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

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.

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.

I've always felt a little indifferent toward this song. In addition to the reasons you cite, OC, the Arrested Development "People Everyday" interpolation of this left such a bad taste in my mouth that by the time I spent time with the real thing I was kind of predisposed to dislike it. But I would agree that out of all of Sly's big hits, this one has always seemed a little facile.

Just want to say this thread has totally revived my love of Sly's discography and I cannot believe I am reading it for free, cos I would pay cash money for this book; a million thanks One Child <3

Ditto. I’m finding myself disappointed if a new entry isn’t posted when I open Zing.

Are you planning on going all the way through to Ain’t But the One Way?

90. Sly & the Family Stone - Sex Machine (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex3NJqRgNho
Predates James Brown's earth-shaking song by over a year, but sadly doesn't match that song's intensity in any way, and feels more like filler for much of its length. Given that the band was back in San Francisco for the first time in years (the album was cut in Pacific High Recording Studios in SF whereas their previous albums had been recorded primarily in New York) and the band was regularly filling places like the Fillmore on bills with white hippies playing 20-minute "psychedelic blues" freakouts, it's easy to place this song in the context of the local contemporary scene. But if they were trying to compete/keep up with other SF groups, it's a little baffling as to why they opted to include something this rote when they had much more interesting songs like "We Love All (Freedom)" (which went unreleased at the time) to stretch out on. Sonically it's of a piece with "Don't Call Me N*****, Whitey". Otherwise it's unlike anything else the band released before or after. This band didn't really do blues jams.

Maybe after all the compact, tightly arranged tunes aimed at the radio the rhythm section just wanted to break loose and ramble for 10+ minutes, which they do with abandon here. Building from a standard blues pattern and shuffle rhythm, Errico, Sly, and especially Graham and Freddie indulge in all sorts of distorted shenanigans - wah wah guitar squals, heavily distorted and wah wah processed vocals, an extended fuzz bass solo (again we are treated to two bass parts at once at one point) - while Sly leans on droning chords on the hammond. Martini and Robinson barely appear, getting in comparatively brief solos. The song ebbs and flows as the players transition, eventually capping off with an actual drum solo from Errico that, sadly, doesn't really highlight his strengths and eventually just crawls to a halt. Was this fun to play? Probably. Nonetheless it feels like an odd misstep in the middle of the album. At the end you can hear the rest of the band laughing behind Errico's back as he completes the take.

Is there a studio version of "We Love All (Freedom)"? All I’m able to find online is the Fillmore version which is very … late-sixties Fillmore-sounding.

Yes, the studio version of "We Love All (Freedom)" was released in 2007 as a bonus track on the CD reissue of "Dance to the Music."

It's right there on all the services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnfOEHe2FSA

(Naive: Was talking about this song recently on twitter and my substack, nice to see people getting interested in it!)

Doh! I saw that but glazed over it because of the (very slightly) altered title.

91. Sly & the Family Stone - You Can Make It If You Try (Stand!, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-5F8-rm8cY
This tune feels of a piece with "Sing a Simple Song", both in its optimistic exhortations and upbeat energy and in its construction as a carefully sculpted funk pop track. It was apparently slated as a follow-up single to "Stand!" in mid-1969, but eventually dropped in favor of the non-album "Hot Fun in the Summertime". While the song isn't really based around a central lick the same way ""Sing a Simple Song"" is, it has a similar arrangement that foregrounds the rhythm section (even the horns play a primarily rhythmic role), the singers darting around the vocal melodies. While Graham's voice is clearly audible on the track, Sly has been cited as playing the bass part, and it seems likely the organ is an overdub from Sly. It also sounds like Little Sister provides the backing vocals, with Rose shouting out that "all together now!"

Opening as they have many times before with a horn-led fanfare, bass, guitar and drums all joining in in unison. Errico, Sly and Freddie lock into a driving funk rhythm. Freddie's crunchy chicken-scratch pattern bears a passing resemblance to some of James Brown's contemporaneous singles, and Sly's wild bassline definitely presages Bootsy's antic fingerpopping. No idea why Graham didn't play it, but Sly's bass part is very in-your-face, practically the lead melodic instrument. The way all the parts intermittently dovetail together at the end of each segment is ingenious; for the verses and choruses, everything orbits around a G7 chord, but then various instruments come back together to play little licks in unison. Errico is the most restrained of the rhythm section (at least at first), laying back for much of the track before unleashing his second canonical drumbreak of the record after the first couple of verses, this time embroidered by a gritty organ lick.

How this was tracked is not entirely obvious; while most of the band is present on the recording, there's a lot of stereo separation and several audible punch-ins (and punch-outs). With the horns and drums in one channel, the guitar and group vocals in the opposite, the lead vocals panned across the field, and the organ and bass in the middle, everything sounds artificially and meticulously isolated. While the instruments all generally sound walled off from each other, there is a fair amount of distortion on the tracks; you can hear it in particular with the vocals, and with Freddie when he pivots from his already hot scratch pattern to overdriven riffs - just listen to those runs underneath the "yeah, yeah yeah yeah" vocal breaks at the end of each verse. Also interesting is that almost all the tracks are recorded dry; the only things with any reverb on them are the horns and, most prominently, Sly's vocal.

Midway through the band hits an actual bridge, the bass and horns doing a call and response with the organ, interspersed with a couple blues licks from Freddie. As they round out the fourth chorus, the players dial back, the voices quiet down and Errico's drumming becomes more intricate and detailed. And then the mix ventures into unusual, truly innovative territory. Sly punches out everything but Errico's drums (this is clearly done in the mix, as you can still hear Freddie's guitar and Sly's bass bleeding into the drum track). Sly then adds back one element at a time: first Freddie's guitar, then Sly's bass (playing a variation of the "Shortenin' Bread" melody), then the organ, then the horns (echoing Freddie's scratch pattern), then the vocals. The pattering drum rhythm and the accumulation of sonic detail make it feel like the song is slowly reaching a rolling boil. All of this points the way towards the Stone Flower singles and "There's a Riot Goin' On".

I cannot believe I am reading it for free, cos I would pay cash money for this book; a million thanks One Child <3

― glumdalclitch, Tuesday, May 9, 2023

Yes. But also I'm worried that no one else will ever do another listening thread because the bar is now too high.

haha don't worry, I'm sure I won't be able to stay away from the Sun Ra or Jandek listening threads for long, and my bar is not as high as this (largely b/c I lack music theory background)

EDIT - a couple sentences got chopped there:

1) the lyrics are straightforward and not particularly nuanced, but it's possible to read them as a desperate mantra repeated to onself in times of stress (I think I can, I think I can) instead of just simple cheerleading.
2) the distinguishing feature of the buildup at the end of the song is that it is done at the mixing stage by Sly, and not by the performers themselves. While the band could absolutely have pulled this off live (standard technique for instruments to drop out and come back in one at a time), Sly instead makes it happen artificially, it's a production choice.

I'm so so happy this was revived. What a joy to catch up to this

Holy shit, I completely did not realize that this thread started three years ago.

92. Sly & the Family Stone - Hot Fun in the Summertime (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg0tFRea0wA
Released July 21, 1969 with "Fun" as the b-side, just ahead of the band's appearance at Woodstock, and at the apex of the band's commercial appeal. The song peaked at number 2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart, kept out of the number 1 spot (ironically) by the Temptations, who were now blatantly aping Sly's hits under the direction of Norman Whitfield.

For an artist so restless and wide-ranging, there are still a few things Sly generally avoids in his music. He doesn't display anger (can't have that from a black man in America), and his songs almost always take place in an ever-present "now". His lyrics rarely look in the rearview mirror. Which is partly what make this song such an outlier in the catalog. While the Family Stone had notched a couple of ballads on earlier records, this is the first time they revisit the swaying 6/8 doo-wop rhythm of Sly's youth, and the first time Sly indulges in any kind of nostalgia. His approach to this song is similar to a certain other California band with a visionary drug-addled leader and a penchant for combining R&B, complex harmonies, and wistful melancholy, an obvious difference being that Beach Boys tracks like "I Went to Sleep" weren't exactly burning up the charts in '69. Incidentally, Phil Collins also made this connection when he mashed up this song with the Beach Boys "Sail on Sailor" to produce the execrable "Misunderstanding".

Another Brian Wilson parallel is that this track was developed purely as a studio concoction; this is not a live take of the full band in the studio. Freddie's guitar isn't even on it, and the song is built around two parallel piano tracks, one in each stereo channel, which overlap, swap parts, wander away from each other, and periodically peter out altogether throughout the song. It's hard not to wonder if the real reason there's two piano tracks in the first place is because pounding out those 8th notes must have been exhausting, and you can hear the parts slip out of time in certain spots, there's even a couple of flubbed notes left in in the verses. That being said the layered minor chords on the piano play a huge role in the song's lazy, hazy mood. The other major factor is the addition (again, a first for the band) of an overdubbed pair of violins, which play stately, high-pitched counter melodies. These misty-eyed elements are countered by a typically muscular rhythmic underpinning - Graham and Errico don't know the meaning of the words "laid back", and give the song an extra bounce, particularly when the piano and bass join up for the ascending line (a minor chord progression that runs through both a 7th and a 6th chord) in the choruses. The vocals, as usual, are traded off between members, with some fairly tricky four-part harmonies on various lines. All of these elements are spun together like cotton candy, the end result a strangely gentle and affecting snapshot of a summer idyll.

I was actually shocked when I discovered this came out in 1969. It feels of such a piece with their earlier work lyrically and musically, as if acid rock hadn’t yet pushed harmony groups aside. But in retrospect, it also feels a little bit like the last gasp of Sly’s youthful optimism, before the demons completely took him over.

Regardless, I completely love it, my favorite Fourth of July barbecue soundtrack.

I always used to put this on on the jukebox in a pub I frequent, in the middle of winter or when the weather was particularly shitty.

I wish it was at least twice as long. I could listen to it on a loop for 30-40 minutes and not get tired of it.

Wmc OTM!

Isn’t it commonly understood that the “hot fun” of the title is a sardonic reference to race riots?

93. Sly & the Family Stone - Medley: Dance to the Music/Music Lover/I Want to Take You Higher (Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58SrSOJuIlI
Recorded in August 1969 at some farm in upstate New York. It essentially captures the band near the end of the first phase of their career, and there's some irony that by the time it was released in mid-1970, Sly was already advancing (or retreating, depending on the POV) into uncharted territory, largely outside the public eye. But we'll get to that in a bit, Sly's output through the remaining months of 1969 provide plenty to chew on.

Since this recording is closely intertwined with the live performance captured on film, this is perhaps the appropriate place to further discuss the band's visual presentation and how this tied into their overall aesthetic and impact. In case it isn't obvious in retrospect: Sly looked fucking insane. Before Sly, R&B acts across the board wore formal attire. Sure some might be flashier or cut a different way, but even Little Richard wore suits. By contrast, Sly comes onstage in skintight leather or draped satin sleeves with 12" fringes, giant space age goggles, platform boots, a bulky tight-fitting gold-link chain around his neck. Hendrix also violated standards in his own grungier, colorful hippie way, but Sly looks like he comes from another planet. An expensive planet, one where a black man is the coolest thing in the universe. Sly and the band were intimately familiar with the black subculture of pimps and gangsters (perhaps too intimate, given some of the things that would subsequently go down), and the men in the band, including Sly, put a twist on this style and catapulted it into the mainstream; this is where the garishly overblown fashions of the 70s take root. After Sly, groups look different.

They all look outlandish, but onstage Sly is the guy that draws the eyeballs, initially just because of how he looks and then because of how he moves, plays and directs the band. Arms pumping, wide open grin, rocking back and forth. In the footage from Woodstock and the more recently excavated Summer of Soul he is alternately laconic and dynamic, at one moment huddled over his keyboards, the next marching laughing across the stage. Here's a bit of the live clip from the movie, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me-UKbXOFts

The released track is a 14-minute medley, recorded around 3:30am, starts with the band at full bore, Robinson screaming at the top of her lungs to get the crowd on its feet. The sound is a crush of low end rumble and high end crunch, and the pace is frenetic as the band races through the opening "Dance to the Music" section. The band rapidly shuttles between all of the little bits they've honed to a fine point over the last few years; the scat-singing breakdown, the pounding drum break, the fiery guitar fill, the practically Sabbath-esque fuzz bass highlight. Midway through Sly pulls the music back and starts talking directly to the band like he's Bobby Freeman telling audiences how to do the Swim back at the Cow Palace just five years prior, engaging in some classic call-and-response straight out of the church. The band barrels ahead, moving into the "Higher" section, with the horns taking the melodic center and the band intermittently cutting out to let the crowd take over. There's a brief pause (presumably to catch their breath) before they launch into the final "I Want to Take You Higher" section, and the mix is a churning morass, a whirlpool of distorted, bludgeoning rhythm, the horns and vocals the only thing that cut through in the upper register. The arrangement hews closely to the recorded version, but the energy and effect are totally overdriven. For a piece about ascension, the sound is *heavy*. Sly runs through the refrain a few times before Freddie takes a wah-wah solo, then Robinson on trumpet, then another series of call-and-response breakdowns, before ending with just Errico's drumbeat. As a live performance the overall effect is both exhilarating and exhausting.

The standard narrative is that it was all downhill for the band after this, both commercially and personally if not artistically, and in terms of live performances there's some truth to it. Up to this point the band's schedule was very intense, constantly shuttling around the country for series' of shows every few days, with the occasional week or two off (https://concerts.fandom.com/wiki/Sly_%26_The_Family_Stone). Sly was already getting a reputation for being unreliable, and other bandmembers heavily resented his growing penchant for personally delaying things and/or cancelling at the last minute. Nonetheless, through the end of 1969 the original line-up went on to play another two dozen shows, including this incredible set broadcast on ABC's "Music Scene" in October (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nczKHDCyhNo). It isn't until February of 1970 (when he was due, not coincidentally, to deliver a follow-up LP to "Stand!" to the label) that the first real pattern of significant cancellations set in. Sly was not yet spent as a creative force by any means, but the end of the original septet's run as a barnstorming live act was coming to a close.

94. Abaco Dream - Life and Death in G&A (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENaucSgxZ4U
Released in August 1969 and hit number 74 on the Billboard Hot 100. Credited to Abaco Dream, it's actually Sly and the Family Stone backed by Little Sister, with Joe Hicks singing lead and playing harmonica. Given the release date this was likely recorded at some point before the band's Woodstock appearance. For some reason Manager Dave Kapralik sold the backing track to an associate of his (Ted Cooper) at another label, with the intention that Abaco Dream would overdub their own vocals, etc. onto the track, but instead Cooper didn't bother with that and just released it in its original form. Presumably this was Kapralik and Sly's ways of testing the waters with producing and releasing music with other acts on other labels, ahead of getting Sly's Stone Flower label imprint off the ground in 1970.

This is the first of several versions of this song, and bears some resemblance to the cover that would later appear on Chairman of the Board's "Skin I'm In" album, as opposed to the slower and more subdued version that Joe Hicks subsequently cut for Stone Flower. Joe Hicks was an SF R&B guy that had recently reconnected with Sly and found their interests aligned: Sly needed an artist to produce, and Hicks probably jumped at the opportunity to work with one of the hottest artists in the medium.

The track itself is almost comically simple in conception - a series of two note phrases based around the titular two chords (G and A), and a set of lyrics that just lists various opposites, capped by the mantra of every self-absorbed hedonist: "if it feels good it's allright". Errico switches between his marching cadence, with snare hits on every beat of the bar, and a funkier pattern where he cuts the snare hits by half. By contrast Graham and Freddie generally stick to a consistent counter-rhythm with their two note riffs, with the horns and vocals alternating between higher and lower octaves to give the song some harmonic variation. Little Sister pops in at the end with some additional "yeah yeahs", as does Hicks with a bit of harmonica. The band shuffles around the song's basic building blocks and Errico in particular gives it a sense of hot-n-sweaty propulsion, but the piece is still fairly static due as a result of the thin material and lack of changes or dynamics. While I doubt this was ever performed in front of a live audience, it feels designed to fit into their high energy live sets, and gets over just on energy alone.

I first heard this on the Chairmen of the Board box I bought several years ago – that version is a super proggy, synthed out suite produced by Jeffrey Bowen and augmented by Funkadelic. To your point, it helps flesh out (and stretch out) an otherwise fairly simple tune, but it’s def. one of the highlights of the record.

I never realized what the G and A referred to! Kind of brilliant.

The band barrels ahead, moving into the "Higher" section, with the horns taking the melodic center and the band intermittently cutting out to let the crowd take over.

I first saw Woodstock when I was 12, and one thing that still blows my mind to this day — along with the rest of the Sly sequence — was how he stopped cueing the crowd, stopped saying, “Wanna take you higher!”, but they still responded in full. And it was 3:00am.

The Who had the profoundly unenviable task of following Sly’s set; Townshend later said, “There’s been no better band in history than Sly and the Family Stone.”

95. Joe Hicks - I'm Goin Home (Part I)/Home Sweet Home (Part II) (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRYt3GSODb0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4wwDR4y4cw
Released on the Scepter label in October 1969, ahead of Sly getting Stone Flower Records off the ground. These songs are addressed as a single entry since the single was really just one track split into two sides, which was in itself unusual. As with the prior Abaco Dream entry, this recording features Joe Hicks backed by the original Family Stone septet and sounds like it was tracked primarily live in the studio. The single does generally highlight an interesting contrast between two different approaches: the first half leans more towards the complex pop arrangements of the band's first albums, but the second leans the other way, more towards the funkier, murkier direction they were heading into. There's no authoritative transcription of the lyrics, and Hicks' enunciation makes the precise wording difficult to make out, but the general theme of homecoming, the joy of belonging, comes through.

Someone else will have to weigh in on what oddball time signature "I'm Goin' Home Part 1" opens with; it's a little reminiscent of the stop-start phrases in the verses of "Higher" off of "Dance to the Music". Piano and bass play the lead riff in unison, backed by a tricky horn countermelody, before Errico cues up a 4/4 rhythm on the toms and then it's off into the verses. Freddie and Graham charge through a clever series of R&B chord changes as Hicks (previously dismissed as an Otis Redding sound-a-like) enters with the vocal, before the whole band stops dead at the end of the 8-bar phrase. The band comes back in for another verse and then hits the descending "Hit the Road, Jack" chords in the chorus as Hicks wails over the top. They hit the verse/chorus pattern again, repeat the intro, and then unexpectedly hit a major-key bridge, complete with group vocal harmonies. This is a *lot* of changes to cram into two-and-a-half minutes, and the sound overall is tight and gritty.

But they aren't done yet. After the bridge, Graham, Errico and Freddie all lock into monotone 8th notes, take a breath for a bar, and then Graham fires off a lead-in triplet phrase that launches the song into a James Brown-ish coda. Drums, bass, and horns all punch out counter-rhythms, Hicks' double-tracked vocal bawling out "home sweet home", an extra fuzz guitar part adding to the grimy texture. This is basically where the b-side starts as well, with the same 8th note lead-in pattern, this time with an extra electric guitar part that's been run through a Leslie speaker, as well as intermittent squeals from Sly's organ. Graham's playing on this section is absolutely bonkers, it's like he's playing the drums and the bass all with just his fingers, Errico doing his best to contain everything. It's notable that "Home Sweet Home" repeats the same sections as "I'm Goin' Home", just in a different order - the coda essentially becomes the verse (Hicks adds in a melody and lyrics), and the band only repeats the intro and the original verse section once, as a kind of bridge, before furiously diving back into the one-chord polyrhythm. The band just moves around the building blocks, while never letting up the momentum.

96. Sly & the Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) (non-album single, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOa5UOHdwnc
The months following Woodstock were a pivotal point for Sly. He moved to LA, got his own label imprint, and Dave Kapralik set up offices for them across the street from Capitol Records. Sly set himself up in a gigantic mansion in Coldwater Canyon, flanked by gangsters, drug dealers, and a bevvy of hangers on. He moved his base of operations for recording to West Village Recorderders in West Hollywood, and acquired a Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2 drum machine. The label had given him a deadline of February 1970 to deliver the band's next album. He spent fall and winter shuttling between live shows, recording, getting together acts for Stone Flower, and (by all accounts) doing mountains of coke and PCP.

Martini: “There was a cloud flying over Sly from the time he moved down to Los Angeles. Things really changed when he moved there. That’s when Gun the dog and all the fucking assholes came into his life. It was havoc. It was very gansterish, dangerous. The vibes were very dark at that point.”

Hamp “Bubba” Banks: “When I got out of jail, Sly got in touch with me and said ‘Bub, I need you, man.’.. They were in a million dollar house and I moved right in. Sly made everybody understand that I was the one. Nothing happened without me. When it got to big for me, I knew the cat that knew the cat that could get it done. That made me the cat, period... When I got to Los Angeles he was the cocaine king. I saw him going down Hollywood Boulevard with a little violin case and he looked like the Morton salt woman. Cocaine was falling out the back of it. The cat had gotten so big, as big as life. He was doing what he wanted.”

Released as a standalone single with "Everybody is a Star" as a double A-side (have never understood this term) in December 1969, "Thank You" reached number one on the soul single charts and the Billboard Hot 100. This single is the inflection point of Sly’s career. It’s the apex, both a commercial and artistic triumph. But it also signals the dissolution of the original septet, and in one way or another every single thing Sly did after this (in another odd parallel of Brian Wilson) would be considered or in many cases deliberately marketed as a “comeback”. This is the mountaintop, and it’s a long, strange, tangled path down the other side.

At this time the contours of funk as a style/subgenre were in the process of being slowly fleshed out. Sly was in many ways setting the pace but also keeping up with jaw-dropping singles from James Brown, the Temptations and other Motown acts openly copying him, and other bands quickly rushing in to fill the breach that he had opened (Kool & the Gang, the Meters, the Bar-Kays, etc.) At the center of funk is the one, the downbeat. Individual musical elements contract around the one, and then expand outward into a syncopated, polyrhythmic froth. This creates the fundamental pulse of the music; a constant, dynamic push and pull between a mathematical matrix of control and the wild, slippery, organic elements contained within it. Sly had already figured this out, had already explored it piecemeal on earlier singles and album cuts, but “Thank You” is the first time he really zeroes in on it and fashions an entire song out of it.

It is difficult to envision a song more different than its preceding single ("Hot Fun in the Summertime"). The sound is fierce, expansive, thunderous. The arrangement foregrounds Graham's unique, signature slapping-and-popping technique; at no point does he deviate from the monster bass hook, the dark heartbeat at the center of the song. There's two choppy, clangorous guitars bouncing around the rhythm, one through a wah-wah pedal and the other clean, both panned apart from each other. Also noteworthy is that Sly basically beatboxes through the entire song in one channel; when he first pops into the track around 10 seconds in he sounds like an extra snare or a shaker. The horns pepper their lines throughout, alternating between quick staccato punches and longer, smeared harmonies. For the first time in the band's catalog, there is no organ or piano. There are also no changes, the only real shift that happens is two spots where the bass drops out and the guitars both get panned to a single channel for a couple of bars. Errico's canonical funk beat is grounded by unwavering snare hits and the 8th notes on the hi hat, opening the hi hat on the 3rd beat of every bar to tug the beat back, then pushing it forward with little kick drum accents that are ahead of the beat. Even with a relatively small number of instrumental elements at play, things quickly blur together in the mix: at various points it becomes difficult to pick out exactly which element is doing what (is that the drums, or Sly's vocal mic, or is it a guitar scratch?) Different accents get picked up by different instruments - sometimes the horns do a crescendo, and then the next time around Sly's vocal does it. The vocals follow the melody of the bass riff, then skitter away from it. The vocals in general are, in another first, all sung in unison throughout rather than traded off. Sly's voice nonetheless dominates (after all he has a whole other vocal track to himself). The cumulative result is that this song is all groove, all space, everything orbiting and rotating around each other, a throbbing clockwork perpetual motion machine that feels like it's spiralling out into eternity, even if it's only 4 1/2 minutes long.

That's just what's going on instrumentally. Lyrically Sly also hits a new peak with this song, leaning into the dualities he was so fond of to paint a contrasting picture of fear and desperation, juxtaposed with gratitude and affirmation. The song sounds alternately ebullient and dark, and the lyrics mirror this. As he's done many times in the past, he explicitly references family and throws in callback quotes to prior songs. The first verse is practically Biblical (or at least Dylanesque circa ""John Wesley Harding"") in its archetypal imagery. And the bleakest lines about running for your life, trying to get away from the constrictions embedded deep within America, selling out versus dying young, read like a death rattle for the original lineup's optimism as a self-contained unit. Now Sly is just himself, alone, leaving the party, moving on, everybody after him. But, you know, thank you for the party.

Lookin' at the devil
Grinnin' at his gun
Fingers start shakin'
I begin to run
Bullets start chasin'
I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle
I was on the top

I want to thank you falettinme
Be mice elf agin
Thank you falettinme
Be mice elf agin

Stiff all in the collar
Fluffy in the face
Chit chat chatter tryin'
Stuffy in the place
Thank you for the party
But I could never stay
Many thangs is on my mind
Words in the way

Dance to the music
All nite long
Everyday people
Sing a simple song
Mama's so happy
Mama start to cry
Papa still singin'
You can make it if you try

Flamin' eyes of people fear
Burnin' into you
Many men are missin' much
Hatin' what they do
Youth and truth are makin' love
Dig it for a starter, now
Dyin' young is hard to take
Sellin' out is harder"

fuckin’ right

There's never been a proper stereo mix of this, has there? The 45 is mono, the Greatest Hits version is some kind of ugly simulated stereo.

Apparently whatever stereo mix exists was done around 1990, not by Sly.