FEATURE:
Beneath the Sleeve
Sly & The Family Stone – There’s a Riot Goin’ On
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RELEASED in November 1971…
IN THIS PHOTO: Sly & The Family Stone
I am putting a classic album under the spotlight for Beneath the Sleeve. There is a slightly sad reason. The album’s writer, producer and arranger, Sylvester ‘Sly Stone’ Stewart died earlier this week. It was a massive loss for the music industry. Following his death, many wrote about his influence and legacy. Many also highlighted a masterpiece from Sly Stone. There’s a Riot Goin’ On was a slight departure for Sly & The Family Stone. After more optimistic and upbeat releases, the 1971 album is a more political and darker release that addresses Stone's fame and 1960s counterculture against a tumultuous political climate in the United States at the turn of the 1970s. One of the most acclaimed albums of all time, I am exploring this incredible album deeper for this feature. I will end with a review of this classic. First, I am bringing in a couple of features. I am starting out with a feature from Ultimate Classic Rock that was an audio gut punch to America. With warfare internationally and unrest at home, it is an album that endures and sounds so relevant today:
“Almost exactly a year before There's a Riot Goin' On's release on Nov. 20, 1971, Sly & the Family Stone put out their massively popular Greatest Hits record, which collected singles and deep cuts from 1968 and 1969. The dozen tracks wrapped up the brief history of one of R&B's best crossover bands, chronicling a dizzying couple of years that yielded some of the era's most enduring songs.
But anyone expecting a second sunshine-kissed greatest-hits volume in a few years was most likely sidelined by the despairing tones crawling throughout There's a Riot Goin' On. Originally titled Africa Talks to You, and recorded partly in response to Marvin Gaye's sociopolitical What's Going On (another era-defining album released in 1971), the album was a moody, murky indictment of the United States at the turn of the decade. The cover art, featuring an American flag with suns replacing the familiar stars, says it all: Blood-red stripes offset the remaining black and white.
It wasn't an easy record to listen to then, and it's still tough to get through at times now. But Sly & the Family Stone never made a more significant album. It's their masterpiece, but it's also one of music's most harrowing and desolate works, and one that reflected the turmoil going on within Stone.
After Sly & the Family Stone's rousing Woodstock performance, their leader became unreliable. He missed shows. He missed album deadlines (prompting the release of Greatest Hits). He became more and more paranoid. He moved to Los Angeles. He joined the Black Panthers, who urged him to drop the white members of his multi-racial group. And he started to take more and more drugs, which clouded his mind and, to an extent, his creativity.
When he was able to get it together, he didn't like what he saw, particularly the end of civil-rights activism and the dark pall cast on the final years of the '60s. So he made an album about it, replacing his band's usual psychedelic pop and funk with a deeper, sleepier version muddled with gut-churning bass rumbles, mumbled lyrics and a sense that there was a violent revolution brewing, but only if its leader didn't nod off first.
Stone worked on the album, mostly by himself, throughout 1970 and 1971. Many of his vocals were recorded in his bedroom, with a drum machine driving the beat. The other members of the group later overdubbed their parts. And Stone himself overdubbed even more on top of that. The result was a mix so thick and muddy that it perfectly suited the album's themes of disillusionment and despair.
From the opening "Luv n' Haight" – one of the few songs here that doesn't sound like a 45 played at 33 1/3 – to the closing "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa," a gloomy, seven-minute reworking of Sly & the Family Stone's 1969 No. 1 hit "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," There's a Riot Goin' On plays out like a drug-induced nightmare that's a simultaneous end to the '60s and the start of an equally tumultuous decade. The title track, which closes out Side One, runs 0:00, erasing all time and space from the record.
It's a fitting summation of the album, because nothing else sounded like it at the time. All these years later, it remains one of the most distinctive records ever made. It confused a lot of people then, and it still does. But the success of the single "Family Affair," which hit No. 1, drove the LP to the top of the album chart.
It would be the group's last No. 1, though they did manage to make one more great album, 1973's Fresh, before Stone couldn't keep it together anymore. There's a Riot Goin' On touched just about everyone who heard it. Jazz got darker and funkier, funk got darker and deeper, R&B got weirder and druggier and rock 'n' roll got more adventurous and complicated (the Rolling Stones, for one, were influenced by the murky production enough to bury Exile on Main St. in a similar mix). But pop music rarely got this scary again”.
In 2021, Albumism celebrated There’s a Riot Goin’ On at fifty. The feature looks back at 1969 and Sly & The Family Stone playing Woodstock. How it was a strong performance, although the band were dissolving. How bad influences and drugs were coming into Sly Stone’s orbit. It was the end of one chapter. You can understand why there is some darkness and discontent on There’s a Riot Goin’ On. It is one of the most powerful and important albums ever. Documenting the state of a nation in the early-1970s:
“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.
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”.
I am going to end with a review. Before that, The Guardian spoke with a host of stars as they shared their memories and impressions of There’s a Riot Goin’ On. A drug-fuelled landmark album that should have been a wake-up call for America. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On seems like a companion piece. Similarities for sure, though there is something about Sly & The Family Stone’s masterpiece that hits in a different way:
“Nile Rodgers
The statement that the album made to young Black America was one of positivity. A lot of the problems that we were facing – and unfortunately continue to face – we were starting to talk about and deal with directly in our pop music. Black artists traditionally didn’t have the freedom to do that, unlike white artists, but now Sly was at the vanguard of that. It felt like our time had come. You sure can dance to Family Affair, but it talks about the beautiful mosaic of people on Earth. The album was a revolutionary statement. It was liberating and gave a young artist like me, coming up, the ability to dream.
Greg Errico, drums, Sly and the Family Stone
All the stories about the Riot sessions are true. It was a tumultuous time. The group was splintering and there was huge pressure on Sly to make another record just as we were breaking up. We had cut Family Affair and Thank You For Talkin’ to Me Africa with the original band the year before. Then Sly wanted to do it all himself, maybe realised it wasn’t such fun but couldn’t back down.
It went from a traditional studio to the attic of his house – with all the chemicals. He’d knock on my door at 3 or 4am and say: “Come on, I’ve got this part. Get up, let’s start recording!” Other times he’d call the sessions off. Eventually I stopped going, which got him into using the drum machine. It was the kind of thing the guy in the lounge of the Holiday Inn would use to make lame music, but Sly used it very creatively. Starting the machine’s rhythm on an off beat turned the beat inside out and gave a unique sound.
The music was darker because times were darker. When I first heard the finished album, I had a little attitude – “He should have stuck with us” – but gradually I realised it was really creative and lyrically he was talking about what was going on. I started listening with a smile on my face.
Moor Mother
I was trying to learn about the music that came before [Riot] and came across a clip of Sly and the Family Stone doing I Want To Take You Higher live. I couldn’t believe how diverse and how good they were. We come from these kind of segregated places in terms of who’s allowed to do what or play what and he just didn’t recognise those boxes. The sense of freedom was so empowering and has inspired me enormously in terms of being free and taking in everything. He wasn’t bound by sound.
The music and lyrics on Riot are like a collage. It’s like walking through different neighbourhoods, but makes you realise how connected everything is. It jumps around because we’re all included and it’s about raising our vibrations and calling us to attention. I love what hip-hop has been able to do with his music; tracks like the Roots’ Star, sampling Everybody Is a Star. There are no bad samples from Sly and the Family Stone. The music sounds fresh after 50 years because it’s the truth. When you hear Sly, you go to a different place.
Speech, Arrested Development
In the 90s I kept hearing these great drum sounds on hip-hop records and realised they came from Sly and the Family Stone. Their multiracial, multigender lineup was crucial to our evolution: without them, there would be no Arrested Development. Everyday People gave us a chorus for one of our songs [People Everyday] and so they became very dear to me.
There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a ray of sunshine. It shows the humanity of the Black experience in a way that a lot of soul music of that time and today doesn’t. For me, Family Affair is about the ups and downs within a family. Just Like a Baby is so vulnerable and Running Away is so light and airy, yet it’s about hard times in American history for Black people”.
I am going to end with a 2009 review from the BBC. One of many albums that examines and salutes such a pivotal and groundbreaking album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On will continue to inspire for generations to come. It is a tragedy that we recently lost Sly Stone. However, he knew what a remarkable album he created with There’s a Riot Goin’ On:
“As the 1970s dawned, and Altamont, Vietnam and civil unrest signalled the disintegration of the hippy era, Sly & the Family Stone were in a similar state of disarray. Their riotous Rainbow Coalition of funk, soul and rock had captured the optimistic spirit of the psychedelic era. Now, though, leader Sly Stone spent countless unproductive hours in the recording studio, fuelled by a fearsome amount of illicit chemicals, recording mostly alone, with funk luminaries like Bobby Womack, Ike Turner and Billy Preston adding occasional instrumental assistance.
Released in 1971, There’s a Riot Goin’ On replaced the Family Stone’s bright and bold pop with a sound that was blurred by Sly’s endless overdubbing, murky but potent, as troubled as the times themselves. The grooves were edgy, restless: opener Luv n’ Haight was a desperate call-and-response set to fiercely combative licks; Thank You for Talking to Me Africa rewrote their upbeat 1970 anthem Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) as a ghostly, enervated jam: still effortlessly funky, but unsettling rather than uplifting. The gonzo yodel-thon of Spaced Cowboy, meanwhile, sounds every bit as drugged-out and lunatic as the session which yielded it.
Against this backdrop of paranoid and brilliant funk, Riot’s pop moments shone brightly, though this context also lent them a darker edge. (You Caught Me) Smilin’ was winningly vulnerable, a brief flash of joy; Runnin’ Away chuckled bitterly at Sly’s self-destructive tendencies (“making blues of night and day / ha ha, hee hee”). Family Affair, meanwhile, found a mush-mouthed Sly whispering tales of domestic tumult – warring brothers, anguished newlyweds – over drum-machine pulse and melting Fender Rhodes chords, while sister Rose Stone’s soulful vocal hook offered a precious note of optimism.
The song’s blend of painful wisdom and enduring hope (Sly’s croak of “Blood’s thicker than mud”) delivered the group a #1 single, but the parent album’s hazy, disquieting funk left long-term fans puzzled. Years on, however, There’s a Riot Goin’ On is rightfully regarded as a masterpiece for its unique sound, for its bleak tone and wasted mood, summing up the unease and menace of its era as perfectly as their earlier hits had captured the positivity of the late-1960s”.
If you have never heard There’s a Riot Goin’ On, then this is an album that you need to listen to. Read about it and check out as many interviews and podcasts about it. It is one of the greatest albums ever released. One of the earliest examples of matured Funk that would influence the likes of George Clinton and Miles Davis, There’s a Riot Goin’ On had a giant impact on fellow musicians. It has been ranked consistently alongside the best albums ever. Its legacy and importance will grow even stronger in the years to come. This is an album that…
EVERYONE needs to hear.