Sly and the Family Stone Greatest Hits Poll

^ tracklist?

This is impossible. Instinctively, Everyday People but it hurts to leave everything else out.

Family Affair
Runnin' Away
(You Caught Me) Smilin'
If You Want Me to Stay
Frisky
If It Were Left Up to Me
Time For Livin'
Loose Booty
I Get High on You

just 9 songs vs the original 11

original 12, sorry

“There’s a midget standing tall”
Cringe

Even the "lesser" tracks here benefit immensely when they're heard in this context. "Fun" and "Life" sound like fine singles on their own, but they're more enjoyable here than on the original LP's. For lack of a better word, hits compilations can be a bit 'patchwork' but this one feels marvelously cohesive. It really works like a great album, not just a compilation.

pulled the trigger for "sing a simple song" after remembering the acapella "do re mi" part. one way to make me love a sly stone song is to include vocals from larry graham

*very much not acapella lol, but you get my drift

was there or could there have been an expanded version of this that actually worked? including later hits while still holding up well as an album you can listen to and enjoy w/o needing to use shuffle? maybe vol 2 is the only thing that would work. the longer chronological comp i heard (prob from a 90s CD release) did not remotely work as an "album" and was a drag to hear as one even though every song was good to amazing

There was a later set called Anthology that went through Fresh in chronological order. 20 tracks, including all of this one.

There was a later set called Anthology that went through Fresh in chronological order. 20 tracks, including all of this one.

For those on a very tight budget (and who don't mind worse sound), that's the CD to get if you can only have one, but it doesn't play quite as well. The Riot tracks really should be heard in their original context - that truly is an album, something that needs to be heard as its own unified statement.

Also FWIW, the original Greatest Hits and Anthology both have one flaw - the shitty fake stereo processing on the three single-only tracks that they originally mixed only to mono. Those three tracks ("Hot Fun in the Summertime", "Everybody Is a Star", and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)") eventually got true stereo mixes in the 1990s and 2000s, but it would have been nice to have a pressing that had the original mono 45 mixes instead of the fake stereo versions.

(There was a label called Audio Fidelity that reissued Greatest Hits with both the original mono mixes for all twelve tracks AND the original 1970s quad mixes for those who can play SACD's, but it's now out-of-print.)

anthology is the one i heard, it was too much and too dispiriting as a whole. this one is a great album

but even aside from what happened to the band on a personal level the version of "rock" you hear on these 60s tracks feels so much more radically open than what people later decided rock was supposed to mean. parts of it do eventually feed into disco esp via 70s R&B (no longer accepted as rock to rock's detriment) including but actually not primarily their/his own 70s work. i can't be cynical about the early lyrics bc it's easy & the cynicism feels like it comes from a much smaller place than the lyrics did, one with at least some connection to the backlashes & disillusonments that made earnest pleas for social change seem *so obviously* corny or naive to basicall y everyone over the next few decades

Sony put the mono single versions of "Hot Fun..." and "Thank You" on a compilation called Higher!, from 2013, I think it's a distillation of a box set of the same name.

Sony put the mono single versions of "Hot Fun..." and "Thank You" on a compilation called Higher!, from 2013, I think it's a distillation of a box set of the same name.

Correct, and I think the box set was the first time the Life singles were released in mono too, but the Audio Fidelity reissue had much better mastering. (The box set and distillation both had quite a bit of extra compression even though those mixes were already very compressed.)

Check the same drum pattern on “simple song” and “thank you”
1 / 2 / and 4

my personal theory about why this music (and much of the classic records that came out during that late 60s period) sounds so singular is that it was this weird, short-lived time where multitrack recording and studio experimentation was starting to flourish, but there were still some big technical limitations, particularly in number of available tracks, that forced bands to get creative with how they were recording and mixing. 16 and 24 track recording came shortly after, and with that the recording process also matured and calcified. So you got a kind of standard for what "professional" recording should sound like that didn't really change for a long time after that, but you also lost the incentive to make those unusual mixing choices that you really only hear on records that came out during that 2-3 year period.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

“Sing a simple song” shoots up from 7th to 2nd!