Eddie Hazel – Game, Dames and Guitar Thangs

Some people can’t even alphabet correctly, it seems. I was blithely plowing through the albums I’ve bought in the past year or so that I wouldn’t have covered in my alphabetical tour of my record collection, and it should have been pretty clear to me that right after Françoise Hardy, I needed to talk about Eddie Hazel – but then I skipped right on to John Lee Hooker. Any hopes of this ultimately appearing in proper alphabetical order on the blog are probably gone anyway.

I’m gonna start with this: I’m not a guitar worshipper. I tend to love the totality of the music, not the individual licks, and technical prowess that has no connection to the soul of the music bores me. And I’m more than a little sick of fanboy “greatest guitarist evaaarrrrhhh” lists that prop up Clapton, Van Halen, and the like, and that somehow don’t have a single person of color except for Hendrix until they get to Carlos Santana, wherever he falls on their list. I’m looking right now at Guitar World’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, a concept I hate anyway, and it’s white, white, white. Even in the blues category, they put a white guy at the top of the list, and then add three more in the top 10.

Bullshit.

Because if you’re going to do a list like that, subjective as they are, and you’re not including Eddie Hazel, your list is bullshit. Period.

Eddie Hazel created some of the most out-there, funky, psychedelic guitar sounds ever. As a long-time lover of psychedelic music whose exposure was primarily the British and American white guy bands of the ’60s, hearing Hazel’s work on the Funkadelic records (which I’d grown up with just a radio-hit-level awareness of) was absolutely revelatory. Go listen to “Maggot Brain,” go listen to “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts,” and then explain how Eddie Hazel isn’t on those greatest guitarist lists. It’s almost as if . . .

Rant over. This is his 1977 solo album, his only solo album. It appears it barely had a release, and hit the cut-out bins quickly, so the original is considered a rare record. I didn’t even know it existed until my bass teacher was extolling its virtues one day. And though it’s Eddie’s record, P-Funk artists are all over it, so it sounds like you’d expect it to sound.

It opens with an incredible soulful interpretation of “California Dreamin'” then pumps through a small collection of Hazel and Clinton/Hazel songs. In part the collection is small because Hazel included a 9:26 rendition of The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” that really psychedelicizes what was already a psych classic. (Yes, the original on “Abbey Road” was shorter.) This version gets right to your heart, and again: if you worship guitar licks, get on your knees, because here’s something worthy of worship.

I really don’t, and this wouldn’t work for me except that with Hazel, as with most of the P-Funk universe, every note was in service of the music – not just to show what you could do, but to advance the mood, the vibe, to draw the listener in.

So I’m happy that this rarity got a re-release. I got this at the end of 2021, and include it in the rotation every time I go to the Funkadelic well, and that’s pretty damn often these days.