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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

god this one is bleak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loose Booty is all-time tho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wow

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

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

I can practically smell that REO Speedwagon cover shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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