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

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.

"Blessing in Disguise" is a good song but, yes, the execution and arrangement let it down. The other two songs don't really go anywhere.

I quite like "Sexy Situation" though.

162. Sly & the Family Stone - Everything in You (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkgP-1IqVuE
This album is certainly consistent. Whether or not that's a virtue is a different matter. Again Sly's songwriting prowess is not exactly diminished, but its subsumed beneath an overcooked mass of middle-of-the-road arrangement choices. The song is dominated by the bass, drums, and a dense array of strings, vocals and horns. Sly's keyboard stays mostly in the background, and his singing - while still characteristically exuberant and acrobatic - is often overwhelmed by the group vocals. Structurally it opens with a chorus, which introduces the titular refrain for a couple of bars, all strings and vocals for a couple bars. Then the rhythm shifts and tightens up, resolving its major key melody and then throwing in a passing fifth chord and switching to a highly percussive scatted "ba-ba-ba" vocal. This is contrasted with a syncopated horn countermelody, and an intense 16th hi-hat pattern and a staccato bass part interspersed with triplets. This is all within the first 30 seconds, and it's quite a barrage before the song settles into the two chord plagal cadence of the verse and it's piping vocal melody. There's another chorus, another verse, and then it's the chorus through the fade out. It moves through its melodic hooks smoothly, even if it doesn't transcend the smothering treatment. Lyrically it's more of Sly's familiar homilies, which have long since begun to ring a little hollow.

It's a long time since I listened to this album but this song is pretty good too - though it's hard to actually hear Sly on so many of these tracks.

This is a good tune and there are a bunch of components that feel pretty consistent with 1968-era Sly. But there’s a weirdly frantic quality to it—the strings are again partly to blame—and I can’t quite get past the feeling that the title refrain may have been inspired by Sly getting his stomach pumped or something.

163. Sly & the Family Stone - Mother is a Hippie (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLwBG-V2F5Q
OK this one is a little wild. Opens with a staccato horn fanfare and then launches into a recycled bassline from "Organize", paired with (in something of a first) a lead synth line and another furious 16th note hi-hat drum pattern. The hi-hats push the rhythm forward but the drummer lays back on the rest of the kit, the tempo is actually pretty slow. The mix also foregrounds hand percussion (sounds like congas, likely another first), and then brings in an eerily harmonized female vocal line, Sly's keyboards occasionally poking through. This all breaks up for the verse, the arrangement circling back to the rhythm and staccato horns of the opening bars to create a strange, disco oompah band feel. Sly takes the lead vocal over the descending chord change, there's a brief stiff quarter note turnaround, and then it's back to the 16th note hi-hat vamp, Sly trading lines with one of the lead female vocalists. This vamp-verse-structure is repeated, and other elements are swapped in to fill out the arrangement - some subtle strings, for once, as well as some thin, distorted wah wah guitar. Definitive lyrics are difficult to parse, and there's random stock phrases ("tell the truth to the youth", "yippee ki yay" etc.) While some of the individual transitions feel a bit forced, overall this is pretty good, and definitely harkens back to some of Sly's pre-1969 songwriting.

Agreed, this is a p good one.

After years of owning most of these records, this thread is finally helping me hear the directions Sly was trying take during the post-Fresh period, with Small Talk swapping intricacy for intimacy and High on You’s embrace of some sort of mid-70s funk, albeit with his typical oddball flourishes.

In places,including this track, Heard Ya Missed Me kind of feels like the Sly and the Family Stone Big Band. Because it’s Sly, even when the huge, hyper-cluttered arrangements don’t work—which is probably about half the time—they’re rarely boring. And even if he was a dog chasing his own tail at this point in his career, nothing else really sounds like this.

I remember not liking the second side of this album very much and this track is a bit of mess with no hooks or anything to hang your hat on.

164. Sly & the Family Stone - Let's Be Together (Head Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODQu3LnSfk4
Sly pulls out another old trick, opening a track with a headfake, in this several bars of baroque electric piano, before segueing into the verse proper. This is another instance where Sly pulls out his pop composition playbook for verses, choruses, and breaks - each section with something interesting going on harmonically, rhythmically, or melodically - delivered via a fairly conventional R&B/funk band and sound. As with the rest of the album, the ensemble is quite large and Sly seems to fade into the background. He cedes much of the vocals here (shared with who? who knows), and the arrangement is crowded with the requisite hand percussion, strings, horns, and wah wah guitar overshadowing Sly's organ. It's an up-tempo, energetic take, and anonymous as much of the backing is on this album, the production wisely foregrounds the rhythm section. Lyrically it's one of Sly's odes to hedonism; vocally it's a little strange to hear him trot out the original Family Stone's traded group vocal approach without them.

165. Sly & the Family Stone - The Thing (Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENZt1eAjmWM
Another track that sounds like it could've been written in 1968, but delivered in an updated style that papers over Sly's idiosyncrasies and foregrounds a not particularly exciting studio ensemble. Again there's a veritable army of vocalists, percussion, strings, horns, guitar and keyboards, all relatively tastefully arranged, anchored by a strong rhythm section and a fairly novel bass part. After the opening buildup the song downshifts into a mid-tempo groove, overlaid with a series of syncopated, staggered vocal lines. Sly's in there somewhere, although his vocal isn't even clearly audible until almost halfway through the first chorus. The refrain itself is a little hard to make out ("Why don't you go where your mind is and please stop that..." and then what now?) and much of Sly's lyrics are unintelligible. The band repeats the buildup in the middle, and then returns to the vamp for some long, bent and bluesy harmonized horn and keyboard lines, then more vocals through to the end. It's all capably delivered - zero in on any one component like the bassline or the keyboard interplay and it's fine - it just isn't especially compelling in the aggregate. Again there seem to be shades of P-Funk present here ("America Eats Its Young"-era in particular), albeit without any of the weirdness.

166. Sly & the Family Stone - Family Again (Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jg4rPwJcBE
Absent any context, this sprightly, discofied album closer sounds like little more than an innocuous opportunity for the band to indulge in some spotlight turns (a drum break, a brief keyboard duel, a group vocal breakdown) and some oddball effects (Sly's talkbox bit at the beginning). But in the context of Sly's career and discography, there's an inescapable "uncanny valley" effect at this kind of zombified recreation of the original septet's schtick without any of the original septet. The players are all professionals, none of them embarass themselves, but the "feels like family again" refrain takes on a grimly false ring, and all the twists in the arrangement (even with the addition of strings and hand percussion, which the original septet never indulged in) are both predictable and hollow. This is not the Family; it's an openly crass effort to mimic it and pretend the prior 6-7 years didn't happen, and comes off strangely forced. It's as if Sly was hoping that if he just gave his old schtick enough of a modern sheen, he could trick his audience into re-living his glory days.

After this, Sly ignominiously disappeared for several years. He was gradually entering George Clinton's orbit but was without a record deal, a band, or any kind of stable support system.

From the title down, this album has the feel of Sly wandering about assuring people he's alright really - even if they haven't asked if he's alright. I think it's an enjoyable enough listen in places but, ouch, "Feels like family again"? I think that's Sly trying hard to convince himself before he gets anywhere near convincing anyone else

fwiw, just realized there's a substantial excerpt from the forthcoming Sly Stone memoir right there on the publisher's website.

167. Bonnie Pointer - Jimmy Mack (Bonnie Pointer, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9sM_p17QKU
Motown house producer Jeffrey Bowen had brought in various Sly and P-Funk alumnus for Temptations sessions, and apparently either brought Sly back or re-used tracks for a couple of Bonnie Pointer solo songs in the late 70s. As a result, Funkadelic guitar god Eddie Hazel and Sly appear on a track together, along with Freddy on bass. Sadly, this isn't exactly a showcase for either of their talents. Sly is credited with a barely there, droning ARP synth part, and Eddie sticks to basic comped chords.

168. Bonnie Pointer - Nowhere to Run (Nowhere to Hide) (Bonnie Pointer, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZQOZlFrGcI
Freddie and Sly are both credited with electric rhythm guitar (that fuzz distortion lead is credited to Benny Shultz). Which one is which is impossible to tell. The parts alternate between the furious scratching and some picked breaks, generally providing the rhythmic embellishment for this disco take on the Motown classic. Not terrible as an extended disco jam, but Sly's involvement feels largely perfunctory.

So the verdict on Heard Ya Missed Me? I think Xgau got this one right too:

Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back [Epic, 1976]
The rhythms and vocals may not be compelling, but they're certainly unpredictable. The words aren't great, but they play the margins of black music's romantic-spiritual themes with some finesse. Anyone else and we'd be waiting until he fulfilled his potential. But he already has. B-

169. Sly & the Family Stone - Remember Who You Are (Back On the Righ Track, 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WJOw6vZNwU
Sly's first album not produced by Sly, and the extensive credits for longtime sidekick/henchman/enabler Hamp "Bubba" Banks suggest that he had a key role in getting this album together. In many ways this is the underrated gem in the back end of Sly's career; it's brief, consistent, solidly written, tightly arranged and simply delivered. In some ways it's "Fresh" Pt 2. It's also largely out of step with prevailing industry trends, existing in a hermetically sealed off universe of Sly's own, predicting nothing and in dialogue with no one.

Behind the kit is Sly's first black drummer, long-time R&B vet, George Harrison sideman and session pro Alvin Taylor, and on the bass is Keni Burke, of the Five Stairsteps (also a Dark Horse Records alumnus). Together the two provide a methodical and in-the-pocket rhythm section, hearkening back to the Newmark/Allen combo, albeit not as tricky. The rest of the credits are a little harder to work out. Sly's role is clear (vocals, keyboards, harmonica) but there's a bevvy of guitar, horns, and backing vocal credits, including some familiar ones: Rose and Freddie are both credited with backing vocals, and Robinson and Rizzo reappear as well. But in general the feel is of a more intimate ensemble, no more strings or timbales or dense orchestration; from the opening bars of the opening track it's evident that things have been scaled down.

Taylor splashes in with a brief opening fill, followed by a familiar tick-tock pattern, a straight 8th note bassline, and a wash of keyboards and guitars hitting whole notes on the downbeat as they establish a creatively circular four chord progression of minors and 7ths. Burke in particular acquits himself admirably, clearly relishing the opportunity to step into the pantheon of Sly bass players, putting his own muscular spin on a familiar style. For the chorus Sly pivots to a second four chord pattern, drops the minor chords, and brings in a bright, syncopated countermelody from the horns as Taylor opens up on the hi-hat. This verse/chorus pattern repeats throughout the song with minimal variation, the focus is on the disciplined delivery. There's no excess noise, no sloppy edits, no reverb, no distractions, just Sly doing his thing. He's in fine voice on the lead vocal, doubled by multi-tracked, stereo-panned female vocals. Lyrically he's again looking in the mirror, doling out advice about ignoring the haters and being true to yourself with his typical mix of inversions and turnabouts. Not every line connects but his knack for a clever turn of phrase still shines through here and there ("Ever feel like you're nobody / Remember you're nobody else, too").

A deftly executed, if modest, opener.

Wow, I've never heard this album. The drummer is absolutely killing it with those 16th note hats (that is a *fast* tempo for that groove, I could never).

(and yeah everything sounds fantastic)

Check out Alvin Taylor's wiki photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Taylor

OK I've never heard this album, the title scared me because it once again smacked of desperation. This OK though, I least you can hear Sly this time round.

Wow, it's short this album!