Sly Stone S/D

How about High On You from 1975? The critics seemed to like it around the time it came out. It just...tanked.

Small Talk is very good, High on You is spottier but still nice-sounding. W/r/t to the critical consensus, I think Fresh is the last great record, but the stuff that followed isn't as embarrassing as many lazy critics would have it. It's sort of a shame that the records I mention have all but been written out of history. Although the inclusion of some tracks from Small Talk and High on You (in remastered versions!) on the recent Essential Sly and the Family Stone set bodes well.

No kidding. I remember having some cassette hits compilation in college that had "Loose Booty" from Small Talk, easily one of the tightest little jams he ever did (and famously sampled on Paul's Boutique). It's almost embarrassing that the song has been available exclusively on those Rhino funk comps until this recent comp.

Maybe on the end of side A, it's track 4 on my CD. Anyway, terrific, yes! It's called Dance to the Medley and it's over twelve minutes long. A great album, Dance to the Music.

Maybe on the end of side A, it's track 4 on my CD. Anyway, terrific, yes! It's called Dance to the Medley and it's over twelve minutes long. A great album, Dance to the Music.

post-Riot Search: Fresh is fantastic, as is High On You, Small Talk, and Back on the Right Track. This stuff is *all* up there with his best work in my opinion.

Destroy: Heard You Missed ME, Well I'm Back.

why are these late-mid period Sly CDs out of print, and his last coupla albums relatively easy to track down now??

Plus, from the late records, the aforementioned "Crossword Puzzle," the title track of "Small Talk," "Same Thing (Makes You Laugh, Makes You Cry"), "Loose Booty." And from one of the early ones, "Advice."

(Plus I really want to know what the fucking chords in Family Affair are).

i rate his albums like this:
riot
stand
whole new thing
fresh
dance to the music/life

i like the others in the 70s but his songwriting was going down the pan a bit, already.

S: "Underdog," a song I love to kick a mixtape off with.

Presumably this isn't referring to the Electric Spanking of War Babies. The tracks from that album that Sly collaborated on are brilliant!

(Plus I really want to know what the fucking chords in Family Affair are).

Shakey Mo, do ya know what I own? The "Riot" SONGBOOK, with all 'em in it. I can't believe I ever found this, but I do have it, and if you want the chords to any of the songs, be glad to e-mail them to you, make copies and regular mail them, whatever. ("Family Affair" is actually quite simple!)

the lack of a closing quotation mark here had me thinking that sly had recorded a song entitled ""ha ha, hee hee, and sly's so out of tune he's nearly pushed out of that song altogether"

is out of print too, and fucking hard to track down.

yeah. no market for that.

ILM, I KISS YOU!

many others...

Yup! More here: https://www.weatherreportdiscography.org/fifty-years-ago-today-greg-errico-joins-the-band/

Errico and Graham also played on Betty Davis' first album.

Greg's on fire throughout the recently unearthed pre-fame live LP that came out for RSD and is getting wider release soon

What’s the name of that

is that the Live at Winchester Cathedral thing?

the clips from that are so good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzI7dCsnDY

A very good Craig Jenkins piece.

https://www.vulture.com/article/brian-wilson-sly-stone-death-racism-double-standards.html

For non-subscribers: https://web.archive.org/web/20250612192406/https://www.vulture.com/article/brian-wilson-sly-stone-death-racism-double-standards.html

That’s been my take on Wilson for a while. Like, how are Isaac Hayes, and so many other black artist from that era not considered genius

Andy Newmark wasn't an original member - besides the shows he was only on Fresh - but he went on to do a lot of session work like Bowie's Young Americans and Lennon's Double Fantasy.

Also with Roxy Music - Flesh And Blood, and (perhaps most notably) Avalon

XP

Jenkins touches on this in the article, but so much of it is down to how a lot of early, foundational Rock critics either almost completely ignored Black R&B (Paul Williams, who at least would defer to others about it in Crawdaddy!), frequently wrote poorly about it when they were starting out before getting better in the '70s (Jon Landau, Xgau), or just straight-up sucked at it any time they pulled the assignment (loads of Rolling Stone hacks).

Dave Marsh had the Detroit thing going, so he <got> Motown way the hell before his peers did. Greil Marcus did okay, but as always with his annoying habit of having to place everything in a prescribed context to trace back from.

(I don't know if any of this makes sense--I've again been mainlining vintage Funk & Soul and have been trying on my own to square the discrepancy between current canonization & scholarship vs. then-contemporary reporting.)

not entirely sure i grasp what the craig jenkins piece was trying to get at. feel like it would have been better if he had just come out and said something, rather than making a bunch of florid insinuations?

what are those insinuations?

not entirely sure i grasp what the craig jenkins piece was trying to get at. feel like it would have been better if he had just come out and said something, rather than making a bunch of florid insinuations?

Circumlocution is Jenkins' whole thing. Any solid idea is wrapped in a cloud of foggy prose. He really needs an editor to strip his prose down to the Terminator skeleton within.

All this comparison of the two, but no mention of their 1974 duo album as Sly 'n' Bri, The Family Wil-Stone?!?

xp he seems to be saying that the "industry," or sly's peers, or music critics, or the public, or some combination of these entities resisted sly's incursion into "rock" music, which is supposed to have be the domain of white musicians. and that when sly "fell short" (he doesn't specify what this means), sly got flack "for having too much proverbial dip on his chip" (he doesn't explain what this means either). so the piece is ostensibly about a racist double standard, but i would've appreciated some specificity. he does mention the appearance on dick clark, which suggests popular success, and the only critic he quotes is greil marcus's fawning praise of sly's untouchability in '71.

elsewhere he claims that brian wilson's mental health struggles were viewed with more empathy (by ... somebody, he doesn't say) and that people were harsher about sly (again ... some citations would be nice). speaking from personal experience, brian wilson has always been the target of cruel jokes my whole life, even from people who love and respect his work. sly on the other hand i only ever hear about in reverential tones, usually tinged in sadness about the tragedy of his inability to get out from the grip of drug abuse. so personally i had a hard time understanding this framing where brian is this untouchable genius but sly doesn't get the respect he deserves. but maybe i am not understanding him correctly -- the piece, as i said, isn't written in a very clear way

Their respective issues with drugs aren't really similar enough to draw useful conclusions.

Put a glide in your stride and a dip on your chip
And come on up to the Mothership

Hard to draw a conclusion as they had different baggage to deal with. Wilson’s abusive father, his brothers, Mike fucking Love, weight issues. Sly, racism, the band and him falling apart with drugs, pressure from Black Panthers to be more militant.

Either way, I only saw sadness at what happened to them both and a hope that both would get help and support and come good. That it happened to Wilson with the ‘Smile’ release and concerts but not Sly is a tragedy.

agreed on both accounts

feel like it would have been better if he had just come out and said something, rather than making a bunch of florid insinuations?

Or he could have just, like, not written the article.

Flattening to the point of misrepresentation the lives and art of 2 artists who need no introduction and in service of an idea that eluded him anyway? ugh
Is he even a fan of either?

Most of the time i was reading that i was thinking “yes, i know who Sly Stone/Brian Wilson is tyvm” and the small remainder of the time “wait, that’s it?? Where’s the rest of the article?”

He really needs an editor to strip his prose down to the Terminator skeleton within.

So not worth it, just hire rushomancy to write it instead

One thing the two deaths got me thinking about was what reference points anyone under, say, 40 has for either of them. I'm sure the Beach Boys are more culturally present than Sly and the Family Stone, though I'm not sure what the vectors of that have been. (Supposedly a Fox News anchor said "Kokomo" is the song she'll remember the Beach Boys by lol.) For Sly, I don't even know. As relatively big as they were at the time, I don't feel like they've ever been much of a presence on, like, oldies radio. Maybe younger folks have some reason to know "Everyday People"? I just don't know where or how anyone is encountering Sly these days.

through samples, I assume

"Everyday People" has been in a ton of commercials. (IIRC, after a point wasn't Sly's publishing controlled by Michael Jackson?)

They always loom large in the Woodstock mythos as well.

They always loom large in the Woodstock mythos as well.

He said under 40. Nobody under 40 gives a fuck about Woodstock. Hell, I'm 53 and I don't give a fuck about Woodstock.

Hippie kids are eternal, bruv.

snoopy is big with gen z, bound to be some residual woodstock love

dance to the music was in shrek. it always comes back to shrek.

If anything, I'd say that in a strange way Sly gets more "credit" from critics for his downfall than Brian? Almost as if it were an orchestrated crash, or a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable culture? I could be drawing a lot from the portrayal in Mystery Train, which mentions Stagger Lee repeatedly but avoids the topic of drugs.

So not worth it, just hire rushomancy to write it instead

― doe on a hill (Deflatormouse)

lol i'd love to get paid for something, that's mostly on me tho

here's what i wrote in the brian wilson thread, re: the idea of brian wilson having a third act "redemption" and sly stone not:

the idea of "redemption" is a difficult one for me. a lot of it is privilege. this doesn't invalidate what brian wilson did or make it any less... i mean i did tear up hearing elton john say "you gotta be tough to survive what he's been through", on the page that looks trite, but the way he said it, it meant something. it's really good to see that he's recognized and valued for the work he's put in.

the tragedy, for me, of sly stone is that he wrote "you can make it if you try", and he meant it, and he did try, and did he make it? i don't know. the world isn't fair or just. and yes, he did also run away. our lives aren't one or the other. i don't place any blame or value judgement on either of them, sly for not getting a "redemption arc" or brian for having the privilege he did.

to expand a little:

i don't think either of them needed to be "redeemed", for what it's worth. i think they both had hard times, and they both deserved to be cared for more than they often were. with melinda, i feel like brian got that. i don't get the sense that sly ever really got that. was sly being black, a member of a marginalized, comparatively underresourced group part of that? of course it fucking was! all you have to do is look at the history of Black Americans in popular music. look at Arthur Lee. (how many lives were ruined by that fucking three strikes law?) Look at Marvin Gaye. American Black musicians, just like _all_ Black Americans, go through shit that white people like Brian Wilson just _didn't_. At the same time, that's not ABOUT Brian Wilson, and it doesn't help to MAKE it about Brian Wilson. I _do_ think it's super fucked up, and it's at least important to me to point out that there _is_ a double standard, that Black Americans have to deal with a _lot_ of fucked up shit that doesn't necessarily get seen or acknowledged.

my take on "privilege", speaking as a white cis-passing woman who has absolute _loads_ of privilege, is this: it's not that people like brian wilson deserved _less_. it's that people like sly stone deserved _more_.

Hendrix performance of the SSB at Woodstock is kinda the thing that will be around 100 years from now. Not sure anything else really matters or will last from the event

Arlo Guthrie rappin' to the fuzz?!?

xp i think the "redemption" arc stuff is partly about our sick (lol not really) need for narrative, to encapsulate our own lives and others, especially famous ppl like artists and musicians. i think most lives are too messy to be collapsed into the kind of narratives we're used to hearing, like in the Brian Wilson mould, even from sometimes extraordinarily sensitive writers or even posters. the other side of it is the weird entitlement that comes out of rock crit and fandom, this feeling that it must be a tragedy if somebody walks away from it all, we are owed a reunion tour, we are owed a farewell album and a farewell concert, that kind of thing. i'm not saying that with sly it was all his volition, but i think there's a tendency to invest our own disappointment into the arc of the story instead of just admitting that there's a lot we don't know and maybe might never know

what i'm saying is, we must imagine Sly happy

(no, not really)

the Vulture is what tis, copy for the day. you would never compare them otherwise

Arthur Lee maybe

(p.s. i should buy and fly the Riot and One Nation flags)

The redemption arc just comes from watching too many vh1 specials when you were younger

yeah

like point is not lost on me, but i never (at least in my adulthood) got the sense that Sly was looked on as anything BUT a genius
and all of his false-start comebacks were pretty emotional for critical onlookers, at least to me

and maybe i am straying from the point mightily but critics discount familial/personal redemption for these artists but i mean jesus Sly connected w his kids and grandkids in his 70’s in a way he ~never~ got to be in what, 30 years

like that shit counts too

and the Landy of it all (re:Wilson) muddies the waters in terms of the way Wilson retreated and for how long and how Wilson was re-received back into performing, like there’s a whole completely different layer of stuff going on there that is just not at all 1:1

when I’m in the car with the fam and any of the GH comes on

i think the "redemption" arc stuff is partly about our sick (lol not really) need for narrative, to encapsulate our own lives and others, especially famous ppl like artists and musicians

This reminds me of an odd novel I read last year, Glimpses by Lewis Shiner, where in the late 80s a guy manifests the ability to "fix" unsatisfactory 60s rock records, eventually time travelling to help complete Smile and Celebration of the Lizard, but failing to save Jimi Hendrix; all tied, of course, to his feelings about his own life and family.

the weird entitlement that comes out of rock crit and fandom, this feeling that it must be a tragedy if somebody walks away from it all, we are owed a reunion tour, we are owed a farewell album and a farewell concert, that kind of thing

I don't know that people would feel badly if Sly had ended up painting for the last 35 years like Grace Slick did; it's the weird pathos of his not-quite comebacks, the feeling that he was (or maybe people around him were) actually trying to achieve something...or he wanted to appear to be trying for a moment, only to disappoint?

Digging thru the “Higher!” deluxe set

loving these:
Whats That Got To Do With me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QGUWCOYGZc

and this version of Fortune & Fame
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK_f8qBe_Bw

these are great

Live Rockpalast Episode from 1970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c2EbTSqtGg

Only sly could pull off that white crochet hat

Wish they could remix the sound, the balance is all over the place - I can barely hear Cynthia on "Everyday People." A shame because aside from Woodstock, I rarely see any film footage of entire performances from this era, everything else tends to be standard def broadcast recordings.

Only sly could pull off that white crochet hat