Sly Stone: A Reassessment

Sly Stone: A Reassessment

THERE'S A RIOT GOIIM' ON SLY & THE FAMILY STONE EPIC

Sorry, gang. The riot�s over. Uh, but you can stay for the after party, even though some of you might claim it�s a wake.

The last Sly single before the great lull was �Thank-you etc.�, a story about, well, fighting the people you have to fight with and escaping with your life and all of the songs the group had recorded and, well, the period that Sly and the Family Stone blossomed in: Youth and Truth are making love Dig it for a start Dyin� young is hard to take Copping out is harder.

It�s here again on the new album: THANK YOU FOR TALKIN� TO ME AFRICA. It�s slowed down to the point of being dragged out. Sly and the Family dragging through their memories and wondering as they go along — is this for real?

�Dance to the Music� exploded during the hey-day of the shing-a-ling, the kind of song that was always good to play through one more time with the same partner. A little later, they came to Detroit for their first concert date. It was one single later, �Life/ M�Lady�, and they appeared with the Chambers Bros, and the Iron Butterfly. The concert was so good that no one really cared; later someone claimed that the people who first jumped up and started the crowd dancing in their seats were paid plants. Sly was so great that you knew the audience would have danced on its own anyways. The act was r&b and soul but feeling all of the things that were budding among the neophyte freeks (remember hippies) and the peace/love/flowers (later dope) generation. They sold tons of records to a mixed audience that ran from ghettoes to suburbs the same way they mixed African styled chanting with wah-wah pedals and psychedelia.

�Luv N� Haight� probably comes closer than anything else on the album to the music that has been Sly at his best: rocking soul with a taste of electronics. The chanting is missing on this cut and the rest of the album, but maybe that was getting too predictable. Starting off saying, �Feel so good/inside myself/ Don�t wanna move,� the song repeats the line incessantly with a few nice instrumental interludes (this is cut one side one: you can�t be bored yet). Unfortunately, the song doesn�t move and leaves you on the edge of your seat waiting for it to really rip loose. The length of the album is a long time to wait. The only movement in the song is for the lyrics to change from �Don�t wanna move� to �Want to move�. Big DEAL!

Sly�s breakthrough was followed by a stream of hits: �Life/M�Lady,� �Sing a Simple Song/ Everyday People�, Stand/You Can Make It If You Try�. His knock-out concerts became THE talk: the time when Sly and Rose ran down into the audience on the Ed Sullivan show, dancing and hand jiving amidst all sorts of people trapped in their tuxedos who probably couldn�t dance anyways. Everyone watched the tv listings to see when Sly and the Family would grace the tube with their presence and pump some life into it.

Their albums provided good material ranging from stuff that sounded pretty much like the singles to bits of wit like �Jane is a Groupie� to the infamous �Sex Machine�, the extended jam of the third album. They also did social commentary, nice tunes like �Everyday People� and �Don�t Call Me Nigger Whitey�. They were �We gotta live together� tunes that really couldn�t hurt anybody, in fact they made a lot of people feel gobd enough to buy them.

A medley of fine tunes that sucked in the audience made them one of the most popular groups at Woodstock and they occupy a good piece of the record, giving it one of its more popular cuts. (I remember the time a friend asked me how tired I was of white kids asking if you thought Sly was �soulful� at Woodstock.) Despite the moving performances of Hendrix and Havens, Sly was probably the black prince of Woodstock. But then where does rock have its roots?

The single, �Family Affair�, is the album at its best. Even after that ridiculous wait for a new single, that tune justified it — especially the first time on the car radio somewhere on Woodward late at night. Like much of the material here, it is reserved and introspective,, sparse in arrangement. But it�s not overdone in any way and the style fits the song about a delicate situation (or group of situations) without becoming either Grude or cliched. Sly even sounds a-little like, you guessed it, Lou Rawls! \

The �Stand� lp was followed by two (2) singles and an immense gap. The talk about the group changed, no one talked about the bomb appearance alittle while ago because they were too pissed off that he hadn�t shown. Even if he did show chances were that someone would tell you that they saw him hanging out of the side of his limo or that he couldn�t pull his stuff together during the set or not until half-way through. There was Sly too, the summer before last, talking on Cavett�s show about how strung out he became on vitamins or health foods or some such.

�(You Caught Me) Smilin� � and �Runnin� Away� seem to be using high pitched voices to talk either as his conscience or good fairy. The former is about getting caught while you�re stoned and Sly sings in the most dragged out Lou Rawls voice one can imagine. The latter tune is self-explanatory.

Maybe the riot, the milieu that the group came to prominence in, the last half of the sixties, has vanished — or at least changed. Maybe Sly feels the same need to get to more of a black thing that drove Hendrix during the latter protion of that artist�s life. True, Sly never got so far from his musical roots as Hendrix was at times accused of. Yet, for a black artist to play the prince of Woodstock can cost a high price in mental orientation when he realizes that he can no longer express faith in that culture.

Sly, on this album, has taken to giving lip-service to Pan-Africanism. Actually, two titles refer to Africa or at least have the word Africa in them. One is the dragged out version of �Thank You� mentioned earlier, the second is a new tune called �Africa Talks To You �The Ashphalt Jungle� �. It rambles about �Timber '. . . all fall down/ timber ... who�s around�; it talks about copping out in vague terms and promptly does so. The tunes are both empty and add nothing to all the gaps, the tiredness and the failures of the past pointed to elsewhere in the album. Sly has offered nothing new other than a superficial hint of moving in a very positive direction ... that or a red herringed cop-out.

Welcome to the after party at least.

W. Kim Heron

SPIDERS IN THE NIGHT ANDY ZWERLING KAMA SUTRA

Would you like to make an album? Not all alone if you don�t want to, because we�d let you bring some friends along.

Okay, now you: Would you listen to his album? Maybe you would. And maybe not. But what if you�d made an album? You�d probably be more willing to listen to his album, huh.

Now for the hard one: Do you think everybody who wants to should be able to make an album?

David Rubinson, Fillmore Records: � ... and that�s where I think the great music of the Seventies is going to come from — people who understand recording techniques well enough to get just the kind of sound they want by carefully choosing a home recorder and microphones and recording themselves in their own homes. That�s where they make music "anyway!! That�s where they�re most relaxed!! So why not???�

Did you like McCartney"!

Who is Andy Zwerling? A kid. He lives on Long Island with his mother and sisters and a couple of Labrador puppies. He writes neat things, some of which you�ve read here in CREEM, and others of which you read in Rolling Stone, and a very nice one of which is inside this album.

He writes songs, too. I can�t relate to a one of them. They�re real smart-New-York-teenager-my st ical-alm o st-tuned-twelvestring-guitar songs. If I were thirteen, I think I�d be closer to them, but I turned that corner a while ago.

I liked �Downwaters/Crosswaters,� come to think of it. Nice production, nice melody, nice lyrics.

Would I ask you to buy this album�, even though I know Andy? Nope.

But if you�re somewhere between eleven and fourteen, I might.

And if you�re older, and want to give something to your younger sister or brother — the one you don�t talk to much — this might be it.

I hope Andy makes another album, because he says it�s gonha be a rock and roll album.

And I hope you make your album, too.

P.S. Lou Reed sez he likes Spiders in the Night. It�s not James Taylor, in case you were worried.

Ed Ward