This highly anticipated studio follow-up to Sly and the Family Stone's 1969 blast of hope, Stand!, was the grim, exact opposite: implosive, numbing, darkly self-referential. Sly Stone's voice is an exhausted grumble; the funk in "Family Affair," "Runnin' Away" and especially the closing downward spiral, "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa," is spare and bleak, fiercely compelling in its anguish over the unfulfilled promises of civil rights and hippie counterculture. "It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger," wrote critic Greil Marcus in Mystery Train. Take that as a recommendation. (Rolling Stone)

Total album sales: 1 million

Peak chart position: 1

It's easy to write off There's a Riot Goin' On as one of two things -- Sly Stone's disgusted social commentary or the beginning of his slow descent into addiction. It's both of these things, of course, but pigeonholing it as either winds up dismissing the album as a whole, since it is so bloody hard to categorize. What's certain is that Riot is unlike any of Sly & the Family Stone's other albums, stripped of the effervescence that flowed through even such politically aware records as Stand!. This is idealism soured, as hope is slowly replaced by cynicism, joy by skepticism, enthusiasm by weariness, sex by pornography, thrills by narcotics. Joy isn't entirely gone -- it creeps through the cracks every once and awhile and, more disturbing, Sly revels in his stoned decadence. What makes Riot so remarkable is that it's hard not to get drawn in with him, as you're seduced by the narcotic grooves, seductive vocals slurs, leering electric pianos, and crawling guitars. As the themes surface, it's hard not to nod in agreement, but it's a junkie nod, induced by the comforting coma of the music. And damn if this music isn't funk at its deepest and most impenetrable -- this is dense music, nearly impenetrable, but not from its deep grooves, but its utter weariness. Sly's songwriting remains remarkably sharp, but only when he wants to write -- the foreboding opener "Luv N' Haight," the scarily resigned "Family Affair," the cracked cynical blues "Time," and "(You Caught Me) Smilin'." Ultimately, the music is the message and while it's dark music, it's not alienating -- it's seductive despair, and that's the scariest thing about it. 8by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG)

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