Thankful n' Thoughtfull: The Sly Stone Dedicated Chronological Listening Thread

As discussed here: what dedicated listening thread should we do next (the poll). Since Sylvester Stewart's output is actually fairly self-contained this should take just a few months, going at a clip of a track a day. We'll start at the beginning and then trail off somewhere towards the end... I have compiled a list restricted primarily to things he played and/or sang on (productions/writing credits would have complicated things).

Away we go!

oh cool, definitely don't know the early or post riot stuff

1. The Stewart Four - On the Battlefield (1952)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hsezfNAW4M

Apparently that's 8yo Sly singing, backed by siblings Freddie, Rose and Vaetta and their mother Lorreta on piano. Crazy how he's already got that raspy grain in his voice. Pretty standard family-style gospel fare for the time. I'd never heard this one before.

someone better versed than me in the gospel of the era could maybe provide some context - all I know is, like, the Soul Stirrers and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson

Oh cool, I should be able to sync up with this. Switched up my deep plunge into 1990 pop albums (was not doing it for me) and now I'm going through every late-'60s r&b album I have, so Sly is on the docket.

yeah not super notable other than as you mention, he definitely sounds like "Sly" even at that age

I assume he started sneaking cigarettes at the age of four, just to put some scratchiness in his tone

just like a baaby

Didn't know we were doing this, but I'm on board!

feel like a lot of Sly's themes are appropriate for the moment - family, isolation, claustrophobia, paranoia, mania etc.

This is quite literally juvenilia, but it is kind of amazing that we have it at all.

xpost Yeah, and didn't he record a good deal of There's a Riot Going On while lying in bed? Resonant.

Apparently that's 8yo Sly singing, backed by siblings Freddie, Rose and Vaetta and their mother Lorreta on piano.

Hmmmmm, about that - if Sylvester is 8, Freddie is 5, Rose is 7 and Vaetta is... 2!

don't look at me, that's just what it said on the youtube credits

pic checks out re: approximate ages tbh
https://img.discogs.com/P3UR1smZBZm9VWSMG9cphTwjyN4=/600x800/smart/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/A-3529112-1484314284-1139.jpeg.jpg

https://img.discogs.com/KzaLdqfv-beo_8e4ZUTpBzh6v_0=/322x125/smart/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/A-3529112-1418491865-4633.jpeg.jpg

2. The Stewart Four - Walking in Jesus' Name (1952)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-OKdOgOJ4o

The b-side to yesterday's track. A little bit of boogie woogie thrown in with the gospel, Sly's young voice already sounding remarkably lived in and expressive. Not sure who's playing all those guitar breaks, if that is in fact Freddie that's really impressive for a 5-6 year old. Hearing these early family gospel cuts made me think of how little gospel and the church figure into Sly's ouevre in general - he doesn't have a "Jesus Children of America" or "Have a Talk With God" in his catalog, for example (Stevie is kinda an interesting study in contrasts with Sly)

these really are juvenilia in the sense that they don't signal too much of where he was headed - unlike the juvenilia of Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson, which were genuine pop hits and played a big part in establishing their identities as artists.

Give him a break, he is only 8!

lol

bookmarked, looking forward to this

lol LOOK HOW FUCKING YOUNG THEY ARE

I wasn't doing shit except eating Bugles and watching Happy Days reruns

I like this one a lot better, gives his voice, which as Shakes said is remarkably distinctive even at that age, more room to shine

I like this one better too. Livelier arrangement and more distinctive vocals from young Sly.

I'm gonna live a Christian life
God knows I'm not ashamed

this is getting ahead of ourselves, but when digging up that youtube the next video that got queued up was Sly on Letterman in 1983 doing If You Want Me To Stay and oof that was quite a transition

lol

really dig both these tracks. interesting enough even if they don’t necessarily have a lot to reveal about what was to come.

but yeah, what a voice !

3. The Biscaynes - Uncle Sam Needs You (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1d_80NtY3E

Apart from the bizarre lyric, which I haven't quite managed to parse yet, this reminds me of the kind of stuff Johnny Otis was cutting at the time. Definitely not gospel, more in that space where doo wop, rock n roll and R&B overlap. Not sure what the level of Sly's involvement with this was, apart from the couple of solo vocal lines he gets in the breaks.

also looks like this was a mixed-race group...? and none of the other Stewart family members involved?

This is where I admit, with some embarrassment, that I had no idea about any of Sly's pre-Family Stone career.

It didn't exactly set the heather on fire tbf.

yeah this is all pretty obscure, he was on the margins until "Swim" and the Beau Brummels

I don't even know about any of that!

I just recently read mystery train and learned all this too

I remember a story about him producing a rock band and them being so inept he ended up playing all the instruments himself on their record.

^^Supposedly The Great Society (featuring Grace Slick).

I thought it might be them!

Is there a released recording of that

Cuz I dont have it in the queu

Aside from like the Little Sister and 6ix singles, I know basically nothing about Sly's extra-Family affairs. So this thread is welcome for numerous reasons.

from Wikipedia:

While signed to Autumn Records, the band worked with the label's staff producer Sylvester Stewart (better known as Sly Stone), who at the time was still in the process of forming Sly and the Family Stone. Purportedly, Stewart eventually walked out as the band's producer after it took The Great Society over 50 takes to record a version of the song "Free Advice" that was suitable for release.

lines up with this

https://www.discogs.com/The-Great--Society--Someone-To-Love-Free-Advice/master/519426

But I don't want to drop $300 to find out what it sounds like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQXd0IIxzOE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEVOyvf8Kq0

If Wikipedia's to be believed there should be 48 more of these.

such a terrible band

oddly, a few months ago I pulled out the first Sly & the Family album, the one with no hits, and listened to it for the first time…I was startled upon hearing one song that it is the basis of a huge huge huge hip-hop hit that everyone reading these words knows…I look forward to when Shakes gets to it in a week or whenever…I think that it's clear that the Dance to the Music album has the tremendous title track and a bunch of engaging filler that was cut pretty fast to satiate Clive Davis…Life and obviously Stand but also the first one are far more solid…

I know that's what people say about the "Dance to the Music" album but I don't agree fwiw.

Some background on the Viscaynes tracks:

Jerry Martini: The Viscaynes were a Vallejo singing group that was very hip and very unique because it was an integrated band. They had a Filipino. Sly was the Afro. There were girls and boys and different colors...He [Sly] had a hell of a time back then because when he was in the Viscaynes, he was hammering one of the girls in the band, the most beautiful girl, and they had to keep it a secret. He had all this talent and was so far beyond this racial bullshit that was going on back then that it had to affect his psyche a little bit. It was just bullshit... they had to sneak around. When I met him, he was hanging out with Joe Piazza. I played with Joe Piazza and the Continentals. We started doing side gigs together. We were the backup band and we also did Sly's first record, "Yellow Moon", backed with "Uncle Sam Needs You Boy". It didn't get off the ground. Sly sang lead on both sides. He sang high on one side and low on the other side. He had incredible range. It was just a single, but it got him the attention of Bob Mitchell and Tom Donahue, who hired him to work at Autumn Records.

Sounds like they probably spent more on the bus fares to the studio than the actual recording - if it was recorded in a studio, the vocals sound like they were recorded in a bathroom.

not sure what quality studios were available in the Sacramento/Vallejo corridor at the time, probably not a lot if any

4. The Viscaynes (or Biscaynes?) - Yellow Moon (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYO307vnrH0

this feels like pretty straight doo-wop, his voice in fine form. Interesting how different all these tracks are, stylistically.

A lot of the details around these early singles - date of release, titles, names of artists, etc. - seem pretty fluid and hard to untangle.

That you're making the attempt at all is a public service, and I thank u.

I'm just making it up as I go along.

Martini says that track was released under the Viscaynes (and he gets the backing band right) but the label says "Biscaynes" and it's shown up on comps under both names so... whatever

according to discogs "biscaynes" was a misprint on this single which was reissued with the name corrected to viscaynes.

I prefer his earlier material.

I was thinking "How on earth does Sly Stone make it through this?" but then the fact that he's still alive speaks to something about his resilience. Love "Free Advice."

the discography in the back of "Sly and the Family Stone: Off the Record" seems exhaustive, also details what he did on various productions, I'm going to lean on that pretty heavily. He had a handful of singles out in 1961, the chronology of which I am not clear on, so I'm just going to go through the remainder of them this week.

5. The Viscaynes - Heavenly Angel (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAtVkphZE0k

I'm a sucker for these 6/8 doo-wop ballads, and the arrangement actually sounds pretty dense - there's clearly different vocal tracks overdubbed (listen to that echo!), plus the saxophone augmenting the standard guitar-bass-drums-piano combo. I feel like this would have been in Lou Reed's 45 collection.

This is nice, and I'm glad I have an excuse to hear this stuff, but I confess I'm getting a bit anxious to get to the Family Stone.

yr gonna have to wait a couple weeks :)

Can't say I much care for the juvenilia so far.

Not a great fan of doo-wop so I'm not getting much out of any of this tbh.

I used to have a comp of pre-Family Stone stuff and I don't remember any of it being much good. I'm prepared to change my opinion though.

for my part I can't say I love any of this either, they're basically curiosities, not bad but not really absorbing either.

but these threads are about being completists, goddammit, you can't bail at the beginning!

buncha whiners imo

for real

I'm here till the bitter end!

Not going anywhere; just not finding a whole lot to say about these songs yet.

yeah this is interesting, good work Shakey

"Yellow Moon" is great. Sly!

Re. earlier discussion: other rock bands he produced were the Vejtables and the Mojo Men.

And Psyrkle aka Crazy Horse

Wow, that's an obscure one. Neither the band nor that entire record label (apparently a subsidiary of Autumn) seem to be on Discogs.

6. The Viscaynes - Stop What You Are Doing (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg_LeUbz9ts

The Viscaynes second single. Around this same time, Sly put out a couple 45s under his own name (or some variation thereof), which we will get to shortly. That kinda doesn't sound like Sly singing lead to me on this one. Fine but not particularly remarkable doo-wop imo.

That kinda doesn't sound like Sly singing lead to me on this one.

You don't say? I would have thought this stuff was maybe a bit out of date in 1961?

not really, doo-wop's peak is late 50s/early 60s. Dion was killin it in 1961 for ex.

For what it's worth: there was definitely a revival around that time--probably the commercial peak, yeah--but I think most of the greatest doo-wop was the first wave in the early/mid-'50s: "In the Still of the Nite," Moonglows, Flamingos, Drifters, Nolan Strong, "Earth Angel," etc.

yeah, quality is a different argument. Commercially it was still a viable form in 1961.

Not coincidental to the commercial peak: it definitely got a lot whiter during the revival. Some of which--Dion, the Diamonds' "Little Darlin'," the Capris' "There's a Moon Out Tonight," etc.--was pretty great.

Maybe it was a west coast thing, but this record is 1963 and this was a black group.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq0I8MAz3H4

I'm sure it was still popular in the west coast Latinx community even later than that. Something like "Sad Girl" by Thee Midnighters still has that 6/8 groove going.

1963:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ_unB6ODy8

And if you guys will indulge me (sorry, I love this stuff), one more. Black group, L.A., 1962.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe1d0b4Y--I

You know, I think when it comes to someone like Zappa, this is something that's misunderstood. When the Mothers started out playing in this style, it was not actually some archaic, defunct form of music. It was current. (See also Beefheart's "I'm Glad.")

7. The Viscaynes - I Guess I'll Be (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv0lkEkKUQ0

The b-side to "Stop What You Are Doing" (both tracks also credited in some places to the Viscaynes and the Ramblers).

hard to detect Sly in this mix, although I assume he had a hand in the writing/arrangement but who knows.

i really like this one !

kinda has a “dream lover” lite vibe

def a bit of the Bobby Darin version in that guitar pattern

Was just reading about how Jeff Miller, one of the students killed at Kent State, was a big Sly and the Family Stone fan and would travel to see them play. His brother wrote this letter for this year's commemoration, which is tomorrow, the 50th anniversary.

https://www.kent.edu/sites/default/files/file/russ_miller_letter_0.pdf

Still no sign of Shakey.

yeah, strange.

8. Danny (Sly) Stewart - Do You Remember aka I'm Just a Fool (non-album single, 1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXAyOIzOLKs
The first appearance of the ""Sly"" moniker and his initial foray as a solo artist. Continuing in the doo-wop vein of previous one-offs, he delivers a controlled and stylized lead vocal complete with vibrato and few of the idiosyncratic tics that he would develop later, although in the bridge his voice becomes more recognizable as it hits his upper register. Otherwise the song is fairly standard 6/8 ballad with a conventional instrumental and vocal backing arrangement.

That you, Shakey?

I fear it may be some time before we have an interesting song to listen to.

9. Danny (Sly) Stewart - A Long Time Alone (non-album single, 1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY4Y9tKd6kg
It's hard to argue that there's much distinctive about his early doo-wop efforts. Here we have another weepy teenage romance set to a 6/8 ballad arrangement, with a prominent vibraphone part and some odd, descending half-step chord changes in the refrain being the most unique things about it. Sly's lead vocal is serviceable, again leaning on a crooning vibrato.

He is like 17 or 18 here, it's better than Lou Reed could manage when he was 16 but that's about it.

10. Danny (Sly) Stewart - Oh What a Night (non-album single, 1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKbomnigCQ8
Things starting to get a more little interesting. We're still in solidly workmanlike doo-wop territory, but this time there's a good hook, some rhythmic tomfoolery with the stop-start accents throughout, plus a key change. The best of the lot so far.

11. Jessie James and the Royal Aces - I Will Go (non-album single, 1962)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3_T4j7g0Ts
Sly on guitar, trading licks with the piano player throughout the song in a somewhat jazzy (and frankly, overly busy) manner for this slow grinding ballad. Oddly picks up the pace into double-time in the middle before Jesse's smooth vocal slows things back down for the showstopping last verse.

Worth noting that at this point Sly is already working with a few future members of the Family Stone, including his brother Freddy and Jerry Martini (who is on several of the tracks already posted, including "Yellow Moon". Sly is 18 when he meets Bobby Freeman in 1962, and Autumn Records founders Bob Mitchell and Tom Donahue also get interested in hiring him as a house producer around the same time.

12. Jessie James and the Royal Aces - Cha Cha Minnie (non-album single, 1962)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtFS-qt8Jok
Sly also credited with playing guitar on this rocked-up cha-cha, which was the B-side to ""I Will Go"". There were a bunch of similar songs like this a couple of years prior (Johnny Otis' ""Willy Did the Cha Cha"", Sam Cooke's ""Everybody Loves to Cha Cha""), so a little behind the times perhaps.

Sly had one other production credit ahead of his tenure at Autumn records, which we will get to tomorrow. After that things enter much more varied musical territory (Bobby Freeman, Beau Brummels, Mojo Men, etc. Although not certain that the above-referenced proto-Crazy Horse Psyrcle record allegedly produced by Sly actually exists; it is not in the Selvin book's discography).

14. Gloria Scott & The Tonettes - I Taught Him (Pts 1 and 2) (non-album single, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlR7tU9WT-0
A great, short and sweet girl-group single with a head-held-high spoken intro and an energetic vocal from Gloria. The horns blare, the bass walks, the drums roll and the girls tell off their no-good (former) boyfriend. Not especially remarkable for the genre but credibly delivered overall. Sly's hand is not particularly evident - it doesn't sound like he performs on the track - but emblematic of his blossoming range and tastes.

15. Bobby Freeman - Let's Surf Again (non-album single, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Pw0IDTgJ4
By this point Sly is 20, he's been diligently studying music in Vallejo at Solano Community College and working in San Francisco as a disc jockey for KSOL (and later KDIA) and has finagled his way into a staff producer position with the newly founded Autumn Records. Bobby Freeman is already friends with Sly and familiar with the label-owners, and is tapped as their lead artist for this tune, the label's first release. The first of several inexplicably aquatic-themed records (this time namechecking the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean in a shameless and hilarious bit in the middle), Freeman delivers a fine soul-shouting performance over a rollicking drum-and-guitar centered arrangement. Not sure who's playing guitar here but the licks are energetic, the horns and backing vocals sailing over the (many) drumrolls until we get to the droning call-and-response section at the end, the bass leaning into a nice octave-jumping riff. Not bad, but not a hit.

16. Bobby Freeman - Come to Me (non-album single, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYFmLqHsMeU
The b-side to Let's Surf Again hearkens back to Sly's doowop sides of just a couple years prior. It's almost Spector-ian in its production, cramming what is clearly a pretty large band of drums, guitar, piano, horn section, backing vocalists into the echo chamber. The song sways in the standard 6/8 time signature, working through a gently ascending and descending lead melody and lovelorn lyrics. Serviceable.

17. Bobby Freeman - C'mon and Swim (Pts 1 & 2) (C'mon and Swim, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PT40tW-qgI
In mid-1964 Sly co-writes and produces ""C'mon and Swim"", as well as playing organ and guitar and possibly bass. It sells a million copies, goes to #5 on the US pop chart - Sly's first involvement with a real hit. Future Family Stone member Jerry Martini has also been in Sly's orbit for several years already (he's on some of the Viscaynes tunes) and is also in the 15-piece horn section used here. Seems like there's some racial politics dimension to a black man using surfing/swimming as a marketing gimmick in the early 60s, and perhaps this aspect appealed to Sly, already deeply invested as he was in crossing rigidly enforced color-lines. Essentially a novelty dance tune, the sound is nonetheless pretty immense, big and brassy, Freeman doing his best Sam-Cooke-in-party-rocking mode. Easy to imagine this going over gangbusters at the Cow Palace and other Bay Area dancehalls.

18. Sylvester Stewart - I Just Learned How to Swim (non-album single, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbYyNXK-88Q
This solo single was presumably a quick cash-in to ride the success of the Freeman hit. Sly has absorbed rock and the British Invasion at this point, plainly obvious from the opening Chuck Berry riff, the driving 4/4 beat and the dance-oriented lyric. Some pretty serious shredding on the guitar solo and the whole thing has an energy and propulsiveness that sets it apart from his previous doo-wop roots.

19. Sylvester Stewart - Scat Swim (non-album single, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2vjKDdpqGE
A choppy surf-rock guitar rhythm opens the b-side, leading abruptly into a swing-rhythm scat-singing breakdown, Sly evidently employing some DJ patter skills likely developed during his stint at KSOL. The scatting gives way to a guitar solo over a chugging proto-Nuggets organ, and then we're back to the beginning. Kind of a bizarre studio throwaway/experiment which, while incorporating pieces of the a-side arrangement, is actually built around a completely different take/backing track.

Don't worry, I'm going to sit down and listen to all these at some point! The thing is I actually have a CD of all this stuff somewhere that I think I played once.

fixed youtube link for no. 18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qe1KKTQvjI

That Gloria Scott track sounds incredible. Some naked drums at the end, I wonder if they've been sampled.

20. Bobby Freeman - S-W-I-M (C'mon and Swim, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f4cDwVOVk0
The same old dance we did before, now we're back to swim some more. For a hacky attempt at repeating a prior hit, the production and performance here feel a bit hotter - that's a huge horn section blasting away, and the rhythm section is similarly laying into this with a level of fury and commitment not entirely justified by the material. Sly's goofy humor peeks through with an inexplicable organ quote of the theme from Peter Gunn in the middle. In general it's easy to see this as Sly flexing his muscle in the studio following a successful single: now that he's got the resources and skills to arrange for a bigger ensemble, the strategy is to repeat the formula and just crank up the energy level. It didn't really work, the single stalled at 56 on the US Pop Charts, and was Freeman's last hit.

21. Bobby Freeman - That Little Old Heartbreaker Me (C'mon and Swim, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BvN91Iz6HQ
A fantastically inventive arrangement and production of a fairly simple song, the parts rippling and echoing one another, the distorted lead guitar, backing vocals and horns swapping and juxtaposing melodic and harmonic lines throughout. Freeman indulging in some ode-to-himself mythologizing as a cruel lothario (heartbreaker/break her heart as the background chant goes) is almost incidental to the song's appeal. Sly was reportedly a devoted student of the music theory classes he'd been taking in the years prior, and this seems like evidence of him playfully deploying some of what he'd learned to gussy up an otherwise non-descript b-side. This may be the first time Sly deploys a musical phrase/tic that he would quote/repurpose later (a tactic he would return to frequently throughout his discography) - the guitar riff that leads the opening of the song here shows up as a horn line on ""If This Room Could Talk"" from the Family Stone's debut album.

great thread!

22. The Spearmints - Little One (non-album single, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-jZgDWb9b4
The Beatles, the Beach Boys and (perhaps most significantly) "Louie Louie" have hit the US by this point, ushering in an avalanche of (mostly white, mostly male) rock 'n' roll combos eager to explore and capitalize on this relatively new template in popular music. Sly's a popular figure, DJ and musical jack-of-all-trades in the Bay Area with a well-established interest in crossing genre and racial lines and an available outlet for exploring commercial possibilities, so it makes perfect sense that he would have no problem moving from R&B to the burgeoning rock market. The Spearmints (which sounds like it had a mixed-gender lineup) deliver on the bankable "Louie Louie" template of a I-IV-V chord progression over a slightly latin beat plus your basic teenage romance lyrics. Perhaps the most interesting thing going on is the vocal arrangement, with some variations on the refrain gradually getting layered and shifting around until it resembles the Beach Boys (especially with the higher falsetto part). Sly keeps the production simple and straightforward, much more stripped down than his previous productions. This was not a hit, but it's not bad by any stretch. The b-side (""Jo-Ann"") does not appear to be available on Youtube.

23. Beau Brummels - Laugh Laugh (Introducing the Beau Brummels, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ4WE0GviLg
Sly's second big hit - and the first big hit of the SF rock scene - couldn't be more different than his first. While Beau Brummels' lead guitarist Ron Elliott has insisted this song was actually inspired by the Four Seasons, it's presentation is undeniably mid-period Beatle-y, what with the mid-tempo acoustic guitars, tambourine, harmonica riff, and complex vocal harmonies (not to mention the hard stereo panning of individual instruments). Lyrically the song is a multisyllabic mouthful, which lead singer Sal Valentino delivers in the somewhat mannered style of a more traditional crooner than either Lennon or Macca. And, let's face it, on a melodic and harmonic level this is a very weird song; while the verse, prechorus and chorus are all distinctly catchy on their own, each section is in a different key. It's not hard to see how this new territory would have appealed to someone with Sly's wide-open ears. Per Elliott: "He brought the band up a notch. He had me do a lot of overdubs, playing different parts, acoustic parts, electric parts." The single went to number 15 on the US charts, initiated "the San Francisco sound", successfully delivered on Autumn Records designs to cash in on Beatlemania, and made it clear Sly's success with Bobby Freeman was no fluke.

I like all that Swim nonsense. I generally can't stand the Beau Brummels' vocalist but he's OK on this one. I don't think I'd ever heard this song before - even though it's pretty famous.

The song is a bit like something Gene Clark could have written for the Byrds but it obviously pre-dates the Byrds.

never knew abt any of this stuff, thanks

24. Beau Brummels - Still in Love With You, Baby (Introducing the Beau Brummels, 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pULBWGT9bsk
The b-side to "Laugh Laugh". Decidedly simpler than the a-side, with surf-rock drumrolls/breaks and vocal harmonies that place this at some mid-point between the Beach Boys and the Byrds (which this predates by 6 months). Sly's production is clean and functional but not particularly noteworthy.

25. Bobby Freeman - I'll Never Fall in Love Again (C'mon and Swim, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy1z9KyIrOM
Sly's first writer-production credit for Autumn Records in 1965 was another attempt at a follow-up hit for Freeman. As the a-side of the single, this one didn't land, and it's not hard to hear why: there's no hook. A driving marching beat charges out the gate under a compellingly gritty and strange elecric guitar figure that seem to briefly signal that we're headed into some proto-Doors/Velvets territory, but once the vocal and overly busy horn line come in it doesn't actually go anywhere. The song is built around a rhythmic pattern that Sly would return to often - one that Larry Graham would subsequently rip into with abandon - this time around it just doesn't cohere.

I never understood what could have happened that would have explained your absence for three years. but I have missed you, I hope you contribute to more discussions, and I'm looking forward to this thread getting up to the non-obscure, highlight-of-20th-century-music era.

26. Bobby Freeman - Friends (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8V7y8qhtg
Sly wrote and produced the b-side as well, and this one is at least unexpectedly bizarre, with it's wonky 3/4 time signature and offbeat woodblock accents. It isn't good exactly, and it doesn't seem like a fit for Freeman at all. It feels more like an exercise for Sly to experiment with rhythmic arrangements in his inimitable way, with each section of the band (the percussion, the guitar, the horns, the vocals) all emphasizing different beats in the bar, creating a weird, rickety machine-like effect. Melodically it's similarly all over the place, moving through a series of shifting two-chord patterns and changing key midway through in a way that Brian Wilson probably would have appreciated, and the ascending ""friends, friends, friends"" refrain hints at a similar figure he would use for "Stand" a few years later.

27. Beau Brummels - Just a Little (Introducing the Beau Brummels, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYneeXVOAyA
Recorded early in '65 and released in April, the Beau Brummels' follow-up to their initial hit goes a bit further afield, right from the first few bars. Downright Ennio Morricone-ish in places, for some reason this became their highest charting hit, reaching no. 8 in the US. Sly seems to have reveled in the challenge of seeing what he could do within the confines of the restricted palette and abilities of the band, making up for their limitations by creatively leaning on arranging tricks: swapping instruments in and out, using different effects. You can hear it here in the intro where he's got two strikingly different guitar sounds paired against the vocal crescendo, or later on in the song when it switches to the "Be My Baby" beat and the guitars trade lines. Sal Valentino: "He was always joking, always real enthusiastic. He wanted to play more than he actually got to play. I think the end of "Just a Little" is the only thing he ever did that you can hear, that little timbales thing."

28. Beau Brummels - They'll Make You Cry (Introducing the Beau Brummels, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdafwzPG6NI
"Just a Little"'s b-side sounds like the theme song to some z-grade cowboy tv show with its repeated harmonica refrain and woodblock accents. The ridiculously affected nasal vocal delivery is an odd touch, perhaps a Dylan homage/parody? Although the other elements in the song don't sound like Dylan at all, including the simple but precisely arranged guitar parts (including one that is pitched up, or perhaps some kind of harp?) The foreboding tone of the lyrics do seem a little Dylanesque ("some people are fools/others are clowns", "life is no game" etc). A curio.

29. Mojo Men - Off the Hook (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srwhFKFZZII
A slight but charming slice of garage rock, opens with a not entirely convincing guitar figure and then sliding into familiar white-teenagers-do-three-chord-R&B mid-temp territory. Sly doesn't take too heavy a hand from the producer's chair - this is basic stuff. There's plenty of bands like this circulating in the SF-scene by 1965; it's hard not to fantasize about what might have happened if Sly and Fogerty had crossed paths.

Shakey, I love this thread and am so glad you are back and sharing all of this.

30. Mojo Men - Mama's Little Baby (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOAtLwDIjFQ
"Shortnin' Bread" a la Nuggets. This song is so basic the devil's always in the details, and there are a bunch here thrown in here for good measure (off-key piano solo, handclap accents, inserts of lyrics from "the Jerk"). They don't elevate it above its clear throwaway status.

31. Sylvester Stewart - Buttermilk (Pts 1&2) (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRQDW6tIZ74
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKzyfe4xxYI
Most appropriate descriptor for this instrumental dance number is probably "groovy". The arrangement is an interesting but not altogether unusual mix of disparate elements - jazzy organ lines, an R&B harmonica solo (Sly clearly really loves the harmonica, it's a constant in his arrangements), a bluesy bass and acoustic guitar breakdown. Hard to guess who's playing what but the chops are sharp and the pieces all propel what is essentially a very basic throwaway into some unexpected places. It wouldn't be out of place scoring a dance sequence in some shitty 60s beach movie. The "have a glass of buttermilk" refrain is pure R&B DJ patter, there were tons of songs like this up through the mid-70s.

2. The Vejitables - I Still Love You (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLsjE-c2Fqc
More proto-psych-rock from the Autumn Records stable, this time opening with a bit of faux-sitar elecrtric guitar, signalling we're firmly in jangle-pop territory. The rhythm section goes into double-time on the bridges, pushing against the longer melodic phrases of the male/female harmonies. Oddly it looks like this predated the Mamas & the Papas first single, the similar sound and approach are unmistakable. The "oh yeah" refrain at the end is particularly nice, with the counter-melody from the harmonica. Again nothing groundbreaking here but more evidence that Sly is more than comfortable operating with a different combination of sounds and instruments than one typically found in his R&B productions. The b-side ("Anything") does not appear to be available on Youtube.

wow, "Buttermilk" sounds like a direct swipe of the Stones' "2120 S. Michigan Ave." minus its guitar solo

The beginning of Buttermilk pt. 2 would sound great looped up, either slowed down for a rap beat or as the basis for a krautrock jam.

Oh yeah, just put it on .75 speed, that really should have been a '90s hip-hop sample.

I have an Autumn Records compilation somewhere on vinyl, I'll listen to it in conjunction with the thread before we're done this era.

I never realized Sly produced that Vejtables single! Their drummer, Jan Errico, is Greg Errico's cousin.

I kinda like the Bobby Freeman sides.

God bless Sly for trying his best with the Beau Brummels' tracks but I'm distracted by how dull the songs are.

Despite (more or less) covering what Brian Wilson called the greatest song ever written I'm not hearing much of any interest in the Mojo Men.

"Buttermilk" the first part is indeed groovy, the second part sounds like some guys messing about in the studio, I wonder who's playing that bass solo?

The Vejitables' track has nice vocals.

33. Beau Brummels - You Tell Me Why (The Beau Brummels Volume 2, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tXcDGIAe8U
Keeping up with the competition, the Beau Brummels seem to have taken a few tips from the Byrds this time out. "You Tell Me Why" is anchored by a pretty acoustic 12-string guitar part, walking the song through a fairly standard folk chord structure, punctuated by a harmonica lick. Valentino's delivery seems a bit David Crosby-ish as well, his tone is softer and less melismatic than on other cuts. The rhythm breaks down into staccato triplets for the bridge, augmented by four-part vocal harmonies. And again Sly goes with the hard stereo panning of elements into separate channels. Reached 38 on the Billboard chart in the states (number 8 in Canada for some reason). Not bad.

34. Beau Brummels - I Want You (The Beau Brummels Volume 2, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q9oqFB-7_0
The b-side to "You Tell Me Why" opens with distinctively plucked harmonics on a heavily reverbed 12-string and more "Be My Baby" drums/tambourine, hard panned across the mix. The three-part vocal harmonies are up-front and dry, completing a pretty minimalist arrangement (that only gets even more minimal in the middle when the vocals get whittled down to a solo). Its not particularly complex harmonically, melodically or rhythmically but it achieves an appropriately dreamy effect, like a proto-Stone Roses. Better than the a-side?

35. Chosen Few - I Think It's Time (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_P6LjB4EVo
Doesn't seem to be a lot of available details on the Chosen Few apart from their being from Stockton. The production on this single almost seems like a step back from the others Sly was cranking out; it's in mono for one thing and the sound is a bit grimier and more distorted, it sounds like it was recorded pretty much live. If the Brummels were aiming for the Beatles the Chosen Few seem to be shooting for the Stones. The circular bass riff that anchors the song works well against the merseybeat rhythm, and there's some nice interplay in the breaks. Also: more harmonica.

36. Chosen Few - Nobody But Me (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JwpHoZm77k
The b-side. Was expecting an inferior version of the Isley Brothers/Nuggets classic. Instead we get a not particularly complex but still solid little barnburner, built around that marching Motown rhythm. The male and female vocals work, the electric guitar licks are hot, the bass is fat, and of course there's that harmonica again.

37. Mojo Men - Dance With Me (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqySswHgSWg
For a song called "Dance With Me" the bizarre rhythm makes this seem like it would've been pretty damned difficult to dance to, the drummer can barely keep it together and it's one of those songs that deliberately obscures the downbeat. The organ solo in the middle seems tentative, like it doesn't know where to start or stop. To be fair this kind of rhythmic bait-and-switch tomfoolery is probably what appealed to Sly about the song in the first place. The vocal, at least, grows entertainingly more over-the-top as the song goes on, the ad-libs towards the end are pretty amusing. The b-side ("The Loneliest Boy in Town") does not appear to be available on Youtube.

38. Beau Brummels - Don't Talk to Strangers (The Beau Brummels Volume 2, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwiyK9HXAlA
While the Byrds only had a few singles out prior to this getting released, the similarities here are pretty striking. "I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better" has an identical 12-string guitar hook and had just come out two months earlier. This was Sly's last attempt at recapturing the Brummels' initial chart success. It didn't even crack the top 50 in the US. The delivery of "be aware of hidden dangers/and don't you dare go unto strangers" over the "Be My Baby" drumbreak (again!) is probably the best bit; otherwise it doesn't really gel, and the singers straining to hit those harmonies at the end is embarassing. The production itself is solid, but the songwriting and performance are lacking.

39. Beau Brummels - In Good Time (The Beau Brummels Volume 2, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTxdVCs_Pro
Well at least they switched things up for the b-side. Here they try their hand at a clumsily modified Bo Diddley beat, and the addition of a crackling fuzz guitar almost puts this in freakbeat territory. Valentino delivers another Dylan-esque vocal, which unfortunately is rather undermined by sloppy harmonies. Sly and the Brummels would both go on to better things shortly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTxdVCs_PRo

40. Bobby Freeman - The Duck (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sylv98uzFI
One last swing for the fences. Keeping with the aquatic themed dances that were his bread and butter, Sly and Bobby simply borrowed this song from Fred Sledge Smith and Earl Nelson. It isn't clear if this came out before or after Jackie Lee's version (which went to No. 4), but Bobby's didn't even chart. As a basic one-chord groove (okay there's three counting the turnarounds) this is actually pretty thumping, and Freeman is obviously in his sweet spot doing this rile-up-the-crowd schtick, even injecting some dynamics more suited to a live show when he brings things down a bit towards the end. Sly's arrangement and production are solid, capturing the energy and raucousness of a big R&B ensemble cranking away at full gear.

41. Bobby Freeman - Cross My Heart (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX8XhOoiAWU
The b-side to ""The Duck"" single. This one is pretty different from Bobby's hits, opening with a callback to Sly's occasional attempts at latin rhythms like the cha-cha. Lyrically there's an ironic statement of purpose about his staying power (not to mention a callback to "Little Old Heartbreaker"), but Bobby's time in the limelight was basically over after this. While the song builds nicely and is competently delivered, it lacks a dynamic hook or riff, unfortunately.

So happy to know about Sly Stone's early aquatic dance-based career.

42. Sylvester Stewart - Temptation Walk (Pts 1 & 2) (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of-BmZydkQk
Sly's last release under his own name for Autumn Records, this time a stop-start arrangement built around a bongo break, a droning organ, and even some distortion creeping into the electric guitar. The drums, interestingly, have no swing to them at all - they pound away in a very straight, driving 4/4 rhythm, with a walking bassline and the other instruments providing the color and movement. No lyrics per se beyond the shouted refrain, which (harbinger of things to come) is a call-and-response between male and female voices.

Definitely starting to sound very Family Stone!

43. Mojo Men - She's My Baby (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgLeOkSm56E
That ripping fuzz bass riff is clearly the highlight of the band's final Autumn Records single, and it kicks this little white R&B nugget into high gear when the gang vocals, harmonica and tambourine are firing away on the refrains. Otherwise things don't get too wild, this is compact, serviceable garage rock. Sly would keep this fuzz bass sound in his arsenal for the next several years. This song didn't even chart, the band's biggest success didn't arrive until the following year with a cover of a Steven Stills song ("Sit Down, I Think I Love You") on Atco.

44. Mojo Men - Fire in My Heart (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-fvVxCvnog
At first this b-side seems to be more in the vein of the Beau Brummels with that chiming guitar part, but the minor key chords, the droning farfisa and wordless backing vocal take this in a slightly stranger direction, more discordant and spooky, especially on the instrumental section in the middle where they're basically doing a modal, two-chord drone. A bit more interesting and unique than their other productions with Sly.

45. Sly Stone - Rock Dirge (Pts 1&2) (non-album single, 1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjX4Xt4rZXo
This is not actually the first release under the name "Sly Stone". It was issued in 1970 on some label called "Woodcock" as a cash-in on the band's post-Woodstock popularity, but actually recorded much earlier (circa 1965) prior to languishing in the vaults. The title is a total misnomer as the song is neither a dirge nor does it rock - instead it leads off with a surprisingly dusty and funky drumbreak, well ahead of the curve of the rhythms of the time. What follows is a fairly straightforward organ, drum and acoustic guitar workout, with lots of breakdowns and dropouts, making it sound like it was likely assembled from multiple rough takes in the studio.

interesting

phat360's avatar
phat360 Apr 16, 2008
This is an early and very good compilation of psychedelic soul from the eccentric Sly Stone.
I picked this record up in a charity shop the other day for £1 and judging by the album cover I believed that it was going to be a live album from a show in SanFrancisco. To my great surprise and relief it wasnt.
Some really good mind bending soul with the up tight Sly twist.
If you like your break beats head straight for Rock Dirge as this is one monster of a beat!
This beat is easy to loop and is a real pounder of a beat that hasnt really been sampled too heavily.
I think it may have been sampled by the hardcore rave breakbeat heros of mine Genaside II but i'll have to check.
A break beat for the ones who know.
Classic!

46. Great Society - Someone to Love (non-album single, 1966)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw7BSVBrpTg
When Autumn Records folded in 1966 (most of the recording contracts were sold to Warner Bros, the records and catalog going to Vault Records), they were struggling to outbid bigger labels for potentially successful signees like the Warlocks (aka the Grateful Dead), the Charlatans and the Great Society. But before all that went down, Sly was on-hand to produce the Great Society's initial single for Autumn's subsidiary North Beach. Darby Slick: "Sly started coming over to some rehearsals and started having ideas how we should change this and that. We flatly refused to anything he suggested because we knew where it was at. Getting in the studio was a real nightmare for him and not that much fun for us, because we wouldn' accept any of his ideas there either... I'm sure he thought of us as very unprofessional, unpolished, maybe not even real musicians. And we thought of him as this controlling guy who wanted to make everything be a certain way." Sly reportedly was pissed that it took them 53 takes and this is all they got. Can't blame him, the band sucked.

47. Great Society - Free Advice (non-album single, 1966)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DSX62KLAoU
More awful warbling from Grace Slick, a flatly delivered vocal from David Miner and a backing track that is simultaneously both too boneheaded and yet not boneheaded enough. It's hard not to think of the Velvets, who would have imbued this material with perhaps sloppier musicianship but also more menace and unpredictability. As it is it just grinds on mindlessly, never developing or building up to anything.

Yes, this is a terrible single, and supposedly Sly left the studio before it was "completed". Imagine how bad the previous takes must have been that these were regarded as releasable masters!

...even or especially by 1966 standards.

Huh, I had no idea Sly produced the original Someone to Love.

I listened to The Autumn Records Story, which contains eight of the songs discussed above, and can't really add anything to the excellent summaries already offered, except "Dance With Me" is even more rhythmically perverse than described!
The record also includes "Anything", the Vejtables b-side, which is an interesting haunted and moody minor-key but peppy tune, with a strange percussive instrument high in the mix. I'd actually call it better than any of the other selections on the record (doubtless due to rights issues, the only Beau Brummels songs on the compilation are two demo/outtakes).

"Anything" was (smartly) the Vejtables track included on Rhino's S.F. Nuggets box.

48. Billy Preston - Advice (The Wildest Organ in Town!, 1966)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFDVGmNb9zc
1966 turned out to be very much a transitional year for Sly - Autumn Records folded, he took his radio show from KSOL to the more straight-laced KDIA, and he put together a band called Sly and the Stoners (not to be confused with his brother Freddie's competing band, the Stone Souls). All of the future Family Stone members were in each others' orbits at this point, either playing with or competing against each other. In the meantime, he gets an arranger gig with fellow R&B child prodigy Billy Preston, who's already had a wildly successful career backing Mahalia Jackson, Nat Cole, Little Richard and Sam Cooke (oh, and he also knows the Beatles). Jack Douglas was in the producer's chair. Sly is credited as arranger for this entire album, but the tracks that most likely feature his actual instrumental contributions seem the most relevant here.

And this first track is especially interesting because it predates the version that would appear a year later on the Sly & Family Stone's debut album. Evidence of Sly's composing and arranging skills, the song is pretty much fully formed already - it's got the staccato riffs, the lyrics, and a soon-to-be-very familiar vocal refrain that he would return to again and again. For some reason there's also a harmonica-led "Louie Louie" breakdown in the middle. Throughout, Billy does what he does best, punctuating the tune with a flurry of embellishments, runs and fills on the Hammond.

49. Billy Preston - It's Got to Happen (The Wildest Organ in Town!, 1966)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_wmsmXoIbQ
Understandably indulging in a proverbial organ workout, bolstered by some percussion shenanigans between the bongos (panned hard left in the stereo field for some reason) and the drums. The song opens at a breakneck pace and never really lets up, leaping between some simple chords banged out on the piano and Billy's more melodic and dynamic organ fills. As a showcase for Billy's inventive phrasing and improvisational skills against a high-energy dance rhythm it works great, in many ways not that far off from Blue Note's contemporaneous stable of "rare groove" organists (Jimmy Smith, Lonnie Smith, Ruben Wilson, etc.)

Billy apparently returns in a few years to play on a later Sly album.

50. Billy Preston - Free Funk (The Wildest Organ in Town!, 1966)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3dyfC5aO0w
A different kind of "funk" - the blue, depressed kind. Billy is a showy player, and Sly wisely keeps the arrangements understated and simple so that nothing distracts from showcasing the organ. Billy's playing is (as usual) really wonderful, running through all kinds of figures and turnarounds but always with a keen ear for melody and expressiveness, accentuated here and there by the reverb cranking up. Sly essentially getting out of the way and just giving Billy the proper backdrop.

51. Billy Preston - Can't She Tell (non-album single, 1966)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjQ-zQWL_tI
Produced by David Axelrod. Possibly an outtake from "The Wildest Organ in Town" sessions (which had production credited to Steve Douglass) given that it has Sly's credit on it and was cut in '66, but the overall sound is pretty different, and it was issued as a non-album 7" single. Sly's touch is definitely evident in the bass and drum parts, can't tell if that's him singing harmony on the choruses or not. Odd to hear Billy playing piano instead of organ. While his playing drives the arrangement he doesn't indulge in any of his usual fireworks - it seems like this was constructed more towards the goal of getting a hit pop song, with the emphasis being on the vocal and the instrumental interplay. The driving Motown backbeat, clanging electric guitar, and thumping ascending bass riffs are all hallmarks of Sly's early signature sound.

52. Sly & the Family Stone - Underdog (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPEIFMSAkcQ
The core group in place (minus Rose, who was around but would not officially be in the band until the next record), Sly's palette is now exceptionally broad - while he's unquestionably the leader the ensemble nature of the arrangements and performances have clearly pushed Sly into new territory, and this doesn't bear much resemblance to anything else he's cut so far. Drums and bass rumbling underneath, the opening cut on their first album leads off with the horn section doing a weird minor key interpolation of "Frere Jacques" before Sly calls out "hey, dig!" and the rhythm section locks into a James Brown-ish ""washing machine groove"" (as Fred Wesley used to call it), punctuated by a cappella gospel "yeah yeah"s. Sly's vocal dashes back and forth from a sung-spoken lead, brief snatches of harmonizing, and ad-libbed shouts. The drums dropping in and out give the song a constantly shifting feel, manic and propulsive during the verses, contrasted with the horns alternately jabbing out counter-melodies and then marking time in the choruses.

As with pretty much all of Sly's songs from here on out the lyrics are in the present tense - a wry mixture of pep talk, social comment, and hipster patter molded into a statement of purpose. The band's overall presentation is worth further consideration, because it was very deliberate - "Underdog", like many of the band's songs, is about *the band* and their lifestyle, presented as an aspirational ideal, a multi-ethnic, gender-balanced, self-aware unit that is in opposition to the current social fabric. This is pretty unusual for the time; Sly isn't (generally) writing narratives or poetic metaphors for the band to sing, he's writing self-mythologizing, declamatory expressions of their identity. While this was a time-honored approach for blues musicians and early r'n'r guys like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, by the mid-60s R&B and rock acts generally weren't doing this. James Brown would certainly get there shortly, but compared to the Motown and Stax acts or Sam Cooke or other predecessors, this is strikingly different.

53. Sly & the Family Stone - If This Room Could Talk (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIuIR0DByLM
Again opening with a deceptively clean, catchy horn line that then abruptly shifts into a head turning rhythm, this time one that emphasizes the last upbeat of the phrase, rather than the downbeat. The sound is relatively spare and tight, but also exuberant, with Sly taking the lead over a simple two chord plagal cadence pattern, and Freddie, Cynthia and Larry's backing harmonies occasionally peaking through. At the bridge Sly's organ lays down droning chords as they switch to a more standard motown beat, Sly hollering and ad-libbing over the top. By the end Sly, with Errico's drums popping along underneath, introduces a vocal style he and the group would return to again and again - ridiculously rhythmic and percussive scat-singing. (An aside: never seen this suggested anywhere, but this seems like a clear antecedent to Michael Jackson's "bow-chicka-mmh-ahh" signature vocal interjections; Sly did it a lot, and certainly the Jackson 5 was taking notes on him and the band in general). The lyrics are lightweight lover-I-didn't-mean-to-do-you-wrong nonsense but it doesn't matter, the appeal here is in the bizarrely energetic Frankenstein arrangement; the embryonic ensemble is the star.

Sly turns 80 today!

"Underdog" has a much more bitter, incisive lyric dealing (I guess) with racism than you would expect if you only knew his '68 and '69 songs of togetherness and celebration, the harshness of 1971 was already latent.

if one child posts at the rate he appears to be inclined to, in three days there's gonna be a treat for anyone who was paying attention to or fondly regards popular music in 1991, but who may not be the biggest crate digger. Like me! I have a promo of the Whole New Thing record, sent to me alongside all the better known peak era Sly records, that were each reissued in —what was it? 2002? 2003? I didn't listen to it until 2020, and man, this whole record is super exciting, cuz precisely because of its obscurity, no hits at all, its absolutely fresh and much much better than the record that followed. It's pretty obvious that Dance to the Music is comprised of THAT song alongside a shit ton of filler, as they had to cut it really fast after "Dance…" hit and Clive Davis wanted more material. Anyone who cares about Sly but only knows those bangin' fuckin' hits or canonical hits needs to hit this thread…

These are two of the best songs on the album (even though "Underdog" is perhaps slightly too long), I'm saying that but I haven't actually listened to this album in a long time so I might change my mind on that.

I have a promo of the Whole New Thing record, sent to me alongside all the better known peak era Sly records, that were each reissued in —what was it? 2002? 2003?

The first CD reissue of A Whole New Thing was in 1994 or ‘95. I remember buying it and feeling a little apprehensive, as the only reviews I’d read were lukewarm. But I was pretty blown away, and it’s among my favorites of his…or anyone’s.

Sly turns 80 today!

Just noticed that. Somewhat miraculously still with us.

54. Sly & the Family Stone - Run Run Run (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiLWrU-JX08
Larry Graham's impact on the band's overall sound, R&B/funk, and bass playing in general cannot be overstated, and you can hear it clearly in the opening bars here, with his fleet-fingered thumping propelling the song forward. A brief bass-and-melodica fanfare blossoms into some weird, frantic folk-rock/Motown hybrid that shifts gears so many times it's head-spinning. Byrds-ian electric guitar breaks, a chiming xylophone, droning organ, bass and drums maintaining a furious rhythm, before an abrupt left-turn to an arpeggiated horn part, followed by the addition of a worldess vocal and a simple bass drum pulse. Then it whips back to the verse, shouted vocals, more xylophone, more instrumental verses. The band overall is very self-aware about the audacity of what they're doing both on a musical and socio-political level, and the lyrics reflect a theme (initially broached on "Underdog") they would turn to again and again: us vs. them, the freaks vs. the squares, the hippie day-glo utopia vs. the button-down establishment. No doubt this is the kind of song that turned an initially small coterie of white hippies' heads as well black musos like Miles Davis.

55. Sly & the Family Stone - Turn Me Loose (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpWL60Z5txs
Channeling some of the more manic strains of James Brown's R&B blowouts, this one comes charging out of the gate with horns, guitars, bass, gospel organ and drums galloping along in what at times could almost pass for a hyped up ska song. All the players get off crazy breaks, particularly Errico and Freddy. Vocals are a similarly hyped up call-and-response series of exhortations. And then it's all over in under 2 minutes. Seems designed to serve as a live set opener to rile up the crowd.

56. Sly & the Family Stone - Let Me Hear It From You (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsVY87NdXqw
Larry's first showcase, reportedly recorded late at night when his voice was at its most relaxed and supple, also unfortunately feels like the album's first misstep. Worth noting that right from their first rehearsal when Larry suggested having a vote to determine who would be the frontman/bandleader (everyone else laughed off this suggestion, as it was clear Sly was in charge), Larry was not entirely comfortable taking a backseat to Sly. As crucial as he was to the band's sound and dynamic, he could not accept that he was just not the songwriter or performer that Sly was.

Led off with a blaring organ and drum fanfare, the song then downshifts into a languid, lovesick ballad, almost minimalist in its construction compared to the rest of the tracks. Sly and Larry's playing throughout is lovely and dynamic, and can't really fault his emotive vocal, but the song itself is just kind of boring, something of a straight Otis Redding/Stax pastiche, without any of the idiosyncrasies or cross-genre experimentation that they draw on elsewhere.

yell if this is a derail too far but i started looking up the timeline of electric slap bass -- as in who was brown's bassist in 1967 (bernard odum), who first played thumb-slap with brown ("sweet" charles sherrell in 68, followed by bootsy, who was actually with brown for less than a year) , and so on…

anyway i found this curious section in larry graham's wikipedia

Born in Beaumont, Texas[2] to successful musicians, Graham played bass in the funk band Sly and the Family Stone from 1967 to 1972.[1] It is said that he pioneered the art of slap-pop playing on the electric bass, in part to provide percussive and rhythmic elements in addition to the notes of the bass line when his mother decided to no longer have a drummer in her band, while Graham also admits in a BBC documentary on funk music that he is unsure if it was done on economical grounds;[5]

why is graham's mother suddenly mentioned but not named? economic grounds in what sense? turns out (from his own site) that pre-sly he played first organ then electric bass in his mother's band (the dell graham trio) in california and when she slimmed it down to a duo he apparently developed his slapping style to compensate for the slimmed-out drummer

When my mother (Dell Graham) and I started working together I was playing guitar and so it was guitar, my drummer from my band, and piano. And we worked like that for a little while, but then we went into this one club where they had the organ and I started playing the bass pedals and the guitar at the same time. So we had bottom. But when the organ broke down, we missed the bottom. I went down and rented a bass, temporarily, until the organ could be repaired. I was not planning on being a bass player. As it turned out, the organ could not be repaired - there was no parts available or whatever.

My mother at that point had traveled all over the world - she sounded almost identical to Dinah Washington when she sang, and she played almost identical to Erroll Garner. So that was the combination. She did standards, jazz, blues, pop, country, whatever.

When we started working at Relax with Yvonne's on Haight and Ashbury... I had developed this style. We didn't have a drummer now, so I would thump the strings to make up for not having a bass drum, and pluck the strings because I didn't have that snare drum backbeat. And I developed this style, but I didn't think I was developing anything new. It was just out of necessity. Just trying to do the gig right, make it sound good and feel good. After a while of doing this, that's just the way I play. I never thought about playing the overhand style, the way bass players were playing then, because I wasn't gonna be a bass player. So even though musicians would look at me like "that's a weird way of playing you are playing there," it didn't matter, because it was just not my instrument. I didn't care what anybody thinks, says, or nothing. At the same time, I'm not listening to bass players to be influenced by them, because I'm not a bass player. I'm a guitar player. In my mind this is just a temporary gig.

And bass players in those days - playing lead guitar and singing was kind of out front, where bass players were more in the background, which is cool if that's where you want to play. But that was never in my thinking, I was out front singing, playing lead guitar and stuff. I think it was because of all that focus on the guitar, wen it came to bass, there was noting to interfere with creating this style that later on became different. When Sly head this - by that time, I had developed it a lot - he asked me to join his band. Now I was going to be combining that style with drums. That in itself, looking back, was really something different. And he being the person he was, he was able to see that this is something that would be a contribution to the band. - Larry Graham, "Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History" (Joel Selvin, 1998)

Here we begin to encounter some of the problems I have with this album. For all the unusual and clever arrangements and instrumentation I just don't think the songwriting is that great.

Man, it never even occurred to me that “Let Me Hear It From You” wasn’t Sly on lead vocal. I can hear it now, particularly when he jumps up an octave but both have a similar tone in the baritone range.

As for the songwriting, I have always really enjoyed “Underdog” and “I Cannot Make It” since I first heard them when I was reviewing The Essential Sly Stone for Stylus. But I was actually a little surprised at how much I enjoyed the songs on A Whole New Thing as none of them were hits.

But in general I found the performances and record as a whole way more compelling and listenable than Dance To the Music, which had a lot of filler, and arguably Life (tho I may find I feel differently once we get to those albums). While the songs are not as strong from a pure writing standpoint as you get later on, and the arrangements do a lot of heavy lifting here, all the nursery rhyme brass bits and little vocal snatches, combined with some really tough rhythm section playing, do give this record a really fresh, vibrant feel on the whole.

I know people don't rate it and think it's superficial (or something) but the grooves and basslines are so much better on "Dance to the Music". But we'll get to that.

57. Sly & the Family Stone - Advice (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sFOSiSr9l8
Another horn fanfare intro immediately segues into a brief but deeply funky drumbreak that would become a hip hop staple decades later. Errico is up there with Stubblefield, Starks, Modeliste and a small coterie of other drummers in developing a new rhythmic template in pop music, and this is the first instance where that really shines through. The consistent groove allows the ensemble to pack an incredible amount of detail into the arrangement in under 2 minutes, without ever losing focus or cohesion. This is especially remarkable for material that was tracked live to four-track; every couple of bars some new twist is introduced. The group vocals are loose and dynamic, alternately harmonizing and splitting apart into multiple lines, Sly, Larry and Freddy growling and whispering, ad-libbing, trading lead. Sly again pens present-tense lyrics full of the titular advice - he and his gang are exhorting people to live a certain way and follow their lead (and stop hassling them just cuz they're different, maaaan). And then there's a melodica solo fed through a tremolo effect, and a certain repeated two-note horn stab that the band would turn to again and again later in the discography.

58. Sly & the Family Stone - I Cannot Make It (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGPsvHd6mbo
The band's musical ingenuity is on full display, turning a handful of riffs and a fairly simple chord pattern into an opportunity for all kinds of rhythmic change-ups, dropped beats, and unexpected turnarounds. Errico and Graham in particular spend the whole song pushing and pulling each other into unfamiliar figures that all rotate around a straight 4/4 rhythym. Great harmonies embroidering lovelorn lyrics, and there's an almost countrified set of guitar licks from Freddy in the bridges. And it concludes with a little tape manipulation trickery for an extra psychedelic touch. Perhaps the most Beatle-y track on the album.

that all rotate around a straight 4/4 rhythym

Not always -- the bit at 0:30 goes 4/4, 7/4, 4/4.

I was going to say you were being pedantic, but I actually think that’s a good catch. The fact that it goes 7/4 twice means that the downbeat turns back to the two and four by the time the second verse rolls around.

Killer writeup on Advice. That was not a song I fully grokked until this listen. It’s an incredible Sly miniature.

"I Cannot Make It" is a definite high spot on this album. Disco hi-hats around 0:51! "Advice" is a good one too.

59. Sly & the Family Stone - Trip To Your Heart (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgmvPNef4Lk
Opens with perhaps one of the most abrasive moments in Sly's catalog, a cacophony of shrieks, drum rolls and guitar slides, before abruptly launching into a double-tracked, deeply funky drum break, a rising-and-falling vocal melody and a contrapuntal horn line. Sly's lead vocal rides over the top, featuring the first (?) of many thinly- and not-so-thinly veiled drug references. With the chorus the mix gets overtly "freaky" - you can hear the two drum parts split as one keeps the rhythm and the other highlights the ride cymbal following the lead vocal and skipping over the beat in triplets, while heavily reverb-ed organ swells, slide guitar and what sounds like a wavering theremin make it feel like the song is falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. The structure repeats and then the song ends as it begans, with cacophonous wailing. Four track psychedelia at its most tightly arranged, intentionally disorienting and disconcerting.

The Inspector Gadget horn riff on this one is p damn catchy.

60. Sly & the Family Stone - I Hate to Love Her (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp2k-6lgMN4
The band dials back the manic energy for a bit, shifting gears for a mid-tempo tune with a drifting horn line over suspended organ chords. They still throw in some aural left-turns (is that a melodica played through a wah-wah? Plus a rhythmic change-up in the refrain).Freddy's guitar seems mostly absent; the song is anchored primarily by the organ and the complex group vocal arrangement. The melodramatic bass vocal (Larry?) is a bit much, and the standard lovesick lyrics are not particularly notable.

Vocals might be Freddie? Not much of a song, to be honest. "Trip to Your Heart" is entertaining in a Haunted House kind of way. I still think the songwriting on this album isn't that strong.

I'm wondering if I'd be enjoying "Trip To Your Heart" this much if LL never sampled it. Definite synergy there.

How in the world does “Mama Said Knock You Out” not give a writing credit to Sly?

61. Sly & the Family Stone - Bad Risk (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXzWj_GbQ8
The band rolls out another groove with a combo horn and tremolo guitar line over a thumping rhythm section. Larry takes the lead on the vocal arrangement, backed by the others' occasional "oohs". The chord changes follow a fairly standard blues pattern (as do the slut-shaming lyrics) but the rhythmic change-ups and inventive arrangement constantly keep the song off-center, with tambourine accents, cold stops, a shifting horn line, and electric guitar licks constantly popping in and out. Sly in particular seems to take something of a back seat with the organ, generally staying out of the way.

62. Sly & the Family Stone - That Kind of Person (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws5Uj0ihNGA
Their version of a slow-burning R&B ballad. The arrangement and performance are solid if not particularly inventive - the organ swells, the horns stab, the guitar is fluid, Sly's vocal swoops and glides - but it doesn't reach the heights of similar fare from the likes of Otis Redding or Solomon Burke.

63. Sly & the Family Stone - Dog (A Whole New Thing, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haDoWNvozYg
Starting and ending the album with dogs, for some reason (this band loved dogs according to numerous anecdotes, both positive and negative). Opens with another brief horn fanfare, then rolls into a funky uptempo rhythm that proceeds to twist and turn and start and stop numerous times before we even get to the first chorus and its a capella breakdown. Again, the arrangement is tightly packed with details, phrases and rhythms popping in for a couple of bars before swerving off on a different tangent (check out that brief fuzz guitar in the second verse), but all within a recognizable pop structure. Sly leads the vocals, with the others interjecting at key points, the lyrics a jumble of mixed metaphors and shopworn woman-done-me-wrong sentiments.

64. Sly & the Family Stone - Dance to the Music (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn2PNlhvy8E
After building a rep in the Bay Area and recording the first album in LA, the band decamped to New York. Manager Dave Kapralik: The group was on the road playing toilets and Sly came into my office, truculent. The album had died and he wanted out of his contract, wanted out of Epic... I remember saying to Sly that the response was great from other musicians, but it is not in the pop idiom. I said that he should do a record that pop ears can relate to and in between stick in your innovative schtick. He continued to be surly and said that he was going back to San Francisco.

Jerry Martini: I remember Sly going over to CBS Records and the executives saying to us, "This is what you should listen to." They gave us some shit and Sly threw it down and looked at me and said "Okay, I'll give them something." And that is when he took off with his formula style. he hated it. He just did it to sell records... it was so unhip to us. The beats were glorified Motown beats.

It is perhaps also worth noting that by this point, Sly had already begun to surround himself and the band with thugs (Hamp ""Bubba"" Banks, in particular) and everybody involved is generally awash in cocaine and heavy-duty pharmaceuticals.

Released as a single at the tail end of 1967 (with "Let Me Hear It From You" from the previous album as the b-side), this gave the band their first hit and opened the door for things to come. The second album was subsequently rush recorded and released in April 1968 to capitalize on the single's momentum. What's inarguable is that the formula worked, and soon tons of people were applying it and profiting from it. Structurally, the formula works like this: lay out a simple dance beat, introduce a group refrain, then have each vocalist take a turn highlighting themselves and their instrument, in turn spotlighting the bass, the horns, the fuzz guitar, the organ, etc. one at a time. Thematically, the lyrics are an unabashed mix of partying exhortations and hippie sloganeering. The complex changes and arrangements of the previous album have been excised. It's not difficult to detect the cynicism in this approach but it's also hard to resist the actual end product - especially the ridiculous group scat vocal breakdowns that they were refining to perfection. The song became something of an anthem/calling card for the band, and soon they were opening shows with it and performing it on TV (there are some absolutely nuts clips out there).

One particular stylistc facet that was perhaps perfected for this single (but which first appears on "I Cannot Make It" from the previous album) is a certain bass figure - while the drums play a stiff, four-on-the-floor beat, evenly emphasizing each beat of the bar, the bass moves around in a peculiar way, emphasizing and drawing out the "and" beats (one-AND-two-AND etc.), creating a certain amount of tension in the rhythm. Not sure if Larry invented this, but once you notice it you can hear it carried through their entire catalog, and this rhythm subsequently pops up all over the place (funk, reggae, disco). The band was at the forefront of developing an entirely new rhythmic vocabulary that incorporated this push-and-pull dynamic between the bassline and the drums.

Maybe that's why he looks so miserable on the cover.

great song, great thread - turns out the narrative I had in my head about the band and why their music changed was far too simplistic, it's wonderful seeing their music come together even though red flags are showing up much earlier than I was ready for

did the entire band consider their popular material to be commercial hackwork or is that just martini's (and maybe sly's) opinion? it's a shame if that was the case

That's a good question, I don't know. Larry always seemed like he'd be more into the fun side of things, in a lot of ways Graham Central Station were like the Family Stone with all the darkness removed.

If I were One Child, it would be a great April Fools' joke to stop the thread here after so many years of waiting: "we've dealt with the highlights, nobody cares about all the rest".

65. Sly & the Family Stone - Higher (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLWireCuqoo
Huge, formulaic hit aside, this is still a band of hyperactive weirdos on a mission to aggressively synthesize musical styles, and their chops and instincts could not be fully suppressed. This song could easily have been on "A Whole New Thing" the way it whipsaws between its stiff, staccato, oom-pah-band-at-the-county-fair opening, the swirling organ-led verses, and then the overdriven shoutalong choruses with its ascending chord pattern (and then, because of course, a harmonica solo). It's something of a jerry-rigged monster that doesn't quite work, Sly still working out what to do with this refrain that he was obviously fond of and knew was special. As with most of "A Whole New Thing" it sounds very much like it was recorded live with minimal overdubs/edits - they left in the "You" vocal flub at 1:45.

Can you be formulaic when you've only just invented the formula? "Higher" does sound like two songs squashed together.

66. Sly & the Family Stone - I Ain't Go Nobody (For Real) (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7h_mjRfhQ8
Maintaining the same tempo and feel of "Dance to the Music" but deviating from the structure to make room for more adventurous interplay, including opening with another carnival organ riff that gradually snowballs into the verse's two-chord vamp. The creatively voiced chord progression in the intro is structured such that it seems to be both ascending and descending as it builds in intensity, and is repeated throughout the song to break up the verses, which are comparatively basic and taken as an opportunity to throw off various licks. The band seems energized throughout (apart from an organ line that seems to falter a couple of times), but going on for 4-and-a-half minutes seems a bit unnecesary. Sly's vocal and lyrics are unremarkable, apart from the lines equating loneliness with freedom.

Can you be formulaic when you've only just invented the formula? "Higher" does sound like two songs squashed together.

67. Sly & the Family Stone - Dance to the Medley (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNwS82EtDcE
In which the band invents(?) the "extended remix". It sounds like it's patched together from various takes of the title track, you can practically hear the engineer's razor splicing the tape. Along with Freddie's heavily distorted guitar, Larry's fuzz bass is prominently featured. Not sure if this is the first recording to really spotlight such an effect but it was definitely unusual. The structure of the track itself, however, ultimately feels almost random. Various parts are extended, there's a lot more vocal lines (including quotes of other songs), the drums drop in and out, there's small variations in the horn lines, but there's no cohesive structure. Things do not build up or gather momentum as modern ears might expect. At certain points the tempo starts to drag, the rhythm track drops out entirely, and elements get repeated in a seemingly haphazard fashion. By the end the drums disappear and there's just a squall of hard panned guitar fuzz and wandering farfisa lines before it peters out entirely. Is this a genius dancefloor filling moment compiled from studio scraps or is it just ... filler? No doubt sticking this kind of track in the middle of the album seemed (to some listeners at least, and ostensibly the band as well) as cheap and lazy.

It's not something I listen to very often but, nonetheless, this track is amazing and, to use the old cliche, years ahead of its time.

"I Ain't Got Nobody" - I love the way the guitar, organ and piano do little filigrees around each other in the interludes between verses, it really elevates a pretty good song into something special.

68. Sly & the Family Stone - Ride the Rhythm (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDLiUjQju6g
A brief tattoo on the snare and the band gallops off at full clip with the horns blasting away, but just as quickly everything drops away leaving just Sly's bubbling organ and Freddie (?) kicking off a series of traded lead vocals between himself, Sly and Larry that harken back to both Bobby Freeman's dance hits and Sly's radio DJ patter. The band vamps on the titular refrain for a bit but it isn't long before Errico runs into trouble keeping up the pace as it hurtles forward. Freddie gets off a bunch of wild wah-wah guitar theatrics in the background. Really it's Larry and Freddie that drive the song, especially towards the end when Errico drops out entirely and the band (again) launches into some a capella scatting. While the tune is distinct from "Dance to the Music" (it's more frantic, for one thing) it does feel like it's assembled from previously developed bits: calling out the drummer for a spotlight, the two-note horn figure, the scatting, the dance-oriented lyrics.

Catchy enough chorus but the song as a whole doesn't particularly go anywhere.

It's said that Sly was overdubbing a lot of the instruments himself by the time of Riot, but do we know that, say, the guitars on the earlier records are Freddie and not him?

I don't know why they wouldn't be Freddie, he was a pretty good guitarist. It's been mentioned itt but a lot of these early tracks were likely recorded live.

69. Sly & the Family Stone - Color Me True (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_SwgcmO5O0
A quality deep cut, albeit one that similarly relies on familiar bits that are interspersed throughout the album. Errico, Robinson and Martini kick it off with a complex little drums-and-horns fanfare that again seems designed to trick the listener as to where the downbeat is, before Larry and Freddie come into to establish a mid-tempo groove over Sly's minor key organ drone (Larry again doing his pumping-and-breathing bass pattern). There's minimal chord changes here, not even from the verses to the choruses; the band instead leaning on creatively arranging their various riffs to drive things along.

Sly, Freddie, Larry and Rose trade off the lead vocal lines, and while at first blush the lyrics echo some of the familiar hippies-vs-the-squares rhetoric there's more going on here. More ambiguity, more irony, more reflectiveness, more bitterness, more paranoia. It can be read as self-righteous criticism directed at a listener, or as a weirdly paranoid internal dialogue, or even an intra-band argument.

Do you know how to treat your brother?
Do y’all know how to get along with one another?
When you retire, do you go right to sleep?
Do toss and turn when fear starts to creep?
Color me true

Freddie doesn't usually get much credit as a flashy player, but his ability to navigate a variety of styles (wah wah solos, folk fingerpicking, fuzz leads etc) is underrated and he gets off some nice parts throughout, switching between Pops Staples-ish blues licks and chicken scratches. The breakdown at the end with just Errico and Freddie is super tight, just before Sly leads in the rest of the band with another scat-sung coda.

I'm loving these breakdowns... it's fascinating the things that a musician keys in on, that I wouldn't have noticed.
Based on the trajectories at play here, it shouldn't be long until the first instance where One Child's write-up is more interesting than the song of the day

70. Sly & the Family Stone - Are You Ready (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3tA75qmCxs
Another real gem tucked away in the back half, possibly the best song on the album. A lone snare crack kicks off a melodic line from the horns and organ, one of the best hooks on the album, followed by a fantastic bassline from Larry, bobbing and climbing his way up until he and Errico snap into a skintight, one-note groove for the verse and the titular vocal refrain from Rose and Sly. The interlocking parts here are ingeniously arranged, every instrument has its own little bit that's distinct from the others and emphasizes a different beat in the bar, but it all fits together. Then it's back to the hook and a verse with one of Sly's sharpest and sunnily sloganeering lines yet ("Don't hate the black / Don't hate the white / If you get bit / Just hate the bite / Make sure your heart is beatin' right"). The rest of the song employs the "Dance to the Music" approach of stripping everything down to just a drum break before reintroducing each instrument one at a time, building things up to the climactic horn-and-organ hook. Larry, Freddie and Greg especially do a killer job here as the rhythm section, listen to that wah wah fuzz squeal underneath the hook, just before Errico gets off a series of drum fills. Sly's organ also notable, you can hear him feeling around the edges of a funkier style than he's employed before, inserting staccato fills between the sustained chords.

Yes yes yes to all of that. Track could easily be twice as long though.

71. Sly & the Family Stone - Don't Burn Baby (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUHdRAjpZA4
One of those tracks that seems like maybe cocaine was involved, the pace is ridiculous. Opening with a horn figure was standard for them by this point, although this time it's initially juxtaposed against ticking clock percussion from Errico and Sly's suspended organ chord. The energy ramps up as Errico establishes the manic tempo on the kick drum and the other instruments roll up (the bass, guitar, and horns all fire off quick ascending runs ahead of the vocal coming in). Errico's hand percussion (bongos) adds an extra layer of frantic rhythm accents. Larry's bassline alternates between staccato 8th notes (matching the drums) and quarter notes matching the horn accents, by the time they reach the first chorus everything feels way too fast, and the structure repeats. Freddie's guitar fills in the breaks switch between folk-raga-rock phrases and speedfreak riffing; both he and Larry are really ripping through almost every bar. Lyrically it's more generally upbeat, positivist lyrics in the face of the riots and uprisings that were tearing through the country in the summer of 1968, with a sing-songy DJ patter delivery (note the callback to "Underdog"), by the end devolving into just shouts and grunts.

72. Sly & the Family Stone - I'll Never Fall in Love Again (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdqoeQfUclM
Larry takes another lead turn at the mic, ending the album with a song that bears little to no resemblance to anything else on it. Every other song on the album is built around either a simple set of riffs with minimal chord changes or a fairly basic verse-chorus-verse structure, but this one has both an unusual amount of chords and a much more complex pop song structure. It also lacks Sly's more distinctive lyrical tics, instead relying on shopworn lovelorn sentiments. Sly took full writing credit for every track on the album, which was perhaps not entirely justified given everyone else's obvious contributions, but this one in particular feels like Larry likely had a direct hand in writing it. In some ways it sounds like a leftover from the previous record.

Larry alternates between playing melodic leads, the horns, guitar and organ scattering around him, employing double-stops just before the vocals come in, and playing an ascending bassline under the vocals (Sly and Freddie leading in with "never never never" on the refrains is a nice touch). There are a bunch of weird chord inversions and unexpected turnarounds, as well as an actual middle eight where the rhythm section reverts to staccato quarter notes while the horns pop off countermelodies. Midway through the song they hit on an extended one-chord vamp, Larry doing a call-and-response with the group vocals, before the horns come back in and cue the switch back to the choruses, Freddie again filling in with a bunch of fluid guitar runs.

73. Sly & the Family Stone - Dynamite! (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxfRj2TO0O4
At the core of why Sly is such a frustrating and fascinating figure is that while he is a genius (innovative, charismatic, funny, progressive, prodigiously multi-talented), he has a flipside that runs counter to all that: lazy, repetitive, petty, selfish, greedy, destructive, violent. And this isn't entirely a personal judgment, a lot of this is evident in the discography, in the music itself. When he hits on something new and exciting and successful, he goes back to it over and over and over again, he doesn't know when to stop. With the original band this manifested as a reliance on formulas and musical tropes that congealed into a singular style - the a capella scat breakdowns, the horn stabs, the bass patterns, the self-referential lyrics. Which has a lot to do with why the second album can sometimes sound like a handful of ideas stretched over too long a running time, as opposed to the debut where there's a bit more variety and freshness to everything.

Recorded in May 1968, just a few months after "Dance to the Music", and then released in September 1968, the third album represents something of a retrenchment. At this point, they're making industry waves as the new hot-shit crossover R&B act that no one quite knows how to handle, which is clearly a position that Sly and the band relished. They have some very famous peers taking notes - Miles Davis, Motown, Mose Allison, Tony Bennett - and they have a mass audience. They have more freedom and clout now, as well as a proven pop formula. The band is touring large ballrooms in the US (Fillmore East, Electric Ballroom, Aragon Ballroom, Electric Circus, etc.) On the non-musical front, Sly is carrying around a violin-case full of pharmaceutical grade cocaine and prescription pills from a NY doctor, and the band has already had multiple run-ins with the law (including the National Guard during the Detroit riots) and various people (both black and white) who are enraged by their interracial entourage and relationships. Following the release of ""Life"", Larry being busted in London for weed torpedoes the band's UK tour.

As a high energy opening track, "Dynamite" is awash in the psychedelic rock trappings of the day, right from its keening distorted guitar riff, which is almost immediately blasted into overdrive with the addition of Larry's fuzz bass. The song has a dynamic structure, gradually building to a climax before looping back to the intro multiple times. The band digs into their bag of tricks - traded vocals, soul claps, burbling organ and popping basslines, galloping drums - for this ode to a hippie wild child, before dissolving into a morass of stereo panned psychedelic effects (as well as a quote of their big hit for good measure). While this still retains the live-in-the-studio approach there's clearly a bit more engineering chicanery going on here than before; you can hear punch-ins and cuts, and there's hard stereo separation of several of the parts.

Interestingly, and going back to Sly's penchant for constantly recycling and reimagining material, he later recorded an entirely different take on this song a couple years later with 6ix for his Stone Flower label. (We'll get to it).

very much appreciating your continued work itt, sir

Prefer the second album to the first album and the third album to both. I don't really mind acts who have a formula if the formula is good (Fela Kuti? Ramones? Numerous others). Having said that, these albums tend to be on the lightweight side, with ideas that aren't always fully developed - the songs are often too short, for instance.

74. Sly & the Family Stone - Chicken (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb-8-2D8kdw
A brief but ingeniously and humorously constructed mini-drama. The lyrics feature a dialogue between a would-be seducer and an unimpressed object of affection, again sung by aternating vocalists, interspersed with a chicken squawk refrain that is mirrored by the guitar, organ, and horn lines. On one level this is a silly dance track, but on another it reflects a duality Sly loved to explore - the cocksure exhibitionist who is also wracked with doubt. Several lines reference fear/being scared, with Freddie delivering perhaps the most inscrutable, admonitory verse ("Don't let a stranger sell you stories / Buyin' is cheap and so is lyin' / I've got a place already for you / The space between livin' and dyin'")

Musically while the chord and verse-chorus-verse structure are rudimentary, the instrumental interplay is bonkers. Errico takes a bit more of a pounding approach to his and Larry's trademark rhythm four-on-the-floor rhythm, and Sly and Freddie in particular throw in all kinds of back-and-forth curlicues and embellishments in an almost conversational manner. The horns generally stay out of the way, dropping one-note blasts one the downbeat and doubling the vocal bok-bkok phrase. The stereo-panned production is also sharper and more nuanced than on the previous two albums, every instrument is given its own space in the stereo field but the overall effect is of a cohesive, live performance (mostly, there's definitely some punched-in backing vocals that have their EQ squeezed into the high end).

The contemporary Rolling Stone review called Life "the most radical soul album ever issued"; would there be any other likely candidates by 1968?

75. Sly & the Family Stone - Plastic Jim (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFr8w8QPI9E
This band loved to winkingly quote other songs (Sly devotee and occasional partner-in-crime George Clinton's penchant for quoting nursery rhymes seems like an extension of this) and they open this track with a bizarre juxtaposition: the horns deliver a tweaked line that borrows its phrasing from "Mary Had a LIttle Lamb", while Sly and Freddie sing a modified version of "Eleanor Rigby's" most famous lyric. Errico plays long drum rolls under the intro before picking up the tempo for a series of three-chord verses, interspersed with choruses that repeat the intro melodies. Interestingly, the whole structure bears more than a little resemblance to "Underdog" from the debut. Once again there is a lot of space in the stereo mix, and it sounds like a few things (horns and vocals) have been double-tracked. Lyrically in the vein of Bob Dylan's "finger-pointing songs" (albeit not as verbose), the band again draws a line in the sand between the hippies and the squares, before winding up the song by downshifting back to the intro, minus the vocals.

Freddie again knocks out sharp fills and runs throughout; its notable how rarely he sticks to a rhythm guitar role, and how much this is a function of the ensemble being composed almost entirely of lead players, no one really takes a backseat to the others (with the notable exception of Rose). Graham is similarly kind of unhinged as a player, his background as a dynamic lead guitar player is always very much in evidence. This ensemble approach is really one of the band's distinguishing features - Sly is ostensibly the lead, but everyone else is equally flashy in a way that was not common with other R&B (or even rock) bands. Everybody is a star. This is not to say that James Brown or Otis Redding's backing bands weren't full of fantastic players, but they didn't sound like they were all trying to steal the spotlight from one another from one bar to the next. With the original lineup of the Family Stone it feels like there's a constant jockeying for position that gets funneled into really creative arrangements.

76. Sly & the Family Stone - Fun (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLBZBv-J8w0
A classic. Neither a single nor a hit, this song still feels like it could have been both, and was later included on their stopgap "Greatest Hits" album in 1970. For such an exuberant sound and subject, the arrangement is compact, streamlined, restrained. There's no intro horn fanfare, no lead guitar lines, no breakdowns for the players to show off. The verses follow a repeated 4-chord pattern (with a 5th thrown in for a turnaround). Errico's introductory snare snap launches right into the verse's vocal line, Freddie and Sly (or Rose? not sure) playing alternating rhythm parts on the electric guitar and organ respectively, and Graham popping staccato 8th notes over Errico's straight-ahead snare hits on the 2, 3 and 4. This sets up a chugging rhythmic backdrop for the vocal, with Martini and Robinson playing a countermelody in unison. Where the fun comes in is in the vocal delivery and the lyrics, the band is clearly enjoying themselves as they trade lines, throwing in a comical "Sock it to me" (this phrase was everywhere for some reason in '67-'68, cf. Aretha's "Respect", Mitch Ryder, Laugh-in) and a significant amount of giggling and studio chatter in the second half of the song. Not for the first (or last) time there's also explicit references to family throughout - sisters, brothers, father, mother - which function as both generic archetypes as well as literal references to the band itself (Sly's father K.C. was still their road manager at this point, by all accounts a devout Christian who nonetheless managed to turn a blind eye to the band's interpersonal sex and drugs shenanigans).

Bass playing on this album is stellar.

Re: "Sock it to me", Andrew Hickey covered this in his episode on Aretha Franklin's "Respect":

Another bit of slang was that backing vocal phrase, “sock it to me”, which Aretha’s sister Carolyn had heard someone say and had decided would make a good background line. “Respect” popularised the phrase, and it soon became a national catchphrase, becoming a running gag on the comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, to the extent that even Richard Nixon joined in with it in a desperate attempt to seem down with the kids prior to his election as President

77. Sly & the Family Stone - Into My Own Thing (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-gt5fRWH6c
Mixing the rhythmic template of the previous LP's "Color Me True" (albeit slowed down a bit) with the "Dance to the Music" player-callout structure. The famously sampled opening phrase, with the guitar, organ and horns playing in unison, segues immediately into a one chord vamp underpinned by a martial cadence from Errico and the titular chanted refrain. That's pretty much the entire song, which is otherwise interspersed with a fuzz guitar lead, trilling piano, and a brief snatch of fuzz bass. It all sounds fine but it doesn't develop in any way, and the lyrics can most charitably be described as "functional".

78. Sly & the Family Stone - Harmony (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwoSHG4tnlk
Sly's presentation of the band as a model or a template on multiple levels (musical, familial, political) was self-conscious and deliberate. It was as if the overarching guiding principle was to performatively demonstrate all the levels on which an archetypal multiracial unit could function, right down to the construction of the music itself. ""You can be you / let me be me / that's harmony"". There's some other more muddled lines in the lyrics, maybe the most notable of which is the "easy as a-b-c / 1-2-3" rhyme (Sly is often- sometimes sloppily - cited as a precursor to Prince, the Temptations psychedelic period, Miles Davis going electric, etc. but his impact on the Jackson 5/Michael Jackson seems to be a less common topic).

Oddly, for a song about harmony this tune is based much more around some pretty complex melodic interplay than it is around harmony. Apart from the way the vocals split into three on the word "harmony" in the choruses, there aren't many harmonies at all, most of the horn and vocal lines are in unison. There is a lot of remarkable playing right out of the gate though, and apart from some overall improvements in fidelity and mixing it wouldn't have been out of place on the debut LP. From the very first bar there's three different countermelodies going on - Sly playing one melody on the organ, Rose (playing a similar line to the next tune, "Life") on the piano, and Martini and Robinson playing their lead line, which is joined by the lead vocals entering with the aforementioned refrain for the first chorus. Freddie joins in at that point as well, throwing in a flurry of fills and runs, and Graham lays in one of his trademark huffing-and-puffing staccato 8th note basslines. Remarkably everyone finds a lane and stays in it, each part is clear and distinct from the others, but also contributing something essential to the machinery of the song. The band rolls through a couple of verses and choruses before abruptly slowing to a waltz time breakdown and then drawing out the last two chords for a melodramatic ending. A solid deep cut; if it has any drawbacks it's that it feels like a dry run for the next (even better) song.

Interesting, that opening horn part on "Harmony" recycles the lead vocal melody from a radio promo spot Sly did for his own radio show (no idea of when). The lyrics go

S-T-O-N-E yeah
S-T-O-N-E
(can't remember this line)
Soulful as you can see

Sly Stone is my name
Playing records is my game
A little bit different every night
Always outta sight

...and then he vamps and laughs a lot while the track plays on for another ~10 seconds. I just spent about an hour looking for confirmation of this spot anywhere online, esp on youtube, but can't find it. It pops up pretty often on WFMU's Rock and Soul Radio stream, but the promos and ads used as interstitial bits between tracks don't show up in archived playlists. The main R&SRadio automated stream isn't archived (anymore) but the Night Owl show still is; if I ever hear the Sly promo on an archived show again I'll note it here.

79. Sly & the Family Stone - Life (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D71VV30MYog
Evidence of the fundamental injustice of the universe, this lead single from the LP was not a hit. Backed with "M'Lady" it debuted and peaked at No. 93 on the Billboard Hot 100 dated August 27, 1968, and lasted only three weeks on the chart. As with "Fun", "M'Lady" and a few of the other tracks on the album, the tune is economical and precise in its construction, the band's outlandish and exuberant tendencies harnessed into a tight pop structure. The carnival barker opening - a classic psych pop move (cf. Sgt. Pepper's etc.) - is accompanied by a calliope-like organ riff and the horns introducing the chorus melody as an oom-pah band delivery (not sure who that is on the tuba, presumably Robinson). Errico and Graham enter with their signature 4/4 rhythm - note how Larry picks up the tuba line - and the rest of the band launches into a couple of choruses with group vocals, Freddie playing rhythm guitar accents throughout. Larry sings the first verse over staccato accents from the horns, organ and guitar, and Sly takes the revealing second verse: "You might be scared of somethin', look at Mr. Stewart / He's the only person he has to fear / He'd only let himself get near / He don't trust nobody / If he stopped bein' so shady / He could have a nice young lady". Again with Sly's trademark juxtaposition of pep talk and paranoia. Freddie gets in the last verse (which contains yet another dog reference, perhaps appropriately as Freddie was the perpetually abused puppy of the group) and then the song wraps up with a sharp 1-2 hit. It's the little details that make this song work, the verses and choruses are both structured around the same four chord pattern (with some alternate 7ths thrown in). Just listen to that horn line in the verses as it skitters around the rhythm, or Larry's bassline bopping up and down between octaves.

80. Sly & the Family Stone - Love City (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvaICINNHkY
This one feels like filler, based around a simple concept (hippie utopianism) and a handful of their standard riffs, the exception being Errico's drumbeat, hard-panned in the right channel and tailor-made to be endlessly looped. The horns play a line that echoes the vocal melody of "Harmony" at one point, and in the background you can periodically hear Martini play a figure with similar phrasing to his line in "Dance to the Music" and "M'Lady". As on several of the other songs, Graham uses his fuzz pedal to signal his entrance and kick the energy up a notch, although it's interesting he never seems to use this sound for more than a bar or two. Freddie, Rose and Sly generally don't offer much beyond handling the group vocals. There is a little bit of studio experimentation going on in the track - aggressive stereo panning, reversed, overdubbed cymbal splashes and some occasional washes of reverb. Second-tier.

81. Sly & the Family Stone - I'm an Animal (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCDc711Wd7k
This track sounds like it's punched in in the middle of a take, starting right in with the "hey hey hey" (subsequently repurposed for "I Want to Take You Higher") and the titular refrain. Freddie's fuzz lead doubled by Graham's bass, which keeps up the pulse throughout. Errico plays with a bit less energy and inventiveness than usual, sticking to a minimal beat. Otherwise the song's bones are it's ascending chord line and the one-note "I'm an animal" vocal line. Sly seems to be attempting to take a playful spin on a trope with obvious racist undertones, but it doesn't quite land, the lyrics are overly goofy. Things get a little more interesting with the dreamy, suspended chords in the bridges, although those sections are marred alternately by some of the sillier lines ("Let me be your bear friend / And I wanna monkey around with you") and all the over-the-top growling and animal noises (again: dogs). Sly had a real penchant for mouth music, scatting, non-verbal vocalizations, beatboxing, whatever you want to call it: it shows up early on with the group vocals, his frequent interjections "boom shaka laka"/"buh-boom boom boom" etc), this song, "Don't Call Me N***** Whitey", a bunch of other tracks. It's a distinctive, perhaps overlooked but significant aspect of his style.

This will interest you.

found this for 50p - promo of sly and the family stone’s “dance to the music” with press release! I’m so happy! pic.twitter.com/A6KXHeOeHQ

— huw (@huwareyou) April 22, 2023

"82. Sly & the Family Stone - M'Lady (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7kyNlb1PJQ
Formulas aren't bad in and of themselves, the good ones provide creative artists a playground to mess around in. "M'Lady" repurposes many of the band's formula components in a way that's obvious to anyone paying attention: the group vocal scatting, Errico's pounding martial dance beat, Graham's fuzz bass punch-ins, Martini's clarinet lick, the way instruments drop in and out. But this is not just an uninspired retread of "Dance to the Music", the band sounds energized, and each little phrase and part has been tweaked or refined in an interesting way. Odd details pop in right from the start. The group vocals pan across the stereo field, Sly's vocal mimics Freddie's guitar part, Sly throwing in triplet organ fills that build into an actual descending chord change midway through the song before abruptly reversing and climbing back up the scale. By the time the band lands back on the chorus they're firing on all cylinders, the sound is thick and rich, Errico and Freddie slamming the downbeat while the horns, organ, guitars and vocals swirl around. Then it's a jump-cut back to the a capella breakdown and another chorus to the fade-out. It's more compact than "Dance to the Music", more focused. A few audible edits with overdubbed vocals aside, the band's mostly live-in-the-studio performance has a palpable joy. The placeholder lyrics can be forgiven. Released as the b-side to "Life".

83. Sly & the Family Stone - Jane is a Groupee (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee2Nj5YRlOE
These lyrics are harder to forgive. The overt slut shaming comes across as cruel and hypocritical. Which is too bad because there's some really interesting things going on musically in this song that deviate from the band's usual bag of tricks. For one thing, Errico develops a variation of one of his standard grooves, throwing in a little triplet figure between each beat that gives some extra propulsion to his normal marching-band funk rhythm. Sly would return to this pattern consistently for years to come, cf. the opening of "In Time" and many others. The other players also get creative: Freddie trades fuzz licks with Larry but also indulges in some of his most outwardly acid-rock moves throughout. The horns play long, langurous phrases as the energy of the song ebbs and flows every few bars. In between his usual fleet-fingered basslines, Larry drops out for entire measures, adding to the stop-and-start feel of this dreamy, minor key song.

It's worth noting that the third album is really the last time the original ensemble functions as a discrete, cohesive unit. Through this point there really is a sense that the band functions as a democracy with Sly as more or less a figurehead. Everybody plays on every track, everybody gets a turn in the spotlight, everybody is throwing in ideas. And while the next album and its subsequent singles represent the commercial peak, it's also at this point that that approach breaks down. Sly begins to acquire even more of a central/dominating role: changing up the instrumentation of various songs, bringing in outside players, playing things himself, sidelining first Freddie and then Larry (culminating in death threats and actual violence between competing factions in the band).

Great writeups

Re: Jane Is A Groupee, the same year we had "Star Collector" by the Monkees, so the groupie phenomenon seem to have been on the radar at the time.

Written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin no less!

84. Sly & the Family Stone - Stand! (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49vjFN6Fsw
Preceded by the release of their first no. 1 single "Everyday People" (b/w "Sing a Simple Song") in November 1968, their fourth album "Stand!" followed in May 1969 and was a commercial and artistic inflection point for Sly and the band. After three relatively unsuccessful LPs, there is a clear refinement of their approach on the LP, and some subtle but significant changes creep into the songwriting and performances.

At first blush, the song contains a lot of familiar elements. It opens with yet another circus/fairground musical figure, this time a drumroll from Errico that makes it sound like the band is about to take a swan dive off a trapeze, and then abruptly cuts to the verse, powered by Errico's four-on-the-floor rhythm and Freddy and Larry anchoring the chords on the up-beats. Sly takes the lead vocal for himself for once, with the others chiming in to provide harmonies, delivering another of Sly's hectoring sermons about bucking social constrictions. Larry does his fuzz bass accents, the horns play a drifting counter-melody, Freddy gets in a couple wah wah licks in between comping chords, and the choruses are lifted up by soul claps and the climbing vocal line.

The mix is ferocious, but it bears pointing out that the chord structure is also ingenious: the verses start with a simple three-chord pattern but then the whole pattern modulates down half-a-step, creating a tension that's released when the melody swoops up to the chorus, which goes up a full step higher, ultimately resolving on the same chord the verses do. There's a circular motion to the structure that's oddly satisfying, like it could just go on forever.

But that's not what happens. Instead there's an audacious edit at the end that patches on an entirely different coda, which switches to C minor for a one chord vamp. By all accounts this was added after the rest of the track had already been completed and an early mix had received a poor public reception. Sly took Errico, Martini, Robinson and some unidentified session musicians (most likely Little Sister for the backing vocals, more on them later) back to the studio and cut this incredible 49-second section, featuring a highly syncopated bass riff doubled by a guitar and offset by Sly's organ, a furious drum pattern (just listen to those 16ths on the hi-hat), a two-note horn blast that Martini and Robinson had been using for years, and an insanely catchy vocal hook (can never go wrong with "na-na-na"s). This tag pushes the song into groundbreaking, audacious territory and there's no doubt it contributed to the song's overall success (#22 on the Hot 100, #14 on the soul chart). Hard to imagine that Graham and Freddy didn't regret their absence or feel burned by their exclusion.

I never knew that about the session musicians for the coda! I still remember the first time I heard this song -- the main tune itself struck me as *very* 60s hippie on first blush but I was immediately blown the fuck away when the coda edit came in. This wasn't long after I'd discovered late-60s/early-70s James Brown and this felt such a piece with that, but, as you note, with a fury and aggression I had never heard before. At that point, the contrast with the more utopian verse became much more powerful (and desperate). Another great writeup.

the verses start with a simple three-chord pattern but then the whole pattern modulates down half-a-step

Actually three semitones; and the coda sounds in C# to me. One of the neat details of that verse is that sometimes the subdominant chord is minor ("...end you'll still be...") and sometimes major ("...done all the...").

Actually you're right: the coda's in C, and I've been starting the song in A instead of A♭!

85. Sly & the Family Stone - Don't Call Me N***** Whitey (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G-2U-qPsZU
(Title g00gleproofed because racists). Putting this as track two is a pretty ballsy move. The N-word had essentially vanished from popular mass media by the 60s - apart from relatively underground comedy records, it was verboten to either utter or spell out the word on a record. There's no doubt that Sly was aware of this, and opted to break ground by defying convention and putting out a song that highlighted America's racial divide in the most confrontational way possible. The use of the term on record skyrocketed after this (Last Poets debut would come out less than a year later, for example). A generous reading would assume there's no false equivalence intended between the terms used in the song; what Sly is really doing is conveying stasis, paralysis, a seemingly never-ending manichaean conflict between two sides that can't figure out how to move forward, as Rose sings on the song's lone verse: "Well, I went down across the country / And I heard two voices ring / They were talkin' funky to each other / And neither other could change a thing". This is not a song of hope, or even a plea for understanding or unity.

The title and lyric are not the only provocative element, the song bears almost no resemblance to anything else in Sly's discography to-date. It's built out of two distinct sections: one a see-sawing two-note pattern underpinned by a slower-than-usual marching cadence from Errico, and the other a half-time section built around the titular refrain, punctuated by long horn blasts. As the band alternates back and forth between the two sections, Sly leans hard into a heavily processed scat-sung lead vocal (which sounds like it's primarily being fed through a heavily distorted wah-wah pedal), with occasional interjections from Graham. Sly doubles the refrain with his organ, as does Freddie with his wah-wah guitar. And it's long, much longer than anything they'd put out so far (with the exception of "Dance to the Medley") The song only seems to become more and more tense as it rumbles on, never really resolving or reaching a climax, eventually just cutting short altogether."

86. Sly & the Family Stone - I Want to Take You Higher (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqWQzOzK3kw
On the LP, the band followed its most in-your-face moment yet with another that was begging to court controversy, cheekily basing an entire song around a double entendre meant to highlight the parallels between the effects of drugs and music. While perhaps novel or shocking to some, that was only because people hadn't been paying attention: the song is built primarily out of motifs Sly had been playing around with for years. These include the central refrain, which had previously appeared in "Higher" (off of "Dance to the Music"), and before that in Billy Preston's "Advice (off of "The Wildest Organ in Town"); the "hey hey hey" from "I'm an Animal" (off of "Life"); and the one-chord vamp + riff structure they'd explored on several previous tracks ("Into My Own Thing", etc.) They also make the obvious Doors quote because hey, why not.

Clocking in at over 5 minutes, this is another instance where the band stretches out into longer, slightly jammier material than they had previously ("beat is getting stronger/music gettin longer too"). Freddie, Larry, Rose and Sly all trade lines as they have many times before, but the feel of this song is overall sweatier and more distorted, the result of several different production and arrangement choices. For once, Larry lays on the fuzz bass for more than just a bar or two, leaning on it for entire verses. It also sounds like there's actually *two* bass tracks (one clean and one distorted) at certain points. The vocals, horns, and organ also intermittently stack on top of each other, playing the same riff in unison. There's a cumulative weight to all this that lends the track its extra punch and crackle, which is evident right from the opening bars where Sly's wailing harmonica overlaps with the horns' introductory crescendo and Larry doubling Freddie's guitar line with the fuzz bass. While overall the track sounds very live, there were definite overdubs and edits. Sly's harmonica, the horns, and several bass and vocal bits are clearly punched in. The organ is dropped out for the "boom shaka laka" sections and it also sounds like initially live horn takes are bleeding through to other tracks at various points. In some ways this track is the band in its archetypal/ideal state. Everyone is energized, united, euphoric. Any cracks are papered over with a cooperative enthusiasm, and the playing and singing on everyone's part is muscular and aggressive. Sly (on harmonica), Freddie, and Robinson all take solos, and towards the end Martini impressively sustains a single high note for about half a minute. Who knows how long the master take of this went on for, as with "Don't Call Me N*****, Whitey" it sounds like it was designed to be potentially infinite.

Released as the b-side to "Stand!", the second single off the LP. Subsequently reached #38 on the Billboard Chart on its own in 1970, following their performance at Woodstock. Their officially released live performance of this track at Woodstock will be covered in a separate post.

glad you're gonna cover the woodstock version, best performance of the entire festival imo

What I notice most in this recording is the many different levels of the voices - different placement in the stereo field, different volumes and levels of reverb, compared to the insistent and constant instrumental track. It's very subtle and measured compared to what e.g. George Clinton would do with similar tracks in the next couple of years.

87. Sly & the Family Stone - Somebody's Watching You (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyCuIBDjehg
Fantastic deep cut from start to finish. Classically-trained studio engineer Richard Tilles has noted that "the Family Stone up to 'Stand!' was a symphony orchestra, whereas the stuff after that is more like chamber music". "Somebody's Watching You" is where that transition starts to happen. This is where the recording strategy starts to migrate from capturing the in-studio performances of an ebullient live band to something more hermetic, sculpted, pieced together. In parallel (or perhaps even ahead of) similar engineering techniques being refined in UK studios at the time, instruments and voices are close-mic'd so that the sound is dead and dry, with no natural reverberation. Overdubs and punch-ins come to the fore. Effects like reverb are applied at the mixing stage not to evoke an actual physical space, but to disassociate the various instruments from each other. At no point in this song does it sound like everyone is playing in the same room together: various elements (including the reverb that pops in on the instrumental choruses) are hard panned in one channel or the other; the horns are heavily compressed and off in a closet somewhere; Sly's wandering organ solo is clearly overdubbed and at one point is punched out so abruptly it creates a weird drop-of-water sound effect; the EQ on the vocals in the third verse are crushed in the upper frequencies, like they're coming out of a transistor radio.

This song is also emblematic of how dense and tangled the band's music was becoming. Stephen Paley, Sly's A&R from the label: "He had a music theory book by Walter Piston, about orchestration, and he would always refer to it." This song doesn't have a particularly complicated structure - it's just a descending four chord pattern interspersed with a two-chord chorus and some grace transitional chords between - but the chord voicings and inversions and overall melodic inventiveness are beguiling. As soon as you zero in on a particular detail like the horn line or the intertwined vocal harmonies they zip off in some unexpected direction. The organ chords are voiced in a way that tricks the ear as to whether they are going up or down the scale. Errico's drumming is both minimal and tense, as if he can feel the Rhythm Ace that would soon replace him lurking in the background. Freddie comps chords in a pattern that's not tied to either Graham or Errico at all, occasionally bursting into fuzz licks on the instrumental breaks. Graham still drives the rhythm with his familiar patterns, but even he seems more restrained than usual. The vocals periodically break apart, fluttering into different spaces in the stereo field during the choruses, then dovetailing back together for tight harmonies on the verses. The horns play a countermelody that meanders into its own little pocket universe almost entirely distinct from the vocal melody.

The coy, epigrammatic lyrics outshine every other song on the record. Many of the lines can be read as intensely personal references. For example: in a veiled but unfortunately homophobic touch, Sly calls out Dave Kapralik, his gay manager, as "shady as a lady with a mustache"; also hard not to read the "Sunday school don't make you cool forever" as a jab at his parents, or "Secrets have a special way about them / Moving to and fro among your friends" as being about the band (not sure if Sly's affair with Robinson was already underway). But lines like these are also not unnecessarily specific, they are broadly observational, universal; they're a unique mixture of the deadly serious and the comic, delivered with a sad, knowing wink. And some are just blankly grim: "Jealous people like to see you bleed" or "Ever stop to think about a downfall? / Happens at the end of every line" (coke reference?)

Sly would shortly cut an entirely different version of this song with Little Sister (comprised of his younger sister Vette and two of her friends), who had been singing backup for the Family Stone since the beginning, and release it on his Stone Flower label.

A fascinating overlooked track (considering that almost every other song on here wound up on Greatest Hits); my favourite detail is how he holds back the ♭VII chord (E♭) until the very last bar of the chorus. The heightened suspicions of the lyric seem to be a result of increasing cocaine paranoia.

I almost completely missed this until I heard the Little Sister version.

Me too! Love the LS version so this one is a bit of a late revelation.

Same – the writeup does a great job of giving me a ton to chew on and sort through.

I see Sly is working on a memoir. Is the Jeff Kaliss book any good? I read the oral history some years back but would absolutely dig into a really good biography.

There's quite a lot of Sly anecdotes in the George Clinton book Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?: A Memoir. In fact, Sly is the only character who comes across warmly and vividly; Clinton doesn't really delve into the personalities of his band members, and is particularly dismissive of Bootsy Collins.

It struck me as weird, when Sly was doing his quasi-comeback about 15 years ago, that either he or his handlers seemed to be avoiding discussing the issue of drugs. Rather than playing up the "recovery" aspect, as you would with most stars who had been largely absent from the public for more than two decades, there seemed to be a desire just to turn the clock back to 1968 and play the material for its most obvious "party up" aspects. That's why I wonder what sorts of revelations could be expected from a Sly memoir.

Now hold on a minute there, George Clinton dismissive of Bootsy? Say it ain't so.

88. Sly & the Family Stone - Sing a Simple Song (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42YGprrAOj0
Closing out side one of the LP with the b-side to "Everyday People", which was initially released ahead of the album in November 1968. The song begins by abruptly cutting into a gradually swelling organ chord, Freddie's guitar wailing over the top as the vocals gradually join in. Errico dials up the tension with a drumroll before dropping a truly monstrous beat that has reverberated for decades. Sure this song (like all the others) is credited solely to Sly but the recording is completely dominated by the rhythm section. Errico's groundbreaking and hugely influential beat is unlike anything else he's played up to this point, both taut and slippery, a combination of hammered hi-hat quarter notes, nimble footwork, and hard-hitting fills, and Graham matches him pound for pound with an octave-jumping bass riff (doubled by Freddie's guitar). Sly's overdriven organ lurks in the background, punctuating the end of each bar, and the horns alternate between crescendos and staccato accents. Throughout the verses the horns and organ and horns duck in and out to emphasize different bits of the central lick.

As with much of the rest of the album, the recording is fairly hot and live, with hard stereo panning to give everything space, anchored by the organ and bass in the center (iIsolating the drums in the right channel would subsequently make it easier for hip hop producers to chop a clean sample). Sly's shouted vocal careens back and forth across the stereo field, the other voices all given their own individual sonic space. The song ducks back and forth between the mammoth hook and an ascending four-chord break that ramps up the tension each time around, with Errico pounding out uniform quarter notes as the vocals slide up the do-re-mi scale. Midway through, however, there is an honest-to-god drumbreak/middle eight where Graham and the vocals drop out, ceding the spotlight to Errico and a growling, bent-note riff from horns and Freddie (with Sly's organ also peeking through), putting the song on a whole other plane. As with the coda on "Stand!", the break feels like it was specifically designed to leave the audience wanting more, a peak that appears only once in the song yet begs to be repeated endlessly.

The lyrics are Sly at his most wide-eyed and uplifting, an ode to joy and perserverance in the face of trouble, frowns, and and ups and downs, delivered again by the whole band, with even Cynthia joining in this time around. The lines have an appealing, repetitive nursery rhyme quality and the lines are pitched back and forth by the singers like a game of hot potato. The song ends on an unusual note, an isolated and deliberately placed studio artifact of the overdubbed vocals, as if Sly meant to pull back the curtain and flip the song inside-out to expose the seams holding it together.

Didn't really like this one until I heard the single version, which fades out a minute earlier - it just seemed a more focussed performance.

89. Sly & the Family Stone - Everyday People (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUUhDoCx8zc
The band's first bona fide pop crossover hit went to number one on the Soul Singles chart and Billboard Hot 100. As one of their signature songs it encapsulates the sentiments the band leaned into so heavily on their first four albums, distilling their mult-cultural ""can't we all just get along"" philosophy into a simple series of melodies that play out over what is essentially a one chord vamp (ok, two if you count the subdominant chord in the piano part). Graham doesn't have much to do with his atypically one-note bassline, so he leans into the his slapping technique to accentuate the off-beats of Errico's mid-tempo rhythm. Freddie's guitar is entirely absent (unless that's him on those punched in fuzz accents). The horn lines essentially echo the vocal melodies. And really it's the vocals that make this song work and cemented it as a hit, the way they're arranged is almost a textbook exercise in how to wring out harmonic and melodic variations from a single chord. For a band as exuberant and technically skilled as they were, this song is weirdly restrained and minimalist in its construction, there's no solos, no flashy demonstrations of technique, no trading off in the spotlight - it's all about the voices.

And yet, while the overall message comes through, the lyrics seem kind of sloppy and muddled. They incorporate a nonsensical "and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo" to the "nanny nanny boo boo" melody (Songs that incorporate the "nan nanny boo boo" melody). And the "there is a blue one who can't accept the green one" and "There is a yellow one that won't accept the black one / that won't accept the red one / that won't accept the white one" are possibly the archetypal "i don't care if you're black, white, purple" lyrics (i don't care if you're black, white, purple). These nursery-rhyme type of lines get the point over and are definitely part of the song's broad appeal but they also are a little cheap, even hacky. On the other hand, coining "Different strokes / for different folks" goes a long way towards redeeming the lazier lines.

Sly has often cited Solano Community College music professor David Froelich with instilling in him an appreciation for paring a song's musical elements down to the bare minimum; for a song to work, it has to function at the level of its most basic components, otherwise piling additional elements on top achieves nothing. "Everyday People" seems emblematic of this approach, which Sly would increasingly focus on over the next couple of years.

These nursery-rhyme type of lines get the point over and are definitely part of the song's broad appeal but they also are a little cheap, even hacky. On the other hand, coining "Different strokes / for different folks" goes a long way towards redeeming the lazier lines.

I've always felt a little indifferent toward this song. In addition to the reasons you cite, OC, the Arrested Development "People Everyday" interpolation of this left such a bad taste in my mouth that by the time I spent time with the real thing I was kind of predisposed to dislike it. But I would agree that out of all of Sly's big hits, this one has always seemed a little facile.

Just want to say this thread has totally revived my love of Sly's discography and I cannot believe I am reading it for free, cos I would pay cash money for this book; a million thanks One Child <3

Ditto. I’m finding myself disappointed if a new entry isn’t posted when I open Zing.

Are you planning on going all the way through to Ain’t But the One Way?

90. Sly & the Family Stone - Sex Machine (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex3NJqRgNho
Predates James Brown's earth-shaking song by over a year, but sadly doesn't match that song's intensity in any way, and feels more like filler for much of its length. Given that the band was back in San Francisco for the first time in years (the album was cut in Pacific High Recording Studios in SF whereas their previous albums had been recorded primarily in New York) and the band was regularly filling places like the Fillmore on bills with white hippies playing 20-minute "psychedelic blues" freakouts, it's easy to place this song in the context of the local contemporary scene. But if they were trying to compete/keep up with other SF groups, it's a little baffling as to why they opted to include something this rote when they had much more interesting songs like "We Love All (Freedom)" (which went unreleased at the time) to stretch out on. Sonically it's of a piece with "Don't Call Me N*****, Whitey". Otherwise it's unlike anything else the band released before or after. This band didn't really do blues jams.

Maybe after all the compact, tightly arranged tunes aimed at the radio the rhythm section just wanted to break loose and ramble for 10+ minutes, which they do with abandon here. Building from a standard blues pattern and shuffle rhythm, Errico, Sly, and especially Graham and Freddie indulge in all sorts of distorted shenanigans - wah wah guitar squals, heavily distorted and wah wah processed vocals, an extended fuzz bass solo (again we are treated to two bass parts at once at one point) - while Sly leans on droning chords on the hammond. Martini and Robinson barely appear, getting in comparatively brief solos. The song ebbs and flows as the players transition, eventually capping off with an actual drum solo from Errico that, sadly, doesn't really highlight his strengths and eventually just crawls to a halt. Was this fun to play? Probably. Nonetheless it feels like an odd misstep in the middle of the album. At the end you can hear the rest of the band laughing behind Errico's back as he completes the take.

Is there a studio version of "We Love All (Freedom)"? All I’m able to find online is the Fillmore version which is very … late-sixties Fillmore-sounding.

Yes, the studio version of "We Love All (Freedom)" was released in 2007 as a bonus track on the CD reissue of "Dance to the Music."

It's right there on all the services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnfOEHe2FSA

(Naive: Was talking about this song recently on twitter and my substack, nice to see people getting interested in it!)

Doh! I saw that but glazed over it because of the (very slightly) altered title.

91. Sly & the Family Stone - You Can Make It If You Try (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-5F8-rm8cY
This tune feels of a piece with "Sing a Simple Song", both in its optimistic exhortations and upbeat energy and in its construction as a carefully sculpted funk pop track. It was apparently slated as a follow-up single to "Stand!" in mid-1969, but eventually dropped in favor of the non-album "Hot Fun in the Summertime". While the song isn't really based around a central lick the same way ""Sing a Simple Song"" is, it has a similar arrangement that foregrounds the rhythm section (even the horns play a primarily rhythmic role), the singers darting around the vocal melodies. While Graham's voice is clearly audible on the track, Sly has been cited as playing the bass part, and it seems likely the organ is an overdub from Sly. It also sounds like Little Sister provides the backing vocals, with Rose shouting out that "all together now!"

Opening as they have many times before with a horn-led fanfare, bass, guitar and drums all joining in in unison. Errico, Sly and Freddie lock into a driving funk rhythm. Freddie's crunchy chicken-scratch pattern bears a passing resemblance to some of James Brown's contemporaneous singles, and Sly's wild bassline definitely presages Bootsy's antic fingerpopping. No idea why Graham didn't play it, but Sly's bass part is very in-your-face, practically the lead melodic instrument. The way all the parts intermittently dovetail together at the end of each segment is ingenious; for the verses and choruses, everything orbits around a G7 chord, but then various instruments come back together to play little licks in unison. Errico is the most restrained of the rhythm section (at least at first), laying back for much of the track before unleashing his second canonical drumbreak of the record after the first couple of verses, this time embroidered by a gritty organ lick.

How this was tracked is not entirely obvious; while most of the band is present on the recording, there's a lot of stereo separation and several audible punch-ins (and punch-outs). With the horns and drums in one channel, the guitar and group vocals in the opposite, the lead vocals panned across the field, and the organ and bass in the middle, everything sounds artificially and meticulously isolated. While the instruments all generally sound walled off from each other, there is a fair amount of distortion on the tracks; you can hear it in particular with the vocals, and with Freddie when he pivots from his already hot scratch pattern to overdriven riffs - just listen to those runs underneath the "yeah, yeah yeah yeah" vocal breaks at the end of each verse. Also interesting is that almost all the tracks are recorded dry; the only things with any reverb on them are the horns and, most prominently, Sly's vocal.

Midway through the band hits an actual bridge, the bass and horns doing a call and response with the organ, interspersed with a couple blues licks from Freddie. As they round out the fourth chorus, the players dial back, the voices quiet down and Errico's drumming becomes more intricate and detailed. And then the mix ventures into unusual, truly innovative territory. Sly punches out everything but Errico's drums (this is clearly done in the mix, as you can still hear Freddie's guitar and Sly's bass bleeding into the drum track). Sly then adds back one element at a time: first Freddie's guitar, then Sly's bass (playing a variation of the "Shortenin' Bread" melody), then the organ, then the horns (echoing Freddie's scratch pattern), then the vocals. The pattering drum rhythm and the accumulation of sonic detail make it feel like the song is slowly reaching a rolling boil. All of this points the way towards the Stone Flower singles and "There's a Riot Goin' On".

I cannot believe I am reading it for free, cos I would pay cash money for this book; a million thanks One Child <3

― glumdalclitch, Tuesday, May 9, 2023

Yes. But also I'm worried that no one else will ever do another listening thread because the bar is now too high.

haha don't worry, I'm sure I won't be able to stay away from the Sun Ra or Jandek listening threads for long, and my bar is not as high as this (largely b/c I lack music theory background)

EDIT - a couple sentences got chopped there:

1) the lyrics are straightforward and not particularly nuanced, but it's possible to read them as a desperate mantra repeated to onself in times of stress (I think I can, I think I can) instead of just simple cheerleading.
2) the distinguishing feature of the buildup at the end of the song is that it is done at the mixing stage by Sly, and not by the performers themselves. While the band could absolutely have pulled this off live (standard technique for instruments to drop out and come back in one at a time), Sly instead makes it happen artificially, it's a production choice.

I'm so so happy this was revived. What a joy to catch up to this

Holy shit, I completely did not realize that this thread started three years ago.

92. Sly & the Family Stone - Hot Fun in the Summertime (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg0tFRea0wA
Released July 21, 1969 with "Fun" as the b-side, just ahead of the band's appearance at Woodstock, and at the apex of the band's commercial appeal. The song peaked at number 2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart, kept out of the number 1 spot (ironically) by the Temptations, who were now blatantly aping Sly's hits under the direction of Norman Whitfield.

For an artist so restless and wide-ranging, there are still a few things Sly generally avoids in his music. He doesn't display anger (can't have that from a black man in America), and his songs almost always take place in an ever-present "now". His lyrics rarely look in the rearview mirror. Which is partly what make this song such an outlier in the catalog. While the Family Stone had notched a couple of ballads on earlier records, this is the first time they revisit the swaying 6/8 doo-wop rhythm of Sly's youth, and the first time Sly indulges in any kind of nostalgia. His approach to this song is similar to a certain other California band with a visionary drug-addled leader and a penchant for combining R&B, complex harmonies, and wistful melancholy, an obvious difference being that Beach Boys tracks like "I Went to Sleep" weren't exactly burning up the charts in '69. Incidentally, Phil Collins also made this connection when he mashed up this song with the Beach Boys "Sail on Sailor" to produce the execrable "Misunderstanding".

Another Brian Wilson parallel is that this track was developed purely as a studio concoction; this is not a live take of the full band in the studio. Freddie's guitar isn't even on it, and the song is built around two parallel piano tracks, one in each stereo channel, which overlap, swap parts, wander away from each other, and periodically peter out altogether throughout the song. It's hard not to wonder if the real reason there's two piano tracks in the first place is because pounding out those 8th notes must have been exhausting, and you can hear the parts slip out of time in certain spots, there's even a couple of flubbed notes left in in the verses. That being said the layered minor chords on the piano play a huge role in the song's lazy, hazy mood. The other major factor is the addition (again, a first for the band) of an overdubbed pair of violins, which play stately, high-pitched counter melodies. These misty-eyed elements are countered by a typically muscular rhythmic underpinning - Graham and Errico don't know the meaning of the words "laid back", and give the song an extra bounce, particularly when the piano and bass join up for the ascending line (a minor chord progression that runs through both a 7th and a 6th chord) in the choruses. The vocals, as usual, are traded off between members, with some fairly tricky four-part harmonies on various lines. All of these elements are spun together like cotton candy, the end result a strangely gentle and affecting snapshot of a summer idyll.

I was actually shocked when I discovered this came out in 1969. It feels of such a piece with their earlier work lyrically and musically, as if acid rock hadn’t yet pushed harmony groups aside. But in retrospect, it also feels a little bit like the last gasp of Sly’s youthful optimism, before the demons completely took him over.

Regardless, I completely love it, my favorite Fourth of July barbecue soundtrack.

I always used to put this on on the jukebox in a pub I frequent, in the middle of winter or when the weather was particularly shitty.

I wish it was at least twice as long. I could listen to it on a loop for 30-40 minutes and not get tired of it.

Wmc OTM!

Isn’t it commonly understood that the “hot fun” of the title is a sardonic reference to race riots?

93. Sly & the Family Stone - Medley: Dance to the Music/Music Lover/I Want to Take You Higher (Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58SrSOJuIlI
Recorded in August 1969 at some farm in upstate New York. It essentially captures the band near the end of the first phase of their career, and there's some irony that by the time it was released in mid-1970, Sly was already advancing (or retreating, depending on the POV) into uncharted territory, largely outside the public eye. But we'll get to that in a bit, Sly's output through the remaining months of 1969 provide plenty to chew on.

Since this recording is closely intertwined with the live performance captured on film, this is perhaps the appropriate place to further discuss the band's visual presentation and how this tied into their overall aesthetic and impact. In case it isn't obvious in retrospect: Sly looked fucking insane. Before Sly, R&B acts across the board wore formal attire. Sure some might be flashier or cut a different way, but even Little Richard wore suits. By contrast, Sly comes onstage in skintight leather or draped satin sleeves with 12" fringes, giant space age goggles, platform boots, a bulky tight-fitting gold-link chain around his neck. Hendrix also violated standards in his own grungier, colorful hippie way, but Sly looks like he comes from another planet. An expensive planet, one where a black man is the coolest thing in the universe. Sly and the band were intimately familiar with the black subculture of pimps and gangsters (perhaps too intimate, given some of the things that would subsequently go down), and the men in the band, including Sly, put a twist on this style and catapulted it into the mainstream; this is where the garishly overblown fashions of the 70s take root. After Sly, groups look different.

They all look outlandish, but onstage Sly is the guy that draws the eyeballs, initially just because of how he looks and then because of how he moves, plays and directs the band. Arms pumping, wide open grin, rocking back and forth. In the footage from Woodstock and the more recently excavated Summer of Soul he is alternately laconic and dynamic, at one moment huddled over his keyboards, the next marching laughing across the stage. Here's a bit of the live clip from the movie, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me-UKbXOFts

The released track is a 14-minute medley, recorded around 3:30am, starts with the band at full bore, Robinson screaming at the top of her lungs to get the crowd on its feet. The sound is a crush of low end rumble and high end crunch, and the pace is frenetic as the band races through the opening "Dance to the Music" section. The band rapidly shuttles between all of the little bits they've honed to a fine point over the last few years; the scat-singing breakdown, the pounding drum break, the fiery guitar fill, the practically Sabbath-esque fuzz bass highlight. Midway through Sly pulls the music back and starts talking directly to the band like he's Bobby Freeman telling audiences how to do the Swim back at the Cow Palace just five years prior, engaging in some classic call-and-response straight out of the church. The band barrels ahead, moving into the "Higher" section, with the horns taking the melodic center and the band intermittently cutting out to let the crowd take over. There's a brief pause (presumably to catch their breath) before they launch into the final "I Want to Take You Higher" section, and the mix is a churning morass, a whirlpool of distorted, bludgeoning rhythm, the horns and vocals the only thing that cut through in the upper register. The arrangement hews closely to the recorded version, but the energy and effect are totally overdriven. For a piece about ascension, the sound is *heavy*. Sly runs through the refrain a few times before Freddie takes a wah-wah solo, then Robinson on trumpet, then another series of call-and-response breakdowns, before ending with just Errico's drumbeat. As a live performance the overall effect is both exhilarating and exhausting.

The standard narrative is that it was all downhill for the band after this, both commercially and personally if not artistically, and in terms of live performances there's some truth to it. Up to this point the band's schedule was very intense, constantly shuttling around the country for series' of shows every few days, with the occasional week or two off (https://concerts.fandom.com/wiki/Sly_%26_The_Family_Stone). Sly was already getting a reputation for being unreliable, and other bandmembers heavily resented his growing penchant for personally delaying things and/or cancelling at the last minute. Nonetheless, through the end of 1969 the original line-up went on to play another two dozen shows, including this incredible set broadcast on ABC's "Music Scene" in October (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nczKHDCyhNo). It isn't until February of 1970 (when he was due, not coincidentally, to deliver a follow-up LP to "Stand!" to the label) that the first real pattern of significant cancellations set in. Sly was not yet spent as a creative force by any means, but the end of the original septet's run as a barnstorming live act was coming to a close.

94. Abaco Dream - Life and Death in G&A (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENaucSgxZ4U
Released in August 1969 and hit number 74 on the Billboard Hot 100. Credited to Abaco Dream, it's actually Sly and the Family Stone backed by Little Sister, with Joe Hicks singing lead and playing harmonica. Given the release date this was likely recorded at some point before the band's Woodstock appearance. For some reason Manager Dave Kapralik sold the backing track to an associate of his (Ted Cooper) at another label, with the intention that Abaco Dream would overdub their own vocals, etc. onto the track, but instead Cooper didn't bother with that and just released it in its original form. Presumably this was Kapralik and Sly's ways of testing the waters with producing and releasing music with other acts on other labels, ahead of getting Sly's Stone Flower label imprint off the ground in 1970.

This is the first of several versions of this song, and bears some resemblance to the cover that would later appear on Chairman of the Board's "Skin I'm In" album, as opposed to the slower and more subdued version that Joe Hicks subsequently cut for Stone Flower. Joe Hicks was an SF R&B guy that had recently reconnected with Sly and found their interests aligned: Sly needed an artist to produce, and Hicks probably jumped at the opportunity to work with one of the hottest artists in the medium.

The track itself is almost comically simple in conception - a series of two note phrases based around the titular two chords (G and A), and a set of lyrics that just lists various opposites, capped by the mantra of every self-absorbed hedonist: "if it feels good it's allright". Errico switches between his marching cadence, with snare hits on every beat of the bar, and a funkier pattern where he cuts the snare hits by half. By contrast Graham and Freddie generally stick to a consistent counter-rhythm with their two note riffs, with the horns and vocals alternating between higher and lower octaves to give the song some harmonic variation. Little Sister pops in at the end with some additional "yeah yeahs", as does Hicks with a bit of harmonica. The band shuffles around the song's basic building blocks and Errico in particular gives it a sense of hot-n-sweaty propulsion, but the piece is still fairly static due as a result of the thin material and lack of changes or dynamics. While I doubt this was ever performed in front of a live audience, it feels designed to fit into their high energy live sets, and gets over just on energy alone.

I first heard this on the Chairmen of the Board box I bought several years ago – that version is a super proggy, synthed out suite produced by Jeffrey Bowen and augmented by Funkadelic. To your point, it helps flesh out (and stretch out) an otherwise fairly simple tune, but it’s def. one of the highlights of the record.

I never realized what the G and A referred to! Kind of brilliant.

The band barrels ahead, moving into the "Higher" section, with the horns taking the melodic center and the band intermittently cutting out to let the crowd take over.

I first saw Woodstock when I was 12, and one thing that still blows my mind to this day — along with the rest of the Sly sequence — was how he stopped cueing the crowd, stopped saying, “Wanna take you higher!”, but they still responded in full. And it was 3:00am.

The Who had the profoundly unenviable task of following Sly’s set; Townshend later said, “There’s been no better band in history than Sly and the Family Stone.”

95. Joe Hicks - I'm Goin Home (Part I)/Home Sweet Home (Part II) (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRYt3GSODb0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4wwDR4y4cw
Released on the Scepter label in October 1969, ahead of Sly getting Stone Flower Records off the ground. These songs are addressed as a single entry since the single was really just one track split into two sides, which was in itself unusual. As with the prior Abaco Dream entry, this recording features Joe Hicks backed by the original Family Stone septet and sounds like it was tracked primarily live in the studio. The single does generally highlight an interesting contrast between two different approaches: the first half leans more towards the complex pop arrangements of the band's first albums, but the second leans the other way, more towards the funkier, murkier direction they were heading into. There's no authoritative transcription of the lyrics, and Hicks' enunciation makes the precise wording difficult to make out, but the general theme of homecoming, the joy of belonging, comes through.

Someone else will have to weigh in on what oddball time signature "I'm Goin' Home Part 1" opens with; it's a little reminiscent of the stop-start phrases in the verses of "Higher" off of "Dance to the Music". Piano and bass play the lead riff in unison, backed by a tricky horn countermelody, before Errico cues up a 4/4 rhythm on the toms and then it's off into the verses. Freddie and Graham charge through a clever series of R&B chord changes as Hicks (previously dismissed as an Otis Redding sound-a-like) enters with the vocal, before the whole band stops dead at the end of the 8-bar phrase. The band comes back in for another verse and then hits the descending "Hit the Road, Jack" chords in the chorus as Hicks wails over the top. They hit the verse/chorus pattern again, repeat the intro, and then unexpectedly hit a major-key bridge, complete with group vocal harmonies. This is a *lot* of changes to cram into two-and-a-half minutes, and the sound overall is tight and gritty.

But they aren't done yet. After the bridge, Graham, Errico and Freddie all lock into monotone 8th notes, take a breath for a bar, and then Graham fires off a lead-in triplet phrase that launches the song into a James Brown-ish coda. Drums, bass, and horns all punch out counter-rhythms, Hicks' double-tracked vocal bawling out "home sweet home", an extra fuzz guitar part adding to the grimy texture. This is basically where the b-side starts as well, with the same 8th note lead-in pattern, this time with an extra electric guitar part that's been run through a Leslie speaker, as well as intermittent squeals from Sly's organ. Graham's playing on this section is absolutely bonkers, it's like he's playing the drums and the bass all with just his fingers, Errico doing his best to contain everything. It's notable that "Home Sweet Home" repeats the same sections as "I'm Goin' Home", just in a different order - the coda essentially becomes the verse (Hicks adds in a melody and lyrics), and the band only repeats the intro and the original verse section once, as a kind of bridge, before furiously diving back into the one-chord polyrhythm. The band just moves around the building blocks, while never letting up the momentum.

96. Sly & the Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOa5UOHdwnc
The months following Woodstock were a pivotal point for Sly. He moved to LA, got his own label imprint, and Dave Kapralik set up offices for them across the street from Capitol Records. Sly set himself up in a gigantic mansion in Coldwater Canyon, flanked by gangsters, drug dealers, and a bevvy of hangers on. He moved his base of operations for recording to West Village Recorderders in West Hollywood, and acquired a Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2 drum machine. The label had given him a deadline of February 1970 to deliver the band's next album. He spent fall and winter shuttling between live shows, recording, getting together acts for Stone Flower, and (by all accounts) doing mountains of coke and PCP.

Martini: “There was a cloud flying over Sly from the time he moved down to Los Angeles. Things really changed when he moved there. That’s when Gun the dog and all the fucking assholes came into his life. It was havoc. It was very gansterish, dangerous. The vibes were very dark at that point.”

Hamp “Bubba” Banks: “When I got out of jail, Sly got in touch with me and said ‘Bub, I need you, man.’.. They were in a million dollar house and I moved right in. Sly made everybody understand that I was the one. Nothing happened without me. When it got to big for me, I knew the cat that knew the cat that could get it done. That made me the cat, period... When I got to Los Angeles he was the cocaine king. I saw him going down Hollywood Boulevard with a little violin case and he looked like the Morton salt woman. Cocaine was falling out the back of it. The cat had gotten so big, as big as life. He was doing what he wanted.”

Released as a standalone single with "Everybody is a Star" as a double A-side (have never understood this term) in December 1969, "Thank You" reached number one on the soul single charts and the Billboard Hot 100. This single is the inflection point of Sly’s career. It’s the apex, both a commercial and artistic triumph. But it also signals the dissolution of the original septet, and in one way or another every single thing Sly did after this (in another odd parallel of Brian Wilson) would be considered or in many cases deliberately marketed as a “comeback”. This is the mountaintop, and it’s a long, strange, tangled path down the other side.

At this time the contours of funk as a style/subgenre were in the process of being slowly fleshed out. Sly was in many ways setting the pace but also keeping up with jaw-dropping singles from James Brown, the Temptations and other Motown acts openly copying him, and other bands quickly rushing in to fill the breach that he had opened (Kool & the Gang, the Meters, the Bar-Kays, etc.) At the center of funk is the one, the downbeat. Individual musical elements contract around the one, and then expand outward into a syncopated, polyrhythmic froth. This creates the fundamental pulse of the music; a constant, dynamic push and pull between a mathematical matrix of control and the wild, slippery, organic elements contained within it. Sly had already figured this out, had already explored it piecemeal on earlier singles and album cuts, but “Thank You” is the first time he really zeroes in on it and fashions an entire song out of it.

It is difficult to envision a song more different than its preceding single ("Hot Fun in the Summertime"). The sound is fierce, expansive, thunderous. The arrangement foregrounds Graham's unique, signature slapping-and-popping technique; at no point does he deviate from the monster bass hook, the dark heartbeat at the center of the song. There's two choppy, clangorous guitars bouncing around the rhythm, one through a wah-wah pedal and the other clean, both panned apart from each other. Also noteworthy is that Sly basically beatboxes through the entire song in one channel; when he first pops into the track around 10 seconds in he sounds like an extra snare or a shaker. The horns pepper their lines throughout, alternating between quick staccato punches and longer, smeared harmonies. For the first time in the band's catalog, there is no organ or piano. There are also no changes, the only real shift that happens is two spots where the bass drops out and the guitars both get panned to a single channel for a couple of bars. Errico's canonical funk beat is grounded by unwavering snare hits and the 8th notes on the hi hat, opening the hi hat on the 3rd beat of every bar to tug the beat back, then pushing it forward with little kick drum accents that are ahead of the beat. Even with a relatively small number of instrumental elements at play, things quickly blur together in the mix: at various points it becomes difficult to pick out exactly which element is doing what (is that the drums, or Sly's vocal mic, or is it a guitar scratch?) Different accents get picked up by different instruments - sometimes the horns do a crescendo, and then the next time around Sly's vocal does it. The vocals follow the melody of the bass riff, then skitter away from it. The vocals in general are, in another first, all sung in unison throughout rather than traded off. Sly's voice nonetheless dominates (after all he has a whole other vocal track to himself). The cumulative result is that this song is all groove, all space, everything orbiting and rotating around each other, a throbbing clockwork perpetual motion machine that feels like it's spiralling out into eternity, even if it's only 4 1/2 minutes long.

That's just what's going on instrumentally. Lyrically Sly also hits a new peak with this song, leaning into the dualities he was so fond of to paint a contrasting picture of fear and desperation, juxtaposed with gratitude and affirmation. The song sounds alternately ebullient and dark, and the lyrics mirror this. As he's done many times in the past, he explicitly references family and throws in callback quotes to prior songs. The first verse is practically Biblical (or at least Dylanesque circa ""John Wesley Harding"") in its archetypal imagery. And the bleakest lines about running for your life, trying to get away from the constrictions embedded deep within America, selling out versus dying young, read like a death rattle for the original lineup's optimism as a self-contained unit. Now Sly is just himself, alone, leaving the party, moving on, everybody after him. But, you know, thank you for the party.

Lookin' at the devil
Grinnin' at his gun
Fingers start shakin'
I begin to run
Bullets start chasin'
I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle
I was on the top

I want to thank you falettinme
Be mice elf agin
Thank you falettinme
Be mice elf agin

Stiff all in the collar
Fluffy in the face
Chit chat chatter tryin'
Stuffy in the place
Thank you for the party
But I could never stay
Many thangs is on my mind
Words in the way

Dance to the music
All nite long
Everyday people
Sing a simple song
Mama's so happy
Mama start to cry
Papa still singin'
You can make it if you try

Flamin' eyes of people fear
Burnin' into you
Many men are missin' much
Hatin' what they do
Youth and truth are makin' love
Dig it for a starter, now
Dyin' young is hard to take
Sellin' out is harder"

fuckin’ right

There's never been a proper stereo mix of this, has there? The 45 is mono, the Greatest Hits version is some kind of ugly simulated stereo.

Apparently whatever stereo mix exists was done around 1990, not by Sly.

There is a 360 Reality Audio mix of this on Amazon Music HD – I presume it is a transfer of the contemporaneous quad mix CBS did of Greatest Hits as a bunch of other records from that era have them including every song on that record.

The Greatest Hits mix on Spotify doesn’t sound simulated? It’s not nearly as separated as some of Stand or, for that matter, Riot. But the two guitars seem panned halfway left and right. And the bgd vox of the chorus are def. more in the right channel.

97. Sly & the Family Stone - Everybody is a Star (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-1s2gqDs_U
The flipside of arguably the greatest 45 single ever issued by an American major label. Maybe not as outwardly groundreaking as the other side, but every bit as good, and obviously intended as it's inverse, it's mirror image. It's a 180 degree turn from "Thank You", gentle and plaintive, even mournful.

Whereas "Thank You" has basically no chords (okay, one chord), "Star" is comprised of two beautiful chord progresssions stitched together by an uplifting turnaround. Descending like the proverbial falling star in the last verse, the chords in the first segment drift down through half-steps before coming to rest on the fourth of the root chord, buoyed by the vocal and horn melodies swooping back up. It’s all delivered with the opposite effect of the clamor of "Thank You", it’s a pillowy mix of padded piano and organ, heavily compressed horns playing off-beat accents, and Rose, Freddie, Graham and Sly trading lines, just like they used to.

For the second segment the chords deceptively ascend to the fifth, but the melodies immediately begin a second descending line, punctuated by a shift in the underlying rhythm. Errico has never played with such restraint, he's barely there in the verses, just matching the keyboard parts for emphasis. When the band switches gears he creates a pocket for the bass to nestle into, and Graham sustains his notes in between each beat as he has many times before, pushing the staccato phrasing of the "ba, ba ba ba" vocals. And just as they pick up a bit of energy, aided by Freddie’s barely audible guitar (sorry Freddie, no showstopping fills for you this time, just comped chords), it all drops away, Little Sister’s angelic harmonies floating off into the clouds. The structure is repeated twice, Sly's organ eventually shining out like sunlight through stained glass with a long sustained note. The lyrics are a marvel of compassion and generosity. “I love you for who you are / not for who you feel you need to be”, everybody wants to hear that from someone.

But Sly has often said that he would write songs while looking in the mirror (certainly a deliberately and cheekily loaded statement). And there’s deep irony in this song, which functions in some ways as a requiem for the original septet. It's the last song to feature their signature shared lead vocals, and it's the last time the original rhythm section all recorded together (Errico quit the band before the release of "There's a Riot Goin' On", and Graham has stated all of his parts on that record were overdubbed). Around this time Sly had also taken to wearing a Star of David as a kind of in-joke between him and Kapralik (Sly is the "Star" of "David" Kapralik, get it?). Maybe on record everybody was a star, but in practice *Sly* was now the star, at least partially the result of a by now familiar dynamic of a fiercely capitalist industry initially nurturing a cohesive unit only to subsequently break it into its constituent parts to maximize continued profitability. Sly owned the publishing, Sly made the decisions, Sly was the producer, Sly was the one the audience knew, Sly drove the band's creative direction, Sly was the one bringing in the money. And increasingly, he would be doing more and more of the actual work of writing and recording by himself, with other musicians treated as hired hands. The unfortunate flipside of the lovingly rendered sentiments of this song is that Sly wasn’t necessarily singing to his audience, or even to his band, he was singing it to himself.

I am convinced the three years you spend off of ILX was spent working on, thinking about, refining etc, this project…there is NO FUCKING WAY you are tossing this shit off the day of posting… this project is staggering, and we who are reading this owe you at the very least a big thank you!

He also hasn't made any extemporaneous posts, leading me to wonder whether the deep dive down the Sly Stone rabbit hole didn't cause One Child to become a recluse himself, and these posts are being assembled by his estate executor, from a huge notebook of increasingly illegible entries.

For the first time in the band's catalog, there is no organ or piano. There are also no changes, the only real shift that happens is two spots where the bass drops out and the guitars both get panned to a single channel for a couple of bars. Errico's canonical funk beat is grounded by unwavering snare hits and the 8th notes on the hi hat, opening the hi hat on the 3rd beat of every bar to tug the beat back, then pushing it forward with little kick drum accents that are ahead of the beat.

This level of detail and depth of analysis is incredible though -- it could be a great book/podcast. This is the best thread going on ILX right now.

However you're producing these capsule reviews, OC, keep it coming.

98. Little Sister - You're the One (Parts I and II) (non-album single, 1970)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_07mWCE3ZY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPLTTTyK0wg
Initially issued as the inaugural release from Sly's Stone Flower label in February of 1970, the single reached No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 4 on the R&B chart, with Part II flagged for radio DJs. It also, perhaps more significantly, enjoyed a highly unusual and storied afterlife, becoming a staple of early disco DJ sets and one of the first 45s to be beat-matched and spun back to back (https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/11/francis-grasso-interview). There's a couple different versions floating around, as the song was originally issued in mono and split into two parts, but there was also a longer, slightly different stereo edit issued in 1972 (which is also the one that shows up on Light in the Attic's recent compilation). The mix addressed here is the original mono 45 version.

One of the great things about the Light in the Attic reissue ("I'm Just Like You: Sly's Stone Flower 1969-1970") is that the liner notes actually contain a scan of the recording session tracklist for this song, indicating exactly what went onto the 16-track tape at Western Village Recorders. The personnel for the session was Sly, Little Sister, Martini, Robinson, and reportedly Billy Preston. What is clear from the tracklist is that this was overdubbed piecemeal; given the personnel (ie, Sly playing organ, guitar, bass and drums) there's no way the bulk of it was tracked live.

Even so, the cumulative effect is overheated, organic, like being in a hothouse. Maybe it's the huffing and puffing, whispered vocals that open the track, metronome ticking in the background, before it dives into the verses. There's a tentative drum fill and then Preston pounds out a couple of intro chords as Sly's bass enters thumping and bumping in a manner that's similar to Graham in heaviness, if not pure melodic inventiveness. Sly's figured out that you can run anything through a wah-wah pedal, and this time around it's the organ, plonking along on the downbeats. The guitars get the wah wah as well, delivering a lick similar to "Thank You". The ladies sing in unison: "I'm the one who wants to be ahead / I stand in line and I'm behind instead / What is happenin let me look around / Not a thing trying to hold me down / Now I know I got to look at me / Some things a little hard to see".

And then we get our first "oh shit!" moment with the pre-chorus, all the instruments diving together to hit the syncopated riff in unison, Vet, Mary, and Tiny's voices blaring out in wordless abandon. The horns enter with an answering riff, Preston's hammers out a one-note fill and Sly delivers what would become a signature bass hook, one that climbs up the stairs and then back down again, landing on the song's second "oh shit!" moment: the actual chorus.

Sly cleverly inverts the arrangement of "Thank You": here it's the electric guitar that carries the central riff, the bass sticking to a one-note pulse. The horns play a contrapuntal line, every emphasis on the offbeats, and the vocals ring out in unison: "And your mama can't make you good / You're the one / Can't blame no argument / You're the one / Don't you know how to take a hint / You're the one / Your teacher can't teach you dumb / You're the one / But your pity can make you numb / You're the one". Overall the lyrics here are very sharp, constantly turning back on themselves, every line immediately flipped on its head. They're inspiring, then critical, directed outward, then turning inward. "I think I'm making it, I think I'm near / Then I realize I'm in the rear." Sly's always second guessing himself.

All the pieces established, Sly and the ladies excise the verses and just stretch out the chorus to pop-mantra length for part 2, adding in another backing vocal line, occasionally returning to the turnaround of the prechorus. Sly replicates Errico's open hi-hat trick from ""Thank You"" but switches it to the second beat and really leans into it. The guitar pops on the fourth beat of every bar, the horns come in and out. Wracked by self-doubt as he may have been, as a follow-up to "Thank You" Stone Flower's debut definitely delivered the goods. He didn't immediately follow it up or attempt to repeat its success. His next recorded output wouldn't arrive for over 8 months, and would end up signaling an even bigger stylistic shift.

“Oh shit moments” is right: this song is amazing – pretty clearly at the top of my favorite non-Family Stone Sly material.

Sly was supposed to deliver the follow-up to ""Stand!"" to Epic Records in February 1970. That didn't happen. What did happen over the next 8 months is a bewildering and often sordid catalog of drug-fueled insanity (primarily cocaine, downers and PCP), violence, backstabbing, cancelled shows, missed opportunities, and intermittent flashes of brilliance. The result was Sly's longest gap in recorded output since he had turned 20 in 1963.

Released at the end of November in 1970, the second Little Sister single made it to No. 8 on the R&B chart and No. 32 on the pop chart. Widely, if inaccurately, credited as the first popular recording to feature the use of a drum machine for its rhythm track (it is predated by over a year by the drum machine-accompanied musings of some British teenage depressive named Robin Gibb). There is not a lot of clarity on how Sly first came into possession of a Maestro Rhythm King or what drove his fascination with it from 1969 through 1971. Necessity being the mother of invention, Errico's disengagement from the band was a likely spur. Errico is on record that "Everybody would call and say that he was messing with the drum machine and he wanted me to come down there... and I just didn't want no more part of it. I was done with it. It wasn't fun anymore." But it seems highly likely that Sly also saw the "funkbox", as he reportedly called it, as uncharted territory, somewhere interesting with room to grow.

As is readily apparent in this demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kWJ2fBy6NQ), the Rhythm King was a clunky and inelegant instrument. What is also readily apparent is that Sly didn't just turn it on and let it run; none of the default beats are identifiable as being used on record. Instead Sly played the Rhythm King like it was an instrument, mixing and matching the settings, adding accents, tapping out unique patterns on the buttons, treating it as a rhythmic compositional tool. This is 4 years before Kraftwerk became robots, 9 years before Grandmaster Flash's "Flash it to the Beat", 12 years before Prince purchases a Linn Drum, 15 years before "Under Mi Sleng Teng". Apart from Larry Graham, who was sharp-eared and smart enough to cotton to what Sly was doing and carried it over to his own work with Graham Central Station, hardly anybody that noticed thought it was good idea. Most people didn't notice at all.

The drum machine contributes to the warped, muted delivery of the song, in comparison to the original version. Errico's drum part was not particularly aggressive but here the Rhythm King has no low end muscle, all of the percussive sounds are clustered in the mid- and upper ranges, woodblock hits and white noise emulating a snare and a shaker, the gentlest of kick drum pulses buried in the background. Most unusually, the drum machine doesn't actually provide much of a rhythmic foundation for the song - most of it is off-beat, highly syncopated accents. It sounds like Sly likely combined two of the pre-programmed beats, but otherwise didn't alter or add to what was coming out of the Rhythm King. Instead, the rhythmic framework comes from the bass and the organ. Finding himself in the same position that Graham was in when he originally developed his slapping-and-popping technique (ie compensating for the lack of a drummer), Sly plays an extremely percussive bass part to compensate and firmly anchor the song's rhythm. One organ plays sustained chords, signaling the changes and holding the structure of the song in place, but the other marks time, providing throbbing quarter notes through a wah wah.

Otherwise, the overall structure remains but there's less going on instrumentally than in the Family Stone version; no countermelody from the horns, for one thing, and the vocal arrangement has been simplified to fit Little Sister's voices. The guitar is barely there, a high and thin sound tinkling out a new set of accents in the background of the verses. The dynamic range of the vocals is dramatic, swinging from a whisper in the lower octave to belted out harmonies in the upper octave. In the refrains the bass and guitar step to the fore, aggressively snapping out a couple of straight-time quarter note and eight note riffs as the organs drop out.

There's a lot of grain in this recording (the close-mic'd vocals and drum machine settings surely contributing to this), as well as a lot of space. Instruments have been routed directly into the mixing board, bypassing amplifiers and the ambient sound of a physical space, and then had reverb applied to varying degrees, creating a sound that makes some things sound claustrophobically up close and others disconcertingly distant. Sly's approach here is in many ways proto-dub; although he was not working with the tracks of the original version, he was using innovative studio techniques to re-imagine the song in a completely different context, and several strategies that dub producers would develop further are in gestation here. The sound is eerie, beguiling, sometimes quite pretty and relaxed, but there's an undercurrent of tension in the lyrics, lurking around the corner, looking over Sly's shoulder.

c+p error/correction

99. Little Sister - Somebody's Watching You (non-album single, 1970)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaA3ShRy0JM
Sly was supposed to deliver the follow-up to "Stand!" to Epic Records in February 1970. That didn't happen. What did happen over the next 8 months is a bewildering and often sordid catalog of drug-fueled insanity (primarily cocaine, downers and PCP), violence, backstabbing, cancelled shows, missed opportunities, and intermittent flashes of brilliance. The result was Sly's longest gap in recorded output since he had turned 20 in 1963.

Released at the end of November in 1970, the second Little Sister single made it to No. 8 on the R&B chart and No. 32 on the pop chart. Widely, if inaccurately, credited as the first popular recording to feature the use of a drum machine for its rhythm track (it is predated by over a year by the drum machine-accompanied musings of some British teenage depressive named Robin Gibb). There is not a lot of clarity on how Sly first came into possession of a Maestro Rhythm King or what drove his fascination with it from 1969 through 1971. Necessity being the mother of invention, Errico's disengagement from the band was a likely spur. Errico is on record that "Everybody would call and say that he was messing with the drum machine and he wanted me to come down there... and I just didn't want no more part of it. I was done with it. It wasn't fun anymore." But it seems highly likely that Sly also saw the "funkbox", as he reportedly called it, as uncharted territory, somewhere interesting with room to grow.

As is readily apparent in this demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kWJ2fBy6NQ), the Rhythm King was a clunky and inelegant instrument. What is also readily apparent is that Sly didn't just turn it on and let it run; none of the default beats are identifiable as being used on record. Instead Sly played the Rhythm King like it was an instrument, mixing and matching the settings, adding accents, tapping out unique patterns on the buttons, treating it as a rhythmic compositional tool. This is 4 years before Kraftwerk became robots, 9 years before Grandmaster Flash's "Flash it to the Beat", 12 years before Prince purchases a Linn Drum, 15 years before "Under Mi Sleng Teng". Apart from Larry Graham, who was sharp-eared and smart enough to cotton to what Sly was doing and carried it over to his own work with Graham Central Station, hardly anybody that noticed thought it was good idea. Most people didn't notice at all.

The drum machine contributes to the warped, muted delivery of the song, in comparison to the original version. Errico's drum part was not particularly aggressive but here the Rhythm King has no low end muscle, all of the percussive sounds are clustered in the mid- and upper ranges, woodblock hits and white noise emulating a snare and a shaker, the gentlest of kick drum pulses buried in the background. Most unusually, the drum machine doesn't actually provide much of a rhythmic foundation for the song - most of it is off-beat, highly syncopated accents. It sounds like Sly likely combined two of the pre-programmed beats, but otherwise didn't alter or add to what was coming out of the Rhythm King. Instead, the rhythmic framework comes from the bass and the organ. Finding himself in the same position that Graham was in when he originally developed his slapping-and-popping technique (ie compensating for the lack of a drummer), Sly plays an extremely percussive bass part to compensate and firmly anchor the song's rhythm. One organ plays sustained chords, signaling the changes and holding the structure of the song in place, but the other marks time, providing throbbing quarter notes through a wah wah.

Otherwise, the overall structure remains but there's less going on instrumentally than in the Family Stone version; no countermelody from the horns, for one thing, and the vocal arrangement has been simplified to fit Little Sister's voices. The guitar is barely there, a high and thin sound tinkling out a new set of accents in the background of the verses. The dynamic range of the vocals is dramatic, swinging from a whisper in the lower octave to belted out harmonies in the upper octave. In the refrains the bass and guitar step to the fore, aggressively snapping out a couple of straight-time quarter note and eight note riffs as the organs drop out.

There's a lot of grain in this recording (the close-mic'd vocals and drum machine settings surely contributing to this), as well as a lot of space. Instruments have been routed directly into the mixing board, bypassing amplifiers and the ambient sound of a physical space, and then had reverb applied to varying degrees, creating a sound that makes some things sound claustrophobically up close and others disconcertingly distant. Sly's approach here is in many ways proto-dub; although he was not working with the tracks of the original version, he was using innovative studio techniques to re-imagine the song in a completely different context, and several strategies that dub producers would develop further are in gestation here. The sound is eerie, beguiling, sometimes quite pretty and relaxed, but there's an undercurrent of tension in the lyrics, lurking around the corner, looking over Sly's shoulder.

100. Little Sister - Stanga (non-album single, 1970)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyBpJ_XLQc
The b-side to "Somebody's Watching You". Musically this song is almost entirely uncharted territory. There were plenty of other bands developing funk as a genre at this point, but nothing sounded like this gritty, minimalist, proto-robotic mixture of clustered riffs and slithering rhythms. Opening with a clattering latin beat from the drum machine, after the first four bars you can hear Sly manually add in snare hits on the three beats, as well as additional kick drum accents that continue throughout. These are augmented by a series of echoing pings and clinks from Sly on an organ with a very sharp attack, the only element in the mix with any reverb, which periodically bursts through the mix (particularly when Sly rolls his knuckles down the keyboard) before submerging back beneath the surface.

The otherwise spare arrangement is all rough edges, almost all improvisation within an airless, hermetically sealed tonal center. As on the a-side, the bass is more percussive than melodic, what really comes through is the rattle of the strings, the pop against the pickup.The bassline rarely repeats any phrases or settles into a groove; in each chorus the bassline plays a different pattern. The sharp single note runs of the two wah wah guitars are similarly slippery, perpetually rising up and down in the mix, then slinking off in some new direction. There's two organ parts, one run through a wah wah and in a similar range as the guitars, that hews more closely to syncopated chords but likewise drops in and out. Every time the end of a verse rolls around Sly plays a series of swelling chords to signal the change to the chorus, and each time he plays something totally different.

This is more or less without precedent in Sly's catalog. If he'd been using the Family Stone they likely would have workshopped it until things coalesced into distinct parts, each player would have dug in to nail down their specific riffs and melodies and then figure out how to fit them together to perform it more or less live. That's out the window now. The focus is on endless melodic and rhythmic invention. All the parts Sly plays are just chasing a groove from bar to bar, with only the barest relation to any kind of conventional structure. There are no changes per se (apart from a half-hearted bridge stuck near the end of the song that features a briefly ascending line on the guitar), and there's almost nothing familiar for the listener to grab onto.

Except for the voices. Claustrophobically grouped together, their gospel harmony roots showing, they are the sole melodic through-line of the song, working their way through three verses that make the overall thrust of the song clear: this is twelve lines about struggle, only one of which conveys any optimism. For all the violence swirling around both the country at large and the band in particular (riots, fistfights, guns everywhere), it isn't until the "grinnin' at his gun" line in "Thank You" that Sly deployed any violent imagery. Here it's addressed in even starker terms: ""some time or another / might see a brother hung"". There's bitterness here too, and an acknowledgment of what black women go through in America: "some time or another / they call me 'honey' / some time or another / they treat me funny". Having never seen any explanation of what "Stanga" means, nor seen it used anywhere else, the titular refrain remains a mystery.

Phenomenal posts!! Thanks you again for doing this.

101. 6ix - Dynamite! (non-album single, 1970)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkVvqTwc5mI
For 6ix's lone single on Stone Flower, issued in December 1970, Sly revisited the opening track of"Life" from just two years prior. Here it's lethargic, grimy, stripped to its bones. 6ix had initially been assembled and groomed as a sort of junior version of Sly and the Family Stone, but for this release Sly essentially took over, relegating the band's contributions to just vocals and harmonica. Sly retained the original, functional lyrics, which don't bear much examination - here what's most interesting is what's going on musically.

The drum rhythm does not sound pre-programmed; the only way to explain how the beat shifts between minimal timekeeping (which bears no resemblance to any of the default settings on the Rhythm King) and then all those staccato hits in the chorus is that Sly was playing this beat manually with his fingers all the way through. Fascinatingly, it's basically a trap beat - the parts aren't oriented around the standard "one" of a funk rhythm, but around the straight eighth notes, and the snare hits on the three. This is established right out of the gate with the chorus at the beginning of the song, the wah wah organ also opening up on the third beat of every bar and Sly's bass doing seesawing, straight eighth note runs. Nothing swings, everything is stiff, lumbering.

As with the other Stone Flower singles the bass is the propulsive element, and here also the most melodically complex, jumping up and down between octaves, and again played with a lot of rhythmic intensity. The instrumentation is otherwise fairly sparse; a barely there piano (particularly audible on the pounded eighth notes in the choruses), a wah wah guitar with its EQ range crushed in the middle, and the wah wah organ, all of which stick fairly closely to syncopated two note accents. There's not a ton going on melodically - none of the wandering improvisation of "Stanga" - and the various riffs featured in the original version have been excised. That leaves room for very close-mic'd lead vocals and an answering harmonica lick that gets repeated throughout the verses. The gritty vocals arc into the upper register, almost a falsetto in places, and split into harmonies on the refrains, adding in a second countermelody towards the end. There's no reverb, not even on the organs this time. The tracks have been smothered, pressed together, all sibilance and crackle.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this song didn't chart, and it seems like an odd choice for the a-side. It's slow-crawling tempo, unusual (perhaps entirely new?) rhythm, and weird, distorted, country-blues energy would have been very out-of-place on pop radio. If its vibe is similar to anything it's to some of the tracks on Funkadelic's debut like "Music for My Mother", but without all the cavernous echo.

102. 6ix - I'm Just Like You (non-album single, 1970)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3F03IpoHUs
The b-side to the "Dynamite!" single. The Rhythm King's "mambo" preset opens the track. The bassline takes a couple bars to establish the downbeat with a popped riff, and then Sly manually adds in a hi-hat cymbal on the one that sustains all the way through the beat, as well as additional kick drum accents. Combined with the bassline's emphasis on quarter notes, Sly manages to create a wholly different funk rhythm that's still based around the downbeat but has all this other syncopation going on. Variations of this rhythm would still be reverberating through popular music 30 years later (Outkast's "I'll Call Before I Come" from 2000 springs to mind).

As with the a-side, Sly keeps the instrumentation sparse and lean, again putting the electric guitar and farfisa organ through a wah wah, but this time largely sticking quietly to the chords on both. There's a little more air in the production in general - reverb applied to the organ, Higgins' vocal, and Marvin Braxton's harmonica, plus audible chatter in the background in a few spots. The playing is unusually spare, the bass is really carrying the weight of the song as the vocal and harmonica growl and grumble through the one-chord vamp of the verses and the fairly standard turnaround of the chorus. That is, until the song gets to the bridge and the vocal melody resolves on a minor chord, Sly making it clear that his skill with harmonically complex changes remains undiminished. Sly interrupts Chuck Higgins' marble-mouthed delivery with a series of drifting chords and a wistful organ solo, bathed in echo off in the distance. Interestingly Sly underpins this section of the song with a series of straight eighth notes and a syncopated pattern lifted directly out of Errico and Graham's pockets.

Higgins' lead vocal is distinctly reminiscent of Sly, it sounds like he's practically swallowed the microphone as he whispers, yelps and snarls while still keeping the overall volume in check. Definitive lyrics are hard to determine; the enigmatic last line ("magic mirror / now don't you fear her?" as possible Snow White/cocaine reference?) stands out. The lines that are clear seem to cover familiar themes for Sly, empathy undercut with cynicism and ambiguity. As usual the observations seem designed to be directed both outward and inward, begging the question as to whether Sly's giving this song to someone else to sing was just another way of singing to himself.

103. Joe Hicks - Life and Death in G&A (Pts I and II) (non-album single, 1970)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkkiYN2Dtoo
Joe Hicks was tapped for this final Stone Flower single, which was also released in December 1970 and subsequently failed to chart. Ironically Sly had come full circle back to his first foray outside of the Family Stone with Abaco Dream, cutting a second version of this tune that he had originally given to them over a year before. Here the song is completely deconstructed and reimagined. It's not quite a dub ""version"" as he's not working with the original recording's instrumental tracks, but, as with Little Sister's "Somebody's Watching You" and 6ix's "Dynamite!", Sly's innovative deployment of in-studio technique to re-create strange, warped versions of the songs is definitely some kind of dub antecedent. While not fully (or in most cases even partially) grasped at the time, Sly's method of recording the Stone Flower singles and "There's a Riot Goin' On" established the template for how music would be made in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st. Sly is the fulcrum point, the connective tissue, between the "studio-as-an-instrument" innovators like Phil Spector and Brian Wilson and the Jamaican dub architects like King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Sly puts the pieces together: playing the faders on the mixing desk like an instrument, using it as a manual tool for creating arrangements; banging out unheard of beats on a drum machine; generating seemingly endless variations and reconfigurations of snatches of melodies, riffs, rhythms; mixing and matching different parts and tracks; using echo and delay not to replicate a physical space, but as an aesthetic effect. Everything is overdubbed. Details accumulate, vanish, reappear. (The only development he didn't really presage with any enthusiasm was synthesizers).

Of all the Stone Flower singles, "Life and Death" is the most minimalist, the most abstract, the most dessicated. It's dark, but it's oddly and hypnotically gripping in its way. Perhaps its funereal atmosphere was an intentional choice for the label's last release. As with the original version, Sly boxes everything in to just two alternating chords; the guitar, organ, harmonica and bass careening between octaves but never deviating from the fundamental, droning pulse. There's no changes, and not really any dynamics either; each instrument intermittently surges to the fore and then recedes into the background, almost randomly. A preset from the drum machine maintains a steady tick-tock rhythm, augmented by Sly bouncing all around the beat with tapped out snare accents and fills. Hicks' vocal, sped-up to put him in a slightly higher register than normal, alternates between his upper and lower registers, often mimicking Sly's own vocal tics. Again the organ is ghostly, the only element with any reverb on it next to all the other dry, suffocated instrumentation. Towards the end Sly throws in some distinctly Billy Preston-ish squeals from the organ, a brief buzzing electric guitar, a flurry of sustained wah wah chords, stretching for some variety. This is a song that essentially has no beginning and no end.

It's a strange and unsettling conclusion to Stone Flower's run, which began with an energetic splash on the charts and ends here, with a song that sounds like it was recorded in a coffin and exhumed from some graveyard in the Deep South, no commercial appeal anywhere in sight. Sly's creative instincts were still fully engaged, but as others have noted (Kapralik, Paley, etc.) around this time his sense of the pop market, what would resonate with his audience, was starting to erode.

Legendary thread. Thank you, One Child. Loving the microscopic rhythmic analysis.

104. Sly & the Family Stone - Luv N' Haight (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoPJZ4UMm7E
"There's a Riot Goin' On" was finally released on November 1, 1971, almost a year after the last two Stone Flower singles sank without a ripple. This absence from the airwaves had been accompanied by unreliable live appearances and squandered opportunities; Greg Errico became so frustrated he was the first member of the original septet to quit altogether, leaving the band prior to the album's eventual release.

From here on out, determining who plays what on each track becomes something of an educated guessing game. Whereas prior releases were produced by a stable lineup that was occasionally augmented or modified, byt this point the original group had splintered and Sly had emerged as the definitive ringleader, sometimes taking over duties himself, sometimes just corralling whoever else was available. Further, his production practices of recording, re-recording and overdubbing on marathon, around-the-clock sessions at the Record Plant in Los Angeles (wikipedia is currently incorrect on this point, by the way), as well as his own custom-designed studio in the attic of his home at Bel Air, resulted in a lack of authoritative documentation. In some cases various people involved are on the record about who played specific parts, in others it's guesswork.

That being said, Errico may have been gone by November of '71, but that's definitely him on "Luv 'n' Haight" and ironically he opens the album with the same drum pattern that closed out the previous LP (the coda of "You Can Make It If You Try"). There's an uncertainty in where things are going as the bass and wah wah guitar trade riffs before swerving into the 8-bar intro, a harmonically dense stew of vocals from Little Sister, a low-key horn line from Martini and Robinson, wah wah guitar licks, and fierce interjections from the piano. The bassline pops and gambols around, dropping off the one beat entirely in spots and otherwise hovering between two notes, letting the harmony vocals and the piano carry the chord changes, Sly's mumble-mouthed vocal slurring over the top.

Structurally and harmonically this is in many ways a classic Sly composition, with plenty of similarities to previous songs. There's an 8-bar verse, consisting of a 4-bar, one-chord vamp (the piano jabs out the root minor 7th chord) and a clever 4-chord turnaround, with the intro serving as a bridge. But the delivery is a whole other story. No more interlocking, finely tooled arrangements of precise parts; now the final arrangement of a song is the emergent result of a freewheeling, messily organic process. The players don't stick to consistent phrasing, improvisation within the general framework of the song is now the modus operandi. Once the verses kick in, neither the bass, the guitars or the piano repeat phrases from one bar to the next. There's two drum tracks (two different hi-hat patterns are clearly audible), creating a skittering, stuttering pattern that also elides the downbeat, only locking into a more standard 4/4 pattern for the turnarounds at the end of each verse. The horns, always the most disciplined element, stick the closest to their charts, playing swelling notes in unison for the turnarounds that act as a nice transition into Little Sisters' backing vocals on the bridge, where the horns switch over to their countermelody. After two run-throughs of the verses and bridge, the band latches onto the vamp and extends it through the fade out, the polyrthyms of the bass, drums, guitars, and piano becoming so knotty and tangled that there's no discernible center, just a constantly shifting prismatic effect, different elements intermittently flickering in and out of focus.

The vocals too are subsumed by this new approach, the clearly delineated group effort of prior records is gone. Sly takes the lead, ceding the turnarounds to Rose, with Little Sister serving as a chorus. But the dynamic and delivery is also different. Sly's double-tracked vocal twists and turns around itself right from the start: "I am here / I'm gonna tell you something" he begins, before devolving into a series of overlapping "yeah"s and "hey"s and delivering the song's refrain: "feel so good inside myself / (don't) wanna move, wanna move". He groans, shouts, whines, grunts, constantly shifting his phrasing, avoiding providing a clear melodic anchor for the listener. Instead the vocals are subsumed into the thicket of the other instruments. Rose sings "As I grow up, I'm growing down / And when I'm lost, I know I will be found" in the first turnaround but then is oddly absent altogether in the second. When Little Sister's backing vocals finally chime in with the repeated refrain for the end of the song, they are double-tracked to ping-pong on either side of the stereo field, hectoring back and forth while Sly sits in the middle, immobile, grasping for the family's call-and-response gospel roots.

As provocative and enthralling as this song is, it's baffling that Sly wanted it be the lead single, perhaps a sign of his faltering commercial instincts (Paley wisely did an end-run around him to get out "Family Affair" instead).

his own custom-designed studio in the attic of his home at Bel Air

This was John Phillips' home studio; he goes into some detail in his memoir about having to put together a "gang" to evict a recalcitrant Sly from the house.

Variations of this rhythm would still be reverberating through popular music 30 years later (Outkast's "I'll Call Before I Come" from 2000 springs to mind).

the groove reminds me a little of busta's "put your hands where my eyes can see"

105. Sly & the Family Stone - Just Like a Baby (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoHlLXaxGec
It's interesting how, especially in this particularly febrile period, Sly returned several times to the bluesy 6/8 doo wop rhythms of his youth, after having abandoned them entirely between '64 and '68. This song was originally built around one of the Rhythm King's presets (as evidenced by the demo version on Light in the Attic's Stone Flower compilation), but here the song's beating heart rhythm is delivered with lead-footed precision by Errico. If that is in fact Graham on bass he is also unusually sedate, sticking pretty closely to a standard walking bass pattern. The song is built around a bewitching, minor key 16-bar blues progression that descends down the scale and briefly resolves on a major chord before throwing in a transitional 7th and circling back to the beginning. In an unexpected twist midway through, Sly throws in a couple of 8-bar bridges that ratchet up half a step from the root chord to a 7th. The vocals and organ die away, and there's a brief suggestion of a sweeter, brighter direction before the song collapses back into the blues.

Blues clavinet? Why not. The instrument was a relatively new addition to Sly's arsenal, and he uses it's thin, percussive sound across at least three tracks here, alternating between chords and fills while sustained, eerie organ chords, swathed in reverb, hover in the background. A clean electric guitar (possibly Bobby Womack?) enters in the first bridge, shadowboxing with the wordless vocals and then chopping chords against a wandering clavinet line before dropping out, only to return later. Sly toggles between different combinations of instruments throughout: while the drums and bass are locked in place, clavinets, organ and guitar come and go, weaving in and out, sometimes disappearing for entire sections. It has to be said that compared to the meticulous engineering on prior records, a lot of this is sloppy. You can hear chairs squeak. Wrong notes have been left in. The vocals are occasionally distorted. There's audible surface noise at several points. There's track leakage all over the place, fragmentary echos of punched out tracks lingering in the mix. There's also generally more reverb here than on the Stone Flower tracks, applied to both the keyboards and the vocals.

And there's at least three vocals here. One, hard panned in one channel (with its echo in the other), is definitely Sly. The others - dry, raspy and higher pitched - sound more like Womack. All three are more often than not wordless, a series of moaning, reedy interjections and ad-libs, occasionally coming together to repeat the refrain. Freed from the constraints of the original septet's group vocal dynamic, the loose and restless qualities of Sly's singing are brought to the fore. The others follow his lead, trading cues, mimicking the guitar line, crying quietly, drifting away. The lyrics are fragmentary, just a handful of lines, some barely distinguishable at all. "Just like a baby / Sometimes I cry / Just like a baby / I can feel it when you lie to me / Just like a baby / Everything is new / Just like a baby / Come to find out / I'm a whole lot like you, too ... see the babies growin'" The song goes on for much longer than it's basic building blocks or minimal lyrics would seem to require, but the lugubrious groove has the pull of quicksand, sucking everything down into it.

Have always loved this one’s woozy soulfulness. The mistakes are part of its “this could really go on forever” 3AM charm.

I’ve heard Bobby Womack was on this record but never known where – agree that might be him on the “HEYY, EYYY, EYYY” at 1’39” and “Ooh yeaahhhh” around 3’26”.

This thread…my gosh. In all the best poss ways.

totally. we're not worthy. can't wait to spend a saturday afternoon binging these posts.

106. Sly & the Family Stone - Poet (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iHZ9vAp6a4
The first track to feature both the Rhythm King and a live drummer (presumably Errico; Sly briefly hired the Banana Splits' drummer, Gerry Gibson, for a few months after Errico left but it seems doubtful he's on the record; unable to find any direct references to him playing on anything). The drum machine is very much in the background, essentially providing percussive color; it's the steady 16th notes on the hi-hat, the thumping kick drum, and the snap of the snare on the four-beat that hold the song together. Once gain Sly and Errico hit on a rhythmic pattern that has very little, if any, rhythmic precedent.

Right from the start the track is a haze of clavinet runs, clipped electric guitar riffs, and a wah wah farfisa briefly establishing the root 7th chord on the backbeats. Each instrument moves around inside the bar, individually emphasizing different beats and off-beats. There's no central riff, the only recurring motif being a four-note melody on the clavinet that occasionally gets repeated. This sounds very much like it has its roots in the Stone Flower singles sessions, it seems likely that it was constructed from the ground up with the drum machine and various overdubs by Sly, and the live drums tacked on afterwards. The bassline also resembles Sly's playing on the Stone Flower tracks, establishing a basic, melodically simple pulse when it enters with the second lyrical stanza but then getting more squirrelly as the song goes on. There's no real structure or arrangement here; again the core approach is one of primarily rhythmic improvisation within a strict but complex framework (this isn't free jazz, the drum machine never wavers).

There are some thick layers of irony in the song's lyrics. A guy with perpetually armed bodyguards that beat up other bandmembers and surrounded himself with guns singing "my only weapon is my pen". Declaiming himself a poet and a songwriter on a track that features only six fairly basic lines and none of the elements of conventional songwriting. In the context of Sly's previous self-reflective, statement-of-purpose type songs like "Underdog" and "Everyday People", there's a pattern of gradual deconstruction: there's the initial blast of a showy, tightly-arranged group working within the current pop idiom, then an almost academic exercise in how many melodies the group can wring out of one chord, and finally a song where there's not really a group, a composition, or even any melodies to speak of. Instead there's this jigsaw of jumbled polyrhythms, threads of interstitial phrases coiling around each other, sometimes pouncing on the downbeat, other times languorously sliding away from it. There's no other singers, just Sly. There's no horns. No changes, only guitars, organ, and clavinets snaking around each other.

How did people react to hearing this album on first listen when it came out? Three songs in and there's none of what people must have been expecting: no hooks, no dance beats, no exuberance, no Family.

107. Sly & the Family Stone - Family Affair (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ssaRBcaMmI
The band's third and final number one single. Is this the greatest song Sly ever wrote? Maybe. It's a distillation of a lot of what made him special. It's casually engaging and emotionally resonant, coyly inventive on a musical level, equal parts nostalgia and futurism. It sounds warm, lived in, comfortable but tinged with sadness. Stephen Paley: "I knew "Family Affair" was going to be a hit, it was so unique and so melodic, just very special. I had never heard a record like it, exactly, with the strange vocal he had and the rhythm machine instead of the drums. I just knew it was a hit and he didn't hear it. He wanted "Luv n' Haight". Ron Alexenberg, who was head of promotions, and I decided to override Sly and put it out anyway. He couldn't do it because Sly had the rights to choose his own singles, so we made acetates and sent them to stations. I said "Sly, I don't know how this happened, but they are playing the record - we have to go with "Family Affair."" He knew it was probably my doing and he was annoyed. He said that it better be a hit. Not only was it a hit, it was the biggest hit he ever had. It was over two and a half million singles. It was a giant hit."

Errico has claimed that the original band cut a version of "Family Affair" the year before (this version has not surfaced, if it even still exists). This relatively recent video of the original band (minus Graham) listening to a playback of the multitrack tapes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQLweeUk8GE) is instructive about how the final version of the song was constructed in the studio. Perhaps the most striking aspect is how much was ultimately left on the cutting room floor. The final mix is one of the most minimalist on the album: bass and wah wah organ (both presumably Sly), Billy Preston on electric piano, Bobby Womack's wah wah electric guitar, vocals from Sly and a reportedly half-awake Rose, and, most significantly, the indelible Rhythm King combined with live drums and percussion. The Rhythm King's samba beat is dramatically sped up and overlaid with offbeat accents on a cowbell and a simple kick and snare pattern that holds steady on the backbeat, essentially creating a new hybrid beat out of three different rhythms. The Rhythm King and cowbell are both muffled and pushed into a narrow EQ range with all the high end stripped out, providing a thick polyrhythmic background. The effect is head-bobbingly hypnotic, detailed without being cluttered, both mechanical and organic.

The structure of the song is oddly circular, opening and closing with several descending minor 7th chords before resolving on a dominant 7th, a pattern which is not otherwise repeated during the rest of the song. The verses are just two chords (a minor 7th and a dominant 7th), and the choruses differ only slightly by shifting to a I-IV-V progression. Aside from all the 7ths, this is not particularly complex harmonically, but the devil is in the details. In a bizarrely inspired twist, it's the opening and closing of the wah wah pedal on the farfisa that maintains a steady quarter note rhythm. The bass pops and snaps - again, often more percussive than melodic - but is wildly all over the place, sometimes sticking to firmly to the roots of the chords and other times doing Sly's signature rising and falling lines. The real star of this song (apart from the vocal) is unquestionably Preston, whose nimble curlicues on the electric piano are endlessly inventive but always right in the pocket, a bottomless wonder. Womack plays a similar role but is less prevalent, his cleanly enunciated lines brought in to add color to the choruses. There's no reverb anywhere, but there are ghostly echoes from track bleed of the various guitar and vocal lines that Sly had cut out of the mix. Rose, ironically the only member of Sly's family on the track, sings the refrains with a simple clarity.

Sly's lead vocal is a laconic marvel. He shows an unusual degree of restraint, reining in his more outwardly expressive tendencies in favor of a more conversational delivery that is deceptively meandering as he varies his phrasing, exploring hidden corners of the melody. He sounds resigned, reflective. As with much of "Riot", the lyrics are brief, cryptic, a hall of mirrors. Sly stretches himself though, dabbling in narrative and character in a way that was rare for him. The two verses are separate dramas in miniature that don't require any biographical analysis to carry weight. They're about the obligations of relationships, the need to feel loved and the fear of commitment, ambivalence borne of doubt, how familiar and familial roles can be like a prison, even when they're all that's holding people together. "You can't cry, 'cause you'll look broke down / But you're cryin' anyway 'cause you're all broke down." This is the emotional center of the album, and arguably of Sly's entire catalog.

there's no discernible center, just a constantly shifting prismatic effect, different elements intermittently flickering in and out of focus.

I doubt Sly heard it, but the closest precursor to this I can think of, in rock, is the Magic Band on Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man, released earlier in 1971, jamming on one chord vamps, riffing but never breaking out into solos.

"Poet" has a very disconcerting recurring sound in the second half which sounds like a backwards cymbal, or backwards echo on a cymbal? But I can't think of another instance where Sly reversed tapes.

The most intriguing detail in "Family Affair" is how Rose alternates singing the same melody over both the minor key section and the two chord verse vamp, giving brighter and darker colouration to the same words and notes.

108. Sly & the Family Stone - Africa Talks to You ""The Asphalt Jungle"" (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp2vQkBXiPI
For the first time on the album, Sly opts for a stretched out mix that spotlights the guitars, and (also for the first time on the album) the presence of the original Family Stone rhythm section of Errico, Graham and Freddie appears to be detectable. The guitar players in particular (Freddie? Bobby? Sly? Ike Turner?) churn up a river of riffs and rhythmic cross-talk that flow non-stop through the song, rushing over the mid-tempo groove, creating little eddies and whirlpools around the vocals. As with several other tracks here, there’s no conventional song structure per se, just a tonal center and a lockstep rhythm for the instruments to move around in, although this time around there are distinct riffs and phrases that are picked up, played in unison, tossed around, and then discarded.

Again Sly builds up a unique rhythm by combining live drumming with a preset from the Rhythm King, in this case a dramatically slowed down bossa nova beat. The bass leads the instruments in, a wah wah farfisa and guitar hitting the twos and fours, the clavinet comping straight 8th notes. The rhythmic boundaries established, things quickly become more fluid, individual volumes swell and dissipate, Sly's aggressive interventions at the mixing board more evident than ever. Errico enters gradually, at first establishing the downbeat with kick drum accents and then introducing a tick-tock 16th note pattern on the hi-hat. There's no dynamics in the drums, just a continuous, sinuous shuffle. Errico's entry is a cue for release of a torrent of clean, bluesy guitar licks across 8 bars, before group vocals come in for the first verse, followed by the "timberrrrr" refrain. Little Sister's backing vocals are clearly audible, but there's also multiple other vocals in the mix, including a couple male falsetto voices (Sly? Bobby? Freddie?) There's another 8 bars of guitar and keyboard interplay, then another verse and refrain before the mix is pared back to just drums, bass, clavinet and one guitar, with the other additional elements gradually being added back in. There’s at least three guitar tracks, and they all sound like they have been plugged directly into the mixing console, with varying degrees of reverb applied. Running guitars direct into the board this way (a tactic Prince would lean on heavily 10 years later) produces a distinctly airless, compressed sound due to the lack of amplification, which results in an effect that is both unnatural and strangely intimate, as if there is no space between the guitar and the listener's ear. The song ebbs and flows, tumbling forward with no end in sight over it's nearly 9-minute length, the longest on the album. Once the (very brief) verses are dispensed with, the vocals return for more "timberrrr" refrains every 8 bars; some are hystrionic, some little more than over-amplified whispers.

What decipherable lyrics there are are Sly at his most inscrutable or, at worst, lazy. The central refrain seems to be a portent of disaster ("all fall down"), there's references to dying and crying, getting old, getting too cold. In the mix some of the vocals are panned apart from one another, but the overall effect is one of a dissolute gospel chorus, a mass of voices shouting over each other, mumbling, crying. Is this Africa talking? Previously Sly had always been careful to reference racial dynamics in America with an eye to both sides of the black and white divide, but here he seems, in some oblique way, to be acknowledging that he knows exactly which side of that divide he's on.

109. Sly & the Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)

Expanded from zero seconds to four seconds (of silence) on the latest remaster!

110. Sly & the Family Stone - Brave & Strong (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD7443z6Xog
Released as a the b-side to the album's second single "Runnin' Away". Only the second song on the album to feature Martini and Robinson's horns, it also sounds like Errico, Graham and Freddie contributed. And while it bears some of the hallmarks of the original septet's previous work, these are subverted by Sly's dominance on the track (he again takes the sole vocal), his production and arrangement choices, and the song's slippery structure.

Errico and the Rhythm King are once again symbiotically bound together, right from the opening bars. Errico's accompaniment, which sounds like it's comprised of two separate tracks, is primarily on the top of the kit, all hi-hat 16th notes and snare accents, the low end of the kick drum almost entirely obscured. The beat clatters, skittering around the rhythm restlessly, occasionally settling on heavy quarter notes on the hi-hat just to keep time through the turnarounds.

Martini and Robinson are heavily featured, but interestingly they were never granted (or perhaps not interested in, or capable of) the improvisatory freedom often accorded the guitars and keyboards on "Riot". As ever, their parts are carefully composed and delivered either in unison or with tight harmonies; no exploratory solos or free blowing here. For this track they stick to a countermelody in the verses, the emphasis is on quick staccato bursts and rapid crescendos, their rising and falling volume a mirror of Sly's own singing, keyboard playing, and mixing in general.

The arrangement is incredibly cluttered. here's two wah wah farfisa tracks, an electric piano, a stingingly clean electric guitar track that definitely sounds like Freddie's rhythm style, and, most prominently, a driving bassline. And in the backgound, all the way through the song, are fragments of track bleed and ghost signals from the horns and keyboards. Whether this is by design or carelessness is impossible to say; it does give the track a dizzying level of detail, especially with all the stereo panning, every crack and corner of the frame is filled with dodging, overlapping lines. All of the instruments pop in and out from bar to bar, emphasizing different beats, the keyboards in particular constantly shifting between keeping straight time, swelling chords and rolling fills. The bass is really what holds everything together, providing the bottom end lacking in the drums and also leading all the changes.

And the changes here are very unusual. The basic building block of the song is an 8-bar verse built around a one chord vamp, but what happens at the end of that verse is different every single time. The first 8-bar verse is followed by a 4-bar turnaround; the second verse has the original 4-bar turnaround that is then extended by an additional, different 4-bar turnaround; the third verse also has the original 4-bar turnaround, but then extends that with yet another, different, 6-bar turnaround; the fourth verse is actually 12 bars and concludes with still another entirely different 4-bar turnaround that is repeated twice; and then the song returns to the basic vamp that carries on through the fade-out. Such a structure makes it seem like Sly may have been making this up as he went along, just playing along with the Rhythm King on keyboards and then overdubbing everything else later. It definitely sounds at various points like not all the players know where the song is going, and at times other elements are punched out to let the bass and keyboards carry through.

Sly's vocal and lyrics are similar to "Luv n' Haight", the titular refrain interspersed with a host of shouts, slurred lines, and ad-libs. The lyrics are fragmentary, scattered, but generally appear to address Sly's common theme of persistence in the face of adversity. Some of the lines seem deliberately obscure or part of some weird in-joke ("before me was a cowboy star / Indians / and there you are"?), others incomplete ("When you walk / know where you're walking / when you talk...") The overall effect augments the track's splintered sonics, Sly soldiering on through a house of cracked mirrors.

really can't thank you enough for this thread - excited each time i see a post and def inspired to (when can find the time) do a deep listen with this in hand

Loving and appreciating this work thank you. “Poet” is one of my favourite songs of all time.

111. Sly & the Family Stone - (You Caught Me) Smilin' (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfljDrx9Tho
The third single from the album, but also the lowest charting, reaching only 42 on the pop chart and 21 on the R&B chart, and it starts with a head fake. A curiously harmonized guitar, piano and organ lick is abruptly cut in in the middle of the bar and then disappears (never to return), leaving Errico a few beats to establish a straightforward, mid-tempo 4/4 rhythm. What follows is an alternately eerily pretty and clangorously funky tune that bears the hallmarks of both Sly's still-potent compositional chops and the original septet's incredible dexterity. Really this almost sounds like was written earlier - it bears some harmonic and structural similarities to some of the tracks from '69 - and then re-worked extensively in the studio; but this is just speculation.

The verses open with the titular refrain, sung over a wistful descending chord progression, led by the electric piano, that is all major and minor 7ths at first but then pivots to dominant 7ths for the last two lines. This pattern repeats twice before cutting over to an instrumental break that bounces up half a step, highlighted by a horn crescendo and dense polyrhythmic playing that vaguely resembles "You Can Make It If You Try". The entire sequence repeats twice before fading out. This strict A-section/B-section kind of structure was a songwriting tactic Sly had often drawn on in the past; it's something of an outlier on this album. The mix is dry, nothing has any reverb, but the way individual instruments are brought in and out throughout the song are evidence of some heavy editing on Sly's part.

Moreso than a lot of other tracks on "Riot", this also sounds closer to the work of the original septet. The pitter-patter of Errico's drums is tight and nimble, splashing out on the refrains and snapping back into focus with clattering fills at the end of each section. Way in the background there's an intermittently audible metronome or drum machine click, but Errico is the percussive center. The keyboards are the by now familiar combo of electric piano and wah wah clavinet (likely Rose on the former and Sly on the latter). There's at least three guitar tracks, and Freddie's stylistic tics are evident in the popped riffs and chunky chords. The bass, per Robinson's recollection and rather surprisingly, is played by Sly rather than Graham, although it doesn't seem very far off from what Larry would have come up with if he hadn't shown up for the session a week and a half late; once again it's mixed way out front, providing a remarkable amount of drive and rhythmic invention, swerving between slapping and popping and then some rather gently slid notes for the refrains. The breaks are a dramatic shift from the relaxed feel of the verses (witness that lazily descending clavinet line); the guitars and clavinet become harsher and choppier as they come to the fore and suddenly the track is swarming and sputtering, particularly the second time around when the guitars also go for the wah wah pedal. The juxtaposition of the two sections is obviously the point, yet another instance of Sly's penchant for highlighting dualities.

Sly and either Little Sister or Rose handles the vocals - Sly is double-tracked, the female voices added in on the refrains, an octave above. The combined effect is teasing, childlike, glib. The lyrics, brief and direct, are rather blatantly about getting caught getting high and not giving a fuck, but then close with a repentant longing for connection. "You caught me smilin' again / Hangin' loose / 'Cause you ain't used to seeing me turnin' on... You caught me smilin' again / In my pain I'll be sane to take your hand." Even without indulging in biographical speculation, it's difficult to not read this song as an addict's coy mea culpa, the titular smile as a mask.

112. Sly & the Family Stone - Time (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Eq8hacV9c
The second 6/8 shuffle on the album is molasses slow, even slower than "Just Like a Baby". The organ in the introductory section is possibly the bleakest and loneliest stretch of bars he ever cut, a rare moment of naked melancholy unmoored from any irony or obfuscation. Towed along by the Rhythm King's unadorned "slow rock" beat, Sly's emotive vocal and rippling keyboard playing trail behind, drowning in a sea of reverb. Sly drifts through several verses of 16-bar blues, indulging in and deconstructing a ballad format that he hadn't engaged with at all since the unremarkable "That Kind of Person" from the band's 1967 debut. The sound is desolate. It seems unlikely that there's anyone else on the track at all; for once Sly seems completely and totally alone. His keyboard playing is, as ever, fascinatingly fluid and creative; the relatively simple blues changes are draped with transitional chord runs on two different clavinet tracks, the otherwise subdued organ periodically surging to the fore. A wah wah guitar track periodically keeps time, supplying additional color. There's no supporting vocals from Rose, no sympathetic filligrees from Womack or Preston. Just Sly musing to himself as the ship goes down, hollering, moaning, squealing, mumbling.

Lyrically not all the lines connect. Sly indulges his penchant for self-reference with a callback to "everyday people", and there's some off-handed rhymes that come off like filler. Sly can't stop himself from trying to inject some folksy humor to lighten the mood, but if there's a smile invoked here it's a death's head grin. Ultimately the key lines are the ones that open and close the song: "Time / Needs another minute / (At least) / Take your time / But you've got a limit" and "Time they say is the answer / But I don't believe it". This is frustration, exhaustion. Tired of being worn down, tired of always having to wait. On an album with plenty of darkness in it, this is it's darkest track.

The rushing, flowing phasing effect in the closing bars of this song are some of the most eerie, uncanny music ever. I picture him trapped there in that moment of disintegration forever; because for a song supposedly about the passage of time, what it's really about is stasis.

Re. “(You Caight Me) Smilin’ Again”

A curiously harmonized guitar, piano and organ lick is abruptly cut in in the middle of the bar and then disappears (never to return), leaving Errico a few beats to establish a straightforward, mid-tempo 4/4 rhythm

Re. “(You Caught Me) Smilin’,” I can’t hear the five-second harmonized guitar intro phrase without thinking about like a hundred P-Funk arrangements in the mid-70s. Just one of a zillion things Sly tossed off that became the basis for other people’s whole careers.

113. Sly & the Family Stone - Spaced Cowboy (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcQV0YK_mkc
Sly loved Jim Ford. He was reportedly always around during the recording of "Riot", and while he is not credited with appearing on this track it seems likely he was the nominal inspiration. Sequenced after the grim trudge of "Time", the levity and inherent silliness of this song serve as a bit of an antidote, a course correction to bring some levity to the proceedings.

While this is in many ways the slightest song on the record, Sly nonetheless commits to the bit, employing a standard country chord structure filtered through the album's general aesthetic of multilayered percussion, shifting polyrhythms and wah wah keyboard accompaniment. There's some blatantly sloppy engineering here, as evidenced by the amount of surface noise in the opening bars alone. A mid-tempo preset from the Rhythm King leads the way, with the bass and two wah wah farfisa tracks feeling their way into the arrangement, along with two live drum tracks (presumably Errico). The song burbles along, gradually establishing the I-IV-V chord pattern as the drums putter along, before the farfisa finally hits some sustained chords and cue the vocals to come in. Sly takes the lead with a solo vocal, augmented with some heavy echo and a couple other voices (at least one of them female) doing ad libs in the background. A clavinet and wah wah guitar also wander in and out, sometimes interjecting little licks, other times helping hold the rhythm and chord structure together. Sly throws in some distorted yodeling in between the lines, and each time Errico switches to double-time for a kind of ersatz country drum part. Sly is obviously enjoying himself here, chuckling and even doing a little bit of a Jimmy Rodgers imitation, as well as throwing in an instrumental verse so he can take a harmonica solo (one last time). As an exercise in the retroactively-defined genre of "country funk" the song hits its sardonic mark, Sly reveling in yet another juxtaposition of nominally black and white styles.

Lyrically we're basically in half-assed limerick territory, Sly rattling off couplets in a joking manner, interspersed with some hearty but similarly goofy yodeling. For some reason Dylan springs to mind, particularly in his more self-consciously comical moments. There are some exceptions: "everything I like is nice / that's why I try to have it twice" is the kind of line that obscures a grim truth with a veil of humor, and the line about being called a pimp likewise has an air of "he doth protest too much" about it. As was often the case with Dylan, Sly similarly seems to indulge in this detour both because he found it personally amusing but also to challenge his audience with something unexpected; Sly was still capable of being both incredible and unpredictable, per Kapralik's PR copy.

114. Sly & the Family Stone - Runnin' Away (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53wP25lucrk
The second single from the album (backed by "Brave and Strong"), reached 23 on the Hot 100 and 15 on the Soul Singles chart. More than any other track on the album ("Smilin'" comes closest), this song feels like a holdover from the previous year or two. It deploys a clear pop song structure and sounds like it could have easily been recorded live in the studio by the original septet. It features the bare minimum of instrumentation: there's no drum machine, no battery of wah wah keyboards, no barrage of twangy guitars. There's also no echo; the sound is warm, if a bit distorted in places, and the vocals are laid back and intimate, up close.

Sly himself seems barely present, ceding the lead vocal to Rose while singing quietly in the background and playing straightforward chords on the organ. The organ is joined by a chiming electric guitar that shepherds the band through the ascending line of the verses, and then launches into a turnaround that drops down into a half cadence of minor 7ths. The pattern repeats twice and then pivots to a major key bridge, led by a pretty horn melody played in unison, and then it's back to the top, ending with an extension of the turnaround that gives the horns the opportunity to incorporate an alternate line. The bass comfortably fills in its familiar pocket, dragging out the twos and fours in the verses and bridges, and popping trills in the turnarounds.

The real stars of this arrangement are Errico, who introduces the song with a quick snare roll and then alternates between a rock solid 4/4 rhythm and a tricky funk break, and the horns. This is the last of only four songs on the album to feature Martini and Robinson. After having been heavily featured on almost every song of the band's previous albums, their being sidelined for nearly 2/3rds of "Riot" is something of a surprise and is certainly a factor in the album's overall stylistic shift. Here the horn lines are unusually fleet and percussive, and interestingly Sly cedes the melodic spotlight to them in the turnarounds and bridges as they run through a series of sharply enunciated staccato phrases. While the horns play in unison, their tracks are panned separately (with so little going on in the track, perhaps this was Sly's way of filling the stereo space).

In contrast to some of the other songs on the album, Sly's lyrics are clear and concise, no fat, no filler. Every line is a seemingly humorous admonition of self-deceptive behavior. But for a singer who habitually injects all kinds of offhand vocal shenanigans into his delivery, here he shows an unusual degree of restraint, and the scripted laugh lines in the lyrics are deliberately forced and mechanical. The song isn't actually funny; it's a sad commentary on people desperately trying and failing to escape their circumstances, of self-sabotage ("the deeper in debt / the harder you bet"). Easy to read this as Sly (again) singing to the mirror, fully aware of the hole he's digging himself and trying to laugh it off. Look at you foolin' you.

has anyone other than The Raincoats ever covered this?

sleepy brown, kinda, for a sly tribute album

115. Sly & the Family Stone - Thank You For Talking To Me Africa (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOlRX_MibFw
Sly opted to close out each side of the album with hypnotically long, deep grooves that directly reference dialogue with Africa: the LP as two sides of a (black) mirror. Apart from recycling the original lyrics this is otherwise a pretty different song from the "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)", and not just because of its drastically reduced tempo. The central bass riff has been chiseled down into an even more basic, elemental throb. The multi-tracked guitars, again run directly into the console to produce a dry, springy sound, stick closely to a short scratch pattern and a single spiralling riff, with only occasional embellishment apart from dramatic changes in volume (presumably Sly's doing from the mixing desk). The drums are spare and heavy, a lumbering stomp that periodically drops out altogether, re-entering with the barest of fills before splashing in on the downbeats. Occasional bursts of keyboard flicker into focus here and there but are otherwise absent for the majority of the track. Across the board the playing is distinctly minimalist, each part finely sculpted and set in stone, with only the briefest flashes of improvisation. Where the original "Thank You" was a dynamo of propulsive energy, here it has been re-cast as a slower, swaggering behemoth, heavy-lidded but sure-footed, containing an immense power.

As with "Family Affair", Errico claims the original band had cut a take of this song the year before. It's impossible to say what may have changed from that version to the one ultimately put on record; at the very least that's clearly Errico behind the kit on the final track, and the guitar part seems very much in Freddie's wheelhouse. Conversely it's hard to imagine Graham keeping his playing limited to the bedrock foundation the bass provides here, much less allowing the sloppiness of some of the fills that dot the transitions between verses. As with the original "Thank You", the horns are nowhere to be found.

While the instrumentation is constricted and tightly chained together, the sound is spacious, filled with cascading echoes. Reverb has been liberally applied to the guitars and, most notably, to the vocals, which are comprised Sly's lead vocal with backing from what sounds like a combination of Sly and Little Sister. Where the other parts of the arrangement are bound in place, Sly's vocals are the one element that roams free, bounding and cavorting around the melody with reckless abandon. The vocals don't even enter until almost two minutes into the song, Sly initially singing with a sighing, yawning delivery as if he's just waking up for a morning stretch. But soon he is shouting, grunting, yelping, talking, embroidering the lyrics with an endless series of ad-libs. Off in the distance his backing vocal answers in reply, a call-and-response dialogue with his shadow. The song is haunted by shadows - by one of the band's most monumental hits, by Sly's cultural heritage, by American racism, by the original septet itself. It's an epochal and sepulchral closer to the album, the thundering rumble of a ghost animated by pain and restlessness, shot through with black humor.

Sly would not release any new music for almost two years.

edit/correction to last paragraph:

While the instrumentation is constricted and tightly chained together, the sound is spacious, filled with cascading echoes. Reverb has been liberally applied to the guitars and, most notably, to the vocals, which are comprised Sly's lead vocal with backing from what sounds like a combination of Sly and Little Sister. Where the other parts of the arrangement are bound in place, Sly's vocals are the one element that roams free, bounding and cavorting around the melody with reckless abandon. The vocals don't even enter until almost two minutes into the song, Sly initially singing with a sighing, yawning delivery as if he's just waking up for a morning stretch. But soon he is shouting, grunting, yelping, talking, embroidering the lyrics with an endless series of ad-libs. Off in the distance his backing vocal answers in reply, a call-and-response dialogue with his shadow. It's here the Sly most conspicuously traces the contours of roots reggae dub - recycling an old song, slowing it down and making it heavier, putting new, heavily ad-libbed vocals on it, dropping out and punching in elements from the mixing desk, extensively applying echo, but perhaps most significantly evoking Africa through the use of space, subtraction, absence. The song is haunted by shadows - by one of the band's most monumental hits, by Sly's cultural heritage, by American racism, by the original septet itself. It's an epochal and sepulchral closer to the album, the thundering rumble of a ghost animated by pain and restlessness, shot through with black humor.

Great post. Slight correction: it’s not in the foreground but Martini and Cynthia do play quite a bit on the original “Thank You,” including some slippery “Peter Gunn”-ish chordal work.

Correct, that was a mistake/leftover sentence fragment.

Sly would not release any new music for almost two years.

Too long to wait! Fortunately we can discuss "My Gorilla Is My Butler" first.

116. Sly & the Family Stone - In Time (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6xhSqz_4m8
Released in June 1973, "Fresh" was Sly's return to the public eye after firing Kapralik and getting a new publishing deal through new management (ie, Ken Roberts). If anything, the recording sessions for "Fresh" were even more chaotic and disorganized than "Riot", and the stories surrounding the album's creation paint a shocking and grim picture. Much had been made of Sly's unreliability in the nearly two years between "Riot" and "Fresh", but it seems clear that what was primarily holding Sly back from releasing music wasn't a lack of material or creativity - in fact, he was writing and recording constantly.

On a purely artistic (as opposed to commercial) level, this is an incredible record, in many ways a perfectly natural progression from "Riot", created in a similar piecemeal fashion using a phalanx of shifting musicians, many of whom were ecstatic about the opportunity to support Sly, in particular new drummer Andy Newmark. Sly maintained an unusual predilection for white drummers throughout the majority of his career. He always kept one in his stable, all the way up until "Back on the Right Track" in 1979. Errico's departure in the wake of "Riot" left a huge hole and, the Rhythm King notwithstanding, Sly knew it. The arrival of Newmark behind the kit signalled a subtle shift in sound and direction, and coincided with a brief extension of Sly's commercial fortunes, which were nonetheless wholly extinguished by the end of 1974. There are a couple of remarkable accounts of Newmark talking his way into the band (https://med✧✧✧.c✧✧✧@ja✧✧✧.r✧✧✧_84272/its-a-family-affair-395ccb53e9e and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvsvKS6pGy8), and in light of Newmark's playing on this record (and on "In Time" in particular), Sly's reported reaction to hearing him for the first time makes perfect sense. Newmark is, unquestionably, a funky motherfucker.

Robinson: "[Sly] wanted to use a drummer to play his idea for him. He didn't have time to get his drum chops going. His ideas were there. He could do whatever lick he wanted... We were in the studio with that drum thing in "In Time," which is a backward funk thing. Every drummer who heard he was having a session dropped in. Sly wanted to see if any of these drummers could do it. Andy Newmark walked in on that session after five or six drummers came through - Buddy Miles, some others. Syl would show them the lick, how he wanted it done, and they would try and couldn't get it. Soon as he'd see a drummer walk into the studio, he'd be working on a song and stop to see if they could play this lick. Then Andy showed up. So he played it for Andy - I was there - and Andy sat at the drums and did it."

Graham's departure midway through the recording sessions for "Fresh" was also a huge loss, but despite all the bad blood (including death threats and actual attempts to carry out said death threats between Graham and Sly's respective entourages) Graham was gracious and self-aware enough to hand-pick an excellent replacement, Rusty Allen. Allen still had to pass an audition with Sly, but Graham's instincts proved fortuitous: while Rusty wasn't the groundbreaking powerhouse of his predecessor, he had definitely absorbed his style and he fit both Sly and Newmark like a glove.

All that being said, what is actually going on in this song? It opens with a drumroll over a preset from the Rhythm King, Newmark adding little accents but otherwise establishing a firm 4/4 tempo over a 6-bar intro, and then bass, two pumping-and-breathing organ tracks, and a clean guitar lick enter with a descending three-chord pattern before being joined by a fuzz bass for a four-note turnaround, signalling the switch to the verse. Honestly, words fail when it comes to the brain-twisting syncopated beat that Newmark settles into. It's funk for sure, but he's constantly moving around the downbeat without ever actually emphasizing it, he doesn't even hit the same snare pattern from one measure to the next, and yet everything he plays feels snapped tightly together. Which is true of the other instruments as well: the guitar, the horns, the bass, and the other keyboards all dodge and weave around each other with carefully clipped lines, placing the emphasis on different beats throughout. The easiest example to follow is one of the organ lines, which starts out the first verse by consistently hitting a quarter note on the third beat of each bar. But after the intro is repeated and the band comes in for a second verse, this time around the organ sticks to quarter notes on the *second* beat of each bar. The song is littered with these kinds of dizzying inversions.

Everything is dry (except for the drums, which have a fair amount of reverb on them) and everything is panned distinctly apart in the stereo field, which hightens the overall polyrhythmic impact. Everything is also very clean, in a departure from "Riot". The bass, for example, is compressed and doesn't have any of the noise or grit that Graham and Sly typically employed. The guitar and organs are both crystal clear. Even the fuzz bass is relatively constrained. The song repeats it's verse-break structure several times, making way for a couple saxophone solos and drum breaks, and plenty of instrumental interplay before fading out after nearly 6 minutes.

It’s notable that this is the first time there’s a saxophone solo on a Sly and the Family Stone song, and yet it isn’t Martini that plays it, it’s Pat Rizzo, the new guy. According to Martini, Rizzo had been brought in as a kind of threat from Sly to keep Martini from getting out of line and demanding more money. Rizzo: "I played the solo on "In Time". [Sly] would lay a rhythm track down and then start figuring out what he was going to do with the bass lines, guitar parts. I think he played most of the instruments. He always put the drums on last. He had the girls dancing in front of Andy Newmark when he put the drums on. That's why it's so difficult to understand the drum machine and what Newmark's doing on "In Time"."

Sly delivers the lead vocal, with backing from Little Sister on the refrains, and his voice is relatively strong and crisp. Lyrically there's more words than Sly had ever crammed into a song before, but many of them are half-formed aphorisms that don't entirely connect or rely on forced rhyme schemes. The most self-referential lines are the ones that leap out, and it's the "two years / too long to wait" and "switched from coke to pep / and I'm a connosieur" that usually get called out. But as usual there's always a sense of elision, of slipperiness; Sly is rarely being completely honest.

As a shot across the bow, this is quite an opening track. It's Sly taking a formula for funk - one that he had a lead role in creating - and turning it inside out; the emphasis on the one beat has been excised, the players are orbiting around a black hole, suggesting its existence by its absence. Miles Davis reportedly made his band listen to it for 30 minutes on repeat prior to a rehearsal.

"in time" is perhaps the grooviest song of all time

Miles Davis reportedly made his band listen to it for 30 minutes on repeat prior to a rehearsal.

amazing detail, ty

117. Sly & the Family Stone - If You Want Me To Stay (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZFabOuF4Ps
"If You Want Me to Stay" was the band's final Top 20 pop hit, reaching number 12 on the Pop Chart, and number three on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart. After the bewildering "In Time", "If You Want Me To Stay" feels like a reassuring gesture that Sly was not going to leave his pop audience wholly adrift, that he was still capable of delivering a compact, catchy tune. It's built entirely around a sturdy four-chord cycle (ok, yes there's a fifth grace chord) that is repeated throughout, but the real highlights are the remarkably concise bassline and the countermelody from the Rizzo, Martini and Robinson, one of the best horn arrangements Sly ever came up with.

Beginning inconspicuously with a bass figure, a kick drum hit, and the Rhythm King off in the background, there's a few bars of guitar fiddling before the bassline kicks in, along with an acoustic piano trilling around the edges. The bassline serves as the song's hook, another one of Sly's ingenious melodies that sounds like it's going in both directions at once; the chord progression is pulling downwards, but the bassline goes up the scale while still being stitched together by short descending phrases. Sly is reportedly playing everything here except for the horns and drums, and the bassline is pretty solidly delivered throughout, with little deviation, it's the anchor of the song. The horns are mixed relatively low, but are double tracked to accomodate some fairly complex, pointilist lines that overlap and call back to one another, never letting up. Newmark's playing behind the kit is straightforward, occasionally snapping open hi-hat accents, but keeping to the snare on the twos and fours. Sly's keyboards playing - on both piano and organ - is all color and shading, comping swelling, inverted chords and rhythmic variations, the piano and organ only really taking a solo in the instrumental breaks in the middle and towards the end, when the song abruptly putters to a close, much as it started. It's all over fairly quickly, leaving the impression that this was a brief, distilled moment of clarity, Sly whittling down his improvisatory tendencies into an oddly compelling slice of pop funk.

His vocal delivery is, as usual, all over the place, leaping from a falsetto to a throaty lower register, dodging and dancing around the melody. The lyrics are deceptive by design: it's statements of commitment are immediately undercut and revealed as conditional. Kathleen Silva (Sly's first wife): "A lot of things that Sly used to do would end up in a song. People around him would end up being his new material for writing. I remember one time I was pregnant, and I was bitching at him because he was always going to the studio and doing things. He would be out all night... I felt left out. He made a song up: "If you want me to stay / I'll be around today, I'll be available..."" No one's getting any hard promises out of Sly, least of all those ostensibly closest to him.

Is Sly’s vocal sped up here? I’ve always assumed it was (and was an influence on Prince’s Camille character regardless).

Next track sounds more Camille to these ears. What a glorious thread, thank you shakey (?)

Yeah, these breakdowns are great, thanks :)

118. Sly & the Family Stone - Let Me Have It All (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGumgIIq7d4
Many of the tracks on "Fresh" are like an extension of the approach of "Riot", but with some key adjustments: 1) the engineering and production are generally crisper and less muddy (even though there is still plenty of sloppy editing and weird artifacts left in the mixes); 2) the horns are much more prominent, and their parts are highly structured, the result being tracks with a more clearly defined shape; and 3) Newmark is just a completely different drummer from Errico.

As with the prior track, things begin rather inauspiciously, punched in in the middle of a bar, a guitar, bass and organ feeling their way around a slowed down Rhythm King preset, with Newmark tentatively establishing the downbeat. A chair squeaks, there's bleed from a muted electric guitar track off in the background. Then Sly's vocal - likely pitched up, his voice is thinner and higher than usual - enters and a song materializes. This is the seams showing, the overall approach to the song's construction is clearly audible in the finished product. The songs on "Fresh" have an emergent quality, there's no longer any straightforward process of writing a song, reharsing it, and then recording it. Instead there's an accumulation of largely improvised details (the horns are an exception here, it must be said), which are then worked over and edited and shaped into something resembling a conventional song.

Tom Flye, an engineer with the Record Plant in Sausalito where Sly completed "Fresh": "He wouldn't sit and work on a track until it was finished. It was more spontaneous than that. A typical session would be, come in, get everything working. Of course, every time these tapes were given back to me, all the track sheets and all that stuff was missing. Finally, it boiled down to, put a tape up, and run to where you heard music, and then start bringing faders up. If it sounded good, you left the fader up. If it didn't sound good, you turned it off. You could get it all up, then he would say: "I want to do a bass part." You would hook up a bass and do a bass part. Or he didn't have an idea right then. Then we would put up another song. Sometimes, he'd work a little bit on each one of them when they were put up. Sometimes, he could go through ten or fifteen tracks before he found something that he wanted to work on." Perhaps it goes without saying that this approach has become de rigeur, especially since the advent of digital recording technology but even before then too (Prince is an obvious example). In the early 70s, however, this was very rare, if not wholly unprecedented.

On "Let Me Have It All", what gives shape to the track is the vocals and the horns. Without them it's just a jumble of riffs and phrases. There's no chord changes, everything is oriented around a single tonal center, all the movement and shading provided by the polyrhythms and harmonic variations as the instruments and voices swap octaves and chord voicings. The mix is chaotic, wah wah guitars and organs swirling and burbling underneath. Sly's lead vocal establishes a verse/chorus call-and-response pattern with Little Sister. The lyrics are, in something of a novel turn for Sly, romantically oriented, a topic he had largely avoided for much of the previous few years' output. They're still coy and tentative, full of uncertainty; he references marriage in the context of a peak to be reached, but also expresses (as usual) fear and trepidation. Sly wants it all, but is also afraid of actually getting it. Vocals established, the horns enter with a familiar crescendo in the first chorus, capping the line with a staccato phrase that echoes the chorus' vocal melody. The horns then repeat variations of the line throughout, entering in the middle of the subsequent verses and extending through the choruses. The ladies keep up a steady series of "hey heys" and "let me have it all"s throughout, providing another consistent through line.

Newmark is, again, in a whole other league from Errico on this track. Errico may have been an innovator, one who played with a distinctive amount of force and energy and was able to come up with beats unlike anyone else, but Newmark's playing is tighter and cleaner, and also much more nuanced and complex. The Rhythm King is ballast, providing him with the freedom to explore all sorts of tricky figures and polyrhythms without ever losing the groove. Here he employs the technique of playing fills that start in one bar and then extend past the downbeat, into the next bar (something he says he picked up from Tony Williams); he never drops the downbeat entirely, but it is obscured, caught up in this procession of overlapping patterns.

Until, that is, Sly gets bored and the song abruptly peters out, the bass and guitars disappear, a second drum track briefly pops in, and Sly's fingers run off the organ. An off mic "okay" is caught on the track as Newmark, the horns and Little Sister gamely carry on through the fade out.

Killer posts as per usual. I just discovered the alternate mixes version of this album and...yikes...I think it's way more of a sequel to Riot than the released mix.

Holy crap, that alternate mix of this is incredible.

Right? Gorgeous druggy funk.

The vocal on "If You Want Me to Stay" always felt to me like a nod (or challenge? or parody?) to Stevie Wonder.
Speeding up his vocals on this album is sort of the aural equivalent of having the cover photo taken while lying on glass so he looks like he's leaping rather than laying.

119. Sly & the Family Stone - Frisky (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnr3SMeckGg
Flye: "He had a little sixteen-track studio in his aparment in New York... his house in Bel Air had a full, competent studio hidden in the attic. We worked in Sausolito quite a bit. And then, from time to time, we would take one of my portable rigs over to his mother's house in Stonestown. We would work in the basement there... He had a Toyota station wagon that was his tape vault and at the beginning of the session this station wagon would arrive and all this tape would be unloaded and dumped into a big pile on the floor. A station wagon pretty much full. I would say, forty to a hundred reels of tape."

Stephen Paley, Sly's Epic Records A&R rep and Art Director: "I came out there and worked on it a little bit… I just remember a lot of piecemeal recording going on. More micro-editions. He completely let me do the cover. I got Richard Avedon to shoot it. Sly respected brand names and Richard Avedon was a brand name and the company was willing to pay what he wanted, which was a lot. Rolling Stone ran an item about the cover saying that Sly wasn't really jumping, he was standing on plexiglass or suspended by wires. That is nonsense. He was absolutely jumping. He was doing karate. I wrote a letter to the editor."

"Frisky" is another patchwork piece that sounds like it was built up from Sly messing about at the electric piano over the Rhythm King, with the mix gradually layering in Newmark's drums, the horns and Little Sister. The core of the song is clearly the opening piano figure, a fantastically catchy circular turnaround held in place by the slapped bassline. The mix is initially quite minimal, some echo on Newmark's snare as he marks time but otherwise just the dryly recorded bass, piano, and wah wah clavinet, the Rhythm King barely audible. Sly's vocal enters as the piano figure is repeated several times before segueing into a brief, four-chord middle eight, where his delivery gets pretty Stevie Wonder-ish ("call me back on the telephone"). Then it's back to the main riff and the horns and backing vocals come in. The double-tracked horns play two sustained, elastic lines that cross-over each other, voicing tight harmonies, Rizzo breaking off into a solo line for the middle eight. Newmark swerves between some fancy footwork for the central groove and a more straightahead beat on the middle eights, always keeping the snare on the three. There is again an accumulative effect, the accretion of details coalescing into a surprisingly cohesive whole, however briefly, before abruptly fading out (possibly prompted by the extraneous off-beat clapping in the final bars).

The lyrics are a puzzling mix of semi-nonsensical rhymed couplets ("Energy the jailer / wanna keep it in check / gonna check with my tailor / 'cause I don't give a heck") and fairly literal observations about spending a lot of time in bed ("that's why I keep music / all around the bed"), although there is a consistent theme of exhaustion. How "Frisky" fits into this is not entirely clear, Sly sings as if this is a person's name and not an adjective. His vocal again sounds slightly sped up, and the delivery is very conversational, his always expressive voice raspy and grainy (parallels with Ray Charles), singing as if he's relaying a series of private in-jokes. Equating being too lazy to get out of bed with conserving his energy? He was obviously still capable of extended bursts of activity, including recording non-stop and jumping around in platform shoes.

having the cover photo taken while lying on glass so he looks like he's leaping rather than laying.
― Halfway there but for you

Glad to have my bubble burst for only a few hours.

120. Sly & the Family Stone - Thankful n' Thoughtful (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLOH6w4jMpA
From the bottom to the top. As with many of the other tracks on this album, this sounds like a natural extension of "Riot" but the overall mood is lighter, and thematically it looks back (somewhat uncharacteristically for Sly) to his family's gospel roots for some gratitude practice, a paean to persistence and redemption. The tempo is relatively slack and the instrumentation is minimal: two wah wah electric guitars, electric piano, bass, horns, Little Sister, Newmark and the Rhythm King, and Sly singing lead. Again there are no chords, and it sounds like it was largely improvised and structured around a specific hook, in this case the four-note bass riff.

Flye: "Sly was kind of the innovator of the track-by-track, build-your-record overdub style. When I was working with him, he almost never tracked more than one instrument at a time. He really did that way before most people… Sometimes he'd put down an organ track first, and that would tell you the chord changes. Then he'd go onto whatever idea he had next--it might be a little guitar lick; put that in there. So there was no set way of working. The first versions were like demos, and the demos would evolve. If someone else could play the part better than him, okay. If they couldn't, he'd do it. Quite often the drums went on last."

The bassline sticks pretty consistently in the pocket, even with all the various inflections and shifts in phrasing. The electric piano is all over the place, constantly leaping octaves and shimmying up and down the scale, never settling into a particular pattern. Again it's Sly's vocal that provides some kind of familiar verse/chorus structure, which is augmented by Little Sisters' backing vocals repeating the "thankful, thoughtful" refrains. Once the horns enter, playing a tight staccato countermelody in unison that splits into harmonies at the end of each phrase, the choruses are basically a call and response between them and Little Sister, with Sly tossing in some vocal acrobatics in the background. The wah wah guitars enter in the second verse and, similar to the piano, snakes through a series of octave-spanning licks and blues scales, never staying in one place.

Sly is at his most verbose on "Fresh", and he crams in a lot of lines here, all focused around getting prayed up. Multiple lines reference being lucky to even still be alive, a sidelong acknowledgment of an inherently dangerous and risky lifestyle, and many speak directly to an effort to revive the wide-eyed optimism of prior years. Counting his blessings, Sly returns to a familiar theme in the last verse, directly citing his parents as the source of his music. The lyrics are distinctly personal, even with the distancing effect of referring to himself in the third person ("the main man felt Syl should be here another day"). This is Sly trying to do the right thing, keep himself in line, keep his head on straight, be a good kid, let some sunshine in.

121. Sly & the Family Stone - Skin I'm In (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ruq2HJGs31g
Starting with the barest of bass riffs, this is a departure from prior tracks. For one, Newmark is on his own behind the drum kit, leading with a double-time hi-hat pattern and the kick drum on the two beat for the whole 30-second intro, which is nothing but drums, bass and some electric piano noodling (and, to be fair, a whole lot of background noise). But then Newmark unexpectedly changes up his pattern and an entirely different song bursts into full bloom, a staggered, double-tracked horn part charging over a lugubrious tempo as the electric piano fills out the harmonies of a descending chord line. After the initial fanfare the keyboard and bass modulate down for a brief vamp so Sly can sing a few lines before returning to the refrain. This structure is repeated twice, and then there's a remarkable bridge, led by the horns peppering in a cross-chatter of rising and falling 8th note runs. This is probably the most complex horn arrangement Sly had written to-date, as if he's finally unlocked how to incorporate horns into the style and methods he's been leaning on since the "Riot" sessions. The harmonic and rhythmic invention here are eye-opening. Newmark clearly loves it, playing off the horn phrases with a lot of footwork and ghost notes on the snare. There's a very dynamic tension between Newmark's slow, spare drumbeat (he lays off the hi-hat) and the busy-ness of the other instruments; the bass, keys and horns buzz through almost every bar with a flurry of 8th and 16th note runs, seemingly filling in every beat and off-beat.

In all this whirl of activity, Sly's vocal sits in the middle (at one point a second track comes in) but largely takes a backseat, dropping out for entire sections as the chorus and bridge are repeated into the fadeout, ceding the spotlight to the horns. If any part of this track feels unfinished, it's the vocals and lyrics which, in contrast from the daring and twisty instrumental arrangement, are only half-there. There's a handful of both positive and negative lines about being black, ultimately painting an understandably ambivalent picture, but they are disconnected and tossed off, and Sly spends most of the track just ad libbing with as much force as he can muster.

122. Sly & the Family Stone - I Don't Know (Satisfaction) (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmXQBtdPZIA
Sly gets political, in his way. Following a brief introductory bass lick, everything kicks immediately kicks in: Little Sister's backing vocals chanting "All we need is little action, if it's only but a fraction", the horns playing a long crescendo that doubles up on the backing vocal melody at the end of the line. The Rhythm King is again absent, Newmark's midtempo beat is in a constant back-and-forth dialogue with the other instruments, echoing and matching their off-beat accents with his own while still somehow always sticking to the groove. The bass, again likely Sly, dips in and out of familiar slapped and popped, octave-spanning riffs, bright and crisp. The percussive and harmonic stew is thickened with a couple tracks of wah wah guitar and electric piano, playing a series of improvised phrases that swirl around the root chord. Again this is clearly a track that was built up from overdubs and edited into a final mix, and not in the most meticulous way (you can hear Sly tell the engineer to "go back" ie, rewind the tape, towards the end). And again there's no changes; Sly and Newmark construct a dense musical backdrop that is given shape and form by the lines of the lyrics and the vocal delivery.

Sly is in fine vocal form here, nothing spectacular, but he comes off as excitably committed to the stream of half-formed slogans that he rattles off. The backing vocals by comparison are more sedate, resigned. Sly doesn't come up with anything as effective as "different strokes for different folks", though some of the lines do connect and convey a sense of Sly trying to rekindle his previously fiery optimism, recapture that energy, to keep keepin' on. Nothing is very specific. In the past he might have sang about the band or namedropped family members. Here he's primarily singing about himself, the experience of being in a crowd, part of a movement, but it's vague and undefined.

In "Skin I'm In", I've always loved the detail that it's Sly's clothes that provoke him to behave the way he does.

It's telling that his protest song is diffident enough to be named "I Don't Know".

123. Sly & the Family Stone - Keep On Dancin' (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwGt12ywrZs
This isn't the first time Sly helmed a track that was ostensibly about dancing and yet was not itself particularly danceable. True, it's considerably funkier than the Mojo Men's "Dance With Me" (Thankful n' Thoughtfull: The Sly Stone Dedicated Chronological Listening Thread), but the pointillist drum beat, it's long pattern stretched out as if in half-time is not exactly designed to fill dancefloors. It's also not the first time Sly recycled the refrain/theme of one of his earlier hits, here going all the way back to the band's first big success.

That being said, this track isn't bad exactly but it does have a distinct air of laziness about it. At first it follows a standard 12-bar blues chord change (although note that Sly can't be bothered to stick to the script, he switches to a 16-bar phrase midway through), introduced by a bass pulse, a tick-tock rhythm from the Rhythm King and Newmark, and an organ banging out a simple chord on the twos and fours, a guitar mirroring it on the off-beat of the three. Little Sister laconically repeat the ""dance to the music"" refrain throughout. Sly layers in another wah wah organ and a wah wah guitar, but maybe the most notable aspect of the track is that the clean electric guitar track that's been run directly into the desk sounds distinctly like Freddie, all hammered on runs and fluid blues licks. Rusty Allen's credited with bass on this track and he doesn't deviate too far from the template of Sly and Graham, but acquits himself well with a very strong rhythmic line, full of staccato quarter notes, thumb slaps and finger pops. Newmark is also in fine form, flashing open hi-hats accents and little snare fills, again obscuring the downbeat but never losing his way. On the whole it's not too far what Sly might have constructed on its own, small details aside. Sly's vocal is fine, projecting a kind of strained enthusiasm. The lyrics are tossed-off filler about dancing and a girl (and one "I see what you did there, Sly"-level line about getting "snowed in"), and don't really bear examination. Sly's formula sound of knottily complex, overdubbed grooves is sturdy enough to carry what's otherwise a lightweight exercise without much thought to it. The mix is still engaging and the playing is still sharp, even when the material is relatively weak."

god this one is bleak

I find this one kind of witty, playing with audience expectations; though obviously flirting with an indolence that would only increase.

it's a great song it just feels a bit like I'm dancing at gunpoint

124. Sly & the Family Stone - Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be) (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGkWuZxuP-4
The only cover song officially released by Sly and the Family Stone during their initial run. Sly was prone to throwing the occasional curveball (see also: Spaced Cowboy, Sex Machine, etc.), and this track is a definite outlier on "Fresh". After spending most of this album seeing how far he could subdivide slow-rolling tempos with tricky funk polyrhythms (which bears more than a passing resemblance to similar approaches deployed by rap producers in the last 20+ years), Sly makes a detour to transform a pretty pop standard into an in-joke.

Doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, crossed paths with pretty much everybody in the LA music scene in the late 60s and early 70s (for ex. in "Long Promised Road" Brian Wilson recalls Melcher bringing Sly over to his house, where he promptly snorted a bunch of coke and fell asleep on the couch). Melcher was a staff producer at Columbia Records, he produced the Byrds, he produced Manson, he was tight with Kapralik. He appears to have been something of a polarizing figure, and at some point entered Sly's orbit. Martini: "Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son, sleazebag motherfucker, was around. I hate him, very bad person."

Kapralik: "Sly was at the piano and Terry was standing next to him. Doris walked into the living room, on her way to the bedroom, and Tery introduced Sly to Doris. Then Sly started playing "Que Sera Sera" and she sang along or hummed it along with him, said goodbye and that was it."

Paley: "[Sly] could be very charming when he wanted to be. He said to her how much he liked "Que Sera Sera." That song was a huge hit for her in the fifties. They went into the living room and Sly played and she sang it. They did a duet at the piano. Then, the rumor surfaced that they were having an affair. When it came out that he was recording this song, he didn't do anything to discourage this rumor either. When asked about it, he would just kind of smile, but he wouldn't deny it. he wouldn't confirm it either."

Kapralik's recollection puts the gestation of this track earlier in the timeline than much of the rest of this record (which was released following Kapralik's dismissal). It's not clear if that's Graham on bass, but it's possible. The song does feel like it's the product of a different set of circumstances than others on the album. It sounds like it was tracked live with a minimum of overdubs or studio editing: a simple and steady 6/8 R&B ballad drumbeat, electric piano, organ, and bass, with Rose on lead vocal and Sly and Little Sister stepping to the fore on the choruses.

There's more going on with this cover than just ironic provocation. Sly doesn't mess with the song's overall verse/chorus structure or chords to put his own stamp on it, instead, he does slow it down dramatically and casts it as a ruminative, churchified hymn, foregrounding the interaction between him and his sister in a way that draws an explicit connection to their shared experience growing up in a gospel family. The languid, almost funereal tempo stretches the song out, making it the longest on the album (and twice the length of Doris Day's version), allowing plenty of room for Sly (and presumably Rose) to engage in some lovely keyboard back-and-forth throughout. A wah wah guitar briefly steps into the spotlight for a barely-there solo prior to the final verse. There's also snatches of the familial, conversational interplay that was formerly a staple of the band's material as Sly and Rose switch off on lead vocals between the verses and choruses. Really the star of this song is Rose, whose gentle, plaintive delivery of the lead vocal is more effective at conveying the song's dreamy fatalism than Sly's over-emoting shenanigans. To be fair gospel is all about the peaks and valleys, and Sly's delivery makes sense in that context, it's just that the sadness and regret in Rose's verses cuts more deeply.

I’ve always wondered about those Martini comments about Melcher from the oral history. In the context of a band with a leader that had a PCP addiction and an attack dog named Gun chasing band members out of windows (never to return IIRC), calling a visitor a “very bad person” and “I hate him” seems slightly alarming.

I love this song – I actually think the contrast between Rose’s plaintive vocal and Sly’s caterwauling is one of the things that makes it work so well. It also feels uncommonly sad to me.

125. Sly & the Family Stone - If It Were Left Up To Me (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUkfZCSCQOU
A marvelous, neglected deep cut. After so many tracks that were made by retroactively applying songcraft to sprawling, overdubbed grooves, it's almost jarring to hear something this precisely arranged. It's not an especially complicated song, just three short, 16-bar verses. The first 12 bars of each verse feature a simple chord progression, repeated three times, that goes from the I (F) to the V (C), respectively passing through the minor and the seventh, with the last four bars consisting of a turnaround that throws in the minor VII (E) and then the minor VI (D) before landing back at the V. This is an ingenious, highly melodic little set of changes, and bears more of a resemblance to "Family Affair" or "If You Want Me to Stay" than anything else on the "Fresh".

The arrangement is similarly streamlined, its simplicity adding to its effectiveness. Remarkably, Newmark delivers a beat that's beyond basic and essentially recreates (along with, presumably, Graham, although he is not officially credited) Errico and Graham's signature huffing-and-puffing rhythm. The bass pops out evenly accented quarter notes over the 4/4 rhythm, ceding most of the polyrhythmic accents to the horns, who get in a wonderfully nimble countermelody that splits into some very creatively voiced harmonies. Unconventionally, after each verse the band drops out entirely for a full bar, building tension and momentarily keeping the listener guessing until the beat kicks back in. At the end of the third verse, as the organ swells through the last bar, Sly adds on a comical "cha cha cha", like a little bow to tie up the song. It's notable how much Sly stays in the background here; for the first time in a long while he is not the center of attention, keeping strictly to a low-key organ part and sharing lead vocals with Little Sister, whose blaring harmonies blend with the horns, filling in harmonic space that Sly would typically have taken up by guitars and keyboards in this period. This is very much a tight, live ensemble knocking out a finely polished two minute slice of pop-funk.

Sly doesn't even really sing lead here, his voice, relaxed and conversational, is buried under Little Sisters' more dynamic delivery, apart from a couple shouts here and there. The lyrics are some of Sly's best on the record, full of his idiosyncratic mix of hopefulness and despair. Whereas before he often sang of the band as a kind of utopian family, here he is openly longing for that kind of support and connection, reiterating his own commitment to a dream that seems out of reach:

If it were left up to me, it would take more than a notion
If it were left up to me, we could put ideas in motion
Had it been left up to you, would you try, would you try
If it were left up to me, I would try

If it were left up to me, we would live, yeah, in a bubble
If it were left up to me or you, we would stay out of trouble
But it's the way that they do (do us wrong), makes you cry, makes you cry
And still it's left up to you, got to try

If it were left up to you, would you sigh and forget it
And get some sleeping to see if you live to regret it
Now that it's left up to me and you, Will you try, will you try
I promise from me to you, I will try
I promise from me to you, I will try

This is the emotional crux of the record, trying to balance the two sides of idealism and cynicism; also the painful foreshadowing.

I always heard the C as the tonic rather than the F, so each verse (and the whole song) ends on it.

Don't want to be a big nitpick as this thread is absolutely amazing, but Newmark isn't on If It Were Left Up To Me - it was apparently recorded around January 1970 with Greg and Larry and was meant for a Little Sister album.

I must admit I've become kind of obsessed with the alternate mix of this album (which is kind of a misnomer because some of the performances are altogether different). "Let Me Have It All" continues to be my favorite of the bunch--it deletes the horns but sounds like it could go on forever by the third or fourth verse--but man, some of these are just terrific -- and complement the official version nicely in that you can really hear what Shakey is saying about how he layered things and built tracks up through overdubs.

It's not really clear what the origin of these versions is since they were mistakenly released on a CD issue in the early 90s, but it's worth noting that alternate versions exist for every track other than "In Time" (which is a slight bummer as that track is so deep). Also not sure why they didn't release all of them officially on the last issue. But they're so good.

126. Sly & the Family Stone - Babies Makin' Babies (Fresh, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn35vo1PYbo
After a couple of throwback tracks, Sly closes out the album with another ruminative, droning workout cobbled together in the studio. Ultimately it feels like a half-written song, borne out of a fascination with the title phrase and then paired with a fairly simple melodic idea, fleshed out by the horns and backing vocals.

Again there's no real chord changes, all the instruments coiled around the tonic, the horns, organ and backing vocals filling in different chord voicings and harmonies while a clean electric guitar and a wah wah organ play around with a repeated three-note figure that walks up from the tonic to the IV and back down again. The bass and guitar are constantly darting around each other, swapping staggered little phrases. Sly leans on a hammond part to thicken the overall sound and provide some additional variations, but really it's the horns and the backing vocals that have the most distinct melodic role. A twisty, harmonized horn line is repeated throughout and consists of several rolling phrases, with a sustained bent note prominently featured in the middle. Newmark, unusually, doesn't get too fancy behind the kit apart from some cymbal splashes and the occasional snare accent, otherwise hewing closely to a simple, even, midtempo 4/4. This track may be the messiest on the album in terms of excess noise: studio chatter, keys rattling, and especially track bleed from the horns and backing vocals are all prominent.

The vocal arrangement leans heavily on the call-and-response between Sly's lead and Little Sister's backing vocals, which are arranged to closely mirror the horns harmonies, and for once they even get in a few ad libs. Sly, as usual, varies his phrasing constantly, extending and slurring phrases, jumping around the rhythm, endlessly turning the central phrase around. Domesticity and (often half-hearted) commitment were creeping into the picture for Sly, references to both litter the album and come to the fore here. Even so, the lyrics are little more than the titular mantra, interspersed with tossed-off rhymes ("tall or tall, small or small"?) and second-hand homilies ("from the womb to the tomb", "tell the truth to the youth" etc.) The vocals are engaging and the horn part in particular shows real inspiration, but it nonetheless comes off as an oddly muted and not altogether satisfying conclusion to the album. It does, however, presage the band's next album in a very literal way.

139. Elvin Bishop - Sunshine Special (Let It Flow, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cny5-1KRC7U
1974 was the real point-of-no-return for Sly, the beginning of a long period of drifting from project to project, attempting to collaborate, produce, or otherwise make a half-hearted "comeback". In some ways he reverted to the role he played in the pre-Family Stone era of his career, except this time around the commercial success and inspired innovation had been replaced by legal liabilities and self-sabotage born of crippling drug addiction.

Curiously, before finishing "Small Talk", Sly inexplicably appeared on this Elvin Bishop album, released in May of 1974. No idea if Sly is even audible on this track. He is generically credited with "organ" on the entire album and there's a tiny snippet of organ and piano toward the end. Unremarkable.

140. Elvin Bishop - Let It Flow (Let It Flow, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvlBF86TZug
Sly's prominent gospel organ drives this tune, but there's nothing particularly distinctive about it and honestly any half-qualified church organist could've done it. And it's in the service of a song that, much like the rest of the album, is not exactly bad or objectionable but just seems kind of overcooked, full of fussy playing and corny "aw shucks!" humor."

141. Elvin Bishop - Can't Go Back (Let It Flow, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzv-Iw-lweI
It's likely/possible that's Sly on organ. Nothing really notable, he's lost in a highly skilled but conventional ensemble.

142. Elvin Bishop - Bourbon Street (Let It Flow, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygd2oGPIpYA
More gospel organ from Sly, more hokey vocals from Elvin, and another overstuffed arrangement around a sturdy standard that really didn't need this treatment. Hard to parse why Sly was involved with this project, presumably mountains of cocaine were involved.

127. Sly & the Family Stone - Small Talk (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dZJHyr09ek
Sly would still have some flashes of brilliance over the next decade or so, but after the release of "Small Talk" in July of 1974 there were no more hits. The "and the Family Stone" pretense was, at least for a little while, abandoned. Just a month before the record's release, Sly pulled the ridiculous and exploitative stunt of getting publicly married to Kathleen Silva in Madison Square Garden (that's her and their son, Sly Jr., on the cover), and the album's content and promotion leaned heavily on the rather fantastical image of Sly as a rehabilitated father and family man, including going so far as bringing Sly Jr. on-stage for a televised performance of the song that is deeply uncomfortable. The naked cynicism and brutal irony is hard to stomach, given Sly's reportedly horrifying physical and emotional abuse of Silva, who would divorce him just 5 months later after rescuing their son from what she described as a nearly fatal mauling attack by Sly's pitbull "Gun".

Within that gruesome context it's hard to hear Sly Jr.'s crying and burbling on the title track, in some ways even more depressing than Bob Ezrin recording his own crying children for Lou Reed's "The Kids" less than a year earlier. Absent that context, at best it comes off as an overly cutesy gimmick. Apart from the live room mic catching the interplay between Sly and his son, Sly's lead vocal is also hushed and gently delivered, as if he actually is singing while not trying to disturb a baby. The lyrics are little more than the title and some conversational parental lines ("don't let him cry", "how you doin' boy?" etc.)

Musically there is not a lot going on, the instrumentation is spare and the song itself is barebones. The basic architecture is provided by a drum part that combines a triplet pattern on the hi hat, a snare hit on the ""and"" of the four-beat, and a kickdrum on the downbeat; it sounds like something that Newmark would play, except it's played with absolutely no variation at all, which is very unlike him. The bassline seems like it's pieced together from riff's Sly's used dozens of times at this point (not least "Thank You"). There's a spindly guitar part, played through what sounds like some kind of tremolo effect, which sands off the sharp edges. There's a farfisa sound which similarly has its percussiveness dulled by a combination of an aggressively deployed volume pedal and a tremolo setting. There's no reverb anywhere, everything is quiet, tentative. There's no chords or central hook; the farfisa and guitar play a couple turnarounds, comp quarter note chords, but that's pretty much it. As an opening track it's inauspicious, undercooked, with little to offer beyond the familial framing.

128. Sly & the Family Stone - Say You Will (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVa-giTp3zQ
There were a few new credited additions to Sly's cadre of musicians for this album, drummer Bill Lordan (who was connected with Sly via Ike Turner and Bobby Womack), violinist Sid Page (from Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks), and string arranger Ed Bogas (formerly of the United States of America, and also Ralph Bakshi's go-to guy for film scores in this period). Their impact on the sound and feel of the album is sizable, by turns interesting and distracting as Sly attempts to incorporate them into his casually erratic methodology, resulting in a set of songs that is ultimately an odd stylistic cul de sac, a curio.

After the hushed and hesitant opening track, "Say You Will" pivots to a markedly different sound and style, at least partly a result of Sly's return to a more conventional compositional approach. After a brief lead-in cue on the organ, Sly reverts to a tactic he often employed earlier in the band's catalog and opens with two run-throughs of a short six-bar phrase that also pops up later in the song. The instrumentation, at least initially, is fairly standard: organ, electric piano, a thin and clean electric guitar, bass, drums and vocals from Sly and Little Sister. Sid Page's multi-tracked violins, panned across the stereo field, enter with the first verse, which features a typically clever Sly progression that moves through descending minor chords before moving back up to resolve on a major, which sets up the chorus. The band plays through the verse and chorus twice, with a very atypical solo trumpet entering in the second chorus that shepherds the song into an actual bridge. This whole structure is repeated again and capped off with a coda that echoes the intro and prominently features an electronic effect on the bass (sounds like a Mu-tron). After two albums where Sly largeley eschewed this kind of song structure, it's almost jarring to hear him go back to it.

Unfortunately while it's capably constructed and well thought-out - it has a decent melody and hook - it has to be said that the delivery is lacking. The overall sound is thin and cluttered, there's no dynamism in the low end at all. The bass is squeezed into a narrow range and lacks the grit and energy of previous tracks. Lordan's drumming is at best workmanlike, with neither Errico's force nor Newmark's dexterity. Page is a decent violin player with undeniable jazz and country chops, but the string arrangement is bizarrely fussy. In the verses it often feels like a poor substitute for a horn section, but Bogas and Page also dip into picking up and repeating snatches of Sly's vocal melody, or blurring with the background vocals, or playing any number of unnecessary turnarounds and glissandos. This is not a conventional orchestral R&B or chamber pop arrangement, it's some other strange kind of hybrid, and it doesn't really work. While definitely new and different, compared to Sly's previous use of strings it's also distracting, and it obscures the parts of the song that do work (primarily the guitar and keyboards). The other aspect of the song that feels undercooked is definitely the lyrics, which are almost complete gibberish, just a bunch of disconnected phrases thrown together with no rhyme or reason. It's as if Sly spent most of his effort figuring out the musical arrangement and then lost interest altogether. His singing is fine, he sounds like he's having some (possibly forced) amount of fun at least.

129. Sly & the Family Stone - Mother Beautiful (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzKdA_Xxfuc
At this remove it's impossible to be certain, but given the existing available commentary on Sly's methods at the time and what is actually on the recordings, many of these songs sound like Sly tracked his keyboard (and possibly guitar) parts first, possibly with a guiding beat from the Rhythm King, to provide an overall framework, and then overdubbed everything else, similar to how he had approached "Fresh" and "Riot". The difference this time around seems to be Sly's rekindled interest in the pop song vocabulary of chords and changes and the various ways to glue verses, bridges and choruses together. There's less of a focus on grooves and polyrhythms, and more on composing relatively straightforward song structures that serve as a backdrop for the interplay of the musicians, with Sid Page's violin prominently featured.

At the beginning of this song, thanks to Sly's casual approach to editing, there's audible tape artifacts, studio chatter and bleed from a leftover Rhythm King track. A clean electric guitar plays a brief intro figure, augmented by a strange violin harmony, with drums, bass and organ hanging in the background. The verses feature a lovely, almost melancholy chord progression led by the organ and electric piano, with guitar and acoustic piano adding little fills around the edges, which repeats twice. The brief chorus picks up a bit of rhythmic intensity as it segues into a funkier blues change, the bass switches to a more syncopated pattern, and Little Sister chimes in with backing vocals. This verse/chorus pattern repeats twice, followed by a truncated instrumental verse that concludes with a repeated plagal cadence as the song fades out, Little Sister vamping on the titular refrain. Sly's singing and lyrics are direct and empathetic; as an ode to motherhood in general it's simple and effective. Interestingly, as the narrator Sly sings from the perspective of a child, not a parent.

The underlying structure of the song is solid, the melody and general vibe are mellow and inviting, very soft-focus 70s. Sly's parts (or at least the parts he was personally capable of playing, i.e., the keyboards, bass, guitars and vocals) all sound fine, particularly when they are on their own in the mix. Ultimately, Sly is failed by his collaborators. The new gang does not have the chops or energy of the original crew, and in particular the drums and strings drag the proceedings down. Lordan sounds like he's just playing the simplest conceivable part that will hold the song together. And Sly's overall strategy for developing a novel, idiosyncratic approach to incorporating strings into his music is provocative, but the delivery is lacking. Sly's music generally emphasizes both percussive and harmonic interplay, but the violin is by its nature not a very percussive instrument, and Bogas and Page attempt to compensate for this limitation with a lot of distracting, overly busy parts, and this song is no exception. While their phrasing is restrained on the verses, they never settle into a repeating pattern - every time they play a different line. And when it gets to the choruses they play a countermelody that just straight up doesn't work rhythmically or harmonically, obscuring the dynamic shift that the rest of the instruments are following. It's like Sly painted an impressionistic backdrop with the other instruments, and then the violins came in and scribbled a complicated line drawing on top of it, there's a fundamental aesthetic mismatch going on.

That’s an exceptionally good description of why this album misses the mark.

Zooming out a bit, you might come to this record thinking it is perhaps underrated in Sly’s catalogue. It comes right after one of his most innovative and consistent albums. It’s not a retread of past successes. And the whole domesticity aesthetic is carried through, from the lyrics, to the arrangements and instrumentation, to, obviously, its artwork.

But as the first three tracks show, Sly’s ability to execute is failing him here. And the result is not so much embarrassing—we’ll get to that later—as it is just kind of unengaging and often boring.

“Mother Beautiful” is almost a great song – I like that little harmonized string and bass figure in the open and the verse is kind of dreamy and romantic. But the intro never comes back, the strings )as with “Say You Will”) just kind of wander around, clogging airspace during the choruses, and the coda starts fading out so quickly that the song is over before you even realize it. It might have worked as a miniature but isn’t helped by the fact that the two songs that bookend it kind of blur things, with not dissimilar arrangements, tempos, keys, and themes.

At any rate I’m really enjoy this stretch because you are getting into not just that these songs don’t work but why.

130. Sly & the Family Stone - Time For Livin' (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBt9Fb5B858
The first single released from the album, and the band's final Top 40 hit (where it reached #32; it hit #10 on the R&B chart). The experiment with Page's violin continues. This detour in Sly's output is the first time in maybe a decade where Sly's restless, seemingly bottomless appetite for exploring new and different musical avenues does not really pay dividends. He's not using strings the way Norman Whitfield was at Motown or the way Gamble and Huff were in Philly, this is much more idiosyncratic, less innately orchestral and more like some strange, jazz-prog experiment. Page and Bogas gamely try to incorporate Sly's musical vocabulary, but get tripped up trying to fit into his syncopated polyrhythms and improvisatory framework. It's like they can never decide if the violin should be a string section or a solo instrument, and so they split the difference, sticking out like a sore thumb as a result.

Nonetheless, while the strings are again prominently featured in the mix (stereo panned and mixed high), there is a decent song in here. Compositionally it's not terribly complex; there's a few introductory bars of drums and bass that establish the tempo and tonic, and then it's straight into a repeated chorus/verse structure. The choruses feature a typically clever progression from Sly, starting on D minor and moving through Amaj7 to Bflat and then F, ending with a little syncopated flourish, and the verses are a bluesy vamp that just alternates between D minor and G. Sly's playing is as detailed and on-point as ever. There's the usual battery of keyboards, mainly organ and electric piano, and, combined with a bassline that sticks to an imitation of one of Graham's signature patterns, the bones of the song are all in place. Unfortunately, the drums are listless and often dragging, the cymbal hits on every downbeat of the choruses sounding like a lame attempt at pushing things forward. There's some capable footwork, but in general this sounds like Lordan trying and failing to imitate Newmark. And then there's the strings, barreling over everything, muddling the rhythmic dynamic with a seemingly endless array of smeared phrases and piercing runs. Again, the elements of the song that work are undermined.

Setting aside the domestic theme for a moment, Sly returns to his declamatory, statement-of-purpose lyrical style. There's even a rare and brief flash of anger ("If I have to I will yell in your ear") amid the more broad appeals for urgency and change, but it all eventually collapses into cynicism. "Time for changin', re-arrangin'/ No time for peace, just pass the buck / Rearrangin', leader's changin' / Pretty soon he might not give a damn". As usual, the target of the lyrics is not made clear, they could apply to Sly himself, or the band, or Nixon, or the American public in general, take your pick. As a vaguely topical song it expresses sentiments common in this era without getting into specifics.

131. Sly & the Family Stone - Can't Strain My Brain (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Ahmesc9mE
While this song continues in a similar laconic vein as the other tracks, the façade of domestic bliss is momentarily ruptured. The fairly minimal instrumentation, lackadaisacal beat, and relatively restrained strings, this time augmented by a horn line, are juxtaposed against a set of lyrics that belie the music's laid back mood. As with many of the other tracks, it opens with a bit of studio chatter and tentative, barely there lead-in bars before Sly's vocal enters and establishes a straightforward chorus/verse structure. There's remarkably little instrumentation; an unusually distorted organ leads the chord changes, with a wah wah guitar sashaying over it, and a bassline that leaps all over the scale, occasionally losing its way (especially towards the end). The drums have a bit of swing in them, little snare rolls leaning into the beat as they plod along. The strings, for once, largely stick to long, sustained notes for harmonic color, and it's the horns that deliver the trickier countermelody. There is something a little off about the orchestration though, the harmonies intermittently clashing with the bassline.

The lyrics are grim. Sly's vocal doesn't always convey it, he still sings like he's smiling, but it's a laughing-to-keep-from-crying type of smile, there's real desperation here. There's an addict's defiance in the almost nihilistic escapism of the lines. "I can't strain my brain / I know how it feels to worry all the time / I can't take the pain / I know how it feels to worry over just a dime / Yes, pleasure was made for us to see / And we're gonna have to be free, keep on runnin'".

The song ambles along with little in the way of dynamics. There are flashes of greatness - some genuinely pretty, almost country-fied guitar phrases, some audacious bass runs, the horn line is clever - and then it just sort of peters out, the bass wandering away before cutting out altogether.

132. Sly & the Family Stone - Loose Booty (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_Z7HwDnuNI
Evidence that Sly still had some tricks up his sleeve, this unexpected blast of high energy funk comes out of nowhere. Unlike the majority of the other songs on the album, this one is abruptly punched in with the band already cranking at full-tilt, the horns playing a long, sustained note over a chugging rhythm section, wailing organ, and exuberant vocals from Sly and Little Sister. The opening chorus then gives way to a ridiculous biblical incantation of "shadrach, meshach, abednego" (Book of Daniel, Chapter 3), Sly's hyper-enunciated vocal blurring together with the wah wah guitar and Little Sister repeating the title in the background. The drums and bass snap together for a little double-hit on the downbeat, the bass periodically galloping off for a ridiculous run that gets repeated throughout. The horns fill a call-and-response role with the vocals, and this time around they're doubled by Page's violin, which lends a strangely unique timbre and rhythmic decay to the phrases. For once, the strings are fully integrated and become an ear-catching sonic detail, rather than an obstruction. Then everything is punched out for a drumbreak and Rose shouting/singing a descending figure in unison with Robinson's trumpet. This is just the first 30-seconds, and already the track feels like it has more ideas, more vigor than anything else so far.

The drums and bass power through what is essentially a one chord vamp for the verse, supported by the occasional organ interjection, a bit of wah wah guitar and the horns and violin repeating their half of the call-and-response phrases. This leaves plenty of room for the type of back-and-forth vocal interplay that the band has not indulged in for several years, and it sounds like it's not just Sly on the mic this time either - Rose, Freddy and Little Sister are all clearly audible. Things kick into overdrive with sustained notes from the organ and horns as the choruses climb up and up to the climax. The nonsensical chant comes back, and the band rolls through the arrangement a couple times, never losing steam. The lyrics alternate between the title, the repeated "shadrach" refrain, and exhortative, not entirely coherent verses about letting it all hang out and being free.

Where did this come from? At a guess, this was recorded earlier in the process, as it also sounds like Newmark behind the kit. (Which songs he played on versus Lordan is not entirely clear, but Lordan appears in live clips playing some of the material on this album, and his style is not as aggressive or detailed as Newmark's). It's infectious dynamics and odd details set it apart from the rest of the album. It's an outlier in both its apparent attempt to recapture some of the band's pre-1970 power, and in the degree to which it succeeds. Remarkably, while it was released as the second single from the album it didn't even crack the Top 40 (hitting only #82), peaking at #22 on the R&B chart. There was a ton of incredible funk music in the charts at the time, and this was just lost in the shuffle.

133. Sly & the Family Stone - Holdin' On (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thKRFsuOjrw
A return to the supple, interwoven grooves of "Riot" and "Fresh", but this time with strings in a supporting role and an arsenal of overlapping horn and vocal lines. Sly again leaves in some studio chatter and introductory bars before the horns announce their entry and everything coalesces. The drums don't push the rhythm (Lordan doesn't seem capable of doing so) but they do provide a steady, evenly accented framework for a dizzying array of rising and falling blues riffs from the bass, clavinet and guitar. The clavinet in particular leans on a descending melody that popped up all over the place in this period (including Funkadelic's "Super Stupid" and Miles Davis' "On the Corner"). The horns, strings and backing vocals from Little Sister color in the rest of the harmonic spectrum with constantly churning call-and-response patterns, dotting the arrangement with crescendos and staccato blasts. It's basically just one chord with a bunch of passing turnaround changes thrown in at the end of each bar; as usual with this kind of tune it's the multi-layered playing that makes it work. It's satisfying to hear the strings successfully blended into the whole for once, rather than showily getting in the way.

Lyrically it's pretty simple, Sly alternates between the back-and-forth "holdin' on" lines and the repeated "soldier, I'm a soldier" refrain. He has a theme and he (mostly) sticks to it, but there's not a lot of depth or detail otherwise. His vocal is alternately choked, raspy, defiant. He's talking himself into persisting, not giving up. In the face of what is not clear and possibly beside the point. The insistent marching rhythm, always pushing forward, is the real message of the song.

This record - which I'd never listened to, thanks Shakey for guiding me into all these tracks! - puts me in mind of Dylan's Desire for the obvious reason of adding prominent violin parts to artists whose style was thoroughly established. Seems to me like this works well when it's a vocal-like melody line, and less so when it's orchestration. Lots to enjoy here though, despite the overall B-team vibe as you say.

Loose Booty is all-time tho

It def. is. I found it interesting that the alternate version of “Loose Booty” found on the latest reissue of this record lacks the “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego” chant. Despite being the best known part of the song, it must have been a later addition.

For those who don’t know the story, according to Wikipedia, the three “are thrown into a fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Babylon for refusing to bow to the king's image. The three are preserved from harm and the king sees four men walking in the flames, ‘the fourth ... like the Son of God.’”

Despite feeling a little tossed off, given his family’s background in the church and propensity for self mythology, you wonder if the reference was Sly’s way of presenting himself as some kind of principled maverick of the music industry protected by a higher authority.

134. Sly & the Family Stone - Wishful Thinkin' (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUICXLAKUX4
This track makes the limitations of Sly's slapdash approach painfully apparent. The deliberate choices made - such as opening so many of the cuts, including this one, with extraneous studio noise - would seem to indicate that the casual feel of the album as a whole is by design, fitting in with the nominal theme of early parenthood and its associated bleary-eyed mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion. But these choices are also an excuse for laziness, for letting shoddy performances and poor decisions slip through, and one has to reach back quite a ways into Sly's discography to find something else this slipshod.

Sly's instincts don't fail him entirely; the skeletal sketch of a verse filled with minor 7th chords and an uptempo major key turnaround is there, faintly outlined on the organ, which drifts in and out of focus in the mix. There's an uncharacteristically jazzy guitar part, the tone thick and rich, which doesn't sound like something Sly would play - most likely this is Freddy (whose voice can be heard in the background as well, coming to the fore towards the end to trade off with Sly), doing his best Grant Green impression. Strangely there's also a flute (at least in the first half of the song), adding in a few melancholy lines. There's potential for a dreamy, wistful ballad to emerge and provide an appropriate showcase for Sly's vocal theatrics.

Instead everything collapses in on itself. The glacial tempo confuses Lordan, who can't figure out anything else to do besides occasionally hit the snare. The bass misses changes multiple times, sometimes chasing after Sly's vocal, other times stumbling behind the strings, unsure of where the song is going. The strings, mixed with a completely dry, naked sound that does them no favors, are all over the place, playing long languid lines one moment and then clipped, piercing phrases the next, and the harmonies often clash with the organ, backing vocals and guitar. Little Sister and Freddy gamely stick to some gospel harmonies on the refrain, but their energy isn't matched by the instrumental backing.

Sly, bizarrely, sings like none of this is happening, shifting rapidly between a whisper and a shout, disconnected from pretty much everything else that's going on musically except his organ. The lyrics are a muddled mix of the refrain and "you got that right", with some extraneous lines about relaxing and not letting it be the end. Like the rest of the track, they feel thrown together, with little craft or forethought.

135. Sly & the Family Stone - Better Thee Than Me (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoKCre7bL3c
20 seconds of off-mic snippets of conversation and violin warmups precedes another elephantine funk workout. The drums feature a skittering double-time pattern on the hi-hat, in contrast with the half-time emphasis placed on the kick and snare. This may have been accomplished with two drum tracks, as the hi-hat and a second snare seem to be present in the mix at a lower volume than the main drum track. Is this some attempt at overdubbing Lordan to enable him to sound like Newmark, or a mix of both of them (or one of them and Sly?), or is it just Newmark himself? Who knows. The bassline, presumably Allen, similarly splits the difference between emphasizing straight quarter notes and more syncopated runs. The end result is a slow, lurching rhythm that nonetheless has some antic subdivisions happening in almost every bar, making way for the vocals, horns and strings to occupy a lane somewhere in the middle. The instrumentation is otherwise again restricted to a thin and clean electric guitar, Sly on organ, Page's multi-tracked violin, and vocals from Sly and Little Sister, with some snatches of a solo saxophone that sounds more like Rizzo than Martini. Strangely it's the bass that seems to initially establish the basic melodic structure, with some chromatic double-stops that are quickly expanded on by the guitar and organ. The strings, as usual, bulldoze their way through a series of disconnected phrases, matched here and there with the saxophone. Sly, Little Sister, and Freddy's vocals bleed together, with no clear division between lead and backing vocals as they run through several stanzas of unusually snarky and, more often than not, incomprehensible lyrics. While the intent seems to be one of dispensing hard-won wisdom, the tone is foggy and sour.

I often think of this song title and it's use of thee!

A few rando thoughts as we slog through this portion of Small Talk:

I’d never spent much time with Sly’s legendary performance of “I Want to Take You Higher” at Woodstock until I pulled it up on Max this week. Holy smokes. Along the same lines, the “Love City” performance there just absolutely kills as does “Stand!” which starts with just organ and voice before climaxing with an almost disco-flavored wah-wah groove.

The studio cut of “Love City” didn’t get a lot of love from Shakey here but that is great as well. Errico’s beat is hard as a damn rock – a precursor to Jaki Liebezeit’s epic Tago Mago grooves. I don’t consider it filler at all.

Has anyone seen the On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone documentary that came out in 2017? I can’t find it anywhere. No idea if it’s any good but it sounds like it was a labor of love.

136. Sly & the Family Stone - Livin' While I'm Livin' (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06BwZjBtr60
Throwing another curveball, the band pulls out an up-tempo rock-ish rhythm, something that wouldn't have been out of place on the first couple of records. After another inauspicious opening of background noise and the band easing into the rhythm, the overstuffed arrangement is shortly bursting at the seams with manic performances, especially on the part of the drums and bass, which sounds like Newmark and Allen furiously trying to outdo each other with popped, double-time syncopation. Sly's organ holds down the chord changes while an electric piano, multiple violin parts, a clean electric guitar, and a fuzz guitar all compete for space during the introductory, instrumental chorus, before group vocals (led by Sly) come charging in for the first verse. The drums and bass downshift to a straight 4/4 rock pattern for the chorus and the band crams in a horn line in the second verse. After the second chorus the drums, bass and organ barrel ahead into a barely-there bridge, almost everything else dropping out except for some plucked violins, and then the band extends the verse for a vamp through the end.

It almost works. Jittery and overdriven, it's like a high-energy show opener to rile up the crowd and get everybody clapping. The playing from the rhythm section, particularly Allen, is nuts; they're clearly reveling in the opportunity to show off a little bit. The vocals keep pace, although the lyrics are practically stream of consciousness rhymes, and there's an almost bitchy undertone of bitterness to some of the lines. But it has to be said: the multitracked strings ruin this. They clog up the mix, swooping into every available nook and cranny of an already cluttered arrangement, pulling the rhythm in the opposite direction, making the song more exhausting than exciting.

137. Sly & the Family Stone - This Is Love (Small Talk, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pakgPb0xejo
Sly's roots are doo-wop and gospel, and those roots run very deep. Christgau flagged this as the album's standout cut ("it's only memorable song a doowop takeoff" and while that's arguable it isn't hard to hear why he singled it out. It's one of the only tracks where the strings are successfully integrated into the arrangement and everyone involved seems to understand what the song calls for. If it resembles anything contemporaneous it's Parliament/Funkadelic's occasional doowop excursions, especially the lead, choral vocals. Over a simple, back and forth two chord pattern, the band actually plays like a conventional band, everyone stays in their lane: the piano comps 8th notes, the bassline and bass vocal stay in the pocket, the strings sway along in the background, the guitar chops chords on the 4 beat of the 6/8 bar. The whole performance has a natural ease to it as it ebbs and flows, the "shuwa doowop" vocals hearkening back to an earlier era (there's barely any actual words at all). Underwritten as it is, the sound is evocative, rich, like a brief glimpse of the elusive marital bliss the album is ostensibly all about.

It's a strangely pretty and moving conclusion to an album that often feels muddled and confused, an echo of both "Hot Fun in the Summertime" and Sly's earliest singles. Perhaps it's a sign that Sly was ready to look back, sensing that he was already adrift in uncharted territory, that the family that had anchored his career for nearly a decade was slipping away from him. Maybe centering this entire album around a largely fictional new family was also some way of compensating for that. Anyway, this album is generally cited - including by the remaining members of the Family Stone itself - as "the end". A pathetic and ramshackle performance at an undersold Radio City Music Hall signalled was the last straw. Martini called it quits. Hamp "Bubba" Banks, by now married to Rose Stone and handling her business, withdrew her from any further performances. Robinson drifted away ("I never quit the band. I just stopped getting calls for gigs"), and Allen was cut loose ("I stayed until something happened. I was in L.A. Sly was up north. I called him collect. The operator said 'will you take a collect call from Rusty Allen?' 'Hell, no' he said and hung up the phone. I was, like, damn I was playing with this guy a week ago - how can he cut the umbilical cord that easily? But it wasn't shit to him.")

Freddy: "It is sad to say. He knows what he didnt do. He knows what we wish he had done. I know he wishes he could have done better. By me and by a lot of other people. I think he thinks about it all the time."

138. REO Speedwagon - You Can Fly (Lost in a Dream, 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivaKIxSlapc
Somehow, in a truly unpredictable move, Sly ended up playing piano and organ on this track from the Illinois rock band's fourth album. Difficult to detect who's doing what, there's so many keyboard parts happening at various points in the song. Certainly some of the growling organ swells were part of Sly's bag of tricks, as were the syncopated clavinet type of lines. Otherwise it's a surprisingly supple groove, and various bits, including the bass and the the vocal seems deliberately patterned after Sly. In a weird way the song seems like a pastiche of Sly's various stylistic tics, and as a slightly proggy pop-funk workout it's not bad. Unable to find any info as to why this collaboration happened, it seems to have gone by completely unnoticed.

wow

Since we’re moving into 1975 I feel compelled to share this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xzSoD0dCPg

I can practically smell that REO Speedwagon cover shot

BTW while we’re waiting for hopefully the rollout of High On You I just discovered that Sony has made (what I presume are) the quad mixes from the 70s available of Greatest Hits and Small Talk (which was probably the latest release when CBS started doing quad mixes) in the 360 Reality Audio format, which is streaming on a handful of platforms.

“Loose Booty” is such a dense mix in its normal form that it sounds kind of amazing in quad. Most of the record benefits from the added space in the mix.

143. Sly Stone - I Get High On You (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaBt-mY70ns
The Radio City Music Hall gig in January 1975 was the point at which Martini and Rose Stone both said "fuck it" and, perhaps looking to get some mileage by positioning himself as a "solo" artist (even though he'd more or less functionally been one since roughly 1970), "High on You" was released under the Sly Stone moniker in November 1975. Various members of the Family Stone are still credited on the album, most likely because Sly's use of tracks that had been recorded earlier. All of the players (with the exceptions of Graham and Errico) would continue to weave in and out of Sly's orbit for years, some more than others. Given the fluid nature of Sly's approach to recording and his lack of a stable musical unit, the credits on this album are a mysterious mix of original Family Stone personnel, "Small Talk" holdovers, Bobby Womack associates, and people who have clearly written their own wikipedia entry. As such, this was Sly's first attempt at an expressly post-Family Stone career, and it didn't really work out. The album itself failed to chart. "I Get High On You" was released as the first single and missed the Top 40 altogether, but at least managed to get to number 3 on the R&B chart.

It opens with a thumping, very Graham-esque bassline, quickly joined by a driving, mid-tempo funk rhythm from the drums (lots of 8th notes on the hi-hat), a keening organ, brief snippets of a clean electric guitar, and, most surprisingly, a monophonic synthesizer line. As the band picks up steam, the horns join in with a typically long crescendo, signalling the entry of Sly's vocal for the first verse. While not especially unique or distinct from much of the other funk of the time, the opening bars alone have more cohesion and excitement than most of "Small Talk", all the pieces fit together and the playing is dynamic. Wikipedia, not always reliable for this type of minutiae, lists Bobby Vega on bass, Jim Strassburg on drums, and a "Little Moses" on organ for this track. The latter seems particularly questionable, as the rambunctious organ fills and clavinet lines distinctly resemble Sly's playing; Sly never had much of a propensity for synthesizers so maybe that's where "Little Moses" came in (sounds like a Moog model). The arrangement is basically a pure funk jam, no chord changes, just tons of pounding polyrhythms and overlapping melodic runs, the horns sticking almost entirely to simple offbeat staccato accents. Sly and especially Little Sister deliver exuberant, full-throated vocals as they cycle through three stanzas punctuated by "I get high on you" refrains. The lyrics are unusually sexual - not really a common topic in Sly's ouevre - in keeping with the sweaty, dancefloor throb of the music.

While not particularly innovative or idiosyncratic, this is a solidly entertaining opener; taken on its own merits it's a blast. If it comes across as Sly treading stylistic water, it's worth considering that one likely reason this single got lost in a sea of other R&B and funk is because Sly had already heavily altered the ecosystem with his prior innovations, and leaning on his established tropes was no longer enough to stand out. Once you've broken new ground and spawned imitators, you don't sound so unique anymore. If Sly was having trouble standing out on charts crowded by the likes of Earth Wind and Fire, the Isley Brothers, Labelle, the Ohio Players, the O'Jays, or even (lol) Graham Central Station, it's at least partially because all those acts had already taken so many cues from him.

144. Sly Stone - Crossword Puzzle (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D88lekGs2Ms
The theme and instrumentation of this song (which includes Page on violin) would seem to suggest that this was an outtake/leftover from "Small Talk". If so, it's baffling that it was held back. Continuing the general groove and feel of "I Get High On You", the song opens with a steady funk beat, snare hits on the two and four, bolstered by a couple of organ tracks and a busy bassline. As the ensemble hits the descending, three-chord turnaround, a dizzily multi-layered horn arrangement steps to the fore. The keyboards more or less vanish for the rest of the song, ceding the spotlight to the horn arrangement, which is a marvel of creative chord voicings, complex counter-rhythms, and bent notes that glide and bop around the bassline. Page largely stays out of the way, occasionally doubling up with the horns, interspersed with dramatic triplets at the end of each vocal line of the verse.

Sly double-tracks his vocal, enabling a cleverly delivered conversational back-and-forth dialogue between the two tracks, with one track echoing the last word of each line. Little Sister chime in for the titular refrain at the end of each verse. The first verse describes a child borne out of wedlock, empathizing with the plight of the mother. (It's difficult to avoid reading this lyric as self-serving and autobiographical, given that Sly had a child with Cynthia Robinson while he was still involved with Silva; perhaps this is why the song was left off of "Small Talk"). The second and third verses are less specific and more standard fare for Sly, exploring the game theme with his signature mix of cheerleading, ambivalence, and self-reflective humor before circling back and repeating the first verse. The band never lets up, maintaining the rollicking arrangement throughout. In general a surprisingly solid song, packed with well-executed musical and lyrical ideas.

145. Sly Stone - That's Lovin' You (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsL761PU7cE
The first clue that this album is going to be more of a grab-bag than the collection of party jams suggested by the first two tracks. At a guess this is also a leftover track from the "Small Talk" sessions, given the credited presence of Lordan and Page. Incorporating strings into his ouevre seems to have been a challenge that Sly felt compelled to wrestle with repeatedly in the mid-70s, making them a recurring but often distracting feature of his troika of albums released between 1974 and 1976. Here the strings provide a top line melody right off the bat, organ and guitar wiggling around in the background. Lordan plays a soft and simple mid-tempo funk pattern, the bass driving the beat and laying in a familiar pocket as they navigate a few off-beat turnarounds and fills. The structure is another of Sly's R&B pop confections, opening with an instrumental intro before switching to a verse comprised of four lyrical stanzas over a repeated descending chord pattern. The band switches to a different descending pattern for the chorus, repeats half a verse, and then hits an unexpected left-turn by modulating up and making room for 8 bars of some bizarre violin soloing over a syncopated horn part. Then it's back to the verse, this time with the horns adding in a counter-melody and reverting to simple chords beneath the violins for the final choruses as the song fades out.

There is some pretty creative songwriting going on here. And there's a fair amount of nice playing as well, particularly an unusually warm and mellifluous electric guitar part, and Sly's gentle and unassuming vocal. Lyrically, it's more or less a love song - another comparative rarity with Sly. The mood is consistent with much of "Small Talk", an ode to fidelity that nonetheless features some self-absorbed hedging ("You know that's lovin' you / All my dreams cost and / I do too / You know that's lovin' you"). This commitment to being basically unreliable is a recurring feature of Sly's lyrics, the narrator always reflecting on (and more often than not insisting on) his own selfishness.

Unfortunately the more compelling elements of the song are obscured, marred by a combination of the overly busy string part and some strangely mismatched production choices; there's lots of reverb on the vocals and strings, everything else is dry, the organ and guitar buried deep in the mix.

Great deep dive into “That’s Lovin’ You,” which is not a song I thought much of what makes a lot more sense in the context of Small Talk.

I agree with pretty much every word you wrote about “I Get High on You.” The remix on Ten Years Too Soon is similarly low-cal enjoyable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5JQ4pGjqVE

“Crossword Puzzle” is my favorite late-period Sly song by some distance. It’s still not perfect – the sublime rhythmic interplay, horn chart and almost atonal bass line kind of disguise that the song really doesn’t have a melody. And yes, it does date from the Small Talk sessions – the reissue of that record has an early version which, while interesting, sort of reveals how much the track relies on its arrangement. But man, what an arrangement.

*but* makes a lot more sense in the context of Small Talk.

146. Sly Stone - Who Do You Love? (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1cIpfro9aM
Maybe the biggest reason that Sly's post-"Riot" output generally gets short shrift is because expectations were just too high. But while there are few (if any) truly great songs that equal his peak period output, there are plenty of good ones. Like "Loose Booty" and "Crossword Puzzle", "Who Do You Love?" is a straight banger that, if released earlier and in a more hospitable context, may have been better received instead of roundly ignored. Imagine if he'd cut this in 1970 instead of five years later.

There's no real reason he couldn't have, all of the main elements of this song were in his arsenal at the time: the dual bass parts (one fuzzed out/one slapped), the stuttering horn line, the beat from Little Sister's "You're the One", the wah wah guitar. It is (again) difficult to be certain about who's doing what, although Strassburg is credited with drums, and the horns have to be some combo of Robinson, Martini and/or Dennis Marcellino. Everything else is likely Sly, Freddie, and Little Sister. The opening drum roll cuts to an ascending chord progression, highlighted by a call-and-response bit between the electric guitar and Sly's shouted vocal and a choppy 8th note horn line, and then it's straight to the chorus. That's basically the whole song, but it's plenty for the band to chew on; the bass playing (both tracks!) in particular is wild, all octave-jumping forward motion. Freddy's guitar keeps pace, swinging between diving licks and matching the bass with a scratched rhythm. The layered, stereo-panned horn parts are blended with Little Sister's rich, vibrato vocals, further in the background. The lead vocals from Sly and Freddie are full of energy and humor. It doesn't matter that the lyrics are underwritten (and also surprisingly risque, including references to coming and masturbation).

It's a good-to-great track, a fun snapshot of a path not taken. Hard to resist thinking about what the original septet would have done with this in a live setting, Graham tearing up that bassline.

I never really rated “Who Do You Love?” before but listening on a pair of headphones now it definitely smokes. Those bass parts are ridiculous and it just spends the entire track at full tilt.

This record was reviewed pretty well – I believe Down Beat of all publications praised it to the sky while Xgau is more muted but gets it right I think:

High on You [Epic, 1975]
The lyrics haven't regained their punch, and neither have the melodies--when he does try to say something, you barely notice. But the old rhythmic eccentricity, both vocal and instrumental, makes this more interesting to listen to than the run of dancey goop. Let's not give up on him yet. B-

I've always liked this album.

147. Sly Stone - Green Eyed Monster Girl (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgguH9tfUyM
An all instrumental organ feature. Sly hadn't released a non-vocal track since 1969's "Sex Machine". Opening with a rattling tambourine, a bass pulse, and a simple but loose-limbed drumbeat from Michael Samuels, the track immediately switches focus to Sly's joyful organ, soloing over a single pedal tone. His playing doesn't really have any structure, it just ebbs and flows naturally as Sly works his way through a series of long sustained notes and more furiously syncopated fills. The melodic range is fairly limited, but this is more Ray Charles/Billy Preston than a jazz workout and who cares, really; the feel is there. It's supported by a bright, wah wah guitar and a series of long, swelling semitone trilling horn lines which, interestingly, stagger their rhythmic emphasis differently each time. The bass sticks to a relatively simple quarter note pattern with some popped accents. There are some distracting elements, in particular a second, hard-panned organ part that is consistently off the beat and out of sync with the other instruments and really should have been left on the cutting room floor. Overall it comes off like filler, but it's enjoyable filler and unlike "Sex Machine" it doesn't overstay it's welcome.

148. Sly Stone - Organize (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLDgW_kQW5c
A number of unusual things in this track. For the first (and only?) time, Sly gives his brother Freddie a writing credit. There's a baritone sax in the mix (Marcellino? Martini didn't generally play bari) which is also possibly a first in Sly's catalog, and there's some great interplay between the bari player, the lead vocal and the other horns in the back half of the song. Rusty Allen is credited with bass, which would indicate that this was recorded earlier in the year, if not during the "Small Talk" sessions, and he lays down a circular, descending bass riff that is both a great hook and atypical of the kind of basslines Sly and Graham often cooked up. There's essentially two lead vocals and it seems likely that one is Sly and one is Freddie, but one is mixed much louder than the other and it's hard to discern which one is which, their timbres are so similar.

The song opens with a briefly suspended organ chord and some trilled bass notes, and then a cymbal crash cues the bass hook and we're back into strutting, funk workout territory, the uncreditd drummer really laying into those open hi-hats on the twos and fours. An organ, electric piano and wah wah guitar are all hard panned apart from each other, dipping and diving in and out of the arrangement almost at random; the majority of the harmonic space is really taken up by the long, sustained vibrato phrases of Little Sisters' backing vocals and a heavily syncopated horn chart. For the verses the bass drops out intermittently, sometimes for entire measures, as the vocals do some jabbering cross-talk. There's no chord changes, and only the barest of melodies, just tons of polyrhythmic interplay. It generally hangs together, the horn arrangement carrying a lot of the weight and compensating for vocals that feel a bit messy and dashed off. Part of that is down to the lyrics, which are practically a stream of consciousness mishmash of "Take Me to the River", the repeated title, "drug/drag" wordplay, and some gibberish about washing.

149. Sly Stone - Le Lo Li (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5UbjmbQf24
Perhaps the most bizarre song on the album. Page and Bogas' string arrangements take center-stage, along with (in another first) two pedal steel guitar parts, uncredited. Drummer Willie Wild Sparks, who was also the drummer on the first two Graham Central Station albums, delivers a workmanlike 4/4 beat, and the only other instruments present are a standard Sly bassline and an offbeat piano part that stays perpetually out of sync with the rest of the arrangement.

There's a barely there verse/chorus structure, but very little in the way of changes, and most of the harmonic and melodic action comes from the pedal steel and the (again) incredibly fussy string part. Little Sister gamely try to make the schoolyard chant of the refrain work but there isn't much of a melody to work with, and Sly's lead vocal seems like it was improvised on the spot. He gets off some good lines in the first verse but then quickly devolves into conversational non-sequiturs ("Shakabra / Shakadida / Means right on brother and right on sister / Anyway I learned it in Hawaii"). The whole thing is baffling, neither catchy nor particularly danceable, the overdone orchestration attempting to mask weak songwriting. For some incomprehensible reason this was released as a single. It did not chart.

Love this track.

It's a weird one. My oldest daughter loved the refrain for about 10 minutes when she was in the second or third grade and used to call her little sister Le Lo.

Disorienting to hear the verse groove of "Say No Go" in a wholly different song!

150. Sly Stone - My World (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ujH91XGqAk
The album takes another left turn, this time into romantic ballad territory. Sly delivers the misty-eyed, sentimental lyrics with an unusually soft touch, his typical vocal inflections and asides are rendered with a disarming tenderness that doesn't have much precedence in his catalog. For once there's no fear, no sarcasm, no deflections in the lyrics - this is a straight-up love song. Apart from the lackadaisacal drumming (Lordan is not exactly Al Jackson), the arrangement - built around a horn figure and a bounty of plush electric piano and organ parts from Sly - comes off as a surprisingly pretty and effective gloss on Al Green, especially with the dreamy string line layered on top and the occasional filligree from a full-bodied electric guitar. The song's structure is simple and effective, the introduction with the muted horn melody followed by a chord sequence that drifts perpetually upward through minor and major 7th variations in the verses, with a brief staccato turnaround thrown in between. Sly's wonderful organ playing in particular stands out, a mix of uplifting churchy phrasing and casual melodicism. There are, nonetheless, some odd decisions that seem to work against the overall vibe - the muted trumpet is a strangely corny and old-fashioned sound, and the song abruptly fades out in mid-sentence, just as Sly starts to lean into a vamp-y repetition of the turnaround. But these are minor complaints. The theme, strings, and drumming would seem to indicate this is a "Small Talk" leftover, where it would have fit right in.

151. Sly Stone - So Good To Me (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ed8Nmjvlqs
Out of nowhere Sly pulls off a song straight out of his 1969 playbook, a genuine throwback that makes it clear he could've churned out this type of material if he'd been so inclined. Everything that made his work with the original septet distinctive is here: the clever chord changes, the clean horn lines, the fuzz bass, the pumping rhythm, the keyboard and guitar interplay, the wryly observational, generous lyrics. What's missing (of course), is the actual septet. The rhythm section (Jim Strassburg on drums, possibly Sly on bass) is not quite on the level of Errico and Graham, they're fine but more functional than eye-poppingly dynamic, there's no real fireworks there. And there's no traded lead vocals, this is distinctly not a family affair. Even so (and perhaps more importantly), the song works.

Punched in on a brief drum tattoo in the middle of the bar, the arrangement immediately dives into a series of horn phrases that step down the scale but then pivot midway through, inching back up and end on a staccato blast that announces the verse. Sly enters with a low-key vocal, full of ease and gratitude, over a four chord pattern anchored by organ and piano and a wah wah guitar filling in the details, the drums and bass driving the upbeat 4/4 tempo underneath. The chorus is heralded by a blasted walking pattern on the bass and backing vocals from Little Sister, and then modulates up a couple steps as the horns re-enter with off-beat staccato accents and circle back to the beginning of the verse. The pattern repeats twice, but then the third time around Sly sticks in the intro horn section as a bridge (again repeating an arranging trick he used often early in the band's career), before going back to the fuzz bass section of the chorus, which the band treats as a coda, repeating on a loop.

This is all of a piece with Sly's pre-Riot style, and it's remarkable how well it works. It's no longer novel or innovative at this point, it's more like he's just showing off how well he knows his craft. The lyrics and vocal delivery also seem devoid of any acknowledgment that time has passed or styles have changed. They're full of cheeky drug references and open-hearted cheerleading: "You're good for me / I know it / I can't blow it / You're good to me / All you people in general /You're good to me / Because you're people / Chitter chatter going round / But I can't let it bring me down."

152. Sly Stone - Greed (High On You, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-KqxI0ULY
For a grab bag album thrown together from different sessions with different personnel, it's not surprising that the album is inconsistent from one track to the next, but a lot of the material is surprisingly solid, including this proto-disco album closer. Strassburg is again credited behind the kit, capably if not particularly heavily laying into a 16th-note hi-hat pattern that is driven along by an aggressively slapped and popped bassline. The distinguishing characterstics here are really the horn chart and the panoply of vocals. The horns dip and dive around the vamp with a variety of different staccato phrases, generally staying out of the way of the vocals in the verses but otherwise providing what little melodic variation there is against a backdrop of spindly wah wah guitars. Sly brings in an organ on the choruses, adding some modulation over the root chord. Singing-wise he leads a basic call and response, with Little Sister echoing each line, but other vocals also pop in and out throughout (including some at the end where it seems like Sly is cycling through various outboard effects at the mixing desk - maybe the first and only time we hear him messing around with heavily delay effects). The lyrics are finger-wagging but humorous right from the start ("fe fi fo fum") and Sly gets off some of his better one liners in awhile ("Who's got what's his face to blame / You don't even know his name / If the shoe fits oh beware / You might sometimes be unfair"). The mix is unusually wet, there's a bunch of different reverb effects on the vocals, and the multi-tracked horns are stereo-panned to create something of a slapback effect, making it generally sound a little muddier than usual."

Good write-ups for a record that bears a little closer inspection than its reputation might suggest.

It feels like Xgau largely got this one right:

High on You [Epic, 1975]
The lyrics haven't regained their punch, and neither have the melodies--when he does try to say something, you barely notice. But the old rhythmic eccentricity, both vocal and instrumental, makes this more interesting to listen to than the run of dancey goop. Let's not give up on him yet. B-

153. The New Riders of the Purple Sage - Mighty Time (Oh, What A Mighty Time, 1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU19PDwo6F8
Still unpredictable. Sly plays organ and sings lead (!) on this lead-off single from the Grateful Dead-adjacent country rock band's 7th album. Slightly less inexplicable than his appearances with Speedwagon and Bishop, at a guess this came about through Bay Area connections (Record Plant in Sausalito, mutual drug dealers, who knows). While he neither wrote nor produced it, he leaves an indelible stamp on its rather basic four-chord, 16-bar structure, injecting gospel organ fills here and there and leading the call-and-response vocals through all the soul-clapping, tambourine shaking, and countrified trilling. His vocal delivery is all over the place, quiet and conversational one bar, full-throated. ecstatic shouting the next. The rest of the players are all fine and capable but the song is so simple it's kind of beneath him - he hadn't done anything this basic in quite awhile - maybe he was just enjoying an opportunity to cut loose on something easy.

154. The Temptations - Up the Creek (Without a Paddle) (Wings of Love, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inEa6P3kqUI
A strange hybrid beast of an album, involving contributions from three different pioneering funk camps that were all at a crossroads. The Temptations were still trying to find their footing with their latest producer (Jeffrey Bowen), disgruntled founding member of Funkadelic Billy "Bass" Nelson (who had also appeared with Eddie Hazel on the previous "A Song For You" LP) was again roped in, and Sly brought along Rusty Allen, Pat Rizzo, and Freddie. The first half of the album prominently features this amalgam of all stars. Keyboards (clavinet, ARP, organ) for three of the cuts on side one are credited to a "Truman Thomas" on the LP sleeve, although according to Wikipedia at least some of this is actually Sly, which seems credible given the presence of the rest of his band and the fact that appearing on a Motown recording likely presented issues in terms of contracting and taxes.

Sly's playing is pretty much in the background, you can hear his organ periodically peaking through the machine-tooled, finely buffed arrangement (and he briefly plays a single note on the ARP), but for most of it he's generally like a ghost, haunting a house he built but which is now inhabited by a bunch of other people that are wearing his clothes and eating off his dinner plates. The overall sound owes a huge debt to Sly, Rusty's thumping bass part in particular drives the whole thing, and really overall the song is pretty good, but Sly is a footnote here.

155. The Temptations - Sweet Gypsy Jane (Wings of Love, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnUMjUIYxA
More of the same, but this time faster. Sly's organ enters with some rhythmic comping and then some long sustained notes but again mostly fades into the background for much of the song, dropping out entirely for long stretches and then coming back in to just hold down a single chord. The spotlight here is on the rhythm section, the horn chart, and (understandably) the Temptations' vocals. Again, this is really pretty good for what it is - sweaty, up-tempo dancefloor fodder - Sly just isn't doing much.

156. The Temptations - China Doll (Wings of Love, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj4PLwakkFI
Maybe the best arranged track of the three, a tightly woven tapestry of syncopated guitar, clavinet and horn lines on top of some booming drums. Sly doesn't get fancy on the heavily reverbed clavinet, he mostly sticks to repeating the same phrase throughout, just a cog in the Motown machine. It works, but Sly's involvement doesn't add anything, any number of session guys could have filled his role.

157. Sly & the Family Stone - Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=960bhrExDW0
Biographical details of this period are currently scarce; there's a gap between 1975 (where Selvin's "Off the Record" stops) and 1980 or so (when Sly pops up in a couple P-Funk-related bios/autobios, including George Clinton's). How this project and its personnel came about is not entirely clear; it closed out Sly's contract with Epic and was the last time he was effectively in the producer's chair. Despite it's title it is definitely not a reunion of the original septet in any way shape or form, nor does it play to Sly's strengths. It features him experimenting with an almost completely different musical vocabulary and style, which in itself is not uncharacteristic of Sly, but never before did he sound so adrift and anonymous while simultaneously trying something new.

It's not just the dense, overly orchestrated production that's new, the melodic and harmonic framework he's working in is also strikingly different. This song is a mess, a Frankenstein's monster of mismatched melodic ideas incoherently stitched together, from the almost baroque opening flute line to the weirdly chromatic chord changes in the verses, to the two-chord vamp that seems to be in a different key altogether. There's horns, timbales, a prominent clavinet, organ, guitar, bass, crowd noise, backing vocals, a bunch of percussion. The impression is of a handful of ideas being squeezed together and endlessly fussed over; without a central hook the hope seems to be to distract the listener with something new every few bars. Wen the band finally gets to the coda and settles into a two-chord vamp, overlaid with horns and flutes playing the intro riff, the repetition comes as a relief.

Sly sounds lost in his own song, the enthusiasm forced, the jumbled backing overwhelming him. There's a truly strange live TV performance of this where, incredibly, Sly is out front with nothing but a microphone and a Bobby Womack haircut, backed by a huge ensemble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA8zU1yecjA. It isn't pretty. The lyrics don't go much further than the title, aggressively overcompensating and papering over any emotional depth in a fairly gruesome way ("I can laugh because I was so sad" etc.) This is almost grotesque, "Brian is Back" territory.

I, for some funky reason, love this track!

I really like it too. Sounds like a Sly song to me, even if the arrangement doesn't.

Comment from that video on YouTube replying to a quintessentially YT “If only the fans had stuck by him” post:

No rock star ever did a better job of throwing away his fan base than Sly Stone did. I saw him in late 1974, and he put on the most disgraceful twenty minute concert that I've ever seen. He came on two hours late, then he had the nerve to complain that the concert hall was only half full. A friend of mine worked at the place and I asked him if Sly had been held up travelling or something, and he replied, "This asshole has been backstage for three hours". I asked if Sly had been sick, and he replied, "No, he spent the three hours chewing out his drummer because he didn't ask Sly's permission to go to the restroom".

158. Sly & the Family Stone - What Was I Thinkin' In My Head (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tav3rbdC2o
A slickly delivered disco-pop tune. For better or worse there's no sign of the idiosyncratic sloppiness that marked many of Sly's productions from 1970 onward - no extraneous noise, no studio chatter, no wayward playing, no audible engineering artifacts. The arrangement is precise: the phalanx of guitar, keyboards, strings, horns, backing vocalists, drums and bass parts are all cleanly differentiated and capably executed. For once Sly sounds like part of a conventional, well-oiled machine, in step with current trends and trying desperately to fit in.

The song opens with a horn blast, immediately launching into the piledriving disco beat and Sly singing the chorus refrain in unison with the female backing vocals. There's a full stop and then it's into the verse, where Sly again - rather uncharacteristically up to this point - leans into a series of ascending, chromatic chord changes, topped with a twisting vocal melody that doesn't always accomodate all the syllables he's trying to cram in. The chorus is a one-chord blues vamp, burbling clavinet, lot of double-time bass riffs. By the end when the ensemble settles in and extends it, the drummer really lays into those open hi-hat accents, and the horns come in for some punchy lead lines. Lyrically it's not bad, Sly returning to familiar themes of the ironies of being humbled. His voice is somewhat overpowered by the backing vocals, whose delivery bears more than a passing resemblance to contemporaneous P-funk vocal arrangements (in fact, in some ways the whole thing sounds like a Brides of Funkenstein song). This isn't bad, per se, but as with much of this album it's lacking in character, there's an anonymity to its glossy surface.

Great bassline!

My favorite tune on this record.

159. Sly & the Family Stone - Nothing Less Than Happiness (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdIlyhj-dB0
Built around a two-chord pattern of hammered out 8th notes on the piano in a 6/8 rhythm, reminiscent of ""Hot Fun in the Summertime"", but only in passing. Instead this simplest of constructions in belabored with a battery of bland ideas: a duetted female lead vocal, a fussy string melody, anonymous horns, some doo wop bass vocals. Again the sound is clean and clear and all of the playing/singing is fine, it's all just lacking character and depth, it's boring. If one was predisposed to prefer surprises from Sly, the only one here is how *normal* his music sounds. The lyrics are likewise unremarkable, a series of shopworn platitudes.

160. Sly & the Family Stone - Sexy Situation (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFXUQ61YPq0
An incredibly fast blues shuffle, full of buzzing triplet melodies and off-beat, syncopated vocal and horn lines. Again, the ensemble is huge: keyboards, a super-compressed and very thin-sounding electric guitar, bass, drums, multiple backing vocals, a terrible string arrangement (why did Sly hang on to Ed Bogas so long?), and tinny sounding horns. There's no chord changes, this is a vamp that's been meticulously detailed and thorougly worked over. But for all its frenzied activity it's strangely lifeless. Sly's personality is smothered by the arrangement, he seems barely present. It's also a strangely mismatched lyric, the groove is hardly bumping-and-grinding.

161. Sly & the Family Stone - Blessing in Disguise (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP6JMqtVI88
The inauspiciously treacly flute and string fanfare that opens this song does not bode well. The bones of the song - both musically and lyrically - are strong, especially the way the descending minor key chord pattern and melody pivot upwards and switch to a major pattern at the end of the verse, mirroring the lyrics' change in tone going into the refrain. The melody, harmonic structure, and lyrics are classic Sly, including the one-chord vamp thrown in as a bridge and coda. But unfortunately it's all buried under a cavalcade of fairly conventional and fussily arranged vocals, strings, and horn lines. As with much of the album, the song has been dressed up in current fashion, but the clothes don't quite fit.

Just want to say that I've really enjoyed dipping into this thread, especially the Riot/Fresh posts and your musical analyses.

"Blessing in Disguise" is a good song but, yes, the execution and arrangement let it down. The other two songs don't really go anywhere.

I quite like "Sexy Situation" though.

162. Sly & the Family Stone - Everything in You (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkgP-1IqVuE
This album is certainly consistent. Whether or not that's a virtue is a different matter. Again Sly's songwriting prowess is not exactly diminished, but its subsumed beneath an overcooked mass of middle-of-the-road arrangement choices. The song is dominated by the bass, drums, and a dense array of strings, vocals and horns. Sly's keyboard stays mostly in the background, and his singing - while still characteristically exuberant and acrobatic - is often overwhelmed by the group vocals. Structurally it opens with a chorus, which introduces the titular refrain for a couple of bars, all strings and vocals for a couple bars. Then the rhythm shifts and tightens up, resolving its major key melody and then throwing in a passing fifth chord and switching to a highly percussive scatted "ba-ba-ba" vocal. This is contrasted with a syncopated horn countermelody, and an intense 16th hi-hat pattern and a staccato bass part interspersed with triplets. This is all within the first 30 seconds, and it's quite a barrage before the song settles into the two chord plagal cadence of the verse and it's piping vocal melody. There's another chorus, another verse, and then it's the chorus through the fade out. It moves through its melodic hooks smoothly, even if it doesn't transcend the smothering treatment. Lyrically it's more of Sly's familiar homilies, which have long since begun to ring a little hollow.

It's a long time since I listened to this album but this song is pretty good too - though it's hard to actually hear Sly on so many of these tracks.

This is a good tune and there are a bunch of components that feel pretty consistent with 1968-era Sly. But there’s a weirdly frantic quality to it—the strings are again partly to blame—and I can’t quite get past the feeling that the title refrain may have been inspired by Sly getting his stomach pumped or something.

163. Sly & the Family Stone - Mother is a Hippie (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLwBG-V2F5Q
OK this one is a little wild. Opens with a staccato horn fanfare and then launches into a recycled bassline from "Organize", paired with (in something of a first) a lead synth line and another furious 16th note hi-hat drum pattern. The hi-hats push the rhythm forward but the drummer lays back on the rest of the kit, the tempo is actually pretty slow. The mix also foregrounds hand percussion (sounds like congas, likely another first), and then brings in an eerily harmonized female vocal line, Sly's keyboards occasionally poking through. This all breaks up for the verse, the arrangement circling back to the rhythm and staccato horns of the opening bars to create a strange, disco oompah band feel. Sly takes the lead vocal over the descending chord change, there's a brief stiff quarter note turnaround, and then it's back to the 16th note hi-hat vamp, Sly trading lines with one of the lead female vocalists. This vamp-verse-structure is repeated, and other elements are swapped in to fill out the arrangement - some subtle strings, for once, as well as some thin, distorted wah wah guitar. Definitive lyrics are difficult to parse, and there's random stock phrases ("tell the truth to the youth", "yippee ki yay" etc.) While some of the individual transitions feel a bit forced, overall this is pretty good, and definitely harkens back to some of Sly's pre-1969 songwriting.

Agreed, this is a p good one.

After years of owning most of these records, this thread is finally helping me hear the directions Sly was trying take during the post-Fresh period, with Small Talk swapping intricacy for intimacy and High on You’s embrace of some sort of mid-70s funk, albeit with his typical oddball flourishes.

In places,including this track, Heard Ya Missed Me kind of feels like the Sly and the Family Stone Big Band. Because it’s Sly, even when the huge, hyper-cluttered arrangements don’t work—which is probably about half the time—they’re rarely boring. And even if he was a dog chasing his own tail at this point in his career, nothing else really sounds like this.

I remember not liking the second side of this album very much and this track is a bit of mess with no hooks or anything to hang your hat on.

164. Sly & the Family Stone - Let's Be Together (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODQu3LnSfk4
Sly pulls out another old trick, opening a track with a headfake, in this several bars of baroque electric piano, before segueing into the verse proper. This is another instance where Sly pulls out his pop composition playbook for verses, choruses, and breaks - each section with something interesting going on harmonically, rhythmically, or melodically - delivered via a fairly conventional R&B/funk band and sound. As with the rest of the album, the ensemble is quite large and Sly seems to fade into the background. He cedes much of the vocals here (shared with who? who knows), and the arrangement is crowded with the requisite hand percussion, strings, horns, and wah wah guitar overshadowing Sly's organ. It's an up-tempo, energetic take, and anonymous as much of the backing is on this album, the production wisely foregrounds the rhythm section. Lyrically it's one of Sly's odes to hedonism; vocally it's a little strange to hear him trot out the original Family Stone's traded group vocal approach without them.

165. Sly & the Family Stone - The Thing (Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENZt1eAjmWM
Another track that sounds like it could've been written in 1968, but delivered in an updated style that papers over Sly's idiosyncrasies and foregrounds a not particularly exciting studio ensemble. Again there's a veritable army of vocalists, percussion, strings, horns, guitar and keyboards, all relatively tastefully arranged, anchored by a strong rhythm section and a fairly novel bass part. After the opening buildup the song downshifts into a mid-tempo groove, overlaid with a series of syncopated, staggered vocal lines. Sly's in there somewhere, although his vocal isn't even clearly audible until almost halfway through the first chorus. The refrain itself is a little hard to make out ("Why don't you go where your mind is and please stop that..." and then what now?) and much of Sly's lyrics are unintelligible. The band repeats the buildup in the middle, and then returns to the vamp for some long, bent and bluesy harmonized horn and keyboard lines, then more vocals through to the end. It's all capably delivered - zero in on any one component like the bassline or the keyboard interplay and it's fine - it just isn't especially compelling in the aggregate. Again there seem to be shades of P-Funk present here ("America Eats Its Young"-era in particular), albeit without any of the weirdness.

166. Sly & the Family Stone - Family Again (Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jg4rPwJcBE
Absent any context, this sprightly, discofied album closer sounds like little more than an innocuous opportunity for the band to indulge in some spotlight turns (a drum break, a brief keyboard duel, a group vocal breakdown) and some oddball effects (Sly's talkbox bit at the beginning). But in the context of Sly's career and discography, there's an inescapable "uncanny valley" effect at this kind of zombified recreation of the original septet's schtick without any of the original septet. The players are all professionals, none of them embarass themselves, but the "feels like family again" refrain takes on a grimly false ring, and all the twists in the arrangement (even with the addition of strings and hand percussion, which the original septet never indulged in) are both predictable and hollow. This is not the Family; it's an openly crass effort to mimic it and pretend the prior 6-7 years didn't happen, and comes off strangely forced. It's as if Sly was hoping that if he just gave his old schtick enough of a modern sheen, he could trick his audience into re-living his glory days.

After this, Sly ignominiously disappeared for several years. He was gradually entering George Clinton's orbit but was without a record deal, a band, or any kind of stable support system.

From the title down, this album has the feel of Sly wandering about assuring people he's alright really - even if they haven't asked if he's alright. I think it's an enjoyable enough listen in places but, ouch, "Feels like family again"? I think that's Sly trying hard to convince himself before he gets anywhere near convincing anyone else

fwiw, just realized there's a substantial excerpt from the forthcoming Sly Stone memoir right there on the publisher's website.

167. Bonnie Pointer - Jimmy Mack (Bonnie Pointer, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9sM_p17QKU
Motown house producer Jeffrey Bowen had brought in various Sly and P-Funk alumnus for Temptations sessions, and apparently either brought Sly back or re-used tracks for a couple of Bonnie Pointer solo songs in the late 70s. As a result, Funkadelic guitar god Eddie Hazel and Sly appear on a track together, along with Freddy on bass. Sadly, this isn't exactly a showcase for either of their talents. Sly is credited with a barely there, droning ARP synth part, and Eddie sticks to basic comped chords.

168. Bonnie Pointer - Nowhere to Run (Nowhere to Hide) (Bonnie Pointer, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZQOZlFrGcI
Freddie and Sly are both credited with electric rhythm guitar (that fuzz distortion lead is credited to Benny Shultz). Which one is which is impossible to tell. The parts alternate between the furious scratching and some picked breaks, generally providing the rhythmic embellishment for this disco take on the Motown classic. Not terrible as an extended disco jam, but Sly's involvement feels largely perfunctory.

So the verdict on Heard Ya Missed Me? I think Xgau got this one right too:

Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back [Epic, 1976]
The rhythms and vocals may not be compelling, but they're certainly unpredictable. The words aren't great, but they play the margins of black music's romantic-spiritual themes with some finesse. Anyone else and we'd be waiting until he fulfilled his potential. But he already has. B-

169. Sly & the Family Stone - Remember Who You Are (Back On the Righ Track, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WJOw6vZNwU
Sly's first album not produced by Sly, and the extensive credits for longtime sidekick/henchman/enabler Hamp "Bubba" Banks suggest that he had a key role in getting this album together. In many ways this is the underrated gem in the back end of Sly's career; it's brief, consistent, solidly written, tightly arranged and simply delivered. In some ways it's "Fresh" Pt 2. It's also largely out of step with prevailing industry trends, existing in a hermetically sealed off universe of Sly's own, predicting nothing and in dialogue with no one.

Behind the kit is Sly's first black drummer, long-time R&B vet, George Harrison sideman and session pro Alvin Taylor, and on the bass is Keni Burke, of the Five Stairsteps (also a Dark Horse Records alumnus). Together the two provide a methodical and in-the-pocket rhythm section, hearkening back to the Newmark/Allen combo, albeit not as tricky. The rest of the credits are a little harder to work out. Sly's role is clear (vocals, keyboards, harmonica) but there's a bevvy of guitar, horns, and backing vocal credits, including some familiar ones: Rose and Freddie are both credited with backing vocals, and Robinson and Rizzo reappear as well. But in general the feel is of a more intimate ensemble, no more strings or timbales or dense orchestration; from the opening bars of the opening track it's evident that things have been scaled down.

Taylor splashes in with a brief opening fill, followed by a familiar tick-tock pattern, a straight 8th note bassline, and a wash of keyboards and guitars hitting whole notes on the downbeat as they establish a creatively circular four chord progression of minors and 7ths. Burke in particular acquits himself admirably, clearly relishing the opportunity to step into the pantheon of Sly bass players, putting his own muscular spin on a familiar style. For the chorus Sly pivots to a second four chord pattern, drops the minor chords, and brings in a bright, syncopated countermelody from the horns as Taylor opens up on the hi-hat. This verse/chorus pattern repeats throughout the song with minimal variation, the focus is on the disciplined delivery. There's no excess noise, no sloppy edits, no reverb, no distractions, just Sly doing his thing. He's in fine voice on the lead vocal, doubled by multi-tracked, stereo-panned female vocals. Lyrically he's again looking in the mirror, doling out advice about ignoring the haters and being true to yourself with his typical mix of inversions and turnabouts. Not every line connects but his knack for a clever turn of phrase still shines through here and there ("Ever feel like you're nobody / Remember you're nobody else, too").

A deftly executed, if modest, opener.

Wow, I've never heard this album. The drummer is absolutely killing it with those 16th note hats (that is a *fast* tempo for that groove, I could never).

(and yeah everything sounds fantastic)

Check out Alvin Taylor's wiki photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Taylor

OK I've never heard this album, the title scared me because it once again smacked of desperation. This OK though, I least you can hear Sly this time round.

Wow, it's short this album!

By 1979? It’s probably all they could wring out of him.

The cover to this album is hilarious. It’s as if they told him if he dressed up nice for church they’d let him release another album.

I am def. a fan of this song BTW.

I have a white label promo of this record with cool promotional stuff from the label. It rules.

actually it's a test pressing

https://www.discogs.com/release/12376571-Sly-The-Family-Stone-Back-On-The-Right-Track

170. Sly & the Family Stone - Back on the Right Track (Back On the Righ Track, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZT0yuMHJE
Just from a technical musicianship standpoint, things get a little more interesting here. The intro is in half-time, dominated by some remarkably agile hi-hat work from Taylor and a fleet-fingered descending bass lick, a wah-wah/phased guitar, Sly's organ, and an electric piano filligree filling in the chords. Rose, returning to the mic for the first time in several years, tentatively sings a few "heys" as a lead-in and then the track vaults forward into an up-tempo disco groove, punctuated by a great, nimble horn line as Rose delivers the titular refrain. Burke really outdoes himself with some ridiculously fluid popping as Sly's vocal enters for the verse, then the band modulates up a whole step for the chorus with the horns, Freddie and Rose returning for some swapped backing vocals. Then they repeat the intro (but no longer in half-time) and it's back to the top for another couple of verses and choruses. That's pretty much it in terms of structure, but the song doesn't really need much more - the tempo and rhythm move at a serious clip, and there's plenty for the guitars, organ and vocals to work with, lots of little licks worked into the fabric, the bass leading the way. Again everything is recorded dry and clean, very simple. The lyrics are relatively threadbare, but it's great to hear Sly, Freddie and Rose singing together again.

had not heard that funky temptations byway and it's fantastic

Pretty good but, apart from the vocals, could be anyone tbh.

171. Sly & the Family Stone - If It's Not Addin' Up… (Back On the Righ Track, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir1bHmxF714
Takes an old bass riff and alters the phrasing slightly in order to juxtapose it against a very Newmark-style drum beat, all 16th notes on the hi-hat but laid back on the kick and snare. Really it's that rhythm section that make this song as solid as it is. The other parts, however, are not without their charms. Two guitars, two keyboards, plus a sharply enunciated horn section, are atomized, each cordoned off with their own little pocket of staccato phrases and panned separately across the stereo field, creating a bopping, ping-ponging effect. Surprisingly, there's also a burbling synth that enters midway through, adding some additional color. There's no changes, the dynamics here are all driven by the froth of constantly moving polyrhythms. Again the mix is dry and clear, each part distinct and balanced. Sly's voice sounds a little strained, and he gets some support from both male and female backing vocals (assuming one of those is Freddie) as he runs through a set of lyrics that feature some goofy lines about math and the alphabet along with Sly's usual cautionary admonitions, and a reference to his mother for good measure.

172. Sly & the Family Stone - The Same Thing (Makes You Laugh, Makes You Cry) (Back On the Righ Track, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y_A0_spHfI
A bit underwritten, but still enjoyable for a number of reasons. For one thing there's the talkbox, which fits Sly's usual vocal acrobatics like a glove. For another there's the titular dualistic homily in the lyrics, which does not receive much elaboration but is so prototypically Sly it's amazing that he hadn't used it earlier. The slow funk tempo has a curious dynamic too it, the bass in particular peppering the rhythm with staccato pops that cut across the hi hat pattern. The guitars and organs chop up two chords, with multiple male and female vocals trailing Sly's lead. Every 8 bars the band takes a breath, Taylor hits the splash and then it's back into it, over and done with in less than 3 minutes. Short and sweet.

this one is great!

The groove on 'If It's Not Addin' Up' is clearly meant to evoke 'Thank You...', but the interlocking bass & drum groove is actually really sick.