Sly & The Family Stone - 1971 - There's A Riot Goin' On

Sly & The Family Stone

1971

There's A Riot Goin' On

01. Luv N' Haight

02. Just Like A Baby

03. Poet

04. Family Affair

05. Africa Talks To You "The Asphalt Jungle"

06. There's A Riot Goin' On

07. Brave & Strong

08. (You Caught Me) Smilin'

09. Time

10. Spaced Cowboy

11. Runnin' Away

12. Thank You For Talking To Me Africa

Bonus:

13. Runnin' Away (Mono Single Version)

14. My Gorilla Is My Butler (Previously Unreleased Instrumental)

15. Do You Know What? (Previously Unreleased Instrumental)

16. That's Pretty Clean (Previously Unreleased Instrumental)

Sly Stone – keyboard programming, synthesizers, guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals

Rose Stone – vocals, keyboards

Billy Preston – keyboards

Jerry Martini – tenor saxophone

Cynthia Robinson – trumpet

Freddie Stone – guitar

Ike Turner – guitar

Bobby Womack – guitar

Larry Graham – bass, backing vocals

Greg Errico – drums

Gerry Gibson – drums

Little Sister – backing vocals

“When you’re dealing with a pathfinder, you allow that genius to unfold.”

Clive Davis, Vanity Fair 2007

There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a striking example of a pathfinder taking a road, both musically and personally, that tests every relationship to the brink and beyond to a place and time where tumult is inevitable and damage is dealt harshest of all to the protagonist at the center of it.

In trying to explain why the album sounds as it does, it becomes a study of the dangers of drugs, the wear-and-tear on Black lives lived in a white supremacist society, and the writhing mess of a capitalist music industry. At the intersection of all those things stands Sylvester Stewart (to his mother) and Sly Stone (to the world) replying in 1971 to Marvin Gaye’s musical question: What’s Going On.

But the groundwork for this new blueprint of soul and funk lies in its predecessor Stand! and, more importantly perhaps, the success it brought with it. Released in 1969 after three solid, if unspectacularly performing albums, it reached #12 on the Billboard Top 200, whereas none of the previous three albums had broken the top 100. Part of its success can be attributed to a moment that goes down as one of the most important in 20th Century musical history: the Woodstock Festival.

When Sly and The Family Stone took the stage at 3.30am on Sunday August 17, 1969, their lives and careers changed forever. Almost knee deep in mud and worn low by the ravages of a weekend of intoxicating substances and little sleep, the crowd was revitalized by the surging, infectious performance the band gave—a lengthy, exultant “I Want To Take You Higher” lit the touchpaper and the band never looked back. In fact, it was a palpable moment of realization for those involved, as well as those in the crowd. Larry Graham, the slap bass innovator, recounted in later years the fact that the band fully grasped their potential and realized what the awesome power of the fully operational group could attain.

But the savage irony of that realization is that the seeds were sown at that moment for the gradual dissolution of the group. For with success, came money and, somewhat inevitably, distractions. It may be a tale oft-told but it remains true—no one prepares you for success and all the trappings it brings. The distractions that afflicted Sly Stone in particular are well documented—for him it was cocaine and PCP that were his escape. Scanning through the interviews he gave to journalists in the early 1970s (which were few and far between), each and every single one of them makes mention of his cocaine habit.

Many and famous were the musicians who kept Sly company in those days—Bobby Womack, Miles Davis and Ike Turner were just some of the folks who indulged alongside him. Jeff Kaliss’ book I Want To Take You Higher – The Life and Times of Sly and The Family Stone is replete with tales that show just how deep Stone wallowed in cocaine and PCP. Ria Boldway (Stone’s on/off girlfriend) was clear that most visitors partook of the drugs “but nobody used like Sly, poor baby.”

Those drugs entered Stone’s orbit more readily when he moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco in the autumn of ’69. “There is a cloud flying over Sly from the time he moved down to LA,” Jerry Martini (saxophone player) recalled to Joel Selvin for his oral history of the group published in 1998. “Things really changed when he moved down there . . . it was havoc. It was very gangsterish, dangerous. The vibes were very dark at that point.”

It also transpired that part of the band’s appeal as a multi-ethnic promise of a future possible world was also under pressure. It is alleged by some (but refuted by Sly himself) that the Black Panthers and Stone’s sister Loretta urged Sly to dismiss Martini, Greg Errico (drums) and manager David Kapralik.

And then there were the internal band tensions that had been present since almost day one. Larry Graham and Sly tussled numerous times as the former challenged Stone’s authority. There were also rumors of Graham having affairs with Rose (Sly’s sister) and Sharon (Sly’s brother Freddie’s wife)—hardly a cocktail for healthy relationships and dynamic musical brotherhood. The upshot of all that was that Graham barely appeared on There’s a Riot Goin’ On, instead bass parts were played by either Stone himself or Rustee Alan who was more in line with James Jamerson’s luxuriously smooth bass playing than Graham’s newly minted slap bass techniques that had contributed so memorably to Stand’s success.

Evidence of Stone’s addiction and subsequent unreliability post-Stand came in the shape of missed shows. During the year after their success, Sly Stone missed 26 of the 80 planned shows, but things may not have been quite so straightforward. For all that the drugs would inevitably contribute to the problem, there was the idea that some form of scam was being run by those around the group. If Stone was waylaid by someone, resulting in a missed show, it was alleged that that person got a split of the resulting financial payoff Stone was obliged to produce. When he was interviewed by David Letterman in 1983, he addressed the issue head on: “There’s no way to make three gigs in one night, if you only know about one.”

For all that that can be interpreted as diminished organizational memory brought on by the cocaine, there is also another more sinister reading of the statement that backs up the earlier notion of grubby, greedy hands somewhere along the line.

Recording sessions for There’s a Riot Goin’ On didn’t take place as soon as the record company wanted—they put out a greatest hits album in 1970 while they waited impatiently for new material. When it came to recording, Stone used The Plant Studios in Sausalito and the loft of his Bel-Air mansion but with one added curiosity. Sly also owned a Winnebago that was fitted out (somewhat chaotically) with recording equipment that added to the places Stone could hide himself away and create what would become Riot. It was a solitary endeavor for the most part though, something that was made possible by the advent of the most basic of drum machines.

The Maestro Rhythm King MRK2 had preset patterns that he would use in a new, exciting way as Greg Errico (a real human drummer!) grudgingly testifies in Kaliss’ book: “The machine. . . was a lounge instrument that the guy at the bar at the Holiday Inn might have used. Sly took the ticky-tacky, which started on the ‘tick’, and he inverted it, turned it inside out, into something the ear wasn’t used to. He took the texture and created a rhythm with it that made it very interesting.”

It’s no stretch to draw the developmental line from Sly through Prince and all the way up to Pharrell and beyond in wringing the soul out of a mechanized drum machine. Having flipped the preset, Stone would often then overdub with drums too and this method was used repeatedly over the course of the album, resulting in the dense, foggy feel that pervades. Members of the band would come at Stone’s behest, lay down the track according to his instructions and then he would record again over the top of it himself.

There were other times when tapes would be re-used too. In the mist of drug-fueled good times, Stone would invite girls to sing vocals for him before recording over the top of it later, to scrub their throwaway vocals down the drain, again contributing to the unique (at that time) grimily obscured sound that sprang from those sessions.

There is a tendency to draw harsh lines between Stand! and Riot in terms of the attitudes that prevail on each. Stand is often characterized as bright, upbeat and positive, while Riot is often shown to be dark, brooding and the start of a downward spiral. In truth, the seeds of some negativity are found on Stand! in the shape of “Don’t Call Me” and “Somebody’s Watching You,” so the distinction between the two becomes blurred rather than sharp and clear. Yet it would be churlish to say that Riot isn’t all of the things others suggest it is.

The music on Riot is funky, very funky, but it is of a totally different ilk to the funk others offered. Take James Brown’s work of the time with his new lineup that included Bootsy and Catfish Collins. Their brand of funk was expansive, punchy and dancing to it meant the chance to use huge movements—spins, pirouettes and leaping splits; arms and legs flung as extensively as possible. But it is hard to imagine those same movements in response to the deep, gloopy funk of Riot. Here the funk is wearing a strait jacket—the movements it provokes are limited in scope and scale, instead the neck bears the brunt of the groove.

It seems almost beyond comprehension that the group’s biggest song would come from this album, but “Family Affair” hit #1 on the charts and stayed there for three weeks. Recorded with Billy Preston on electric piano and Bobby Womack on rhythm guitar, it buried Sly’s guitar in the mix and featured his singing in an entirely different register. Gone were the urgent gospel-like vocals of previous years and in its place came a guttural, underplayed vocal that mirrored the gloomy approach to recording and the overall feel of the album.

The other singles released from the album were “Runnin’ Away” and “(You Caught Me) Smilin’” both of which did pretty well (reaching #23 and #42 respectively on the Billboard charts). But it is hard to imagine anything else being palatable as a single—the funk is so thick it wades through molasses and is unlike anything else of the time.

This is undoubtedly a great album that changed the course of soul and funk music. Its effects can still be heard today in many places—a listen to Van Hunt’s The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets (2015) alone for example will reveal the debt he owes to this album and the sounds Stone created along the way. D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000) also dwells in the same swampy funk as Sly Stone’s brand of soul and his vocals echo Sly’s when he slides into his upper register too. But the painful truth is that although I recognize its sheer, unadulterated brilliance, I play it relatively seldomly—it never transcends my circumstances in the way other albums do. I have to be in a certain frame of mind to enjoy it.

Clive Davis was well aware of Stone’s genius, both at the time and in retrospect, but the path that his genius took him on was far from what was wanted by any record executive. Though he would record another great album in 1973 (Fresh), the end of his productive road was almost in sight and Sly spent years in the wilderness of addiction, fighting for control of his work and wrestling his legacy back from unscrupulous record labels. If he had not been exploited in such a way and wasted so much energy on regaining what was rightfully his, who is to say that he wouldn’t have returned to releasing more incredible music? I certainly wouldn’t have bet against it.