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If you had to pick a year when the 1960s truly started to go to shit, you could do a lot worse than 1969. Nixon had become president a year earlier. The body bags were starting to come back from Vietnam. In a climate of growing racial tension, people no longer automatically bought into the idea that "we shall overcome". And the drugs that had seemed so liberating earlier in the decade were starting to claim victims.
Stand!, which came out in May of 1969, was one of the last albums to document the expansive, optimistic, tune-in-turn-on-drop-out attitude of the early 1960s. It is one of the most overflowingly joyful albums that ever was -- a blend of rock, funk, soul, psychedelia and blues that even now, now that we know how the 1960s turned out, can take you higher every time.
Sylvester Stewart, or Sly Stone as he came to be known, formed his Family Stone in 1967, with himself on keyboards and guitar, his brother Freddie on guitar, the monstrously talented Larry Graham Jr. (later of Graham Central Station) on bass, Greg Errico on drums, Rosie Stone on piano, Cynthia Robinson playing trumpet and Jerry Martini on saxophone. Along with Love, the band was one of the few integrated musical groups of the late 1960s, putting blacks and whites, men and women, side by side for its ferocious stage shows.
It took about a year for Sly and the Family Stone to emerge from obscurity, finally pulling away with its 1968 single "Dance to the Music". Later the same year, the band released its breakout hit "Everyday People", which prepared the world, more or less, for Stand!.
Starting, literally, with a drum roll, the title track sweeps triumphantly upward, Graham's fuzzy eighth-note bassline propelling the gospel vocals, verse punctuated by horn bleats and trilly "woooos" that would make Al Green proud. The piece shifts dramatically in its final minute, ditching the traditional melody and lyrics for a unstoppably funky bass and "na-na-na-na-na-na" chorus. This darker, harder edge grows more pronounced in the politically-engaged "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey", all wah-wah laden funk with distorted vocals, driving two-note keyboards and scale ascending trumpet blasts. Improvisational and maybe just a touch too long, this track shows Sly flirting with the electric funk of James Brown and George Clinton (with whom he later played) and thinking about leaving his pop side behind, something he does more finally on his follow-up There's a Riot Going On.
Stand!'s third track is the amazing "I Want to Take You Higher", and here, everything works -- the traded off male and female vocals, the bone-shaking bass line, the syncopated blasts of trumpet and sax and the "boom-lacka-lacka-lacka-lacka" percussion. Danceable and trancelike at the same time, the song makes time for instrumental solos from Martini, Robinson and Graham within its tightly constructed groove. It has the mystical pull of the Temptations' transcendent "Cloud Nine", and the infectious good feeling of "Cool Jerk". You cannot listen to this track without moving, without raising your hands or singing pathetically along, no matter how white or clumsy or unsoulful you are.
The tempo backs down considerably in "Somebody's Watching You", which chugs along on horns and organ without really taking off. But that's just the cigarette between goes, because "Sing a Simple Song", which follows, proves that Sly et. al can hit it all night. The song is actually far from simple, a complicated syncopation of guitar, bass, drum, and wait-for-it fractions of funky dead space. Listen to the close duet between Martini's sax and Freddie's guitar near the end and the slow building choruses that climax in a scream.
The best-known song from this album, "Everyday People", is up next, and I don't know what I could say about this song that everybody doesn't already know. Its childlike chorus, its soaring vocals, its conviction that we could all do better at helping each other out, all combine to make something completely of its time and completely universal. The band veers funkward again in the mostly instrumental "Sex Machine" (no relation, as far as I can tell, to the James Brown tune), which again distorts the vocals and wrings the wah-wahs out of the guitars and goes on for more than 13 minutes. The glorious, horn-driven "You Can Make It If You Try" closes the album, again the scale-stepping swell of undiluted gospel vocals against a tightly constructed funk background.
Stand! was the Family Stone's last upbeat album. It was followed two years later by the dark and angry There's a Riot Going On, after which key members of the band -- Graham and Errico -- left and Sly hung on to produce lesser albums like Fresh and Small Talk.
After the mid-1970s, Sly Stone disappeared under the weight of cocaine addition, numerous run-ins with the police and only sporadic musical output. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, but Sly himself was conspicuously away from the spotlight. Still, the band remains influential. The tracks on Stand! alone have been covered by dozens of artists. You can find versions of "Everyday People" sung by acts as diverse as Aretha Franklin, Belle & Sebastian, Jeff Buckley, Arrested Development and Joan Jett, while "I Want to Take You Higher" has attracted the attention of both Blues Traveler and Duran Duran. "Sing a Simple Song" may be the only track ever to be recorded by both Booker T and the MGs and Ani DiFranco. And of course, acts like Prince, Solomon Burke, Living Color, the Bell Rays and the Ohio Players could hardly get started without Sly and the Family Stone to set an example.
Why is no one making music like this anymore? Maybe we're too jaded or too boxed in by our categories. We end up aiming for small things and miss them just as much as Sly did with his big targets. We used to think that music could change the world. All you had to do was Stand!.
-- Jennifer Kelly
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