1971 was a high point in American Black electric music. Live-Evil, There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Revolution of the Mind, and, perhaps at the summit, Maggot Brain. There is a very famous story about the lead track, which involves George Clinton telling Eddie Hazel to imagine his mother has just died. (They’re both tripping? And then Clinton tells Hazel to imagine that his mother isn’t actually dead? It’s a kind of sadistic scene.) What came out the other end is a ten-minute guitar solo, with little wisps of other instruments floating on the edge of the Echoplex return. The “Maggot Brain” solo deserves its status because it isn’t ten minutes of shredding, not at all. Hazel creates a full narrative, and runs through an entire color wheel of strategies. His solo could be subtitled “Different Ways You Could Approach Playing ‘Maggot Brain’,” which makes this a little bit Fluxus, too. You also get two of Funkadelic’s heaviest rock tunes on this album—“Hit It and Quit It” (also one of their heaviest funk tunes) and “Super Stupid” (the template for Lenny Kravitz’s recording career). You get a taste of their old doo wop sunshine on “Can You Get To That?” and then one more freakout to bookend the album: “Wars of Armageddon,” blending Bernie Worrell’s organ pumping and Tiki Fulwood’s windy drumming into a mash of spoken word samples and sitcom laughs. And then Hazel solos again. I’m always a little loose on what “psychedelic” means, except for this album, which is completely psychedelic.

Infamously told by Clinton to play as though his mother had just died, the title track to Funkadelic’s 1970 second album features guitarist Eddie Hazel delivering ten scorching minutes of anguished Stratocaster soloing. His overdriven guitar, drenched in Echoplex delay, creates an emotive electro-organic sonic collage that is easily one of the finest guitar solos ever committed to wax. Elsewhere, tracks like Super Stupid and Hit It And Quit blend killer guitar riffs with pounding funky drums, gospel organ and sophisticated vocal arrangements into distorted, visceral funk-rock jams. Raw, cathartic, playful and like nothing else at the time.