Drugs, funk and hitmen: the story of Sly Stone’s ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’
There’s something thrillingly dark about the cover for Sly and the Family Stone’s masterpiece There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and not just because there’s a giant American flag on the cover.
Let’s be real here, most people would look at that and see a symbol of patriotism. A whole bunch of people still see Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ as a jingoistic anthem celebrating the good ol’ US of A and not a stinging take-down of its treatment of veterans. Yet there’s something about the muted colour palette of this particular flag. The shadows looming across it as it rises and falls in the wind. The visible stitching that shows the hard work that went into forcing these disparate, separated things together in the name of unity, whether they want to be or not.
If it sounds like I’m reading too much into a literal flag, I would be if it wasn’t for the fact that this is directly the stuff that the album is about. If Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece What’s Going On was titled in confusion and despair, the state of the world, There’s a Riot Goin’ On was the bitter response, as if telling the soul icon to buckle up, buttercup, ‘cos it’s about to get a whole lot worse. Now, any album released in 1971 anywhere in the world was responding to a world on fire, but the anger and the cynicism of There’s a Riot Goin’ On wasn’t just political, but personal too.
The truth was that the Family Stone was going through some tribulations all of its own. The album is just as much a response to those interpersonal issues as anything you could read about in the headlines, and the core issue was exactly that phrasing. For a band that literally called itself a family, there was someone very much at the head of it. Sly did earn this status. He wrote the songs, he formed the band, he produced most of their records and got them their record deal.
At least, at first.
How did ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ pull the band apart?
The truth was that by the time the 1960s became the 1970s, success was going to Stone’s head. He was an erratic, moody drug addict who was refusing to collaborate with his bandmates, most notably bassist Larry Graham, the group’s talismanic secret weapon. Now, erratic, moody rock stars who piss off their bandmates are otherwise known as “singers” in the world of rock music is nothing new. However, if they’re making hits, they can more or less do what they want.
For the entirety of 1970, they did not do that. Not even because the songs they were releasing didn’t hit, they didn’t even have any songs to release. Any trip to the studio ended in fights or drug-induced blackouts. Stone even began missing the band’s concerts, which, considering they had the biggest gigs in their history scheduled and had a reputation as an incredible live act to uphold, was a huge no-no. In his drug-fuelled paranoia, Stone began to see everyone gently requesting him to stop snorting everything in sight and start writing some songs as an enemy of his.
This caused him to hire his own personal managers, recruiting two friends of his, Hamp ‘Bubba’ Banks and JB Brown, to run his day-to-day operations away from his label and his bandmates. They, in turn, hired two gangsters to act as Stone’s bodyguards. Having now completely isolated himself from his label and band, Stone finally began working on new music. This should have been a recipe for total disaster. A paranoid, drug-fuelled egotist shutting himself up in his mansion to make weird, dark music fuelled by his loathing of the world and his fellow man.
The problem is that historically, that’s made for some kickass music in the past, and obviously, There’s a Riot Goin’ On was no different. It took some time to settle, as the initial critical reaction was confused. Yet the commercial reception was as strong as ever. Its lead single, ‘Family Affair’, was a full-blown hit, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The problem was that this did nothing to quell the tension within the band. In fact, quite the opposite.
Something had to give, and after a concert in 1972, everything fell apart. The details are fuzzy, but supposedly, Stone’s new bodyguards got wind that Graham had hired a hitman to kill Stone and began assaulting Graham’s entourage with every intention of getting Graham before he could (supposedly) get their boss. Graham and his wife escaped out of a hotel window and finally quit the band officially shortly afterwards, Stone losing his most trusted musical lieutenant.
The band staggered on for three more dismal years of drugs, paranoia and dismal live shows before finally splitting officially in 1975. Yet still, despite the drugs, the paranoia, and eventually the violence, it was all worth it to get There’s a Riot Goin’ On out of it at the end.
A testament to just how incredible that record is.