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

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.