160. Sly & The Family Stone - Stand! (1969)




















Track Listing

1. Stand!
2. Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey
3. I Want To Take You Higher
4. Somebody's Watching You
5. Sing A Simple Song
6. Everyday People
7. Sex Machine
8. You Can Make It If You Try

Review

A very funky album indeed. This is the first post for a few days, as I had to make a lightning trip to Portugal over the weekend. So, back to the daily grind with 12 hours of trip on me and a terrible flu, so excuse me if this isn't as long a review as most others.

Like the Temptations, Sly & The Family Stone are also pioneering Funk. Sly + Family are much more of an all funk group than the Temptations - obviously - and this album is full of Funky classics, like Stand!, I Want To Take You Higher and Everyday People. It is only marred by Sex Machine, a 13 minute instrumental which breaks the rhythm terribly.

Buy the fucker, but better funk would be done in the future. Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Everyday People
2. I Want To Take You Higher
3. Stand!
4. You Can Make It If You Try

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

An amazing live version of I Want To Take You Higher, live at Woodstock, probably one of the best performances in the whole of Woodstock:



From Wikipedia:

* The success of Stand! secured Sly & the Family Stone a gig at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival, which became on of the most iconic music festivals of the rock and roll era. The Family Stone's set, performed at three o' clock in the morning on August 16, 1969, included "Everyday People", "Music Lover", and much of the rest of the band's repertoire. "Music Lover" contains a repeating lyric of "wanna take you higher" (which was expanded into "I Want to Take You Higher" for Stand!), and Sly Stone used the lyric to create a chant, interspersed with an inspirational dialogue, which resulted in the thousands of festival goers all chanting "higher!" along with Sly. Many music critics, as well as the members of the band itself, see the Woodstock performance as the zenith of the band's performance career.

* Stand! is among the most sampled recordings in popular music history; late 20th century hip hop producers were particularly fond of sampling Gregg Errico's drum lines from "Sing a Simple Song" and "You Can Make It If You Try", and either looping the tracks or chopping them up and using the drum sounds. The drums from these two tracks can be found on literally hundreds of hip-hop and contemporary R&B songs, by artists such as LL Cool J, The Jungle Brothers, Digital Underground, Ice Cube, TLC, Jodeci, and many more.