingly "bluesy" solo if he sticks to the same three or four notes in a particular pattern (I submit Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" as the absolute nadir of bendy three-note solos). But in the end, it's not about that. Great blues guitarists have personality and vocabulary that they make their own--they might play the same three notes over and over, but it's three notes that no one else would play in that particular way at that particular time. There's a reason one can tell that it's clearly Hazel and not fellow Funkadelic guitarist Michael Hampton playing the solo on, say, "Red Hot Mama," and it comes down to the fact that listeners learn to notice the particular choices that great, unique guitarists can make, even on the dime.

Eddie Hazel was a master and should continue to be respected as such. His later drug addiction didn't really do him any favors, and I think he could have exceeded "Maggot Brain" had he not become so dependent, but who knows? "Maggot Brain" is as austere, thoughtful, and emotionally riveting as any extended solo I have ever heard.