Sly Riot

I’ve just finished Miles Marshall Lewis’s entry in the 33 1/3 series, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and it’s stirred up lots of memories from the time Sly & the Family Stone’s album came out and I rushed out to buy it. 

I was a freshman at SMU, a white suburban boy with a black roommate.  (I’ve wondered ever since whether I got a black roomie because all the other white boys checked “no” to the question on the housing application about rooming with someone of a different race or that I just got picked randomly out of a long list of white boys who checked “yes.”)  I was a huge fan of Sly and the Family Stone, a proud owner of Stand, and I often sang the “dum-dum” vocal break from their earlier song “Dance to the Music” on the street corner with my choir buddies as a high school junior.  Stand was such a great album, full of poppy hits that had substance, harmonies, and rhythms.  The band was the first big pop group that comprised integrated, male and female instrument-playing regular members.  Their image was optimistic and civil-rights righteous, their lyrics were hopeful and the music was joyful.

And then came There’s a Riot Goin’ On.  The band was mostly MIA, the lyrics were cryptic and introspective, and the music was not bright and poppy (although two of the album’s songs became big hits).  No one was expecting such a switch after all that preceded it, but there were signs, most obviously Sly’s notorious habit of showing up way-late to his gigs, if he showed at all.  (When I saw him in 1972, he was only 45 minutes late…)

The Lewis book got me dragging out my well-worn copy of the LP and my well-worn copy of Greil Marcus’s book Mystery Train, in which Sly Stone is one of the six artists focused upon, in an essay centered around There’s a Riot Goin’ On.  Listening to the album and reading these books, I got to wondering: Why, in 1971, did I just accept this album as another great Sly & the Family Stone record?  I maybe played it a little less than Stand, but not much less.  I loved it!

Marcus writes, “With Riot Sly gave his audience–particularly his white audience–exactly what it didn’t want.  What it wanted was an upper, not a portrait of what lay behind the big freaky black superstar grin that decorated the cover of the album.”  My main complaint about the record was that the sound of the recording was muddy and occasionally distorted.  And I sometimes wanted to skip “Spaced Cow Boy.”  But it became one of my favorite albums instantly, right alongside its very different predecessor.  All I knew then was that it was atmospheric, exotic, and you could move to it.  And playing it again now, I find it as rich and strange as I found it 36 years ago.

Robert Christgau, in his Record Guide: Rock Albums of the 70s, ranks Sly & the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits the second-best album of 1970; he places Riot at #4 for 1971, over such competition as Lennon’s Imagine, The Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Led Zeppelin IV, and Joni Mitchell’s Blue.  (What a great year for music!)  So he liked the poppy Sly and the psycho Sly equally, too.

We all found out later what There’s a Riot Goin’ On represented: a pop genius freaking out and losing it, and it foreshadowed the fact that, except for 1973’s Fresh, Sly would be doing nothing else of great and lasting value.  (At least he hasn’t yet; fellow drug burnout/pop genius Brian Wilson got his second chance decades after the crash, so maybe Sly’ll re-emerge yet.)

Greil Marcus explains how Stand and Greatest Hits led to Riot: “Emerging out of a pervasive sense, at once public and personal, that the good ideas of the sixties had gone to their limits, turned back upon themselves, and produced evil where only good was expected, the album began where ‘Everybody is a Star’ left off, and it asked: So what?”

It’s a revolutionary record, difficult and infectious at the same time.  I’m thinking it oughta be on the all-time best record lists right up there with Pet Sounds and Are You Experienced? and Revolver.