George Clinton, in his 2014 memoir Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You?, recalled the recording session clearly, saying, “Eddie and I were in the studio, tripping like crazy but also trying to focus our emotions.” He continues, “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 thought his guitar.

“I knew immediately that he understood what I meant,” Clinton wrote. “I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web. When he played the solo back, I knew that it was good beyond good, not only a virtuoso display of musicianship but also an almost unprecedented moment of emotion in pop music.”

But the recording process was just the first step of the song’s evolution.

While Hazel was deep into fuzz and wah effects and experimented with phasers and flangers, most of the trippy delay and other effects threaded through his solo on “Maggot Brain” were added by Clinton in the mixdown. “When Eddie played originally it was over a more traditional slow band jam,” Clinton recalls. “I took all the other instruments off the track and then I Echoplexed it back on itself three or four times. That gave the whole thing an eerie feel, both in the playing and in the sound effects. There’s a noise at the beginning of the song that’s a chattering or chewing, and people something ask if it’s the sound of maggots feasting on the brain. I can’t say that it was. I was just trying for something fucked-up and novel.”

(Fender.com)