In some ways, though, the band is already near or at its prime form. The opening "Underdog" has everything I could want to kick off the band's career; a groove driven by a great drum sound, Sly blurting lyrics rapid-fire about needing to be better than everybody else to be treated the same, fun "yeah yeah!" backing vocals, and especially those great sax/horn parts carrying the instrumental breaks (and opening/closing the song with a minor-key "Frere Jacques"). Every bit as breathtaking is the two-minute "Turn Me Loose," propelled by a fun horn groove and amazing vocals from Sly (especially in the falsetto grunts and scatting), with that intoxicating bass going all the while in the background. Yup, the band could rip as well as they ever could at this point, as shown by these tracks and the slower-but-the-more-funky-for-it "Bad Risk" (with Larry singing), all of which just rock my head off.

The rest of the album, aside from the two soul ballads mentioned earlier, doesn't hit any major highs but nonetheless consistently gives the vibe of "second-tier material from a first-tier band" (as opposed to "bad material from a first-tier band"). "If This Room Could Talk" could have been done as a pretty conventional R&B number (with a cute horn riff) in other hands, but Sly does all sorts of things to liven it up, like the way he stretches syllables to great lengths a line before each chorus or the silly vocal noises he does during the last 30 seconds. "Run Run Run" is quintessential Flower Power music, not necessarily in all of the best ways (the "People! Listen! People! Listen!" Cynthia chants are a little dumb), but the xylophone is very cute, and the alternation between Sly's witty lyrics and the falsetto "Bah bah bah ..." bits is a lot of fun. "Advice" starts off sounding like a throwaway, relatively conventional song, but the alternation of voices between Sly and Freddie gives some variety, and the instrumental parts, from the horn parts sliding down (with the vocals moving in tandem) to the warm harmonica playing over organ, definitely don't sound like boilerplate 60s R&B.

"I Cannot Make It" (with Freddie on vocals) immediately suggests it's going to be a silly listen with the "I'm so hip!!" declaration, but it turns into another great varied pop song, veering from Stones-like 60s pop to call-and-response vocals over another great groove, before the "I cannot make it/I'm so hip!" declaration returns to disintegrate the song. "Trip to Your Heart" is easy to dismiss as just a typical 1967 psychedelic freakout, but closer listens betray a more intricate weaving of R&B with psychedelic tendencies than is immediately apparent, and I have to imagine that it was influential as hell.

Rounding out the album (with the great groove of "Bad Risk" and the slow schlock of "That Kind of Person" sandwiched between) are the ballad-ish "I Hate to Love Her" and the more rocking "Dog." "I Hate to Love Her" is much closer to the band's ideal than "Let Me Hear it From You" could ever be, featuring Sly doing all sorts of bizarre Sly things in the vocals and the horns playing a hypnotic set of lines that have an odd sense of poppy hypnotic mystery about them. And finally, "Dog" may be a slight throwaway in terms of not having much of a great vocal melody in the verses, but the chorus is phenomenal (even if I kinda wish that the female part had been sung by Rose instead of Cynthia), and there's just something warm and welcoming about the song that makes it appeal to me a lot.

In short, while the band may still be pretty young and a little too reliant on cliches in spots, they're also already full of personality and creativity and wit, and their debut album reflects all of these. Don't get this first, but if you like the band's other albums, be sure to get it.

PS: For what it's worth, it didn't contribute any songs to the band's Greatest Hits compilation, but I think "Underdog" could have fit in quite well.

"Dance to the Music" was the band's first big hit single, of course, and while I'm sure this was largely because of the simple happy chorus, it's also one heck of an interesting three minutes. The formula of the song, beyond Cynthia's opening scream "Get on up ... and dance to the music!!!" and later resurfacing with "All the squares go home!!" is to introduce each part of the band's sound in the lyrics and immediately feature them, in a way that basically comes off as Sly Stone's "Groovy Person's Guide to the Funk-estra." Freddie, Larry and Sly all sing lead at some point, but they also provide intricate scat vocal interplay, and everybody does their best to add life and energy to a song they really didn't enjoy making that much. Overall, it's a little bit primitive compared to what they'd be doing starting on the next album, and it might well be the weakest song on the Greatest Hits album, but I still like the song and its underlying formula a lot.

This album is often snidely dismissed as something along the lines of "Dance to the Music Theme and Variations," but that's a gross oversimplification. "Dance to the Medley" (more on that in a bit) is basically an extended elaboration of "Dance to the Music" and "Higher" (an organ-driven shuffle with a nice build into the "I want to take you higher!" chorus, which would be used a thousand times more effectively in a couple of years), and "Are You Ready" briefly goes into "Larry sings then plays, then Freddie sings then plays" mode, and I guess the drum groove (divorced from the formula of the other instruments) gets reused a couple of more times, but this strikes me as a more varied album than it's usually regarded. "I Ain't Got Nobody" isn't a spectacular song, but the simple organ riff is rather charming, and the moments when the instrumentation quiets down and Sly makes his peppy vocal part softerthenLOUDer seem interesting to me. On side two, "Ride the Rhythm" somewhat makes use of the "Dance" formula, but it's done in a subtle way, and I focus much more on the joyful horns, the busy bass and the light use of wah-wah in the guitar. "Color Me True" is an interesting mix of Stones-ish bluesy rock and snide lyrics sung in a Sly/Rosie duet, with Greg doing a great Charlie Watts and the horns providing a touch of menace in the groove of the chorus. The remaining side two song, "Don't Burn Baby," does the genre of "acid gospel" proud, with Sly preaching it with slickly non-blatant call-to-arms lyrics, while the groove slips and slides all over the place. Again, these tracks aren't quite on the highest level of what the band could do, but they're not that far off either.

While all of those tracks are nice and all, though, it's the behemoth that closes side one that rightly gets most of the attention. The more I listen to it, the less I agree with the notion that "Dance to the Medley" is just a jammed-out version of "Dance to the Music," and instead I tend to think of "Dance to the Music" as a 3-minute distillation of the ideas presented here. "Music is Alive" is the same basic groove as "Dance to the Music," with different lyrics, but it also has that great psychedelic siren call in the guitar to start things off, and plus this one has Rosie singing, whereas the more famous single only had Cynthia (who is a great horn player and an enthusiastic backing vocalist, but sure isn't of the same caliber as Rose as a singer), and everything about this groove is intoxicating. The second part of the medley, "Dance In," is a slightly inferior rendition of the groove, which could inspire some cynicism, but all of this is forgiven when the third part, "Music Lover," comes in, heralded by Rose's initial, "Up, up and away" line. The build in the groove (which includes the immortal Larry line, "Music for the human race/I'm gonna play some funky bass!" followed by another great fuzz bass part) is totally intoxicating, and the stretch of the band going "I wanna take you higher! HIGHER! Higher! HIGHER!" followed by Rose's "Up, up and away! Up, up and awaaaaaaaaaay!" vocal soaring into the sky, followed by a perfect horn part over the groove is as orgasmic as this kind of music can get. Eventually the jam dissolves into psychedelic meandering, which isn't ideal, but it still sounds like a reasonable conclusion.

I suppose this album isn't as brimming with distinct ideas as the next few would be (I should note that my edition contains a bonus track, "Soul Clappin'," which is catchy and a lot of fun but also reuses that groove again), but it's just so happy and colorful and so able to make the stiffest honky want to wiggle that I can't help but enjoy it a lot. Any fan of 60s pop music should be happy to hear this.

There aren't any bad tracks on here, just a couple of tracks that stand out as relative weaknesses (and they're the longest tracks on the album, lasting a whopping 3:31 and 3:20). "Plastic Jim" is an attempt to ape both The Beatles (with the clear nod to "Eleanor Rigby") and Frank Zappa (with the clear nod to "Plastic People"), and it's easy to fixate too much on those parts (which cross earnest tone with outright theft enough to make me fidget a little), but the bulk of the song is classic Family Stone, with a nice horn riff in the instrumental breaks and active guitar work over the great upbeat rhythm section. "I'm an Animal" gets a little draggy in the slower verses with the silly lyrics ("silly" not really meant in a bad way, but not in an especially good way either), but the main groove is spiced up enough to keep the track interesting (with animal imitation vocal noises and Rose adding flair from time to time), so I don't mind it terribly.

The rest of the album is all great or close to it, and it's maybe one more really good tune away from an even higher grade. Life was certainly a terrific choice for an album title; from the very first notes, this music is alive alive alive alive alive. The opening guitar line and driving main riff of "Dynamite" would make for a fine song on its own, but crossing that with all of the energy from the band's vocal interplay, leading to the build into the chorus, culminating with "...made my heart beat dynamite! DYNAMITE! DYNAMITE!" makes for a major classic. "Chicken" is another animal-based song like "I'm an Animal," with the guitar imitating a chicken cluck and a repeated line featuring the band singing "Don't be a buck-buck-buck-buck-buckaw!" with Larry responding, and while I can see somebody dismissing it as lightweight, the song's too much fun for me to give that credence.

After "Plastic Jim" dampens the momentum of the album's beginning a little bit, the album goes on a five-track stretch that's nothing short of spectacular. "Fun," "Into My Own Thing" and "Harmony" are all prime Sly and the Family Stone, with lyrics that put the band's focus on individuality crossed with community on center stage, and music that's catchy, varied and groove-heavy in the way only this band could pull off at this time. If "Fun" isn't disco (in 1968!!!), then it's the closest thing the 60s could offer to disco (only without the sterility that so often ruined disco), and the combination of that rhythm section, those descending horn lines, those vocal harmonies and that catchy-as-hell vocal melody makes it another classic. "Into My Own Thing" is full of delightfully disjointed guitar parts, barroom piano, vocals drifting from speaker to speaker and that incessant chant in the background, and then "Harmony" brings us out of the murk with energy, catchiness and great vocal parts like Rosie's "Something settles in my brain/stop what you're doing and listen to me/do you like me for what I am/or what you want me to be?" and the chorus of "Let you be you/let me be me/that's harmony."

Side two begins with the title track, which shows the band latching onto circus music (!!!) courtesy of the horns and the organ, and the chorus (with great lyrics and yet another memorable horn line) is one of the best moments on an album full of great moments. And then comes "Love City," and oh good grief that drum groove and those harmonies are spectacular (and it fades out just as the horns start to catch fire!!!). "I'm an Animal" then slows the album down a bit, but the album finishes strong with "M'Lady" and "Jane is a Groupee." "M'Lady" is definitely a clear revival of the "Dance to the Music" style, especially in the Larry section ("A pretty face! A pretty face! Oh what a gorgeous mind!" *fuzz bass funk overdrive*), but I tend to like it more than the original, mostly because of the ecstatic horn part surrounding each repetition of the chorus. And finally, "Jane is a Groupee" shows the band briefly sheathing its happy-go-lucky image in favor of its more caustic soul, with biting lyrics about groupees who pretend to like musicians to get into their pants, and while it's an out-of-place way to end the album, it's memorable and atmospheric in ways that please me just fine.

The album may not have been appreciated in its day, but as far as I can tell it's gotten its proper due with the passage of time, and I'm glad for it. If you've heard Stand! and Riot already, this should be your next stop, and if you're a fan of great 60s rock in general, this is a must.

Now, as much as most people tend to like the bulk of this album when they've heard it, there's still a "yeah, but ..." caveat that tends to prevent them from rating this at quite the level I do. Amidst all of the happy funk-pop goodness that makes up the bulk of the album, there are a couple of jam-based tracks here that tend to make people fidget. The first of these is the bluntly-titled "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" (where the "chorus" involves the alternation of the title and the companion line, "Don't call me whitey, nigger"), a six-minute piece with few vocals (there's a verse with Rose singing solo, but it's relatively unimportant) and a whole lot of Sly singing through a talk-box over a nagging organ line (and bits of wah-wah guitar and the rumbling bass). While the track is pretty far from a pleasant experience, the intensity of it makes it listenable and even kinda enjoyable (and very interesting) to my ears. Sly's snarled delivery of "WHITEY"/"NIGGER" at the end of each line is striking to say the least, and the incessant talk-box noises end up having some charm after a while, but my favorite detail is definitely the part (repeated later for good effect) where the horns keep climbing and climbing until they reach the upper stratsopheres of their range (and start to crack). I guess the track could have gotten across the same point in 4 minutes as it does in 6, but it's a point that Sly and the Family Stone was uniquely positioned to deliver, and I'm glad they did.

As for "Sex Machine," well, it's a 14-minute instrumental rock/blues/funk/jazz/psychedelic jam of the kind that Miles Davis would be doing better in a couple of years with Jack Johnson, but which I still enjoy plenty. Using the same base riff over and over wasn't the greatest decision in the world, I suppose, but I enjoy all of the different soloing sections plenty, and there's enough variety in the passages on top of it that I don't get tired of it (which is a remarkable accomplishment for a track like this from a band that never attempted a track with this instrumental scope again in its career). Sly's talk-box section isn't nearly as long as it seems on first listen, Freddie's guitar soloing isn't Hendrix-level but is definitely a few steps above competent, Larry's fuzz-bass solo near the end is delightful, and even the drum solo at the very end (followed by the band laughing and somebody saying, "Yeah, we blew your mind out!!") seems ok enough. The track is a lot of fun! In the spectrum of late-60s long jams, I'd probably put it behind "Voodoo Chile," but it would probably come out around or a little ahead of "Gumbo Variations" (and way ahead of the jams that were on CCR's Bayou Country), and that's good company.

The rest of the album, then, is strong enough that, even with whatever slight ambivalence I might feel towards the two long tracks (and I don't really feel much at all; whatever small gripes I might have with the details is balanced and then some by how incredibly interesting I find their inclusion on an otherwise upbeat and straight-ahead album), I can rate this with a grade of F without too much difficulty. The only one of the remaining six tracks that didn't make Greatest Hits was "Somebody Watching You," but even that one's a delight, combining mildly paranoid lyrics about having to watch your back (the line "Shady as a lady in a mustache" is especially choice) with a gentle set of horn lines and a memorable vocal part that make this into a worthy inclusion for this album. Among the other five, the one that, from my experience, may seem a little underwhelming on first listen is "Sing a Simple Song," but I realize now that my reaction to it was from only remembering the screamed Cynthia lines at the beginning ("Sing a simple song!!!") and in the middle ("Try a little do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do!!"). "Sing a Simple Song" rides a spectacular groove, with the band milking its vocal-alternation talents for all they were worth, and the way Sly's scream fles from channel to channel like a shrieking ghost is something to behold. I also really dig the brief mid-song instrumental break, with just the horns over the drum for a bit; that sax sound in that moment just strikes me as divine.

The opening title track, which starts with an appropriately dramatic snare roll, spends its first couple of a minutes as a really nice, vaguely political anthem, reaching its best moments in the high horn parts at the end of each "Stand! Stand! Stand!!!" chorus, but it's easy to see why, when the song was first previewed, it didn't generate a tremendous amount of buzz (the main song is very good but in clear need of one more great idea). So Sly went back into the studio without most of the rest of the band, grabbed some various studio musicians, and recorded a minute-long coda that has to be considered one of the greatest and most forward-looking musical moments of the 60s. If you can't be roused when hearing Little Sister (a girl-group that included one of Sly's siblings and whose primary function was as backing vocalists for some Sly and the Family Stone singles) scream "STAND!!!" over those keyboard/guitar sounds, with that tight drum groove and those horns, then you should just give up, because you're already dead.

Even better is "I Want to Take You Higher," a monster-groove-to-end-all-monster-grooves that's a strong contender for the title of the band's best song. The Freddie/Larry/Rose/Sly (with Rose's screams as the standout) vocal combination is done at its very best in this track, the bassline is spectacular, the horns are spectacular, the "boom-laka-laka-laka" ad libs are spectacular, and the "Everybody HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER! HIGHER!" at the end is as rousing as anything can be. The instrumental breaks are great as well; Sly gets in some harmonica, there's a nice horn break near the end, there's a brief-but-nice guitar solo, and all the while the rhythm section barrels ahead like a freight train. There could be no better choice to open the Greatest Hits album.

The album's best-known song, of course, isn't "Stand!" or "I Want to Take You Higher," but the brief 2:16 piano pop of "Everyday People." Of course, "piano pop" shouldn't be taken to suggest that the various elements that make the band and the album so notable are suddenly stripped out; there's virtually no prominent guitar, but the rhythm section is as tight as ever, the horns are prominent, and Sly's delivery of the verses and chorus (with Freddie/Larry/Rose providing harmonies) is balanced by the delivery of Rose in the bridge. And yet, for all of these familiar elements, the use of them in a relatively simplistic setting (though that tune, simple as it may be, is just genius) makes the lyrical message all the more effective and disarming, and it's hard to listen to the track without coming out of it with a "racism is stupid"/"up with people" warm fuzzy.

Closing the album is "You Can Make it If You Try," which I initially assumed would be a cover of the Ted Jarrett tune that The Rolling Stones covered (poorly) on their debut album, but it's another great Sly original, with the band once more alternating vocals in the verses (each time culminating with Cynthia's hilarious delivery of "All together now!") over yet another great groove (with some amusingly discordant organ popping up during the instrumental breaks). As a whole, then, this album may not really match its predecessors in terms of breaking ground (the relative experimentation of "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" and "Sex Machine" notwithstanding) and establishing the band's style, but it shows the band in total mastery of this style, and that's enough to make me rate this as one of the best albums I've ever heard. Because of the fundamental nature of these tracks (as great as the melody ideas may be, this is still a groove album first), it's a little harder to come up with flowery prose for this one than for some other great 1969 albums, but that speaks to my flaws as a writer, not to any flaws of the album. I find it a little sad that circumstances changed enough for the band that making more albums in this vein would be impossible, but even much of this album shows that the optimism of the bulk of Life and the more uplifting parts of this album wasn't necessarily going to last (nobody who is entirely right with the world is going to write "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey"). Regardless, what had come to this point was great, and what soon followed, while somewhat horrifying, would also be great.

PS: Since they were all released within a few months of this album, let me take a quick opportunity to discuss the three non-album tracks that made it onto Greatest Hits (if it's not clear, these tracks have no impact on the rating of Stand! itself). "Everybody is a Star" is a gentle ballad with the uplifting lyrical message you'd expect from the title, with the standard 4 taking turns on vocals, and it has a curious repeated "bah bah bah bah ..." vocal from Sly over most of the instrumental parts. "Hot Fun in the Summertime" can't help but evoke images of running through the sprinkler when you were 6, or going to the beach in college, or other pleasant memories from that time in your life when summer wasn't just that season where it got hot, and it's really the last time we hear the really happy 60s-style version of the band.

The third track is still in the same general vein of what had come thus far with the band, but with the turn of the decade from the 60s to the 70s, it's clear that something has gotten a little darker with the band and with Sly. "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" has the ultimate funk bass riff at its forefront, and Greg's drum groove is tight even by his standards, and the harmonies and the horn parts and Freddie's guitar are all in prime form, but beyond the glorious chorus there are lyrics here that give a strong hint that whatever came next was not going to be what people had grown accustomed to. This may well be the best song the band ever did (at least it's in a dead heat with the three best Stand! songs).

The centerpiece of the performance is a medley of "Everyday People," "Dance to the Music," "Music Lover" and "Higher" (the start of the medley is typically considered to start with "Dance to the Music" and end with "I Want to Take You Higher" but I feel like the medley much more clearly starts and ends a track earlier on both ends) and these tracks simply belong together. Obviously, "Everyday People" receives a significant rearrangement appropriate to the environment (the piano foundation is replaced with an emphasis on organ and guitar), but it sounds no worse for it, and the medley takes off from there. The energy level in this medley is off the charts, both from the performers and from the audience, and the combination of roughness in sound and tightness in performance is my very idea of heaven (if you don't find yourself starting to fidget in place by the time Cynthia shouts "Get up! Dance to the music! Get on up! Dance to the funky music!!" then there's something absolutely wrong with you). These songs were already great in studio, of course, and there aren't any major changes to them overall, but even if they're just great songs done live, they are GREAT SONGS WHEN DONE LIVE.

The other selections are terrific as well. In the course of the show they manage to hit all of the songs from Stand! that would ultimately make it on to Greatest Hits (if I had to pick a highlight I'd pick "I Want to Take You Higher," but all of the performances are ace), and the inclusions of "M'Lady" and "Love City" (where Sly works the crowd into a frenzy by getting them to spell "L-O-V-E" at his command) prove to be inspired ones in context. It's hard to come up with descriptions of any of these performances that go far beyond "this is awesome why aren't you listening to this right now" but that's somewhat the nature of the beast with this band; I could listen to this album on repeat for a good six hours straight and probably not begin to get tired of it.

Anybody who likes the band but hasn't heard this album is doing themselves a major disservice (I somehow didn't hear this for years after getting into the band and I still rue my folly). This is easily one of the best live albums I have ever heard, capturing an all-time great band in an all-time great performance, at the moment when its place in the cultural zeitgeist would never be more prominent.

The story of what happened to Sly and the band between Stand! and this release is a little bizarre, but it ultimately boils down to this: cocaine is a hell of a drug. After Stand!, everybody in the band started using drugs to some extent or another, but Sly went overboard, and it affected his ability to fulfil his professional obligations, to put it mildly. Not only did he start making a habit of not showing up for concerts, he also stopped writing and providing the band with new material to record, which was a problem given that they were under a contract that required them to release material at regular intervals. As much as I love the 1970 Greatest Hits album, the fact remains that it was released solely because there was no new material available when Epic was expecting to release a new album.

By late 1970 and early 1971, Sly had coaxed himself into writing and recording new material, but the process wasn't the same as it had been; the band members are all present to varying degrees, but the days of tight ensemble work and of trading vocal parts and of sounding like a band are completely gone. Much of the material began as Sly singing and playing over a drum machine, often laying down vocals from the comfort of his bed, and contributions from others in the band (and other prominent musicians of the day, such as Bobby Womack, Ike Turner and Billy Preston) generally came from later overdubs. In turn, though, Sly often ended up overdubbing the parts laid down by Freddie, Larry and Greg, and the excess of his instrumental overdubbing, as well as the continual dubbing and erasing of vocal tracks from whatever girl(s) had his fancy at the moment, ended up giving this album a murky feel totally unlike anything I've heard that proceeded this. Pitchfork, in its very silly review of Kid A, referred to that particular album as "womb-like," but as silly a phrase as it looks on paper, I actually find that extremely appropriate for this album; a great deal of this album sounds like I imagine most things would sound while listening to the world through a bunch of amniotic fluid (I just realized in reading other people's reviews that Capn'Marvel said something very similar in his review of this album, but it's an unavoidable analogy). I can't imagine how much this terrified Sly's record executives the first time they heard this.

The unfortunate downside of this interesting sound is that "and the Family Stone" is basically made anonymous on this album, despite their best efforts; Rose is distinguishable as a unique contributor, and there are moments when the horn section pops in with decent moments, but Larry and Freddie are muted as vocalists, and I have no idea which instrumental parts are them and which are Sly or somebody else. The overall effect is that the other members are there, but not really; they come and go as if they're ghosts or are otherwise disembodied. It's a really neat effect, and it becomes fascinating to hear so many interesting sounds come and go in a given song, while all the while the funk is deep and ever-present.

In a lot of ways, the description of the album thus far makes it sound like it should be a catastrophe, the work of a coked-out recluse ruining the contributions of everybody else and making something uncomfortable and not a lot of fun, in the process wrecking everything people had liked about the band to this point. Well, that might well be true, but this album works as well as it does because, in addition to all of the peculiar aspects about the sound, Sly still really had it going on in terms of musical ideas, even if they were darker and more fragmented than before. The opening "Luv and Haight" is essentially the dark side of something like "I Want to Take You Higher" from the previous album; whereas that was groove-heavy (with energetic uplift from everybody) and centered around an up-lifting mantra-like chant, this one is groove-heavy but centered around a chant of "Feels so good inside myself, don't want to move," and the effect of hearing multiple Roses (and whomever) jumping from channel to channel chanting this over the muddy instrumentation is disorienting to say the least. And yet, as disorienting as it may be, that simple line (as well as some brief vocals from Rose) is incredibly striking and memorable, and the many variations in which it's presented do a good job of sustaining the whole album.

There is a good deal of more fully-formed material on the album, of course. The album's smash hit was "Family Affair," where (a weirdly subdued) Rose sings the chorus while Sly sings a rambling but still memorable vocal in the lowest parts of his register, all over a drum machine, a bass part from Sly, a guitar part from Bobby Womack and electric piano from Billy Preston. Everything is incredibly low-key for what's still an up-tempo song, but this relative minimalism gives the song its own kind of intensity, and it works incredibly well. A few tracks later, "(You Caught Me) Smilin'" has a very pleasant chorus and some very interesting (and varied) Sly vocals, and there are some very simple but very effective horns over the funky-as-hell other instruments. "Time" may just be an atmospheric blues at its core, with Sly singing and playing clavinet (I think) over a drum machine, with just a touch of guitar for color, but the atmosphere is glorious, filling me with all kinds of introspection. "Runnin' Away," with different production, wouldn't have sounded totally out of place on the band's previous albums, what with the more active use of the horns (the climactic part in the last minute is fantastic) and the increase in energy in the guitars, but it clearly belongs on this album, largely because of the effortless (in a good way) Rose vocal in duet with Sly. It's hard not to feel some happiness when listening to this song, as chipper as it is on the surface, but there's also a definite melancholy about it, as if the song itself knows that its relative giddiness is all a lie.

Much of the rest of the album, though, is about riding the murky groove, and this material is much more about the aggregate experience than the individual songs. "Just Like a Baby" and "Poet" (between "Luv and Haight" and "Family Affair") have distinct and occasional memorable melodies, but both of their foundations are built on drums, bass and keyboards (with minimal guitar at most), while Sly's voice occasional soars out of the mix with a memorable line or three. This may sound like limited praise, but believe me, I love these tracks to death, just as I love "Brave and Strong," which is based around drums, bass and horns, with an actual tangible presence of guitar in the breaks, and which has its own share of memorable vocal moments. Meanwhile, "Spaced Cowboy" is an utter crackup, a funk-over-drum-machine take on Western music, culminating in a rousing yodel (!!) in the chorus, and featuring a rather nice harmonica part near the end. If you don't crack a smile while listening to this track, albeit a smile possibly crossed with a look of abject horror, shame on you.

The remaining two tracks are very long and very important to the makeup of the album as a whole, and they're the two best opportunities to hear something resembling the whole band working together. "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle'" is an 8:45 track that starts with Sly in falsetto, singing with Rose, before a chorus with an interesting choice of music to set to lyrics that go, "Timber ... all fall down! Timber ... who's around! ..." pops in, after which the track stays on a low-key jam punctuated by an occasional "Timber!" or vocal non-sequitir from Sly. It may not seem like much, and it may not sound like much on first listen, but Larry's basslines are KILLER, and Freddie does all sorts of nice guitar things, and it sounds like a perfectly good successor to "Sex Machine."

And finally, there's "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa," a seven-minute revamp of "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." It may seem like a bit of a cheat to remake an enormous hit, and even more of a cheat for me to list it as one of the best songs, but this version transforms the original in such a terrifying manner that I feel no qualms about regarding it so highly. Anybody who's heard the original version and Stand! and is interested in possibly listening to this album for the first time should be sure to acquaint themselves with this track before they listen to the rest of this album in order to prepare themselves properly. The deep funk of the original is now DEEP FUNK, with the bassline made simpler and deeper, the rhythm slower, the song bluesier and the vocals opaque ... ier. Nothing better symbolizes the notion that the good-times up-with-people party was over for the band than this track.

I can't recommend this album for everybody, and as somebody who had this album for a couple of years before drawing any real enjoyment from it, I can totally understand somebody hating it, even if somebody likes the first few albums from the band. There is certainly a legitimate argument one could make that life is too short to try and force-feed oneself an album like this, and it definitely took a long time for this album to rise up to such high esteem in my eyes. But regardless of the time it took, it rose up to such high esteem in my eyes, and I don't regret the time or effort spent on it one bit. Give this album a chance, and if you don't like it, give it another one. I still prefer Stand!, but this is a strong #2 from the band.

The result is an album that sounds much more like a natural 70s extension of the 60s Sly and the Family Stone sound than Riot did. Greg Errico left the band before recording began, and Larry Graham had left after contributing bass to the cover of "Qué Será, Será" (as well as to "If It Were Left Up to Me," an outtake from the 60s), but they're adequately replaced by Andy Newmark (drums) and Rusty Allen (bass on some tracks), and Sly plays some good bass himself. The horn section, which now features another saxophone player in Pat Rizzo, in addition to Cynthia and Jerry, is maybe better than ever. Rose and the Little Sister women provide fantastic backing vocals, Freddie is clearly more prominent than on Riot (not as much as in the 60s but the situation is improved), and overall the band is functioning as a band again, as opposed to a loose confederation of support for Sly's ideas.

Don't go into this album expecting something similar to Life or Stand!, though. The fresh idealism and joy of those albums is long gone, replaced by a somewhat emotionally sterile sound that's every bit as cocaine-addled as Riot was, just in a totally different way. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that "If It Were Left Up to Me" is likely a leftover (most likely re-recorded but preserving Larry's bass) from the Life sessions; in less than 2 minutes, it conveys more genuine happiness (especially in the moments when the women soar upward) than the rest of the album combined, even as it becomes clear in listening to Sly's ravaged voice in isolation that all is not well. The album's other major nod to the past comes from "Keep on Dancin'," which revels in its cocaine-fueled updating of "Dance to the Music," and while some might roll their eyes at such blatant self-plagiarism, I kinda think it would have been funny, if the band had been able to stay together in its original form for longer than it did, for the band to resurrect the "Dance to the Music" groove in an updated form every 3 or 4 years as a running joke. As is, it's still amusing to hear the life and joy of that song filtered through the general style of this album.

The bulk of the rest of the album is essentially variations on a basic approach, which is to build a groove of often surprising rhythmic complexity (sometimes using a drum machine along with Newmark) out of some combination of Rose/Little Sister, the horn section and whatever odd instrumentation Sly decides on, let Sly do his loose-tight vocal rambling over it, and play that groove over and over until the music arbitrarily stops or fades out. For somebody who wants a little more song in their songs, I can see where this description might not seem very promising, but these grooves are very interesting, and I loved this album right away. The standout among the grooves is the opening "In Time," which starts with just a drum machine and then starts piling on weird guitar parts, weird organ parts, and loud-as-hell bass until it's become a tight mechanism of off-kilter rhythm, with horns popping in and out as Sly rambles about everything (including the great line "I switched from coke to pep and I'm a connoisseur") with occasional response from Rose and Little Sister. Maybe it doesn't really go anywhere in its 6 minutes, but the space it occupies in those six minutes is killer (and apparently Miles Davis liked it so much that he made his band listen to it for half an hour straight at one point).

The big hit from the rest of the groove tracks was "If You Want Me to Stay," centered around another great bassline and a fascinating vocal delivery that Prince must have spent hours listening to and learning to imitate (this album is a must for fans of Prince, and especially for fans of Sign O' the Times), but most of these tracks could have been big hits if released as singles. If I was forced to pick the least entertaining of these tracks, I guess I'd pick "Let Me Have it All," but it's still very entertaining in the moment (the stars here are primarily Sly and Rose/Little Sister). "Frisky" primarily centers on electric piano (played by Rose, I assume) and Sly's lust-filled vocals, with great horn parts; "Thankful N' Thoughtful" primarily centers on Sly, Rose/Little Sister and GREAT horn parts; "Skin I'm In" centers on Sly and the horns; "I Don't Know (Satisfaction)" (the best of the groove tracks other than "In Time") centers on Sly, Rose/Little Sister and the bass; and the closing "Babies Makin' Babies" is everybody coming together while Sly keeps coming back to the title. It seems a little unfair to me that I'd condense about 20 minutes of great funk into a single (semi-colon delimited) sentence, but these are tracks where their greatness comes in spite of the fact that they can be summarized in such a short fashion.

The track that stands apart from the overpowering groove of the rest of the album, though, is the band's cover of the old classic "Qué Será, Será (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)." The juxtaposition of Rose's fantastic vocals (in the lower parts of her range) in the verses and the relative looseness (certainly much looser than anything else on the album) of the band in the chorus (where Sly becomes the featured vocalist) is certainly startling, but in a good way. What I admire most about this rendition is that they manage to make it seem like they were covering a soul classic, which the song most certainly wasn't (the original first appeared in a Hitchcock film), and ultimately they really make the song their own.

This album may not have quite the set of obvious immortal classics that Stand! has, nor the horrifying underpinning narrative that Riot has (well, it's there, but not explicitly), but it's a great album nonetheless. When an album can be pinned as a clearly major influence on Prince but also drew explicit notice from both Miles Davis and Brian Eno (who noted it as a significant milestone in regards to recording approach, in that the lowest instruments in the mix became the most important ones), you know you're dealing with something special. Riot may be a better album, but this one is definitely easier to like. And sadly, it's the last Sly and the Family Stone album worth seeking out.

What happened is that Sly got married and had a kid (whose cries are prominently featured in a track that's muzak otherwise), and this apparently changed his artistic frame of mind a lot, because the album is full of a lot of material that makes Sly and the band sound banal and insipid. The first half of the album passes by without a single really interesting thing happening, dragged down by the fact that Sly tries to write a couple of ballads ("Say You Will" and "Mother Beautiful") but doesn't succeed, and neither the lite-funk of 'Time for Livin'" nor the string-laced (I should mention that Sly expanded the lineup again to include Sid Page on violin, and he gets used a lot) soul-blues of "Can't Strain My Brain" hold a candle to anything the band had done (outside of the throwaway soul ballads of the first album). What these tracks remind me of, to a fascinating degree, is the gobs and gobs of throwaway material that Prince would be putting on his albums 15-20 years later; I have a terrifying feeling that Prince listened to Small Talk just as much as Fresh or Riot growing up and thought this was just terrific (obviously this is all speculation and I can't prove a thing).

On side two, the best track, by a country mile, is "Loose Booty," a totally bonkers groove where the whole band finally shows life and, outside of some verses in the first couple of minutes, centers around Sly chanting "Shadrach, Meschach, Abednego" (yup, the guys from The Book of Daniel) repeatedly. "Holdin' On" and "Livin' While I'm Livin'" aren't quite as entertaining, and at best they're pale imitations of the kinds of mega-grooves the band could muster up just a year ago, but it's still a treat to get a last glimpse of the chemistry the band had built up. Unfortunately, the rest of the side doesn't have a lot to offer. "Wishful Thinkin'" is an endless meandering ballad, "Better Thee Than Me" is stiff and rigid without much to offer in compensation, and the closing "This is Love" is a decent doo-wop (!!) ballad (with nice falsetto harmonies) but not much more.

While this album sold reasonably well, the band was on its last legs, and by early 1975 it had dissolved. The tendency of band members (sometimes Sly, sometimes others) to not show up for concerts (for various drug-related reasons) or to show erratic behavior during shows had gotten worse by this point, which in turn irritated potential audience members, which in turn led to fewer people coming to their shows, until they had a show at Radio City Music Hall where almost nobody showed up. It was an ignominious end for one of the all-time great bands, and the only way it could have gotten worse would have been if Sly decided to prop up the band's corpse a la Weekend at Bernie's and pretend it was still viable and fully functioning. But that would have been silly.

Oh wait, that's exactly what happened.

This album initially struck me as a good deal better than I would rate it now, but that's largely because it starts and ends on very high notes. Whereas Small Talk put me off immediately with its title track, this album gets off to a roaring start with "I Get High On You," built off a monster of a funky bassline, great 70s analog synths and a great vocal delivery of lyrics that embrace his love of drugs. The following "Crossword Puzzle" is a slight step down, but it has a tightness that resembles the best moments of the band in the past (it should be noted that, while this is a solo album, it also features contributions from Freddie, Jerry, Cynthia and Little Sister), and while the style is definitely less distinctive than the band at its best, it should be pleasing to any fan of the band. And hey, I have to say that I rather like the closing "Greed," another horn-heavy funk-rocker with socially-conscious lyrics that captures the spirit of the classic band just fine.

The middle chunk of the album has its ups and downs, but the ups are nice enough. "Who Do You Love" absolutely sounds like an outtake from Life or Stand!, and while it has less substance than the bulk of the material from those albums, it's so much fun to hear this kind of bass interacting with this kind of spitfire horn playing and classic female backing vocals that I'm happy to overlook its redundancy in the moment. "Green Eyed Monster" is a half-decent 4-minute funk instrumental, with energetic organ work as its main feature, and both "Organize" (written with Freddie) and "So Good to Me" are relatively conventional funk-rockers that nonetheless would have improved Small Talk considerably (and oh that distorted fuzz bass in "So Good to Me" makes me happy). The aforementioned bad tracks drag down the album considerably, but given the weakness of Small Talk and everything that followed, the presence of so much good material on this album seems like a godsend.

Finding this album on CD is currently a bit of a challenge (like a couple of others from this period, I had to order it from Japan), but if you've heard all of the band's top-notch material and find yourself craving more, it's definitely worth seeking this out for "I Get High on You" and some of the other songs. This is definitely the last Sly Stone album that anybody would need to hear for reasons other than an obsessive need to hear his complete discography.

Even worse is that, after High on You had provided some optimism that Sly had righted himself enough to be competent again, this album shows that he'd basically reached a Barrett level of messed-up, only without anyone of the caliber of David Gilmour or Richard Wright to try and make chicken salad out of chicken s**t. He once again tries to diversify from straight funk with disco, this time also making some nods to Philly soul, but the results range from kinda sorta ok to horrifying. "What Was I Thinking In My Head" builds from decent disco into an actually pretty solid groove in the second half, and the groove of "Sexy Situation" is enough to make me somewhat ignore the ridiculous falsetto used in the chorus, and I guess I kinda like the straight funk of "The Thing" (which wouldn't be in the top half of tracks on High On You), but the rest is depressing. The ballads are just as weak as ever ("Nothing Less Than Happiness" is mediocre doo-wop, "Blessing in Disguise" is string-laced and overblown and rambling), the funk/disco tracks are ruined by being totally square ("Everything in You," "Family Again"), completely incoherent ("Let's Be Together") or full of ill-conceived synth noises ("Mother is a Hippie"), and the opening track just sounds like a bad parody of the band's Flower Power roots filtered through generic 70s soul. It also doesn't help that Sly's voice sounds horrible in the moments that it peeks out from underneath the endless layer of female backing vocals piled on top of it.

The most merciful aspect of this album is that it's only about 29 minutes long, but it's still a long and agonizing 29 minutes, and the fact that Sly couldn't muster up more than this much material for what was supposed to be his big comeback album should be a major red flag. Given how bad it is and how rare it is, I can't see any reason for trying to find this; even the "good" tracks are nothing special.

A couple of the tracks genuinely sound like what I'd imagine Sly and the Family Stone would have sounded like if they'd been able to stick together through the end of the 70s and if drugs hadn't ripped the band limb from limb. The title track prominently features both Rose and Freddie helping out on vocals (granted, Rose's most common word is "hey" but you take what you can get), and while the groove is certainly pedestrian by the standards of ten years previous, it's nonetheless glorious to hear Sly, Rose and Freddie trading vocals while Cynthia's trumpet helps out in the background, and I definitely enjoy the track more than not. "Shine On" is just as good, with Sly preaching it well over a rather intense mid-tempo groove augmented well by Cynthia and with Rose throwing in some vocals in the last minute for good measure. Again, the standards have fallen a bit, but the incessant "We want to, we've got to, we want to shine it on" backing vocals, against this backdrop, provide for a strong hook that at least somewhat calls up the good old days.

The rest is somewhat enjoyable when on, but the tracks tend to sound like good tracks that weren't quite finished, and it's hard not to get the feeling that the various parties involved with the album didn't push Sly too hard to extend himself, perhaps out of fear that stress would drive him into bad habits. Two of these tracks ("Remember Who You Are," "The Same Thing (Makes You Laugh, Makes You Cry)") were released as singles, and they're ok (I enjoy Sly's work with a vocal distorter in the latter), but they don't really do anything to stand out for better or worse. The other four tracks are far more notable for combined effect than for individual interesting moments, and my main impression from listening to them is that they do a good job of whetting my appetite for the band's classic albums (whereas the worst moments of Small Talk and Heard Ya Missed Me just make me feel sad).

Predictably, this comeback didn't go anywhere; the world wasn't primed to listen to a burnout relic like Sly Stone in 1979, and making a relatively non-descript, tiny album at this point wasn't the way to change this. Still, if you can find it very cheap, like I actually did, this is worth hearing once or twice if you're a hardcore fan.

The parts of the songs that are clearly discernable as Sly show he was in a decent mood, and was interested in making music more or less along the lines of Back on the Right Track, which isn't the worst thing in the world. The most notable tracks on here are a strange cover of "You Really Got Me" (which just drips weirdness and cocaine) and the closing "High, Y'All," in which Sly mixes the familiar "I want to take you higher" groove with repeated "How much wood could a wood knot if a wood knot could knot wood" chants, but pretty much everything here (except the unsettling 45-second instrumental "Sylvester") is memorable for at least a while and sounds competent. "Ha Ha, Hee Hee" is the closest the album comes to a ballad; the rest is either funk-by-numbers or slightly above average funk-by-numbers.

Needless to say, Warner Bros. ended the Sly Stone comeback experience after releasing this album, and apart from occasionally appearing as a guest here and there, this basically marked the end of Sly Stone's career as a recording artist. It's not a spectacular failure of an ending, at the very least.