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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loose Booty is all-time tho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wow

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

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

I can practically smell that REO Speedwagon cover shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've always liked this album.

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

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

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

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

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

Love this track.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels like Xgau largely got this one right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I, for some funky reason, love this track!

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

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

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

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

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

Great bassline!

My favorite tune on this record.

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

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

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

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