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

"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?

75. Sly & the Family Stone - Plastic Jim (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFr8w8QPI9E
This band loved to winkingly quote other songs (Sly devotee and occasional partner-in-crime George Clinton's penchant for quoting nursery rhymes seems like an extension of this) and they open this track with a bizarre juxtaposition: the horns deliver a tweaked line that borrows its phrasing from "Mary Had a LIttle Lamb", while Sly and Freddie sing a modified version of "Eleanor Rigby's" most famous lyric. Errico plays long drum rolls under the intro before picking up the tempo for a series of three-chord verses, interspersed with choruses that repeat the intro melodies. Interestingly, the whole structure bears more than a little resemblance to "Underdog" from the debut. Once again there is a lot of space in the stereo mix, and it sounds like a few things (horns and vocals) have been double-tracked. Lyrically in the vein of Bob Dylan's "finger-pointing songs" (albeit not as verbose), the band again draws a line in the sand between the hippies and the squares, before winding up the song by downshifting back to the intro, minus the vocals.

Freddie again knocks out sharp fills and runs throughout; its notable how rarely he sticks to a rhythm guitar role, and how much this is a function of the ensemble being composed almost entirely of lead players, no one really takes a backseat to the others (with the notable exception of Rose). Graham is similarly kind of unhinged as a player, his background as a dynamic lead guitar player is always very much in evidence. This ensemble approach is really one of the band's distinguishing features - Sly is ostensibly the lead, but everyone else is equally flashy in a way that was not common with other R&B (or even rock) bands. Everybody is a star. This is not to say that James Brown or Otis Redding's backing bands weren't full of fantastic players, but they didn't sound like they were all trying to steal the spotlight from one another from one bar to the next. With the original lineup of the Family Stone it feels like there's a constant jockeying for position that gets funneled into really creative arrangements.

76. Sly & the Family Stone - Fun (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLBZBv-J8w0
A classic. Neither a single nor a hit, this song still feels like it could have been both, and was later included on their stopgap "Greatest Hits" album in 1970. For such an exuberant sound and subject, the arrangement is compact, streamlined, restrained. There's no intro horn fanfare, no lead guitar lines, no breakdowns for the players to show off. The verses follow a repeated 4-chord pattern (with a 5th thrown in for a turnaround). Errico's introductory snare snap launches right into the verse's vocal line, Freddie and Sly (or Rose? not sure) playing alternating rhythm parts on the electric guitar and organ respectively, and Graham popping staccato 8th notes over Errico's straight-ahead snare hits on the 2, 3 and 4. This sets up a chugging rhythmic backdrop for the vocal, with Martini and Robinson playing a countermelody in unison. Where the fun comes in is in the vocal delivery and the lyrics, the band is clearly enjoying themselves as they trade lines, throwing in a comical "Sock it to me" (this phrase was everywhere for some reason in '67-'68, cf. Aretha's "Respect", Mitch Ryder, Laugh-in) and a significant amount of giggling and studio chatter in the second half of the song. Not for the first (or last) time there's also explicit references to family throughout - sisters, brothers, father, mother - which function as both generic archetypes as well as literal references to the band itself (Sly's father K.C. was still their road manager at this point, by all accounts a devout Christian who nonetheless managed to turn a blind eye to the band's interpersonal sex and drugs shenanigans).

Bass playing on this album is stellar.

Re: "Sock it to me", Andrew Hickey covered this in his episode on Aretha Franklin's "Respect":

Another bit of slang was that backing vocal phrase, “sock it to me”, which Aretha’s sister Carolyn had heard someone say and had decided would make a good background line. “Respect” popularised the phrase, and it soon became a national catchphrase, becoming a running gag on the comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, to the extent that even Richard Nixon joined in with it in a desperate attempt to seem down with the kids prior to his election as President

77. Sly & the Family Stone - Into My Own Thing (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-gt5fRWH6c
Mixing the rhythmic template of the previous LP's "Color Me True" (albeit slowed down a bit) with the "Dance to the Music" player-callout structure. The famously sampled opening phrase, with the guitar, organ and horns playing in unison, segues immediately into a one chord vamp underpinned by a martial cadence from Errico and the titular chanted refrain. That's pretty much the entire song, which is otherwise interspersed with a fuzz guitar lead, trilling piano, and a brief snatch of fuzz bass. It all sounds fine but it doesn't develop in any way, and the lyrics can most charitably be described as "functional".

78. Sly & the Family Stone - Harmony (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwoSHG4tnlk
Sly's presentation of the band as a model or a template on multiple levels (musical, familial, political) was self-conscious and deliberate. It was as if the overarching guiding principle was to performatively demonstrate all the levels on which an archetypal multiracial unit could function, right down to the construction of the music itself. ""You can be you / let me be me / that's harmony"". There's some other more muddled lines in the lyrics, maybe the most notable of which is the "easy as a-b-c / 1-2-3" rhyme (Sly is often- sometimes sloppily - cited as a precursor to Prince, the Temptations psychedelic period, Miles Davis going electric, etc. but his impact on the Jackson 5/Michael Jackson seems to be a less common topic).

Oddly, for a song about harmony this tune is based much more around some pretty complex melodic interplay than it is around harmony. Apart from the way the vocals split into three on the word "harmony" in the choruses, there aren't many harmonies at all, most of the horn and vocal lines are in unison. There is a lot of remarkable playing right out of the gate though, and apart from some overall improvements in fidelity and mixing it wouldn't have been out of place on the debut LP. From the very first bar there's three different countermelodies going on - Sly playing one melody on the organ, Rose (playing a similar line to the next tune, "Life") on the piano, and Martini and Robinson playing their lead line, which is joined by the lead vocals entering with the aforementioned refrain for the first chorus. Freddie joins in at that point as well, throwing in a flurry of fills and runs, and Graham lays in one of his trademark huffing-and-puffing staccato 8th note basslines. Remarkably everyone finds a lane and stays in it, each part is clear and distinct from the others, but also contributing something essential to the machinery of the song. The band rolls through a couple of verses and choruses before abruptly slowing to a waltz time breakdown and then drawing out the last two chords for a melodramatic ending. A solid deep cut; if it has any drawbacks it's that it feels like a dry run for the next (even better) song.

Interesting, that opening horn part on "Harmony" recycles the lead vocal melody from a radio promo spot Sly did for his own radio show (no idea of when). The lyrics go

S-T-O-N-E yeah
S-T-O-N-E
(can't remember this line)
Soulful as you can see

Sly Stone is my name
Playing records is my game
A little bit different every night
Always outta sight

...and then he vamps and laughs a lot while the track plays on for another ~10 seconds. I just spent about an hour looking for confirmation of this spot anywhere online, esp on youtube, but can't find it. It pops up pretty often on WFMU's Rock and Soul Radio stream, but the promos and ads used as interstitial bits between tracks don't show up in archived playlists. The main R&SRadio automated stream isn't archived (anymore) but the Night Owl show still is; if I ever hear the Sly promo on an archived show again I'll note it here.

79. Sly & the Family Stone - Life (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D71VV30MYog
Evidence of the fundamental injustice of the universe, this lead single from the LP was not a hit. Backed with "M'Lady" it debuted and peaked at No. 93 on the Billboard Hot 100 dated August 27, 1968, and lasted only three weeks on the chart. As with "Fun", "M'Lady" and a few of the other tracks on the album, the tune is economical and precise in its construction, the band's outlandish and exuberant tendencies harnessed into a tight pop structure. The carnival barker opening - a classic psych pop move (cf. Sgt. Pepper's etc.) - is accompanied by a calliope-like organ riff and the horns introducing the chorus melody as an oom-pah band delivery (not sure who that is on the tuba, presumably Robinson). Errico and Graham enter with their signature 4/4 rhythm - note how Larry picks up the tuba line - and the rest of the band launches into a couple of choruses with group vocals, Freddie playing rhythm guitar accents throughout. Larry sings the first verse over staccato accents from the horns, organ and guitar, and Sly takes the revealing second verse: "You might be scared of somethin', look at Mr. Stewart / He's the only person he has to fear / He'd only let himself get near / He don't trust nobody / If he stopped bein' so shady / He could have a nice young lady". Again with Sly's trademark juxtaposition of pep talk and paranoia. Freddie gets in the last verse (which contains yet another dog reference, perhaps appropriately as Freddie was the perpetually abused puppy of the group) and then the song wraps up with a sharp 1-2 hit. It's the little details that make this song work, the verses and choruses are both structured around the same four chord pattern (with some alternate 7ths thrown in). Just listen to that horn line in the verses as it skitters around the rhythm, or Larry's bassline bopping up and down between octaves.

80. Sly & the Family Stone - Love City (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvaICINNHkY
This one feels like filler, based around a simple concept (hippie utopianism) and a handful of their standard riffs, the exception being Errico's drumbeat, hard-panned in the right channel and tailor-made to be endlessly looped. The horns play a line that echoes the vocal melody of "Harmony" at one point, and in the background you can periodically hear Martini play a figure with similar phrasing to his line in "Dance to the Music" and "M'Lady". As on several of the other songs, Graham uses his fuzz pedal to signal his entrance and kick the energy up a notch, although it's interesting he never seems to use this sound for more than a bar or two. Freddie, Rose and Sly generally don't offer much beyond handling the group vocals. There is a little bit of studio experimentation going on in the track - aggressive stereo panning, reversed, overdubbed cymbal splashes and some occasional washes of reverb. Second-tier.

81. Sly & the Family Stone - I'm an Animal (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCDc711Wd7k
This track sounds like it's punched in in the middle of a take, starting right in with the "hey hey hey" (subsequently repurposed for "I Want to Take You Higher") and the titular refrain. Freddie's fuzz lead doubled by Graham's bass, which keeps up the pulse throughout. Errico plays with a bit less energy and inventiveness than usual, sticking to a minimal beat. Otherwise the song's bones are it's ascending chord line and the one-note "I'm an animal" vocal line. Sly seems to be attempting to take a playful spin on a trope with obvious racist undertones, but it doesn't quite land, the lyrics are overly goofy. Things get a little more interesting with the dreamy, suspended chords in the bridges, although those sections are marred alternately by some of the sillier lines ("Let me be your bear friend / And I wanna monkey around with you") and all the over-the-top growling and animal noises (again: dogs). Sly had a real penchant for mouth music, scatting, non-verbal vocalizations, beatboxing, whatever you want to call it: it shows up early on with the group vocals, his frequent interjections "boom shaka laka"/"buh-boom boom boom" etc), this song, "Don't Call Me N***** Whitey", a bunch of other tracks. It's a distinctive, perhaps overlooked but significant aspect of his style.

This will interest you.

found this for 50p - promo of sly and the family stone’s “dance to the music” with press release! I’m so happy! pic.twitter.com/A6KXHeOeHQ

— huw (@huwareyou) April 22, 2023

"82. Sly & the Family Stone - M'Lady (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7kyNlb1PJQ
Formulas aren't bad in and of themselves, the good ones provide creative artists a playground to mess around in. "M'Lady" repurposes many of the band's formula components in a way that's obvious to anyone paying attention: the group vocal scatting, Errico's pounding martial dance beat, Graham's fuzz bass punch-ins, Martini's clarinet lick, the way instruments drop in and out. But this is not just an uninspired retread of "Dance to the Music", the band sounds energized, and each little phrase and part has been tweaked or refined in an interesting way. Odd details pop in right from the start. The group vocals pan across the stereo field, Sly's vocal mimics Freddie's guitar part, Sly throwing in triplet organ fills that build into an actual descending chord change midway through the song before abruptly reversing and climbing back up the scale. By the time the band lands back on the chorus they're firing on all cylinders, the sound is thick and rich, Errico and Freddie slamming the downbeat while the horns, organ, guitars and vocals swirl around. Then it's a jump-cut back to the a capella breakdown and another chorus to the fade-out. It's more compact than "Dance to the Music", more focused. A few audible edits with overdubbed vocals aside, the band's mostly live-in-the-studio performance has a palpable joy. The placeholder lyrics can be forgiven. Released as the b-side to "Life".

83. Sly & the Family Stone - Jane is a Groupee (Life, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee2Nj5YRlOE
These lyrics are harder to forgive. The overt slut shaming comes across as cruel and hypocritical. Which is too bad because there's some really interesting things going on musically in this song that deviate from the band's usual bag of tricks. For one thing, Errico develops a variation of one of his standard grooves, throwing in a little triplet figure between each beat that gives some extra propulsion to his normal marching-band funk rhythm. Sly would return to this pattern consistently for years to come, cf. the opening of "In Time" and many others. The other players also get creative: Freddie trades fuzz licks with Larry but also indulges in some of his most outwardly acid-rock moves throughout. The horns play long, langurous phrases as the energy of the song ebbs and flows every few bars. In between his usual fleet-fingered basslines, Larry drops out for entire measures, adding to the stop-and-start feel of this dreamy, minor key song.

It's worth noting that the third album is really the last time the original ensemble functions as a discrete, cohesive unit. Through this point there really is a sense that the band functions as a democracy with Sly as more or less a figurehead. Everybody plays on every track, everybody gets a turn in the spotlight, everybody is throwing in ideas. And while the next album and its subsequent singles represent the commercial peak, it's also at this point that that approach breaks down. Sly begins to acquire even more of a central/dominating role: changing up the instrumentation of various songs, bringing in outside players, playing things himself, sidelining first Freddie and then Larry (culminating in death threats and actual violence between competing factions in the band).

Great writeups

Re: Jane Is A Groupee, the same year we had "Star Collector" by the Monkees, so the groupie phenomenon seem to have been on the radar at the time.

Written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin no less!

84. Sly & the Family Stone - Stand! (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49vjFN6Fsw
Preceded by the release of their first no. 1 single "Everyday People" (b/w "Sing a Simple Song") in November 1968, their fourth album "Stand!" followed in May 1969 and was a commercial and artistic inflection point for Sly and the band. After three relatively unsuccessful LPs, there is a clear refinement of their approach on the LP, and some subtle but significant changes creep into the songwriting and performances.

At first blush, the song contains a lot of familiar elements. It opens with yet another circus/fairground musical figure, this time a drumroll from Errico that makes it sound like the band is about to take a swan dive off a trapeze, and then abruptly cuts to the verse, powered by Errico's four-on-the-floor rhythm and Freddy and Larry anchoring the chords on the up-beats. Sly takes the lead vocal for himself for once, with the others chiming in to provide harmonies, delivering another of Sly's hectoring sermons about bucking social constrictions. Larry does his fuzz bass accents, the horns play a drifting counter-melody, Freddy gets in a couple wah wah licks in between comping chords, and the choruses are lifted up by soul claps and the climbing vocal line.

The mix is ferocious, but it bears pointing out that the chord structure is also ingenious: the verses start with a simple three-chord pattern but then the whole pattern modulates down half-a-step, creating a tension that's released when the melody swoops up to the chorus, which goes up a full step higher, ultimately resolving on the same chord the verses do. There's a circular motion to the structure that's oddly satisfying, like it could just go on forever.

But that's not what happens. Instead there's an audacious edit at the end that patches on an entirely different coda, which switches to C minor for a one chord vamp. By all accounts this was added after the rest of the track had already been completed and an early mix had received a poor public reception. Sly took Errico, Martini, Robinson and some unidentified session musicians (most likely Little Sister for the backing vocals, more on them later) back to the studio and cut this incredible 49-second section, featuring a highly syncopated bass riff doubled by a guitar and offset by Sly's organ, a furious drum pattern (just listen to those 16ths on the hi-hat), a two-note horn blast that Martini and Robinson had been using for years, and an insanely catchy vocal hook (can never go wrong with "na-na-na"s). This tag pushes the song into groundbreaking, audacious territory and there's no doubt it contributed to the song's overall success (#22 on the Hot 100, #14 on the soul chart). Hard to imagine that Graham and Freddy didn't regret their absence or feel burned by their exclusion.

I never knew that about the session musicians for the coda! I still remember the first time I heard this song -- the main tune itself struck me as *very* 60s hippie on first blush but I was immediately blown the fuck away when the coda edit came in. This wasn't long after I'd discovered late-60s/early-70s James Brown and this felt such a piece with that, but, as you note, with a fury and aggression I had never heard before. At that point, the contrast with the more utopian verse became much more powerful (and desperate). Another great writeup.

the verses start with a simple three-chord pattern but then the whole pattern modulates down half-a-step

Actually three semitones; and the coda sounds in C# to me. One of the neat details of that verse is that sometimes the subdominant chord is minor ("...end you'll still be...") and sometimes major ("...done all the...").

Actually you're right: the coda's in C, and I've been starting the song in A instead of A♭!

85. Sly & the Family Stone - Don't Call Me N***** Whitey (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G-2U-qPsZU
(Title g00gleproofed because racists). Putting this as track two is a pretty ballsy move. The N-word had essentially vanished from popular mass media by the 60s - apart from relatively underground comedy records, it was verboten to either utter or spell out the word on a record. There's no doubt that Sly was aware of this, and opted to break ground by defying convention and putting out a song that highlighted America's racial divide in the most confrontational way possible. The use of the term on record skyrocketed after this (Last Poets debut would come out less than a year later, for example). A generous reading would assume there's no false equivalence intended between the terms used in the song; what Sly is really doing is conveying stasis, paralysis, a seemingly never-ending manichaean conflict between two sides that can't figure out how to move forward, as Rose sings on the song's lone verse: "Well, I went down across the country / And I heard two voices ring / They were talkin' funky to each other / And neither other could change a thing". This is not a song of hope, or even a plea for understanding or unity.

The title and lyric are not the only provocative element, the song bears almost no resemblance to anything else in Sly's discography to-date. It's built out of two distinct sections: one a see-sawing two-note pattern underpinned by a slower-than-usual marching cadence from Errico, and the other a half-time section built around the titular refrain, punctuated by long horn blasts. As the band alternates back and forth between the two sections, Sly leans hard into a heavily processed scat-sung lead vocal (which sounds like it's primarily being fed through a heavily distorted wah-wah pedal), with occasional interjections from Graham. Sly doubles the refrain with his organ, as does Freddie with his wah-wah guitar. And it's long, much longer than anything they'd put out so far (with the exception of "Dance to the Medley") The song only seems to become more and more tense as it rumbles on, never really resolving or reaching a climax, eventually just cutting short altogether."

86. Sly & the Family Stone - I Want to Take You Higher (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqWQzOzK3kw
On the LP, the band followed its most in-your-face moment yet with another that was begging to court controversy, cheekily basing an entire song around a double entendre meant to highlight the parallels between the effects of drugs and music. While perhaps novel or shocking to some, that was only because people hadn't been paying attention: the song is built primarily out of motifs Sly had been playing around with for years. These include the central refrain, which had previously appeared in "Higher" (off of "Dance to the Music"), and before that in Billy Preston's "Advice (off of "The Wildest Organ in Town"); the "hey hey hey" from "I'm an Animal" (off of "Life"); and the one-chord vamp + riff structure they'd explored on several previous tracks ("Into My Own Thing", etc.) They also make the obvious Doors quote because hey, why not.

Clocking in at over 5 minutes, this is another instance where the band stretches out into longer, slightly jammier material than they had previously ("beat is getting stronger/music gettin longer too"). Freddie, Larry, Rose and Sly all trade lines as they have many times before, but the feel of this song is overall sweatier and more distorted, the result of several different production and arrangement choices. For once, Larry lays on the fuzz bass for more than just a bar or two, leaning on it for entire verses. It also sounds like there's actually *two* bass tracks (one clean and one distorted) at certain points. The vocals, horns, and organ also intermittently stack on top of each other, playing the same riff in unison. There's a cumulative weight to all this that lends the track its extra punch and crackle, which is evident right from the opening bars where Sly's wailing harmonica overlaps with the horns' introductory crescendo and Larry doubling Freddie's guitar line with the fuzz bass. While overall the track sounds very live, there were definite overdubs and edits. Sly's harmonica, the horns, and several bass and vocal bits are clearly punched in. The organ is dropped out for the "boom shaka laka" sections and it also sounds like initially live horn takes are bleeding through to other tracks at various points. In some ways this track is the band in its archetypal/ideal state. Everyone is energized, united, euphoric. Any cracks are papered over with a cooperative enthusiasm, and the playing and singing on everyone's part is muscular and aggressive. Sly (on harmonica), Freddie, and Robinson all take solos, and towards the end Martini impressively sustains a single high note for about half a minute. Who knows how long the master take of this went on for, as with "Don't Call Me N*****, Whitey" it sounds like it was designed to be potentially infinite.

Released as the b-side to "Stand!", the second single off the LP. Subsequently reached #38 on the Billboard Chart on its own in 1970, following their performance at Woodstock. Their officially released live performance of this track at Woodstock will be covered in a separate post.

glad you're gonna cover the woodstock version, best performance of the entire festival imo

What I notice most in this recording is the many different levels of the voices - different placement in the stereo field, different volumes and levels of reverb, compared to the insistent and constant instrumental track. It's very subtle and measured compared to what e.g. George Clinton would do with similar tracks in the next couple of years.

87. Sly & the Family Stone - Somebody's Watching You (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyCuIBDjehg
Fantastic deep cut from start to finish. Classically-trained studio engineer Richard Tilles has noted that "the Family Stone up to 'Stand!' was a symphony orchestra, whereas the stuff after that is more like chamber music". "Somebody's Watching You" is where that transition starts to happen. This is where the recording strategy starts to migrate from capturing the in-studio performances of an ebullient live band to something more hermetic, sculpted, pieced together. In parallel (or perhaps even ahead of) similar engineering techniques being refined in UK studios at the time, instruments and voices are close-mic'd so that the sound is dead and dry, with no natural reverberation. Overdubs and punch-ins come to the fore. Effects like reverb are applied at the mixing stage not to evoke an actual physical space, but to disassociate the various instruments from each other. At no point in this song does it sound like everyone is playing in the same room together: various elements (including the reverb that pops in on the instrumental choruses) are hard panned in one channel or the other; the horns are heavily compressed and off in a closet somewhere; Sly's wandering organ solo is clearly overdubbed and at one point is punched out so abruptly it creates a weird drop-of-water sound effect; the EQ on the vocals in the third verse are crushed in the upper frequencies, like they're coming out of a transistor radio.

This song is also emblematic of how dense and tangled the band's music was becoming. Stephen Paley, Sly's A&R from the label: "He had a music theory book by Walter Piston, about orchestration, and he would always refer to it." This song doesn't have a particularly complicated structure - it's just a descending four chord pattern interspersed with a two-chord chorus and some grace transitional chords between - but the chord voicings and inversions and overall melodic inventiveness are beguiling. As soon as you zero in on a particular detail like the horn line or the intertwined vocal harmonies they zip off in some unexpected direction. The organ chords are voiced in a way that tricks the ear as to whether they are going up or down the scale. Errico's drumming is both minimal and tense, as if he can feel the Rhythm Ace that would soon replace him lurking in the background. Freddie comps chords in a pattern that's not tied to either Graham or Errico at all, occasionally bursting into fuzz licks on the instrumental breaks. Graham still drives the rhythm with his familiar patterns, but even he seems more restrained than usual. The vocals periodically break apart, fluttering into different spaces in the stereo field during the choruses, then dovetailing back together for tight harmonies on the verses. The horns play a countermelody that meanders into its own little pocket universe almost entirely distinct from the vocal melody.

The coy, epigrammatic lyrics outshine every other song on the record. Many of the lines can be read as intensely personal references. For example: in a veiled but unfortunately homophobic touch, Sly calls out Dave Kapralik, his gay manager, as "shady as a lady with a mustache"; also hard not to read the "Sunday school don't make you cool forever" as a jab at his parents, or "Secrets have a special way about them / Moving to and fro among your friends" as being about the band (not sure if Sly's affair with Robinson was already underway). But lines like these are also not unnecessarily specific, they are broadly observational, universal; they're a unique mixture of the deadly serious and the comic, delivered with a sad, knowing wink. And some are just blankly grim: "Jealous people like to see you bleed" or "Ever stop to think about a downfall? / Happens at the end of every line" (coke reference?)

Sly would shortly cut an entirely different version of this song with Little Sister (comprised of his younger sister Vette and two of her friends), who had been singing backup for the Family Stone since the beginning, and release it on his Stone Flower label.

A fascinating overlooked track (considering that almost every other song on here wound up on Greatest Hits); my favourite detail is how he holds back the ♭VII chord (E♭) until the very last bar of the chorus. The heightened suspicions of the lyric seem to be a result of increasing cocaine paranoia.

I almost completely missed this until I heard the Little Sister version.

Me too! Love the LS version so this one is a bit of a late revelation.

Same – the writeup does a great job of giving me a ton to chew on and sort through.

I see Sly is working on a memoir. Is the Jeff Kaliss book any good? I read the oral history some years back but would absolutely dig into a really good biography.

There's quite a lot of Sly anecdotes in the George Clinton book Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?: A Memoir. In fact, Sly is the only character who comes across warmly and vividly; Clinton doesn't really delve into the personalities of his band members, and is particularly dismissive of Bootsy Collins.

It struck me as weird, when Sly was doing his quasi-comeback about 15 years ago, that either he or his handlers seemed to be avoiding discussing the issue of drugs. Rather than playing up the "recovery" aspect, as you would with most stars who had been largely absent from the public for more than two decades, there seemed to be a desire just to turn the clock back to 1968 and play the material for its most obvious "party up" aspects. That's why I wonder what sorts of revelations could be expected from a Sly memoir.

Now hold on a minute there, George Clinton dismissive of Bootsy? Say it ain't so.

88. Sly & the Family Stone - Sing a Simple Song (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42YGprrAOj0
Closing out side one of the LP with the b-side to "Everyday People", which was initially released ahead of the album in November 1968. The song begins by abruptly cutting into a gradually swelling organ chord, Freddie's guitar wailing over the top as the vocals gradually join in. Errico dials up the tension with a drumroll before dropping a truly monstrous beat that has reverberated for decades. Sure this song (like all the others) is credited solely to Sly but the recording is completely dominated by the rhythm section. Errico's groundbreaking and hugely influential beat is unlike anything else he's played up to this point, both taut and slippery, a combination of hammered hi-hat quarter notes, nimble footwork, and hard-hitting fills, and Graham matches him pound for pound with an octave-jumping bass riff (doubled by Freddie's guitar). Sly's overdriven organ lurks in the background, punctuating the end of each bar, and the horns alternate between crescendos and staccato accents. Throughout the verses the horns and organ and horns duck in and out to emphasize different bits of the central lick.

As with much of the rest of the album, the recording is fairly hot and live, with hard stereo panning to give everything space, anchored by the organ and bass in the center (iIsolating the drums in the right channel would subsequently make it easier for hip hop producers to chop a clean sample). Sly's shouted vocal careens back and forth across the stereo field, the other voices all given their own individual sonic space. The song ducks back and forth between the mammoth hook and an ascending four-chord break that ramps up the tension each time around, with Errico pounding out uniform quarter notes as the vocals slide up the do-re-mi scale. Midway through, however, there is an honest-to-god drumbreak/middle eight where Graham and the vocals drop out, ceding the spotlight to Errico and a growling, bent-note riff from horns and Freddie (with Sly's organ also peeking through), putting the song on a whole other plane. As with the coda on "Stand!", the break feels like it was specifically designed to leave the audience wanting more, a peak that appears only once in the song yet begs to be repeated endlessly.

The lyrics are Sly at his most wide-eyed and uplifting, an ode to joy and perserverance in the face of trouble, frowns, and and ups and downs, delivered again by the whole band, with even Cynthia joining in this time around. The lines have an appealing, repetitive nursery rhyme quality and the lines are pitched back and forth by the singers like a game of hot potato. The song ends on an unusual note, an isolated and deliberately placed studio artifact of the overdubbed vocals, as if Sly meant to pull back the curtain and flip the song inside-out to expose the seams holding it together.

Didn't really like this one until I heard the single version, which fades out a minute earlier - it just seemed a more focussed performance.

89. Sly & the Family Stone - Everyday People (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUUhDoCx8zc
The band's first bona fide pop crossover hit went to number one on the Soul Singles chart and Billboard Hot 100. As one of their signature songs it encapsulates the sentiments the band leaned into so heavily on their first four albums, distilling their mult-cultural ""can't we all just get along"" philosophy into a simple series of melodies that play out over what is essentially a one chord vamp (ok, two if you count the subdominant chord in the piano part). Graham doesn't have much to do with his atypically one-note bassline, so he leans into the his slapping technique to accentuate the off-beats of Errico's mid-tempo rhythm. Freddie's guitar is entirely absent (unless that's him on those punched in fuzz accents). The horn lines essentially echo the vocal melodies. And really it's the vocals that make this song work and cemented it as a hit, the way they're arranged is almost a textbook exercise in how to wring out harmonic and melodic variations from a single chord. For a band as exuberant and technically skilled as they were, this song is weirdly restrained and minimalist in its construction, there's no solos, no flashy demonstrations of technique, no trading off in the spotlight - it's all about the voices.

And yet, while the overall message comes through, the lyrics seem kind of sloppy and muddled. They incorporate a nonsensical "and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo" to the "nanny nanny boo boo" melody (Songs that incorporate the "nan nanny boo boo" melody). And the "there is a blue one who can't accept the green one" and "There is a yellow one that won't accept the black one / that won't accept the red one / that won't accept the white one" are possibly the archetypal "i don't care if you're black, white, purple" lyrics (i don't care if you're black, white, purple). These nursery-rhyme type of lines get the point over and are definitely part of the song's broad appeal but they also are a little cheap, even hacky. On the other hand, coining "Different strokes / for different folks" goes a long way towards redeeming the lazier lines.

Sly has often cited Solano Community College music professor David Froelich with instilling in him an appreciation for paring a song's musical elements down to the bare minimum; for a song to work, it has to function at the level of its most basic components, otherwise piling additional elements on top achieves nothing. "Everyday People" seems emblematic of this approach, which Sly would increasingly focus on over the next couple of years.