Album Reviews # 96 Sly & The Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On

 

'For twenty five years now, Sly Stone has played out the unhappy role of contemporary music's most spectacular burnout...' (Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff)

The fact that Sly Stone is still alive seems vaguely remarkable but he is. Of all the great Rock and Roll eccentric crackpot Rock and Roll visionaries,, Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, Roky Erikson, Prince, add your own name here, along with Brian Wilson he's probably the last man standing. His actual wheabouts, activities and well being are shrouded in some mystery. He's currently at any rate, seventy eight.

I hope he's well, though I imagine he's somewhat haunted by his past. In many ways, during his initial, extraordinary burst of fame, critical and commercial adulation he was something of a beacon of positivity.  Sly & The Family Stone the extraordinary band he put together, led and fronted in the mid Sixties through the early Seventies have as good a claim as any to be the outstanding group of that astonishing period in American cultural and musical history when the country experienced incrediible turmoil, self-doubt, transformation and change of a sort it may not have gone through before or since. Their albums, between 1967's A Whole New Thing and 1973's Fresh as good as any a set of records put out by any American artists of that period as a way to listen to and try to make some sense of what happened there.

There are any number of records you might listen to which testify to his and their greatness. A Best Of compilation would probably do. A set of the most danceable, euphoric and innovative singles runs ever made by anyone. Of his albums, though several are quite exceptional you'd probably be best directed to two. 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On and 1973's Fresh. They act as companion pieces in some ways, like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Let's Get It On, though like those two, they're vastly different records.

There's A Riot Goin' On is generally considered his best album, though it's not really typical in some ways as it sounds like the most troubled. Made in remarkable circumstances that were far from the Love and Peace ones that he espoused in those wonderful earlier singles and albums. When he was'Soul Brother Number One in the charts of both Black and White America,' (Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff). This is really a Sly Stone record. Members of the Family Stone were only minimally involved and Sly brought in plenty of music buddies to play on it, Ike Turner, Herbie Hancock and Bobby Womack.Another reason why it sounds slightly different from any of the other truly great records that he put out.

Housed in a sleeve of the Stars and Stripes, (somewhat ironically I'd suspect),  it's truly a soundtrack of its times and definitely a Seventies rather than a Sixties one. In some ways the record it resembles most is Miles Davis's Bitches Brew from a couple of years earlier. You can hear the rumbling turbulence America was experiencing in its grooves. Rioting on the streets, the Kennedy's. Martin Luther King and Martin X all dead and gone, Vietnam burning on. Watergate on the horizon.

Davis himself was drawn in awe and admiration to Stone during these years like a moth to a flame. But even he thought the situation Stone found himself in was far from healthy: 'After he got big he always had strange people hanging around his house.and recording sessions. I went to a couple and there was nothing but girls everywhere and coke, bodyguards with guns looking all evil. I told him I couldn't do nothing with him - told Columbia I couldn't make him record any faster. We snorted some coke together and that was it.'

It's an easy record to listen to, and there's plenty here to fully enjoy, but it clearly has a troubled soul. Talent will out and this is a man just brimming with talent. You have only to rent a copy of Woodstock and watch him completely upstage everyone else who performed at that fabled threeiday event back in August 1969 - including Jimi Hendrix and The Who...'  (Kent again).

Here Stone appears to be struggling with that talent and doing all that he can to keep things positive. It's an album that bubbles without ever boiling over. That's the best way I can think of to describe it. It's by turns, Funky, Soulful, poetic and reflective. It has Family Affair one of the band's best known hits on it and that song that slots in nicely on the record but has plenty of bedfellows here that are either just as good or better.

Nothing seems out of place, it has an easy flow which testifies to its high and enduring critical standing. But it seems to tell a story of Sly paying the cost of fronting the highest profile multiracial and male-female band of its time when that must have been an incredibly difficult role to bear.

Sly clearly had his demons, you only need read any decent biography about him to find that out pretty quickly. What I love about all of his best records is that he always does his upmost not to let that show. The musical glass is always half full even when his life and those around him clearly aren't. 

Stone it seems became entirely deranged during the making of There's a Riot Goin' On. Kent reports that he actually tried to have bandmate Larry Graham killed during the same period.To read Kent's slightly harrowing account of events round about that time in The Dark Suff it all sounds like the downward spiral that occurs to everybody concerned on the end section of Boogie Nights.

One more great record, Fresh (and it is a really great one), and he was pretty much done as a creative force. Cocaine had wreaked havoc on his muse and creative drive. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield among his black contemporaries were making far more innovative and interesting records. Sly was done But when he does go he'll be remembered as one of the true greats. For a while, very few held a candle to him.