Eddie Hazel’s strength as a guitarist was this: What virtuosity he had (and he had a ton) always felt like it was in the service of pure emotional expression. As large as the spirit of Hendrix loomed as an acknowledged precedent, Hazel had just as much John Coltrane in him, and “Maggot Brain” — the album and its heart-snatching opening salvo of a title cut — is his A Love Supreme. Which is to say it’s a deeply spiritual performance, albeit arguably tied more towards a personal perspective than any higher-power acknowledgment. George Clinton famously told Hazel to play like his mother’d just died, and in one take he cranked out nearly ten minutes of music that sounded like a direct line to his own anguish. All Clinton had to do in post was add enough Echoplex to make it sound like it was emanating from the sun. If “Stairway To Heaven” was 1971 guitar rock’s equivalent of magical realism, “Maggot Brain” is a documentary, though shot with the same cameras Kubrick used for A Clockwork Orange.

Hazel’s masterclass extends far past the title track, of course, and it does so in ways that complement the fact that everyone else in the band is at the top of their game: using his wah-wah wailing as a logical extension of Bernie’s Jimmy Smith-trumping church-of-acid organ on “Hit It And Quit It,” skulking in the background of “You And Your Folks, Me And My Folks” as the rhythm section breaks concrete like a slow-motion jackhammer, or leading everyone in a Hitchcock-goes-heavy metal charge to personify the closing phrase “You’ve lost the fight and the winner is fear” in overdose nightmare “Super Stupid.”

Just beneath that breathtaking musicianship — listen for Tiki Fulwood’s locomotive drums, or the Parliament-ary intricacy of the gospel-soul vocals on the bucolic bummer of “Can You Get To That” — lies one of the great underrated meditations on The Death Of The Sixties, a jaundiced if bracing look at squandered potential and drugged-out solipsism that came out the other end both wiser and more frustrated. There’s no better line to expand a breakup song into a glimpse into an expanded American condition than the couplet that opens “Can You Get To That” — “I once had a life, or rather, life had me/ I was one among many, or at least I seemed to be” — except maybe the bridge, which reads like a metaphor for affection as debt (“When you base your love on credit/ And your loving days are done/ Checks you signed with love and kisses later come back signed ‘Insufficient Funds'”) but is paraphrased from MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech. And “You And Your Folks” takes the structure of the typical “let’s all get together” protest-song calls for unity and sinks into hard-earned cynicism, where class divisions and threats of annihilation make their “we all got a thing” pleas feel starkly desperate. There’s a damn good reason this album starts with a struggle to “rise above it all or drown in my own shit,” and ends with the “Freedom! Now” chants of “Wars Of Armageddon” — it’s one of the most cathartic R&B albums ever made, even in its quieter moments, the audio answer to what that face on the cover is screaming about.