In the 90s, along with many of my friends, I got really into 70s soul music. It was everywhere. On a trip to the wintry student town of Dunedin I picked up a soundtrack CD for a movie I’ve still never seen, just based on the songs on it. I rightly picked it was a super cheap way of getting many absolutely cracking tunes. This song opened that album and is still one of my favourite Sly Stone songs:
From there I remember living and breathing the chunky hits collection Anthology, and only much later bothering to check out the critical faves There’s A Riot Going On and Fresh.
What I was into back then (or what I’m going to unreliably reimagine 30 years on!) was how those recordings sounded so, well, fresh, because of the murky, ramshackle sound world on them. It was something they had in common with that other ubiquitous 90s alt obsession, the original Jamaican dub records. Big grooves, but sometimes often kind of sparse or weirdly mixed elements sitting on top and almost subliminal, often noisy layers lurking far in the back. Home organ drum machines and fx didn’t hurt.
Why I guess it still sounded so fresh was that it had the same kind of quality that was showing up in hip-hop and, yep, trip-hop records where producers were picking out and highlighting incidental and/or unintended sounds from records and making music where this was part of great grooves.
In these 90s producers’ efforts this was intentional, while I believe now a lot of the quality of these Stone records is due to pushing recording tech beyond what it could handle. But my point is the result was similar.
I also remember isolating and sampling various drum breaks from songs off Anthology that I spotted as already in use in hip-hop. I remember sampling only one channel of a stereo mix to try and cut down on the bleed of other elements in the mix, but still hearing some stray stuff in there besides drums, and eventually settling on the idea that that actually added character.
If you listen to the above or “Family Affair” the rhythm section is huge (and sounds great) and there’s immediately far away and off-kilter sounding instrumentation lurking in the mix. It’s noisy but never in an aggro way, just sort of scuffed and, I dunno, wooly? Anyway, this is definitely a thing I still really love. I still chase that kind of murky plus groove-heavy combo today – perhaps now leaning more into the murk in my own music, but still both in my listening habits for sure.
Back then I knew bugger all about the breadth of what Sly Stone got up to musically. I definitely didn’t know anything about his production credits for 60s San Francisco rock bands or any of that. I’ve got no reason to lay out what you can read anywhere about him, but just wanted to capture some of my experience with his music.
While I am here I will link to a great article by Jill Mapes reflecting on who gets the luxury of sanitising their own legacy, with reference to Questlove’s doco about Stone.