Sly & the Family Stone's 'There's a Riot Goin' On': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that gives you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows
and more. I am so sick of doing the alliterative.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Thing, but we thank you for letting us be ourselves.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
You're right, it was right there. Yeah, I really left
that one on the table. Yeah, I regret the air.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Yeah, but it makes sense for me to do that one.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
And it does, doesn't it? It does, But grammarly just
gave me a pop up that says, this document looks
a bit long, you robot.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Anyway, I'm Alex Hager, I'm Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
And today, in this true spirit of Si Slone, I'm
gonna be talking over Jordan and everything's going to be
panned really hard, left and right and flanging and then.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Be a lot of slap based talks.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
We're talking about Sly and the family stone, though mostly Sly.
There's a riot going on. Sly's death a month ago
was justifiably and correctly met with an outpouring of tributes
for a guy who, for a brief time seemed to
exemplify the musical and social utopian promise of capital t
capital s the sixties. Put in the helicopter with a

(01:22):
fortunate son in there. Yeah, okay, thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
You know, I chired him last week and I almost
told him that we've turned one of his most powerful
songs into a running bit in our podcast. Yeah yeah,
see cool, very cool, very cool. Almost made me cry.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, oh good. I don't think i'd be abre to
talk to him without doing my impression of him. But
I'm good.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Good. It's like Southern Robert Plant. I was thinking about that.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
He's not Southern though.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
I know. Yeah, no, I know long is.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I can see either or not. Okay, So yeah, a charismatic,
wirdly talented musical polymath leading an interracial and intergender band
sliced alone, not befer some I'm going to do this.
Sly Stone was heralded as a visionary and pointed to
as a cautionary example of what happens when black genius
runs aground with the shores of white America. Then the

(02:12):
next day Brian Wilson died and everyone forgot about sly Oh,
I'm kidding, of course, do this to me. I'm kidding
of course, but it does seem cosmically unfair that Sly's
death was overshadowed by one of the whitest men ever
to make music, a guy who's all dude, all white
band got famous pedaling an extremely specific and mostly unreal

(02:34):
version of white America.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
He turned a studio into an instrument for guys like
Sly Stone Off.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
So Jordan is probably going to plan We're probably gonna
have like seven hours on pet Sounds at some point
this year, but before that, we're going to talk about Sly,
and there's a riot going on.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
I'm getting the sense that you're subtly framing me as
a racist right now for the amount of time I'm
spending on Brian on the Beach Boys. This correctly.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Okay, no, not at all. It's just hilarious that, as
I said, one of the most examples of black genius
run them up was immediately abor and forgot about it
because the whitest guy of all time died.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Genius is genius.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Genius is genius. Shamefully, I didn't really get with with
Sly until college. I grew up hearing everyday people. It
feels like every day. At one point in like a
singular wireless ad. And I also find that song really annoying.
I hate sing songy and I hate nonsense lyrics, so

(03:37):
you know, and so Wan and so Wan and Scooby dude,
that just makes my blood boil.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, No, you're you're absolutely correct. I think it was
a toyota ad. It was a Toyota ad that really
did a major disservice to Slies work throughout the nineties
because that song. I still don't think I've actually come
around to that song.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah no, I'm not over it, and neither was neither
was anyone in the band, as we'll learn later.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
On ah Yeah. But the one thing that we have
to thank for it question Mark. It helped popularize the
expression different strokes for different folks. Good.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah, there's a right going on is a remarkable piece
of work, even when you kind of divorce it from
all its crazy circumstances and the personality. It is the
classic death of the sixties narrative going on there. And
even though that's a patently well, that's a facile understanding
of it. It's an overused critical warhorse to talk about

(04:28):
this record. But I think what makes it so unique
is that it is from a black guy, first of all,
and Sly, unlike anyone else, actually managed to genuinely pull
off the quote unquote dream of the sixties. You know,
he had an interracial, intergender band with his actual family
members in it. At one point they were all living

(04:49):
in La together, and.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
He was in control, and he kind of for a
while answered to no one from writing and producing and
performing his own stuff, like Brian Wilson.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
You need to stop doing that. Well, but you know so,
I also fell the furthest of probably anyone in the
music industry, not that I want to measure tragedy porn,
but like for someone who had so many people pulling
for him, and we both have kind of inside information
on this. Yes, Sly was remarkably determined.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
To go his own way.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, yeah, for better or for worse. Yeah, but yeah,
I got into this this record in college, and frankly,
I think it was ahead of me. It actually wasn't
until I really flipped my over d'angelo's voodoo, and then
I just kept hearing people be like, well, D'Angelo just
took his whole vocal overdub approach from Sly and like wow,

(05:43):
and also to the idea of trying to humanize I've
heard I mean just because I heard Questlove also talk
about this. This whole idea of Questlove's drumming on that
album and elsewhere is like kind of taken from Jay Dilla.
He was building beats with MPCs, but he wasn't squaring
them to a grid, So like that was a huge
revolutionary moment in hip hop.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
What's MPC? Sorry, NPC is the multi?

Speaker 2 (06:08):
What actually is it? A medi production center was what
it was originally called, and it was it's this thing
that it's like a it's like an interface. It's got
a sequencer, but it's got these pads on it that
you can drum live on. And Dyla was making the
early slum Village and a lot of those a lot
of his beats by drumming on it live and then
not squaring it to a grid, and so unlike normal

(06:29):
drum machine beats, it has like a human feel to it.
It's often referred to as the drunk Dilla feel because
Quwslov famously said, the first time you heard it, he
was like, is that a drunk toddler playing drums? Anyway,
I think you can trace a lot of this back
to sly Man, because this album is built on the
world's basic drum machine, and then it's got all these

(06:52):
organic grooves going over it. And you know, even people
like dirty projectors, like the way that they were doing
so much vocal hocketing, which I'll get into later. Yeah,
that's from this That's like you can trace that to
this record. And so it's just like learning more and
more about it. I was finally like, I need to
give this thing like a proper true deep dive, and

(07:13):
it is just like such a headphone narcotic masterpiece. You know.
I just did like the classic like huge headphones into
a chair like moment with it, and of course all
his other stuff whips. I mean, like it doesn't take
it much.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
It's it.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
This album is just so unique and weird that it's
it almost sounds like it came from a completely it's
like a completely different project. But that's what makes it
so cool in the context.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, I mean, I love it, and I've come to
appreciate it, especially after working on this episode. But because
I so rigidly adhere to the utopian sixties dream, it's
probably not a huge shock to know that I prefer
his early stuff. I mean not to be that guy.
But as we'll touch on later, if you go all
the way back, there's actually some really cool gospel records
that he made with his brother and two sisters, yes,

(07:57):
when he was a literal child in the fifties, and
it came out on like seventy eights, So it's it's
pretty cool. Definitely track those down. We'll touch more on
that in a bit, but it's so wild when you
listen to those, because he's like, I don't know, maybe
seven or eight, nine years old, it was eleven. His
whole flow is already there in place age eleven, like

(08:22):
his old vocal style and mannerisms. It's really crazy. I mean,
he was very clearly a child prodigy of multiple instruments,
but it's rare to have something on record from somebody
who became so famous that.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Are just fully formed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's so cool. Yeah,
I mean, he got a lot of that from the church,
just because, like I think when his family moved to Vallejo,
which we'll talk about, but it was not a racially
progressive part of California by any stretch, and so I
think he was just kind of locked down to the
church and people would just say, that's like he would
just kind of taught himself everything just hanging out there,

(08:58):
which is.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Yeah. And also I think I mentioned this a few
times on the show. For a while, I had a
sort of a sixties radio show in college, and then
I would DJ Soul nights out in Brooklyn, and it
was kind of then that I got to know Sly
as a producer because he has some bangers that pre
date The Family Stone. There's some solo stuff he did
which is amazing for Autumn Records, but also he produced

(09:23):
Bobby Freeman's Come On and Swim, which is just like
a deathless soul filthy songs. It's beautiful. It's an amazing
party song.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
I also figured you would probably love that he did
production work for The Bowls.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Yeah, they're kind of an American answer to Mersey Beat,
but songs like laugh Laugh and just a little like
they go for like nineteen sixty five. It's pretty intense.
And that's all Sli's doing. But for me, my Sly
albums are Sly and the Family Stone albums, I should say,
of Choice or nineteen sixty nine Stand which has how
I Want to Take You Higher on it, and that
song Whips, But I think my favorite is nineteen sixty eight.

(10:00):
It's called Dance to the Music, and that's kind of
a No Skipps record for me, and I love how
he layers the instruments on the title track. He kind
of builds it up starting with the drums. They're gonna
add some bass guitar, Like that's a fun trick.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
But then so he got that from Boom Doom Doom, Doom,
Doom Doom doom.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, tight, you be on the dreels. Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe I'm not sure. But the song that ends side
one is this twelve minute medley that is psychotic in
the best way. Even at that insane length, you don't
want it to end. It's swirly and weird and it
fits no structure at all. It's just a giant groove

(10:45):
with different sections of like I think everything that you
had just heard. It's basically like a weird, chopped and
screwed version of all the songs you'd heard on the
album up to that point, done in the psychedelic sized whirl.
It's great. Definitely check that out. I think it's just
called Dance to the medley, But this is all before
the darkness sets in and there's a riot going on
is dark. It's been commented upon that the fact that

(11:08):
Sly and Brian Wilson died days from one another is
fitting because both were self taught geniuses who revolutionized the
recording industry by writing, performing and producing their own music
before being sidelined by drug and meoultal health problems for
arguably the rest of their lives. You could, and right
now I will compare there was a riot going on

(11:30):
with Pet Sounds, because both are lonely, studio bound albums
by brilliant men who are losing control. Brian losing romantic
control and Pet Sounds and Sly is much more raw and.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Losing every control.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yes, and they both had bands with their families, which
was not a psychologically good thing for either of them.
But this was music for an era when, as Sly
put it, the possibility of possibility was leaking out and
leaving America feeling drained. He always had a good way
with words to me. This album occupies the same psychic

(12:10):
space as the Beatles White Album or the Stones Excellent
on Main Street. It's this jagged, nightmarish vision of the
cultural landscape.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
It's a feel Bad records.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
It sounds very much yeah, oh yeah. I mean it's heavy,
it's desperate, it's relentless, and like all those aforementioned records,
it's brilliant.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
So from Jesus, I should have filled these in.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Uh No, this is going to be our tribute to
the silent title track.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Oh yeah, instead of our usual thing. Here's four seconds
of silence to indicate that we're about to start Side
two of the podcast, Part one about there's a riot
going on, much like stallone. Sly Stone was born Sylvester,

(13:03):
although his last name was Stuart, on the IDEs of
March in nineteen forty one in Denton, Texas, sight of
my favorite one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs, the
best ever death metal band out of Denton. The family
relocated to Vallejo, California when sly was two, sight of
the first Zodiac murder.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yep, exactly. I'm glad you mentioned that, because I was
going to.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
I knew you were. And by the age of four,
sly was part of a gospel group with his siblings.
His first official recorded release was on the Battlefield for
My Lord with Walking in Jesus Name as the B
side and he sang lead, and he was eleven years old.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
I might splice that in here. It is well worth
checking out. Oh I was walking around soon too.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
M A jesus Is drafted.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Him in the service he could me.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
He took me back.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
I joined the Trisian band. You know that.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
I'm all sly Who.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
Apparently his nickname came when a classmate misspelled Sylvester as
Slyvester and the nickname stuck. He was very quickly recognized
as a musical prodigy. By age seven, he'd already developed
a strong command of the keyboard, and by eleven he'd
added bass, guitar and drums to his growing list of instruments.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, as I mentioned briefly, for a Southern family relocating
to California, especially Vallejo, which is not quite the Sticks,
but it's certainly not San Francisco or Oakland, their biggest
social point was the church. And there was an interesting
bit of commentary in one of his oral histories by
Joel Selvin that basically he says that one of the
reasons Sly went so was so susceptible, I should say,

(14:51):
to like corrupting kind of street influences and like why
the kind of apparatus of cocaine addiction was so easy
for him to fall into and start hanging out with
bad people. Was because he was like not a bad kid.
He was a relatively well behaved, church going child who
was still nevertheless kind of fixated on those elements of

(15:12):
black life. In Vallejo, he like joined a gang, but
it was the only it wasn't like a real street gang.
I think the only reason they let him in was
because he was the only one.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
In a car.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
So there's like, there's there's a sort of element to
that of kind of wanting to be a little bit
more from the wrong side of the tracks than he
might have already been. And to that end, he managed
to find some success with music before he had even
left high school, with a band called the Viscaynes. What
does that mean, Jordan, Is that like Biscaynes.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
I don't know. Let's look.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
They had a near hit with Yellow Moon. Sly was
the only black person in the group, and they made
appearances on local TV shows, but he didn't rest on
his laurels at the time. He was at nineteen, he wrote, produced,
and played on the aforementioned Bobby Freeman's Come On and Swim,
which ended up going gold, and he used the money
to move his family out of Vallejo and into a
big house on the outskirts of San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
I'm just getting such a kick, imagic an era when
you can, you could do that.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
You could buy your.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
Parents a new house on the proceeds from one song
of a gold song. But Bobby Friedman's an interesting guy.
He's hailed as the first rock star of San Francisco
along before all the Hayde Ashbury Summer of Love acts.
His song do You Want To Dance was later a
hit for the Beach Boys and the Mama's on the Papas,
and in nineteen sixty four he played nightly at the

(16:37):
Condor Club in San Francisco's North Beach, home of Carol
Dodo's groundbreaking and of being serious topless go go dancing shows.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, I mean North Beach
is was the center of the beat. So it was
also where a lot of the jazz community was. Well,
I'm getting ahead of myself. I have a whole thing
in here about San Francisco. Damn it, Jordan, damn it.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
We both contributed a lot to this.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, this is a true tag team. Another formative figure
and point of time in Stone's life around this time
was the year that he spent at Solano Community College
in Vallejo, where he studied music with a guy named
David Frolick or Furlicic. This seems like a minor detail
except for like, how much Sly loved this guy. He's
talked about him in multiple interviews, He's thanked in the

(17:22):
liner notes of different records, and though Sly at this point,
as you mentioned, was proficient on a couple of different instruments,
he thanked Frolich at length in his autobiography What did
I learn from him? Everything? We did ear training, which
taught us to recognize chords, scales, intervals, and rhythms. Then
we went deeper reading Walter Piston books like Harmony, Counterpoint,

(17:43):
and Orchestration. Orchestration was almost six hundred pages filled with
big ideas. Walter Piston was a New York composer and
educator who authored a bunch of books on this and
I think he was one of his early Among his
students were possibly Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Kope. I think
Orchestration was almost six hundred pages filled with big ideas, cadences,

(18:06):
irregular resolutions, raised supertonics. Above all, I learned how to learn.
I could get lost in the reading, but mister Frolic
led me out. Take Piston's explanation of counterpoint. The art
of counterpoint is the art of combining melodic lines. The
contrapuntal essence as an ingredient of inner vitality in music is, however,
something deeper than a process of manipulation and combination. Most

(18:27):
music is to some degree contrapuntal. That was like walking
through branches at night. But when mister Frolic explained it,
it was clear, skies. I could see the melodic lines,
watch them intertwine. Music. Education is important people.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
That's very cool. Well, in the early sixties, Slides started
djaying for a local radio station K Soul.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Which was not originally named that. They were just calling
it ksol, And then when they hired him, he started
pushing it more in this direction of soul music and
R and B, and basically coined it as K Soul.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
I didn't realize that that's cool. He also worked with
Billy Preston on an album called The Wildest Organ Phrasing.
It's a great album, actually, Billy Preston, I'm legally obligated
to mention later went on to play with the Beatles
during the Let It Be sessions. During the same period,
sly worked as a staff record producer for Autumn Records,

(19:20):
producing for predominantly white San Francisco area bands like the
aforementioned Bo Brummels, The Mojo Men, who are like garage rock.
I think they have a track on the Nuggets box set,
Bobby Freeman, who he mentioned earlier, and Grace Slick of
the Jefferson Airplanes first band, the Great Society. He put
Gray Slick through fifty takes of their song Free Advice,

(19:42):
which is an early example of his autocratic recording practices.
He also played keyboard for major stars coming through town,
like Dion Warwick, who we saw in the Bay Area
together the Righteous Brothers. Kind imagine if Slyestone had played
keyboards for ninety something year old Off Warwick.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
We saw, I truly cannot cannot. I cannot, I simply cannot.
I lack the powers of imagination.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
The Righteous Brothers, Marvin Gay, as well as at least
one of the three Twist Party concerts for then chart
top or Chubby Checker held at the Cow Palace, yea
in San Francisco in nineteen sixty two and nineteen sixty three.
Is it is the Cow Palace still there?

Speaker 2 (20:25):
I don't think so, or if it is.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
It's not like a concert venue anymore, because everybody who
came through San Francisco in the sixties played there.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
No, it is it is, I was, I was wrong.
It's in Daily City. It's like that's like the ass
end of San Francisco. It's like South San Francisco. So
it's actually quite funny. It's literally on the border. So
half the like a portion of the parking lot is
in San Francisco and the rest of it's in Daily City.
But it's called the Cow Palace because it was the

(20:52):
state livestock pavilion.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
That can't have spelled nice to perform in.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
Well, I think they I don't think it was. They
were temporary of each other. Well, concurrent, I think is
maybe what I wanted to say there.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
I thought I remember there be in some account, might
even the rolling stones seem the kind of the thing
the rolling stones that get stuck with where it was
like some hot summer and they were playing there and
like a like some kind of livestock convention had just vacated,
and you could you could like tell.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
Well, by nineteen sixty six, Sly, after cutting his teeth
ejang and producing other bands, was starting to play in
his own band. I can't believe this was what they
were called Sly in the Stoners. Okay, by nineteen sixty
six they probably knew what that meant.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Then, I'm guessing, yeah, I venture against Okay.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
This included Cynthia Robinson on trumpet, who was later featured
quite prominently in Sly and the Family Stone. Meanwhile, Sly's
brother Freddie had a band called Freddie and the Stone Souls,
with drummer Greg Rico and saxophonist. Saxophonist, you love what
I say that I heard doctor Waters in a Big four.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Because he's British, he would say. He also says aluminimum
and raccoon.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
You know what's the second one?

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Raccoon? What's that raccoon? Hear the difference?

Speaker 1 (22:10):
No, raccoon, raccoon, raccoon. That's a very subtle one. Okay, Okay,
sax player, there are you happy? Jerry Martini, who later
went on to be and Sly in the Family Stone
Bassist Larry Graham was added to the fold. Much more
on him later, as well as pianist Rosie Stone, who's
sly In Freddy's sister, and with that sly In, the

(22:33):
family Stone solidified. It's a lineup.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
I think they were cousins too.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
I think you're right. I think that comes up in
here later.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah, yeah, Larry's cousins with somebody. It gets murky. It
can't be overstated how big it was for signing the
Family Stone to exist in the Bay Area in the
mid sixties, because for all of the hippies utopian talk
of like post racial society and the glee with which
they Pilford Black traditions for their own gain, they were

(23:04):
mostly all white bands, and the bands that were progressive
had just white women in them imitating black people mostly. Yeah,
the Big Three, Grateful Dead, Jefferson, Airplane, Janis Joplin all
white folks. So first Slies band to have Greg Erico
and Jerry Martini and Robertson and Rose interracial, intergender. That

(23:26):
was huge, and especially when you consider San Francisco's issues
at the time, which I wouldn't then get into. Martini said,
I just love the fact that guy's name is Jerry Martini.
Jerry Martini said it was deliberate. He told me about
it before we even started the band. He intentionally wanted
a white drummer. There was a pot full of black
drummers that could kick Greg. Yeah, that could kick Greg

(23:48):
Erico's ass, and there was a lot of black saxophone
players that could kick mine. So I knew exactly what
he was doing. Boys, girls, black, white. And this is
laudable for him because San Francisco has historically not been
very cool to black people. As of the twenty nineteen census,
the percentage of black people in the population was down
to just under six percent, down from thirteen point four

(24:10):
in nineteen seventy.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
That's crazy wow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
And black people have been an overlooked part of this
city's history from the very beginning. There were black people
who arrived from Mexico thanks to the Spanish, and a
few of these people were very wealthy. Juana Briones di Miranda,
a businesswoman of mixed race ancestry, is considered the founding
mother of San Francisco. She was an early settler of
the land but it was still known as Yerba Buena

(24:37):
and an Africribbean entrepreneur named William Alexander leidisurf. It was
one of the people who just helped build San Francisco
period as legitimate city. Black people arrived in greater numbers
in San Francisco during the Gold Rush and the first
and second great migrations of black people from the South
following first the Civil War and then second World War two.

(24:59):
And when the gold Rush ended, facing considerable discrimination, black
people moved into the service sector hotel workers, restaurant workers, this,
that and the other, but they were still discriminated against.
I mean, there's an instance of one of the most
famous hotels in San Francisco at one point just smarily
fired all of them and went with an all white
staff because the unions were controlled by white people, which

(25:20):
is a theme that will repeat itself. But there was
actually even this early on, there were still like havens
for black people in the city. They call it the
Barbary Coast era, which is like just sort of what
the region was called for a time before it had
an official name. There was a place called Terrific Street,
which is a great name for an entertainment district. Is

(25:40):
actually located on Pacific Street in North Beach, which, as
I mentioned earlier, was a big nightlife jazz hotspot. There
were some of the first ever strip clubs there and
it became the Beats kind of social center around City
Lights Bookstore in the fifties. So Terrific Street was actually
Pacific Street, and it was famous for having a bunch
of black and Tan clubs as they were called, which

(26:02):
explicitly catered to interracial audiences in a way that, like
I guess, legitimate clubs could not be called themselves inter racial.
If you ran a quote black and tan club, you
were okay with that. And Jelly Roll Morton, who claims
to have invented jazz, your mileage may vary, opened a
club on Terrific Street in nineteen seventeen. And so World

(26:23):
War two drew a lot of black people to the
city as well. The War Manpower Commission hired a boatload
of Southern workers for the naval docks which were located
in Hunter's Point. Actually, the housing that was constructed for
those workers working at the dockyards is now a notorious slum.
As happens, so between the years of nineteen forty nineteen fifty,

(26:43):
black people in San Francisco went from being a half
percent of the city's total population to four and a
half percent. And actually, the black population of the city
were direct beneficiaries of another horribly shameful part of San
Francisco in California and American history. The Japanese and Tournament
of Night teen forty two left a large number of
unoccupied homes and businesses in the Fillmore district, which quickly

(27:06):
became the focal point of black life and black entertainment
in San Francisco. Eda James started her career singing in
the Filmore in nineteen fifties and it became known as
such a hotspot it was referred to as the Harlem
of the West. And so if you go back to
all of these like mid century jazz stars, almost every
single one of them has a live in San Francisco album.
And of course this could not last. The city's majority

(27:27):
Italian and Irish American populations were notoriously racist, and they
were the power behind the labor unions at the time.
Black people also faced housing discrimination, which got elevated to
the national spotlight in nineteen fifty seven when San Francisco
Giants baseball legend Willie Mays attempted to buy a home
in San Francis Wood, which was a tony planned community,

(27:47):
and he was refused because of his race. Then the
real villain of the story steps in, which is an
organization called the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency that was founded
in nineteen forty eight and did not shudder until twenty twelve,
and they were basically in bed with all the local
real estate power and real estate magnates. Between nineteen forty
eight and nineteen seventy six, they demolished over fourteen thousand

(28:11):
housing units in San Francisco on the grounds of slum
clearance and urban blight. The sketchy part, as if that
wasn't bad enough, was that the SFRA issued thousands of
certificates of preference to anyone who they displaced, essentially, which
are documents that they could then return to and say, hey,
we were here, you guys kicked us out, so we

(28:33):
get first DIBs at new housing. Allegedly, of the eight
hundred and eighty three certificates given to black owned businesses,
only thirty nine resulted in legitimate business relocations. Of the
four seven hundred nineteen certificates given to families, only just
under eleven hundred put families in other homes. So nineteen

(28:53):
sixty nine, after about twenty years this residents of the
South of Market neighborhood created the Tenants and Owners in
opposition to redevelopment. This is a group that charged the
SFRA for not fulfilling its promise of finding affordable housing
for its displaced residents. This was brought all the way
up to the Federal District Court and they ruled against
the Redevelopment Agency. They ruled in favor of the Renters Union,

(29:17):
which was like a weird landmark in history where a
federal judge cited against the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But did you think that the story would be complete
without a cartoonishly evil statement from a white guy.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
No.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
In nineteen seventy, Justin Herman, executive director of the San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency, said about the South of Market neighborhood,
this land is too valuable to permit poor people to
park on it.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
He even got a park named after him, which they
thankfully renamed in twenty seventeen. So that's a lot of information.
But this is all the backdrop against which sly Stone purposefully,
willfully formed an interracial intergender ban and became huge local
stars with that. In this context, Questlove, who produced the

(30:04):
film The Burden of Black Genius, focusing on Sly, said,
I feel like the Bay Area alone shaped Sly's boldness,
his brazenness in terms of not having the fear of
trying something so utterly radical like this intersexual, interracial band.
Without that boldness, he wouldn't have had the legion of
followers that he had.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
What do you make of that, well said Questlove, And
well said Heigel film.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Or is real sad man? I mean, well, everything in
San Francisco is gentrified. But like you know, the whole
reason that Bill Graham was able to open up there
was because it was not valuable real estate anymore by
that point. Same with Jim Jones and opening the People's
Temple there.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
Yeah, I mean he catered to I mean, I guess
they both cater to disenfranchise people in a very different ways.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, Jim Jones was purposely like targeting
black people, but that was because of his own racial
hang ups, as we will discuss, maybe never, because it's
so so sad, it's real bad.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah. Well, speaking of White Devils, Clive Davis, Clive Davis, everyone.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Clive Davis signed Slide in the band after a tepidly
received debut album, A Whole New Thing in nineteen sixty seven.
They did a lot of touring. They hit Las Vegas
for residency.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
You know who loved that tepidly received first album. Who's
that Tony Bennett. That's Tony Bennett, another legend of San Francisco,
if only for that song.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Oh, trust me, we count that.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
Oh you count that? Okay? Good? Yeah? I think it's
for the Bronx though, so we count that too.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Clive Davis supposedly pushed Slide to write with an eye
on the pop charts, which resulted in the band's first
hit single, Danced to the Music. Love that song It's
later the title track on their nineteen sixty eight second album.
With Davis in mind, sly worked on a new approach
to the band's music. Each lead singer in the band
shared vocals by either singing them in unison or taking

(31:55):
turns singing bars of each verse with scat vocals and
instrumental solos. I'm interested in his take or even exposure
to the band. The bands because that seems like something
that they did all.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think the simplest
explanation that I can give is that that idea of
like loose harmony singing exists in every culture, you know,
and as we'll mention, some of the techniques that SLI
used are even like pre civilization period, you know. And
the thing that was so cool about the band is
that they were both coming at it from this aspect

(32:30):
of like, oh, we love the impressions and we love
you know, soul music and everything, but they were also
coming from it as like hillbillies playing like bluegrass and
you know, folk music and church music and white church music.
I should specify, and not that one's better than the other,
even though we all think in it. But yeah, so

(32:51):
I don't know that. I don't know that that's explicitly
a thing, but it would be cool if it was
that they just like heard a lot, cool if they did.

Speaker 1 (33:02):
So.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
The band hated this, however, Jerry Martini says in The
sly Stone Oral History by Joel Selvin, so I hated
this formula. He just did it to sell records. The
whole album was called Dance to the Music Dance to
the Medley Danced to the Schmedley. It was so unhipped
to us. The beats were glorified motown beats.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
It's like my favorite part of that album. That breaks
my heart. I love that. I love the Medley. Actually,
I thought it was like unintentionally groundbreaking thing because it
was like almost variations on a theme, which I thought
was really cool, which I mean, I'm sorry I should
probably say this with the pet Sounds episode, but that's
kind of the way Brian Wilson was working in this
period too. Their outtakes for things that he never finished,

(33:42):
and I think there's some outtakes with something Slide did too,
which had been stitched together into these ten minute tracks
which are all wildly different reworkings of the same simple theme.
And it's the way that a classical composer would work.
It's really really fascinating stuff. But as much as the
family Stone disliked it, the single Dance to the Music

(34:02):
was a huge influence on the music industry, which labeled
this new sound psychedelic soul. Artists like The Temptations directly
responded with songs like their Grammy winning Cloud nine and
maybe Ball of Confusion, and then there are other artists
like the Fifth Dimension in War turning out Sly esque
material and copying the band's style. And as you know,

(34:25):
even Parliament Funkadelic was influenced by the band's fashion sense,
which was dictated by Sly. George Clinton and Sly were friendly,
or at least drug buddies. Yeah, they scored smack together
in a Denny's parking lot, only to immediately get busted
because everyone was like, hey, sly Stone and George Clinton
are in a Denny's parking lot. They're probably doing a

(34:47):
drug deal. Yeah, zo way where you were gonna ask
me something before?

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Oh yeah, what's your take on the whole kind of
psychedelic soul thing. I think it's one of those genres
that gets brought up and then everyone's like, oh yeah,
it's that Chambers Brothers song, and then there's like many
other exact samples of it. I'm asking you as a
soul specialist, especially from stuff like around this era.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
I mean, I like some of it. I think it's
a I'm gonna choose my words really carefully here. I
think it's a rare instance of black musicians trying to
get in on a white sure sounds. Yeah, and because
they're better musicians than a lot of the white people
they're ripping off. It's a bit. It's just inherently better.
I mean there's like like Chubby Checker does a great version.

(35:29):
He had this weird psychedelic era, I say, psychedelic posts
the twist. Chubby Checker sure did a cover of back
of the USSR, which like, okay rips it's so good. Yeah,
it's weird. I mean we kind of talked about this
in the Satisfaction episode. I noticed reading covered Satisfaction, it
was like one of those black artists to cover a

(35:51):
song by a band that grew up worshiping them.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
Basically, Yeah, it is really funny to think, like of
all the like psychedelic bands who were like like you
know great like and all these people who are like,
I've never sang, I'm never sang in front of a
live band before, and you get all these black guys
coming in who've been like, I've been playing on the
Chitlin circuit for years, I've survived stabbings like whatever you want,
you want me to do a psychedelic thing, now, great,

(36:14):
I got it. Roll the tape.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Yeah, I want to know more about the Fifth Dimension
because I actually don't know a lot about how much
they were, you know, a band versus a studio project
that was put together. I mean, they can all sing
their asses off, but they had you know, songs written
by Laura and Iro and songs from the The Hair
soundtrack and whatever, and all their backing I think was
done by the Wrecking Crew, which are the La stud musicians.

(36:40):
So yeah, I like a lot of that stuff. I
think Sly is probably the only one who really was
doing anything innovative, even though I like like the Chambers
Brothers and you know Time Has Coming Today is a
great song. And I'm sure there's probably other less famous
examples that I'm not thinking of right now, but he

(37:00):
is kind of the only one that Oh, well, Hendrix,
I guess, but a lot of that like swirly psychedelic
noodling stuff I wasn't as into as just him shredding
on blop. Yes.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Like Interestingly enough, the Fifth Dimension were like an exact
example of what we're talking about. They started in nineteen
sixty three as a jazz a jazz group called the
High Fives, who opened for Ray Charles in nineteen sixty three.
Then they changed the name to the Vocals, and that
band broke up, and then they added more people and

(37:32):
that lineup that became the Fifth Dimension was called originally
called the Versatiles or the Versatiles.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
They recorded some motown songs as a demo tape and
they sent it to Barry Gordy, and Barry Gordy was like,
you sound great, but I don't hear a hit, and
so of all people, Johnny Rivers had just started a
label called Soul City Records and signed the group and
was like, you guys need a new name, and they

(38:00):
just went like the Fifth Dimension.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
They're like, good, yeah, Jetter Rivers is great. Is even better.
Marylyn McCoo big crush on Marylyn McCoo as a kid,
probably the only kid grown up in the late nineties.
What a huge crush on Marylyn McCoo the Fifth Dimension?
But I did she was she the.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
One who became She was one of them. Was a
beauty pageant like one of them was like almost Miss.
She hosted Solid Gold in the eighties. Oh Florence LaRue
and Marilyn McCoo both won the Grand Talent Award in
the annual Miss Bronze Beauty pageant.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
Miss Bronze almost.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
Interesting, you've missim there anyway. So this new musical formula
struck big with the band's fourth album, nineteen sixty Nine's Stand,
which sold over three million copies. You know that song
from it Stand in the Place that You Live.

Speaker 1 (38:53):
God, that sucks. Sucks.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
I fucking hate that song. Number of hit single, number
one hit single on Everyday People. And by the summer
of sixty nine, Slid and the Family Stone were on
top of the goddamn world deservedly, yes, exactly. The hot
Fun in the Summertime and the aforementioned thank you for
letting Me be mice Elf Again. Both of those were
top five singles, and they nailed the hat trick of

(39:17):
influential summer performances of nineteen sixty nine. They played Summer
Soul in Harlem, the Newport Jazz Festival, and then Woodstock,
which is pretty a pretty good run and.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
Bonus points for missing Altamont. Yes, I think controversial take
might be my favorite Woodstock performers. Oh sure, I mean,
like when he has higher that's incredible.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah, and he's clearly never gotten over it. He like
devotes passages at length about it in his memoir of
just like that being the moment that he knew having
the crowd sing higher back to him, poor guy. One
major fan of this era was Miles Davis, who mentioned
twelve times in his own autobiography he probably didn't mention
his own mother twelve times. For Miles to think positively

(40:07):
of anyone was a huge feat, much less openly admit
he was influenced by them. When I first heard Sly,
I almost wore out those first two or three records.
Dance to the music, Stan, Everybody's a Star. Davis's record
On the Corner, which was one of his big after
Bitch's Brew, which was like so experimental and a big
change for him. He doubled down on sort of the

(40:30):
funk R and B textures and sound with On the Corner,
And when that record came out, people were just like, oh,
you ripped off sly dude. Miles also wanted to work
with Sly on a record, much like Miles just had
his finger on the pulse. I mean, he wanted to
collaborate with Jimmy Hendrix. He wanted to make a record
with sly Stone, and all of these things were derailed
by drug addiction. Basically, which is so sad. He visited

(40:56):
Sly's home studio one point and wrote of the incident,
there were nothing but girls everywhere in coke, bodyguards with guns,
looking all evil. We sorted some coke together and that
was it. Another anecdote that has commonly come out from
their interaction was that Sly was so unnerved by the
like polytonal, like twentieth century harmony chords that Miles Davis

(41:19):
was playing him on his organ that he made him leave.
He was like, those are bad chords, man, that's bad.
Those are bad vibes.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Devil's interval. Yeah, you hear that story about how Miles
Davis and Jimmy Hendrix got together in London and then
they put in a call of Paul McCartney to play bass,
and they were going to try to record something together,
but Paul was like in his farm or something and
didn't get the message and it never happened.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Kind of makes them look bad that they didn't know
any other black people in London. Kidding me, I mean
maybe they thought he would sell records, but yeah, surely
there was another bass player available. God imagine if they
called John, Paul Jones or any player who wasn't Paul.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
They knew the pecking order, they knew who they had
to call pick the first. I think we following him
and he wasn't home. We tried, we left a message
or they.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Were like after meeting each other, they were like, yeah,
there's too much dick swinging going on. We got to
find us someone we can bully, and naturally Paul came up.
I know someone who'd just be thrilled to let us
push him around respectfully to all involved except Paul.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
Well Slide was also close with Jimmy Hendricks, and in
his twenty twenty three memoir he discussed how they were
supposed to hang out the night before he died and uh.
He also talked about Eda James asking him for money
for a plane flight and instead sly gave her a
Cadillac which he just bought, which is not really the
same thing, but but I appreciate the gesture. Unfortunately, she

(42:52):
got pulled over and when they ran the plates, they
determined that the car was stolen. So oh, not a
great not a great gesture.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
No, no, but he uh, he at one point owned
like thirteen cars. He spent money like in this era,
I guess was going out of style.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Did you read his memoir?

Speaker 2 (43:11):
I didn't because I heard that, Like what turned me
off of it was just all these people being like,
so he talks about how he got clean and like,
he talks about all this then, but he still doesn't
really take a much responsibility for most of his no props.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
It was actually really hard to read because it was
very clear that the guy who ghost wrote it actually
the guy who ghost wrote his memoir, Ben Greenberg, sure
his name is, also ghost wrote Brian Wilson's, which I
find interesting. Wow, Like he's very good at dialing.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
In his way into stuff.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
Oh, dialing in on the uh troubled sixties geniuses who
spent their later years as a recluse demographic.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
It's a good beat.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
But yeah, yeah, I'm sure it pays well. But he
clearly had no leeway when it came to editorializing or
any sense of perspective. And as you said, there's zero
sense of remorse for anything that Sly does. There's no
like rock bottom moment at all. There's no like, you know,
I got to get my life together moment. And it
was just all told from Sly's point of view, and

(44:16):
Sly is a stubborn bastard. Sure yees to hear him
tell it. I thought of the Keith Richards quote I
didn't have a problem with drugs, I had a problem
with cops. Like that was sort of like slis general
take here. There's a point in the book when he
says words to the effect of everyone felt like I
was two different people what I was using, but I

(44:37):
don't know what they're talking about. And you want to say, like,
you know, why do you think that was?

Speaker 2 (44:43):
What's so sad is that that is very much true.
And in reading the oral history that I did and
the thirty three and a third on this record, multiple
people verbatim said that, yeah, I mean it.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
He went from a mansion in Beverly Hills to an
RV that had to be parked outside of different friends houses,
and he like that was just mentioned in passing. There
was no like how did I get here? Moment. But
then he spends most of the book talking at length
about very specific thirty to forty year old magazine profiles

(45:15):
that he takes issue with.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
So I don't know, love a score settler.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
Yes, yeah, but yeah, even until like the end of
his life, he would go and see doctors and I'm
talking in like the twenty tens, and like, yeah, if
you don't stop using crack, you're gonna die. And then
he was like, I know, I disagree, Yeah, respectfully or
disrespectfully disagree. I think he eventually did get clean in

(45:40):
twenty nineteen.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Twenty nineteen was what I heard, largely thanks to one
woman whose name is escaping.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
Man, who I think he lived. Maybe I'm wrong. I
think he lived out in front of her house in
his RV. I think she let him park his RV. There.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Should we segue into our slide hour sly stories.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
I don't really know if I have any sly stories.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Oh, okay. As mentioned in the intro slies, drug issues
are well known, like basically every musician in the fifties
and sixties and a lot of writers and blue collar
workers and housewives. And it was a speedy time for America. Yes,
so he was doing the classic uppers to perform, downers
to sleep routine, pioneered by Hollywood and tested on their
most promising child stars. However, cocaine turned into his real problem,

(46:26):
and by the end of nineteen sixty nine, which I
feel is early in his particular, drugs history. He had
added PCP to that, which is not really a drug
that anyone has ever had anything nice to say about.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
No, no, no, Yeah, there is a poignant moment for
all I just said about his memoir in that book
when he talks about a fan coming up to him
at an airport and she's all, you know, going in
a full fan meltdown, load and tears and tell him
what she loves him. And then she hugs him and
whispers in his ear, you got to get your sh together,
which is like hard to hear from somebody in that dynamic.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
Another time his mobile home was repossessed and his friends
gave him money to get it back, and he didn't
use that money to get it back. There was a
time when he was freebasing cocaine and blew up his
bathroom allah his friends Richard Pryor, as he writes, noise, light, fire,
everything time stopped for a second. Then the place was
choked up with smoke, except for one spot over me

(47:22):
that was clear like a halo. I just stared up
at it was I being saved, singled out. I took
a breath and looked around. I couldn't see how to
get to the door. Hey, I hollered, Hey, I've always
came back, come through here. I ran towards the voice
as fast as I could. As I got to the door,
I hit my head so hard on the corner of
the frame that I still have a knot. I was

(47:42):
glad that was all I got. Just always unrepentant about
this stuff.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
In the eighties, Michael Jackson purchased his song rights and
he offered to either sell or, in some version of
the story, give them back to Sly on the condition
that he got clean. But Sly basically told him to
go to hell.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Yeah, I mean so, I guess the goodest place is
anything you can punch into it. When I was a
People magazine, I spent when when it was first heard
that this campaign was mounting to get his songwrits back
to him, which obviously would have made a huge difference
in his quality of life, et cetera. I started working
it and I did an obscene amount of interviews with

(48:24):
like it had to have been like two to three
hours at points, with his legal team.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
I've never heard this.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
Yeah, his his the first to the league guy on
the case, and then the and then like they made
me and that was like an hour and a half
and then he like talking about all the legal ins
and outs and precedents of this case. And then then
they he conferenced me in with the rest of the
team and I just sat there for like forty five
minutes listening to them all kind of cross talk, and
obviously I don't care about the lawyers. I wanted to

(48:53):
talk to Sly. Yeah, So the culmination of all this,
at the end of this last interminable call, I was like, Hey, cool, guys,
this is great, Thank you so much. I think I
got everything I need from the sort of legal end
of this, and you know, obviously I can email you
more questions. Do you think I'd be able to talk
to Sly about this at any point? And there was
a long awkward pause and then the main lawyer said,

(49:16):
we don't know where he is, and that was the
end of that experience for me. But like, and then
it was just a very awkward silence that followed, because
you know, what do you say to that, Yeah, what
are you going to get how are you going to
get him his money? Man?

Speaker 1 (49:32):
What do you like?

Speaker 2 (49:34):
So eventually they found.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
Him or I'll see was this when he was he was.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
In an RV. Yeah, down by the river. No, I
mean legitimately, I think he was like he was partly
down in skid row in like La and actually living
by the river. But yes, there's that, there's that partly bit.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yeah, he was getting cracked from members of the Bloods,
I believe, And so with this woman whose house he
lived out in front of for a long time, who
he credits with getting and clean, would literally chase off
these gang members who were there to sell him drugs.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
That's wild.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Yeah. No, I did not get anywhere near as far
as you did. When I tried to interview him when
his memoir came out a couple of years ago, it
was immediately like, nope, sorry, he's not speaking especially to you, cracker. Yeah,
I can hear by Tony your email you're white as
the day is long. But there is a great profile

(50:27):
that was published in the Guardian I think around this time.
I think it was an email interview by the great
music journalist Alexis Patritis, and he has this great line
that I liked. Some people thought his behavioral was admirable.
A black artist demanding agency and an industry built on
denying black artists agency some people just thought he was
unbearably arrogant. I am who I am when I am it,

(50:49):
sly shrugged at one Rolling Stone reporter as he told
me I never lived a life I didn't want to live.
I thought that was a cool line.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
Powerful powerful, like just a refusal to blink in the
eye of it, or just nuclear grade self delusion.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Two things can be true at the same time. I
know it's because we worked in this realm for a
long time, but I do want to share this kind
of funny, behind the scenes story from this journalist Alexis
Protitis about the lengths that he went to to get
an interview with sly Stone. This would have been back
in twenty thirteen. He said, it was around the release
of Hire, a lavish retrospective box set, and it remains

(51:28):
the weirdest experience of my journalistic career. Negotiations to bring
Slide to the phone went on for weeks. I called
repeatedly at the appointed times, to be met by an
answering machine. You called, or did you? We'll call back,
it said, with no option to leave a message. Eventually,
Slide picked up the phone and literally told me to
pick off. He wouldn't do an interview unless he was

(51:49):
paid in advance, which I should say most places, or
at least people in any place I've worked for you
do not pay for interviews. No, after further negotiations, I
tried again. He spoke for twenty minutes, told me he
wanted to form a new band made up of musicians
with albinism, which would quote neutralize all the different racial problems.
Then excuse himself to go to the toilet. You asked

(52:10):
me about regrets. He said, if I don't take a
big right now, I'll regret that.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
I do remember that quote. Actually, yes.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
Shortly afterwards, his archivist called me. Sly wanted to know
if I knew the British royal family, as he had
a plan to earn money teaching music to their children.
I mean, sure I would.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah, I'd leave my children with slyestone as you meditate
on that, we'll be right back with more. Too much
information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (52:53):
So the main takeaway here is Sly had some issues
with drugs. So back back to nineteen seventy, Back to
to Sly reaching his apex and the way.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
So far. It didn't take long for these habits to
start impacting the band's fortunes. It took months. In fact,
after their landmark nineteen sixty nine, Sly and the Family
Stone missed out twenty six of the eighty dates they
booked that year. This also extended to the studio label execs.
Stephen Paley has said that Sly would book studios and

(53:27):
not show up, which definitely precipitated the label's interest in
setting him up to record at home. Sly also faced
another problem in that nineteen sixty eight had happened, which
did considerable damage to his Summer of Love ideals. The
Black Panthers, who must be said started in Oakland, across
the Bay from San Francisco, were among the voices that

(53:50):
placed pressure on Sly to abandon his vision and embrace
a more pro black stance. According to manager David Kropollock,
who doesn't really he come off that great. He basically
talks about like, yes I did a bunch of coke,
and yes I descended into drugs, but it was just
because of how cool Sly was Anyway, he says. Jerry

(54:11):
Martini is the one who told me that in Boston,
some Black Panther members tried to get Slide to drop
me get rid of Whitey, get rid of the devil.
He wouldn't hear of it.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Boston's not a good place to have that conversation.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
Well played. Slier used wore a star of David around
his neck, which many people believed was his tribute to
this his David Kropolic as Jewish manager in the early years.
But Sly's concession to these ideas at least, well, he
didn't convert. It wasn't a Sammy Davis thing. It was
just he was wearing a star of David anyway. Sly
didn't turn a deaf ear to some of these developments,
though the original title for Riot was Africa Talks to You,

(54:48):
which is a reference in its track titles. One more
heartwarming anecdote about Sly's championing of his White Devil buddies.
When the band played the Apollo in nineteen sixty nine,
they entered with their usual routine. Greg Erico starts on drums,
rest of the band joins one by one. Fortunately, greg
Erico was Italian and therefore dark enough to pass for biracial,

(55:12):
and when Jerry Martini came on stage, the whole Apollo
started booing him and Sly had to come out on
stage interrupt this whole rotune and explain to the audience
that Martini might be white, but he was also a
great saxophone player, and if they wanted Sly in the
family Stone, they wanted both black and white musicians. And
a woman in the audience supposedly shouted out, all right,
send him out here, and the tension was diffuse, And

(55:37):
amid all of this, the label was also on Stone
for that sweet sweet product. He said in October of
nineteen sixty nine, the record company wants another LP by February.
This is important to note that they'd put out four
records in three years. I think at that point the
early one then.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
That's the music there was. Life was the third one, Yeah,
also in sixty eight, and then Stand with sixty nine.
So yeah, it's just four and two years.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Yeah, and they wanted another one by seventy February of
the following year. He said, we could do some good songs,
but that would just be another LP. Now you expect
a group to come out with another LP in another
There's got to be more to it, but what can
you do? So as a stopgap, the group released three
singles Thank You, Everybody Is a Star and Hot Fun
in the Summertime, and these were lumped into nineteen seventy's

(56:26):
Greatest Hits Album, which was a stopgap measure released in
nineteen seventy when it became very clear that Slide was
going to blow several deadlines.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
That's a hilarious move to release a greatest Hits album
for a band like.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Three years after they s Yeah, making top.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
Tens for two years, that's insane. And it's also because
of Spotify and streaming services. Artists in the last ten
years don't have greatest Hits albums anymore. That think of
like Taylor Swift that mean the Greatest Hits album or
Billie Eilish or something. Yeah, I think they're just going
to die out, which you know, I find kind of sad,
I do.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Man, Like you know when you're like a I mean,
this is now a point in time that is no
longer relevant, But when like I was a kid and
I didn't know anything about any of these bands, incredible
entry point. Yeah, what do you what more do you
want to have a greatest tit? I'm not gonna wade
through like Amma Gumma and a saucerful of secrets. To
get to Pink Floyd when I'm nine? Did you get

(57:20):
echoes too? Like I echoes? Forty licks was a big
one for Rolling Stones, Like I think there's nothing wrong
with the greatest tips. I mean, I think the real
problem is that Spotify Digital Music have let Spotify and
labels in the record industry push exactly what Sly is
talking about to the nth degree, to the point where

(57:43):
you know that Swedish piece of who runs Spotify was
quoted as saying, like, oh, it's just unreasonable for artists
to think they can only release an album a year
at this point. That's why it's just an everlasting stream
of tracks. I hate that guy, Thank You and Everybody's
a Star with a final. Family Stone Recordings issued in

(58:03):
the nineteen sixties and marked the beginning of a twenty
month gap of releases from the band, which would finally
end with the release of Family Affair as the lead
single off There's a Riot Going On. Good Time is
anything to talk about? Larry Graham the architecture of slap
and pop bass playing, which can be heard notably in
Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself Again. I don't

(58:25):
know how to say that I want the whole thing
like tribe called Quest Style Jordan. I know we're not
allowed to put songs in particularly, but there's an instructional
video where Larry Graham talks about this.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Oh do you think we could put that in there?
I will try to put that in there. Yeah, what so.

Speaker 2 (58:40):
Than wait lay. Larry Graham had been playing guitar in

(59:05):
a trio or in a group that was doing like
kind of cocktail gigs and stuff, and then their drummer left.
I believe he was forced to switch over to bass.
He was playing with his mother in his mother's band, actually,
so he switched from guitar to bass, and then they
lost their drummer, and so he developed this idea of
basically mimicking the drum set with his bass lines and

(59:27):
you know slap bass where you're just kind of hitting
the string percussively enough to add the sound of it
really hitting the fingerboard that was actually present in like
rockabilly music and even early jazz. There's a lot of
New Orleans bass players did that. There's a track on
Charles Mingus's Blues and Roots called My Jelly Roll Soul

(59:49):
that is like a love letter to New Orleans jazz
and jelly roll Morton, and he's playing like really aggressive
slap bass on it. So that was not unknown to
bass players, but certainly became much more easy with an
electric bass because the strings are parallel instead of arced,
and so basically Larry Graham was playing. The essence of

(01:00:10):
it is playing the kick and the snare at the
same time that you're playing your bass lines. So you
hit it. The downstroke is generally with your thumb. That's
the thump, and that's supposed to sound like a bass drum.
And then the pop, which you're doing with your index
finger or middle finger, is actually going under the string
and pulling up to get that sound of it snapping

(01:00:32):
against the frets and the fretboard, which is imitating the
higher pitch sound of a snare drum. And people have
taken this technique and gone absolutely batched with. Victor Wooten
is one of the guys who is credited as doing
you know to without going down too deep of a
rabbit hole. He essentially adds multiple thumb strokes to it.

(01:00:52):
It's called double thumping, so he gets like two or
three hits out of his thumb and then pop with
almost every one of his other fingers, So he gets
these really insane runs and all this stuff done that
with that style that really shouldn't exist. But you know,
you started hearing this, it was the sound of funk
bass essentially. I mean you started hearing it. Brothers Johnson,

(01:01:15):
Louis Johnson was another bass player who was a big
formative guy as far as how that came across in
the funk genre. But Larry Graham deserves the credit as
the main guy for that, and it's quite a shame
that he stopped being able to get to do it
because he was written out of the band's recording process
thanks to a whole lot of drama, which we will

(01:01:37):
get to now actually.

Speaker 1 (01:01:39):
In a section called there's a drama going on.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Intra band tensions had also emerged during the band's meteoric rise,
the kind of tensions that don't really get better when
you're suddenly world famous and have just to move to
La which the band did in nineteen sixty nine. Clive
Davis later wrote of this time period, Slide was simply
not producing albums at all. I heard stories that he
was laying down hundreds of instrumental tracks in Southern California Studios.

(01:02:04):
Without vocals, there was strong speculation that he would never
sing again. We will return to how this white devil
precipitated that later. So in La the band had moved
into a large house previously owned by John and Michelle
Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas also deeply haunted
members of the musical scene. Yeah, not the best karma

(01:02:24):
for your house to have, no I feel by them.

Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
I would assume that was actually probably where their marriage
finally ended, because Michelle had an affair with the other
Papa and the Mamas and the papa's Danny Doherty and
John Phillips. Let's see, he was hanging out with the
Roman Polanski. Roman Polansky had an affair with Michelle Phillips also,
and then when Sharon Tate was killed, Roman assumed that

(01:02:50):
John Phillips had done it and snuck into his house
and dusted his rolls Royce looking for traces of blood. So,
if your wife is murdered and the first person you
think that might have done it as John Phillips, John
Phillips probably not a good guy.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
And then he's also famously been accused.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
Of incesture relationship with his daughter McKenzie.

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
Yeah, there's no real way to phrase that delicately.

Speaker 1 (01:03:14):
Is there? Just the facts, ma'am, Yeah, just the facts.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
Gross, so sad anyway, not a great house to move into,
But it did have a hidden recording studio in its attic,
accessible via a bookcase in the one bedroom, which is
so cool.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
Yeah, but I don't like the fact that it was
hidden because for for John Phillips anyway, Yeah, that guy, Yes,
a hidden space.

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
Yeah, he shouldn't be allowed to hide things allegedly. But
what happened was essentially, with slies, increasing paranoia, cocaine induced,
PCP induced otherwise uh and his work habits, it became
something of a prison, and band members literally referred to
it as such. Sly would grill people about when they
were leaving, when they'd be back, who they were leaving with,

(01:04:01):
who was coming back. He would also start whenever he wanted.
He famously banned clocks in the house so that he
could work on his own timetable, which would often mean
hanging around. The band would just hang around for hours
until he called them up to do a horn part
or whatever, and Jerry Martini sex offenist Jerry Martini would

(01:04:22):
later say he tried to pull us together as friends again.
Come on down and see it again. Let's make it
like the old days. I went for it. I became
a coke addict, drug addict, vegetable sitting around waiting for
my line like the rest of these holes.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
I assume he doesn't mean that he became a vegetable addict. Also,
I guess while we're here with sly getting other people
hooked on drugs. In his memoir, he also claims that
he gave Grace Jones her first taste of crack, which
she mercifully hated. He wrote, I was on Grace to
smoke some crack. That's a vote for the HS. She

(01:04:54):
got royal about it. Also, Gretline, no thank you, she
said in her slippery Grace Jones accent. Amazing. I kept
making the case. This is an incredible economy of storytelling here.
Eventually she came around. I'll try it, she said. I
don't like it. She said I couldn't believe it. Who
did it once and stopped a valid point? Yeah wow,

(01:05:19):
Jesus okay.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
Slide also hooked up with your friend and mine, Terry
Melcher around this time, whom the other members of the
band emphatically did not like an earlier visit to la
Before he moved, Slime met Terry Melcher's good friend Charlie
Manson and his own family, no doubt, no doubt, marveling
over the very different meanings that word can have.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Yeah, Yeah, I'd like to quote that brief section of
Sli's memoir in full. One of the other people in
Terry Melcher's circle was a short, intense guy who'd kicked
around the music business for a few years and kept
auditioning for Terry. Terry was a record producer. His name
was Charlie Manson. I crossed paths with him a few times.
Some times he'd be give an opinion and I'd give

(01:06:02):
the opposite, and we'd have a little disagreement. They weren't
even about songs. They were about nothing. Turn the lights
brighter or darker, open or close the door. He's having
like a Seinfeld moment with Charlie Janson. Whichever way I went,
he'd go the other way. Terry wasn't gonna sign him
to a record deal, but he also didn't tell him

(01:06:22):
to leave, partly because Manson made everyone uncomfortable. I remember
once getting the feeling that he shouldn't be there anymore.
We have to get out of here, I said, it's
time to go. I went to the door, walking real slow,
making sure Charlie came along. Then when he was at
the door, I turned and went back in and worked
on some songs with Terry. I didn't put it all
together until later. Manson had his family and I had mine.

(01:06:46):
One of his tex Watson was really named Charles too,
but they called him text because he was from Dallas
and even lived in Denton where Sly was born. For
a minute, small world, sometimes too small. That house that's
I was talking about very well, maybe the house on
Sila Drive that rum and planskins Sharon Tate moved into
where the murders happened.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
So does that it's weird to have It's weird to
have the appearance of someone with worse vibes. Yeah, than
the round the clock cocaine and guns sessions that were
there's a rade going on.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
But hey, you know, well controversial question. Could it have
just been that Charlie was more powerful than him in
those settings?

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
Well, I mean Sly is also like again not to
speak ill of the dead, but he was also like
a real quick to temper kind of guy, even before
I think the drugs, Like there was some random anecdote
about them, like when they were touring in Vegas or
something about like being pulled over and you know, unjustly
and racistly. But Sly was like not behaving as a

(01:07:56):
survival oriented black man of the time would be, and
the rest of the band was like sitting there like, Sly,
shut up, dude, like we need to get out of
we need to live, we need to get out of here.
Do you want to be yourself again? And he did
uh also to appoint this era. I didn't find an

(01:08:18):
exact date of this, but it needs to be mentioned
that Sly and one of his thug buddies, so at
one point he basically just got a bunch of like
local street tufts and heavies, and they created a real
schism between the other musicians and everyone because people were
having sex with everyone and these guys were basically just
around to like have guns and hold drugs and like
beat people up. But so Sly and one of these cats, JB. Brown,

(01:08:43):
once beat the shit out of three Dog Night. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:08:46):
Jeremiah was a.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
Yeah, I was invited to a party with Three Dog
Night in New York, said JB.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
Brown.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
So Sly says, let's all go down. We went down
to his hotel room, knocked on the door and this
guy gets out of line, so Sly smacked him. Then
we were fighting Three Dog Knight. Well it wasn't a fight.
We beat them up, me and Sly. Then we got sued.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
While we're here, should we talk about Three Dog Knights
exploding penis?

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
I think it's that time.

Speaker 1 (01:09:14):
Yeah, folks, welcome to a section we like to call
an exploding penis going on. That was so hard to

(01:09:35):
do the straight face. In the nineteen seventies, Three Dog
Knight became one of the biggest bands in America with
hits like Mama Told Me Not to Come, Never Been
to Spain, Joy to the World won and the rest.
The run at the top came with all the usual
trappings of rock stardom, rampant drug use, financial missteps, and
a revolving door of romantic entanglements euphemism, but among all,

(01:09:58):
they're behind the scenes chaos. The most infamous story to
emerge involved singer Chuck Negron's penis That's an incredible prog
rock band name. According to Negrin. His prolific groof be
escapades led to such severe swelling and chafing that he
was forced to seek medical help. After an examination, his
doctor warned him that if he didn't take a break

(01:10:19):
from sex, he could do serious damage, much like Slide
probably would have done. Negron ignored this advice, and he
paid the price. During a particularly enthusiastic encounter with a
former Miss America contestant, Negrin says, I can't say this face.
Negrin says he heard a quote whooshing sound as his

(01:10:41):
overworked members split down the middle, quote like a hot dog.
That alone would be horrifying, But in the aftermath, while
he's being treated the emergency room, Negridge entered laughter and
whispers from the hospital's staff as they stitched him up.

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
Yeah, no shit.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
Now sober for many years and having lost the fortune
that he earned a three Dog Knight to his drug addiction,
Negrin says he looks back on the incident with what
he calls, quote some amusement anything to add I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
Even no, no, I got nothing. I mean like, I'm
not a doctor. Why would I weigh in on this?

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
One of the new shows I'm working on is a
men's health show with the tenantive title The Mailroom with
a urologist from UCLA, doctor Jesse Mills. Okay, I may
ask him about this. We're tapping our pilot on Monday.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
I think you very much should.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
The people weigh with baited breath. Also waiting with bated breath.
No was the White Devil Clive Davis. He suspended Sly's
record contract over the protracted weight over Riot, which I
guess is fair, except that it also stopped Sly from
collecting royalties on anything he'd done previously while it was

(01:11:55):
held up in court. So for months he could not
make any money from any of his other hits, and
so he was poor, coke addicted, PCP addicted, increasingly paranoid,
and all of this dovetailed into a Kurt Cobain level ulcer.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the minutia
of a deceased grunge icon's medical history, many people suggest

(01:12:17):
that the reason Kirk Cobain turned to heroin, which would
ultimately add to his demise, was because he had a
severe stomach ulcer that left him in you know, unendurable pain.

Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
That right, that's certainly a factor.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it didn't put a shotgun in
his mouth, but maybe it helped anyway. So Sly was
prescribed placidyl, which is one of the least euphemistic drug
terms I've ever heard. It's a sedative. So he would
take that to double the pain and go to sleep
and then take coke to wake up from that, et cetera.

(01:12:52):
Another George Clinton anecdote I want to throw in here.
At one point Stone decamped to Michigan to go to
George Clinton's farm on what I think was an ill
conceived attempt to clean up, because why would you get
anywhere within miles of George Clinton trying to get clean?
But he was so broke he couldn't afford drugs. So

(01:13:13):
George Clinton knew a dealer who was a super Sly
fan and had him show up to the farm. And
Sly was like, well, I'm a little light, but I
can give you this tape of music that I've been
working on. This unreleased Sly tape that you can hold
is collateral until I do have the money. You just
can't listen to it or tell anyone about it. And

(01:13:35):
he describes this guy's eyes lighting up like he was
just about to get traded the Holy Grail for coke.
But as the guy drove off, Sly started laughing and
George Clinton asked him what he was laughing about, and
so I was like, there's nothing on those tapes. The
drug dealer did eventually discover this fact, but again, according
to Sly, he was not mad, simply saying you have
to respect that, which like you found the one nice

(01:13:59):
drug dealer in the world, because many of them would
not say they had to respect that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
Or he's completely lying because this is like his standard
thing in his memoir, his highly Suspect memoir. They weren't
even mad.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
Like yeah, no one was mad at me. No, no,
I mean, I'm just a little guy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:18):
There's this like really heartbreaking story where he says he
goes to see his son with a grand in his
pocket to buy him Christmas presents, and his son's like,
I don't know, like ten, and he says on the
way to his sons as he keeps stopping at various
places to score drugs and by the time he's with
his son, he's out of money, and he writes, I
felt terrible, but I was straight with him, tell truth
to the youth man, I said, I have nothing left

(01:14:40):
for you. I spent it on dope. He wasn't mad,
and if he was sad, he hit it. He just
looked at me, clear eyed and told me he would
get it next year.

Speaker 2 (01:14:49):
I just have a hard time believing that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
Yeah, sorry, Yeah. The lack of any kind of ownership
of his stuff in this book is really hard to take.

Speaker 2 (01:14:58):
Yeah, and also just like again, like what child hears
that and is like, no, it's cool, Like your life
revolves around Christmas presents at that point, especially from your
I don't want to say the deadbeat, but it's a word.
Was he a great father?

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
Do we think there's an anecdote in a little while
that I think can answer that question.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
Drummer Greg Erico was the first member of the original
lineup to leave after Stone recorded or during I think
the Riot sessions, or immediately before. Obviously, with so many
unreliable narrators, it's very difficult to get a precise chronology
of this process. Because his replacement is also on Riot,
which we'll talk about in a twenty nineteen interview, Erico said,

(01:15:41):
I left because I didn't see a path or anything
I could bring to the table any longer to change
the situation. And it's really a tragedy. No one died
or anything like that, but I mean it's a tragedy.
The focal point changed from it all being about the
music and our relationship to chemicals. Larry Graham would leave
in nineteen seventy two after years of drama that started
when he was in a relationship with Rose Stone and

(01:16:04):
one of Sly's new criminal buddies, the afore mentioned Bubba Banks,
also had a thing for Rose and was not happy
about this. He did eventually persuade her to leave Graham,
which she did, and then she married Bubba and divorced
him in short order. But because of how close Bubba
was to Sly, and because there was already sort of

(01:16:25):
a clash of egos between Sly and Larry, like both
of them kind of thought they were the ship, and
they were. But there's only one in a band that
has your name on it, and it's not the bass players.

Speaker 1 (01:16:37):
I learned that the hard way in your band.

Speaker 2 (01:16:39):
Oh oh, don't tell the people. I was some kind
of a monster.

Speaker 1 (01:16:46):
You were not. You were a benevolent dick there. You
were thinking you're the best band leader.

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
Thank you, thank you. Yeah. So things got so bad
over this that they both believed that they had taken
a hit out on each other at points and were like,
there's there's a stuff in the oral history about like
Larry Graham like making other people open the foot of
his car, like start, like they were really really concerned

(01:17:13):
that the other one was just going to straight up
kill the other one.

Speaker 1 (01:17:15):
No, I mean, okay, cocaine, hell of a drug, et cetera. Yeah,
given the people that Sly hung out with, I could
almost see it being like an accidental hit, like you
know what I mean, Like, no, I don't this guy's
this guy's really pissing me off.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
Someone should do something about that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:34):
Yeah, and then it's like no, no, no, no, no, no,
it's not no no.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
That yeah yeah yeah, maybe let's make the boss happy. Yeah.
Larry would add that on Riot he never played live
with any of the other band members. I think he's
only on two tracks of it, and sometimes he would
find out later that Sly had replaced bass parts he'd
already recorded.

Speaker 1 (01:17:56):
I went on some like I forget it was Steve
Hoffman or what but some rabbit hole about how you
could tell who's playing what, and you could always tell
it Sly because Sly liked using a pick.

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
Yes, actually I was about to say that later. Yeah,
like you hear his He comes at it like a
guitar player, where his lham plays like a bassist. Which
is why, boys and girls, if you're one of those
guitarists that thinks you can just switch to bass real easily,
you can do that, but we all laugh at you
behind the bucks. We all know we can all hear

(01:18:29):
it anyway. Greg Erico told The Guardian all the stories
about the Riot sessions are true. It was a tumultuous time.
The group was splintering and there was huge pressure on
Slide to make another record. Just as we were breaking up.
We had cut Family Affair and Thank You for Talking
to Me Africa with the original band the year before.

Speaker 1 (01:18:47):
Then.

Speaker 2 (01:18:47):
Sly wanted to do it all himself. Maybe realized it
wasn't such fun, but couldn't back down. He'd knock on
my door at three or four am and say, come on,
I've got this part, get up, let's start recording. Other
times he'd call the session off. Eventually I stopped going,
which got him into using the drum Machine.

Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
And he would later hire Andy Newmark, who went on
to play with John Lennon I think for his Double
Fantasy Session, the last album that he made before he
was killed. So that's my one. That's my one, Beatles one.
Thank God, thank you for talking to me Africa. That's
a reworking of thank you for letting me be myself,

(01:19:22):
as we'll talk about later. Is that re recorded entirely?
Or is it the original tape slowed down and manipulated
sliced up?

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
I mean I don't have those ears. Yeah I would,
and I certainly didn't develop them today, So like I
maybe could find that out if or like really give
it a deep listen.

Speaker 1 (01:19:46):
But yeah I can't.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
Yeah, it was enough for me to like go in
and try and just constantly listen to like is that
Larryers or Sly? But yes, the tail is the pick
and also just like so much other string noise and
stuff like he's he's not as good a bass player
as the professional bass player. What a shock. So Greece
is all the background and contemporaneous information and context that

(01:20:11):
Riot needs to be properly talked about. But before we
dive into the bel Air Mansion part of this just
take a brief detour into Sunnier Climbs. The record plants
newly open Northern California location in sas Alito. We touched
on this a bit in the Fleetwood Mac Rumors episode,
but Sly was a very big client of these guys,
and so after Riot actually came out, Slide convinced the owners,

(01:20:34):
Gary Kelgrin and Christone to convert one of the offices
in the sas Alito location into something that was eventually
dubbed the Pit.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
This is after Riot came out.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
He'd been recording there again Timeline, everybody was doing a
lot of drugs. But my understanding is that he had
been recording with them there before and then was like,
can you build me this pipe dream of a studio
and they were like, okay, man, and then they did.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
So.

Speaker 2 (01:21:01):
I don't know how much of it he actually really
used or how much time he spent there. I know
it was his crash pad for a while, as we'll
talk about anyway, The Pit was a recording studio that
had a recording console and a sixteen track tape machine,
but they were a full story underneath the rest of

(01:21:21):
the situation of the of this room. It was like
a two tiered room, and the musicians were set up
on sort of a I don't even know what the
technical touris. No, like a ledge. It was like the
circular ledge that surrounded this sunken area.

Speaker 1 (01:21:37):
It was like a giant conversation pit. And then the
musicians were on top.

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):
Of yes, exactly, and Sly would like he also would
like make the B three get lowered down into there
to play. But it was also all covered in plush carpet.
I'm sure like Hella Shag Yeah, so absolutely acoustically dead
space psychedelic murals that she was all embroidered. Bob Welch,
who was at the record Plant recording with Fleetwood Mac,

(01:22:02):
would say, you're laying on this carpeted floor, guitars on
your lap, pillow under your head. I remember watching Rolling
Stone's bass Bill Wyman doing vocals at one point, lying
down with a bottle of brandy and a mic jack
stuck through the wall. Kelgrin later built Stone his own
apartment for his extended stays at the record Plant, complete
with a small office, lounge, bathroom, and bedroom. The bed

(01:22:25):
was accessible by climbing through a huge pair of bright
red upholstered lips to get into this bedroom part. But
they also ran connections into the headboard of the bed
so that you could record vocals while lying down in bed.
And as a final grace note, I think the pit
was also equipped with black lights so that you could

(01:22:46):
flip them on and turn off the incandescence and find
all the coke that you previously hadn't been able to see.

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
And we talked about this recording space in the Fleetwood
mac Rumors episode because this is where Stevie Nicks came
to hide away from the absolutely rancid vibes in the
studio with Lindsay and everybody. She would sneak into Sly's
disused private studio with her notebook and that was where
she wrote Dreams. He wrote the lyrics to Dreams in

(01:23:17):
Sly's circular bed, if I recall yeah with his roads. Yes, yes, yes,
I've been desperately trying to find photos of all of us,
but to no avail. If you were a loved one,
have images of the bright red upholstered lips that led
to a loft in sly Stone's private day area studio
in the early seventies, Please get in touch the studio.
Musician Al Cooper, who played the organ part on Like

(01:23:39):
a Rolling Stone, said it looked like something out of Thunderdome,
which I love.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
Did you ever hear the other Al Cooper story about
the pit. No, At one point they got really into
nitrous oxide and they just had a tank of nitrous
oxide there all the time through like a crooked dentist,
and he loved it so much. Al Cooper did and
like had a real problem with apparently he was just
like about to become a nitrous addict. But that eventually

(01:24:05):
went away when they just found someone passed out under
the controlled desk with the nitrous tube still in their mouth.
Because you know, airtight studio you're doing, you're doing inhillents
in there. Not generally a smart combination, but you know,
it was the seventies.

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
This footage of the dead, I'm pretty sure it was there.

Speaker 2 (01:24:26):
Yeah, because they did working man's there.

Speaker 1 (01:24:28):
Yeah, passing around uh a nitrous hose in a very
early home video footage. It's very funny to see. Hilariously,
the hourly rate for the record plant in this area
was one hundred and twenty five dollars an hour, which
is closer to a grand an hour today, so it makes.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
Honestly not that expensive. Oh really, dude, there's engineers and
studio time at like one of these top flight paces.
I mean, you know, probably get up to about that
because it's so damn expensive these days. You don't rent everything.
Like you couldn't just run it out of a bungalow.

(01:25:05):
I mean, you can't guarantee you no studio could afford
to set up in Sosolito right now. But anyway, simpler times.
Although Riot is now heralded as a sort of predecessor
to like Bedroom produced DIY Records or like Laptop producer guys,
the truth was that the atmosphere in the bel Air

(01:25:25):
mansion was more of a drug fueled open house frequented
by not only musicians like Bobby Womack, Ike Turner, Johnny
Guitar Watson, Billy Preston, and even country funk icon Jim Ford.
Billy Preston and Bobby Walmack both ended up playing on
the record, but people who didn't who also drop by
were Richard Pryor, drummer Buddy Miles, Isaac Hayes, and Red Fox,

(01:25:47):
who sign in the family Stone had played with I
think they opened for him in Vegas.

Speaker 1 (01:25:53):
Oh yeah, he did have a Vegas vicidency for a
long time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
Bobby Willmack wouldn't tell the Guardian. It was so spacey.
I remembering there in the dark and sly studio, coke
to the brain, trying to sing, staying up for four, five,
six days. That's just the way he was. That's like
close to like the point where your brain starts working. Yeah, well, cocaine.
That's an endorsement, just cocaine, statement of fact. Yeah. The

(01:26:19):
householdso include a number of Slies non musical entourage.

Speaker 1 (01:26:22):
This is the bell I imagine.

Speaker 2 (01:26:23):
Yes, the aforementioned Bubba Banks and JB. Brown among them.
And as John Phillips wrote in his autobiography, Sli's goons
were sullen, unfriendly and armed. These people were rough. They
laughed at me, which of course they did, you Minge.
There were lots of guns, rifles, machine guns, big dogs.

(01:26:44):
Sly Stone's pitbull gun was one of them. And as
Bobby Wilmack would remember, you would be playing one minute
and the next minute Slide would say, everybody better find
a hiding spot because I'm going to turn gun loose.
I would run and hide. This dog didn't play apparently
the rules of two peacocks on the property that would
attack anyone leaving the house at night.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
I have some unpleasant gun stories. Would you like to
hear them?

Speaker 2 (01:27:08):
I heard the less detailed version of this from Jerry
Martini in the Oral History, so I would love to
hear whatever more graphic version of it you have.

Speaker 1 (01:27:17):
Well. Well, first off, there was an incident with Gun
where the pit ball quote savaged Slies pet monkey to
death and then had sex with its corpse in front
of the horrified house's residence.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):
Yes, I believe Jerry Martini, Jerry Martini among them.

Speaker 1 (01:27:32):
Okay, okay. Slies memoir also includes this disturbing anecdote after
Gun attacked his baby boy, Slies baby boy. The incident
occurred when Sly reportedly allegedly whatever legal reasons, whatever legal
thing we need here, this wasn't, including the memoir, left
home for two weeks without making accommodations for the dog,

(01:27:54):
and as a result, Gun didn't eat for two weeks,
and when they returned home they found him starving and
understandably acting beyond reason. Sly Wright's gun gut Sylvester Junior's
entire head in his mouth, teeth, went down one side
of his face and took off part of his ear. Kathy,
Sly's wife, screamed and rushed to separate them. She this

(01:28:15):
isn't in the memoir, but I read elsewhere that she
reportedly got down on all fours and began growling and
barking like an animal herself to convince Gun to release
the infant. She drove Sylvester Junior to the hospital so
he could be patched up. Sly then took Gun upstairs
to a balcony. He said, I shot him and threw
his body down into the canyon. It was the hardest

(01:28:35):
thing I'd ever done. He was my best friend. It
tore through me after that. It was even hard for
me to look at certain places in the house because
they made me think about him. Gun Nah. Bringing it
back to the album, makes a cameo in the inner
gatefold collage for Riot, and as you mentioned, there were
lots of literal guns around. Sly reportedly kept guns in

(01:28:56):
every room of the house, including under pillows and inside
toilet tanks. When band members asked about them, Sly responded
by saying, you never know, although in Sly's case, you
do know later in his life, but also probably around
this era, Sly was convinced that the FBI had bugged
his house. In an event, a sense of paranoia permeated

(01:29:19):
these sessions.

Speaker 2 (01:29:20):
Well they were raided at what point? Yeah, I'm trying
to find that now because I didn't put it on. Yes.
He was arrested in nineteen seventy three at the bel
Air mansion, where Vice agents found cocaine, obviously heroin, marijuana PCP,
and six hundred doses of placidyl and also twenty pistols,

(01:29:43):
three rifles, and one shotgun. He was twenty nine and
was freed after posting bond.

Speaker 1 (01:29:49):
I honestly, twenty sounds low to me.

Speaker 2 (01:29:50):
Yeah, wow, that's what they found.

Speaker 1 (01:29:53):
You know, they weren't really probably looking in toilet tanks.

Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
Yeah, I mean that's a there's a lot of guns
for a guy who's doing PCP.

Speaker 1 (01:30:03):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:30:04):
The other big thing that everyone talks about with Riot
is its use of a drum machine. At this point,
drum machines were basically toys. They were extremely limited in
what they could do. I think Jerry Martini derisively talks
about it is one of those things. Cocktail Bostonova pianist
would use while he was performing at a supper club
or something like that, which is what they were actually

(01:30:26):
used by. It was like people who couldn't afford a
drummer were like pianists. Keyboard players could play by themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:30:31):
I mean, all those weird technological advanced things in this
era you're right, were used. I think the beltron was
used for cabarets. Initially it was like the script, some
kind of like union rule, I think. And so that's
why you have, like, you know, all these pre programs,
backing tracks and stuff in these early synthesizers was for

(01:30:51):
exactly what you just mentioned. So these guys could play
alone on stage at cabaret clubs and the owners enough
to pay a whole band.

Speaker 2 (01:30:59):
Yeah, Sly was not the first person to put out
a record with this. People say that Family Affair is,
but it's the first American record. Oh no, I'm sorry,
that's wrong. I was incorrect about that first hit, first
American hit. Well, first American hit, because Robin Gibb Baby
with his nineteen sixty nine single Saved.

Speaker 1 (01:31:18):
By the Bell, notched that record.

Speaker 2 (01:31:20):
But Stone's use of it first use of it and
an American so he has that because we don't care
about America. That's the only thing that really matters around here.
If I'm being truthful with your brother, don't countless. It's
in these contiguous forty eight I can't imagine in like
nineteen sixty nine, like drummers who are being sampled today

(01:31:41):
to build drum packs from are just floating around out there,
and you're like, I choose this box, this toy. The
toy is a Maestro. Mr K two Stone first use
it on a song he produced for the band Little Sister,
and he just flipped over it. He called it the
fon punk Box, and apparently he just kind of enjoyed

(01:32:02):
making it work. It enabled him to skirt a drummer
for having to play drums for his own. He could
just lay down one of these tracks and just overdub
everything else to it himself. And engineer Tom Fly, who
worked on Fresh, the follow up LP to Riot, said
usually he'd start with the Maestro Maestro. It could do
real simple stuff, but it gave him a foundation to

(01:32:23):
work on, and then he'd build his record to the
rhythm box. Sometimes he replaces it with real drums, but
on some tracks the funk box is still on there,
or he'd use both. There was no set way of working.

(01:32:51):
Another thing that Riot is famous for is it's murky,
nigh on incomprehensible mix. Slide was overdubbing track after track
after track with little notions of traditional recording consistency. He
doesn't bother to match up the backing vocals from anyone
to the lead vocal. He's not even bothering to sing
his own phrasing when he's doubling his lines, and this

(01:33:13):
makes it really difficult to understand the lyrics, which is
very funny considering that Sly was a big Bob Dylan
fan and even wanted to work with him on a record.
And another tricky part about the vocals on this album
is that Sly was in the habit of bringing women
back to the mansion and auditioning them. I'm using air
quotes here, you can't see it, so having them sing
and then further auditioning them, and then in the morning,

(01:33:36):
when their audition was complete, he would just erase it
off the tapes and never see them again. Obviously, he
did have.

Speaker 1 (01:33:42):
A headboard with Mike Jackson it, so that.

Speaker 2 (01:33:45):
Was in saslido. I don't I'm not familiar with his mansion,
the bel air recording setup. If you were a loved
one with either imprisoned by size.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
Blow.

Speaker 2 (01:33:55):
In a druggy la Hell, I'm so so sorry. Sorry
first of all, but please get in touch. I would
like to know more about that.

Speaker 1 (01:34:06):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (01:34:24):
Riot, as previously mentioned, was originally titled Africa Talks to You.
One of the reasons for the name change may have
been that Motown released Marvin Gaye What's going On six
months before Riot came out, and that sly was answering
the question posed by Gay's landmark work.

Speaker 1 (01:34:41):
That's really interesting me and that never occurred to me
until reading this, because the phrase there's a riot going
on became something of a catchphrase in the era of
early rock and roll, thanks to the liber and Stolo
trackt Riot and Cell Block Number nine, which features the
there's a riot going on refrain over like one four
five pattern, and it kind of just became like one

(01:35:03):
of those like stock phrases in very very early rock songs,
and for years was really until researching this episode, I
always assumed that this was sly reappropriating that line, which
was really interesting by two white guys in a black
musical idiom yeah, and presented in this new era in
the early seventies in a context that was totally different.

(01:35:23):
And I know this kind of seems like a stretch,
and I'm so sorry to keep bringing them up, but
this time it's relevant. The Beach Boys, during their very
brief politicized period in the early seventies, released a song
in nineteen seventy one before There's a Riote Going On
Sli's album came out. It was a rewrite, a write
in Cell Block number nine called Student Demonstration Time. They

(01:35:44):
just took the yeah, I know, it was a Mike
love song and they rewrote the lyrics. They saved the tune.
It rewrote the lyrics, kind of like what they did
with the Chuck Berry song for a Surfin USA.

Speaker 2 (01:35:54):
It was the same I'm making a hurry up a
gesture with my hand.

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):
You make me nervous, No, no, I can't.

Speaker 2 (01:36:00):
The only lyrics you watch him.

Speaker 1 (01:36:03):
The only lyrics from the original version that remains was
the there's a riot going on refrain. So it was
already in the musical ether with a very popular LA
band in this period that they took this old there's
a riot going on phrase from the fifties and brought
it into contemporary culture by commenting on riots and demonstrations.

Speaker 2 (01:36:24):
So yeah, real shame Sly's dead so we can't ask
him if you got that title from a Beach Boys,
I know that would have been the Scoopa damn century. Okay,
I just or you deserved it. You deserve that one.

Speaker 1 (01:36:34):
Why. It's an interesting point about the meaning of this
album title. Okay ors a response to Marvin Kay, Okay,
what's going on with the riot going on? Fine? Maybe?
Or it's just an obvious phrase. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:36:47):
I'm just saying that, like, do you really think Sly
had his ear to the Beach Boys?

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):
I mean they were huge and they were local.

Speaker 2 (01:36:54):
Do you really think Sly had his ear to the
Beach Boys for like musical ideas? Go ahead say it
with a straight tell me with a straight face.

Speaker 1 (01:37:02):
Two La studio auteurs that were holed up in their
bedrooms doing ungodly amounts of cocaine. Stop just across town.

Speaker 2 (01:37:09):
Stop waffling it. Stop waffling it. Ask you question Jordan.
Do you really believe sly Stone stunts? Damn it? Do
you really believe sly Stone?

Speaker 1 (01:37:19):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:37:19):
You know in the title from a Beach Boys record, it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:23):
Could have sparked something for him. And I also don't
think it would be out of the realm of possibility.
They listened to the Beach Boys for somebody like sly
who seemed as musically omnivorous.

Speaker 2 (01:37:32):
I'll agree with you there. Do you think in the
midst of a coke fueled like nightlife that he was
regularly tuning into the radio to catch the latest Mike
Love number?

Speaker 1 (01:37:41):
Maybe he had it on eight track?

Speaker 2 (01:37:45):
See this is when you google it, All you get
is Brian Wilson in sly Stone, remembering sly Stone and
Brian Wilson.

Speaker 1 (01:37:51):
Well yet now after the debt, Yeah, set on Google
set like everything before June.

Speaker 2 (01:37:56):
Four weeks ago and read it. Why did there seem
to be so little fanfare when sly Stone and died
although it must be said Brian Wilson, No, Brian Wilson live.
Is that his official Instagram?

Speaker 1 (01:38:06):
Yeah? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:38:07):
Well, whoever's run on the socials at least posted about
sly Yeah you think Brian told him to because they
were such close collaborators. Did they go to a lot
of tea together or Hamburgers? Actually? I could see them
actually just being high as picking out on junk food together.
Maybe there's something to this, Jordan, I withdraw my previous cruelty.
Ryot's cover art of a red, white and black American

(01:38:29):
flag with its stars replaced by suns was Sli's idea.

Speaker 1 (01:38:33):
That sounds like a very beach boy thing to do.
They love the sun, famous sun lovers. I wanted the
flag to truly represent people of all colors. I wanted
the color black because it's the absence of color. I
wanted the color white because it's the combination of all colors.
And I wanted the color red because it represents the
one thing all people have in common.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
Blood. I'm there with him, and then he says, I
wanted sons instead of stars, because stars to imply searching,
like you search for your star, And there were already
too many stars in this world. But the sun, that's
something that's always there looking right at you. Here's a
wind up, and here's the pitch. Betsy Ross did the
best she could with what she had. I thought I

(01:39:14):
could do better.

Speaker 1 (01:39:17):
There he is. I like that explanation for the most part.

Speaker 2 (01:39:21):
Yeah, I mean it's the kind of thing that some
loopy sixties person would have thought of.

Speaker 1 (01:39:24):
For sure. I don't think I realized that there's no
other text or titles on the cover at.

Speaker 2 (01:39:29):
All, No, which was a real, real gamesaver for all
the people who rolled up joints on it, because she
weren't obscrewing anything.

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
I find it really funny that label executives insisted on
adding a featuring the hit single Family Affair Sticker, which
I'm sure really Chap slies ass well.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
The ad campaign for this album was also It was
something like eighteen months is not that long to wait
for a work of genius, Like that was what they
went on for, like all the standy's and stuff, which
you know, it's not it's not so fun fun weird.
Later stone thing that actually comes in from this period

(01:40:09):
is the cover of k Sara Sarah that is on Fresh.
I believe that was included because while hanging with Terry
Melcher Sly had met his mom Doris Day, he loved
the song and sang it to her because he was
a fan, and then ended up deciding to cover it later.
There was also a rumor going around, which Sly did
not deny, but which annoyed Doris Day that she and

(01:40:33):
Stone were sleeping together.

Speaker 1 (01:40:34):
She was, by all accounts like awesome and despite her
very squeaky clean image, kind of a badass with like
a really wicked sense of humor. And I think she
hung I know, shout out with Paul McCartney. I know
she hung out with some other La rock people. I
think maybe through her son, I don't know. Maybe she
was a staunch animal rights activist, which I think was
the point of connection with Paul. And there's a photo

(01:40:56):
of her in the early seventies wearing a T shirt
that says be kind to animals or all you, which
I mean for you know, America's sweetheart. It's pretty good.

Speaker 2 (01:41:04):
It's good stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:41:05):
It's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:41:06):
So this and the whole auditioning women thing are pretty
indicative of what i'll euphemistically referred to his Sly's difficulty
with women.

Speaker 1 (01:41:15):
In this era, probably every era.

Speaker 2 (01:41:17):
Yes, he'd been involved on and off with the band's
trumpeter and vocalist Cynthia Robinson, which no doubt played into
his tensions with Graham, because Graham and Robinson were cousins,
but in lighteen sixty nine, Sly had also begun a
relationship with eighteen year old Debbie King, who worked for
his Stone Flower record label. He would also occasionally sleep

(01:41:38):
with Stephanie Owens, his girl Friday and kind of general
right hand lady at the time. According to the thirty
three and a third book on Riot, Owens once spoke
with the mother of another eighteen year old girl whom
Sly had slept with and introduced to PCP during the
Riot sessions. The girl apparently had a nervous breakdown, and

(01:41:58):
in the book it says she had to relearn how
to talk, which I don't know if that holds water,
but so pretty up that she was an eighteen year
old and he gave her PCP.

Speaker 1 (01:42:07):
That's not a nervous breakdown, that's a stroke. That's like
Jesus wow.

Speaker 2 (01:42:14):
The family Stone, as was the fashion of the time,
did practice a lot of free love.

Speaker 1 (01:42:19):
It's like free jazz but naked, except more fun to
listen to. Yours was better.

Speaker 2 (01:42:25):
Before the band moved to La Cynthia was also sleeping
with Sly's brother Freddie, who was married at the time,
and that was actually okay, though because Freddie's wife Sharon
was sleeping with Larry Graham. Cynthia Robinson in fact, would
later give birth to Sly's daughter, the tragically named Slide
Silvett Silvette, Oh, Silvette Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:42:49):
In other words, you could say that this was a
don't do it family affair.

Speaker 2 (01:42:54):
Don't do it. We almost made it through the whole record. Yeah,
things got so bad for Stephanie Owens. She called the
band's acting manager, Ken Roberts and begged for a cab
and two hundred dollars and fled. Wow, like in the
middle of the night, like getting to the airport, Like Mom,
meet me when I'm coming home.

Speaker 1 (01:43:13):
Tina Turner fleeing Ike, Ronnie fleeing Phil. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:43:17):
A lot of women, a lot of women flee men.

Speaker 1 (01:43:20):
Yeah. I went to pack that. No, No, this went
down long after the Riot sessions. But I'd be remiss
not to mention Sly's wedding to Kathy Silva that occurred
on stage during a sold out Madison Square Gardens show
in nineteen seventy four in front of twenty one thousand

(01:43:41):
very surprised fans. It remains perhaps one of the cokeiest
events to ever take place. Sly's mother came on stage
for the event, and the bride and groom wore gold
lamey outfits designed by the famous designer Halston Futures for
Icon Halston and the ceremony was a fish hited by
Soul Train host DoD Cornelius. Yes, and then they wanted

(01:44:05):
to have I think somebody dressed as an angel descend
from the ceiling on a bunch of doves, but the
insurance was prohibitive so they couldn't do it. And then
after the ceremony took place, Sli in the Family Stone
played a concert. Their marriage lasted five months, Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:44:26):
Well, perhaps appropriately. Riot opens with love and hate, hate
being spelled like the hate Ashbury District in San Francisco,
and the first thing you hear on the track is
not the sound of Larry Graham, but of Sly ticking
off a fore count with his pick on the base.
And between that and the narcotic haze of lyrics, which
consist entirely of variations on the phrase feels so good

(01:44:49):
inside myself, don't need to move, it's very clear from
the jump this is a different Family Stone record. Sly
and experimented with extreme stereo panning as early as sing
a simple song, but it is very apparent on this record,
and particularly Love and Hate, where he has Rose Stone,
who's the only backup vocalist doing call and response vocals

(01:45:09):
with herself across both stereo channels. He really went nuts
with this stuff. There's a track on Fresh that I
stumbled into onto recently that is like a panning nightmare.
It is mixed so weirdly, like the drums are super upfront,
everything else is panned hard around it, and I think

(01:45:30):
the bass is going back and forth between the two channels.
But this kind of plays into the next thing that
I want to talk about, which is a characteristic of
slies arrangements that's called hacketing. It was formalized as a
practice medieval chanting, and what hocketing essentially is is when
you split up a melody or a single line between
multiple singers, as opposed to having singers in unison seeing

(01:45:50):
the same line. Hocketing is when someone will sing the
first part of a phrase, another singer will jump in,
maybe the first person comes back, or it just continues on.
And that's applicable to not just voices but instruments as well,
and even though it's been Like I said, it's attributed
to the medieval monk chanting practices. There's a book called
Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors by a musicologist named doctor

(01:46:11):
Victor Grauer who actually traces that practice back to African
music from eighty thousand years ago, like Central African pygmies
and forest the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. So it's
crazy that, like this is a thing that people now
think of as like a medieval music practice was actually
closer to Slide than it was the European.

Speaker 1 (01:46:33):
Monks eighty thousand Slide.

Speaker 2 (01:46:36):
Yeah, Slide did this with both vocals and instruments. Yeah.
So the track in Time from Riots follow up Fresh
does this with every instrument. Horns, guitar, and keys are
playing these minute, little rhythmic stabs across both stereo fields,
pingponging back and forth to create this one interlocking sound.

(01:46:58):
And it's crazy. It's hard, it's hard to explain until
you hear it. There's a great video of the guy
from the Dirty Projectors explaining how he does it and
having the band that his two backing vocalists at the
time perform it. You know, one of them is playing
like on the up singing on the upbeats.

Speaker 1 (01:47:16):
She's like, oh, and then they opened a track on
that one big album, beck a Mess or whatever it
was called.

Speaker 2 (01:47:24):
No, that's grisly bear bit bit to Orca, I think
you're talking about. But yeah, they and and then the
other woman comes in with a different part that's on
the down beats, and so they form one track. But yeah,
check out in time to hear how bat he really
went with it. But on right, I don't think he
has it fully dialed in, by which I mean, it's
just just pans back and forth. And really it's very confusing, actually,

(01:47:50):
but it's neat. It's a neat thing that I think
you needed to know about. So I wrote it down
and I read it to you.

Speaker 1 (01:47:56):
Well, I just went and listened to the end time
and you're right, it's pretty wild.

Speaker 2 (01:48:01):
It's quite disorienting. Like I don't know, I mean, I
don't know if anyone was checking these after the fact,
but the fact that no one was like, yeah, that's
the one you want to go inside.

Speaker 1 (01:48:10):
It's like the audio equivalent of you remember those like
home planetariums say more about that. It's just like a
plastic dome with a bunch of little holes in it,
and they project up in the ceiling, like do you
see all the little like okay, constellations and lights and everything.
It's like that in the stereo field, just like little
points of sound. Yeah, three sixty coming at you in

(01:48:31):
random spurts.

Speaker 2 (01:48:33):
Yeah, it's I mean again, it's that's the one that
I think. So that's not on this record, but a
lot of the painting, like and stereotity is doing. Finish
my sentence, Jesus Christ, I'm killing me. Go to your
love and hate.

Speaker 1 (01:48:50):
Yeah. The title love and Hate is admittedly just for
anyone who missed the pun as a reference to the
hippie mecha hate Ashbury, which had once been a place
of pilgrimage for free thinkers and idealists, you know, Rubes.
And there's a bitterness in Slyes song that's, you know,
hard to ignore because the focus of the song is drugs,

(01:49:12):
which was a common musical theme in the late sixties.
But instead of being about mind expansion, which they tended
to be in that era, this song is just about hedonism.
And that's kind of the general theme of this album
is not mind expansion, but just getting numb. Yeah, lyrics
like feel so good inside myself, don't want to move

(01:49:32):
have more than a bit of truth. I mean, Slide
did a lot of takes for this record while literally
lying in bed.

Speaker 2 (01:49:39):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a great thesis statement in
a way that it shouldn't be.

Speaker 1 (01:49:45):
Yeah, you know, he.

Speaker 2 (01:49:48):
Initially wanted Love and Hate to be Rite's lead single,
which Epic obviously was like are you out of your
damn mind? And he was the second cut, just like
A Baby would have been a better choice, since my
favorite song on the album. It is just straight up
baby makeing music. It is so sexy and it's just
Sly and Bobby Womack. Sly's drumming, he's playing clavinet, and

(01:50:09):
Womack comes in and harmonizes. That's him playing guitar. But
as I mentioned earlier, stuff like this is a real,
i think sonic template for some of the D'Angelo stuff
that I was talking about, where it is just this
kind of groove and then there's just all of these
different layers of vocals that are coming in and I mean,
you know that stuff is hard, even when you're doing

(01:50:30):
it in a rat like this ramshackle ragtag way. So
it's cool that is managing all of that. But I
do want to point out that if you listen to
this on headphones, particularly like a good like lossless or remaster,
there's like a drum stool or a chair squeaking that
was never bothered to like be addressed. I think it's
the drum stool or possibly the kick pedal, because there's

(01:50:52):
a brand of the Ludwig kickdrum pedal that was popular
with this time, from everybody to James Brown band to
I think it was Clyde Stubblefield the drummer, but I
know also John Bottom used this kit. The kick mechanism
that you step on to make it go was so
notoriously squeaky that you can hear it in the James

(01:51:15):
Brown records. You can hear it on certain Zeppelin tracks
when he's really working it in like I hear think,
you hear good times, bad times because it's just the
drum break with the double kick and you can hear
this squeaking sound into it. So it's just one of
those like studio easter eggs that once you hear it,
you can be your weird dickhead music friend who's like, hey,
you hear that. That's a drum stool squeaking or whatever,

(01:51:35):
you know, and we like to give that to you.

Speaker 1 (01:51:37):
Guys. We'd like to have fun here.

Speaker 2 (01:51:39):
We like to have fun here. Poet is the first
all Sly track to appear on Riot, and it probably
sounds familiar to children of the nineties or eighties because
Dala Soul sampled it on description from three feet High
and Rising. We'll get into the hip hop sampling history
of this record later. It's another just kind of general
meander on a groove. It's just kind of funny for

(01:52:02):
this one because I found a quote from Larry Graham
where he was, like, the song on Riot called Poet
bad tune as in complimentary, But what would that song
have sounded like if he played that for us in
the studio? Imagine what might have been. Which is this
so sad that, like Larry Graham in the midst of
his relationship dissolving to the point where I don't think

(01:52:23):
they spoke again.

Speaker 1 (01:52:24):
I was gonna ask if they ever met up.

Speaker 2 (01:52:26):
Yeah, certainly for years if ever, but was still listening
to this stuff and going, God, I wish he'd let
the rest of the band have a crack at that.
That was a good song, very poignant. The album's actual
lead single, Family Affairs up next. It went to number
one on Billboard, and it's success meant that Sli's wildly
experimental stuff now at least had provable results, which I

(01:52:48):
think maybe backfired him a little on Fresh Shot. The
stereo panning in this one, though, is actually stable, and
it's really interesting how low Sli's guitar is in the
right channel. That's Billy Preston playing electric piano on the left.
And the vocals on this one's Slide's vocals are so
upfront and dry. There's not a lot of reverb on them,

(01:53:10):
if any, across this record, and that was I think
it's a mix of two things. One it's Mike placement,
like he's definitely up here on the mic a lot
of the time. And two is that the engineer who
is working on this, Tom Fly, who worked on Fresh
Tom Fly, said that Slidelight the sound to come and
go quickly. If you were equing it, he'd want to

(01:53:30):
go for the heart of the sound and get rid
of the rest of this. So no decay, no, no,
Without actually knowing what he's talking about as far as equing.
I suspect that means that they didn't spend a lot
of time sculpting the low end or high end, because
some of his vocals have what's called like a boxy
quality to them, like it's a shorthand for getting, like
an old timey radio sound where you pull out all

(01:53:52):
the lows and highs and all you get is mids.
And I can hear that on some of the vocal
tracks here, So I think that just means that, like
once he has had a vocal sound, he was like,
I'm not echuing vocals anymore. I have seventy more tracks
to put on, you know, but you can also there's
another tracks and other fun examples because you can hear
the Maestro also heavily eq just kind of clicking away

(01:54:12):
in the background under the other drum track. God, he
loved that thing to me.

Speaker 1 (01:54:18):
Family Affairs the inverse of Everyday People because it's one
of Sli's most emotionally subdued and cynical tracks. It explores
dysfunctional family dynamics, including sibling rivalry, marital tension, and generational disconnect.

Speaker 2 (01:54:32):
And that was the party song.

Speaker 1 (01:54:33):
Yeah, that was the it the lyrics reflected the collapse
of the nineteen sixties utopian ideal by suggesting that the
struggles within a family and by extension of society are inevitable, complicated,
and often unresolvable. Ooh, he sings, one child grows up
to be somebody that just learns to love. Another child

(01:54:54):
grows up to be somebody you just love to burn
frames love and pain inescapable coexisting forces. And of course
the line you can't leave because your heart is there,
but you can't stay is devastatingly familiar to anyone who
has family issues. Like in thank You for Talking to

(01:55:15):
Me Africa, Sly sings in a flat, tired, world weary
tone and giving the fractures within his group. It's hard
not to take this song as pretty much autobiographical. Sister
Rose Stone, his actual sister, sings the chorus, providing the
only trace of the traditional family Stone vocal interplay, and
those Sly himself will deny this. Sly's manager later told

(01:55:36):
Rolling Stone that Family Affair was the story of Sly's
own life, which is being cut up by the factions
that surrounded him in his stardom. Slies Take Meanwhile as
as follows songs not about that, Songs about a family affair,
whether it's a result of genetic processes or a situation
in the environment.

Speaker 2 (01:55:55):
I like sort of ascribing his like his later Druggy
quotes to like the member of like a feed up
John Carpenter, like, song's not about that.

Speaker 1 (01:56:04):
I was actually gonna say, David Lynch, not about that.

Speaker 2 (01:56:07):
The song's not about that?

Speaker 1 (01:56:09):
What what I don't think we've done to David Lynch?

Speaker 2 (01:56:14):
Since all right, yeah, no, no, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (01:56:22):
I don't like that. What the guns in the toilet tank?

Speaker 2 (01:56:27):
We like to have fun here. Next up is Africa
Talks to You, another song heavily undergirded by the Maestro.
It's nearly nine minutes of coalescing and disintegrating groove, voices
and instruments coming in and out, breaking things down, building
them back up. Friends become enemies, enemies become friends musically again.

(01:56:48):
Slies lyrics are difficult to understand, but seem actually quite
impression in the review mirror Who's believing? Who who's doing
the fishing? Do what you want to do? Or you
can keep on fishing? Be about drugs, could be about fishing,
Probably about drugs. Probably not about fishing. Although there are
female voices on the track. If Sly is the only
person playing keys, guitar and bass, he's essentially pitting all

(01:57:12):
of them against each other for fills and solos. It's
quite a literal picture of a man fighting against himself,
and according to Sly biographer Anthony Santiago, the lyrics depict
quote fame and its cold retrogression into perceived insanity, with
a chorus that reflects quote Sly's feelings on being cut

(01:57:33):
down in his prime like a tree in the forest.
That's an extremely literal reading of the fact that they
just repeat timber like a hundred times in this song.
But good read man the simple explanation of the title track,
which leads offside too and is silent and runs four
seconds digitally, with Sly saying I felt that there should

(01:57:54):
be no more riots. Clean concise achievable for a while.
People though, thought it was a response to a free
concert that Sla in the Family Stone had been slated
to play Chicago's Grant Park on July twenty seventh, nineteen seventy.
The concert was intended as a dual show of goodwill
both from the city to its youths and from the
band to Chicago to make up for its previously canceled shows. Unfortunately,

(01:58:19):
things disintegrated into a riot in which one hundred and
sixty two people were injured, including one hundred and twenty
six police officers. Three young people were shot, although it
wasn't clear by whom. Cars were overturned in set of Blaze,
and a mob tore through the Loop neighborhood looting, resulting
in one hundred and sixty arrests. However, Sly associate Stephanie
Owens of the fleeing the house in the middle of

(01:58:41):
the night fame said that while the band's lateness was
publicly blamed for the riot, they arrived to have it
already in place. There been other bands playing, and tensions
between the crowd and the cops that were lining the
stage and staffing. The event simply boiled over, which is
something that Jerry Martini says in the same oral history.
He also suggests that Chicago made Richard Daley had no
intention of ever throwing such an event again and simply

(01:59:04):
scapegoated Sly, which made an easy target due to his reputation.
Any thoughts, no, I.

Speaker 1 (01:59:10):
Mean Dick Daily is the He was in charge of
Chicago during the Democratic National Convention riots in sixty eight.

Speaker 2 (01:59:16):
So it bad riots.

Speaker 1 (01:59:19):
Yes, yes, he's kind of the which is sort of
the archetypical sixties riot. I want to yeah, so yeah, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:59:26):
Top sixties riots ranked. We should do that.

Speaker 1 (01:59:32):
I did listen to something today that talks about how
well you know in certain sectors. Nineteen sixty seven, the
summer sixty seven was called the Summer of Love. In
others it was just known as the long Hot Summer
because there were one hundred and fifty nine race riots
that summer alone. In Detroit there was a riot after
and after hours bar was raided, and in Newark cops

(01:59:53):
assaulted a cabby and the city went up in flames.

Speaker 2 (01:59:58):
This was the one that James Brown broke up.

Speaker 1 (02:00:00):
Oh I think I think it was bost I want
to say, yeah, I think it was a Boston riot. Yeah,
possibly after MLK was killed it was.

Speaker 2 (02:00:11):
And yeah, and he was like, Watts riot, Rot's.

Speaker 1 (02:00:14):
Riot is made, Okay, d n C sixty eight is
number one. Watts riot SATs.

Speaker 2 (02:00:20):
This is very cynical of this idea.

Speaker 1 (02:00:22):
I mean, in seriousness, we'll get used to it.

Speaker 2 (02:00:26):
Pitch Brave and Strong is another claustrophobic pile of a
sort of instrumental lines and Sly vocals.

Speaker 1 (02:00:34):
It's a great word for this album, claustrophobic.

Speaker 2 (02:00:37):
Yeah, I'm not the first, can't take credit for that,
but thank you for saying it. But the opening set
of lyrics frightened Faces to the Wall, Oh can't you
hear your mama call the Brave and Strong Survive reflect
a pretty strong about face from the utopian view of
social dynamics, and the fact that Sly repeats the title
line for most of the song is also reflective of

(02:00:58):
his mindset. And then there's also the utter nonsense of
the final verse, which is probably the stupidest thing on
this record. It consists solely of the lines before me
was a cowboy star Indians and there you are. I
guess you could read that as some kind of precursor
to Spaced Cowboy, but man, that's dumb. But it's one
of the only songs on this record that has a

(02:01:19):
really substantial horn part to it, which is nice. You
caught Me Smiling is to my ears one of the
only songs on this record that has a definitive Larry
Graham line. Like I said earlier, he's just a much
better basis than Sly and the dead giveaways whether or
not it's been Bassis being played with a pick or not. Also,
Graham is playing some like double stops and there's some
pretty audible pops on there. So I'm gonna call that

(02:01:42):
a clear one for Larry.

Speaker 1 (02:01:44):
That was.

Speaker 2 (02:01:45):
That was the third single from Riot, released in April
seventy two, after Family Affair and Running Away. Smileon was
also the debut of post greg Erico drummer Jerry Gibson,
who thought he was auditioning for the band when he played.

Speaker 1 (02:01:59):
On this track My God.

Speaker 2 (02:02:02):
So they hied stop and they go congratulations, you got
the job, and he was like, oh, okay, but can
I can I do that one again? And they were like, no.
Time is kind of a lazy song. It's a wird
one too, because slyve forbade the beller mention to have clocks.
You know, yeah, both Bobby Womack and Bubble Banks remember

(02:02:27):
Sly stridently arguing against punctuality, telling Womack make him wait, Bobby,
it's not the time. It's the timing. Great catchphrase, but
some of ironic given the use of a glorified metronome
as the background of most of the songs on this record,
and you know, people have talked about like what he
might have meant by that of being like, you know,

(02:02:48):
not being on someone's not being on the white man's clock,
which sure, man, but you know, people do appreciate punctuality
they are. Is also a fairly bitter lyric in Time
as well, which is the universe needs to be a
little stronger. Time, they say is the answer, but I
don't believe it. That's grim space. Cowboy is probably the

(02:03:10):
closest thing to a joke song on this record. I
am almost one hundred percent sure of the bossa Nova
or Cha Cha pre set on the Maestro, but the
rest of it sounds like a country soul kind of thing,
so I obviously yodels, but there's some like the bass
playing that he sinks into at one point is almost
like a country like.

Speaker 1 (02:03:28):
Boom boom boom boom boom. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:03:31):
I mean, all the vocals are mixed so low, and
they're all out of sync with each other, and you
can even hear him start laughing in the middle of singing.
So funny song. Maybe it had an influence on that
influential anime series Cowboy Bebop, because the sign off in
there is see you Space Cowboy. Maybe this is just

(02:03:52):
a coincidence, hard to say.

Speaker 1 (02:03:55):
Well, the anti utopian sentiment that's kind of laid out
on the opening track Love and Hey is also apparent
in the song running Away. In an interview with Mojo
Magazine in March twenty ten, Sly was asked about the
meaning of this track, and he replied, in those days,
it was the hippies who cut their hair and ran
away from the hippie feeling. It's about how at a
certain time, everybody runs away from something bleak. Yeah, it's

(02:04:20):
one of only two lead vocals from Sister Rose in
the band's run, and despite long held rumors that Miles
Davis played the trumpet solo, it is indeed Cynthia Robinson
and now a closing track, My favorite track on the album,
one of my favorite tracks he ever did. If Family
Affairs the inverse of Everyday People, then thank you for
talking to Me Africa is the inverse of thank you

(02:04:43):
for letting Me be myself. In a very literal sense,
it is a swampy, slowed down version of his exuberant
nineteen sixty nine hit I've Seen This Nightmarish inverse described
as a sort of self deconstruction. All the original track
is celebratory, joyful, and full of bad energy. The riot
version is slowed down, sparse, depressive, and exhausted. Sli's vocals

(02:05:07):
are slurred and buried in the mix, the instrumentation is sluggish,
and the tone is ominous. As we mentioned in this period,
Sly was isolated, paranoid, and heavily addicted to drugs. The
song's repetition, flat emotional affect and echoing production comes across
as a claustrophobic hellscape, as if Sli is trapped in

(02:05:28):
his own head spiraling. It almost registers as Sly saying
that joy, that optimism, it's gone now, and that sense
of joy was gone in the world at large as well.
Released in the wake of the civil rights movements, unraveling
the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and police brutality, the song
reflects Sly's growing distrust of American institutions. The titles direct

(02:05:51):
addressed to Africa, suggests a turning away from white America
and a spiritual, if not literal, reconnection with African identity
or perhaps as the idea of Africa as a source
of ancestral truth and grounding. I've also seen it theorize
that Africa has a stand in for God or truth itself.
In any event, the song is a mournful thank you,

(02:06:12):
thank you for seeing me, for understanding me, for being
the only voice I can trust anymore. In that sense,
the song's a radical act. He reclaims funk from the
dance floor and repositions it as a medium for disenchantment
and resistance. The radical hope of everyday people has curdled
the parties over. The lights are flickering out. This track

(02:06:36):
closes the album on a note of weary, bitter truth.
We believed, we danced, we hoped, and look where we
ended up. Thank you for talking to me. Africa isn't
a celebration but a reckoning. It's sly stone grappling with race, addiction, betrayal,
and the collapse of a utopian dream. It's funk rendered

(02:06:56):
as lament, a personal and political funeral. Dirge guys as
a groove. There's something very scary to me when something
joyful is revisited in a haunted sort of way. It's fascinating.
This kind of meta commentary that's distorting his own work
to prove a point. And I can't think of an
earlier instance of it ever being done, and I find
that as poignant as it is pioneering.

Speaker 2 (02:07:19):
That was some of the finest writing I think you've
ever done, my friend. Oh higel oh, it was really good.
You almost got me a little bit. Yeah, beautiful stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:07:29):
For me, it's hard to listen to. I mean it's
because it's yeah, it's his haunted self being dropped into
his happy dream, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:07:37):
I And I really wish that he'd talked more about this,
because like the idea of engaging with your work in
that way is so sad.

Speaker 1 (02:07:47):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (02:07:49):
Yeah, like to purposefully, to purposefully be like, I'm working
on this thing and I'm going to take an old
song that sums up everything I once believed and just
turn it inside out and make it this complete. Like
somebody spending hours of their life and time doing that

(02:08:09):
is like a deeply sad image to me. Whether he's yeah,
I mean, whether he was aware of it or not.
I mean, you can talk about it in the kind
of like meta side of things, but I mean, if
he was doing that, it doesn't seem like it was
maybe that intentional, which makes it all the worse to
my mind, because then it's like, well Jesus, like if

(02:08:30):
he wasn't intending on doing that, then it just came
out this way.

Speaker 1 (02:08:34):
Yeah, yeah, I know, I don't know what's worse. It's
really unsettling looked at personally, looked at, sociologically, looked at
even musically. To just destroy this beautiful thing that it
destroys a harsh sure.

Speaker 2 (02:08:49):
You know, but I mean even to take like something
that was you know, you got, that's your that was
your vision, man, Yeah, like that was your high water mark,
and then just like a year or two later just
being like, no, I'm going to tear this thing apart
and make it reflect my new worldview, which also sucks.

Speaker 1 (02:09:08):
I really And I've been trying to think all day
of an artist who revisited in such a clear direct
way something that they were known for and recontextualized it. Yeah,
to show a difference in wherever they were, you know,
wherever they're at now. I can't really think of that.

Speaker 2 (02:09:28):
It's kind of cliche, but I would probably reach to
like Johnny Cash, oh the American stuff. But I'm not
actually fully sure of how many of his earlier I
know he did at least one or two, but I'm
not sure how extensive that goes of versions of his
old work that he'd done on there. But that's what
comes to mind.

Speaker 1 (02:09:48):
I don't know which is equally hard.

Speaker 2 (02:09:50):
Yeah, I was gonna say, like Jesus Christ, this has
been a tough episode. I hope everyone's okay, we're not,
thank you, Jordan.

Speaker 1 (02:10:02):
Well, now we're in a section called there's a legacy
going on. Yes, that's a right going on. Happier Yeah, actually, yes,
this is a pretty happy section. The album received a
divided response for both professional critics and general listeners, many
of whom have found its production and lyrical content, as
we mentioned, particularly challenging. Writing in November nineteen seventy one,

(02:10:24):
for the Los Angeles Times, critic Robert Hilburn criticized the
Family Stone's departure from earlier soft flavored, in his words,
hits like Everyday People and Hot Fun in the Summertime,
stating there was little on the album that is worth
your attention. Fellow critic Greal Marcus described the record as
this is kind of amazing, even if I don't agree

(02:10:46):
with all of it. Muzak with its finger on the
trigger Ooh, I don't know about Muzak, but finger on
the trigger is incredible. That's great.

Speaker 2 (02:10:54):
Now I kind of get where he's going with because
you know, with a drum machine, it's sort of the
air Oh yeah, I'm goa use a real college word here.
It's a sort of an air SATs version of like.

Speaker 1 (02:11:04):
Yeah, they wouldn't know what that sounds like. We have
conceptions of drum machines as like we're used to it
with funk and hip hop.

Speaker 2 (02:11:11):
But I guess they'd be like, but is this plastic
sounding thing that I have heard in elevators before.

Speaker 1 (02:11:16):
From one of the funkiest artists that we ever known? Yeah,
all right, that's a good point. Others offered more enthusiastic
praise Rolling Stones. Vinceletti wrote, at first, I hated it
for its weakness and lack of energy, and I still
dislike these qualities, but then I began to respect the
album's honesty.

Speaker 2 (02:11:34):
It's disengaged, and between that this sort of meandering nature.
I can see how a week isn't the word that
I'd use. I would say like low energy maybe, which
I guess is a synonym.

Speaker 1 (02:11:44):
But he wan't to describe this is really interesting. He
really wanted to describe the album as the new urban music.
It's very prescient. Not about dancing to the music in
the streets, you know, dancing to the music with Slye
song Dancing in the streets was the Motown hit Martha
and the Vendela's views before that. It's about disintegration, he continues,
getting up, nodding, maybe dying. There are flashes of euphoria,

(02:12:06):
ironic laughter, who was laughs in this really creeped me out,
even some bright stretches, but mostly it's just junkie death,
oddly unoppressive and almost attractive in its effortlessness. That's savagely accurate.

Speaker 2 (02:12:22):
Yeah, I mean he also sort of like semi predicts
a lot of hippop.

Speaker 1 (02:12:26):
Oh yeah, I know, that's what I mean. Is from
November seventy one. I think, Yeah, that's crazy. In The
Village Voice, my least favorite critic, Robert Christgau concluded, well,
my second least favorite critic, Robert Chriscau, described the songs
as expressing the bitterest ghetto pessimism conveyed through subtle production techniques.

(02:12:46):
And jarring song compositions and declared Riot to be quote
one of those rare albums whose whole actually does exceed
the some of its parts. I agree with that. Yeah,
there's a comparison that I've seen crop up again and
again to another album that I find hard to access
or hard to want to sit and listen to. I
guess I should say The Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street.

Speaker 2 (02:13:09):
Oh, it's absolutely I mean I read someone called that
the White There's a Riot.

Speaker 1 (02:13:15):
Oh wow, which I actually agree with. Yeah. Yeah, I
think it was released within a few months of each
other in nineteen seventy one at least, Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (02:13:24):
And I think if they hadn't been trusting Jagger to
write all the lyrics, I'm sure the lyrical content would
be much more reflective of times and basically like if, yeah,
if you didn't have Keith to come in there and
you know, do all those peacocking like that might have
been a more topical record, or not even topical but

(02:13:45):
self reflective, which as we know, is not sure makes
strong points now.

Speaker 1 (02:13:50):
Pop Matters journalist Zeth Lundy offered this description of there's
a riot going on, which could easily be applied to
exile too. He called Riot Quote a challenging listen at
times rambling, incoherent, dissonant, and just plain uncomfortable with some
episodic moments of pop greatness to be found, and he
went on to discuss its radical departure from the band's

(02:14:11):
past music. It sank their previously burgeoning idealism. At a
time when social disillusionment was all the rage, Slia had
found something else to take him higher, and as a result,
Riot is a record very much informant by drugs, paranoia,
and a sort of half hearted malcontent. That's a great line.
Listening to it isn't exactly a pleasurable experience. It's significant

(02:14:32):
in the annals of pop and soul because it's blunt
and unflinching, because it reflects personal and cultural crises in
a manner prices in a manner unbecoming for pop records
right can be classified as avants soul only after being
recognized as a soul nightmare. The nightmare is, so to speak,
being a reflection of an unfortunate and uncompromised reality, not

(02:14:55):
a glossed over pop music approximation of reality.

Speaker 2 (02:14:58):
Jesus on a great writing about this album, Yeah. Gret
Marcus identified the immediate effects of songs like Family Affair
on the overall tone and nature of Black music going forward.
Curtis Mayfield, Superfly, Freddy's Dead Staple Singers, Respect Yourself, The
OJ's Backstabbers Wars, the World as a Ghetto, Stevie Wonder's Superstition, Temptations,

(02:15:19):
Papa was a Rolling Stone. All of them took a
new tone of self reliance and determination that also met
with real world concerns and real depictions of black life
that had not been previously aired in the genre. Sli's
old friend George Clinton would take the approach of feel good,
booty shaking songs that were primarily about your own repression
and unableness to free yourself wow both societal and mental shackles,

(02:15:46):
and weld it to some of the most room destroying
funk of all time. You know, America eats its young.
What more of a sly statement is that roof destroying?

Speaker 1 (02:15:55):
Please?

Speaker 2 (02:15:56):
Roof destroying? Yes, they do tear the roof off the sucker.

Speaker 1 (02:16:00):
Other just a phenomenal sociological document. The album's legacy is
arguably felt most prominently in hip hop. There's a Riot
Going On has become one of the most sampled records
in music history, with entries on whosample dot com running
several hundred deep artists such as Tupac for Life goes
On De La Soul, which we mentioned at the top
of the episode, and Ghetto Boys Mind Riot for its

(02:16:22):
somber funk and introspective tone. All producers like Jay Dilla
and Madlib would cite it as a foundational influence in
shaping the field their chopped up, sample heavy soundscapes. It's
also songs by Black Eyed Peas, Wu Tang Clan, ghost
Face Killer, Snoop Dogg, and Doctor Dre.

Speaker 2 (02:16:40):
And the Black Eyed Peas have to do with any
of this.

Speaker 1 (02:16:42):
Well. There's also in Sync, who used the family Affair
loop on I Just Want to be with You in
two thousand.

Speaker 2 (02:16:49):
I don't like that.

Speaker 1 (02:16:50):
You don't like that? That makes you feel bad?

Speaker 2 (02:16:51):
Jeordan, I don't like that. I know I don't either, Okay,
just wanted to say I wanted you to know that.
Can we do anything about that?

Speaker 1 (02:17:00):
Or is this already like a statue?

Speaker 2 (02:17:03):
Ah?

Speaker 1 (02:17:05):
I don't like that. I know, I know, I really don't.
I'm not familiar with that song, are you?

Speaker 2 (02:17:10):
I think that would beyond be kind of I thought
it would beyond the Ken for the Swedes to sample.

Speaker 1 (02:17:15):
Uh, yeah, you know, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (02:17:17):
I don't see that as a big part of their
shiny Hit Factory and Sexual Abuse Empire. Wait, is that
doctor Luke is? Doc? Doctor Luke isn't Swedish though, sorry.

Speaker 1 (02:17:29):
With draw the wait a minute, No he is, Oh
he's not, No he is.

Speaker 2 (02:17:37):
Oh he's American, but he has a crazy long last name.

Speaker 1 (02:17:41):
Which show as hell looks Swedish to me. Oh he's Polish.
Oh yah.

Speaker 2 (02:17:48):
Anyway, Uh, doctor Luke sucks.

Speaker 1 (02:17:51):
Others who have covered a rework songs on this record
include Iggy Pop, which I'm not sure if I'm familiar with,
John Legends, Beastie Boy, and Gwen Guthrie. Sly was especially
fond of Janet Jackson's use of his music. However, on
our nineteen ninety three B side and on and on,
Janet incorporates elements from Family Affair and even though this

(02:18:12):
isn't on this record, although I guess it kind of
is a revamped forum, she uses the guitar riff from
Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself in her smash
RHYBM Nation So We'll count it because it was also
in thank You for Talking to Me Africa.

Speaker 2 (02:18:25):
Yeah, we'll count it. I also, man, you know this
band is so this record is so influential that Turnstile,
who were, like, wow, one of the like hardcore kind
of bands that contributed to that genre having a big moment,
and arguably, I don't think, inarguably the most successful man
out of it to do that. You know, they just

(02:18:48):
took thank you for letting Me Be Myself as the
chorus to one of their songs. Really and yeah, it's
literally called thank You. I do wonder I assume they
gave him credit, but maybe they didn't. Well, okay, sorry,
they have a song called TLC or Turnstile Love Connection
that does sample thank you for letting Me be Myself?

(02:19:10):
Is that the actual name of the song or they
just have thank you on all of.

Speaker 1 (02:19:13):
Their merch I do not see him credited for it.

Speaker 2 (02:19:17):
Well, they took it hardcore punk. Ben took that and
interpolated it into the end of their song. So just
par for the chorus for Whitey that sucks.

Speaker 1 (02:19:29):
Yeah, it does does what it's saying.

Speaker 2 (02:19:31):
On discogs man or ascap or something. It's really gonna
kiss me off if I find out they didn't. I mean,
I'm sure they like said.

Speaker 1 (02:19:38):
It on the Turnstile Reddit. Ripedis Lystone, who most likely
inspired the hook towards the end of TLC.

Speaker 2 (02:19:46):
Most likely it's on.

Speaker 1 (02:19:48):
Okay, it's referenced on the Who's Sampled site?

Speaker 2 (02:19:52):
Yeah, but it's not on. They didn't give him a
writer's credit. White people, right, Rob.

Speaker 1 (02:19:57):
Sheffield cited it and is ott bit for sliced one.

Speaker 2 (02:20:00):
Well good, at least someone has their eye on the
damn ball man. That sucks. I'm like pissed because I
remember when that song came out. I was like, oh cool,
they're doing this, and everyone was like, oh cool, they're
doing sly Like I thought that was an accepted thing.
The fact that they didn't give him credit on it.

Speaker 1 (02:20:17):
I know. There's big discourse about turnstyle right now.

Speaker 2 (02:20:21):
They're always big discourse. They're like the archetypal band that,
like hardcore people get so pissed off whenever and anything
gets popular. It's like the worst thing that could ever
happen to them that they conceive of, and they're precious
scene and you know, their unity and all this garbage
that none of them actually believe in Yeah. So the

(02:20:41):
whole reason that people hate this band is that when
they came out, they were like more or less straightforward
hardcore band. They had They started in Baltimore, which has
a thriving punk scene. They had an EP, they put
out a lot of stuff. They even went as so
far as to record at Salad Day's Studios, which is
named after a minor threat song with this guy Brian McTiernan,

(02:21:01):
who's like, They had like all these bona fide credentials
and stuff, and then everybody got really pissed off because
they started dressing like hype Beast influencers and like Neon
and all this stuff, and they started putting eight o
eights into like hardcore songs and and just kind of
breaking different rules that people in the genre are the

(02:21:23):
people fans are notoriously pissy about when you break those rules.
I was always fine with them. I didn't really like it,
but now I'm pissed off.

Speaker 1 (02:21:33):
We got a live Heigel pissed Off birth on Mike.
I'm glad this is this is rare that this happens.
It's like a it's like an astrological event captured.

Speaker 2 (02:21:42):
Just sucks man. There's so much racial up in hardcore,
Like the genre was helped, it was partially created by
black people, Like Bad Brains were one of the founding
Everybody was in awe of those guys, like nobody understood
what they were even doing. They were so good. But
you know, like there's those a lot of racist white

(02:22:04):
punk bands. There's I mean, Screwdriver is probably the most famous.
But like you know, once you start getting into like
hardcore punk as a genre, it's really really white. It's
very macho. I did not really enjoy being a part
of that particular scene. Yeah, I don't know, man, people
like to talk a lot about like, oh no, it's

(02:22:25):
all about like unity and like your brotherhood, Like these
guys are my brothers, and like you know, and straight
Edge obviously goes into it a lot, and like, you know,
I just get so much strength to like to like
persevere from like hardcore or whatever. But it's also like
an incredibly lily white, super masculine genre. And to have
these like the like woke and hardcore band And I'm

(02:22:47):
saying that sarcastically, but also it really pisses me off
that they're like, oh, we're all non binary. Also We
wrote that song all by ourself. That phrase no one
else ever used that as a hook. That was just
us from Marylyn We're just babies. He didn't know that
was a song.

Speaker 1 (02:23:04):
Speaking of frauds, it feels somewhat fraudulent to exit this
episode with a quote from Rolling Stone that I didn't
write and you didn't write. But this line for my
two thousand and three article at least sort of sums
up the hole. There's a riote going on thing for me.
Sly and the family Stone created a musical utopia, an
interracial group of men and women who blended funk rock

(02:23:25):
and positive vibes. Sly Stone ultimately discovered that his utopia
had a ghetto, and he brilliantly tore the whole thing
down on There's a ride going on, which does not
refute the joy of his earlier music.

Speaker 2 (02:23:38):
It's a beautiful sentiment. It is I myself would like
to counter with a different Rolling Stone article, this one
from nineteen seventy one, during which sly hit the writer
Timothy Krause in the face with a wet washcloth at
one point, and then tried to hit him again as
he was going out the door before he threw that
second washcloth, though Stone left him with these words. It's

(02:24:01):
been a real pleasure, as far as I can see,
to the best of my.

Speaker 1 (02:24:05):
Knowledge, get away with words.

Speaker 2 (02:24:08):
Thank you for listening. Everyone, This has been too much information.
I'm Alex Heigel and I'm.

Speaker 1 (02:24:12):
Jordan run Talk. We will catch you all next time.
Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (02:24:24):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

Speaker 1 (02:24:27):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was.

Speaker 2 (02:24:31):
Researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (02:24:35):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

Speaker 2 (02:24:38):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave.

Speaker 1 (02:24:40):
Us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Sly & the Family Stone's 'There's a Riot Goin' On': Everything You Didn't Know