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

has anyone other than The Raincoats ever covered this?

sleepy brown, kinda, for a sly tribute album

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

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

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

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

edit/correction to last paragraph:

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

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

Correct, that was a mistake/leftover sentence fragment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

amazing detail, ty

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, these breakdowns are great, thanks :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy crap, that alternate mix of this is incredible.

Right? Gorgeous druggy funk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

god this one is bleak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loose Booty is all-time tho