Some years ago the no1 swedish musicmagazine named "POP"
listed 100 most important albums in the popular music history.
2 my surpriced & joy I found that Sly & The Family Stone's
"There's a riot going on" from 1971 was listed no1 with
an article written by the swedish journalist Andres Lokko.
I then worked in a really small recordstore & noticed how that
album took a saleboost following that article.
Everybody wanted 2 hear what that album was about.
Needless 2 say ,a few of the customers were left a bit comfused.
They we're obviously not ready 4 that psychedelic "Riot" trip.
I remember recomend them 2 get into "Stand!" first LOL.
Anyway,I just found this old article on the net transcribed 2 english
so here it is:
Merry X-mas 2 all!!!
/peace Manki

#1
Sly & The Family Stone
There's a Riot Goin' On

Epic KE 30986
1971
Studio:
Producers: Sly Stone and Sylvester Stewart
The summer of 1971. Sly Stone's record company, Epic, were worried about what was happening in the studio. The music was much too slow, they said, and there were no hits. A rumour said Miles Davis was one of Sly's most devoted fans. Epic called Miles and persuaded him to pay Sly a visit in his Bel-Air house, which he had just bought from John Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas.
Miles Davis is, and was, known as quite a tough guy. But when he met Sly, who at the time surrounded himself with a number of armed bodyguards and had snorted even more cocain than Miles himself, he gave up. He called Epic, telling them it was pointless. According to Miles, it was impossible to get Sly to do or play anything except whatever he was hearing in his head. The album Sly & The Family Stone were budy with at the time of Miles' visit had the working title "The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly And The Family Stone".
The album had already spent two years on the record company's release schedule. It was never released, at least not with that title and it hardly turned out - as promised by the record company - Sly and The Family Stone's most positive and life affirming album. Instead they got "There's a Riot Going On". Sly Stone's real name was Sylvester Stewart. He was born in 1944, Dallas, and participated even as a 4-year old on a gospel singel, "On My Battlefield For the Lord", for a local record company. Just after that the Stewart family moved to Vallejo, just outside San Francisco. Sylvester renamed himself Sly Stone when he was hired as D.J. by the radio station KSOL in San Fransisco. He refused to follow the station's restriction against everything that wasn't rhythm'n'blues. Sly would just as soon play Rufus Thomas and Marvelettes as the Beatles and Bob Dylan. But the choice of music was not what really distinguished Sly's radio show on KSOL. It was Sly himself, whose yodelling, yells, and incomprehensible slang were the real assets. For one show he rigged up his piano in the studio and sang the whole show; everything from song-presentations to weather forecasts and laxative commercials.

Before his radio career he'd already made a name as producer on the record company Autumn, where he produced such artists as Bobby Freeman, The Beau Brummels and an early edition of Jefferson Airplane.
Sly's ambition was to find the perfect fusion of psychedelia and rhythm'n'blues. And in 1966 he formed Sly and The Family Stone, which began as a number of musicians loosely based/tied around Sly's gigantic afro. Greg Erro played drums, Sly's brother Freddie played guitar, his sister Rose sang and played keyboards, Jerry Martin played the saxophone, Larry Graham both sang and played bass, and Cynthia Robinsons vocal cords sounded rather like her trumpet blasts. Sly himself played guitar, hammond organ, sang, yoddled, screamed, mumbled, whispered, and moaned.
They recorded three albums and had a large number of exceptional hits. All were on the borderland between psychedelia, gospel, rock'n roll, soul, funk, and jazz. All had universal life affirming lyrics and sublime arrangements. But the recording of "There's a Riot Goin' On" was edged with odd stories, now of mythological status. All male members of The Family Stone had a fascination with pimps in common and sometime in the beginning of 1971 this resulted in pure mob-war.
Sly had been a cocaine user for several years and at the same time his physicians gave him sedatives, with the result that Sly used even more cocain in order to have the strength to play at all.
The whole business ended up with bandmembers Graham and Errico deciding to teach their employer a lesson. They set Graham's personal bodyguard on Sly, ready to strike and pistol in hand. Sly was prepared and the bodyguard ended up in hospital. Errico and Graham became unemployed. Sly continued, in spite of drug addiction and escalating schizophrenia, to work on what would become "There's a Riot Goin' On", Sly Stone's first solo album. He made use of Bobby Womack, who played drums and by and large arranged the entire record, and the organist Billy Preston.

However boring this sounds in print, "There's a Riot Goin' On" is essentially a funky blues album or, if you want, a bluesy funk album. The music moves slowly back and forth on one and the same spot, most often the band only treads water. Sly doesn't allow them to move an inch in any direction. They keep playing in the same groove, hour after hour. The result makes for painful, but at the same time hypnotic, listening. The music just keeps going, Sly forces the band to squeeze yet another unexpected turn or melody line out of the base or the guitar and on a first listening "There's a Riot Goin' On" feels like one long unfocused jam session where the chorus doesn't arrive until the fourth song.
All this while Sly himself sings, yoddles, whispers, moans, mumbles, and screams. He invites girls from the street outside and lets them sing duets with him. He invites friends, aquaintances, enemies, drug pushers, and passer-by musicians to help out. All of it's catching by straws. And it's this straw that makes the record so frail. The whole thing is hanging by a thread. At any second Sly will collapse, the musicians will pack up their instruments and leave, Sly will overdose and die. But it never happens.
No other artist has been able to capture the oscillation between life and death, clarity and insany, as Sly Stone. Sometimes he crosses over to insanity. In "Spaced Cowboy" he just yoddles and hiccups euphorically with a steel-bucket over his head. At least that's how it sounds. The next second the whole Sly and The Family Stone has repressed it and play simple popfunk in "Runnin' Away". A song on which Prince has based the majority of his biggest hits.

The fact that it in the midst of all this darkness still was room for two of Sly's simplest pop tunes and thereby two of the best singles in pop history, becoming considerable chart successes across the globe, makes the rest of the record seem even darker and more impenetrable.
When "There's a Riot Goin' On" was released it was met with very mixed reactions. But most agreed that the whole thing was about a horror vision of a politically corrupt U.S.A. No one wanted to, or right then had the energy to, see it as rock history's most desperate cry for help from an egocentric genius who was somewhere he didn't want to be.
Some years later the American critic and writer Greil Marcus compared Sly's previous album "Stan", to the brilliantly powerful machinery in a juggernaut. When listening to it, it felt like you drove the juggernaut and owned the entire freeway. »There's a Riot Goin' On« was about jumping off the same juggernaut. And to suddenly stand dead still while everybody else rushed by in their lorries.
But even to this very day no one, Sly Stone least of all, knows what "Family Affair", the first single from "There's a Riot Goin' On," is really all about. Sly's manager claimed it had to with Sly's confused private life and his refusal to speak with his own parents while recording. Sly himself has many times dismissed the whole record as a two-year long nightmare.

Sly Stone just had to do "There's a Riot Goin' On". Personally, he never thought the album depressive. On the contrary, it was only Sly's basic view of life and everything happening around him that was depressive. His thought was not to try and capture his own - or the entire United States' - depression in the record's grooves. He played music in order to have the energy to get out of bed at all. Music has never been of more vital importance to anyone than right here. The music Sly heard inside his head is a lonely human being's soundtrack for survival.
If Sly had never done »There's a Riot Goin' On«, he would most certainly have died.
Even though they are few, some records can be compared to "There's a Riot Goin' On", John Lennon's "Plastic Ono Band" and Bob Dylan's "John Wesley Harding" are actually the only ones I can think of. All three are about denial of what the artist has done before, about self-hatred, presented as an ironic grimace over the pop music they themselves have helped shaping. John Lennon was in primal therapy during the recording of "Plastic Ono Band" and Dylan discovered God after his motorcycle accident in 1967 and based "John Wesley Harding" around it. Sly Stone instead chose to write "all songs written, arranged and produced by Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone" on the record sleeve.

The honesty so often missed in popular music is realized only when an artist uses himself as starting-point. Then the irony always, sooner or later, strikes back at him or her, and the artist can only maintain a facade as long as he has the strength to defend himself. Sly didn't have this strength, and had already begun digging his own grave in the porous white dust covering the ground of the churchyard of creativity. After each cut with the spade Sly took a deep breath and the white powder went straight to his brain.
After "There's a Riot Goin' On" Sly recorded two decent albums. On 1973's "Fresh" he was for a brief moment as life-affirming and positive as in the beginning of his career. The following year he once again entered the mist, just in time for "Small Talk", his valiant attempt at revival. And in the mist he has stayed. In spite of a number of albums and singels. A few years back George Clinton said it better than anyone else: "Brother Sly will never fully land on planet Earth again."

And today, slightly more than twenty years after "There's a Riot Goin' On", Sly Stone is living on welfare in an apartment house somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He still has a manager who visits him once a week. But Sly mostly sits in front of the TV. Sometimes he gets in front of the computer the hopeful manager has bought for him and composes what he himself calls "phuture phunk".
Slightly more than 10 years after "There's a Riot Goin' On" Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five with "The Message" and Melle Mel with "White Lines" picked up where Sly Stone for ever disappeared into a personal riot that is still going on somewhere. Much too far from the creative peak we hear here.
When Sly on the record's last track sings, weeping, "I'm dying, I'm dying" and closes with "Dying young is hard to take/selling out it is even harder" before he yet again, against the backdrop of a measured bass line as slow as a heartbeat, drones the chorus there's only one way to disbelieve him. By turning off the music.

Andres Lokko

Translation: Johan Floyd
[Edited 12/24/04 12:23pm]

manki,

Thanks for posting the story.
Great record that chronicles a man's soul in turmoil.

I've said something similar before...

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) + = Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm

That is some powerful shit. I always thought Riot was the perfect expression of the dream being dashed and the more I learn about its backstory, the more terrified I am.

They just aired his Letterman interview from 1982. He said his mom encouraged
him to get back to his music cause it was important to use his gift.

Great article! Thanks, Manki!!

I didn't know he is still struggling with his addiction. Didn't he even get a record contract in the mid 90's?

BlueNote

"There's a riot going on
We'll all be here
dancing on the ground
There's party goin' on"

Classic stuff.

Oh... you meant the Sly & The Family Stone record? But isn't that old people's music?
[Edited 12/26/04 3:19am]

One of my all time favorite albums and I love reading about the history of it. Sly Stone is one of the great genius' in the history of music who sadly NEVER gets the credit he deserves. There's A Riot Goin On always seemed like a disallusioned response to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Where Sly attempts to answer Gaye by informing him that the dream is dead and its only getting worse. The original album cover speaks volumes about the album and it inspired that lyric on Prince's The Everlasting Now. When you look at the orginal album cover and you can understand what Sly's mindset was at the time.

DorothyParkerWasCool said:

I have to respectfully disagree with the comparison to "What's Going On" because I think that it's a very overlooked, yet fundamental feature of the album that there is no question mark, nor does the title song ask a question. "What's Going On" is a description, not a question; he's a making a statement about the decayed state of society. There's A Riot Goin On is an interesting parallel statement, but to characterize it as a response or an answer to What's Goin On is a tad inaccurate.

jacktheimprovident said:

I'm not saying its a literal answer to the album title. I don't think Sly set out to answer Marvin Gaye's record. What's Going On does not have a question mark, however the tone of the song/album is questioning the need for the senseless war and where things are headed in society. The album is searching for answers whereas Sly's album is explicitly discussing the ramifications of all of the social movements and has found a way to deal with the problems. Marvin's album was very social and topical but Sly went further into the disallusionment that was affecting the black community. Escape thru drugs and mindless good times because the hope is gone. It foreshadowed the tough years ahead, think about crack in the ghetto, Reganomics etc. Though Gaye did cover drugs on such songs as Flying High In The Friendly Sky, Gaye's tone was moreso hopelessness and despair and Sly's tone was moreso fuck it. Sly took Marvin's record to further depths by exploring the bleak future that the Ghetto would face as a result of death of the Civil Rights Movement. The bullet holes/sunbursts replace the stars against the black backdrop on the orginal album artwork and that is VERY symbolic about Sly's feelings. Sly's album was a reflection of the unabashed reality that had become American society. It screams with frustration about the racism, drugs, war, bullshit leaders etc. The tone of the album was not so much a protest of war and its ramifications, Riot was moreso about waking up to the reality that our nation was mired in and being pissed off about it. Sidenote, this topic has been discussed in various discussions on politically concious music..my comparison is not the first. The albums have a symmetry to them.
[Edited 12/26/04 12:59pm]

I'm not heavy into Sly & them that much but it must be something knowing that he was the main influence behind Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew".

"Just Like A Baby".....A classic....
Sly,Freddie & Larry exchanging great vocal riffs.....

Great article. Great LP.

I first heard the whole album a few years ago and when I heard Sly yodeling , my chin hit the floor.

I was thinking: "I cant believe he did that" & "I cant believe I like it" at the same time.



What a genious...

As great as this article is though, it leaves some things a little ambiguous to me. I'd always heard that sly himself was actually responsible for most of the instrumentation yet the record refers to the band playing as though they were all there during the sessions. Plus, what exactly does he mean that Bobby Womack "arranged the entire record"?