Maggot Brain — Funkadelic
#365Songs: May 2nd
Sometimes I revisit old writing. It’s the fastest way to calculate the distance from then and now, between the versions of me that time and circumstance has altered. I’m often surprised by how prescient my past self was, how many themes exist in that old writing that still haunt me today.
I wrote the post below just a few years ago in early 2021, mid-pandemic, during that stretch of time when checking in on lapsed relationships was momentarily vital. At that point, I hadn’t been back to my hometown since the summer of 2016, the Trump election that broke so many families. I felt a wave of nostalgia, missing people and places I’d lost touch with long ago.
2021
My closest friend growing up was two years older than me, which means he was two years cooler, smarter, and in the know. In the early years, we played video games together late into the night, during sleepovers, or after school. Everything changed when he turned 16. The world opened for us. Long, meandering drives set to cigarettes stolen from my Dad’s half-empty packs littered throughout the house. (It was a different time back then, ok?)
As is true for most kids discovering the art of going nowhere, we lived our best lives.
Windows down, music loud. We were into angst, given the era, but also lots of metal. LOTS of metal. But when I think about that time, about that friend whose life has taken a far different journey than mine, I remember one song. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
That song is Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain.
It was Cleveland, early ’90s, which means we were almost twenty years into a local tradition: every Sunday morning, at last call, a famed DJ for the best rock station in town played the song in full. So for us, we’d do whatever we had to do to be in that car at that time to hear the song live on the air. That wasn’t always easy, but sneaking out was a part of childhood. And that’s exactly what we did, at least a few times.
But let’s get back to the song.
It’s the Eddie Hazel show for over ten minutes, an electric guitar masterclass that meanders with the same enthusiasm of a couple kids driving after dark for the first time. As the story goes at least, George Clinton was all tripped out on acid and he challenged Hazel:
“Eddie and I were in the studio, tripping like crazy but also trying to focus on our emotions… 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. I knew immediately that he understood what I meant. I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web.”
These are the only Clinton lyrics before Hazel loses his guitar-playing mind.
Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit
I’ve lost a mother, and Maggot Brain is what it feels like. Not just that day, but the long days and nights after that for years to come.
It’s been 11 years since that day, and grief still sounds like Hazel’s guitar. But it also sounds like being stoned for the first time, side by side with the friend who opened my mind for the first to the bigger, darker possibilities in life.
So do yourself a favor next time you’re in a car late at night, with no destination in mind. Play this song — but maybe skip the joint, if you’re behind the wheel.
Today
Maggot Brain was playing in a coffee shop, the first time I’ve heard it since I wrote this post. It hit me differently this time, a jolt of sadness, a sort of mourning for emotions I don’t currently possess.
I made it back to Cleveland last summer for the first time since that 2016 summer. I drove those same streets, walked alone through old neighborhoods, past houses that once meant something to me, alert for people who’d recognize me. Nobody did. My father lives in the same old house, on marriage round two since my Mom died, and though the shell of that history still stands, her absence is more profound than ever. I was on alert for feelings I’d recognize. Nothing hit me. I felt removed, numb. I sneezed a lot, got wheezy, and though that was partly due to the cats I suspect I was allergic to something else: a past I no longer recognize, versions of me I can no longer reconcile.
I saw that old friend one night. He’s a cook in a restaurant not far from where we used to drive, where we used to smoke, where we used to dream together of a future that felt so limitless. He didn’t seem ok — and though he’d lost his way long ago, my previous encounters with him felt nice, a shared energy only two old friends can share. We agreed to grab a beer the following day, but I never heard from him. He never heard from me.
I guess that’s what happens as we grow older, more removed from our pasts. We’re not just strangers to our old friends, we become strangers to ourselves. And that’s never more obvious than when we go back to where it all began, when we can see in the mirror of others all the ways in which we’ve changed.
~
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