If you’ve never heard Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On before, I suggest you go do so immediately. I think it’s an album that everyone can get the same vibes from: hazy, fuzzy, depressing, a funk record with a tone so different from other funk records that it’s always surprising. There’s a Riot Goin’ On is simply end-of-an-era coked out genius – and if any one of Sly & The Family Stone’s albums deserves a book written about it, it’s this one. Fortunately, now there is a book about Riot; written by hip-hop veteran Miles Marshall Lewis as part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, it fits the bill almost perfectly. Anyone looking to be enlightened about this elusive album would do themselves a favor by picking it up.

Lewis is a guy with a lot of cred: among other things, he’s had a book of essays published and was a music editor at Vibe and a deputy editor at XXL. It’s not hard to tell; Lewis’ hip-hop allegiance shines through in short personal asides sprinkled throughout the text. And props to him for handing out the information in a way that isn’t going to make readers fall asleep, too. If you’ve read more than a few books on music history, you know authors with good intentions can get tangled in a string of historical facts, and effectively reduce a fascinating story into dry, smoky strips. Pop music lore needs to be as informative and juicy as it’s entitled to be, and the way Lewis sets us up for the the album brings its creation to life and demystifies it.

The story of There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a beacon of the post-Woodstock, post-’60s disillusionment, and the book handles this by beginning with a couple of more contemporary narratives: putting ideas into the mouths and minds of a man and his son driving to a family reunion in 1985 and a man as he experiences the great post-9/11 drop-off of feeling. This really brings the rest of the book into sharp focus, allowing our author to fill us in on a short history of Sly & The Family Stone, and later on to the creation of the album itself. Unlike the track-by-track explanation in the last 33 1/3 book I reviewed, the chapter dedicated to the album is almost the bulkiest and by far the most rewarding section of the book. Read while listening through and your mind just might get blown. The greatest thing about this section is that it demystifies without losing the flavor of the music. The album doesn’t get any less complex or exciting; it just becomes clearer and lets you get a better grip on what’s going on. That, to me, is why this book is a success.

However, Lewis’ telling of the story ends on a strange and unresolved note; the last sentence seems like an uncharismatic fragment, informing us only that Sly sold the group’s publishing to Michael Jackson in ’84. The final, empty chapter follows, with only its title to interrupt the whiteness of the page: it reads 0:00, mirroring the album’s eerily absent title track. I find it fitting that Lewis leaves us on this ambiguous note. Maybe he’s trying to unsettle us, or give us a contrast. Maybe he’s just trying to reproduce the ominousness of the original, or maybe he just needed to get the manuscript in to the publisher. Whatever his reasons for this ending are, it certainly doesn’t tie up any loose ends, and doesn’t provide a whole lot of information about what many people are dying to know…

What the fuck has been going on with Sly Stone?

* * *

Some time after the 2006 Grammys aired, the newspaper circuit was running a short AP piece on Sly’s return to the public arena. In the usual terse, newspaper exposition style, it calmly noted Stone’s brief appearance at the award show, opening with one Greg Zola’s description of Sly as “the JD Salinger of funk” and continuing on to give a few paragraphs of history and even a suitably insipid comment by a member of Maroon 5. Certainly everyone was happy to see Sly again: some were bemused by his appearance, some were just happy to see a great musician perform again, no matter how briefly and in what context, and a few stuck their hands in their pockets and muttered under their collective breaths about what they felt to be the exploitative, overblown and vaguely insulting nature of the Grammy performance. I am, as you can probably imagine, one of the latter.

A Grammy performance has the ability to revitalize an artist who hasn’t gotten their due in a while, because it can bring them back into the public consciousness and spark a reappraisal of their catalogue and achievements. Simply put, I (and I’m not the only one) feel that Sly Stone is one of those artists whose great accomplishments in American pop music haven’t been recognized as much as they should be. Sadly, when an artist doesn’t keep the fame train chugging through the decades into new relevancy (or die a tragic death), their personas become obscured. Sly Stone was a great innovator, leader and songwriter in American pop music: he produced the first American pop song to use a drum machine, influenced Miles Davis to switch up his jazz-fusion style, played with more famous and important musicians than you can count on your hands and feet, and so on.

So when a Grammy performance comes up for someone like Sly Stone, the general feeling is one of excitement, and I caught it as well. After reading Lewis’ book, I wanted to see if I could get new perspectives on Sly Stone, who my generation had probably only seen through the Woodstock film or a few other performances scattered about (I suggest trying to find a copy of the Family Stone on Ed Sullivan). So, after eagerly downloading a high-quality video of the Grammys (as if I was going to actually sit through the rest of that shit), I ended up with what I felt was a disappointing vision; as if some thrill-seeking punks stole an old man from a nursing home, gave him a Mohawk and sent him shambling toward a synthesizer.

The premise of the program was for a group of pop stars to perform perennial Sly classics with most of the original Family Stone, before the man himself triumphantly came up on stage to join them. It seems nice, right? And it might’ve been, if the artists performing hadn’t been pop-star hacks. Joss Stone, John Legend, Van Hunt anyone? Eventually Steven Tyler came on stage (just fucking die already! Shit!) and began to sing “I Want To Take You Higher” – and by “sing,” I’m referring to the phenomenon of stretching his saggy vocal cords in a girlish wail that got old about two decades ago. “‘Ey Sly! Let’s do it like we used to do it!” he yells as garish Dance Dance Revolution-style bullshit flies across some screens in the background.

Eventually Sly comes out, his head down to the crowd pretty much the entire time, and goes up to a synthesizer stage front. He has a funny old man smile, no doubt, and he gave a little oomph in his vocals, but the synth could barely be heard, and his stage presence was less than massive, especially in the throng of musicians around him. He did at least try to go to the crowd and get them going (very briefly), and judging from those annoying cuts to the audience I could definitely see that Tom Hanks was enjoying himself. But after his brief appearance, he walked out – stage left, in the middle of the song. With a lazy, almost dismissive hand motion toward the audience, he was gone. He was the spitting image of a man who didn’t really give a fuck.

The post-Grammys message board scene seems to me a fair reflection of people’s thoughts on the performance (at least for the kind of people that post about music on message boards and read Modern Pea Pod). By any account, it wasn’t a stunning performance, a comeback, or even rousing. In fact, everyone seemed to be scratching their heads and trying to make out what happened, and again, most people were just happy to see Sly up there doing his thing, no matter how short it was. There were a lot of complaints; some complained that the editing minimalized nearly everyone of importance (read: The Family Stone) out of the picture. Many complained about the pop artists playing Sly’s songs, which was the real crux of the thing for me.

And let’s consider them for a moment, those pop stars, as I’d like to bring to your attention Different Strokes By Different Folks, the official tribute album featuring — guess who! — those same pop stars who performed at the Grammys. Does the world need to hear Maroon 5 covering “Everyday People,” or will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas name-checking MC Hammer in an embarrassing rap version of “Dance to the Music?” The answer, of course, is “God no.” The record is available on a few online sites, but don’t expect to find a hundred copies in your nearest mega-chain record shop. Like Herbie Hancock’s latest, it was an exclusive Starbucks deal, coinciding with a release of a Sly comp on the Starbucks “Hear Music Opus Collection.”

I can only hope that a few people will get into Sly’s music from this kind of tie-in, but mostly it’s just a sad idea that these songs will get purchased by some idle yuppie with a wandering eye while his latte gets made. The Opus Collection CD isn’t even remastered, for fuck’s sake. But hey, Starbucks probably made a lot of money, Sly probably made a lot of money, the system works. In the end, though, I can’t help feeling like a disservice has been done to Sly’s music, because it means something to me; and so it kind of feels like someone took a shit, a small one but nonetheless a shit, on Sly’s legacy. And personally, I think Sly’s still too drugged up to care.

So the final question left lying limply on our plates is still: will this be the last we see of Sly? Not if Greg Zola has anything to say about the matter. Zola, D-list actor cum documentary filmmaker (you may remember him in such classics as Pearl Harbor and A Midsummer Night’s Rave), is producing and directing a film called On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone, a documentary ostensibly about the elusive musician and his band. My old friend the Internet informs me that he is currently in production, but gives no clues as to why he decided to make the film.

The question that bothers me is: does Sly Stone need to be found? If he wasn’t tired of the media world, we’d probably be seeing him quipping on VH1 for laundry money or trying to make another comeback. As it is, I feel that Sly’s tried plenty hard enough. Remember those four comeback albums he did? Of course you don’t. He’s burned out, and we should just leave the guy alone. I think at this point he deserves to do whatever he wants.

Of course, I suppose that as long as he remains especially elusive, people will feel that his absence only sweetens the mystery and the incentive to track him down. But hey, if I ever see Sly on an airplane with a suspect violin case?

I hope I catch him smiling. Again.

Reviewed by Jon Cameron