Sly and the Family Stone

SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE
 
 
Sly and the Family Stone  was an American band from San Francisco.  Active from 1967 to 1983, the band was pivotal in the development of soul, funk, and psychedelic music.  Headed by singer, songwriter, record producer, and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone, and containing several of his family members and friends, the band was the first major American rock band to have an “integrated, multi-gender” lineup.  They recorded five Billboard Hot 100 hits which reached the top 10, and four ground-breaking albums, which greatly influenced the sound of American pop, soul, R&B, funk, and hip hop music.  In the preface of his 1998 book For the Record: Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, Joel Selvin sums up the importance of Sly and the Family Stone’s influence on African American music by stating “there are two types of black music:  black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly Stone”.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
In 1966, the Farfisa Organ was even more prominent in the hit song “Double Shot (of My Baby’s Love)” by the Swingin’ Medallions (who were from South Carolina).  That lovely organ that you hear in Percy Sledge’s immortal 1966 hit “When a Man Loves a Woman” is a Farfisa, and Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone was playing one at his landmark Woodstock performance in 1969.  Richard Wrights Farfisa Organ was a key element on many of the early Pink Floyd albums, particularly The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Ummagumma, but also including The Dark Side of the Moon.  Elton John was able to get a different sound entirely from a Farfisa Organ on his hit “Crocodile Rock”. 
 
(December 2012)
 
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Their opening album, Awake in a Dream (1991) was praised by Alex Henderson in Allmusic:  “Eleven was a so-called alternative rock trio of the early 1990’s that drew heavily on the psychedelic rock and soul music of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Awake in a Dream is much too guitar-oriented to have been played on a Black radio station in 1970 or 1973, and yet, enjoyable selections like ‘Before Your Eyes’, ‘All Together’ and ‘Rainbow’s End’ make it clear that singer/guitarist Alain Johannes, bassist/singer/organist Natasha Shneider and drummer Jack Irons have spent a lot of time listening to the likes of Sly and the Family StoneIke and Tina Turner and Stevie Wonder.  Shneider is also heard on the clavinet, a synthesizer that was prominent in 1970’s soul and funk but was seldom used in the urban contemporary music that followed in the 1980’s and 1990’s.”  

 

(April 2015/1)

 

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Writing in 2010 for the Detroit Metro Times, Bill Holdship writes that “the Ramrods [were] Detroit’s first ‘official punk’ band” and also gives a great overview of what the Lovemasters were all about: “Bootsey X & the Lovemasters were the best live rock ’n’ roll show in town then — sometimes approaching rock ’n’ roll carnivaldom. . . . [I]n the mid-to-late ’80s, a Bootsey X & the Lovemasters performance was akin to seeing Iggy Stooge fronting a James Brown and His Famous Flames Revue — that is, if both the Godfathers of Soul and Punk had even greater senses of humor . . . plus, everything else such a concept would involve (with flashes of George Clinton’s Funkadelic and Sly and the Family Stone, both of which were psychedelicized versions of the [James] Brown revue anyway. The act came complete with horns, keyboards, a jive-talking emcee (who doubled on sax), and the ever-present — and ever-hot — Sugarbabes of Soul. . . .
 
“And if that weren’t enough, the crew mixed it all with such perfect punk-ified covers as Neil Diamond’s ‘Brother Love’s Travelin’ Salvation Show’, Elvis’ ‘Kissin’ Cousins’ and ‘Suspicious Minds’, Roy Head’s ‘Treat Her Right’ (the instrumental that always announced Bootsey’s imminent arrival onstage), and perhaps the greatest cover of the O’Jays’ ‘Love Train’ of all time.”
 
(March 2016)
Last edited: March 22, 2021