Song 175: “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone Part 2, “My Own Beliefs Are In My Song”

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickies

Psalm 175

Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone

Part 2 My Own Beliefs Are in My Song

Before I begin, a brief note.

This episode contains a lot of discussion of drug abuse, of racism, and some talk of gangster violence, controlling behaviour, and mental illness.

If you find those subjects upsetting, you may want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode, or skip this one.

Also, as with several other episodes like this one, the information we have about people's behaviour is based on the opinions of people who are around at the time, many of whom may not have had as nuanced an understanding of either mental illness or drug addiction as we would like.

This means that any description of these behaviours will inevitably be filtered through the experiences of the people talking about them, and might not match reality, or how we would talk about the same things today.

When we left Stein the Family Stone at the end of the last episode, the group had just formed.

The group members came from different backgrounds.

We looked at the background of the Stone Stewart family last week, and also at that of Larry Graham, but the other musicians were also professional musicians before joining the group.

Jerry Martini had played Saxe in a band called George and Teddy and the Condors, two black singers performing in a duo along the same lines as Don and Dewey, but backed by white musicians.

The group had been tipped for success.

They'd performed on Shindig and had been sent to Italy for a while in an attempt to break them in the European market.

And they had even met the Beatles, though their records mostly show them covering current hits and RB standards, rather than anything more interesting.

George and Teddy were never hugely successful in terms of record sales, but they were a big live act.

When Martini got the call from Sly to join his new band, he quit the condors right before a residency they had booked at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, where they were going to make $800 each per week, equivalent to about $7,500 in today's money.

But as he said, I saw something in Sly and believed in him so much that I gave up my apartment, I moved in with my in-laws, and lost everything I had and went to work for $10 a night, what we made at the Winchester Cathedral, married, three kids.

My mother wouldn't speak to me for two years.

Gregorico, before joining Freddie and the Stone Souls, Freddy Stone's group, had played with a soul group called the VIPs.

There are no recordings of the VIPs that I know of, but Freddy and the Stone Souls had recorded some demos produced by Sly before their core members had joined the family Stone, like this instrumental titled LSD from 1966.

And Cynthia Robinson, before starting to work with Sly, had played in a bar band that had backed all the touring blues and RB musicians that came to town.

She mentioned blues musicians like Lowell Fulson, B.B.

King and Jimmy McCracklin.

None of them had the same level of success or experience in the music industry as Sly though, and they came from disparate backgrounds.

But crucially, none of them had played just one style of music.

This was important because Sly was very aware of the growing disparity between music that was thought of as black and music that was thought of as white, and this was something he was very concerned about.

As he would say later, I played Lord Buckley, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Lenny Bruce on an RB station.

I had all these black cats calling up and saying, why are you playing Whitey's, man?

I explained to him that there ain't no black and there ain't no white and if it comes down to that there ain't nobody blacker than me.

There ain't nobody blacker than Sill.

And Sly wanted to combine all those different influences.

He wanted to make music that would appeal to the new white counterculture in San Francisco.

Music that would be as melodic and innovative as the Beatles, would have lyrics as poetic as those of Dylan, but which was also as funky as James Brown or Otis Redding.

There were some precursors to the kind of music he wanted to make, but not many.

There had been black musicians who had tried to target the beat group market, like the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's band, who had been produced and managed by Sam Cooke before his death.

That's no lie.

Dables turning now it's her turn to cry.

Because I used to love it.

Day for

the night.

There were the Chambers Brothers, another family group like the Valentinos, four black brothers plus a white drummer, who had started out as a folk group but moved into rock and were soon to have their own big hit with Time Has Come Today.

Now the time has come.

Time is no place to run.

Time I get burned up by the sun.

Time when I have my fun

time I've been loved and

In LA, Love had a similar racial mix, and of all the artists we've covered, Arthur Lee is the one who is most often compared to Sly Stone, and the two men had very similar personalities and career trajectories.

Another influence, less remarked on in recent years, now that Sly and the Family Stone have been neatly characterized as funk or psychedelic soul in retrospect, but very obvious to listeners at the time, was the Fifth Dimension, a black vocal group who had big sunshine pop hits with songs written by people like John Phillips of the Mamas and the Poppers, Ashford and Simpson, Laura Nero, and Jimmy Webb, and whose vocal sound was often based around passing lines between different members, both male and female.

That's an influence the group would specifically acknowledge on their second album, when the song Music Lover included the title of the fifth dimension's big hit, Up Up and Away, as the chorus hook.

All of these contemporaries were trying for some of the same things Stone was going for, and many of them had released records before the Family Stone even formed.

But none of them were going for all of the same things.

Sly and the Family Stone were going to be black and white, and have women instrumentalists, be a vocal group like the Fifth Dimension, but also a rock band like Love, but also with a horn section and gospel backing vocals.

Initially, the group were playing mostly top 40 40 material live.

The first song they ever rehearsed was I Don't Need No Doctor, a song written by Ashford, Simpson, and Armistead for Ray Charles, just before Ashford and Simpson went over to Motown.

Every band member got their own spotlights in the band's show, which was again part of Stone's philosophy at this time.

As he put it, I wanted it to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat.

By that I mean, if there was anything to be happy about, then everybody'd be happy about it.

If there was a lot of money to be made, for anyone to make a lot of money.

If there were a lot of songs to sing, then everybody got to sing.

That's the way it is now.

Then if we have something to suffer or a cross to bear, we bear it together.

The entire show was thus set up to show off all the band members as individuals.

The show would start with Gregoriko on drums, playing a beat, and then one by one each band member would get on stage, sometimes walking through the audience, and then pick up their instrument and join in.

The shows would start with an instrumental piece called The Riffs, which was just a collection of every different jazz riff the group knew, in different keys and time signatures, one after another without a break to show how disciplined the group actually was.

And the show would continue without a break.

The music would literally never stop, as every song flowed into the next with no interruptions.

The repertoire in these early days was mostly hits, usually solo or RB songs, but was again designed to give each member their own solo numbers.

Larry Graham's voice was slightly similar to Lou Rolls, so he'd get a Rawls song like Tobacco Road.

Freddie Stone would sing Try a Little Tenderness in a version similar to Otis Reddings.

Cynthia Robinson would play the old blues song St.

James Infirmary.

And Jerry Martini would play Shotgun, the junior Walker Motown hit.

He wouldn't sing it, but he would play the sax part.

The group's first performances were at a venue that had recently been renamed the Winchester Cathedral, after the new vaudeville band hit, and which was owned by the Bob Rummels former manager, Rich Romanello, who briefly became the group's manager as well.

The Winchester Cathedral was mostly a venue for garage rock bands.

Bands like the Chocolate Watch Band played there, but the Family Stone soon became popular enough with the Winchester Cathedral's audience that they started introducing originals into their set.

The first original they included was a song titled I Ain't Got Nobody for Real, and it's very easy to see from it the ways in which the group were a group and not solely a vehicle for Sly Stone's musical ideas.

Stone's original demo of the song, from before the group ever formed, is a slow Latin jazz track.

I ain't got nobody

looking after me.

I ain't got nobody.

I ain't home free.

If you need

But in early 1967 the group went into the studio and recorded four demo tracks.

They didn't pay the studio bill and as a result the owner of the studio eventually got the rights to the tracks and put them out on various budget albums after the group became famous.

One of those was a new version of the song and you can hear that while the melody and lyrics are very similar the whole feel of the track is transformed by the contributions of the other members of the group.

If you need somebody,

let's get to your man.

It was shortly after they recorded those tracks that the group came to the attention of David Kafalik.

Kapfalik was a strange mixture of the conventional and the utterly unconventional.

He described himself as a middle-class New York-born humanist liberville Jewish prince, and had for a while been the head of AR at Columbia Records, the most conventional of all the major labels.

While there, he had signed Andy Williams and Barbara Streisand to the label, and produced Muhammad Ali's novelty album, I Am the Greatest.

I am the greatest!

I'm the kid who will take old man Lister's title away.

Me, a little old kid who don't even shave yet.

I'm going to be champ of the world before I'm old enough to do my first shaving commercial.

And I'm going to make boxing popular again.

Me with my beautiful, colorful personality.

I'm going to make boxing interesting.

Boxing doesn't have to be dull.

It's the fighters who are dull.

I watched the fight of the week on TV.

They call that the fight of the week.

It was so boring, every time the bell rang it woke up the referee.

But on the other hand, he had also been the person who had first brought together Tom Wilson and Bob Dylan, when Dylan had stopped recording with John Hammond, and thus been a vital link in shaping rock music history.

But it was John Hammond that had caused a change in Kaplik's career.

As head of ANR, he was Hammond's boss.

and he tried to sack Hammond at one point.

According to an interview Kaplik gave in the 1990s, that was because Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin came to him and complained about Hammond's production of them.

But while both Dylan and Franklin did indeed have their differences with Hammond, at the time Hammond was producing them, neither artist was the major star they became later, and the idea of a major record executive deciding to fire Hammond on their word alone is frankly absurd.

Whatever Kaplik's reasons for wanting to sack Hammond actually were, though, he forgot a rather important fact, which is that no matter who was Hu's ostensible boss, John Hammond was, through his family background and his history of discovering important artists, one of the most important men in the industry.

Hammond went round to visit his old friend William Paley, the CEO of CBS, Columbia's parent company, and Kapfalik, rather than Hammond, ended up sacked.

Kapfalik moved sideways into production and management, and had had some success managing a duo called Peaches and Herb.

That act's biggest success would not come until the late seventies, by which time Herb was on to his third peaches.

But the original duo had just released a top 10 hit, Close Your Eyes, on which Kapolik is a credited producer.

Open your heart

and whisper: I love you, I love you.

Tell me you love me,

you love me.

Tell me you love me.

Kapralik was pointed in the direction of Sly and the Family Stone by a San Francisco-based record producer named Chuck Gregory, and he was hugely impressed.

He already knew of Stone as a producer by reputation, and Stone also knew of Kapolik as a record executive, and the two quickly agreed they were going to work together.

In fact, in Kapralik's case, he seems to have been one of the most extreme examples of a phenomenon that happened over and over again.

He seems to have become obsessed with Sly Stone, desperate for his approval, and willing to do anything for him even against his own best interests, fairly quickly subsuming his own identity into stone's.

To start with, Kaplik was able to get the group a residency in Las Vegas at the Pussycatagogo, one of the few Vegas venues at the time that would put on rock acts.

Gary Puckett and the Union Gap and Icantina Turner had previously played there.

The group quickly became the group to go and see among the other entertainers in Vegas, both those doing residencies and those passing through.

James Brown came to see the band, as did the Fifth Dimension in the Ino Tempo, and Bobby Dammin was a huge fan and would come and see the show whenever he could.

The residency was cut short though, and the group had to leave Las Vegas in a hurry, when it became evident that Sly's views of racial harmony and black and white being together extended to his romantic life.

The owner of the Pussycatagogo was both a racist bigot and someone with organised crime connections, and the group found themselves having to leave town quickly.

But before that they'd already cut most of their first album.

While Kapalik had been ousted from Columbia a few years earlier, Columbia had undergone a corporate restructuring towards the end of 1966, and Clive Davis, a former lawyer, had been made president of the newly renamed CBS Records.

Davis had quickly rehired Kapfalik, this time as head of ANR for CBS's subsidiary Epic, and had agreed that Kapfalik could continue to run his management and publishing companies on the side, and could sign artists he managed to Epic, concepts like conflict of interest never having been of huge concern to the record business.

Davis had also, around the same time, become a convert to the new countercultural rock music, after having been invited to the Monterey Pop Festival by Lou Adler, and so all of a sudden CBS was going all out to sign San Francisco rock bands.

The combination meant that very shortly after signing with Capfalik, the group also signed with Epic.

They'd had Mondays off during their Vegas residency, and so every Monday they'd flown to LA, spent 24 hours in the studio, and then flown back to Vegas.

The album's opening track, Underdog, was another song Sly had written before the group was even formed.

Indeed, it had originally been recorded by the Beau Brummels, though their version went unreleased.

I know how it feels when you know for views that every other time you get a raw view, but you're the understounce.

I know how it feels for people to stop, turn round and round, stare stand by a little bit, and no rate me.

I know how free play the farm feels the party was really long, they just underestimate me.

But I understand.

The revised version seems to have been a definite attempt to capture the mood of summer 1967.

Right down to the intro.

The Beatles had, of course, just released All You Need Is Love, with its intro being a section of the Marcias, where it seems likely that that inspired the group to start the track and the whole album with an excerpt of another traditional French tune.

That first album, titled A Whole New Thing, became a huge favorite among other musicians, with fans like Mose Allison and Tony Bennett.

And according to Kapfalik, Teal Massero, the legendary jazz record producer, told Kapfalik that all his artists were raving about the record.

George Clinton, who at the time was a singer in a minor vocal group called The Parliaments, was astonished by Underdog, and realised there were other directions he could take his music in.

The album also showcased the talents of the different members of the band, with both Larry and Freddie taking lead vocals.

Sly was, at this point at least, definitely the first among equals.

But the record didn't sell at all.

Underdog, the first single, did so so poorly that sources seem conflicted about whether it was even released at all, other than as a promo, though there are photos of what appeared to be stock copies on discogs, so I believe it was.

Essentially, at this point, Sly Stone was that most frustrating of things from a record company perspective, a musician's musician.

Stone was someone who had seriously studied composition and music theory, and was applying those ideas to soul and rock.

But what he was not doing yet was writing stuff that appealed to the general audience.

Or to rock critics, who have never, as a collective, been particularly good at understanding music.

A typical review is the one from Rolling Stone, which said, The record represents the Bay Area's very first rhythm and blues group to go national.

It reflects a combination of San Francisco's new thing and some standard RB techniques, an approach which is interesting but not entirely effective.

None of the tracks particularly stand out as strong.

The production, and it is more of production than a performance, is still in the experimentation stage and has not yet come to a satisfactory conclusion.

Notably, the review is very wrong about it being more a production than a performance.

A Whole New Thing is the only album the group ever made to be recorded mostly as live, but everyone at CBS was still convinced that Sly and the Family Stone were potential hitmakers.

After the Vegas debacle, the group relocated to New York, where they had a residency at the Electric Circus, a club which had previously been known as the Balloon Farm, and before that had been the Dom, where the Velvet Underground and Nico had done the early exploding plastic inevitable shows with Warhole.

By this point, Rose Stone had also joined the band on keyboards and vocals, becoming the fourth of the five siblings to be in the band, and the second female instrumentalist in the group, completing the classic line-up that would have the group's biggest success.

As Sly put it, Rose is the electric piano player, singer, dancer, and anything else I need.

You see, when Rose joined the group, everybody was doing everything on stage, and that was almost a requirement that any new member had to meet.

She was a a vital ingredient in the band, but they were still not translating their great live performances into record sales.

Davis and Kapolik had a conversation with Sly, in which they told him that what he needed to do was come up with something relatable, something simple, something people could dance to.

He could still do as innovative stuff as album tracks, of course, but couldn't he just do a pop song as a single?

You know, like all those dance records he'd made a few years earlier?

So he did just that.

Several people, including Jerry Martini, thought that that track was the beginning of the end for Sly and the Family Stone.

Martini was the one who had been the initial impetus for the band's existence, and he was the one who took the idea of compromising their artistic vision for commercial success hardest.

Decades later, Martini would say, Sly threw it down and he looked at me and said, Okay, I'll give them something.

And that is when he took off with his formula style.

He hated it, he just did it to sell records.

The whole album was called Dance to the Music, Dance to the Medley, Dance to the Shmedley.

It was so unhip to us.

The beats were glorified Motown beats.

We had been doing something different, but these beats weren't going over, so we did the formula thing.

The rest is history, and he continued his formula style.

While it's definitely true that the next few albums were more commercial than the group's first, it's hard to say there was anything formulaic about them, or if there was, it was a formula that Sly and the Family Stone created themselves.

There are, of course, elements of dance to the music that can be traced back to other things.

The line, Ride, Sally, Ride, fairly obviously, was a reference to Mustang Sally.

While the structure of the song, introducing each instrument one after another, obviously owes a lot to the group's own shows, with each instrument coming in.

I'm gonna add a little good talk

and make it easier to move your feet.

But it also owes more than a little to King Curtis's then recent hit, Memphis Soul Stew, which does the same thing.

Today's special is Memphis Soul Stew.

We sell so much of this, people wonder what we put in in it.

We're gonna tell you right now.

Give me about a half a teacup

of bass.

Now I need a pound of fat back drums.

Now give me four tablespoons of ball in Memphis guitars.

This is gonna taste all right.

Another part of the track has its origin in an accident that happened either on stage or during rehearsals, accounts vary, but which showed how ultra-disciplined the band were, and how much they followed Sly's lead.

The group were performing a song where Sly sang a verse, then next time round Freddy would harmonise with him, and the time after that Larry would harmonise with both of them.

Sly forgot the lyric and just sang Boom Boom Boom to fill in.

The next time that part came round Freddy also sang Boom Boom, and the time after so did Larry.

Those boom boom booms became a trademark of the group's live performances, and so they were included in the record.

One final sonic characteristic of the record came out as a byproduct of how musicians are paid for their records.

Performers obviously get royalties on records that sell well, and if you're a huge star, that's how you make most of the money from recording.

But musicians who are members of the union also get paid a flat session fee for each recording session, and often in the 60s, a time of low advances and dodgy accounting, the session fee was the only way you could be sure of making any money from a record at all.

There was an overdubbing session for the new album, and Jerry Martini's saxophone parts had all already been recorded, but obviously he turned up to the session anyway, as he was an equal member of the band.

But you could only be sure of getting your musicians' union fees if you actually had an instrument with you.

It was not unknown for union officials to come around to sessions and check up on who was actually playing what.

Martini didn't feel like lugging a heavy saxophone that he wasn't going to actually be playing, all the way to the studios, and like most saxophone players, he could also play clarinet.

The two instruments are not identical, but they have very similar fingering patterns.

The clarinet is much more portable, so he brought that along rather than carry a heavy sax.

He was noodling in a back room when Sly decided that noodling would fit well on the record, and so Dance to the Music became the first soul hit I'm aware of.

Though remember that, as we always say, there's no first anything.

To have the clarinet as a lead instrument.

Martini's clarinet would feature a lot on the next few releases by the group.

Dance to the Music became a top ten hit in spring 1968 and immediately started to have an effect on other musicians.

Otis Williams of The Temptations heard the record and others by Stone, and suggested to Norman Whitfield that this might be a style that Whitfield might want to go in.

Whitfield was initially dismissive of the idea as a passing fad, but within a few months, he had the temptations in the studio recording Cloud Nine, a song that combined the social critique of some of Sly's album tracks with wild wa guitar, lines being passed between different singers, boom-boom backing vocals, and even a brief mention of Up Up and Away, the line that Sly and the Family Stone had used themselves as a nod to the fifth dimension.

You ain't got no responsibility.

And I've been at the NSB.

Reality.

This new style, pioneered by the Family Stone and taken up by Whitfield, incorporating elements from San Francisco hippie music into soul music, became known as Psychedelic Soul and quickly became the dominant mode of black music for much of the next decade.

The group's second album, titled After Their Hit Single, was a far more cohesive piece of work than the first album, concentrating on danceable music, songs like Ride the Rhythm and the 12-minute medley Dance to the Medley, consisting of Music is Alive, Dance In, and Music Lover.

It also contained a song called Hire, which was Sly's first attempt at remaking Advice, the the song he'd written for Billy Preston.

I want to take you higher.

I want to take you higher.

So be alright if we take you higher.

In one of the little bits of acknowledgement of other people's work that Stone would slip in on a semi-regular basis, Hire now included an intro.

That bears more than a little resemblance to Jackie Wilson's similarly named hit: Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher and Higher.

Lifting

higher and higher

The version of Hire on Dance to the Music wouldn't be the last time that the group returned to the song.

Despite being named after a top 10 hit single, and being perfectly calculated to be a massive commercial success, the Dance to the Music album did little better commercially than the previous album had.

It made number 11 on the RB albums chart, but only number 142 on the pop album charts.

But the song Dance to the Music itself was big enough that the group could do fun things like record a joking remake of it in French, released under the name The French Fries.

The Dance to the Music album was cut in New York, and during their time there, the band's dynamics slowly began to change.

In particular, they performed at the Fillmore East for the first time, as a support act for the Jimi Hendrix experience in May 1968, just after the release of the album.

Normally, the Fillmore East would have three acts on, but the Family Stone and the Experience both had such strong reputations as live acts that Bill Graham didn't see a need to add a third.

According to David Kaplik, up to that point, each individual member had their star piece, each member did a solo.

At the Fillmore, he decided that it was going to be a one-man show and everybody else was going to back him up, and he took away all their solos.

That was the first change of substance that I saw.

That wasn't a permanent, total change.

There's an excellent live album of the group's return visit to the Film Or East a few months later, which includes Cynthia doing her trumpet version of St.

James's Infirmary, but from this point on, Sly slowly became the focal point on stage.

Where previous it had been Sly and the Family Stone, now it was Sly and the Family Stone.

But the gig was a spectacular success, though sadly unrecorded.

They knew that they had to impress an audience there to see Hendrix, and made a special effort.

At one point, Sly, Freddy, and Larry jumped down into the audience, first passing the bass over to Cynthia, who was not a bass player but had to nonetheless keep the rhythm going, and started doing Hambone, the old combination dance, street game, and photo rap that involves slapping different parts of your body, and which we talked about way back in the episode on Bo Diddley.

They led the audience in three columns out of the theatre, while doing hambone all the while, with Cynthia and Gregor Eco gamely keeping the rhythm going.

They took the audience out into the street, looped back, and came back in, before Sly, Freddy, and Larry got back on stage and back to the song they've been playing.

There was another change that came that night.

That was, according to Jerry Martini, the first time that he saw Freddie Stone do cocaine, and according to everyone, it was the group's period in New York that cocaine became a major part of the group's life.

We've not had much cause to talk about cocaine thus far in this podcast, because drugs go in and out of fashion, and for most of the 50s and 60s, cocaine was very much out of fashion.

If you were from the jazz world, you used heroin.

If you wanted to stay up all night to play long club gigs, you used amphetamines.

And if you wanted to expand your mind, you used cannabis or LSD.

It shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone though, to know that the drugs of choice in the music world became very different as the 60s turned into the 70s.

Heroin became much more widespread, as we heard about a devastating effect in the episodes on The Grateful Dead and Janice Joplin.

But it's going to be literally impossible to talk about music or culture in the 70s and

without talking about the effects of cocaine, as the drug became absolutely ubiquitous.

The drug really took off in the counterculture in 1969, with the release of the film Easy Rider, but as with many things, Slystone was ahead of the trends, and he and several other members of the band that tried the drug in 1967, and became heavy users in 1968.

Cocaine is going to play such an important part in this story that it's worth taking a while right now to talk about its effects.

As with all discussion of drugs in this podcast, there is a problem in that I can't talk about them from my own experience.

I don't use anything stronger than coffee and never have.

And much as I'd like to be able to talk authoritatively about everything in the podcast, I'm not going to risk both my health and a lengthy jail sentence to do so.

So be aware that when I talk about this, I'm doing so from a position of relative ignorance, and my description of cocaine's effects may differ from what might be said by someone with more personal experience.

Also, as I talk about the effects of various substances on physical and mental health, I want to make very clear that none of what follows is medical advice, and even if it was, nobody on earth should take medical advice from a music history podcast.

Cocaine is an alkaloid that's found in coca leaves, which for millennia have been chewed or brewed as a tea by indigenous people in South America.

In the low concentrations in which it's found in the leaves, the drug causes only a mild euphoria, and the use of coca leaves is largely harmless.

But in the mid-19th century, the compound was isolated and purified, and as with all such new discoveries, it immediately became a wonder chemical, used in everything from eyed drops to soft drinks.

We all, I'm sure, know that it was originally an ingredient in Coca-Cola.

In the 19th century, it was a fashionable drug among the intellectual elite in Europe.

Sigmund Freud wrote of it as a panacea, and it's a lot easier to understand how Freud came to his own conclusions when you realise how much cocaine he used.

But by the 1930s, as the harmful effects of the drug had become more well known, cocaine was mostly being sold to black communities because of a belief by employers that it would make them work harder.

And it had become associated with disreputability, as in Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocha.

Showed her how to kick the gong around.

Hardy-ho!

Hardy-ho!

Hardy-high!

The way cocaine works is by disrupting dopamine reuptake.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter which, as most people are at least vaguely aware, is associated with pleasure.

More precisely, it's associated with what's called motivational salience.

with the brain's reward mechanisms.

When you do something that is associated with an increase in evolutionary fitness, like eating a high-calorie food, or having a drink when you're thirsty, or having an orgasm, cells called dopaminergic cells release a little bit of dopamine in your bloodstream, which then hit dopamine receptors in your brain.

That acts as a motivation for you to keep doing that thing over and over if you can.

Essentially, dopamine tells your brain, keep doing that, it feels good.

Many of these dopamine receptors are in the limbic system, a part of the brain that deals with the way emotion and memory are linked.

So if you get a lot of dopamine from something, your brain also creates an association in your memory that tells you, that felt good, you should do that again.

But having the wrong levels of dopamine in your brain could be bad.

Too much dopamine can lead to schizophrenia, while not enough can lead to other problems like Parkinson's disease or depression.

People with ADHD also don't produce as much dopamine as other people, which causes problems.

It makes it hard to say, okay, I've had enough, because the dopamine receptors haven't had any dopamine, so you keep eating eating more and more and more of the chocolate, trying to produce enough dopamine for those greedy receptors.

Conversely, you could try to do something really important, like writing a script for a podcast episode for example, but find that you're physically unable to make yourself do it.

Your brain doesn't get the same rewards for it that other brains do, and so it just refuses to do its thing.

So in order to prevent you from on the one hand feeling compelled to do completely random things because you get an enormous buzz from them, or on the other hand sitting staring blankly at a screen knowing that you should be doing your work but just completely unable to do it.

The dopaminergic cells have a sort of monitoring system which checks how much dopamine is floating around in your brain.

Not enough and they'll give you a little extra hit.

Just the right amount and they'll stop producing it.

And if there's too much there's a process called dopamine reuptake where the dopaminergic cells suck the dopamine back in inside themselves, lowering the level.

The way cocaine works is to block dopamine reuptake, so your dopaminergic cells don't get the chance to suck that dopamine back in.

So for a while, your brain feels like whatever you're doing was the best idea in the world, and the effect has been compared to the best orgasm in the world, or like a drink of water when you're dying of thirst.

It gives you more energy, suppresses your appetite, and makes whatever you're doing right now, however good or bad it is, feel great.

The problem is that, as I mentioned before, too much dopamine in your system can lead to psychosis, and so taking large amounts of cocaine can lead to feeling like there are bugs crawling under your skin, hallucinations, mood swings, and paranoia.

Unfortunately, because of the way dopamine affects the limbic system, your brain is motivated to seek out more and more cocaine, and cocaine also affects the parts of your brain that deal with stress, rewiring them and making you feel stress and anxiety more when you're not on cocaine, if you take it for long enough.

As you can imagine, this makes cocaine have a very definite effect on people's behaviour, and it certainly started to on members of the family Stone, most notably Sly himself.

Cocaine wouldn't be the first drug to cause the group problems.

The follow-up to Dance to the Music, Life, didn't chart.

But oddly the B-side, Malady, hit the lower reaches of the UK top 40.

To promote that, and off the back of Dance to the Music being a top 10 hit, the group travelled to the UK.

Jerry Martini had been planning to flush a joint down the toilet just before getting on the plane, and Larry Graham persuaded him that rather than throw it away, he should give it to Graham.

Unfortunately, at the other end of the flight, Graham, who was black and so more of a target for customs people, got searched and arrested.

After that, things got worse.

The group's equipment got held up in transit, and instead they were meant to use rented equipment supplied by the promoter.

Unfortunately, the promoter was Don Arden, a man who was not known for caring about the artistic standards of his act, and who was known for threatening them with physical violence if they didn't do as he said.

At the first of the handful of promo gigs they were booked for, the Hammond organ that Arden had provided the group had multiple keys that didn't work, among other problems with the equipment.

The group refused to go on, and Arden explained to them what happened to people who didn't go on stage when he had booked them for a gig.

Eventually, the group went on stage but didn't play.

Instead, Sly explained the situation and that they didn't want to do a substandard performance and rip the audience off because they didn't have the right equipment.

He chatted on mic with individual audience members and got the crowd to be happy despite the problem.

Life, the song for which Milady was the B-side, was the title track of the group's third album, released less than a year after their first.

Life, the album, was a pivot away from the pure party music of the Dance to the Music album and back towards experimentalism, and was much more aimed at the hippie crowd who are into the new rock music.

Sometimes this was blatant references, as in the song Plastic Jim, which took elements from the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby.

And the Mothers of Inventions, plastic people.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, fellow Americans,

take dare you.

He's been sick.

And I think his wife is going to bring him some chicken soup.

I know it's hard to defend an unpopular policy every once in a while.

Prostitute people,

over

and combined them for the cover's hook line.

Indeed, the Mothers of Invention are probably the closest contemporary both to the sound of life, with its sonic experimentation, and to the subject matter.

Songs such as Jane is a Groupie, with its fuzz guitar and sadly misogynistic lyrics about groupies who don't know anything about the music they're fans of, could easily fit onto most Zappa albums.

And while the horn-driven sound of many tracks now signifies soul above all else, at the time there was a minor fad for rock bands with horn sections, like the Buckinghams and Blood, Sweat and Tears.

Life was geared strongly to the white rock market, but the white rock market wasn't interested.

Neither single nor album had any commercial success at all.

It looked like the group might be a one-hit wonder.

But the success of Dance to the Music, which was omnipresent for much of the year, led to an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show.

That included a remarkable medley of Dance to the Music, Music Lover, and I Want to Take You Higher, which included a lovely section where Sly and Rose go into the audience and encourage them to sing along and have a good time while the band keep playing.

And Sly does the same handbone dance he'd presumably done at the film R East.

Don't smack.

Works now.

Works now.

You can't see that in an audio podcast, but the audience is almost all very white, much older than the group's target audience, and for the most part not at all interested in singing or having any good times, thank you all the same.

At the end of the song, Sly says, Thank you for letting us be ourselves, which would later be slightly altered to become the title of one of the group's biggest hits.

But the most interesting thing about that medley comes at the very beginning, when they debut part of a new song.

Don't hate the black, don't hate the white.

If you get bitten, just hate the bite.

We got to live together.

I

have every day before

Everyday People was a song that was almost precision engineered to be a massive hit, and it became one.

The song was based around Larry Graham's slap bass, which just plays a single low G throughout the entire 2 minutes and 22 seconds of the song.

The song only has two chords total, and the basic melody is just a na na na na na playground chant, but there are multiple other hooks.

The horn line, the I Am Everyday People chorus, and the We Got to Live Together countervocal.

It has almost as many hooks in a short space as a record like Sugar Sugar, which came out a few months later.

We got to

Stone later said of the song, I didn't just want everyday people to be a song.

I wanted it to be a standard, something that would be up there with jingle bells on Moon River.

And I knew how to do it.

It meant a simple melody with a simple arrangement to match.

I think Larry played a single note through the whole song.

The message was also a simple one, the one that says a lot about the time it was released.

The point of the song comes in the last verse, which is about racial intolerance.

I

As one would expect from a band created around the idea of total racial integration, the song takes a fundamentally optimistic view of racism, one that could only be held so firmly in the late 60s, at a point when it could seem, after the Voting Rights Act, Loving v.

Virginia, and the Civil Rights Act, that all the institutional problems around race in America were getting fixed, and that from that point on there would be a level playing field for all races, and the only remaining problems would be personal animosity between individuals, rather than problems at the level of society.

Black and white could live together as long as they just accepted everyone's differences, and everyone had the same chances now.

Sly described the philosophy he had at the time by saying, you can't scream that because you are a colour you are anything.

You are black.

You are black, that's all.

You are among people who've been mistreated a lot.

But it doesn't necessarily mean that a white person next door is responsible.

His grandfather may have killed your grandfather, but he himself may love you.

It's simple.

Either everything's fair or nothing's fair.

Either everybody gets a chance to do what he wants, or, you know what I mean?

Of course, there are still people who think that to this day.

But at the time, it was a totally defensible position, possibly the default one that most people of goodwill held.

And Stone makes this message of universality apply to more than just race, in a verse that seems aimed at their hippie following.

There is a long hair that love it like a sharp care for being such a rich on that realm of the world.

What if I stand

for different

souls?

As the 60s were ending, the hippies seemed to be natural allies of the civil rights movement.

And indeed the hippie anti-war movement that came along in the latter years of the 60s grew out of the civil rights movement, and largely used the structures that had been built up by the earlier movement.

Both black people and hippies were getting attacked by the same socially conservative people, and the hippies largely considered themselves opposed to racism.

But of course, there is a difference between being discriminated against for having long hair, and being discriminated against for one's race, in that while either is bad, you can avoid the first simply by cutting your hair if you so choose.

And as the threat of the draft receded in the early 70s, a lot of the hippies lost their former radicalism.

More than a couple of years either side of the track's release in November 1968, the month that Nixon won the presidential election on the back of what was later termed the Southern Strategy, everyday people would ring at least a little false.

But at that brief moment in time, it was simultaneously a portrayal of the currently existing tensions in society and an ecstatic vision of a possible future.

The song went to number one, staying there for a month, and sold a million copies.

Billboard ranked it as the fifth biggest hit of 1969, and Sly's wish came true.

The song did indeed become a standard.

It was covered by artists one would expect, like the Staple Singers, The Four Tops, and the Supremes, and Icantina Turner with the I Ketts on vocals.

but I can be wrong.

My belief is my song.

A butcher, a baker, a drummer, and then

makes no difference what you group on me.

I,

and every day people.

But also, by some people, you definitely wouldn't expect.

Like Dolly Parton, who did a country rock version in 1980.

The Four Freshmen, whose version has a funky backing track, words I never thought I'd say about The Four Freshmen, but keeps breaking into their signature modern jazz harmonies, or Belle and Sebastian and Pearl Jam, both of whom we've covered at live.

My own personal favourite of the various odd covers is one recorded by Peggy Lee just as the original was nearing the top of the charts.

There's a fascinating period around 1969 when a lot of the best kooners and jazz singers, all of whom were used to recording whatever the popular songs of the time were, all simultaneously encounter the music of the late 60s, with very mixed results.

Sometimes you get a perfect match, like Ella Fitzgerald singing Smokey Robinson and Harry Nilson's songs, which just sound like they were written for her.

Sometimes you get a horrible uncomfortable mess demeaning both performer and song, like Frank Sinatra's attempt at Mrs.

Robinson, which really has to be heard to be believed.

though in a future episode we will touch briefly on a more successful attempt by Sinatra to get contemporary.

And then you have records that are just plain odd, like Peggy Lee's album A Natural Woman, which contains a very creditable version of the title track, a truly dire version of Dock of the Bay, a soundlike version of Blood, Sweat and Tears' Spinning Wheel, and this.

Who's that?

We got to believe

the ever.

I am no better.

That's the kind of hit that everyday people was.

And much like Respect had turned socket to me into common parlance, different strokes for different folks went from a phrase that Muhammad Ali had used once, to a common expression that was everywhere in the culture.

The record was a big enough hit that the B-side, Sing Singer Simple Song, made the top 30 on the RB charts and the lower reaches of the Hot 100.

Their next single was also a double-sided hit, though a less major one.

Stand was the title track to their next album and made number 22.

for you to bear

Things to go through if you're going anywhere

That song became the first track by the group to not entirely be by the group themselves Sly took a test pressing of the song to a discotheque and got the DJ there to play it.

The track didn't go down as well as he had hoped and so he had an idea for how to give the track a little extra kick.

He wanted to go into the studio to record a new tag, but several of the band members weren't available on short notice, and so he got in session musicians to record the tag, which many people think is the best part of the track.

At this point, Sly was at the height of his powers as a songwriter and arranger, and everyone notes that he was completely in control in the studio to the extent that when he called in the session musicians, he wrote all the parts for them as sheet music, rather than do the kind of head arrangement that would be normal with a rock or soul producer.

The B-side to stand, I Want to Take You Higher, was a remake of Higher, itself a remake of Advice, but third time was the charm.

They got it right this time, and even though it was a B-side, I Want to Take You Higher made the top 40, with its boom lacka lackalaka vocals, and another nod to the hippie rock audience with a name check of a doors hit.

thank my fire.

Wanna take you fired.

Sound is in your city too.

I Want to Take You Higher became another widely covered song, starting with a version by I Katina Turner that also made the top 40.

Beat is getting stronger.

Beat us getting longer too.

Music sounded good to me.

But I wanna say I wanna, I wanna take you higher.

Yeah,

let me take you higher.

Baby, baby, let me light your fire.

Stan was the group's fourth album in 18 months, and for many bands that level of production would lead to them scraping the bottom of the babel.

But the only sign that they might be flagging slightly was the overlong instrumental jam Sex Machine, which outstays its welcome at nearly 14 minutes.

But the fact that five of the seven other tracks on the album would end up on their greatest hits collection shows what kind of album this is.

It's inventive, it's commercial, and it at times is a little more cutting about racial relations than the big hit from it.

Like this.

And for those who worry about such things, I'm going to fade this before we hear that word.

and not a wonderful change of van.

The entire rest of the lyric to that track consists of the phrases, Don't Call Me, and here they use the most powerful slur for black people, which for obvious reasons I won't say, whitey, and don't call me whitey, and that slur again.

The MME's review of of the album said, Here is the hard rock group which weaves not only exciting instrumental patterns but vocal ones as well.

And while the album only made number 13 on the album charts, it stayed on the charts for two years and went gold within a few months, a massive leap forward compared to the three previous albums, none of which had broken the top 100.

But while the group had put out four albums in 18 months, it would be more than two years before their next album of new material.

The summer of 1969 was, for Sly Sly and the Family Stone, a summer of festivals, and it's fascinating to look at the bills they were playing on and realise that these shows were meant to appeal to a single audience, and what that says about tastes in that time period.

Their first festival of the year, in Toronto, was a two-day event with Chuck Berry, Dr.

John, the band, the Velvet Underground, the Bonzo Dog Band, Frocal Harlem, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Tiny Tim, among others.

The names that show up most frequently on the same bills as the group in 1969 are The Mothers of Invention, Johnny Winter, and the Jeff Beck Group.

Three of the festivals they played are notable above all else.

The first of these, chronologically, was the Harlem Cultural Festival, an event which has since been tagged the Black Woodstock.

The story of this series of concerts is told in full in the wonderful documentary Summer of Soul, which I can't imagine anyone who listens to this podcast not enjoying.

But in brief, as a way of providing some community cohesion and possibly avoiding the race riots that had broken out in other cities in the previous summers, a series of free outdoor concerts featuring most of the top black musicians of the period was put on in Harlem for six Sundays between June and August 1969.

The performers included Stevie Wonder, B.B.

King, Hugh Masakala, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Fifth Dimension.

And Sly and the Family Stone played the first show, at a time when racial tensions were so high in New York that the police refused to provide security for the show, leaving it to the Black Panthers to protect the crowd.

Thankfully, the Black Panthers took their job seriously.

We'll see when we look at the next song what happens when people who don't take security seriously are given the role.

The next major festival the group played was the Newport Jazz Festival.

We've already heard in the episode on Like a Rolling Stone about how there had been crowd control issues at previous Newport festivals, with the Marines having to be called in to clear the streets of marauding jazz fans who couldn't get in at the 1960 event.

The 1969 Jazz Festival was going to be the first one to feature rock music.

As well as such expected names as Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Son Ra, the line-up also included the Mothers of Invention, James Brown, the Jeff Beck Group, Jethro Tull, and a new English band called Led Zeppelin, whose first album had just come out and whose singer Rolling Stone had called as foppish as Rod Stewart but nowhere near so exciting.

But it was Sly and the Family Stone's performance that caused, or was blamed for, the riot that followed.

Hundreds of people broke down part of the ten-foot fence around the concert area and threw rocks at the security guards trying to get in for free.

To prevent further damage, the gates were opened and thousands of people flooded into the already packed space, where people were already in a state of ecstasy, dancing on their seats and in the mud, as the group gave what has been described as one of their greatest performances.

The combination of the music and the excitement of the people rushing in got the crowd so out of control that the promoter called in police reinforcements with riot shields to charge them.

In the middle of the many festivals they played that summer, the group also played the Harlem Apollo.

Like Jimi Hendrix, they were concerned that their appeal was primarily to white rock fans rather than to black listeners, and were worried about what this said about them.

Playing four dates at the Apollo, with the comedian Red Fox supporting, was their way of trying to shore up their black audience.

It was also an opportunity for Sly to make one of his statements about racial tolerance.

The group was still starting their shows with one member at a time coming on stage and starting to play.

The show started with Gregorico on drums, but he was sat at the back, and his Italian heritage gave him a dark enough complexion that he could plausibly have been mixed race.

He was followed on by Jerry Martini, and the crowd started booing.

Sly had to come out on stage and explain to the audience that Martini might be white, but he was also a great saxophone player.

And if they wanted Sly on the Family Stone, they wanted both white and black musicians.

A woman in the audience shouted out, All right, send him out here.

The crowd laughed, and from that point on, the white members of the band felt like they were as welcome as anyone at the Apollo.

At the end of July, the same weekend as the group were playing the Apollo, which was also the same weekend another Apollo was in the news, as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon for the first time, the group released another of their most famous singles, Hot Fun in the Summertime.

County bear in the country showing everything

That song made number two on the charts and became an all-time Summertime classic.

But the real marker of how important the group were was that while they were at number two, this was at number one.

I can turn back the hands of ten, you better believe I can.

I can make the seasons change just by waving my hand.

Oh, I didn't change anything from all the ooh.

The thing I want to do the most, I've been able to do

one happy amount with all the powers I possess.

Those girls, you're the key to my happiness.

Norman Whitfield and the Temptations latest imitation of the Sly and the Family Stone sound was at number one,

while Sly and the Family Stone's song name-checking a previous Temptations imitation of them was at number two.

Sly's sound was the Zeitgeist.

And then after that, came Woodstock.

At first it seemed like the group were going to have a real problem getting the audience on side.

Everything was running very late.

Half the audience were asleep by the time they finally came on.

The other performers that had been on before them were lackluster, and the audience was so vast that they didn't know how to play to a crowd of that size.

Then there were equipment problems which meant that after their first song they had to pause and try to get things working properly.

As Gregoriko said, it was night time.

You had been waiting to do your thing for hours now.

They were in their sleeping bags, tired, burned out, hungry, who knows what, asleep, and you went on the stage to make these people get up and going.

You could feel it.

We started out and did the best we could.

You could feel it drag, and then, all of a sudden, the third song I think, you started seeing heads pop up, people starting responding a little bit.

They couldn't see the audience properly, it was gone 3am and dark.

And after a couple of opening numbers, they went into an extended medley of their hits that lasted 20 minutes without a break.

Which also meant that it was 20 minutes with them having no way to use audience applause to gauge the reaction.

All of which came at the end when they got the audience to join in, and they all did.

Rolling Stone's review of the day saw the group head and shoulders over some big-hitting other acts.

As the night wore on, it was Battle of the Bands.

Grateful Dead, strained after canned heat, climbed out onto a limb without hopes that the audience would reach up to them.

It didn't.

Credence Clearwater, clear and tight, a static giant jopling cavorting with snooky flowers, her backup band just that.

Sly and the family stone, apart in their grandeur, won the battle, carrying to their own majestically freaked-out stratosphere.

Woodstock was arguably the high point of the group's career.

Up to that point, Sly had indeed been taking them higher, but there's a reason that almost every discussion of the group ends up making references to Ichabus.

The group could only get so high before they started to fall, precipitously.

Part of this was because of interpersonal things in the band.

Larry Graham was dating Rose Stone, but one of Sly's gangster friends was starting to make moves on her and she was interested.

Meanwhile, Sly was, sometimes, seeing Cynthia, but was also sleeping with many other women, and Sly's oldest sister Loretta, the only one of the siblings who wasn't performing with the group, got involved in the business side of the organisation and started pushing for Sly to get rid of Kapfalik.

In In this she was supported by various of Sly's new associates, who were very insistent that she should get rid of Kapfalik and the white members of the band.

Sly refused but relationships became strained.

Meanwhile the group relocated to LA, the centre of the entertainment business, but also the centre of the cocaine trade at the time, and this is the point at which cocaine started to become a real problem,

particularly for Sly and Freddy, who were also becoming increasingly close but distant from the rest of the group.

Kapfalik set up a new production production company for Sly to produce other artists, distributed by Atlantic.

Stoneflower put out four singles, one for a singer called Joe Hicks, one for a band called Six, spelled with the number Six instead of the letter S, as if it should be pronounced Six Hicks.

There were rumours that this was so that the IX would stand for the Roman numeral for 9, so the name would secretly be 69, but Stone has always denied those rumours.

The only records on Stoneflower that had any success were two top 40 singles Sly produced for Little Sister in 1970.

You're the one.

Some things are a little hard to see.

And somebody's watching you, a remake of the track from Stand, which became a big enough hit that when Sly and the Family Stone's greatest hits compilation came out, their original was included.

Moving to broke among my friends

Somebody's watching you

Somebody's watching you

Somebody's watching you

Somebody's watching you But there was a reason that the group had a greatest hits collection coming out

Between September 1967 and April 1969, the group had released four albums.

In the last eight months of 1969, they released two non-album singles, Hot Fun in the Summertime and Right at the End of the Year, Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself Again.

That song was in part a celebration of the group themselves, name checking all their hits and thanking the audience for their success.

But getting past the name checks in the chorus, a lot of the song shows a much more paranoid outlook than it initially suggests.

That didn't stop it from going to number one, though, the group's second record to do so.

It would be the last single to feature the classic line-up of the group, and the last new recording of any type they would release for nearly two years.

It wasn't that Stone wasn't coming up with more material, or wasn't recording, but as he said in October 1969, the record company wants another LP by February.

Well, we could do some good songs, but that would be just another LP.

Now you expect the group to come out with another LP and another.

There's got to be more to it, but what else can you do?

The only thing that sounds interesting is something that ties in with the play that finishes what an LP starts to say, and the LP will be important on account of the play.

He was searching for something he couldn't find, and he was hindered in that search by the cocaine he was taking.

Increasingly, Sly would multi-track recordings himself rather than getting his bandmates in.

Listen again to that little sister version of Somebody's Watching You.

Never stop to think about a downfall.

Have a sentence in your very life.

Just quickly, you pull the best one.

We've not talked about drum machines much because up to this point they had only been a novelty.

But in 1969 and 1970 they started to be used properly by serious musicians.

Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees had used one on his solo hit Saved by the Bell in 1969.

I

cry

for

you

I

oh

I

lie

for you

But that hadn't charted in the US and I've seen it cited that Little Sisters Track was the first record to make the US Top 40 to use a drum machine.

I've not listened to every single top 40 record, but that sounds plausible.

Using a drum machine meant that Sly could much more easily record tracks by himself without the group, playing all the other instruments himself.

When he did get other musicians into play, often there would be people other than the band members.

This was even though, for a large portion of this time, the group were living together.

Sly moved into a mansion that had previously been owned by John and Michelle Phillips, who had had a secret 16-track track recording studio built in it behind a hidden panel.

Many of the other group members lived there for at least a portion of the time, although they all found Sly increasingly stressful to be around.

As Martini said, he tried to pull it together as friends again.

Come on down and let's do 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 lion like the rest of the assholes.

At his house with my second wife, turned both of us into idiots, zombies.

A lot of the time, Sly was inviting other friends to work or jam with him.

These friends tended to have two characteristics.

They tended to be astonishingly good musicians, and they tended to be people who shared his taste for cocaine and were horrible individuals when using it.

Miles Davis was a frequent guest, as was Johnny Guitar Watson, though contrary to rumour, neither of them appears on any of Sly's recordings from this period.

Stone was also, for much of the late 60s and early 70s, close friends with Terry Melcher, who was not very liked by some of the other members of the band.

Martini referred to him as a sleazebag mother, and then a word I can't use here, and said, I hate him, very bad person.

According to Stone, before moving to LA, he had often visited Melcher there, and had encountered a creepy man called Charlie who had his own family just like the family Stone.

We will, sadly, be hearing more about that sleazebag mother in a future episode.

Bobby Womack, who had just left his wife after the awful behaviour we heard about from him in the the episode on A Change Is Gonna Come, was one of Sly's closest friends in this period and played on recordings with him, as did Ike Turner.

And Sly renewed his acquaintance with his old friend Billy Preston, who had started working with the Beatles and putting out solo records on their Apple label.

Sly co-wrote an instrumental B-side for one of those Apple singles, which Ray Charles produced for Preston.

The group were continuing to tour, but they were hitting problems entirely of Sly's making.

Sly and his brother Freddy first started showing up to gigs hours late, giving the other band members the excuse that by doing so they were getting the audience more tense than they would otherwise be, so making the gig more exciting, but really just hanging out and doing cocaine.

They started not turning up to shows at all, and often the management team would have to charter private planes to get them to gigs where the rest of the band had already arrived.

And sometimes they wouldn't turn up even so.

Roughly a third of the shows the group were booked in for a period, they didn't play at all.

And according to some of the band members, one of the most notorious events in the group's career came from politicians taking advantage of this.

According to Jerry Martini, Richard J.

Daley, the mayor of Chicago, deliberately caused a riot that could be blamed on the group in order to stop concerts from happening at Grant Park.

According to Martini, the city of Chicago arranged for the band to be told a start time that was several hours after the time their concert was advertised to start, so the organisers could then tell the crowd that the group hadn't bothered to show up, causing a riot which was already in progress when the group turned up thinking they were actually early.

But with their reputation as no-shows, who was going to believe them?

And David Kapfalik, the man who was meant to be the adult in the room, had fallen under the spell of Sly's personality.

He said later, I was blown away on cocaine.

Sly would sit imperially and imperiously with lines in front of him, white lines, and a line of people with their nostrils extended out to the spoon that he was offering.

I was right there in the line, I admit.

All the pain I was in, all the pain around me.

My vision had disintegrated by this point.

Sly's productivity was suffering, to put it mildly.

I had no influence over what Sly was doing.

I never had control.

I never tried to have control.

I had influence over Sly.

I was managing the unmanageable.

I influenced.

Everyone was acting as Sly's yes man.

Meanwhile, Sly's gangster friend, Bubba Banks, persuaded Rose to leave Larry Graham and get together with him instead.

According to Banks, not a particularly reliable source, she had mostly been with Larry Graham because she didn't know how to get her own cocaine, and once Banks could supply it for her instead of Graham, she left him quickly.

She would soon marry, and later divorce, Banks.

This in turn caused a strain between Graham and the Stone family, as well as Sly's gangster friends.

Graham started to surround himself with his own gangster hangers-on, as well as, according to people in the Stone camp, acting as if he was the biggest star in the group.

Banks' story seems unlikely for a variety of reasons, and one of them is that Stone forbade anyone else from bringing their own drugs to his mansion, so they would all be reliant on him for their supply.

By this point, Sly was regularly getting on planes carrying a violin case full of cocaine.

All this time, Sly was working on an album originally intended to be entitled Africa Talks to You, while there would be other Family Stone albums after it, The album, eventually retitled There's a Riot Going On, was in many ways the beginning of the end of the group as a group.

Greg Arico was the first to quit early in the sessions, saying later, People were getting hurt, it got ugly within the group, around the group, the audience, the whole thing.

People were doing goofy things, threatening each other.

It wasn't comfortable.

I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to be part of that.

Arrico went on to play with various spin-offs of the Grateful Dead, like the Rhythm Devils and the Jerry Garcia band, with Carlos Santara and on David Bowie's 1974 tour.

His His replacement had been the drummer for another band who were also known for good time fun music.

Jerry Gibson was a minor session drummer whose biggest credit up to that point had been playing on the recordings for the Banana Splits, a Hanna-Barbera TV series that had some spin-off records.

Martini wasn't impressed by him.

He said later, he was a real mediocre drummer and was just at the right place at the right time.

And he's generally regarded as a far lesser drummer than Erico.

But he played on the bulk of the album.

Some tracks feature Erico, and some tracks just use the drum machine that Stone was using to create the basic tracks.

The track that Gibson was given to audition to was You Call Me Smiling.

You caught me smiling

again.

Gibson played along to the drum machine on that and was told at the end of the take that he had the job and that that would be the record.

He asked if he could do a second take and was told no, the first one was fine.

That was a rare exception on an album that was built up almost entirely from overdubs and retakes.

Larry Graham has talked about how, while on the previous albums the bulk of the recording would be done as live, this time he never played at the same time as any of the other band members, and sometimes he'd later find that Sly had replaced his bass parts with other ones Sly had recorded himself.

The distinctively murky sound of the album came partly through choice, but also partly through this process, parts being recorded, erased and re-recorded over and over, causing the tape to become degraded.

In some cases this was to get the music perfect, but in other cases it was for non-musical reasons.

Sly would apparently regularly bring women he wanted to sleep with to the studio and get them to cut vocals, and then erase them once he'd got what he wanted.

Like Pet Sounds, the album has a reputation as being entirely the work of one man, and like Pet Sounds that's rather unfair to the very talented musicians who are in the band.

Depending on how you count it, the full band actually only appear on four of the eleven tracks on the album.

There are 12 credited on the label, but the title track has a length of 0 minutes and 0 seconds, to show, according to Sly, that there should never be any riots.

Of the other tracks, some are solo sly performances, while others feature individual band members and his friends.

The album's lead single, for example, Family Affair, had Sly on almost all instruments, with Rose on chorus vocals, Bobby Womack on guitar, and Billy Preston on electric piano, but none of the band other than Sly and Rose.

That single was the first new track to be released by the group in 20 months, and it went to number one, as did the album, and as had the StopGap Greatest Hits Collection released at the end of 1970.

Family Affair would be the group's last number one single.

There's a Riot Going On has a reputation as a socially conscious album, but that's as much because of the album's title and cover, The American Flag with the Blue Replaced by Black and The Stars by Sons, as because of the content.

It's not a political album in the way that some contemporaries like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On are,

although politics and social issues certainly have a part to play in the album's lyrics.

But what it is, more than anything, is a portrayal of a mind that's going through a breakdown.

It's an oppressive, dark, gloomy record, even on tracks like Spaced Cowboy, which have a Latin rhythm in the drum machine, and sly yodeling and doing a silly country singer voice.

Everything I like is nice.

That's why I'm trying to hear it.

There's a riot going on is in many ways similar to Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones album that came out around the same time and had a similar atmosphere during its recording.

It's the kind of masterpiece, like John Lennon's Plastic Ono band album, The Beach Boys Love You, or Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear, that is so personal and idiosyncratic that it borders on outsider art.

Stone invented the lo-fi aesthetic decades before it was named, and you can hear the influence of the album all over black music for the next 50-plus years, most notably in the work of Prince.

By this time, people around Sly were thinking of him as two people, using a framing of Sly and Sylvester as different characters.

Bobby Womack later said, Sly was two people.

First, there was Sylvester Stewart, who was pretty cool, creative, a genius musician.

Then there was Sly Stone.

He was the destructive character.

Sly was the kind of guy who liked to start fights just to see people go crazy and get dripped out.

I should note here that Sly himself has objected to this framing, but it's one that almost everyone who knew him at this time has used.

Kaplik seems to have been in his own spiral at this time, and he later said, The intensity of my relationship with Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone was unbearable for me, this disintegrating relationship.

No one would touch Sly.

My lawyer, Peter Bennett, had suggested I bring in Ken Roberts, who promoted Madison Square Garden and other gigs that were trouble but successful.

I knew that if I continued, I would be dead.

I turned over the management to him so I could live.

I had no choice but to die or make a paradigm shift.

I recall going in on my knees before Sly, engulfed in tears, imploring him, begging him to let me go so I could live.

I was doing so much cocaine.

I was in so much pain, confusion.

Kapfalik remained involved in the publishing and production side of things, but was no longer Sly's manager.

This came as a relief to Clive Davis, who had been urging Stone to sack Kapfalik because of the latter's drug use, not realising that Sly was a worse user himself, and a large part of the reason Kapalik was doing this.

Around the same time, the band lost their rhythm section.

Gibson was soon out, replaced by Andy Newmark, who most of the band regarded as a better fit, and Larry Graham was gone shortly after, early in the sessions for the next album, Fresh.

Graham played on two tracks, one of them the only cover version on an album by the original Family Stone.

Will I be pretty?

Will I be rich?

Here's what she said

to me.

That song was apparently included because Sly had been hanging out with his friend Terry Melcher and had met Melcher's mother, Doris Day, and had sung her hit hit to her because he was a fan and then decided to record it.

There was also a rumour going around, which Sly didn't deny but which annoyed Day, that Stone and Day were having an affair.

But there were lots of other rumours going around.

One rumour, according to Bubba Banks, was that Larry Graham had hired a hitman to kill Sly.

According to Banks, he beat up one of Graham's henchmen, and Graham was out of the group at that point.

Graham went on to form his own group, Graham Central Station.

In most American accents, Graham sounds more like Graham than it does in my accent.

And so Graham Central Station sounds something like Graham Central Station and works as a pun on Grand Central Station, in a way it doesn't in my accent.

Who had several RB hits and one pop hit, Your Love.

Graham also had a number of solo hits and played with Prince a lot.

Graham converted to the Jehovah's Witness faith in 1975 and later converted Prince to the the same religion.

The band carried on without Graham, with new bass player Rusty Allen, and Fresh went top 10 on the album charts and number one on the RB charts.

By this point, the group also had a second Sachs player, Pat Rizzo, who was brought in after Jerry Martini started making noises about suing if he didn't get the back pay he was owed, as a way of telling Martini that he was replaceable.

Fresh also had the last top 20 hit single the group would ever release.

If you want me to stay, I'll

You'll never be in doubt, that's what it's all about.

You can't take me for granted and smile.

Come on, please, I'm gone.

Forget it, reaching my phone.

But by this point, Sly's personal life was getting more and more unpleasant.

He got married, apparently as a publicity stunt, to the mother of his first child, Sylvester Jr.

The wedding was at Madison Square Garden, at the start of a Family Stone show.

She left Sly within a few months because she had good reason to believe their child was in danger.

She tried to repair their relationship later, only to find out that Cynthia was pregnant with Sly's second child, Fun, while Sly was claiming to be reconciled with her.

The end for the original Family Stone came after their 1974 album Small Talk, which featured a photo of Sly, his wife, and Sylvester Jr.

on the cover, and is generally considered the first bad album the group ever made.

They booked into the Radio City Music Hall, which seated 6,000 people, to play eight shows.

Only a few hundred showed up.

Freddie Stone described the show, saying, All of the sudden what I was playing was tasteless, empty.

I was looking around at everybody else and they were were just there.

It was sad.

I remember looking at a person out in the audience and they were crying.

It was almost like they could sense what I was feeling.

It was like it was just gone.

I was so glad to get off the stage.

I was through.

The group never officially split up as such.

Sly just stopped answering the phone to people and inviting them to gigs.

And none of them were too bothered at this point.

Sly put out a solo album in early 1975, which featured a few tracks recorded by the Family Stone before the split.

There were then a few more albums by Ursat's Sly and the Family Stone groups, none of which was by an actual band.

Cynthia was the only one who stuck by Stone, and indeed, even after Stone stopped releasing music in the early 80s, she would, according to their daughter Fun, go into the studio every time he called on her to play on new recordings, but in Fun's words, wasn't nobody really working, they'd be down there getting high, running around, with my mum standing there with her trumpet like, what's going on?

Sly and Cynthia had an on-again-off again relationship, which biographer Joel Selvin has characterised by saying, She was delusional about her relationship with Sly, something he no doubt exploited ruthlessly.

To me, it seemed as though she was the victim of tremendous psychological abuse.

It wasn't a pretty picture.

Cynthia briefly joined Graham Central Station, as did Martini, and also played with Prince and George Clinton.

Freddie Stone became a pastor at the Evangelist Temple Fellowship Center in Vallejo.

Rose recorded a solo album, then became a backing vocalist, working with Robbie Williams, Elton John, Fish, and Michael Jackson, among others, and also sings at her brother's church.

And Sly spent the time from 1981 through to last year going through periods of getting clean, periods of relapse into cocaine addiction, and legal disputes with managers he blamed for his financial troubles.

In 2006, there was a brief reunion of the original Family Stone, Minus Graham, for a Grammy tribute, where the group performed with several pop stars from Maroon Five to Steve Tyler.

Sly came on to do a performance of I Want to Take You Higher, wearing a ridiculous blonde mohawk wig, sang a couple of verses into a dead mic, and then walked off in the middle of the song.

There was a brief attempt as a result of that to do a proper reunion of the band, which soon turned into Sly, Cynthia, Vett, and a bunch of new musicians, playing a handful of festival gigs, which turned into Sly walking off or turning up late or not turning up at all.

However, without Sly, Cynthia, Jerry, and Greg formed a new line-up, just called Family Stone, with Sly and Cynthia's daughter, Fun, on vocals, and they toured and even put out a single in 2015.

So let's make it like we got a second chance.

And let's take that stance

and do that dance.

Erico since left the group and plays with various other San Francisco musicians, and Cynthia Robinson sadly died shortly after that single, but Fun and Jerry still tour as the Family Stone to this day.

Sly released one more album in 2011, an album of remakes of his old hits with various famous collaborators.

It was, like everything he'd done since Fresh, underwhelming both commercially and critically.

Shortly after the album came out, it was revealed he was living in a mobile home and essentially penniless.

In recent years, Sly has made repeated attempts at comebacks that have petered out, and occasional collaborations with other people who have been influenced by him, like his guest appearances on a Funkadelic album in 2013, where he looked back to the 60s and recited Lord Buckley's The Naz, the piece that he used to introduce his radio show with before the family storm began.

Just 1,200 of the cats and the kitties out there behind the Naz.

And they look in the corner of their eyes and they see a little cat with the big frame.

So you see that Naz?

Naz step, been looking all the time.

Yet another of those comeback attempts of sorts happened last year.

Sly released a ghost-written autobiography, which reads like far more the ghostwriter's work than his to me, but I could be wrong.

And from what he says in that, he sounds like he's at least happy now and finally clean.

He's won back some of the money he claimed various business people stole from him, and has a house again.

He released a Christmas single last last year, a version of Santa Claus's Coming to Town that sounds like it's sung over a cheap karaoke backing track.

He's no longer healthy enough to even pretend to be able to tour.

He has COPD which limits what he can do, but if the book is to be believed, he's content enough to stay at home and spend time with his children, as well as Sylvester Jr.

and Fun.

He has a third daughter, Novena Carmel, who co-hosts the popular radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic, his grandchildren, and extended family.

The career of Sly on the the Family Stone was a short one.

They only released seven albums, four of them in an 18-month period, and their careers were destroyed by drug abuse, mental illness, and infighting.

And for nearly fifty years now, the story of Sly in particular has been dominated not by what he did, but by what he could have done, had he not been so eager to impress gangsters, had he not got hooked on cocaine, had a million other things been different.

But far more important than that in the end is what he did do.

He and his group made records that changed the very sound of rock, pop, soul, and funk forever.

Without them, there'd be no Prince or Michael Jackson, no 70s Stevie Wonder.

There'd also be no talking heads, no red-hot chili peppers.

The whole genres of disco and new wave would be radically different.

Slystone did, like Icubus, eventually fall, but only after he'd already taken us higher than anyone had gone before.

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