#12 - Family Affair / Sly and the Family Stone

When people first encountered Sly and the Family Stone in their early performances in San Francisco they were often struck by how much they really seemed like a family. They eschewed starriness; no one was put on a pedestal and it was clear that each member was valued and cared for. In a few short years, however, as the 1970s dawned, the band and this idealism seemed to implode. Sly Stone, the band's songwriter, had retreated into his Beverly Hills mansion, making music virtually alone and in the grip of substance addictions. In this context, he made the great song, 'Family Affair', which asks some very fundamental questions: who is our family? What do we owe them? What holds us together when promises are broken and lives fall apart?

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'Family Affair' can be heard here. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs - a podcast on what happens in pop songs and why they mean so much to us, with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs music under the name sky coloured. Al De Marino, the man who would become Sly & the Family Stone’s first agent, remembers his first impression of the band playing together: ‘They were more than band members, it felt like a family, they cared about each other’. Sylvester Stewart, known throughout his recording career as Sly Stone, had been making music with members of his family since childhood, and indeed the line-up of his band, the Family Stone, included his brother Freddie and sister Rose. But the band-name was intended to indicate something much more than the fact that it contained siblings from the same birth family; it asserted a more expansive notion of family: one that, in an era when racial segregation was still a fresh memory and anti-miscegenation laws still existed in parts of the United States, was harder-edged and less sentimental than that might sound to us now, for the Family Stone comprised of Stone and his siblings, who were African-American, as was the trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, but also included the white musicians saxophonist Jerry Martini and drummer Greg Errico. This was a band line-up as social statement, a presentation of what an integrated society might look like: a family containing members of different ethnicities who were embarked on a mutual project together, who cared about each other. One of Sly Stone’s biographers, Jeff Kaliss, wrote of their performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969: ‘They not only played to the times, but they actually looked like the ideals held dear by their fans: black and white, male and female stood side by side on the stage, arrayed in fantastic fashions and hairdos, rallying the crowd to get “higher.”’

By 1971, however, the band was falling apart. Stone had moved from San Francisco, which he had declared in front of a Bay Area audience in late 1969 to be ‘officially over’, and moved to Los Angeles, where he rented a mansion in Bel Air for a reputed $12,000 a month, and which doubled as his private recording studio, increasingly in the grip of substance addictions, alienating his former bandmates. Errico, in an almost perfect inversion of the band’s early statements, said of that time: ‘I just didn’t want no more part of it. It wasn’t fun anymore … I had seen the situation deteriorate and seen [Sly] not responding to it, refusing to respond to the needs of everybody on all different levels. It got ugly within the group, around the group, the audience, the whole thing’. It was in this context that Stone made the album There’s a Riot Goin’ On, thought by many to be his greatest, and from which ‘Family Affair’ was released as the lead single. In his book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, the author Greil Marcus wrote that the album had ‘emerg[ed] out of a pervasive sense … that the good ideas of the sixties had gone to their limits, turned back upon themselves, and produced evil where only good was expected’. I want to look at the song in the context of this notion, widespread even as it was happening, and still powerful, of the ‘death of the 60s’ - most directly prompted by the Manson murders and the violence at the Rolling Stones’ performance at Altamont in late 1969, but more broadly associated with the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, and the failure of protest, in the midst of brutal crackdowns, to curtail the Vietnam War - and to think about what ‘Family Affair’ may have had to do with the band’s original idea of family: as both our social world and the most entrenched, immovable part of who we are. 

Listening to the early records of Sly and the Family Stone, the extent to which the band’s stated ideals were weaved into the work, at virtually every level, is remarkable. They did not simply include references to their ideas and opinions in the song lyrics, leaving the process, and the sound, untouched, as might be said of other pop musicians becoming politically conscious around the same time. Principles of egalitarianism, and racial and sexual integration, were embedded in the visual presentation of the band, the music-making process, and in the compositional form of the finished songs. In 'Dance to the Music', their first record to chart, the band demonstrate their belief in the value of each member of the collective - that each individual contribution combines to make the whole - by openly building the sound, element by element, but never letting the groove drop, so the whole combinatorial process is felt as coherent, and, what’s more, it sounds easy and natural; it sounds fun. They use this technique of distributing the lead vocals around the group repeatedly, and on songs which more overtly express their ideals, like the famous 'Everyday People' and 'Everybody is a Star', which include lines such as 'I can feel it when you shine on me/I love you for who you are'. Sly’s brother Freddie, who played guitar in the band, said of their process: “No one was held to any rules. It wasn’t necessarily about playing the traditional guitar part or the traditional bass part or the traditional horn line. It was about giving the musicians the freedom to create a part that they thought was appropriate.” 

Of course this picture of collective music-making was a partial one: it was never disputed that Stone was the band’s leader, and he was relied on to write the songs, which were then filled out and arranged by the group. Stone was a sensationally good songwriter - the impression of playfulness and spontaneity on those early records was only made possible because of the underpinning of his mastery of harmony and a tangibly composerly sense of arrangement and structure. The music’s apparent effortlessness was a carefully constructed ruse: a musical rhetoric which emphasised looseness and stylistic variety, to distinguish them from the more streamlined, market-friendly productions of Motown and the girl groups. 

Still, when it came to making the follow-up to their 1969 album, Stand!, thought by members of the band to be their high-point as an ensemble, Stone had begun exploring the possibilities of substituting members of his band with electronic instruments, experimenting with some of the earliest drum machines, like the AceTone and the Maestro Rhythm King. The producer, Tom Donahue, writing about Stone's adoption of these rudimentary electronic techniques which allowed him to build up tracks layer-by-layer, playing all the parts in himself, has commented that Stone 'knew what he wanted, so he didn't have to try to explain it to anyone'. This transition from the band arranging the songs together to Stone playing the parts in himself, seemingly an innocuous convenience, is in fact part of a key theme of the story of popular music from the early 1970s onwards: technology’s facilitation of individualistic approaches to music production, in equal parts a liberator of singular artistic visions such as Stone's and a fateful severance of record-making practices from their previously integral social environments. It's a theme we'll return to later in this series but what's striking to me about this aspect of There's a Riot Goin’ On is the extent to which Stone already appears to be grappling with some of the difficult questions such a transition raises: to what extent does being left to my own devices, with total freedom, actually make me happy?  What do other participants in a musical undertaking really bring to the table now they’re not strictly necessary for the project to function? What, indeed, does 'family' mean when I can now seemingly go it alone, not having to 'explain myself to anyone'?

Stone raises the question in the very first line of the record, on the song, ‘Luv n Haight’, singing, ‘Feels so good inside myself, don’t need to move’. As with many of the lyrics on the album, it would be a mistake to take the line at face value: Stone laces his words with a sort of vicious ambivalence, daring us to take him seriously, daring us to assume he’s joking. At a time when collective action was a presiding principle within the politics of protest movements, the line is a rejection of both collectiveness - he’s content within himself - and action - he doesn’t need to move. It’s also a reference to drug-use, in particular heroin, which induces deep drowsiness - a heavy feeling in the limbs - in the user. Many listeners have left it there, hearing it, and the record as a whole, as a retreat into apathy and self-indulgence. And yet in the song we hear it repeated, over and over, with a frightening vehemence, and is there anything quite so indicative of someone in distress than them repeatedly and compulsively telling us they feel so good?

Two songs later, Stone makes his clearest identification with pacifism, in the song ‘Poet’. Much has been made of Stone’s links with the Black Panthers at this time, who reportedly pressured him to commit to a more explicitly political message and to fire the white members of his band and team. Their entreaties were apparently more or less rejected by Stone and the implication that he was opposed to armed struggle seems borne out by ‘Poet’’s opening line, ‘My only weapon is my pen’. Less has been made, however, of what Stone might be saying here about his image of himself as an artist, which seems to be the principal focus of the song: ‘I’m a songwriter, I’m a poet’; he claims his work reflects nothing but his experiences and ‘the state of mind I’m in’. This is, apart from anything else, a radically self-centred idea of his art; ‘poet’, in this context, seems to be a reference to the lone, self-sufficient artist ideal, a legacy of Romanticism, which Stone deploys to express his distance not just from militant politics but also the ideas of collective art-making which had been so important to the Family Stone at their inception.

And in the sequence of tracks on the album, this assertion of personal and artistic autonomy leads directly into the song which confronts us with autonomy’s flip-side, the thorny question of relationships, ‘Family Affair’. Harmonically, the song is built around two sequences: in the chorus, we’re placed clearly in a minor key but it softens into a sequence that almost takes us into the relative major, before circling back, every four bars, to that unambiguous D minor centre. It hints at a melancholy - two of the four bars are dominated by a pretty pure minor tonality - leavened by this circuit through chords which gesture at something lighter or sunnier; the overall emotional effect of this harmonic loop is one of wry acceptance of life’s hardness: it’s as if Stone would be uncomfortable to be seen languishing in moroseness: in an earlier song he had written of ‘Everyday People’, and here he seems to be saying, yes, there’s bitter sadness here, but it’s an everyday sort of tragedy, something everyone encounters. In the verses, Stone simplifies even further, oscillating between two chords - Gm7 and C7 - with the sort of regularity which complements this ‘everyday’ quality; Stone had always been a master at making his music seem effortless, and here it’s put in the service of the song’s mood of stoic acceptance. The verse harmony - that pair of regularly alternating chords - uses what I think of as the ‘funk’ sequence, ultimately a simplified variation on blues harmony, which switches between the tonic minor seventh and the major subdominant. It’s used in virtually every James Brown recording from around 1965 onwards, Herbie Hancock’s funk hit ‘Watermelon Man’, as well as many Stevie Wonder songs of the era, such as ‘Superstition’ and ‘I Wish’. It gives the song further solidity but Stone integrates it into his harmonic scheme so it constantly feels like it could be setting up a II-V-I cadence in the key of F major, although it never does, always reverting back to the D minor of the song’s starting point; there’s an absence of tonal purpose across the track, we simply move along with it, with an acceptance poised somewhere between a clear-minded realism and a resigned, enervated fatalism. 

Melodically, the key characteristic is the contrast between the chorus (a clear, unambiguous line, which repeats in unchanged fashion at the beginning, middle and end) and Sly’s vocal in the verses, which demonstrates an array of different qualities at different points, often seeming to ‘croak’ out of actually sounding the note, slurring across barlines, and at points wandering off the beat entirely. His voice is audibly subjected to a heavy filter: certain frequencies have been taken out of the sound, thinning it. This, in fact, is what happens in telephone microphones, which use filters to make it easier to transmit vocal signals clearly, and this phone-call quality, in contrast to the full, clear vocal sound of his sister Rose singing the chorus, makes him sound distant, as if he’s singing down the phone, a device which highlights his remoteness.

And behind all that, despite the verve with which Stone plays in his own bass and guitar parts, the backing is underpinned by that chugging, unvarying drum machine track. There’s none of the bright horn arrangements which had been so central to the Family Stone’s previous records. The keyboard and rhythm guitar parts - provided by Bobby Womack and Billy Preston, who had been a session musician on some of the later Beatles recordings - seem to come in and out of the ‘murk’ of the sound. The drum machine flattens the emotional ebb and flow of the music, something which, to my ear, does nothing to reduce its overall impact, but which clearly did strike many Family Stone fans as less dynamic and simply less exciting than the earlier arrangements. What’s so compelling about the song is exactly the way it captures the quotidian nature of emotional pain, the way pain doesn’t just exist in moments of acute drama, but often resides in the background of everyday life; for the most part, it doesn’t stop us in our tracks, we get on with the day’s tasks in spite of it, mixed in with life’s joyful and indifferent moments, simply there.

And what is the nature of this pain the song addresses? The title tells us plainly: it’s about family, both in the regular sense, but also, we realise, given who’s singing it, in all the senses bound up in the ‘Family’ Stone. It’s possible Stone got the idea for the title from the name of the hit CBS sitcom, ‘Family Affair’, which ran between 1966 and 1971, in which two orphaned children come to live with their wealthy bachelor uncle in his luxury apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; it was an amiable, wholesome show; the humour - based around the adjustments the uncle and his British manservant have to make to accommodate the presence of two small children - is wholly benign; yet hovering in the background is this tragedy - the deaths of the children’s parents in a car crash - virtually never alluded to but providing the basis of the whole set-up. The warmth we feel towards these characters comes from the fact that they are making do; they’re making the best of a terrible situation, and this is, I think, the meaning of the title phrase: a family affair implies that something has gone wrong - an issue has arisen or an event has taken place which has caused pain or complication - but, nonetheless, it is still a family, and as such, it can withstand and ultimately overcome the ordeals inevitably involved in living life. And so, in Stone’s song, we start with a simple and sweet-natured picture of a family: two siblings, different to each other, but loved equally by their mother, affirming the adage ‘blood is thicker than mud’. But verse 2 goes into more difficult territory - we have a confusing picture of people leaving, crying, breaking down. It’s clearly not intended to be a through-narrative - verse 2 doesn’t tell the story of the siblings now grown up. But the ordering and sense of chronology still feel important - on a more intuitive level, the first verse is about family in the sense of being loved as children regardless of our qualities by our parents, the second is about family in the sense of the inevitable disjunctures and divisions in adult relationships, of encountering the world and not being able to return to where you’ve come from, of experiencing pain. It’s all, Stone concludes, a family affair.

And if we imagine that the family foremost in Stone's mind as he sings this is his band, the Family Stone, who were at this point almost entirely estranged from him, what might we make of the final lines of the second verse, the emotional centre of the song: 'nobody wants to be left out, you can't leave cos your heart is there, but you can't stay cos you've been somewhere else, you can't cry cos you'll look broke down but you're crying anyway cos you're all broke down, it's a family affair'. The repetition of 'broke down', with its implication of pride ('you can't cry cos you'll look broke down') overcome by sheer heartbreak ('but you're crying anyway cos you're all broke down'), is a painful flash of inspired emotional insight, and when we think about the origins of the band, the family that 'cared about each other', and further back than that, on the first recording that Stone made, as a child, a 7-inch gospel single with his brother Freddie and their two sisters Rose and Loretta, we start to understand what's really happening here: he isn't rejecting the family but rather grieving the difficulty of maintaining its ideals under both the particular pressures of his life at the time - he talked in later interviews of how isolating it was to be the target of unscrupulous tour managers and the like in the wake of his early success - but also, it's clear, the universal pressures of being in families of any kind. 

This is where we might return to the notion, absolutely prevalent in its contemporary reception, that the song, and the album it's part of, was a demonstration of Stone's alert receptiveness to the disenchanted mood of the early 1970s in the wake of the death of the previous decade's hopes and dreams. A word frequently attached to the album is 'cynicism' but note the political function narratives of disappointed idealism frequently fulfil: it’s an easy slide from the observation that radical ideas of one era failed horribly to a general attitude that all hopes for a better world are bound to end in bitter disappointment. On closer inspection, the work of Sly and the Family Stone does not map neatly onto the easy trajectory of naive hippie idealism abruptly giving way to jaded introspection. In truth, there was always more canniness and nuance in the Family Stone's early optimism, and by the same token, there's more hope in the world-weary songs of There's a Riot Goin' On, because, though the record may contain many allusions to conflict - to riots both within and without - it's far from cynical: those harmonic rotations, circling us endlessly back into D minor as ‘Family Affair’ fades, are also a way of saying that we keep going; in spite of everything, the family - whether it’s our blood relatives or our wider adopted 'family' - keeps going.

Next time on the Secret Life of Songs I’ll be talking about ABBA, the most loved - and the most hated - band in history. What explains this range of reactions to them and why are they still so popular decades after their late-70s heydey? I’ll be breaking down their early hit, ‘SOS’, among others, to try to answer the surprisingly tricky question of what we’re listening to when we listen to ABBA.

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.