Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) (1969)
It's not easy being a musical genius. There's so much pressure to keep delivering at a high level. Some can handle it, some can't.
In 1964, Sly Stone got his start in the music business as a radio DJ in San Mateo, Calif., while also working as a record producer for Autumn Records for SF-area groups like the Beau Brummels and the Mojo Men. In 1966, he started a band called Sly & the Stoners, while his brother Freddie formed Freddie & the Stone Souls. The two combined their bands to form Sly and the Family Stone, with Sly on guitar and organ, Freddie on guitar and Larry Graham on bass; they added a gospel group called the Heavenly Tones as their backup singers. The group was also multiracial, featuring a white drummer and sax player, which was unusual for the time.
A CBS exec saw a performance and signed the band to Epic Records, where they released A Whole New Thing in 1967. Critics liked it, but it didn't sell well. The group scored a hit with "Dance to the Music" in 1968, which hit #8 on the Billboard Hot 100. Sly and Freddie's sister Rose joined the group just before the single came out. The album of the same name fared well, but the group's third album, Life, was less successful.
Sly and the Family Stone persisted and released "Everyday People" in late 1968 and had their first #1 hit. It was the lead single for the band's fourth album, 1969's Stand!, which sold more than 3 million copies. It also featured "I Want to Take You Higher" and "You Can Make It If You Try." The band headlined the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, a few weeks before Woodstock; the festival was long forgotten until Questlove made his 2021 documentary Summer of Soul, which featured long-lost footage from the event. Sly and the Family Stone then scored a slot at Woodstock and was one of the highlights of the festival.
The group was riding high, but was having problems. The Stone brothers weren't getting along with Graham, the Black Panthers were demanding that Sly replace the white members of the group with black musicians, and the band moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles and was getting way into drugs. Sly reportedly carried a violin case filled with drugs wherever he went, mainly cocaine and PCP. For the nearly two-year stretch from late 1969 to fall 1971, the band released only one single...but what a single.
"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" was released on a double A-side single with "Everybody is a Star" in December 1969 with the intention of being on an album in the works, but the album was never finished. The song is extra funky, with Graham provided an early example of slap bass while Sly and Freddie get the wah wah guitars going. Jerry Martini and Cynthia Robinson provide horn accompaniment and the song sounds like a celebration, but the lyrics tell another story.
"Lookin' at the devil, grinnin' at his gun/Fingers start shakin', I begin to run/Bullets start chasin', I begin to stop/We begin to wrestle, I was on the top/I want to thank you fallettinme be mice elf agin/Thank you falettinme be mice elf agin."
Sly was making grammarians everywhere wince with his spelling, but clearly there was more going on here than just being thankful. Shit was going down, whether it was fighting with the police or someone else, and it was intense.
"Stiff all in the collar, fluffy in the face/Chit chat chatter tryin', stuffy in the place/Thank you for the party, but I could never stay/Many things is on my mind, words get in the way/I want to thank you falettinme be mice elf agin/Thank you falettinme be mice elf agin."
The third verse references some of the group's hits, but it's the last verse that hits hard.
"Flamin' eyes of people fear, burnin' into you/Many men are missin' much, hatin' what they do/Youth and truth are makin' love/Dig it for a starter/Dyin' young is hard to take/Sellin' out is harder."
Sly was getting pressure to make his music more commercial, so that sellout line and possibly the entire song seem like a middle finger in the label's direction. Whatever the case, the public wasn't freaked out by the song, which went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1970. It ended up being included on the Greatest Hits comp released in November 1970, which went quintuple platinum.
In 1971, the band returned with "Family Affair," which became another #1 hit and was the lead single from There's a Riot Goin' On. The album was a dark take on the social issues of the early '70s. After the album's release, Sly and Graham and their respective entourages got into a post-concert brawl. Graham quit the band and started Graham Central Station. There were two more Family Stone albums before the band split up in 1975. Sly released High on You in '75 and Heard You Missed Me, Well I'm Back in '76; the latter was billed as a Sly and the Family Stone album in name only. Sly was dropped by Epic and signed with Warner Bros., releasing Back on the Right Track in 1979.
He toured with George Clinton and Funkadelic in the late '70s and early '80s, appearing on the 1981 Funkadelic album The Electric Spanking of War Babies. He started working on an album with Clinton, but recording stopped after Clinton left Warner Bros. in late 1981. After Sly disappeared, producer Stewart Levine completed the album, released as Ain't But the One Way in 1982. He released occasional singles throughout the '80s, but also continued to struggle with drug addiction. He stopped releasing music after a 1987 arrest and conviction for cocaine possession and use. In 2006, a Sly and the Family Stone tribute took place at the Grammy Awards, which originally was supposed to include a band reunion but it was scrapped. Sly came out at one point and sang part of "I Want to Take You Higher" before waving to the audience and leaving the stage.
In 2011, it was reported he was homeless and living in a van in Los Angeles. Sly reportedly cleaned up during the pandemic and worked with a ghostwriter on his autobiography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), which was released last year.
The song "Thank You" has been covered a few times over the years, including by the post-punk band Magazine in 1980 and Soundgarden during a 1989 John Peel session (later included on the 2014 comp Echo of Miles: Scattered Tracks Across the Path." It was also sampled in Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" and Vanilla Ice's "People's Choice."
No comments:
Post a Comment