There's a Riot Goin' On
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“Dying young is hard to take, selling out is harder.”
Sly and the Family Stone:
Sly Stone: vocals, guitar, bass, keys, drum machine
Rose Stone: vocals on “Luv ’n’ Haight” and “Family Affair,” keys
Freddie Stone: guitar
Cynthia Robinson: trumpet
Jerry Martini: saxophone
Larry Graham: bass, backing vocals
Gerry Gibson: drums
Gregg Errico: drums
Little Sister (Vet Stewart, Mary McCreary, Eva Mouton): backing vocals
Guests: Billy Preston, keys; Bobby Womack, guitar; Ike Turner, guitar
Produced by Sly Stone
art by John Berg
“Obviously, it is easier to kill than to create.” – Josef von Sternberg
There’s A Riot Goin’ On is one of my favorite albums I’ve ever covered on this series. This was also one of the episodes I was never happy with.
When Sly passed last summer, I knew I would revise my coverage of this album as to have proper, up-to-date features on both of Sly and the Family Stone’s defining statements. I was supposed to write two more reviews before this, but I got sick. I laid in bed reading books for a week. You can imagine how inspiration struck.
Thank You For The Party
About his former bandleader, Gregg Errico said,
“On one hand, (Sly) had the capabilities of handling all that attention, all that fame, big audiences. But on the other hand, there was another part of him that didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it, and wanted to be away from it. This fight always went on, where he wanted to be the biggest, the baddest, best, and then, when he got it, he didn’t want to be it; he was scared of it.”
quoted from: Joel Selvin, For The Record: Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History (1998.)
Questlove’s Sly Lives! film wasn’t supposed to be the punctuation at the end of Sly Stone. But that’s how things went. Sylvester Stewart passed last June. The film’s other star, R&B giant D’Angelo, passed in October. This is where we are: the struggle between scope and self, artist and personhood. The central struggle of Sly Stone and There’s A Riot Goin’ On.
As an integrated, mixed-gender group coming out of San Fransisco (an overwhelmingly white scene save for Santana,) the Family Stone already had a magnifying glass on them. In the eyes of the music industry, Sly was one of the nice, marketable black men. Woodstock punted Sly and the Family Stone into the stratosphere. The release of Michael Wadleigh’s film in the spring of 1970 seemed to be timed perfectly with the Family Stone’s appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone.
As Greil Marcus identified in his brilliant “The Myth of Staggerlee” essay, “...the racial contradictions of the counterculture were coming to the surface. There was no music to work out the contradictions, and no music to fill the vaccum.” And, as we’ve pointed out before, pop culture hates a vaccum. Woodstock’s stars were pretty immediately heralded as paragons of the culture; especially Sly. He was the other most prominent black man on the bill. “Hot Fun in the Summertime” peaked at number two on the Billboard singles chart, and Stand! charted for two years. The album established the first of three important musical precedents to Riot: the vocoder, which can be heard on numbers like “Don’t Call Me N*****, Whitey” and “Sex Machine.” Their greatest hit and the second Riot precedent, “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin,)” dropped in December. It’s a number-one hit come the new year. Sly tells the music press a new album is on the way; “the most optimistic of all.”
Let’s recap how the world changed in the year since Stand! The brutal Tate-LaBianca murders shocked the nation. Altamont in December effectively ended the hippie dream. President Nixon said he’d wind down operations in Vietnam. Not only did he ramp them up, he went and invaded Cambodia because...commies? In May of 1970, four young people were killed by National Guardsmen at a Kent State University protest of the invasion of Cambodia. Everything Sly and the Family Stone stood for – unity, optimism, tolerance – is now “square.” Sly remembered in his memoir,
“As early as 1968 I had sensed a shadow was falling over America. It got better during the summer of 1969 – the moon landing, Woodstock – but worse after. The possibility of possibility was leaking out and leaving the country feeling drained. The year the reporter came around, 1971, had (Three Dog Night’s) ‘Joy to the World,’ but also ‘Slippin’ into Darkness’ (by War.) It had (Carole King’s) ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ but also (The Undisputed Truth’s) ‘Smiling Faces Sometimes.’”
quoted from: Sly Stone with Ben Greenman and Arlene Hirschkowitz, Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir (2023.)
Through the last years of the sixties and first of the seventies, the alphabet agencies tried to bust up the counterculture. The most obvious example is the trials of the Chicago 8/7 (If you ask me, the ’68 DNC was the true death of the sixties.) Out in Detroit, John Sinclair was busted for possession and sentenced to ten years in federal prison; all but dissolving his White Panther Party. The Black Panther trials in New Haven, Connecticut unfolded after the murder of Alex Rackley. In New York, the Panther 21 were put on trial. It was the state’slongest trial to date. Despite the feds’ best efforts, the Black Panthers experienced their highest-ever recruitment numbers in 1970. Sly was “colorblind,” as we might say today. As we move into the seventies, there was this attitude amongst his critics that he “wasn’t black enough.” The other most famous black man to play Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, had ditched the Experience to form his first all-black group. According to Dave Kapralik, “(Sly) had enormous pressures on him to get rid of me – the whitey Jew manager – and to align himself with the voices of despair and nihilism and parochialism and separatism,” how he describes the Black Panthers. “and I pulled with all my energy to keep him from becoming a spokesman for those things…” Sly refused to let go of Kapralik, Gregg Errico, and Jerry Martini. The Black power wasn’t too pleased.
Sly was pissing off Epic Records for totally different reasons! Working title “Africa Talks To You” was due in 1970, but Sly wasn’t returning their calls. In the time it took for Sly to make this one project, one of the other cats on Mount Funkmore, James Brown, released five. Sick of waiting around, Epic went ahead and issued their own; rereleasing A Whole New Thing to capitalize on the Family Stone’s post-Woodstock fame and, against Sly’s wishes, issuing a Greatest Hits.
“Greatest hits” albums are generally a bad sign. The label thinks the artist is old news or the hits are no longer reliably coming in. Sly and the Family Stone were most certainly not old news, but the hits were no longer reliably coming in.
Sly is no longer reliably coming in.
But I Could Never Stay
The Family Stone’s crowds were crazy to begin with: see the riot at the 1969 Newport Jazz festival. The Oakland Coliseum went to hell because traffic was so bad, they had to fly Sly the half-mile from the airport in a helicopter! And land it in the hotel parking lot! After the helicopter and police convoy escort, Sly was too frazzled to go on stage. A free show in Chicago was too hot for Sly to safely show; it wasn’t clearly communicated that there would be openers, the audience hated that and got antsy. There was, in fact, a riot thatwent on. Gregg said, “There was no middle ground; it was going to be intense to the positive or intense to the negative. It depended on how Sly would handle it.” According to Rolling Stone, of the 86 shows Sly and the Family Stone were supposed to play in 1970, 26 were cancelled. Sly pushed back on his no-show reputation in his book, blaming promoters.
“I understood that I was being used. The problem was when I got misused. I was being asked to do more gigs in a month than there were days...It wasn’t carelessness on their part. It was calculation. At a certain point we were required to put up a bond that would be forfeited if I missed curtain time...So when I got incorrect information about when a show was starting, that money found its way into pockets. That was an incentive.”
quoted from: Sly Stone with Ben Greenman and Arlene Hirschkowitz, Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir (2023.)
He owned up to being a flake, too. “It’s complicated, draining, and boring, with only the energy of the shows to keep the whole thing lit. Sometimes I didn’t make it and shows had to be rescheduled.”
Promoters stopped booking the Family Stone, and their money ran out. It was spent on excesses, yes, but this mostly happened because Clive Davis got fed up and locked up Columbia’s wallet. He suspended the group’s recording contract with Epic, barring them from collecting royalties as to recoup recording costs from “Africa Talks To You.” If not for a run of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, it’s highly unlikely Columbia would’ve let the Family Stone continue on like this.
Epic – and the public – think Sly’s gotten too big for his britches. Jerking them around. Sly and those closest to him knew the truth: he was really struggling. Think back to that Gregg Errico quote at the top of this piece. Sometimes Sly could handle the post-Woodstock fame. But there was an enormous amount of pressure on him to be the “nice” “marketable” black man. He got so in his own head. Anyone would.
“There was an idea circulating that I was two different people, Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone. Sylvester was clear and calm, the kind of person you would want in the room, but Sly (was) antagonistic, unreliable, always with a joke and sometimes you were it…”
quoted from: Sly Stone with Ben Greenman and Arlene Hirschkowitz, Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir (2023.)
“That poor kid was torn apart,” Kapralik said. “And when you are torn apart that means a lot of pain. And one of the clinical ways to ease the pain is cocaine.” Two old friends of Sly’s, JB and Bubba Banks, began to edge Kapralik out. He took it on himself to quit after a particularly gnarly no-show in Detroit, then came back, then quit again. There were a lot of people trying for that management slot, including Sly’s older sister Loretta at the short-lived Stone Flower Records.
The band retreats to a mansion in Bel Air, once owned by John and Michelle Phillips. There was a home studio in the attic and a 16-track console Sly could work with...when he wasn’t in bed watching Beverly Hillbillies.
Or on an ungodly amount of drugs.
The vibes at Bel Air were bad. Sly’s girlfriend at the time, Stephani Owens, said, “There was no real separation between life and drugs. Life was drugs, and it was music.” Things got out of control. There were a lot of guns and shady people and a truly heroic amount of drugs. Jerry Martini called all these people “fucking assholes,” and I’m inclined to agree. They were a terrible influence on Sly. He was getting the stuff himself, and people were just giving it to him. All agree that PCP (angel dust) was the thing that fucked him and Freddie up. In his memoir, Sly confirmed the rock-and-roll myth that he had a safe of pills. “...since I was the only one with the combination I was the only one who could take a combination of them. Thank you for the party. I could never stop.”
What’s Goin’ On?
Since Riot production was so spread out between the Bel Air mansion, Sly’s bedroom at the Record Plant (it was called the Pit, I can’t find any photos online and that’s a fucking travesty considering how important it is to rock-and-roll history,) and Sly’s Winnebago, there were no more full-band sessions. “If anybody else played with anybody else, I don’t know,” Larry Graham said. It's like the Beach Boys and SMiLE, right? Because it was in so many pieces, no one knew what the hell was going on - not even Brian!
Did Sly record the whole thing by himself? No. You can clearly hear the band on “Luv ’n’ Haight,” “Brave and Strong,” “Runnin’ Away,” and “Thank You For Talkin’ to Me, Africa.” It also hard to parse out who plays where because everything was overdubbed. To hell. And back. Sly would record over the same tape twelve or fifteen times (I’d call this musical convention two-and-a-half.) The timeline is difficult to iron out, too. Sly was the only consistent figure producing Riot, and he was so high he couldn’t remember shit.
But we in the far future can look back clearly and see why this shift to overdubbing shook up Riot. Sly and the Family Stone were the first self-contained integrated group to break through to the mainstream. No backing group, minimum session men. The band was destabilized by this change in their creative process. The third important musical convention to Riot, and arguably the most important: Sly bought a Maestro Rhythm King drum machine. He could lay all the basic tracks down himself. Gregg got fed up with sitting around all day doing nothing for this record and quits the band. Gerry Gibson of the Banana Splits of all people was brought in as his temporary replacement. This triggered the slow disintegration of the Family Stone. Rose was in and out of the group – sometimes Vet Stewart would have to put on a blonde wig and go on stage in her sister's place. Larry Graham quit shortly after Riot, fearing for his life. (Who put a hit on who? Even the Oral History gets in the weeds trying to explain this.) Andy Newmark replaced Gerry Gibson, then Jerry Martini left.
Critics had every reason to savage this thing. Some did: Riot was muddy, unfocused, and lacked the group chemistry that made Stand! so special. (Duh. The group is hardly here.) Miraculously, the week of December 18th, 1971, There’s A Riot Goin’ On peaked at number one on the Billboard albums chart. It would be the Family Stone’s only album to achieve this. Though Fresh continues in its sonic vein, and it’s really quite a good album,Riot stands as the last coherent body of work from Sly Stone.
As a classic amphetamine writer (the difference is I don’t need the amphetamines to think or write this way, check mate Kerouac,) There’s A Riot Goin’ On challenges me. I have an uppers mind, and Riot is the downers album! This album is the worst anti-drug PSA ever. It sounds so cool and it’s so current. I’m astonished by how current this album sounds. I hear this album all over stuff made today – nevermind the obvious links to nineties hip-hop. I think of the high points of Childish Gambino’s Awaken My Love!, the ridiculously high ceiling and floor of To Pimp a Butterfly. Both of those albums (almost ten years old now, shit I’m old) reveal so much about their creators’ respective states of mind. With this track-by-track breakdown, I want to answer this question: how can an album like Riot reveal so much about its creator while revealing so little of itself?
The theme that keeps Riot so current, and the big thing I missed my first time around, is paranoia. I don’t think a record like Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” the most paranoid pop single ever, could have happened without Riot. Various counterculture groups were feeling the heat in 1971 because of COINTELPRO. Riot’s paranoia isn’t explicitly stated much. Only in passing. It’s more in the mood of the music. You can feel the diaspora of a movement post-Malcom X, post-MLK, post-RFK, etc. etc. For example, it’s in how muddied Sly’s vocals are. That’s what happens when you obscure the self to serve the music. We’ve observed this in albums like Kid A or Tago Mago. Lewis thinks this was intentional like it was for Thom Yorke and Can, but Sly said in his memoir that it wasn’t. What does this inescapable mood do for Riot, and the Family Stone’s greater body of work? Marcus made the acute observation Vince Aletti only grasped at in his Rolling Stone review.
“It contains, in a matrix of parody and vicious self-criticism, virtually all of the images Sly gave to us as an audience and which we cherish. The new music calls all of the old music and our reasons for claiming it in the first place into question.”
quoted from: Greil Marcus, “There’s A Riot Goin’ On: Muzak With Its Finger on the Trigger.” Creem, 4/1972.
Both Greil Marcus and Miles Marshall Lewis place Riot in a lineage of albums that “musically deny” (to paraphrase the latter) the artists’ albums that came before. Think John Lennon making his Plastic Ono Band after Phil Spector vomited all over the Get Back project, or Dylan renouncing the “thin wild mercury” sound for the simple pleasures of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. Riot is alarmingly self-aware. Sly said on the Dick Cavett Show, “I write in a mirror...The reason why I do that is that I can critique myself. I can react spontaneously before I realize that I’m going along with what I’m doing, dislike it or like it before I know I’m doing it.” We hear moments of “the old Sly” on Riot. I’ll point them out, but they’re few and far between. The old Sly is now, in the words of Will Montgomery for The Wire, “filtered through a grim and distorting psychedelic prism. A morbid miniature...” Just as the optimism of the sixties was.
Luv ’n’ Haight (get it? A pun on Haight-Ashbury?) is one of my favorite opening tracks on any album. A drowsy thudding bass and sturdy, but reserved drum beat gives way to Riot’s oft-imitated, never repeated sound. It’s warm, fuzzy, and perfectly noisy. Name a neo-soul group that haven’t tried to replicate that sound! The guitar has attitude. The bass plays an ascending line to modulate the key for Little Sister’s chorus of “Aaaaaah”s. As Sly wordlessly croons over the top, it feels like the curtain opening on a gritty drama set in a brutal heat wave in the seventies. A robbery gone wrong. Someone steals someone else’s girl. Maybe she ends up in the dumpster, there’s a bomb in the car, or a case of mistaken identity sends a humble grocer on a wild drug-fueled goose chase. You can feel it. The ascent breaks for a drum groove (one of the few on this record,) flavored with piano accents. The only audible lines Sly sings are, “Feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move.”
What better to do in this heat wave than get so stoned you can’t move?
I wish we had more Rose Stone on this album, her voice is fabulous. She counters her brother with, “As I go up, I’m going down, and when I’m lost, I know I will be found.” All the Stones finish each other’s sentences. Rose begins with, “Another place, another time/ And when I realize I’m still all mine,” Little Sister keeps it going with their “I, I, I, I – ”s, and Sly finishes with, “Feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move.” Connect it all and it reads, “Another place, another time, and when I realize I’m still all mine, I feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move.” These are pretty self-assured lyrics for what will prove to be such an unsettled record.
The thing about all of Riot, “Luv ’n’ Haight” included, is the songs linger for an uncomfortable amount of time. There’s a full two minutes of Little Sister singing “Feels so good, feels so good, wanna move? Wanna move?” after the final unresolved crescendo. These are barn cat songs: they show up when they feel like, stay for however long they feel like, and Irish-goodbye for who-knows-how-long. They’re detached. But when they’re here, they’re evocative, textured, and revealing. Welcome to the thick, humid soundscape of There’s A Riot Goin’ On.
Just Like A Baby introduces two of the main characters of this film: Sly’s keyboard and his drum machine. I love the combinations of organic and inorganic elements Sly experimented with on Riot. The drums and drum machine combine to make this really cool effect. “Baby” is a barely-conscious waltz. The surface noise reminds me of the cotton ball feeling you get in your ears right before you pass out. Other than Sly’s muffled, drawled, “Just like a baby/Sometimes I cry just like a baby…” he croons, wails, sighs, and cries...just like a baby. Lewisdraws Sly’s change in writing style to his idolization of Dylan. I disagree. Unfortunately, I think the guy was too fucking high to write much more than this. But it has an interesting kind of Freudian effect; in regressing language, sometimes you find the very seed of what you mean. (I should really learn that lesson. My video scripts are so goddamn long!)
The key change and barely-audible bleeps and bloops are part of a classic Sly convention: get to the burst (or anti-burst, in this case) of life force, then take it away as soon as you give it up. It’s self-conscious like a man might be as he cries. Crying is the most uninhibited way to openly expresses emotions he’d rather hide. It’s fucking hard to be a man in a world that expects you to be a macho tough guy all the time. Men have complex emotions, too, and shit goes wrong when they don’t know how to articulate and express them.
As I write album reviews, I combine active listening (sitting down with my turntable and a pen and paper, phone off no distractions) with passive listening (playing the album while doing the dishes or the laundry.) I always catch different things in different listening modes. Poet has never stuck out to me until now. The instrumental is positively groovy and one of my favorites on the LP. “Poet” is another oddly self-assured moment in contrast with the self-conscious “Just Like A Baby.” “My only weapon is my pen,” “I’m a songwriter, I’m a poet.” Sly reiterates his messages of nonviolence and tolerance, asserting himself as just as much of a songwriter as a composer. Ironic, considering the bulk of this song is an instrumental! A viscous, wobbly guitar saunters with keyboards, shuffling drums, and an addicting rhythm line. The rest of the muscle mass padded out by Sly’s ad-libbing.
It’s also ironic that the muddiest-sounding cut on Riot was its number-one single! Drum machine, bass, and Rose vocals with a thick blanket over top give Family Affair its dark intrigue.
“One child grows up to be somebody that just loves to learn,
Another child grows up to be somebody you’d just love to burn.”
It’s the classic case of golden child/black sheep. Freddie said Sly was always the golden child, the “god.” Or maybe this is “Sylvester” vs. “Sly.”
“Mom loves the both of them,
You see it’s in the blood (heeeeey.)
Both kids are good and round,
Blood’s thicker than the mud, it’s a family affair.”
Golden child and black sheep are loved equally, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. The ostracized child will burn down the village to feel its warmth. The saying is actually “Blood’s thicker than water,” but this twist makes me think of that tub verse in Love’s “A House Is Not a Motel.”
The second verse lets us in on an unhappy marriage. Newlyweds still checkin’ each other out (heeeeey,) but there’s trouble in paradise. Sly lays it out pretty plainly: “You can’t leave cause your heart is there/But you can’t stay cause you’ve been somewhere else/You can’t cry cause you’ll look broke down/But you’re cryin’ anyway cause you’re all broke down, it’s a family affair.” The age-old dilemma of whether or not to “stay together for the kids.” Do you let the fear of the unknown paralyze you, choose to stay, and be miserable? Or do you throw away what is objectively a great thing? Do I stay or do I go?
You know that line from Anna Karenina, “Every happy family is alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That’s “Family Affair.” It feels like overhearing your neighbor’s drama through the apartment wall. (Or, in my case, hearing them scream it from their driveway that’s right under my bedroom window!) It’s voyeuristic and it’s wrong, but it’s human instinct to eavesdrop. It keeps you and your family affairs safe.
The laid-back drum machine and staccato guitar and keys introduce Africa Talks To You (The Asphalt Jungle.) The drums are anxious, the bass tumbling. Sly said, “...I wrote a song about Africa because in Africa the animals are animals. The tiger is a tiger, the snake is a snake, you know what the hell he’s gonna do. Here in New York, the asphalt jungle, a tiger or a snake may come up looking like…you.” Paranoia takes foot after you’ve spied on the neighbors. “Who’s believing who? Who’s doin’ the fishin’?” It's like COINTELPRO: The Song. Self-doubt creeps in: “When life means much to you, why live for dyin? If you are doing right, why are you cryin?” The chorus is the opposite of “Stand!” “Timber, all fall down.” “Africa Talks” circles around itself for another six minutes, weaving in and out of keyboard tangents. Disembodied cries of “Timber!” sound out. It can’t get out of its own rut. It’s not so much a flow-state as it is a mental spiral.
About the title track being a zero-second hidden track, Sly said, “That was a message, too – don’t give any time to violence. Don’t give it the time of day.” I also see it as representing withdrawal from life; the absence that colored the rest of Sly’s career after Fresh and this.
Other than being structured very similarly to “Luv ’n’ Haight” with its rises and breaks, and a particularly impressive Sly “Woo-wooooo!” Brave and Strong never stuck out to me. Only when I was passively listening could I see its merits; feel over content. Sly’s fuzzy lyrics melt into the soundscape. The break beat drives the song, and the trumpet toots make me crave more Cynthia Robinson on this album.
Sly described You Caught Me Smilin’ as “...a blurry song about sharp regrets.” Blurry indeed, something feels wrong about it. I’ve always favored the sunny music, but look-over-your-shoulder trumpets bring the intrigue. Sly cranks out the lyrics, whatever they are. “Smilin’” starts out carefree, but when the keyboard spirals down, it becomes something more sinister. Sly was famous for his ever-present toothy grin. Why would we ever catchhim smiling? “Never let anyone know your next move,” he says. You never know who’s a tiger and who’s a snake.
Time has never stuck out to me either, I’m afraid. Another woozy waltz on an album of woozy waltzes. It’s here. And then we get to Spaced Cowboy.
Is it the most hated song on Riot? Probably. Do I love how un-serious it is? Fuck yeah, I do!
“Spaced Cowboy” would play over the cantina scene in a psychedelic spaghetti western. Cast Sly as the Cheshire Cat bartender laying on the floor behind the bar. He indulges in the most basic of pleasures: a drum machine, the comfort of his velvet bedding, mumbling what-not and hootin’ and hollerin’ (the truest sense of the word) into a little tape recorder mic. It’s the only truly carefree moment on Riot. It would be a riot of a karaoke song if you could yodel it.
Tied with the closer as my favorite song on the Riot is Runnin’ Away. This track is the most outward expression of the paranoia and inner strife of Riot, that which was mostly implicit before. The short bursts of brass are wonderful. The rest of the arrangement creeps along the floor. Female voices (maybe Little Sister?) mock our unseen protagonist in sing-song voices.
“Runnin away to get away,
Ha-ha, ha-ha,
You’re wearing out your shoes.
Look at you foolin’ you.”
Exactly what you run from is what you end up chasing. Some people spend their entire lives trapped in that cycle. Others people pay the ultimate price trying to escape. Heroic doses, Faustian bargains. “The deeper in debt, the harder you bet.” A whole generation of rock-and-roll heroes either incapacitated or killed themselves on that hellish merry-go-round. Will Montgomery put it perfectly when he said, “All of its pleasure is in the sadistic observation of mental collapse. And its violence is all to do with who’s speaking and why.”
Greil Marcus said Riot removes the superstar clothes, “piece by piece, and what is left, in a weird and modern way, is the blues.” This reminds me of George Clinton’s definition of funk: “just speeded-up blues.” No track on Riot applies to these definitions better than its closing number, Thank You For Talkin’ to Me, Africa.
Its father, “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin,)” is one of the great funk songs. Get up and dance! Look under the hood and you’ll find dark undercurrent.
“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.”
The party atmosphere makes it feel like our narrator wins the battle on “Thank You.” That latent darkness comes to the surface on “Africa.” The party has gone on too long. It’s been six hours, your head hurts, the air is thick with smoke. There’s a body on the carpet, the devil’s got his gun. “Thank You” has mutated into a down-and-dirty funk groove on “Africa,” this makes me sorely miss Larry Graham and Gregg Errico in the group. Trapped in a nightmare, we run through in slow-motion from the devil. Feet in tar, “Thank You” succumbs to vice, temptation, greed, lust, any number of the deadly sins Sly was messing with in 1971. We was on top.
So why did I redux Riot now? Why is this simultaneously so long in the making and so soon? Two weekends ago, the Grammys gave Brian Wilson three tributes. A recitation from John Stamos and two needle drops. Sly Stone? He got crickets. Zilch. Nada. John Gabre seemed to predict the future in the pages of Rickey Vincent’s Funk.
“If Sly is as good as he is described, and he is, why is his name so seldom bracketed with other heavies – Lennon and McCartney, Richards and Jagger, Dylan, Townsend, when people start running down lists of the current rock greats? The reason, I fear, is simple: Sly Stone is a black man, and we have been slow to acknowledge the contributions of black performers to tour music even when they are massive.”
quoted from: Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (1996.)
Even now that he’s gone, the industry is too slow to give this man his flowers. They’ll honor his contemporaries, no problem. D’Angelo got a beautiful tribute. So did Prince nine years ago. But they won’t recognize Sly, because him nor his music are easy to put in any box. Riot is a consistently woozy and self-obfuscating, but no less bitter and real act of rebellion; against the expectations pop culture put on Sly Stone and the institutionalized racism that wrote the ridiculous double-standards black artists face. Be edgy, forward-thinking, and cool, but not too edgy or forward-thinking. Stay nice and marketable.
Brilliant as Marcus’s Riot essay was, I disagree with his thinking that the album is “hard to hear, and it didn’t celebrate anything. It was not groovy.” Riot is so groovy. We groove most of the time! The album is a celebration (if lethargic) of a bygone era of innocence, utopia, unity, and tolerance.
This, I agree with. “Like Bonnie and Clyde, which angered critics in much the same way, Riot was, and is, a rough, disturbing work that can be ignored, dismissed, but never smoothed over.” Bonnie and Clyde invented seventies cinema in 1967, right? By being ridiculous and salacious and over-the-top and, in one moment with Gene Wilder as the undertaker, shockingly real. Sly invented nineties hip-hop in the seventies by being ridiculous, at times salacious, over-the-top, and when the undertaker shows up, shockingly real. Riot is devastatingly current to our times. America in 2026 is disillusioned and fractured. But I have to make note that Sly’s undoing was, in part, because he lost his optimism. Remember this, if nothing else, from this review: joy and optimism are radical acts in the face of oppression and injustice.
All this being said, there’s still something about There’s A Riot Goin’ On that I can’t – and likely won’t – penetrate. The mirror is hazy, clouded with smoke and a thin layer of cocaine. Like Riot’s out-of-focus cover photo, you just have to accept not seeing this album 100% clearly. The land of stars-and-stripes is not clear as it may appear on the shelf. You have to get comfortable with the discomfort. In the un-clarity, you can see the forest for the trees.
Personal favorites: “Luv ’n’ Haight,” “Just Like A Baby,” “Family Affair,” “You Caught Me Smilin’,” “Runnin’ Away,” “Thank You For Talkin’ to Me, Africa”
– AD ☆
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Watch the full episode above!
Aletti, Vince. “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” Rolling Stone, 12/23/1971. https://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/sly-the-family-stone-theres-a-riot-goin-on-1971/
Crouse, Timothy. “The Struggle For Sly’s Soul At the Garden.” Rolling Stone, 10/14/1971. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/slys-soul-madison-square-garden-1971-1235359863/
Lewis, Miles Marshall. 33 1/3: There’s A Riot Goin’ On. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006.
Marcus, Greil. “There’s A Riot Goin’ On: Muzak With Its Finger on the Trigger.” Creem, 4/1972. https://www.creem.com/archive/article/1972/04/01/theres-a-riot-goin-on
Marcus, Greil. “Sly Stone: The Myth of Staggerlee.” From Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music. New York: Plume, 2008 ed.
Selvin, Joel. For The Record: Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. New York: Avon Books, 1998. https://archive.org/details/slyfamilystoneor00selv/mode/1up
Stone, Sly, with Ben Greenman and Arlene Hirschkowitz. Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir. New York: Auwa Books, 2023.
Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996.
“The State of Song.” The Wire issue 243, 5/2004. https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/35010/spread/38
Further watching:
Stanley Nelson and Nicole London, dir. We Want The Funk! PBS: Independent Lens, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrgV35cBHVs
Ahmir “Questlove ” Thompson, dir. Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius). Hulu: Onyx Collective, 2025.
Further listening: this cover of "Thank You" by Magazine, which expertly combines the feel of the original "Thank You" and its "Africa" reworking:
