Sly Finally Speaks
I’ve been reading Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Again by Sly Stone this week and it’s good enough to deserve a big mention. It’s Questlove’s first release as a book publisher, he’s written a few books now and I’ve read them all. He’s got an infectious love of music and reading about the way he thinks and feels about it always gives my love of music the boost it’s been needing. His first outing as a writer was Mo’ Meta Blues back in 2013, it was an autobiography and a history of the Roots. Being that it was his first effort at writing he brought in a co-author Ben Greenman to help. I only mention all this because Ben Greenman is back to help on the Sly autobiography and the guy is obviously excellent at what he does. He’s done autobiographies with George Clinton and Brian Wilson too and they’re also well worth your time. I really sat there reading the Brian Wilson book believing they were his words. He manages to find the true voice of these notoriously difficult and slightly frazzled artists and form the whole thing into a believable narrative. I can only imagine this latest book was the fruit of about five years worth of cagey interviews that started at the most tentative level imaginable. Like visits to a seriously damaged rescue dog in a shelter that you hope will one day blossom into a Turner and Hooch style relationship.
Whenever Sly Stone comes up in conversation, even with pretty knowledgeable musicians, his life and cultural contributions tends to be boiled down to around three bullet points: He was often late for gigs, he did a lot of coke and PCP and his pet pitbull killed his pet baboon and fucked the corpse. A couple of tunes will get thrown in for an honourable mention and then we’re done and moving on to someone else who played funk and dressed wacky. Give Sly his own platform to talk about his own history and although the dog and baboon are still in there the focus shifts for the better.
His phenomenal musicianship and overall artistry are at the centre throughout, you get a real sense of everything that shaped him and excited him starting with a church upbringing. Sly is from a COGIC church, the Church of God In Christ, which is a pentecostal denomination from America. The only reason I know that is that every time I see a virtuoso gospel organist on Youtube playing with the same kind of easy grace as I display getting drunk in an airport, they’re a COGIC organist. Cory Henry is a COGIC organist. Billy Preston was a COGIC organist. Sly was steeped in that same tradition of playing before moving on to more formal music education. He talks of studying Walter Piston’s Harmony, Counterpoint and Orchestration with his teacher David Froehlich and then later taking his copy of the book along to the recording sessions for his first album A Whole New Thing. And I think you can tell.
I’ve been listening to all his albums again as I go through but it’s been great to go back to the start. He’s a little critical himself of what he did back there, he thought he tried to hard to shoehorn the counterpoint and orchestration in and it ended up being cluttered. He’s wrong of course, it’s brilliant. The later stuff is sparser and it’s become the better regarded and remembered stuff for good reason but I love watching the journey from the start and seeing all the trappings that had to be stripped away.
As I go through his back catalogue I can’t believe how many Hip Hop artists’ fingerprints I’m finding, he’s surely up there with James Brown and George Clinton for the most regularly raided of musical legacies. I’d forgotten about this one:
He also had a bash at starting his own label Stone Flower so that he could sign groups and produce them, he was basically doing the whole Prince thing whilst Prince was still in Junior High (assuming Junior High is what I think it is). He signed a group called 6ix and a female harmony group called Little Sister. He wrote and produced this lesser known banger for the latter:
Obviously the PCP and coke took their toll and they’re big players in the story, probably the reason that he was never quite as productive as Prince. But here we are in 2024, Prince is gone and by some miracle Sly Stone is still around to tell a tale. I’d have never seen that coming. Do yourself a service and get it read if you haven’t.
Earlies in Manchester
Around nine years ago when we had a one week long reunion jaunt I posted this photo on Facebook as it’s a special one to me. It’s just a queue outside the Band On the Wall and now I look back at it through the years I can see it’s not even an unusually large one. Whenever I look at this photo though I can still feel a faint shadow of the giddy excitement we all felt sat across the street from a gig we were about to do and watching a queue form. We’d had four separate vinyl releases by this point I think, people had been buying them and particularly in Manchester, but nobody really knew who we were. I was sort of fantisising that we were like the Soggy Bottom Boys in O Brother Where Art Thou, whose record explodes all over America whilst they’re on the run through fields and marshes of the south and nobody knows what they look like. This was like being on a blind date but by some fluke you get to clock who the person coming to meet you is before they see you, give them a good once over before they get to see how ugly you are. And boy were some of us ugly! Nice people though, all of us still are. Most of us look better now than we did then too. The audience had no idea at this point though, just look at them!
Anyway, watching the queue from across the street is the clearest thing I can remember about April 15th 2004. The gig was definitely good, we played really well in a hot and sweaty room that probably had just about everybody I loved at the time in it. The venue was falling apart, the dressing rooms were vintage squalor and the staff were a set of humourless shitbags but we’d sold out a 200 capacity venue and played right at the sharp and perfect edge of our abilities. So that’s why I knew we were all going to be fine from then on, the Earlies were here to stay. I love looking at this photo and thinking “The Earlies are here to stay”. Even though I kind of know we’re not.
I had the same kind of giddiness staring at a queue 13 years later as we sat on the tour bus watching the crowds form outside the Ritz in Manchester for the first solo Liam Gallagher gig. It’s a different story with a different ending but queues are queues and I like to have a sly look at them sometimes.
Chicago and Al Green
Everyone’s favourite continental European saxophonist Nicky Madden sent through this treat yesterday. I don’t think I have to say much about this video, I just want you to watch it. If Sly Stone’s career got reduced to about three salacious bullet points Terry Kath’s got boiled down to one and we all know what it is. It’d be an injustice to mention it here, I think it’s just lovely to see a young smiling band at the top of their game being absolutely thrilled by the presence of a contemporary who they can barely contain their admiration for. We all know why Al Green is royalty but Chicago Transit Authority were too if you grew up in Joe Madden’s house so I imagine I’ll come back to them over and over again.
More Action from overt’ border
Jake Bugg’s guitar tech Olly King, a proud Yorkshire man, was so enamoured with the clips of Fred Truman’s Indoor League that he’s been scouring the internet for local TV gems of that wonderful era. The Yorkshire Disco Dancing Finals of 1980 really doesn’t disappoint, give it a do. I feel pretty embarrassed for my race but (spoiler alert) the black people are better than the white people. Pretty significantly actually, even though they’ve been born and raised in Yorkshire. There’s a pretty deep nature vs nurture debate that’s probably worth having but I’d rather just laugh at the clip. I suppose I should also tell you (second spoiler alert) the final decision fucking stinks. I’m no expert on disco dancing as I’m sure anyone who’s seen me move to music can attest but the Yorkshire judging panel haven’t done themselves any favours. In fact they may have made themselves look unforgivably racist. Nonetheless, a cracking piece of local budget telly. When you’re done with that, why not leap five years into the future and enjoy the Yorkshire Breakdancing competition from 1985 below. The standard of dancing is pretty good to be fair, the main draw for me though is the clueless proto Alan Partridge who’s been brought in to front the whole thing, you couldn’t script the daft bastard.
I think I'm in that band on the wall queue photo. Do you have a hi-res version please? 😉