Havin' a riot with Sly and Babs

Another post from Babs - hi Babs! - and a look at a neglected masterpiece from "the founder of progressive soul" (Crawdaddy magazine)...

On November 1, 1971, Sly and the Family Stone released ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’.  It was an album of dark funk that was a significant departure from the sunny disposition of the band’s earlier recordings.  Gone was the optimism to be replaced by pessimism.  And in the place of Sly’s extravagant showmanship and energy was the shell of a man who had retreated into his own world.  Many music critics and 60s revisionists, site the tired and done to death, ‘end of the hippy dream’ bullshit, brought on by the alleged breakdown of the civil rights movement, of Richard Nixon, of Altamont being the end of the 60s, of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and of Vietnam.  But the truth is Sly was a strung out from smoking angel dust (PCP), and mountains of cocaine.  The isolation, paranoia and bloodshot eyes are prevalent all over the record.  If there’s ever a song that warns you about the adverse effects of sustained cocaine use it is ‘Spaced Cowboy’, the track captures the sound of 4am delirium almost perfectly.

A few years earlier, Sly and the Family Stone were an interracial ‘family’ embodying all that was good about the hippy dreams of the Age of Aquarius.  They were an R&B band who embraced psychedelia, rock, and a band who couldn’t be anything but political just by virtue of their being.  They who wrote subtly brilliant political songs and got the party started with it.  You can make it if you try, they sang: black and white, boy and girl, rock and funk.  They were Everyday People. America loved them.

When Sly Stone was asked, “Who is family, in the Family Stone?”, he’d give a knowing smile and say, “We all are”. Sly and the Family Stone consisted of Sly Stone on vocals, organ, guitar, piano, harmonica, and vocoder, Fred Stewart on guitar and vocals, Larry Graham Jr. on bass and vocals, Cynthia Robinson on trumpet and vocals, Greg Errico on drums, Jerry Martini on saxophone, and Rosie Stone on piano.

On Sunday, August 17, 1969, at 3.30am Sly and The Family Stone took the stage at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair Festival, their lives and careers changed forever.  Almost knee-deep in mud and worn low by the ravages of a weekend of intoxicants 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 fuse, and the band never looked back.

But everyone loves to hear of the fall rather than the rise, so here’s the question: how, after just five years, did Sylvester ‘Sly’ Stone find himself holed up in a secret studio behind a bookcase, strung out on cocaine, PCP and more, muttering into a mic, fiddling with a simple little drum machine, slowly piecing together a load of seemingly half-finished, unstructured songs with the Family Stone almost nowhere to be seen?  And how – and this is the amazing part – and just how is the resultant muddle one of the most beguiling masterpieces pressed to wax?

As the dawn of the new decade arrived, of the 80 concerts his band had been scheduled to play in 1970, Sly had missed 26 of them.  His increasing unreliability and drug induced erratic behavior had understandably created divisions within the band.  And these circumstances only worsened when he left San Francisco for Los Angeles.

Recording sessions for There’s a Riot Goin’ On didn’t take place as soon as the record company wanted—they put out the greatest hits album in 1970 while they waited impatiently for new material.  Sly moved into an in a $12,000-per-month Bel Air mansion owned by John Phillips, from the Mamas And The Papas.  It had a secret studio behind that bookcase, details of the recording are hazy at best.  Most of it was done alone by Sly, or members of the band recording single overdubs – despite the track, this is no Family Affair.

“There was nothing but girls and coke everywhere,” Miles Davis remembered in his autobiography. “I told him I couldn’t do nothing with him. Then I told Columbia I couldn’t make him record any quicker. We snorted some coke together and that was it.” Miles wasn’t the only star to show up at Sly’s door, though. With the majority of his band left behind in San Francisco, apart from trumpeter Cynthia Robinson and saxophonist Jerry Martini who moved in with him, the sessions took on a free form structure.  The likes of Bobby Womack and Billy Preston helped Sly record whenever the mood took him.  They were usually the only ones left around. Band members flew over intermittently to record their various different parts.  But these contributions were often just recorded over by Sly, which gave the album its distinctly worn sound.

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 (uncredited bassist on most of the Motown Records hits in the 1960s and early 1970s) luxuriously smooth bass playing than Graham’s slap bass techniques that had contributed so memorably to the song 'Stand'’s success.

With the group essentially disbanded, and a host of big names acting as Sly’s own personal backing, he needed to get creative with his song arrangements.  The drummer, Greg Errico, had quit part way through the Riot sessions, which led the frontman down an entirely new avenue of instrumentation.  Utilizing the new Maestro Rhythm King drum machine, Sly found a key component of his new sound.  The Maestro Rhythm King MRK2 had preset patterns that he would use in a new, exciting way.  Greg Errico in an interview said grudgingly, “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.”

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 danceable.  Here the funk is wearing a straitjacket—the movements it provokes are limited in scope and scale, instead the neck bears the brunt of the groove. It’s lonely, claustrophobic, woozy, dirty, sleep-deprived, anxious and strung out 4am funk.

‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ is not an easy listen. However, with repeated listening, it’s easy to see why it turns up regularly on so many ‘greatest ever’ lists.

Babs will be along shortly to ask you a penetrating question and frisk you for any illegal drugs - we're running low on them here in the Hole...