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

Sly turns 80 today!

Just noticed that. Somewhat miraculously still with us.

54. Sly & the Family Stone - Run Run Run (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiLWrU-JX08
Larry Graham's impact on the band's overall sound, R&B/funk, and bass playing in general cannot be overstated, and you can hear it clearly in the opening bars here, with his fleet-fingered thumping propelling the song forward. A brief bass-and-melodica fanfare blossoms into some weird, frantic folk-rock/Motown hybrid that shifts gears so many times it's head-spinning. Byrds-ian electric guitar breaks, a chiming xylophone, droning organ, bass and drums maintaining a furious rhythm, before an abrupt left-turn to an arpeggiated horn part, followed by the addition of a worldess vocal and a simple bass drum pulse. Then it whips back to the verse, shouted vocals, more xylophone, more instrumental verses. The band overall is very self-aware about the audacity of what they're doing both on a musical and socio-political level, and the lyrics reflect a theme (initially broached on "Underdog") they would turn to again and again: us vs. them, the freaks vs. the squares, the hippie day-glo utopia vs. the button-down establishment. No doubt this is the kind of song that turned an initially small coterie of white hippies' heads as well black musos like Miles Davis.

55. Sly & the Family Stone - Turn Me Loose (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpWL60Z5txs
Channeling some of the more manic strains of James Brown's R&B blowouts, this one comes charging out of the gate with horns, guitars, bass, gospel organ and drums galloping along in what at times could almost pass for a hyped up ska song. All the players get off crazy breaks, particularly Errico and Freddy. Vocals are a similarly hyped up call-and-response series of exhortations. And then it's all over in under 2 minutes. Seems designed to serve as a live set opener to rile up the crowd.

56. Sly & the Family Stone - Let Me Hear It From You (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsVY87NdXqw
Larry's first showcase, reportedly recorded late at night when his voice was at its most relaxed and supple, also unfortunately feels like the album's first misstep. Worth noting that right from their first rehearsal when Larry suggested having a vote to determine who would be the frontman/bandleader (everyone else laughed off this suggestion, as it was clear Sly was in charge), Larry was not entirely comfortable taking a backseat to Sly. As crucial as he was to the band's sound and dynamic, he could not accept that he was just not the songwriter or performer that Sly was.

Led off with a blaring organ and drum fanfare, the song then downshifts into a languid, lovesick ballad, almost minimalist in its construction compared to the rest of the tracks. Sly and Larry's playing throughout is lovely and dynamic, and can't really fault his emotive vocal, but the song itself is just kind of boring, something of a straight Otis Redding/Stax pastiche, without any of the idiosyncrasies or cross-genre experimentation that they draw on elsewhere.

yell if this is a derail too far but i started looking up the timeline of electric slap bass -- as in who was brown's bassist in 1967 (bernard odum), who first played thumb-slap with brown ("sweet" charles sherrell in 68, followed by bootsy, who was actually with brown for less than a year) , and so on…

anyway i found this curious section in larry graham's wikipedia

Born in Beaumont, Texas[2] to successful musicians, Graham played bass in the funk band Sly and the Family Stone from 1967 to 1972.[1] It is said that he pioneered the art of slap-pop playing on the electric bass, in part to provide percussive and rhythmic elements in addition to the notes of the bass line when his mother decided to no longer have a drummer in her band, while Graham also admits in a BBC documentary on funk music that he is unsure if it was done on economical grounds;[5]

why is graham's mother suddenly mentioned but not named? economic grounds in what sense? turns out (from his own site) that pre-sly he played first organ then electric bass in his mother's band (the dell graham trio) in california and when she slimmed it down to a duo he apparently developed his slapping style to compensate for the slimmed-out drummer

When my mother (Dell Graham) and I started working together I was playing guitar and so it was guitar, my drummer from my band, and piano. And we worked like that for a little while, but then we went into this one club where they had the organ and I started playing the bass pedals and the guitar at the same time. So we had bottom. But when the organ broke down, we missed the bottom. I went down and rented a bass, temporarily, until the organ could be repaired. I was not planning on being a bass player. As it turned out, the organ could not be repaired - there was no parts available or whatever.

My mother at that point had traveled all over the world - she sounded almost identical to Dinah Washington when she sang, and she played almost identical to Erroll Garner. So that was the combination. She did standards, jazz, blues, pop, country, whatever.

When we started working at Relax with Yvonne's on Haight and Ashbury... I had developed this style. We didn't have a drummer now, so I would thump the strings to make up for not having a bass drum, and pluck the strings because I didn't have that snare drum backbeat. And I developed this style, but I didn't think I was developing anything new. It was just out of necessity. Just trying to do the gig right, make it sound good and feel good. After a while of doing this, that's just the way I play. I never thought about playing the overhand style, the way bass players were playing then, because I wasn't gonna be a bass player. So even though musicians would look at me like "that's a weird way of playing you are playing there," it didn't matter, because it was just not my instrument. I didn't care what anybody thinks, says, or nothing. At the same time, I'm not listening to bass players to be influenced by them, because I'm not a bass player. I'm a guitar player. In my mind this is just a temporary gig.

And bass players in those days - playing lead guitar and singing was kind of out front, where bass players were more in the background, which is cool if that's where you want to play. But that was never in my thinking, I was out front singing, playing lead guitar and stuff. I think it was because of all that focus on the guitar, wen it came to bass, there was noting to interfere with creating this style that later on became different. When Sly head this - by that time, I had developed it a lot - he asked me to join his band. Now I was going to be combining that style with drums. That in itself, looking back, was really something different. And he being the person he was, he was able to see that this is something that would be a contribution to the band. - Larry Graham, "Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History" (Joel Selvin, 1998)

Here we begin to encounter some of the problems I have with this album. For all the unusual and clever arrangements and instrumentation I just don't think the songwriting is that great.

Man, it never even occurred to me that “Let Me Hear It From You” wasn’t Sly on lead vocal. I can hear it now, particularly when he jumps up an octave but both have a similar tone in the baritone range.

As for the songwriting, I have always really enjoyed “Underdog” and “I Cannot Make It” since I first heard them when I was reviewing The Essential Sly Stone for Stylus. But I was actually a little surprised at how much I enjoyed the songs on A Whole New Thing as none of them were hits.

But in general I found the performances and record as a whole way more compelling and listenable than Dance To the Music, which had a lot of filler, and arguably Life (tho I may find I feel differently once we get to those albums). While the songs are not as strong from a pure writing standpoint as you get later on, and the arrangements do a lot of heavy lifting here, all the nursery rhyme brass bits and little vocal snatches, combined with some really tough rhythm section playing, do give this record a really fresh, vibrant feel on the whole.

I know people don't rate it and think it's superficial (or something) but the grooves and basslines are so much better on "Dance to the Music". But we'll get to that.

57. Sly & the Family Stone - Advice (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sFOSiSr9l8
Another horn fanfare intro immediately segues into a brief but deeply funky drumbreak that would become a hip hop staple decades later. Errico is up there with Stubblefield, Starks, Modeliste and a small coterie of other drummers in developing a new rhythmic template in pop music, and this is the first instance where that really shines through. The consistent groove allows the ensemble to pack an incredible amount of detail into the arrangement in under 2 minutes, without ever losing focus or cohesion. This is especially remarkable for material that was tracked live to four-track; every couple of bars some new twist is introduced. The group vocals are loose and dynamic, alternately harmonizing and splitting apart into multiple lines, Sly, Larry and Freddy growling and whispering, ad-libbing, trading lead. Sly again pens present-tense lyrics full of the titular advice - he and his gang are exhorting people to live a certain way and follow their lead (and stop hassling them just cuz they're different, maaaan). And then there's a melodica solo fed through a tremolo effect, and a certain repeated two-note horn stab that the band would turn to again and again later in the discography.

58. Sly & the Family Stone - I Cannot Make It (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGPsvHd6mbo
The band's musical ingenuity is on full display, turning a handful of riffs and a fairly simple chord pattern into an opportunity for all kinds of rhythmic change-ups, dropped beats, and unexpected turnarounds. Errico and Graham in particular spend the whole song pushing and pulling each other into unfamiliar figures that all rotate around a straight 4/4 rhythym. Great harmonies embroidering lovelorn lyrics, and there's an almost countrified set of guitar licks from Freddy in the bridges. And it concludes with a little tape manipulation trickery for an extra psychedelic touch. Perhaps the most Beatle-y track on the album.

that all rotate around a straight 4/4 rhythym

Not always -- the bit at 0:30 goes 4/4, 7/4, 4/4.

I was going to say you were being pedantic, but I actually think that’s a good catch. The fact that it goes 7/4 twice means that the downbeat turns back to the two and four by the time the second verse rolls around.

Killer writeup on Advice. That was not a song I fully grokked until this listen. It’s an incredible Sly miniature.

"I Cannot Make It" is a definite high spot on this album. Disco hi-hats around 0:51! "Advice" is a good one too.

59. Sly & the Family Stone - Trip To Your Heart (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgmvPNef4Lk
Opens with perhaps one of the most abrasive moments in Sly's catalog, a cacophony of shrieks, drum rolls and guitar slides, before abruptly launching into a double-tracked, deeply funky drum break, a rising-and-falling vocal melody and a contrapuntal horn line. Sly's lead vocal rides over the top, featuring the first (?) of many thinly- and not-so-thinly veiled drug references. With the chorus the mix gets overtly "freaky" - you can hear the two drum parts split as one keeps the rhythm and the other highlights the ride cymbal following the lead vocal and skipping over the beat in triplets, while heavily reverb-ed organ swells, slide guitar and what sounds like a wavering theremin make it feel like the song is falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. The structure repeats and then the song ends as it begans, with cacophonous wailing. Four track psychedelia at its most tightly arranged, intentionally disorienting and disconcerting.

The Inspector Gadget horn riff on this one is p damn catchy.

60. Sly & the Family Stone - I Hate to Love Her (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp2k-6lgMN4
The band dials back the manic energy for a bit, shifting gears for a mid-tempo tune with a drifting horn line over suspended organ chords. They still throw in some aural left-turns (is that a melodica played through a wah-wah? Plus a rhythmic change-up in the refrain).Freddy's guitar seems mostly absent; the song is anchored primarily by the organ and the complex group vocal arrangement. The melodramatic bass vocal (Larry?) is a bit much, and the standard lovesick lyrics are not particularly notable.

Vocals might be Freddie? Not much of a song, to be honest. "Trip to Your Heart" is entertaining in a Haunted House kind of way. I still think the songwriting on this album isn't that strong.

I'm wondering if I'd be enjoying "Trip To Your Heart" this much if LL never sampled it. Definite synergy there.

How in the world does “Mama Said Knock You Out” not give a writing credit to Sly?

61. Sly & the Family Stone - Bad Risk (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXzWj_GbQ8
The band rolls out another groove with a combo horn and tremolo guitar line over a thumping rhythm section. Larry takes the lead on the vocal arrangement, backed by the others' occasional "oohs". The chord changes follow a fairly standard blues pattern (as do the slut-shaming lyrics) but the rhythmic change-ups and inventive arrangement constantly keep the song off-center, with tambourine accents, cold stops, a shifting horn line, and electric guitar licks constantly popping in and out. Sly in particular seems to take something of a back seat with the organ, generally staying out of the way.

62. Sly & the Family Stone - That Kind of Person (A Whole New Thing, 1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws5Uj0ihNGA
Their version of a slow-burning R&B ballad. The arrangement and performance are solid if not particularly inventive - the organ swells, the horns stab, the guitar is fluid, Sly's vocal swoops and glides - but it doesn't reach the heights of similar fare from the likes of Otis Redding or Solomon Burke.

63. Sly & the Family Stone - Dog (A Whole New Thing, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haDoWNvozYg
Starting and ending the album with dogs, for some reason (this band loved dogs according to numerous anecdotes, both positive and negative). Opens with another brief horn fanfare, then rolls into a funky uptempo rhythm that proceeds to twist and turn and start and stop numerous times before we even get to the first chorus and its a capella breakdown. Again, the arrangement is tightly packed with details, phrases and rhythms popping in for a couple of bars before swerving off on a different tangent (check out that brief fuzz guitar in the second verse), but all within a recognizable pop structure. Sly leads the vocals, with the others interjecting at key points, the lyrics a jumble of mixed metaphors and shopworn woman-done-me-wrong sentiments.

64. Sly & the Family Stone - Dance to the Music (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn2PNlhvy8E
After building a rep in the Bay Area and recording the first album in LA, the band decamped to New York. Manager Dave Kapralik: The group was on the road playing toilets and Sly came into my office, truculent. The album had died and he wanted out of his contract, wanted out of Epic... I remember saying to Sly that the response was great from other musicians, but it is not in the pop idiom. I said that he should do a record that pop ears can relate to and in between stick in your innovative schtick. He continued to be surly and said that he was going back to San Francisco.

Jerry Martini: I remember Sly going over to CBS Records and the executives saying to us, "This is what you should listen to." They gave us some shit and Sly threw it down and looked at me and said "Okay, I'll give them something." And that is when he took off with his formula style. he hated it. He just did it to sell records... it was so unhip to us. The beats were glorified Motown beats.

It is perhaps also worth noting that by this point, Sly had already begun to surround himself and the band with thugs (Hamp ""Bubba"" Banks, in particular) and everybody involved is generally awash in cocaine and heavy-duty pharmaceuticals.

Released as a single at the tail end of 1967 (with "Let Me Hear It From You" from the previous album as the b-side), this gave the band their first hit and opened the door for things to come. The second album was subsequently rush recorded and released in April 1968 to capitalize on the single's momentum. What's inarguable is that the formula worked, and soon tons of people were applying it and profiting from it. Structurally, the formula works like this: lay out a simple dance beat, introduce a group refrain, then have each vocalist take a turn highlighting themselves and their instrument, in turn spotlighting the bass, the horns, the fuzz guitar, the organ, etc. one at a time. Thematically, the lyrics are an unabashed mix of partying exhortations and hippie sloganeering. The complex changes and arrangements of the previous album have been excised. It's not difficult to detect the cynicism in this approach but it's also hard to resist the actual end product - especially the ridiculous group scat vocal breakdowns that they were refining to perfection. The song became something of an anthem/calling card for the band, and soon they were opening shows with it and performing it on TV (there are some absolutely nuts clips out there).

One particular stylistc facet that was perhaps perfected for this single (but which first appears on "I Cannot Make It" from the previous album) is a certain bass figure - while the drums play a stiff, four-on-the-floor beat, evenly emphasizing each beat of the bar, the bass moves around in a peculiar way, emphasizing and drawing out the "and" beats (one-AND-two-AND etc.), creating a certain amount of tension in the rhythm. Not sure if Larry invented this, but once you notice it you can hear it carried through their entire catalog, and this rhythm subsequently pops up all over the place (funk, reggae, disco). The band was at the forefront of developing an entirely new rhythmic vocabulary that incorporated this push-and-pull dynamic between the bassline and the drums.

Maybe that's why he looks so miserable on the cover.

great song, great thread - turns out the narrative I had in my head about the band and why their music changed was far too simplistic, it's wonderful seeing their music come together even though red flags are showing up much earlier than I was ready for

did the entire band consider their popular material to be commercial hackwork or is that just martini's (and maybe sly's) opinion? it's a shame if that was the case

That's a good question, I don't know. Larry always seemed like he'd be more into the fun side of things, in a lot of ways Graham Central Station were like the Family Stone with all the darkness removed.

If I were One Child, it would be a great April Fools' joke to stop the thread here after so many years of waiting: "we've dealt with the highlights, nobody cares about all the rest".

65. Sly & the Family Stone - Higher (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLWireCuqoo
Huge, formulaic hit aside, this is still a band of hyperactive weirdos on a mission to aggressively synthesize musical styles, and their chops and instincts could not be fully suppressed. This song could easily have been on "A Whole New Thing" the way it whipsaws between its stiff, staccato, oom-pah-band-at-the-county-fair opening, the swirling organ-led verses, and then the overdriven shoutalong choruses with its ascending chord pattern (and then, because of course, a harmonica solo). It's something of a jerry-rigged monster that doesn't quite work, Sly still working out what to do with this refrain that he was obviously fond of and knew was special. As with most of "A Whole New Thing" it sounds very much like it was recorded live with minimal overdubs/edits - they left in the "You" vocal flub at 1:45.

Can you be formulaic when you've only just invented the formula? "Higher" does sound like two songs squashed together.

66. Sly & the Family Stone - I Ain't Go Nobody (For Real) (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7h_mjRfhQ8
Maintaining the same tempo and feel of "Dance to the Music" but deviating from the structure to make room for more adventurous interplay, including opening with another carnival organ riff that gradually snowballs into the verse's two-chord vamp. The creatively voiced chord progression in the intro is structured such that it seems to be both ascending and descending as it builds in intensity, and is repeated throughout the song to break up the verses, which are comparatively basic and taken as an opportunity to throw off various licks. The band seems energized throughout (apart from an organ line that seems to falter a couple of times), but going on for 4-and-a-half minutes seems a bit unnecesary. Sly's vocal and lyrics are unremarkable, apart from the lines equating loneliness with freedom.

Can you be formulaic when you've only just invented the formula? "Higher" does sound like two songs squashed together.

67. Sly & the Family Stone - Dance to the Medley (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNwS82EtDcE
In which the band invents(?) the "extended remix". It sounds like it's patched together from various takes of the title track, you can practically hear the engineer's razor splicing the tape. Along with Freddie's heavily distorted guitar, Larry's fuzz bass is prominently featured. Not sure if this is the first recording to really spotlight such an effect but it was definitely unusual. The structure of the track itself, however, ultimately feels almost random. Various parts are extended, there's a lot more vocal lines (including quotes of other songs), the drums drop in and out, there's small variations in the horn lines, but there's no cohesive structure. Things do not build up or gather momentum as modern ears might expect. At certain points the tempo starts to drag, the rhythm track drops out entirely, and elements get repeated in a seemingly haphazard fashion. By the end the drums disappear and there's just a squall of hard panned guitar fuzz and wandering farfisa lines before it peters out entirely. Is this a genius dancefloor filling moment compiled from studio scraps or is it just ... filler? No doubt sticking this kind of track in the middle of the album seemed (to some listeners at least, and ostensibly the band as well) as cheap and lazy.

It's not something I listen to very often but, nonetheless, this track is amazing and, to use the old cliche, years ahead of its time.

"I Ain't Got Nobody" - I love the way the guitar, organ and piano do little filigrees around each other in the interludes between verses, it really elevates a pretty good song into something special.

68. Sly & the Family Stone - Ride the Rhythm (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDLiUjQju6g
A brief tattoo on the snare and the band gallops off at full clip with the horns blasting away, but just as quickly everything drops away leaving just Sly's bubbling organ and Freddie (?) kicking off a series of traded lead vocals between himself, Sly and Larry that harken back to both Bobby Freeman's dance hits and Sly's radio DJ patter. The band vamps on the titular refrain for a bit but it isn't long before Errico runs into trouble keeping up the pace as it hurtles forward. Freddie gets off a bunch of wild wah-wah guitar theatrics in the background. Really it's Larry and Freddie that drive the song, especially towards the end when Errico drops out entirely and the band (again) launches into some a capella scatting. While the tune is distinct from "Dance to the Music" (it's more frantic, for one thing) it does feel like it's assembled from previously developed bits: calling out the drummer for a spotlight, the two-note horn figure, the scatting, the dance-oriented lyrics.

Catchy enough chorus but the song as a whole doesn't particularly go anywhere.

It's said that Sly was overdubbing a lot of the instruments himself by the time of Riot, but do we know that, say, the guitars on the earlier records are Freddie and not him?

I don't know why they wouldn't be Freddie, he was a pretty good guitarist. It's been mentioned itt but a lot of these early tracks were likely recorded live.

69. Sly & the Family Stone - Color Me True (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_SwgcmO5O0
A quality deep cut, albeit one that similarly relies on familiar bits that are interspersed throughout the album. Errico, Robinson and Martini kick it off with a complex little drums-and-horns fanfare that again seems designed to trick the listener as to where the downbeat is, before Larry and Freddie come into to establish a mid-tempo groove over Sly's minor key organ drone (Larry again doing his pumping-and-breathing bass pattern). There's minimal chord changes here, not even from the verses to the choruses; the band instead leaning on creatively arranging their various riffs to drive things along.

Sly, Freddie, Larry and Rose trade off the lead vocal lines, and while at first blush the lyrics echo some of the familiar hippies-vs-the-squares rhetoric there's more going on here. More ambiguity, more irony, more reflectiveness, more bitterness, more paranoia. It can be read as self-righteous criticism directed at a listener, or as a weirdly paranoid internal dialogue, or even an intra-band argument.

Do you know how to treat your brother?
Do y’all know how to get along with one another?
When you retire, do you go right to sleep?
Do toss and turn when fear starts to creep?
Color me true

Freddie doesn't usually get much credit as a flashy player, but his ability to navigate a variety of styles (wah wah solos, folk fingerpicking, fuzz leads etc) is underrated and he gets off some nice parts throughout, switching between Pops Staples-ish blues licks and chicken scratches. The breakdown at the end with just Errico and Freddie is super tight, just before Sly leads in the rest of the band with another scat-sung coda.

I'm loving these breakdowns... it's fascinating the things that a musician keys in on, that I wouldn't have noticed.
Based on the trajectories at play here, it shouldn't be long until the first instance where One Child's write-up is more interesting than the song of the day

70. Sly & the Family Stone - Are You Ready (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3tA75qmCxs
Another real gem tucked away in the back half, possibly the best song on the album. A lone snare crack kicks off a melodic line from the horns and organ, one of the best hooks on the album, followed by a fantastic bassline from Larry, bobbing and climbing his way up until he and Errico snap into a skintight, one-note groove for the verse and the titular vocal refrain from Rose and Sly. The interlocking parts here are ingeniously arranged, every instrument has its own little bit that's distinct from the others and emphasizes a different beat in the bar, but it all fits together. Then it's back to the hook and a verse with one of Sly's sharpest and sunnily sloganeering lines yet ("Don't hate the black / Don't hate the white / If you get bit / Just hate the bite / Make sure your heart is beatin' right"). The rest of the song employs the "Dance to the Music" approach of stripping everything down to just a drum break before reintroducing each instrument one at a time, building things up to the climactic horn-and-organ hook. Larry, Freddie and Greg especially do a killer job here as the rhythm section, listen to that wah wah fuzz squeal underneath the hook, just before Errico gets off a series of drum fills. Sly's organ also notable, you can hear him feeling around the edges of a funkier style than he's employed before, inserting staccato fills between the sustained chords.

Yes yes yes to all of that. Track could easily be twice as long though.

71. Sly & the Family Stone - Don't Burn Baby (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUHdRAjpZA4
One of those tracks that seems like maybe cocaine was involved, the pace is ridiculous. Opening with a horn figure was standard for them by this point, although this time it's initially juxtaposed against ticking clock percussion from Errico and Sly's suspended organ chord. The energy ramps up as Errico establishes the manic tempo on the kick drum and the other instruments roll up (the bass, guitar, and horns all fire off quick ascending runs ahead of the vocal coming in). Errico's hand percussion (bongos) adds an extra layer of frantic rhythm accents. Larry's bassline alternates between staccato 8th notes (matching the drums) and quarter notes matching the horn accents, by the time they reach the first chorus everything feels way too fast, and the structure repeats. Freddie's guitar fills in the breaks switch between folk-raga-rock phrases and speedfreak riffing; both he and Larry are really ripping through almost every bar. Lyrically it's more generally upbeat, positivist lyrics in the face of the riots and uprisings that were tearing through the country in the summer of 1968, with a sing-songy DJ patter delivery (note the callback to "Underdog"), by the end devolving into just shouts and grunts.

72. Sly & the Family Stone - I'll Never Fall in Love Again (Dance to the Music, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdqoeQfUclM
Larry takes another lead turn at the mic, ending the album with a song that bears little to no resemblance to anything else on it. Every other song on the album is built around either a simple set of riffs with minimal chord changes or a fairly basic verse-chorus-verse structure, but this one has both an unusual amount of chords and a much more complex pop song structure. It also lacks Sly's more distinctive lyrical tics, instead relying on shopworn lovelorn sentiments. Sly took full writing credit for every track on the album, which was perhaps not entirely justified given everyone else's obvious contributions, but this one in particular feels like Larry likely had a direct hand in writing it. In some ways it sounds like a leftover from the previous record.

Larry alternates between playing melodic leads, the horns, guitar and organ scattering around him, employing double-stops just before the vocals come in, and playing an ascending bassline under the vocals (Sly and Freddie leading in with "never never never" on the refrains is a nice touch). There are a bunch of weird chord inversions and unexpected turnarounds, as well as an actual middle eight where the rhythm section reverts to staccato quarter notes while the horns pop off countermelodies. Midway through the song they hit on an extended one-chord vamp, Larry doing a call-and-response with the group vocals, before the horns come back in and cue the switch back to the choruses, Freddie again filling in with a bunch of fluid guitar runs.

73. Sly & the Family Stone - Dynamite! (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxfRj2TO0O4
At the core of why Sly is such a frustrating and fascinating figure is that while he is a genius (innovative, charismatic, funny, progressive, prodigiously multi-talented), he has a flipside that runs counter to all that: lazy, repetitive, petty, selfish, greedy, destructive, violent. And this isn't entirely a personal judgment, a lot of this is evident in the discography, in the music itself. When he hits on something new and exciting and successful, he goes back to it over and over and over again, he doesn't know when to stop. With the original band this manifested as a reliance on formulas and musical tropes that congealed into a singular style - the a capella scat breakdowns, the horn stabs, the bass patterns, the self-referential lyrics. Which has a lot to do with why the second album can sometimes sound like a handful of ideas stretched over too long a running time, as opposed to the debut where there's a bit more variety and freshness to everything.

Recorded in May 1968, just a few months after "Dance to the Music", and then released in September 1968, the third album represents something of a retrenchment. At this point, they're making industry waves as the new hot-shit crossover R&B act that no one quite knows how to handle, which is clearly a position that Sly and the band relished. They have some very famous peers taking notes - Miles Davis, Motown, Mose Allison, Tony Bennett - and they have a mass audience. They have more freedom and clout now, as well as a proven pop formula. The band is touring large ballrooms in the US (Fillmore East, Electric Ballroom, Aragon Ballroom, Electric Circus, etc.) On the non-musical front, Sly is carrying around a violin-case full of pharmaceutical grade cocaine and prescription pills from a NY doctor, and the band has already had multiple run-ins with the law (including the National Guard during the Detroit riots) and various people (both black and white) who are enraged by their interracial entourage and relationships. Following the release of ""Life"", Larry being busted in London for weed torpedoes the band's UK tour.

As a high energy opening track, "Dynamite" is awash in the psychedelic rock trappings of the day, right from its keening distorted guitar riff, which is almost immediately blasted into overdrive with the addition of Larry's fuzz bass. The song has a dynamic structure, gradually building to a climax before looping back to the intro multiple times. The band digs into their bag of tricks - traded vocals, soul claps, burbling organ and popping basslines, galloping drums - for this ode to a hippie wild child, before dissolving into a morass of stereo panned psychedelic effects (as well as a quote of their big hit for good measure). While this still retains the live-in-the-studio approach there's clearly a bit more engineering chicanery going on here than before; you can hear punch-ins and cuts, and there's hard stereo separation of several of the parts.

Interestingly, and going back to Sly's penchant for constantly recycling and reimagining material, he later recorded an entirely different take on this song a couple years later with 6ix for his Stone Flower label. (We'll get to it).

very much appreciating your continued work itt, sir

Prefer the second album to the first album and the third album to both. I don't really mind acts who have a formula if the formula is good (Fela Kuti? Ramones? Numerous others). Having said that, these albums tend to be on the lightweight side, with ideas that aren't always fully developed - the songs are often too short, for instance.

74. Sly & the Family Stone - Chicken (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb-8-2D8kdw
A brief but ingeniously and humorously constructed mini-drama. The lyrics feature a dialogue between a would-be seducer and an unimpressed object of affection, again sung by aternating vocalists, interspersed with a chicken squawk refrain that is mirrored by the guitar, organ, and horn lines. On one level this is a silly dance track, but on another it reflects a duality Sly loved to explore - the cocksure exhibitionist who is also wracked with doubt. Several lines reference fear/being scared, with Freddie delivering perhaps the most inscrutable, admonitory verse ("Don't let a stranger sell you stories / Buyin' is cheap and so is lyin' / I've got a place already for you / The space between livin' and dyin'")

Musically while the chord and verse-chorus-verse structure are rudimentary, the instrumental interplay is bonkers. Errico takes a bit more of a pounding approach to his and Larry's trademark rhythm four-on-the-floor rhythm, and Sly and Freddie in particular throw in all kinds of back-and-forth curlicues and embellishments in an almost conversational manner. The horns generally stay out of the way, dropping one-note blasts one the downbeat and doubling the vocal bok-bkok phrase. The stereo-panned production is also sharper and more nuanced than on the previous two albums, every instrument is given its own space in the stereo field but the overall effect is of a cohesive, live performance (mostly, there's definitely some punched-in backing vocals that have their EQ squeezed into the high end).

The contemporary Rolling Stone review called Life "the most radical soul album ever issued"; would there be any other likely candidates by 1968?