I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [39]
The popular judgment on Riot is that it's evidence of Sly's fall from a state of sunlit grace into a miasma of dark introspection, fueled by chemical self-indulgence. In the wider cultural context, the album is pictured as an accompaniment to the Baby Boomers' disillusioned rejection of idealism, based on the preceding years' scourge of assassinations, war, political intrigue, and bad drugs.
Riot does in fact sound different from much of what preceded it, and in looking more closely at Sly's personal circumstances during the production of the album, likely influences on its sound can be discovered. Making too tight a tie between that sound and social and historical circumstances is tempting but fallacious, since much of what was happening to the world in 1971, as well as some of what was happening in Sly's life, had in fact already been happening in the years when Sly and the band were putting out rather different kinds of albums, and would continue for some while after. But 1971, the year of Riot, is a good point from which to take a look at the times, however little Sly himself may have been prone to such reflection.
Attention among Americans in the '70s was shifted toward more militant manifestations of black pride. The civil rights movement, focused on righting wrongs perpetrated by whites on blacks, had resulted in the federally enforced Civil Rights Act of 1964, with marches and protests before and after. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, was a shock to all Americans, but it didn't do away with peaceful protest. The most visible of the militant groups, the Black Panther Party, had been founded back in 1966 in Oakland, while Sly was still gigging in North Beach on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. By the time of Riot, the Black Panthers' power and presence in the press had grown alongside Sly's, and it was no surprise that party members started making overtures to Sly, Jimi Hendrix, and other reigning black rockers. But Sly clearly wasn't interested. His action in assembling a racially and gender-integrated unit spoke louder than any of his rare public declarations on racism, and the Family Stone, unlike some rock and folk acts, never manifested itself as part of civil rights demonstrations or the movement overall. Instead, the band expressed its collective consciousness on the subject in musical form, most famously in "Everyday People," "Underdog," and most explicitly "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey."
Critic Greil Marcus, in his 1974 book Mystery Train, noted, "With this album [Riot], Sly is giving his audience-particularly his white audience-precisely what they don't want. What they want from Sly is an upper, not a portrait of what lies behind his big freaky black superstar grin. One gets the feeling, listening to this album, that Sly's disastrous concerts of the past year have not been so much a matter of insulting his audience as attacking it, with real bitterness and hate, because of what its demands on him have forced him to produce. It is an attack on himself as well, for having gone along with those demands."
The shooting of students at Kent State in 1970 shocked but failed to stop those who'd been protesting the Vietnam War on U.S. college campuses since the early'60s. By 1969, wider protests were moving tens of thousands of people of all ages along the streets of San Francisco and other cities. Among the growing number of bands collectively referred to as being part of the San Francisco sound were several with antiwar messages in their lyrics, most notably Country Joe and the Fish and the Jefferson Airplane. These and other acts, along with folk performers like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, provided inspiration at larger gatherings for peace. Creedence Clearwater Revival (which started in El Cerrito,