Well…..that’s me back from what proved to be a wonderful and memorable 11 days in the Los Angeles area. Loads of things to write about, including two live gigs (one of which saw me invited to the stage to become part of the band’s encore!!), a trip to downtown L.A. just a few days prior to the outbreak of riots in the vicinity of where we were enjoying a stroll, and all-in-all, having a thoroughly great time thanks to the wonderful and generous hospitality of long-time blog friends, Jonny and Goldie.
But all that will be in the near future. Today sees a combination of a post that dropped into the inbox while I was away, along with something my dear friend Aldo posted on Facebook. Dirk’s latest offering is now scheduled for Friday, after which there will be the usual and long-running series on Saturday and Sunday.
It’s now time to hand over to Fraser, our New Zealand correspondent:-
Thank you for the party : Sly Stone, 1943-2025
When you read the story of his life it seems quite remarkable that Sly Stone ever reached the age of 82 before he died on 9 June just past. The history of rock and pop music is overpunctuated with untimely or premature deaths, the casualties of devotedly unhealthy lifestyles, the overdoses, the car crashes, the suicides, the booze and drug-induced misadventures, the heart attacks, the murders. Sly Stone indulged heavily in several of these potentially fatal activities over many years and yet lived five years longer than the average American man, ten years longer than the average African-American.
Sadly for him, a large part of that long life was lived in a fog of drug abuse that in time reduced him to near-destitution and homelessness. Sadly for the rest of the world, he consequently spent most of it in a state of creative inactivity. His artistic legacy, while immense in influence, is all too small.
Like many British new wave kids, forging their musical tastes in the late 70s and early 80s, I was introduced to Sly and the Family Stone by Magazine’s cover of Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) in 1980. Despite the warmer atmosphere of The Correct Use of Soap compared to their first two albums, Magazine’s invigoratingly frosty art rock strips almost all of the funk out of it. Almost, but not quite all. Barry Adamson’s immaculate slap-pluck bass pays due homage to Larry Graham’s innovation that dominates the original single and introduced the sound to the lexicon of funk ten years earlier in December 1969.
At any rate, the cover did what any good cover does and encouraged us all to seek out the original. It so happened that around that time a school friend was introducing me to the Stevie Wonderful world of soul and funk, Aretha, Smokey, James Brown, Marvin Gaye. A cassette was procured with Sly and The Family Stone’s Greatest Hits on one side and their 1973 album Fresh on the other.
Most of the Greatest Hits sound very much of their late 60s time, upbeat singalong songs and dance floor freak-outs, some era-defining classics, but overall, until you get to Thank You, it’s more crossover pop than soulful r’n’b or even the proto-funk that James Brown was already cranking out by the mile. The standard cliché about funk is that James Brown invented it, but Sly Stone perfected it. Like all such aphorisms it’s an over-simplification, but listening to Fresh after the Greatest Hits you can immediately sense that Sly Stone had travelled a long way in a short time.
It was Fresh that hooked me straight away, being at that time the funkiest thing I’d ever heard – and it still is. It’s not Sex Machine or Mothership Connection funky however. Hardly any of it is really dance floor material, but it has the most effortless, natural, laid-back groove, an irresistible warmth and charm, an ultra-cool vibe that feels like the result of long years spent refining and distilling the essence of funk down to this fine, instinctive elixir of sound.
But the refinement had happened pretty quickly. In 1971, on the preceding album There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the sound was already there. Tracks like Brave and Strong have the same almost free-form jamming structure that accounts for much of Fresh. Sly still had the knack for a great simple pop tune however, such as (You Caught Me) Smilin’, Running Away (covered by Paul Haig in 1982) and the chart topping single Family Affair. But the dominating mood of the album is quite different to the radically multiracial Family Stone’s big pop hits of the late 60s. It’s ruminative, introspective, reticent with its messages where they can be discerned at all, completely lacking in the ‘you can make it if you try’ positivism that radiates from the earlier work.
Pop critics mostly hated it, but it sold hugely, and proved massively influential, allegedly even on such musical luminaries as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, and certainly on funk stars like George Clinton and Bootsy Collins. It broke decisively with Sly and the Family Stone’s own past and sounded completely unlike anything else at the time. Aside from the loose and free musical stylings, it was notable for being largely performed by multi-instrumentalist Sly alone, patching together overdubs rather than mixing an ensemble group performance, being one of the earliest uses of a drum machine (Family Affair), and featuring probably the first (and only?) example of yodelling in r’n’b music (Spaced Cowboy).
Despite these ground-breaking shifts, further developed on Fresh and 1974’s Small Talk, Sly and the Family Stone’s star was waning. Drug use by Sly and other band members led to personal divisions, personnel changes and chronic unreliability. Gigs were frequently cancelled or took place without certain members, including Sly, on account of their sudden incapacity. Eventually promoters just wouldn’t touch them, so the band never capitalised on whatever profile their releases might have gained them. In 1975, they booked themselves a gig at New York’s famous Radio City Music Hall and hardly anyone turned up. That was effectively the end of Sly and the Family Stone.
Sly tried to carry on, releasing a solo album and three more under the band’s name, but it wasn’t a band, just him and a succession of guests and session players. By all accounts there are flashes of the old funk in there, but the comeback hype got more and more desperate with each release. Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back (1976), Back on the Right Track (1979), Ain’t But the One Way (1982). A sad and weary Sly smiles up hopefully from the cover of Back on the Right Track. You could tell from the look that he was on the wrong track. Ain’t but the one way – a branch line to oblivion.
Over the subsequent decades there were various guest appearances, collaborations that came to nothing much, and many more disappearances – times when Sly would show up to perform but would end up just walking off stage, walking away, leaving without saying goodbye, riding off on a motorbike…
Magazine’s version of Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is really only half a version – Devoto only sings the first two verses, but it means it ends on a quatrain that not only sounds like the most Devoto-like lyric he never wrote, but seems to sum up perfectly the sad fade-out of Sly Stone’s career:
Thank you for the party
But I could never stay
Many things on my mind
Words in the way.
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
And, as promised, here’s Aldo:-
I remember being about 10 or 11 and having a tape with some Beach Boys on it, in amongst the brilliant surf pop tunes, there was Good Vibrations which I’d end up rewinding again and again, and ok, once more… I’d never heard anything like it, what were these sounds?!
Good Vibrations
Also on the same tape, without the same studio trickery, but equally entrancing was God Only Knows. ‘Can music really be as beautiful as this?’ I no doubt asked myself.
A decade or so on from then, and having fallen in love with Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson is back touring, playing that particular album.
Chuffed to bag a couple of tickets for the show at the Playhouse in Edinburgh, the second ticket being a birthday present for my Dad, who was a big fan. Sadly my Dad passed suddenly just prior to his birthday, and I never got to hand over that ticket.
I’m glad to say I still attended the gig a few months later with a colleague, and it lived up to everything I’d expected of it. It’s one of only two gigs I’ve ever kept press cuttings from. And strangely, it was 23 years ago today.
A year or two later I caught Brian backed by the same band in a tent at T in the Park, tearing through all the classics. It was absolutely joyous, and he seemed to be having a lot of fun.
Thanks for the music, Mr Wilson.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 