Sly & The Family Stone had a really big year in 1969. Their fourth album Stand! is now considered a landmark for the band. It was a full on effort featuring hugely popular hits such as “Everyday People”,”Sing A Simple Song” and the title song. Up until that time,funk was relatively new as a genre (had been a musicians term for decades beforehand),and was generally a singles medium. This new Sly album showcased funk as an album medium-with many hard grooving and melodic songs with equally popular potential. Being so important to funk as he is,it’s amazing I’ve personally never covered Sly on Andresmusictalk so far.
Sylvester Stewart was an artist whom I know about long before knowing his name,or the name of his band. It started at 11 years old when recording songs off the radio during a time of schoolwork induced insomnia. That was when I first heard “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”. At the time,I personally had no idea what I hearing was funk. And despite having heard a lot of it before had didn’t even know what funk was. The song itself was released in December 1969 as a double A side single to “Everybody Is A Star”. Sly Stone was getting ready to start work on what would become There’s A Riot Goin’ On at the time. So this gave him a placeholder to again change the face of funk during the wait.
On the intro,Greg Errico’s peddling hit hat drumming plays second to Larry Graham’s bass line,which accompanies Freddie Stones James Brown like rhythm guitar throughout the song. Here he pulled the strings away from the fingerboard for a deep,round tone. This became known as slap bass. It’ more the rhythmic foundation for this song than Errico’s drums as it’s mixed up higher. As the collective vocals of the group come in to sing the refrains,Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini’s horn lines play call and response to Larry’s bass and the vocals. They do so on the refrain by wiggling in pitch,and on the choruses in full on fanfare. These horns swell to the thickness of the bass line as the song fades out.
Lyrically speaking,this song is somewhat more weary than is usually associated with Sly’s 60’s output. He references his past hits and some of the paranoia that comes with big time show business. The title even seems to imply a whole phase of the Family Stone’s creativity has come to an end. The melody also showcases funk’s blues base more than the gospel/pop melodies of the bands previous hits. It’s Larry’s slap bass that’s the star of the show here. While this technique had already been used in rockabilly,the level of rhythmic thumping on this song allowed for the instrumental vocabulary of funk to be forever altered. As such this wound up being Sly’s final funk innovation of the 1960’s.
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