That’s What’s Goin’ On, Marvin

Here’s a 5-point plan for making an epoch defining LP.

Stage 1: Garner wild commercial and critical success by helming a brilliantly perky multi-racial psychedelic soul-revue, releasing wonderful singles and an acclaimed LP. Take loads of uplifting drugs.

Stage 2: Take loads of slightly less uplifting drugs.

Stage 3: Take loads of very BAD drugs. Turn up to approximately a third of your own band’s gigs, miss several record label recording deadlines*. Get depressed by the dream-crushing realities of the end of the 70’s in the US and dull the pain with, you guessed it, even badder drugs.

Stage 4: Sack the white guys in your band and management and hire some serious gangsters to bodyguard you. Get into a fight with your bass player over whether he had hired a hit man to kill you, forcing him and his wife to escape through a window. Really hit the drugs.

Stage 5: In a weird, rambling isolated state, make a very alien sounding LP using a primitive drum machine, making songs without discernible choruses or hooks. Release it to very little acclaim and then decide to take even more drugs, for reasons you can’t quite remember anymore.

Welcome folks to Sly & The Family Stone There’s A Riot Goin’ On.

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Named in answer to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On six months earlier, Sly’s 1971 LP remains a strange, alienating downer LP to this very day. I don’t quite know what he was taking at the time but There’s A Riot Goin’ On sounds like pure brown industrial-grade heroin to me.

Of course it was received dismissively, this was the guy who got us every day people up and dancing to the music. It’s only with hindsight that we can see how topical his disillusionment and torpor was, how the international mood of that transformative performance at Woodstock had deteriorated to a bummer from above. Retreat was the sensible option, even if it was retreat into one’s own veins.

There’s A Riot Goin’ On thrums and grooves right from the get-go, jiving to a logic and sensibility solely of its own making. Nothing sounds like this, except this. Opening with the most dynamic cut present ‘Luv N’ Haight’ is a smart move, it resets expectations whilst showing enough call-and-response vox and yowling to recall past glories.

The beautiful electric piano of ‘Just Like A Baby’ lulls us through a wonderfully depressing track by stealth, the beat as skeletal as the veins in a decomposing Autumn leaf. Sly’s voice is magnificent, quiet, sad, pleading; nobody did this before**. ‘Poet’ is a magnificent, comparatively guitar totin’ quietly defiant strut, I know Ike Turner played somewhere on this LP, I wonder if it were here.

The big track hereabouts remains ‘Family Affair’, which sounds oddly muted and warped to my ears, like Sly was really trying to be uplifting here and just missed. His voice is incredible, a warm melodic instrument of its own overlaying the prettiest tune here, Billy Preston guests.

Two key pieces of There’s A Riot Goin’ On are ‘Africa Talks To You (‘The Asphalt Jungle’) and the answering, closing ‘Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa’; taking up a third of the album between them. The bass work on the former is worth the price of the album alone, as Sly deals with his own fame and estrangement from the world dismissively and rather cynically. The closer is a cold, slow rework of the band’s own ‘Thank You’ single, full of cocaine emptiness and frigidity.

My fave track tonight is not the title track, placed at the end of the first side and listed at a length of 0:00^, but the weird Bontempi beaten ‘Spaced Cowboy’ which prefigures by decades, a whole 90’s DIY ethos, but with the most fucked-up yodelling ever recorded and an awesome ‘limp/pimp’ rhyming scheme at one point. Should any visiting Venusuians ever want to know what drugs sound like just direct them here.

I knew ‘Brave And Strong’ s opening courtesy of the Beastie Boys sampling it for ‘3-Minute Rule’ and it is a truly excellent (down) beat. ‘(You Caught Me) Smilin” is so unconvincingly upbeat that despite Sly’s best growls it conjures a rictus grin at best, cocaine face ache extraordinaire; albeit with the hint of some great brass.

The frigid despair of ‘Time’ is virtually interstellar in its’ lonely depth, it is a report back to us from somewhere nobody should ever reach. By the time we reach ‘Runnin’ Away’ the attempted jauntiness sounds like a sick joke at the listener’s expense, in a good way!

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The only appropriate response after listening, sorry I mean listenin’, to There’s A Riot Goin’ On is to sit there shaking your head at just what a bummer it all is and expelling the breath that you’ve somehow held for the previous 47 minutes straight.

Which does not describe what an intimate LP it is, not necessarily the type of intimacy you might want, but still. I’d liken it to the way you get to know your cellmate during a 10-stretch, an unavoidably cellular level of knowledge whether you want it, or not; that quiet unwelcome voice that one day you’ll mourn the absence of.

Then the ghostly memories of all those spectral tunes dance before you and before you know it you really are Jonesing for another spin, another run through this dampened down hoedown. It’s an insidious, oft-times invidious, set. You realise that Sly has been places and states where nobody should’ve gone, much less filed copy from and returned; albeit not unaltered.

Forgive me friends for trying your patience but There’s A Riot Goin’ On demands more than a quick paragraph and a quip. Who ever knew that emptiness demanded so much struggle?

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My copy is not, sadly, a dog-eared original but a 2013 reissue on Music On Vinyl. I would really recommend it as a pressing, it captures the quiet dynamics and occasional clumsiness of the tunes perfectly.

1216 Down.

*forcing them to release a Greatest Hits to mark time.

**sure, folks got the blues over their woman/man/lack of dough but nobody ever just set all that aside and lamented the pain of actually existing. No reasons needed.

^Sly said there should be no riots goin’ on, when quizzed on it.