Jim Connelly

Certain Songs #2256: Sly & The Family Stone – “Stand!”

January 3, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Stand!
Year: 1969

. . .

Sly & The Family Stone’s follow-up single to “Everyday People” was also the title track to the first of their indisputably great albums, 1969’s Stand! And while it wasn’t quite as epochal, it was still a pretty fucking great way to open an album, and unlike a lot of their singles, it was mostly Sly doing the lead vocals and everybody else doing the backing vocals.

Everybody else, in this case, included the usual suspects of Freddie Stone, Rose Stone and Larry Graham, but also the vocal trio Little Sister, who consisted of Sly’s little sister Vet Stone plus Mary McCreary & Elva Mouton.

Certain Songs #2255: Sly & The Family Stone – “Sing A Simple Song”

January 2, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Stand!
Year: 1968

. . .

While the monster smash single “Everyday People” eventually made it to 1969’s titanic Stand! album, it was really kind of an outlier on an album that felt like Sly was trying to take on James Brown and Jimi Hendrix at the same time.

So, much closer to the prevailing ethos of Stand! was “Everyday People’s” b-side, “Sing A Simple Song,” which started off with some noisy, bluesy guitar until either Cynthia Robinson shouts the title, and they instantly slip into some hardcore funk led by Freddie Stone’s tough as nails guitar lick, counterpointed by the horns of Robinson and Jerry Martini’s.

Certain Songs #2254: Sly & The Family Stone – “Everyday People”

December 29, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Stand!
Year: 1968

. . .

One thing that the multi-instrumentalist, flash-dressing, master-songwriter, conceptualist-bandleader Sly Stone was not: everyday people. Not only was he about to have one of the greatest — and weirdest — two-album runs in music history, flanked by three #1 singles (and a #2), when he got married, it was at Madison Square Garden in front of 21,000 people. Of course, that was six years later, by which time the illusion of his everydayness was long shattered.

But not in 1968. As the tumultuous 1968 — look it up — crashed into 1969, “Everyday People” probably felt like an optimistic up in the same way that watching Apollo 8 circle the Moon did. That’s a guess, of course, because I was six, and don’t have any specific memories of “Everyday People” like I do of Apollo 8, though on the other hand, it’s not like I remember a time before this song was on the radio, either.

Certain Songs #2253: Sly & The Family Stone – “Life”

December 28, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Life
Year: 1968

. . .

One thing that Sly Stone was never afraid to do was to steal from himself and be totally meta about doing so. And so “Dance to the Music” the song was followed up with Dance to The Music the album in early 1968, which featured a proto-version of “Higher” and an extended 12-minute version of “Dance to The Music.”

On the singles front, the next thing they issued was “Life,” in June 1968. Opening with a carnivalesque organ, joyous horns and the Family Stone making like barkers trying to entice you into a tent, “Life” wasn’t as much of a party as “Dance to the Music,” but it also wasn’t not as much of a party as “Dance to The Music.”

Just a different kind of party that’s all.

Certain Songs #2252: Sly & The Family Stone – “Dance to The Music”

December 27, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Dance to The Music
Year: 1967

. . .

Blazing through the late sixties like an unexpected comet, Sly & The Family Stone filled the skies with incendiary live performances, a couple of classic studio albums, and some of the greatest singles ever recorded — many of which fill one of top five greatest hits albums ever released anywhere.

Sly & The Family Stone was the brainchild of a Texas-born, Bay Area-raised DJ who was born as Sylvester Stewart but went by the stage name Sly Stone. Sly had the idea of a multi-gender, multi-racial band that was — as their debut album proclaimed — a whole new thing. Said whole new thing didn’t quite click, as even the best tracks — like the stop-start soul shouter single “Underdog” — didn’t quite add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Certain Songs #2251: Slobberbone – “Sweetness, That’s Your Cue”

December 22, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Slippage
Year: 2002

. . .

Not really sure how Slobberbone came across my radar, though I’m guessing that Drive-by Truckers might have had something to do with it, as Patterson Hood sang on “Lazy Guy” from their previous album, Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today. It’s also possible that I discovered that their A&R guy was Pete Jesperson, the founder of the immortal Twin/Tone records.

Certain Songs #2250: Sloan – “I Was Wrong”

December 21, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Action Pact
Year: 2003

. . .

Back in 1993, because of some decent reviews, I went out and bought Sloan’s debut album, Smeared, and probably because of the production values, was underwhelmed.

And so I promptly ignored them for probably 10, maybe 15 years, by which time they’d built up a pretty strong discography of power-pop albums. This is what happens sometimes, kids: you get a bad impression of a really good band, and it’s only much later you realize just how wrong you were.

Certain Songs #2249: Slim Dunlap – “Rockin’ Here Tonight”

December 20, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Old New Me
Year: 1993

. . .

The other thing that the Replacements had in common with the Beatles (besides the Beatles stealing an album title from them) is that shortly after their breakup, Paul, Tommy, Slim and Chris all released solo albums. Which, looking back, is kinda weird, give that much of the Replacements reputation at the time rested on the songwriting of Paul Westerberg. That said, each of the solo albums contained individual tracks good enough that you could imagine a killer Replacements album being assembled from them.

Which I did, of course. Back when I wrote about Paul Westerberg’s “Knockin’ On Mine,” I came up with World Class Fad, the final Replacements album, featuring songs from all four of them, one of the key ones being Slim Dunlap’s “Rockin’ Here Tonight.”

Certain Songs #2248: Sleater-Kinney – “No Cities To Love”

December 19, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: No Cities To Love
Year: 2015

. . .

Of course, just because Sleater-Kinney broke up doesn’t mean that the individual members dropped out of the world. Janet Weiss joined Stephen Malkmus’ band The Jicks, and played on a couple of their albums in the 2000s, Corin Tucker put out a couple of solo albums, and of course Carrie Brownstein re-teamed with Weiss in the one-off Wild Flag project, and almost immediately afterwards became an indie TV star.

That was, of course, in the show Portlandia, which she co-created with former SNL cast member, Fred Armisen, and ran for 77 episodes over eight seasons on IFC, and far more people saw her in it than ever bought a single Sleater-Kinney album. For my part, while I only watched the first couple of seasons, I remember her as a low-key, reliably funny presence, especially against Armisen’s ongoing over-the-topness.

Certain Songs #2247: Sleater-Kinney – “Modern Girl”

December 18, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Woods
Year: 2005

. . .

Coming a whopping three full years after One Beat, Sleater-Kinney’s 2005 album, The Woods reflected the inevitable slowing down that happens with any band as it enters its second decade and making music becomes not the only passion, but one of many.

However, “slowing down” doesn’t always mean retreating to your past, and The Woods was probably the most experimental Sleater-Kinney album to date, as they tried out blown-up song structures (“What’s Mine is Yours”), 11-minute big rock extravaganzas (“Let’s Call It Love”), and straightforward indie (“Jumpers.”)