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By Root 313 0

"I later found out that they had a deal going between the promoter and the guy that was taking me to the gig. So I would put up the $25,000 or the $50,000. The guy with me would help me be late, and I didn't realize that was what was going on until later. Then they'd split the money.... I wasn't so focused after a while." Whatever the setup, Sly was five hours late for a show in Washington, D.C., causing a fan melee outside the venue of Constitution Hall in early 1970. He ducked out of five concerts in succession a year later, his excuse, quoted in Rolling Stone, being simply, "Sometimes you don't feel your soul at seven-thirty."

There was a long wait also for Sly and the band's next recorded product, and CBS officials were getting a little nervous. "I'd be fibbing if I said I wasn't somewhat concerned," says Epic's Al DeMarino, "but [Sly's] back catalog was selling constantly, and there was promoter interest and press interest. I had great confidence that he could do it." David Kapralik's confidence was waning. "I had no influence on what Sly was doing," he told Mojo. "I was managing the unmanageable.... His two personas-the shy, innocent poet Sylvester Stewart and the streetwise character he'd invented, Sly Stone-were torn apart. He numbed himself with cocaine." Clive Davis, who headed Epic, was of two minds. "At some point, I started getting concerned about stories I heard about Sly's personal habits," he recalled for Vanity Fair. "But every time I met with him, he was on top of his game. I was somewhat innocent of the lifestyle going on around me, whether it was him or Janis Joplin."

For those fans financially able to partake of pills and powders, harder drugs might provide the illusion of sharing, at least for a while, the high life of performers. Whatever uppers or downers may have been shared by the fans at Madison Square Garden in September 1971, the effect was not lost on Don Heckman, reviewing for The New York Times. "The sheer, exuberant joy that I've seen flowing out of the audiences at Sly's past concerts seems to have been replaced by an almost desperate self-conditioning," he wrote, "a sheer determination that dancing up and down, singing `higher, higher, higher,' waving, whistling, and shouting will somehow revive the old magic. But it isn't working, because the Family Stone sounds as though it is just going through the motions.... Could it be that the milk and honey have been flowing too freely in the gardens of the gods?"

There's a Riot Goin' On took form not in any godly garden, but in the Record Plant, a new state-of-the-art recording studio in Northern California, and at what Jerry Martini described as "a stately mansion," at 783 Bel Air Road, near Beverly Hills. Formerly the home of '30s screen sweetheart Jeannette MacDonald, it bore evidence of its more recent occupants, John and Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas and Papas, a'60s folk-rock group. There was a home recording studio, installed by John Phillips, a small buffet of drugs, and a general mess. Sly had connected with the property, which he rented for a reputed $12,000 a month, through Terry Melcher, who was the son of Doris Day and a well-connected party animal favored by the young entertainers of the late '60s and early '70s, among them John and Michelle, the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, and actress Candice Bergen. Terry had established success as producer of his mother's television show and of records for Columbia, but he also embodied the spendthrift wealth and casual debauchery of young Hollywood. Dennis Wilson had introduced Terry to ex-convict and would-be mass murderer Charles Manson, in hopes of furthering the latter's songwriting aspirations.

Recording at 783 Bel Air Road commenced in the autumn of 1970. The resulting music lacked the live, spacious ambience of the whole band playing together in real time, so much a part of the appeal of earlier albums. Instead, the tracks that would be used on Riot favored a compressed, claustrophobic density, in part due to endless overdubs that actually threatened to wear out the magnetic oxide