I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [43]
On Riot's biggest hit, "Family Affair," the Rhythm Ace, an ancestor of the synthesizers and sequencers that power contemporary urban music, thrummed electronically under Rose's choruses, Billy Preston's keyboards, Freddie's ghetto guitar, and Sly's seductively languid vocal. Stephen Paley, at that point working for CBS's Clive Davis, notes that his boss was skeptical about "Family Affair" before its release as a single. "[Clive] said, `That sounds like he's stoned. We can't put that out: And I said, `Clive, it's okay, it won't matter, it's a great record."'
It was, and so were most of the album's diverse other tracks. "Africa Talks to You `The Asphalt Jungle"' was a long, loose jam, and "(You Caught Me) Smilin"' had some of the same shag-carpet sexy feel of "Family Affair." Riot also revels in solid soul on "Time," and in a very different and capricious mode, a yodeling tribute to Sly's childhood idols on "Spaced Cowboy." "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa" was a slinky, slowed-down retake of "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." As for the title track, with its noted "0:00" timing (there are no sounds), Sly told Jon Dakss in 1997, "I did it because I felt there should be no riots."
Riot was finally released in November 1971, with a cover that depicted an altered American flag, with suns instead of stars, hanging above the fireplace at 783 Bel Air Road. Also on the cover was a composite photo collage of persons involved with the album and other aspects of Sly's life. But it was the first Family cover with no band members depicted. In a year that also heard the debuts of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, the Who's Who's Next, the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, and Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV, Riot proved as easy for the public to be motivated to purchase, in large amounts, as it was difficult for them to comprehend and categorize. Reviewers, however, seemed quick to project onto the album their own alarm about changing times and a changing Sly, vacillating between criticism and praise for his new modes of expression.
"The album is a testament to two years of deterioration rather than two years of growth," wrote Vince Aletti in Rolling Stone, before allowing, "Once you get into the haze of it, it can be rather beautiful: measured, relaxed, hypnotic." Greil Marcus reviewed the album three times for Creem, admitting that "we're confused by it." He compared Riot to "Van Morrison's Blowin' Your Mind, his first solo album, where Van reached for the grotesque because it seemed the only adequate description of everyday life; Dylan's John Wesley Harding, in that Sly is escaping his own past; and Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, though Sly is working with much greater sophistication and control." Less concerned with postulating indicators of personal and general decline, Greil insisted," The success of this new album is that it is simultaneously deeply personal and inescapably political, innovative and tough in its music, literate and direct in its words, a parody of the past and a strong and unflinching statement about the present."
Suggestive of the power and influence of the entire album is the degree to which the deep, brooding funk of tracks like "Luv N' Haight" and "Brave and Strong" earned homage on Stevie Wonder's work later in the '70s, particularly Innervisions (1973) and Songs in the Key of Life (1976). Sly's keyboard on the "Poet" track is a particularly clear antecedent to "Just Enough for the City" by Stevie, whose social commentary was more explicit than Sly's, though in a similar somber mode. Throughout Stevie's lyrics, there were echoes of Sly's fanciful tricking out of the English language, an aspect of poetic prowess rarely encountered in rock or any other song form.