Sly & the Family Stone, "Spaced Cowboy"

I was dimly aware of Sly & the Family Stone¹ in the late 1970s. I’m certain I saw the band name scroll up my TV screen in some advertisement for a various-artists mail-order record set. And I feel like I saw Sly Stone on some afternoon talk show, after my babysitter’s soaps were over. Dinah Shore or something. I just went to Google and searched for <sly stone dinah shore>, thinking I might find some footage to jog my memory. No video, but I did find this wild exchange on Answers.com (typos in the original):

Did dinah shore date sly stone lead singer of sly and the family stone?

**Best Answer**

Yes. Dinah considered Sly her Soul mate and thought they had met in a prior life, Dinah was a devout scientologist and thoght Sly eas the reincaration of the tha Alien leader Zorak.

This answer is:

<Helpful (0)> <Not Helpful (1)>

Further confirming that the Internet is the second-best and -worst idea ever conceived, after only the notion of a Dinah Shore-Sly Stone power couple.

Digging deeper, I’m seeing references to Sly Stone being “whacked out on LSD” on The Dick Cavett Show, and maybe that’s why my earliest memories of Sly run back to talk shows. Could be I learned about this sometime in the intervening years, and this is a case of cultural memory elbowing its way back through the years and passing itself off as something I thought I actually saw.

“Everyday People” (Apple Music, Spotify) was one of those AM radio songs I would hear in the car with my mom, riding down I-680 to our family dentist on Mahoning Avenue. Or not long afterward, in the exam room, as Dr. Spikell dug his metal hook into my teeth, probing for cavities and quite possibly making one or two in the process. Walter Spikell played ’60s pop over the office PA: Dionne Warwick, the Family Stone, the Mamas & the Papas. Much as I appreciate modern dentistry, with its considerably less intrusive diagnostics, I’ll take a medieval bloody-sleeve practice any day, if I can listen to the Shangri-Las over the auto-tuned Top 40 songs I’ve had to hear lately.

In the ’90s Arrested Development released the title-inverted “People Everyday” (Apple Music, Spotify), and Toyota launched its “Everyday People” ad campaign. I was plugged in enough to know who was paid—or should have been—for the underlying IP. Beyond that, I had no interest in Sly & the Family Stone. It was just more ’60s and ’70s bullshit. Somewhere in my crawl space is a mix my dear friend Alli burned to CD for others and me in July 2003, which I now have ripped to MP3 files on this computer’s hard drive. She put “Hot Fun in the Summertime” (Apple Music, Spotify) on that mix. I remember playing it, thinking Nope—not for me, and jumping ahead to the next track, which was Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” (Apple Music, Spotify).

Now, the turn.

Just over a decade ago I became aware that someone had compiled a list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. (See “Your Time Will Come.”) I was hyped to see what records I owned and loved were among these select 1001, and I went online looking for an authoritative rendition of the list. Wikipedia was unobliging, presumably so as not to put users off buying the hardcover sourcebook by Robert Dimery. Eventually I found a Danish radio station website that had gone above and beyond, posting all 1001 of the albums for streaming. At the time I was at MIT, and I distinctly remember working that radio site to death in my windowless office under the dome in Building 10, while I reviewed contracts.

Just now I went digging into my Gmail, and I found a June 20, 2012 thread with a former work colleague about the 1001 Albums.

• It’s a book, apparently, I wrote in my first message to Barry. But this Romanian radio website lists the full set in chronological order, and you can stream them: https://www.radio3net.ro/dbalbums/albume1001/.

Okay, so the radio station was Romanian, not Danish. I’m old.

• Barry’s answer: Ridiculous. The Eagles are on the list. And Queen. Bleh.

Right now you’re thinking Barry’s the best. And he is. Enough so that I’m dragging myself with guilt over the two-CD set of the Beach Boys’ Sunflower and Surf’s Up that he loaned me fourteen years ago, which I’ve neither listened to nor returned to him. Right now you’re thinking Brad’s the worst. And I am.

• My reply: Yeah, well, you know: whenever there’s 1001 of something you’re likely to find something you disagree with. But any list that takes appropriate note of Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys gets big props from me.

If you’ve already tried cutting and pasting that radio3net URL into your browser, then you don’t need me to tell you it’s a dead link. We can assume some awkward alliance of copyright attorneys, record companies, and outraged artists killed it. On-demand streaming is nobody’s favorite in the industry, even now. And streaming without permission or royalty payments in 2012? I’m surprised there weren’t beheadings. Still, for the short time it was up and running, I dug the hell out of that site—meaning both that I liked it a lot and I excavated all kinds of juicy stuff. Back then I didn’t have Dimery’s book, which provides a page-long descriptive blurb for each record. I looked at album covers, band names, and release dates, then toggled over to AllMusic to read more and decide what records to play on a given day. Or on impulse I just clicked and listened.

Something about that moment drew me to the 1970s. Probably that was where I expected the most bang for my buck. I’d lived through the ’80s and ’90s, after all, so I would have known about and already treasured or dismissed entries from that period. I didn’t need a Best Of list to tell me Spiritualized were terrific, and there wasn’t anything anybody could say to get me into Pearl Jam. By contrast, who was Can, and what was this Tago Mago record with the fantastic Matisse-looking mushroom-cloud brain cover? Click through and find out: gorgeous stacked-up drum tracks from Jaki Liebezeit (hard not to love a drummer whose name literally translates to loves time) and delicious percussive vocal scatting from Damo Suzuki:

Ha-llela-lala-lala-lala-lala-lala-lala-lala-lala-lala-lala-lle-le-lu-wah.

Welcome to Krautrock, Brad: “Halleluwah” (Apple Music, Spotify) and praise the Lord!

And Neu!, too—heilige Scheisse: over streamed Romanian radio I first tuned into Neu!!² Their lone entry on the 1001 Albums list was Neu! ’75. These days I rate that record as the least of Neu!’s 1970s trilogy. But it’s a near-perfect LP even so, and arranged not unlike the McDLT: hot side hot and cool side cool. As opposed to Suicide (S/T), which as far as I can tell was written, performed, and engineered by White Walkers at zero Kelvin. I remember falling in love with at least parts of that Suicide record—and coming to appreciate that maybe the Raveonettes weren’t quite so original after all. Looking back, I realize my colleagues and I must have been super-focused on our work whenever “Frankie Teardrop” (links available upon proof of ID) was playing in my office, because it left no marks on my psyche and I wasn’t fired. A year ago I put that track on in the car and had to shut it off halfway through.

Gmail comes through again to document when I actually bought the 1001 Albums sourcebook. I’ve got an order confirmation sent from the Urban Outfitters website, dated June 2, 2016. They had a copy on display in their Harvard Square store, but its cover was beaten up and there weren’t any others left in stock. This is probably the best $36.95 + shipping I’ve ever spent.

On the cover of my Revised and Updated Edition is the celebrated album art from Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.

This might suggest a UK-centric selection bias, and I’m okay with that. I don’t see that British artists are favored over American acts, necessarily—it’s more like the selections are reflective of what NME and Melody Maker were celebrating over the years, rather than Rolling Stone and Creem. So while the Eagles do slide in under the closing garage door, it’s just two records, as against eight from Bowie. And there’s no Phish, Dave Matthews Band, or Whitney Houston on the list. That’s all on-point for me.

In June 2016 I was back working at Harvard, where at my standing desk I would consult the book over the course of the day, reading through the blurbs and selecting albums of interest to play over Apple Music. Twice a week these days, on Mondays and Thursdays, I listen to new episodes posted by the 1001 Album Club (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), a group of committed listeners in Kentucky who are working steadily through the book, front to back, and assigning an episode to each listed album. They’re 643 albums deep, and I admire what they’ve done because I just don’t have that level of commitment. And I didn’t have it in 2016, either. Then, as now, I cracked the book, flipped through the pages, found something interesting, and tried it.

I must have tuned into Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971) almost immediately after my copy of the book shipped, because we went on a trip to Italy at the end of June 2016, and I remember carrying my iPhone around the villa my extended family rented in Tuscany, pulling down signal from a cell tower to play “Luv N’ Haight” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Family Affair” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Africa Talks to You ‘The Asphalt Jungle’” (Apple Music, Spotify) into the open air. All this Family Stone jamming prompted my aunt to say she saw them live back in the ’70s. Of course I expressed that I was super-jealous about that, this got her thinking some more about what other shows she’d seen, and she mentioned a Mott the Hoople gig in Columbus. I looked that up on my phone, and it turned out Queen opened that show, in Mershon Auditorium on May 26, 1974. So to be more precise, this was Queen before they were Queen, playing their early songs about fairies and ogres to a crowd rolling its eyes and hanging on for “All the Young Dudes” (Apple Music, Spotify). Still though: Queen.

As I try to recall what it was about the Riot sourcebook blurb that caught my eye in the first place, back in June 2016, I have to figure it was this bit:

Sly And The Family Stone’s upbeat multiracial rock ‘n’ soul reflected the optimism of the Civil Rights movement through the 1960s; but as that optimism withered away into bitter radicalism, so Stone underwent a similarly painful spiritual journey. Darkness was no stranger to Sly’s Day-Glo fusion-pop; “Hot Fun in the Summertime” slyly sang of the Watts riots. But worsening civil unrest and the carnage of Vietnam, combined with his fragile emotional state and a mess of drugs, prompted him to deliver this haunted State of the Nation address.

Ooh—tell me more. These tipping points where peace and love spill over into violent paranoia are catnip for ’80s children like me. And while it’s tempting to try to identify a particular moment when the upbeat ’60s spirit hit the downslope (the Manson Family murders!), or even a saturation point after all the assassinations and overdoses and the ’68 Democratic National Convention … when you look closer you see that individual artists bottomed out on their own schedules. My two preferred documents of ’60s disillusionment, Love’s Forever Changes and Sly’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, dropped in 1967 and 1971, respectively. Empires rose and fell between these records’ releases.

Recorded during the Summer of Love, Forever Changes’ content is culturally jarring enough to suggest Arthur Lee had a Cassandra Complex, when the truth is he and his bandmates were just taking more destructive drugs earlier on in the timeline. Sly Stone wouldn’t find his dark place for another four years. Current events no doubt helped him along and provided content cues for his work, but the genius of Riot isn’t to be found in its processing of news headlines—it’s in where Sly went musically after he discovered cocaine and retreated into a makeshift recording studio in the attic of his LA rental. Put differently, I first dropped the needle on this record because of what I read about the cultural context and Sly Stone’s headspace. Every other time since, I’ve just wanted to plug into a 47:33 that funkin’ rocks.

You’ll have noted that I’m talking a lot about Sly here and not so much about the Family Stone. That’s because Sly had withdrawn from the group at this time, and the record is almost entirely his baby. Session musicians cycled through the attic, and the likes of Bobby Womack and Billy Preston had standing invites to drop by and help out. Contributions from the Family were scant by comparison, but that is Rose Stone’s voice you hear on “Family Affair” and Runnin’ Away (“Apple Music, Spotify). The record’s credits are silent on who played what and when: fair question whether the label was being cagey here on the band’s status or memories were just foggy about the production. The stories say that Sly was constantly recording, overdubbing, erasing the tape, and starting over.

Apple+ has an eight-part documentary called 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything that shows clips of Sly Stone at work in the studio. They also spend some time on Kraftwerk’s “Kling Klang” (YouTube).³ Many, many artists are featured in this miniseries, but I go out of my way to mention Kraftwerk here because Riot and Kraftwerk 2 were released within three months of one another and are among the first studio recordings to use drum machines. In fact, it’s generally understood that they both used the same make and model, which was the Maestro Rhythm King. This was a novel application, as drum machines had been around for years but were most commonly used in dance classes or in live performances, when flesh-and-blood drummers couldn’t be found.

I just did some research, and it turns out Can deployed a drum machine around this time, too, on “Peking O” (Apple Music, Spotify), one of the experimental tracks on Tago Mago’s wild second disc. Dumb luck, then, that I mentioned Tago Mago earlier, but I hit on connections and coincidences like these more and more often when I write these posts.

But let’s set aside “Peking O” and its cha-cha freakouts to focus on “Kling Klang” and “Spaced Cowboy.” The Kraftwerk song is quasi-classical, with Florian Schneider’s flutes played over shrink-to-fit synths and a metronomic Maestro preset beat. Although Kraftwerk 2 is one of the albums now deprecated by the band—I linked to a YouTube upload of “Kling Klang” earlier, because you can’t find it on the other streaming services—it’s an early marker of the aesthetics Schneider and Hutter were chasing, which involved turning out tracks and traces of a soul in machine-generated sounds, then teasing the listener with them as a form of benign social commentary. Oh, and inventing synth-pop, too. No surprise, then, that Kraftwerk would assign the Kling Klang title to both their private studio in Dusseldorf and the label they’ve used to release their records for these last 50 years.

Recorded half a world away in sunny Southern California, “Spaced Cowboy” couldn’t be more different from “Kling Klang.” Exigency most certainly drove Sly’s use of the drum machine here, at least in the first instance. He’d fallen out with Family Stone drummer Greg Errico earlier in the year, and we suppose session drummers weren’t on hand in the wee hours of the morning when Sly was working out his ideas. But a track like “Spaced Cowboy”—“Family Affair,” too, for that matter—shows how the Maestro’s preset beats could be deployed to a maximally soulful purpose.

The rhythm section in “Spaced Cowboy” (and in “Family Affair, too) is viscous and dripping. Sly opted for a Latin rhythm here, and the synthesized strokes of snare drums, conga, and hi-hat are delicious even before that phat, thwacky bass guitar lands over top. We have wired-in speakers set flush into the walls of our master bedroom. Playing this track yesterday while I was folding clothes, I looked more than once up over the bed to see if syrup might be oozing out of them. I could listen to the drums and bass standing alone all day long, but I’m not disappointed, either, to hear those leisure-suit organ chords and wah-wah guitars laid over top. All these elements add up to the spaced bit, but then Sly starts yodeling. Like, campy campfire Gene Autry yodeling. This, along with Sly’s harmonica, would appear to be the cowboy side of the program.

So much goddam fun, this record—and “Spaced Cowboy” especially. Sly Stone framed the album title as an answer to the question Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? had asked six months earlier. I’m skeptical that this is in fact what a Riot sounds like, but if it is, then I’m right here for it, Molotovs in hand.

1. What—you thought you were getting Bonnie Tyler today?

2. I had to pause here, as a matter of typographics, to consider first whether to add the second exclamation point, then whether to italicize it. This seems like the correct outcome, but I suppose reasonable minds could disagree. Adding the superscript 1 makes it a still more unsightly three-car pileup, but at least now I’ve explained myself.

3. That documentary’s clips of early Kraftwerk include two of my favorite videos on YouTube: the 1970 live gig with a Ralf Hutter, Florian Schneider, and Klaus Dinger lineup on Rockpalast, and the subsequent Beat-Club TV performance subbing in Michael Rother for Hutter, which I’ve embedded elsewhere. (See “This Green City.”)