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

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.