Sly & The Family Stone: A Love Letter in 16 Songs

Charles on a few favorite tracks from an artist we love

Today sees the streaming release of Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), a new documentary from Questlove and Joseph Patel that chronicles the career and legacy of one of the singular voices of pop music in the 1960s and 1970s. I can’t wait to watch, both because of how great the pair’s previous documentary (the Sly-featuring Summer of Soul) turned out, and because Sly & The Family Stone deserves the care and perspective that the film is likely to offer. Of course, they’ve already been the subject of a fine oral history, a great 33 1/3 volume on the album There’s A Riot Goin’ On and Sly Stone’s recent autobiography, which I reference a few times below. Not to mention serious consideration in any book about the music of the period that’s worth a damn.

This remarkable group is distinguished not only by its legendary leader, but also by the expertise of the musicians around him – a conscious mix of Black and white, men and women, to make a still-important cultural statement – who sometimes sound like they’re playing as one but just as often step into the spotlight to take their individual turns. We learn some of their names on record – like horn players Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini, who tell “all the squares” to “go home” on “Dance to the Music” – and we learn others by reputations, like innovative bassist Larry Graham, who left the group in 1972 and went on to his own storied solo career. Joining Sly’s blood siblings Freddie and Rose, founding drummer Gregg Errico, and many other crucial collaborators, Sly & the Family Stone embodied the countercultural collectivity of their Bay Area roots and the longer tradition of the expert ensemble tied together by a brilliant, iconoclastic, sometimes difficult leader.

And what a run. Their string of big hits composes one of the great pop triumphs and charts the larger progression from the big, bright sounds of the late-1960s through the deep funk and symphony soul of the mid-1970s. In that time, they made three albums that I’d call no-skips masterpieces. And, even in their brief time at the top, they earned lasting symbolic resonance, as the journey from “Dance to the Music” to There’s A Riot Goin’ On is an oft-referenced microcosm for the turbulent years marked both by breakthrough and backlash, by expansive “freedom dreams” and nightmares from Vietnam to Chicago, by shifting drugs and souring vibes. But Sly & The Family Stone’s music never settles for such easy separations, even as it announces and articulates them as well as anyone. Instead, their albums reveal their continuities, from the musical styles that remained cornerstones to the often-messy mixtures of hope, love, suspicion, exhaustion, and anger that characterize Stone’s lyrics and how each of the Family’s distinctive singers deliver them. But perhaps their greatest genius – and why their records still sound as fresh as ever despite their clear origins in a specific moment – is because Sly & The Family Stone always figured out a way, even in the worst or weirdest of circumstances, to burst (or float, or ooze) out of the speakers with the same energy and impact.

So, here are 16 of my favorites from Sly & The Family Stone. (Why 16? Why not?) This is certainly not meant as a definitive list of their best or a comprehensive overview of their career, nor does it mean that there aren’t many other tracks that I could’ve included. (I mean, where the hell is this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one?) Let me know which ones you love in the comments – I probably love them too.

1. “Help Me with My Broken Heart” (single, 1962)

The first single released by Sylvester Stewart, this 1962 confection is straight down the middle of the elegant, Latin-inflected pop and R&B then emerging from studios from New York to Memphis to the Bay Area where Stewart grew up and found his way into the music business. “Help Me with My Broken Heart” is many years and stylistic shifts away from the explosive syntheses of the Family Stone, and - with its stiff arrangement and still-tentative Stewart vocal - it’s not likely to replace even the group’s least distinguished album track. But “Help Me with My Broken Heart” is still a treat, especially when Stewart leaves the melody aside to soar into the higher ends of his range, employing the falsetto that was a trademark for the then-emergent category of “soul men” and would be one of his most effective (and flexible) vocal techniques for much of his career. As prologues go, it’s hard to beat something this infectious.

2. “I Cannot Make It” (from A Whole New Thing, 1967)

The ostentatious title A Whole New Thing was only partially realized on the debut album from Sly & the Family Stone. Their intermingling of R&B, pop, and rock in the immediate wake of the Summer of Love certainly announces itself with unique vibrance. But the “whole new thing” remained rooted in recognizable sounds, from the rave-up R&B of “Turn Me Loose” to the smoky pop of “That Kind of Person.” The album works best when it jams together those components in a way that seems legitimately fresh, like on “I Cannot Make It.” A lost-love lament framed by a winking critique of the too-cool crowd, “I Cannot Make It” moves back and forth between jangly stomp, tearful testimony, and horn-driven strut with such seamlessness that it almost (but not quite) disguises how deftly the group mixes all of them. An early example of the literal and figurative multi-vocality that defined the group, “I Cannot Make It” is a three-minute spin across the late-sixties AM dial that sounds a little bit like everything but like no one else at all.

3. “M’Lady” (from Life, 1968)

“M’Lady” is a pretty obvious rehash of “Dance to the Music,” from the pulsing “bum bum bum” vocals to the spotlights for each instrumentalist. But “M’Lady” manages to expand that remarkable formula beyond the statement-of-purpose of the Family Stone’s breakthrough hit. It’s filled with a bunch of ideas and they’re all great: From the opening horn-and-guitar riff to Cynthia Robinson’s scatting near the end, “M’Lady” is a jumble of barely connected parts that join together through sheer, funky will. Like many of their best early hits, “M’Lady” is grounded in the R&B rave-up tradition in which songs seem to exist as much to celebrate their own joyous selves as anything else. (And why not?) Also like many of their best early hits, “M’Lady” flat-out rocks, riding the groove with propulsive flexibility. “Dance to the Music” ordered all the squares to go home. “M’Lady” assured that nobody else would ever want to leave the party.

4. “Stand!” (from Stand!, 1969)

Stand! is that rarest of jewels – an instant greatest-hits album that features four hit singles among its eight tracks, and three others that have made their way into the group’s canon. (Only the 14-minute jam “Sex Machine” feels like it couldn’t also have been a smash.) The title track, which opens the album in declamatory fashion, is the powerhouse anthem for the band’s second phase just as “Dance to the Music” had invoked their breakthrough. While that earlier track announced a wondrous party, “Stand!” demands a pride and self-reliance that corresponds to this fertile era of political protest and cultural redefinition. Or what Stone, in his autobiography, called a spirit of “lift and uplift,” which kicks off from the first drum crash. In circling call-and-response, Sly, Freddie, Rose, and Larry Graham warn against the perils both outside your door and (worse) inside your head. “Don’t you know that you are free,” Freddie Stone sings near the end, “Well, at least in your mind if you want to be.” After these warm encouragements and stern reminders, the group climaxes with a stomping breakdown that links the liberationist vision of “Dance to the Music” with this new assertion, which they carry forward throughout the great album that shares its title.

5. “Somebody’s Watching You” (from Stand!, 1969)

The paranoia that eventually draped over Stone’s music was always there, slinking around the edges of pleas both insistent (“Underdog”) and more elusive (“I Ain’t Got Nobody (For Real”). But perhaps the boldest signal of where the Family Stone was soon heading came from “Somebody’s Watching You,” an enduring Stand! album track that later became a single for Stone’s collaborators Little Sister. Disguised in one of the group’s catchiest sing-a-simple-song melodies, “Somebody’s Watching You” is a poison-pen love letter that warns of dangers coming from seeming success. Each lyric – like the tra-la-la sting of “Ever stop to think about a downfall?”, or the closing reminder “Jealous people like to see you bleed” – gains resonance from the call-and-response construction, in which the singers come in and out of the circle to whisper in your ear. (The near harmony on “The higher the price, the nicer the nice” is a striking note of discordance.) As much as the album’s three celebratory anthems “Stand!,” “Everyday People,” or “I Want To Take You Higher” exemplified the moment, the restless suspicions of “Somebody’s Watching You” proved equally prophetic both to the band and the world around it. Maybe more so.

6. “Everybody Is a Star” (single, 1969)
7. “Hot Fun in the Summertime” (single, 1969)

It’s stunning. On top of two all-timer albums released in 1968 and 1971, respectively, Sly and the Family Stone dropped three tracks on standalone singles in 1969 that are as good as anything they or anyone else recorded. I love the thick funk and brooding crossroads-blues imagaery of “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” because of course I do. But I wanted to spotlight the other two of this almighty trilogy, each of which is defined by its sheer beauty. The flipside of “Thank You,” “Everybody Is a Star” is an anthem of self-love and community support that shines as brightly as its title subject, with the group’s vocalists each stepping into the spotlight to offer their encouragement. No song better utilized the respective vocal ranges, as Rose Stone’s piercing soprano, Freddie Stone’s aching tenor, and Sly Stone’s rumbling baritone form a multi-octave mosaic. The message – “I love you for who you are, not the one you think you need to be” – has never dimmed. Like “Ooh Child,” “Lean on Me,” “I’ll Take You There” or others, “Everybody Is a Star” is a (barely) secular hymn infused with gospel power and called out to whoever needs to hear it. The fluttering “Hot Fun in the Summertime” is equally enchanting, a love song that’s clearly as much about a love for the season as for the woman whose arrival signals its beginning. Over a piano line that grows more layered as the track progresses, the string-assisted Family Stone scales the melody over an arrangement that expands like humid air.

8. “Just Like a Baby” (from There’s a Riot Goin’ On, 1971)

The jump-cut from the widescreen technicolor of Stand! and the 1969 singles (not to mention the group’s justifiably legendary appearances at both Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival) to the muted claustrophobia of 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On has been written about extensively, and for good reason. A jarring portent of a new world order, the brilliance of Riot is rooted in Stone’s refusal to clarify: The tracks are fuzzed-out and burbling, and Sly reaches through the muck to whisper, wail, growl, and goad himself back into the newly ill-fitting suit of the Family Stone formula. This is an album of deep fatigue, with exhaustion permeating each element of the circling, spiraling arrangements. But it’s beautiful, too. “Just Like a Baby” is a weeping, organ-driven blues that finds Stone’s narrator relating to the big-feelings vulnerability of the tender years. If you can’t catch the lyrics, Stone drives the point home with cries, moans, and throttled yelps that bounce around in the echo chamber of the production. No escape.

9. “Family Affair” (from There’s a Riot Goin’ On, 1971)

It’s no surprise that “Family Affair” was a big hit. It gets you from the beginning, with the popping electronic riff that opens the song and continues throughout. Then Rose Stone enters with the title phrase, spinning it out like the first line of a play. And then Sly comes in, leaning wearily (or maybe warily) against each syllable of this hard look at pain and love, before unleashing another pained near-scream to send us off at the end. The presence of ringers Billy Preston and Bobby Womack only reinforces what’s already obvious: “Family Affair” fits perfectly alongside the musically expansive and thematically ambivalent R&B, pop, and rock that found its way to the radio in the early 1970s. It’s strange, sad, and subtly frightening, but it proved that this family (even in fractured form) hadn’t lost their best pop instincts in the midst of the turbulence. “Blood’s thicker than the mud,” indeed.

10. “Spaced Cowboy” (from There’s a Riot Goin’ On, 1971)

Yee haw. Opening with an extended keyboard and bass intro that could’ve gone on for twenty minutes without any complaints from me, “Spaced Cowboy” mixes a few spare lyrics – delivered in sorta-harmony by Sly and Freddie – with a series of increasingly maniacal yodels over a propulsive backing track that offers only a brief harmonica solo as a respite from the pulsing throb. The “spaced” in the title suggests that it’s about drugs, which would make sense given both the contexts of its creation and the strung-out cloudiness that settles over the track as it progresses. But there’s a trickster spirit in this strange little riddle, a smirk from underneath the cowboy hat as you take this weird trip together. As Stone remembered later, “on that one, we were having some real fun.”

11. “Thankful n’ Thoughtful” (from Fresh, 1973)

Fresh isn’t as good as its masterpiece predecessor There’s a Riot Goin’ On, but only by the slightest of margins. Clearing away some of the murk but keeping much of the mood (not to mention those bubbling synths), Fresh further paves the way for later funk-rooted synthesists like D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, or Prince, while nodding at voices elsewhere in rich chorus of early-70s R&B. “Thankful n’ Thoughtful,” for example, is a simmering slow-burn that suggests Sly was paying attention to the work of Al Green, Ann Peebles, and others coming out of the Hi Records hothouse in Memphis. Over a spare, repeating rhythm punctuated by stabbing horns, Stone testifies to his continued survival and his gratitude to “the Main Man” who let him live and create another day. With Little Sister affirming in the background, Stone also praises his mother, noting that she told him to record this “nice thing” because “people got to be reminded where it's really at.” The song and album are awfully good reminders.

12. “Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” (from Fresh, 1973)

Speaking of mothers, the Doris Day chestnut “Que Sera, Sera,” which begins with mom’s advice to a young girl, is transformed into something between a late-night slow-drag and an all-night wake. Stone later said that he recorded this cover as both a Sly tribute to Day (the mother of his friend, producer Terry Melcher) and a sly reference to the rumors that the two were romantically involved. “We made it new. We slowed it down,” he wrote in his autobiography. “We thickened it up. We stayed loose.” They sure did, with an airy verse vocal from Rose Stone that – even with an error in the second verse that Sly pops in to wave away – contrasts perfectly with Sly’s full-throated attack on the chorus. Like many of the Family Stone’s ballads in these years, the song doesn’t so much build up as drain out, trapping us before we know it and far past any desire we may have to escape. “I have no idea what Doris thought about it,” Sly recalled. “I never played it for her.”

13. “Loose Booty” (from Small Talk, 1974)

The underlying chant “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego” isn’t just a fantastic rhythmic device that drives this burning funk from 1974’s Small Talk. (And later inspired the Beastie Boys.) Stone’s autobiography details how he invoked the Biblical trio who defied Nebuchadnezzer and propelled Daniel to heroism in order to make a simple, powerful point: “Music could help you resist everyday problems. Music could keep you out of the fire.” Just as Stone’s historical referents escaped the flames, “Loose Booty” rocks with the same transcendent energy as “Dance To The Music” or other earlier Family Stone anthems. “When you're tryin' to flee from any fakin' grin,” he urges, “Find yourself some roots to let it all hang out/Get into some dancing, do what it's all about.” Of course, such party-up declarations sound different on the other side of There’s A Riot Goin’ On (or Fresh), not to mention in the wake of Family Stone acolytes Parliament-Funkadelic, whose own, different “Loose Booty” is its own masterpiece. Hard-bitten and hard-won, Sly’s calls to “leave the blues behind” for just a moment and storm out of the flames instead sounds redemptive no matter what.

14. “This Is Love” (from Small Talk, 1974)

The last track on the last golden-era Sly and the Family Stone album, “This Is Love” seems both like a beautifully tossed-off trifle and a restful summation. A gorgeous doowop swoon, with Flamingos-style “shu-bops” ringing throughout, “This Is Love” glides on a puffy cloud of an arrangement that’s not far from “Hot Fun in The Summertime,” recalls the dreamiest sides of the 5^th Dimension and Beach Boys, and luxuriates in the sweet soul that Stone worked into even his most brooding or mind-blown recordings. Taken out of context, it feels like bliss. Taken in context with the rest of Small Talk, it sounds exactly the same, a warm smile to match the album cover’s photo of the new family Stone. And taken at the end of one of pop music’s greatest runs, it feels like a perfect conclusion.

15. “The Same Thing (Makes You Laugh, Makes You Cry)” (from Back on the Right Track, 1979)

The story of Sly and the Family Stone’s last few albums is told by their titles. Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back, Back on the Right Track, and Ain’t But The One Way all indicate Stone’s desire to prove that he hadn’t lost his touch. He doesn’t ever quite get there, although Stone’s 1975’s High On You (billed solo, rather than with the Family) is worth hearing top to bottom. But this trilogy, which takes him into the 1980s, contains several moments where Stone and his reconstituted Family recaptures the old magic and remixes it for a changing era. “The Same Thing,” from Back on the Right Track, is a crackling slice of rubber-band funk with Sly returning to the talk-box effects that he’d used to such good effect on “Don’t Call Me N*gger, Whitey,” and new bassist Kemi Burke deploying a slap bass that recalls former Family man Larry Graham without mimicking him. Lyrically, it’s classic blues, with Stone (who admitted borrowing the title from Ray Charles) detailing the double-edged reality behind the things that make life worth living. It’s a hard lesson, delivered – again, in the best blues tradition – with music that refuses to wallow in its implications. There’s probably only one great album to be drawn from those last three Family Stone releases. But it would be a great album, and “The Same Thing” would be one of its highlights.

16. “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” (from I’m Back! Family & Friends, 2011)

Sly Stone’s “return” in 2011 was inevitably a bit of a letdown. While it was remarkable, even miraculous, to get new music from the long-reclusive artist, I’m Back! Family and Friends consisted mostly of able retreads of Family Stone classics with a crew of celebrity guests. It was all well and good, but only caught a spark during the three new songs at the end. The best of those wasn’t a new song at all, but rather Stone’s take on the gospel standard “His Eye Is on The Sparrow.” His voice poking through the enveloping cascade of instruments and background vocals, Stone’s performance is at once both barely there and fully at the center, a fitting symbol for the artist’s uniquely enigmatic presence. I doubt that the new documentary will spur new music from Stone (though one can hope), but the recessional grandeur of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” is a worthy curtain-closer on a recording career that managed to change everything while remaining one of a kind. Amen.

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