“I personally feel that ‘There’s A Riot Goin’ On’ was a very truthful album,” Sly Stone told NME in July 1972, less than a year after the release of his unyielding masterpiece, “made and then released at a very truthful moment in time…. I know that the truth always prevails. And that’s exactly what my music is all about: it’s only concerned with the truth and nothing else.”
The album in question is streaked with an ugly truth, made all the more compelling by the fact that its predecessors were joyous explosions of optimism set to immaculate psychedelic soul that made you move your feet, as if the world could simply dance its way to peace and harmony. For while there, in the ‘60s, perhaps people really believed they could. ’…Riot…’ – its title a response to Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Goin’ On?’ – says otherwise.
While the album’s production is muted and creepy, its lyrics laced with poisonous irony, that didn’t harm its commercial chances. ‘…Riot…’ boogied insidiously to the top of the US charts, as did deceptively buoyant lead single ‘Family Affair’, which held its position for three weeks. The single is one of pop’s great Trojan horses, a wedding disco staple that has variously been described as a bitter lament for the band’s disintegration and the absence of social cohesion in America.
Not that Sylvester Stewart, who has died at the age of 82 after a prolonged battle with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), would have cleared things up much. The man better known as the wildly flamboyant Sly Stone was famously elusive, giving elliptical interviews in his late ‘60s and early ‘70s pomp and refusing them altogether when he slid into self-imposed obscurity thereafter.
Born in Denton, Texas, in 1943, Stewart grew up in Vallejo, a coastal city that hangs on the edge of California’s North Bay Area, where his deeply Christian parents encouraged their five children to find self-expression in music. All but one of their children took them up on the offer. In his landmark book of pop history, Mystery Train, author Greil Marcus wrote that the young Sly “played his part in the high school race riots that were endemic in the town”.
He produced rock’n’roll records for Autumn, a local label, before proving himself a natural broadcaster on the area’s KSOL radio station, spinning straight-up soul tracks as well as The Beatles and Bob Dylan. When he formed his band, then dubbed The Family, he chose a line-up that was ground-breaking in its racial integration and pointed in its mix of genders.
With its supremely gifted musicians, including Sly’s sister Rose (on vocals and keys) and white saxophonist Jerry Martini, the idea was to create their own utopia. “I wanted people to look onstage and see the world and how the world can get along,” Stone told The Guardian in a rare interview in 2013. “If they could see us, see we were having fun, it might make it easier for them to catch on.”
The music caught on, though it took a little time. 1967’s ‘A Whole New Thing’, Sly and the Family Stone’s debut album, was an inventive psych-soul concoction that lacked an obvious hit single and the kind of zeitgeist-bottling lyrics that would become the band’s secret weapon.
Label Epic requested a hit, which Stone duly provided in the manically upbeat ‘Dance To The Music’, the title track to the band’s breakthrough 1968 album. The run of albums that this kicked off is simply astonishing, as a trio of records – completed by that year’s ‘Life’ and 1969’s ‘Stand!’ – exemplified and furthered the development of funk with seemingly endless energy and creativity. The latter’s title track epitomised the radical, resistant joy at the heart of their music: “Stand for the things you know are right / It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight.”
What happened next has become core to the lore of Sly Stone: all-encompassing, drug-induced paranoia; a Bel Air mansion in which he armed himself with guns; missed concerts; and rumours of discord within the group. When ‘Riot’ eventually arrived, after a protracted wait, it did so in the context of Charles Manson’s atrocities and that which scarred the Rolling Stones’ free concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969.
So the dream was over. What now? For Stone, a successful attempt to recapture the group’s earlier exuberance, which resulted in 1973’s ‘Fresh’. Despite the record’s genius, it was like the work of a ghost in the machine, steering the Family Stone through slick psychedelic funk and soul that exuded a false sense of unity. Members had begun to quit, with slap-bass pioneer Larry Graham claiming Stone’s bodyguard threatened his life.
After the Family split in 1975, Stone continued to release coolly received albums with a rotating cast until 1982’s ‘Ain’t But One Way’, after which he made only intermittent public appearances (such as a star-packed performance of Family Stone hits at the 2006 Grammys) amid reports of drug problems.
In 2011, he released ‘I’m Back! Family & Friends’, his first album in 29 years, which consisted of re-recorded classics and three warmed-up ‘new’ songs that were in fact around 20 years old. He finally kicked drugs in 2019 and the arrival of his entertaining but curiously unreflective autobiography, 2023’s Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), proved he hadn’t lost his ability to surprise fans, who never forgot the joyous sense of protest in his art.
Creatively and politically, Sly Stone’s influence is immeasurable. On the day that news broke of his death, rapper Doechii accepted the best female hip-hop artist prize at the BET Awards. She slammed the deployment of military forces in Los Angeles, where the ceremony was held, as the Trump administration targeted protestors opposing his immigration raids. “I feel it’s my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people,” she said. “For Black people, for Latino people, for trans people, for the people in Gaza. We all deserve to live in hope, and not fear.”
It was the same message that Sly and his Family Stone began expressing in their fearlessly truthful work, with varying degrees of optimism, almost 60 years ago. The riots have outlasted the man, but they will not outlast the music.