Higher!

Sly & the Family Stone can be easily found in just about every possible context-- soundtracks, oldies radio, hip-hop sample standards, 60s festival documentaries, lists of essential albums, and the annals of genre-building funk pioneers, for starters. Yet there's something strangely elusive about them, owing not the least to Sly Stone's decades-long battle with his own public presence. The Cliff's Notes version of introductory pop music history tends to focus on only two albums: 1969's Stand!, their breakthrough smash filled with material that they'd work out at Woodstock, and 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On, a masterpiece of spotlight-panic resistance that heralded the decline of their crowdpleasing tendencies and the rise of funk as the decade's most innovative pop-music laboratory. They released three albums beforehand and another two afterwards on Epic, and getting that entire run isn't too difficult; the 2006 box set The Collection has them all remastered and supplemented with bonus B-sides and outtakes. But even a listen to that whole discography, from 1967's A Whole New Thing through 1974's Small Talk, retains a bit of enigma. Where'd they get their funk from, and why couldn't they stay, no matter how many people wanted them to?

Amazingly, Higher! expands on Sly & the Family Stone's history and big-picture role in the development of pop and soul, acting as that rare box set that works as both an introduction for the unaware and a deep excursion into further context for dedicated fans. The major selling point for the physical media edition is an exhaustive run of annotated liner notes, the kind of detail-intensive minutae that satisfies curiosities alongside the usual supplement of rare photos and merchandise detritus. But the musical material alone is an attraction in itself, with 17 unreleased tracks and a good number of underheard ones to go with the big hit singles. Instant-recognition milestones like “I Want to Take You Higher”, “Hot Fun in the Summertime”, and “Everyday People” are released in original single-mix masters (including original mono versions where applicable), strewn amongst obscurities, live cuts, and alternate takes-- from a Francophone “Danse a La Musique” (credited to 'The French Fries') to a major chunk of their rarely heard set at 1970's Isle of Wight Festival. It's a perfectly balanced mix of stuff casual fans know and stuff even obsessives haven't heard.

If you want to get to where Sly & the Family Stone came from, there's some vintage material that reveals origin points from the circa-64 days when the man then calling himself Sly Stewart was cutting dance-craze tracks for Autumn Records. Labelmate Bobby Freeman had a top 10 hit that year with the Sly-penned “C'mon and Swim”, and the first Sly Stewart single has him treading similar thematic water (“I Just Learned How to Swim” b/w “Scat Swim”). But it's also an early indicator that his vision wasn't easy to slot into any specific format-- the A-side's Chuck Berry riffage and Beach Boys harmonies flirt with garage and surf rock, with a horn-drenched backbeat that makes it good playlist lead-in material when you've got the Sonics on deck. The B-side? A little blues, a little jazz, and Sly going off like a guttural Cab Calloway.

The sides he'd record the following year-- “Buttermilk (Pt. 1)”, “Temptation Walk”, and an unreleased collaboration with his brother Freddie called “Dance All Night”-- were a bit more soul-skewing, but they still had that sort of all-purpose beat-music vibe that cares more about dancefloor hip-shaking momentum than any specific musical tradition. The only audience it specifically aimed towards was one that rocked go-go boots and Cuban heels-- everything else could fall into place later. Meanwhile, Stone hammered away at the keyboard and had a blast shaping his voice into something a bit out of control and distinct; he gargles out the titular ad-libs of “Buttermilk” with a comedic rasp that made him sound 50 years older than his early twenties.

That voice was heard on the regular through transistors and stereos in the Bay Area, as his radio DJ gig built up his rapport and performing persona to the point where his frontman status seemed inevitable. It's significant that Stone mixed up rock royalty like Dylan and the Beatles in with the Motown and Atlantic hits he spun during his sets, since he wound up putting his band together in a similar fashion: some rock here, some R&B there, voices of men and women over instrumentation from both black and white artists. With brother Freddie and sister Rose as the literal Family, he brought in a versatile crew to act as the figurative one-- slap-and-pop fuzz-bass motivator Larry Graham, breakbeat Rushmore inductee Greg Errico, the two-person brass powerhouse of Jerry Martini on sax and Cynthia Robinson on trumpet, and the backup singers collectively known as Little Sister.

The material they released in their initial 11-month span-- A Whole New Thing, Dance to the Music and Life-- built up their progressive, funky musicianship, broke it down into more commercial-friendly get-down music, then reconstructed it all over again. All those albums charted modestly or worse, and only the title track of “Dance to the Music” approached anything resembling hit status. They're all excellent albums with plenty of highlights, though; the James Brown-gone-nova defiance of “Underdog”, the tongue-in-cheek creepshow devotion of “Trip to Your Heart”, and the motivational carnival-barker bounce of “Life” all could've and should've been hits before the band hit real chart paydirt in 69. But it's just as telling getting an earful of what was left off their records at the time. There's enough unearthed material from 1967 alone to emphasize all the directions the band were trying out: “Silent Communications” is a slow-building minimalist ballad that proves the players all sounded as amazing in drawn-out isolation as they were collectively, “I Get High on You” sneaks a country twang and nasal, drawling cartoon harmonics into their bottom-heavy thump, and “I Remember” and “Fortune and Fame” are pure gospel-soul vamps where Sly tears out his heart and replaces it with the tonewheel of a Hammond organ.

If there's any truth to the popular notion of upbeat music catching on when it's most needed to soothe our frayed collective nerves, Stand! was the album that 1969 needed. As psychedelia dissolved into roots-rock and heaviness eclipsed mellowness, Sly & the Family Stone's career-making LP emerged as the first all-killer-no-filler pure funk album, their characteristic optimism given a deeper edge of resilient strength and wicked provocation in the face of the previous year's brutal turmoil. “Sing a Simple Song” becomes something that's “all I have to hang on to”; “Everyday People” turns prejudice into a mocking playground chant; “Somebody's Watching You” is the lightest performance with the heaviest sense of dread. Factor in Stand!, the appearance at Woodstock that the album's success allowed, and the string of astounding singles that capped off their year-- “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and the double-whammy of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” b/w “Everybody Is a Star”-- and the idea of Sly & the Family Stone as anything other than an era-defining colossus of all-genre pop is unthinkable.

When their Greatest Hits was released late in 1970, Robert Christgau's A+ review called it “among the greatest rock and roll LPs of all time”; the categorization more surprising in hindsight than the high praise itself. Sly & the Family Stone did a lot to reunite the spirits of the increasingly segregated forms of rock and R&B in the late 60s, but Sly's most breathtaking start-to-finish work in 71-- and all ensuing LPs for the rest of that run on Epic-- fell closer into the funk and soul diaspora, if it could be contained at all. There's plenty that's been said about There's a Riot Goin' On that further words can't do much justice to; it's the sound of one man splintering apart away from the Family he shared a name with and singing like someone dragging a key across the finish of a gleaming new supercar. Given the constant delays and the drastic change in tone, it was commercial suicide-- except it wasn't. Both the LP and lead single “Family Affair” hit #1, the massive departure from crowdpleasing party music to half-tempo introversion pointed towards several imminent musical futures, and the wellspring of an auteur's brush with drug-damaged withdrawal resonated with everyone, sober or high, who saw their standing in the love-hangover 70s as something difficult to fight.

Tellingly, there's little rare material from the 70s on Higher, aside from the aforementioned Isle of Wight recordings, where Stone sounds a bit strained and pressured even as the rest of the band relentlessly caffeinates the early-morning festival crowd. (In his intro to “Stand!”, a deadpan-to-the-point-of-glazed Sly tries to get to the heart of the universal experience by stating that “it hurts if you step on my toe,” appending the least-pained reading of the word “ouch” you could imagine.) The later 70s work, particularly the material from 1973's Fresh and 1974's Small Talk that takes up most of the fourth disc's latter half, attemps to pull back from the fatigue, isolation, and bitterness that made Riot such a bracing work of genius and reconcile it with the more upbeat funk the Family Stone trafficked in at the end of the previous decade. It usually works-- “Time for Livin'”, “If You Want Me to Stay”, and “Skin I'm In” retrofit the cloistered claustrophobia of Riot with a bit more positive energy, and “Loose Booty” is a wholehearted embrace of big, boisterous, platform-soled funk excess that recalled the Family Stone of old.

But the band had already started to splinter noticeably by then-- Graham and Errico were out of the group before Small Talk came out, and by 1975's High on You Sly was releasing albums under his own billing. Cynthia Robinson was the only original member to stick around for the following year's Sly & the Family Stone reboot Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back (note the pronouns), and cuts like the ironically titled “Family Again” didn't do much to help make it sound like just another second-rate funk record after a long catalogue with no shortage of the primo stuff. A couple mid-decade vault findings show glimpses of decent songcraft-- the uptempo organ-driven “Hoboken” makes Sly's complete inability to work well within the confines of disco that much more inexplicable, and “High” is a valiant stab at hitching a ride on the Mothership six years before he dropped in on Funkadelic's The Electric Spanking of War Babies. But it's more a coda of a career's prime than the beginning of another phase.

It's funny, though-- as a box set, Higher really does reinforce how creatively rich a band Sly & the Family Stone were, while making it seem almost unbelievable that their peak only lasted seven years and seven albums. They feel a lot more enduring than that across the generations, whether or not you factor in their elder-statesman canonization and their status as a hip-hop sample goldmine. To modern ears, they're a better representative of their time than a lot of their omnipresent boomer-rock peers, largely because they're so much more complicated and caught up in working out the contradictions and dilemmas of their condition. They were sincere, but they were funny about it rather than hopelessly doe-eyed and naïve. They were catchy and pop-friendly, but capable of tendon-straining heaviness and unprecedented experimentation. They were idealistic about the potential to put all the bullshit aside, yet realistic enough to know what to do when that bullshit wasn't so easy to ignore.