Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs

Sly Stone's first taste of national notoriety began at the tender age of 19 when he produced the moody pop single, "Laugh, Laugh," for the San Mateo folk-rock band the Beau Brummels. As a teen guitarist, Stone's various gigs around San Francisco lead him to cross paths with Autumn Records' Tom Donahue, who gave the budding talent a shot at producing. "Laugh, Laugh" was one of Sly's first efforts and by early 1965, it had climbed into the Top 20. As Ben Fong-Torres said of the single in 1970: "Sly had produced the very first rock & roll hits out of… a city then known for little more than Johnny Mathis and Vince Guaraldi." The "San Francisco Sound" would soon be in full bloom, but here Sly was planting the seeds early on.

During Stone's brief stint at Autumn Records, he made use of their studios to mess around with his own compositions, including this funky, chattering instrumental, likely concocted in 1965. Stone self-taught himself how to play an array of instruments, including the organ that can be heard wheezing away on this track. "Rock Dirge" and similar experiments from this era eventually surfaced on a 1975 compilation of Stone's early work and the song was subsequently pressed onto a seven-inch that's become popular amongst breakbeat-crazed DJs.

Using proceeds earned from Autumn, Stone set himself and his family up in Daly City, just outside of San Francisco. This is where the Family Stone band began to cohere in the mid 1960s and their first official release came on this single for the local Loadstone label. With its snappy, uptempo backbeat and layered vocal harmonies, the song now sounds like a prescient first draft for a style that would take full form on the group's later hits. "I Ain't Got Nobody" only made noise locally but it helped put the group on the radar of Epic Records who signed Sly and the Family Stone that same year.

As the first single and first song on the group's first album, A Whole New Thing, "Underdog" introduced Sly and the Family Stone in as raucous a way possible. It opens, oddly enough, with saxophonist Jerry Martini sleepily riffing on the children's song "Frère Jacques" before giving way to a full acid rock jam of driving horns, dramatic choral yells and a defiant social message about underdogs who have to prove themselves to be "twice as good." George Clinton told official Family Stone biographer Jeff Kaliss that, in listening to the song, "you felt like they were speaking directly to you personally." The song and its album were the group's creative magnum opus… just not a commercial one. They failed to break the Family Stone out nationally, but that moment would come soon enough.

The Sly Stone song most likely to be heard on a 1980s "as advertised on TV" compilation, "Dance to the Music," netted the group their first Top 10 hit by the spring of 1968. Recorded under the insistent direction of Clive Davis, the single's ebullient, infectious energy helped cover for the fact that, lyrically, it's little more than the band narrating what instruments they're about to fold into the groove: drums, then guitar, bass, etc. Within the group, the song and same-titled album was met with mixed emotions. Saxophonist Jerry Martini, speaking to oral historian Joel Selvin, insisted, "It was so unhip to us. The beats were glorified Motown. We did the formula thing." However, engineer Don Pulese, quoted by journalist Miles Marshall Lewis, claims that Sly himself once said of the single, "that's the best bass and drum sounds I've ever got."

Life was a middle child album, shortchanged between the breakout success of "Dance to the Music" and the transcendent accomplishment of Stand! Yet, for all its commercial shortcomings, the album made an impact with critics, especially Rolling Stone's Barret Hansen (a.k.a. the future Dr. Demento) who declared it "the most radical soul album ever issued." Hansen was particularly taken by the group's "element of surprise": Songs like the psych-fringed "Dynamite" or the carnival-esque title track make quixotic shifts in arrangement, with sudden sonic pockets opening up and closing while the Family's singers play tag on lead vocals. As trumpeter Cynthia Robinson told Ebony last summer (before she passed in November), "We were free to adlib things. Sly would cut things off in a different way than the real recordings; he'd just stop it and go into something else."

"The things that were happening across the country changed us as people," said Freddy Stone in a 2013 interview with Wax Poetics. "We would begin having conversations amongst ourselves, and Sly being the genius that he is, he was putting these thoughts into songs." The album that came out of that moment, Stand!, absorbed the furious energies of the era's political and musical revolutions and spit back an LP so potent that more than half of its songs would end up being reissued just a year later on the group's Greatest Hits. "Everyday People" remains the group's pinnacle of that era, a flamboyantly utopian anthem about forging unity through difference. All that and Scooby Dooby Doo, ya'll.

"Everyday People," was an undeniably feel-good pop hit, but for the best-selling single's B-side, the Family Stone unleashed this blistering blast of funk. As rollicking and aggressive as anything James Brown and his crew were pumping out, the song also found Sly playing with studio techniques, including stereo panning to split instruments into separate channels. Greg Errico – whose crackling drum work on the song would be liberally sampled decades later – told interviewer Eric Sandler in 2013: "The track was laid so down to the bone and we all knew it was. You could feel it."

Elsewhere on Stand!, the Family Stone may have painted their social commentary in varying metaphoric shades but with "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey," they left little room for reinterpretation. Clocking in at nearly six minutes, the song is almost all hook (save for a short Rose Stone verse) and its stark, defiant tone stands in sharp contrast to the album's more optimistic vibes. The song is also striking for its spaced-out vocoder effects and distorted instrumentation, predating and predicting the launch of the P-Funk Mothership half a decade early.

It's only fitting that this song – now considered one of Woodstock's most legendary performances – took form at another seminal Family Stone concert: the 1968 Fillmore East show. The original "Higher," a jerky album cut off Dance to the Music, was part of their set and during the performance, the group began to improvise with it, adding the crucial line, "I wanna take you higher." By Stand!, the song had evolved into a lumbering, aggressive tune that promised to drag you to a higher plane whether you were ready to tag along or not.

Epic rushed to capitalize on the group's incandescent Woodstock performance by releasing "Hot Fun in the Summertime" as a standalone single in August of 1969. Compared to the social messaging on Stand!, "Hot Fun" delivered what its title promised: a fun summer anthem awash in some gentle streams of nostalgia and a rare instance of Stone using a string section. Critics generally treated it as a pleasant trifle – Rolling Stone's Jon Landau compared it to "a hard version of the Lettermen" – but years later, George Clinton would laud it as "proof that funk could be a pop standard."