GREATEST HITS (OF THE '70s)
1. I Get High On You
2. Family Affair
3. Crossword Puzzle
4. Time For Livin'
5. This Is Love
6. If You Want Me To Stay
7. Remember Who You Are
8. Blessing In Disguise
9. Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)
10. Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa
_____________________________________________________
Prepare for some chart chat. Funk pioneer-legends Sly And The Family Stone put out their first single in 1967. It didn't chart (and neither did their excellent debut album "A Brand New Thing"). However, their second single from that year, "Dance To The Music," hit #7 in Great Britain and was in the Top 10 on both the American Hot 100 and the R&B singles charts (where they would come to be mainstays, especially on the latter). In late 1968, they hit the top spot on both of those charts again with the track "Everyday People," a level of success that they repeated once more the following year with "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." After their set at Woodstock got rave reviews and was said to be the best show of the festival, the band were at the apex of their stardom. Bandleader/primary creative force Sly Stone would forever afterwards be judged by the critics against this period of his career. Side note, their 1969 album Stand! was enormously popular among the Black Panthers, whose growth peaked simultaneously; a teenage member called Nile Rodgers remembered it foldly in his later years. Another side note, a young and in-the-process-of-having-his-childhood-stripped-away-from-him-by-adults-with-dollar-signs-in-their-eyes-leading-to-lifelong-torment-and-severe-social-maladjustment-issues Michael Jackson ripped off Sly's vocal stylings, and his Motown writers Sly's lyrics, on the Jackson 5's first few famous hits, in particular "ABC."
There was a longer-than-usual gap before their next new releases came out because the band were busy developing their sound (from genre-mashing pop-funk to uranium-enriched pure funk) and changing their lineup (indeed, only Sly and trumpeter/vocalist Cynthia Robinson [a friend with whom he, uh, had a child] would stay in the band for the rest of the decade). Their American label Epic decided to capitalize on the band's '60s successes during said gap by releasing a greatest hits album, which they creatively titled "Greatest Hits," and the demand for this group's music was so great that it hit #1 on the R&B albums chart. When their next album came out in late 1971, There's A Riot Goin' On (the first of their two consecutive masterpieces, and the title of which is a response to Marvin Gaye's excellent What's Going On), it hit the top spot on both albums charts. Its lead single "Family Affair" was a #1 hit on each of the respective singles charts too (and the first such hit ever to feature a drum machine). It would prove, however, to be their last. The following album "Fresh" (the other masterpiece) hit #1 on only the R&B chart, but its lead single "If You Want Me To Stay" peaked only at #3 on the R&B singles (and only hit #12 on the main singles chart, where they were never again to hit the top 30, and never again to hit whatsoever after '75). Forward-thinking musician, producer, and general thinker-type Brian Eno at one point said that Fresh was the first album where the most important stuff was going on in the bass frequencies. Interesting.
Fresh (1973). Sly is actually lying on the floor here. The cover of
Greatest Hits (Of The '70s) is probably from the same photo session.
Although they kept having top 40 hit singles on the R&B chart for the rest of the decade, the band were definetly in commercial decline. The narrative among music critics (who the author does not suggest should ever be payed a single ounce attention to [pardon the tangent, but in the wise words of musician Jen Clother, "those who can, do, and those who can't, review"]; one gets more out of art when developing one's own opinions about it and/or getting opinions from the actual experts in the field, which are the musicians, and not the crickets who are self-important about their opinions when in reality theirs are no more valuable than your own because their opinions are equally subjective, but they've got job titles and income and platforms and more often than not egos, and are all in a big club and share a lot of the same narratives and ideas and labels and hierarchies [which label subjective art that they're biased against as "bad"] that are almost always based on false premises and more often than not transmit the same societal issues [i.e., racism, sexism, fatphobia, beauty standards, harmful views about addiction and sobriety, etc.] that nobody needs to ingest any further from the mass media machine that has reasons to spew them. So avoid music [and, more generally, art] criticism and read instead about the art your most respected artists love, and/or talk about this stuff with people you meet face to face. Tangent complete. So, the narrative among music critics) is that this commercial decline was based largely if not exclusively on Sly Stone's drug intake.
While it's not absolutely false, two things about this drug narrative must be pointed out. Firstly (1), the Anglophone music industry in the '70s literally ran on the stuff (and is indeed quite infamous for doing so). In terms of his peers at the top of the rock world of the '70s, David Bowie was using so much cocaine that he briefly became a neo-Nazi, was seduced by "witches," and couldn't even remember recording his magnum opus Station To Station (of two, the second being Blackstar from 2016). The founders of metal, Black Sabbath, even wanted to call their fourth album "Snowblind" because of the number of lines they were crossing on the high-way. Sly Stone wasn't even the only superstar musician in Los Angeles to be in constant party mode, a state of substance dependency, and experiencing profound drug-induced paranoia. There are two primary reasons for his being picked on for the drug issues; the first being that he only got sober in the 2020s when informed by a doctor that his life was in danger; however, it must be remembered that the future is never pre-written, and during the 1970s this was one of only a myriade of possibilities.
High On You (1975). Sly is probably lying on the floor here too.
The second brings me to my original second point (2), which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, racism (or in other words, systemic and institutionalized human rights abuses at every level of society). By the late '60s, segregation had lessened to the extent that the very, very, very, very, very, very best (like count-on-one-hand-type number of) non-white artists were starting to be allowed to briefly graze the heights of stardom that their generally less talented (because rock music is simply culturally inauthentic for non-African Americans, even when well performed) white siblings (it's a family affair) were permitted to obtain in a more straightforward manner. Along with Jimi Hendrix (who commited suicide at the hight of his fame and was thus immediately diefied), Sly Stone was more or less the first artist since the '50s wave of the initial founders of rock music (such as the king of rock himself, Little Richard) to reach such levels of commercial success and adoration among the commercially-powerful (but sorta segregated) white Anglophone record-buying audience. Non-whites were not (and generally are still not) permitted the same level of nuance and (relative) compassion that whites could be afforded in the public eye, so the solution for many was to flatten themselves and craft an acceptable image, at the cost of authenticity and perhaps even artistry. Sly Stone did not do this, and he suffered the consequences.
In order to tear him down, to reaffirm his birthright of inequality in its profit-hunting eyes, the mass media machine began picking at what its eager horde of jolly white-collar workers deemed to be his faults and sins (for him it was drugs, but see that list of societal issues above; if he were a woman, it would have been beauty standards or [over]sexualization). This proved to be successful; as written above, he disappeared from the meanstream hit charts after 1975, and still today the vast majority of his white non-musician listeners do not listen any further than There's A Riot Going On or Fresh. The amount of acclaim that the former has achieved has even had a particular effect, similarly to Pet Sounds by those Beach Boys, where it being given such immense praise by the (again, there are far better places to get your information from) music critics has made the one project so popularly beloved that the rest of the discography is denigrated by comparison. But it's not true! Both Riot and Pet Sounds are great and excellent of course, and the ones after are a bit weirder, but they're not bad, and in fact all have the potential to be greatly enjoyed by fans of a wide diversity of guitar-bass-drum-vocal musics.
Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back (1976)
While Sly And The Family Stone's commercial trajectory over the course of the '70s was inarguably something of a decline (because if you start out at the top of the hill, the only way forward is down), a better description of it would be a shift in audience. They very intentionally developed their sound at the turn of the decade by leaning hard into a funk which would end up appealing more to the African diaspora segment of their audience than the European diaspora one (because of the historic emphases on rythm over melody or vice versa, respectively, in the two culture groups). This shift is revealed by the R&B chart numbers shown above, as quoted from (fingers crossed on accuracy) Wikipedia, and I will now continue where I left off on that count, with "If You Want Me To Stay" peaking at #3. The album highlight (and only cover they ever recorded) "Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)" is also included, alongside that number, on Greatest Hits (Of The '70s). After Sly became a father for the first time, Fresh's more relaxed follow-up Small Talk hit the storefronts in '74. Its title track is really cool for using his baby's babbling in a rythmic manner to highlight the groove going on underneath. Apart from a one-off single in 1969, Small Talk is interestingly their first album to be lathered in strings. It's an exceptional release for the band (perhaps because of the softer sounds it leans into) in that it didn't touch the R&B albums chart but hit the top 15 on the mainstream American and Canadian ones. However, its lead single "Time For Livin'" reached the tenth rung of the R&B singles chart, so it stll made a significant impact nonetheless. The angelically beautiful closer "This Is Love" has also been included on Greatest Hits (Of The '70s) as side one closer, and it sounds to me like it could be stright off a Wes Anderson movie soundtrack.
What remained of the original lineup of the Family Stone broke up after a concert at a mostly empty concert hall in the winter of '75, whereupon Mr. Stone recorded and released his first and only solo album of original songs, the fantastic High On You. Because he was the lead singer, frontman, composer, virtuoso multi-instrumentalist, and guiding creative force of a band whose lineup had been shiftin anyways, it sounds just like another Family album, and so is included here as such. That LP reached #11 on the R&B charts, while its first single "I Get High On You," reached #3. The album highlight "Crossword Puzzle" has, like "This Is Love," also made the cut.
The original Greatest Hits album from 1970.
Following that solo venture, Sly decided to reform the band and was of course rejoined by Cynthia on trumpet and vocal chords, alongside a bunch of fresh blood. For the band's big comeback on 1976's Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back (which is indeed a run on sentence although I wouldn't know because I've never written one), they made a very special album in the weird vein of funk Sly was mastering. It has what is perhaps Sly's lushest production and most earwormy hooks (something he always had a particular knack for), and departs the relatively straightfordward funk of High On You for a whole mix of genres: do-wop, soul, funk (obviously), hints of latin, and a lot of rock; Peter Frampton even makes an appearance, and there's also a duet with Lady Bianca which alone should show the breadth of the album. Compared to his other records, the melodic aspect of this LP is really brought to the fore, a move which would probably have aligned closer to the tastes of the by-then-largely-disinterested white segment of his audience, if only the album had been better marketed. The lead single chosen was the closer "Family Again," which while fine just isn't the best track on the album for the job (and indeed peaked at #83 on the R&B singles), which is why I chose instead to include the highlight "Blessing In Disguise." The album hit #33 on the respective albums chart, but didn't chart anywhere else.
Epic dropped the Family Stone after that, but before the decade was up they were re-signed by Warner Records. New label, new comeback (and it had been about 3 years anyways), so it was titled Back On The Right Track (1979), which was a top 40 hit on the R&B charts, both for the LP and the lead single "Remember Who You Are." That would prove to be Sly And The Family Stone's final top-40 single, but was nonetheless a decent end to the '70s. This new label marketed the Family Stone as having the same old early '70s magic, which was a mistake; they don't, because it's a different sort of record. Over the last few years the Dayton, Ohio sound had overtaken funk as its second wave, making it slicker and perhaps even slightly less hard-hitting. Unlike his younger contemporaries though, Sly And The Family Stone were still making heavy early '70s funk by the turn of the '80s, which was, I have heard it said, among the heaviest stuff coming out at the time. Unfortunately, they weren't marketed in a way that would capitalize on it, but Back On The Right Track sold alright nonetheless.
Notice that the cover art of There's A Riot Goin' On
(1971) is not actually the American flag.
They got to make another album, but both Sly and P-Funk ringleader George Clinton abandoned it partway through; the polished up leftovers were released as the underwhelming-but-far-from-embarassing Ain't But The One Way, which was the final album ever made of new Sly Stone material; he appeared again decades later with an album made up largely but not exclusively of redundant rerecordings of his past hits, I'm Back! Family And Friends (2011); the three new songs on it are, however, very nice. Apart from a handful of singles, his most prolific musical appearances from the '80s onwards ended up being guest spots on other artists' tracks. So, at you can see, it made sense to leave things off at the end of the '70s. I didn't mention it before, but in '79 an arguably unnecessary disco remix album of the Family Stone's earlier hits was released by their old label Epic; it's from there that the cover art of Greatest Hits (Of The '70s) originates.
So, with the purposes of both mopping up all these truly excellent hits and album cuts, as well as also hopefully helping realize a reappraisal of their '70s catalogue, here, at last presented for your beautiful ears (take care of 'em!), is Greatest Hits (Of The '70s), a much needed follow-up and companion to the original Greatest Hits album from 1970; it even features the same song as the closing track, albeit in a different and even funkier performance, renamed "Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa." The songs on this compilation are all sourced from the 2007 remasters up to Small Talk, the fabulous 2017 digital-only remasters of High On You and Heard Ya Missed Me, and an old 1992 CD of Back On The Right Track that I liked the sound of. So, all in all, what is there to say except rest in peace Cynthia Roberts, and, of course, the one and only Sly Stone.
