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.
Just as “Dance to The Music” was a dance song about how much fun it is to dance to Sly & The Family Stone, “Sing a Simple Song” is a simple song about how much fun it was to sing a simple song with Sly & The Family Stone.
And so Rose Stone sings “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”; Freddie Stone is “talkin, talkin’ talkin’” in his sleep; Larry Graham is “walkin, walkin, walkin’ in the street” all of which leads to Sly singing the verses:
Time is passin’, I grow older, things are happening fast
All I have to hold on to is a simple song at last
Let me hear you say…
After which they all sing the hook, a glorious refrain of “Yaaaaaaaaaaaa / Ya-ya yaa ya” which sticks dead in your craw, as does Robinson’s next exhortation:
Sing a simple song
Try a little do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do
Which is, of course, what Larry Graham does as drummer Greg Errico builds over his cool walkin’ walkin’ walkin’ bass. And speaking of Errico, there’s a breakdown about halfway through that is basically just him and the horn section which is probably the main reason that “Sing A Simple Song” has been sampled an insane 462 times.
The last minute of “Sing A Simple Song” is where all hell breaks loose, as they all improvise over the ever-present “Yaaaaaaaaa / Yah-ya yaaa ya” hook, ending with another cool production trick where all of the music just drops out and you hear the vocals in all of their abandon.
“Sing a Simple Song” is so good, it easily could have been its own single; but instead, as the flipside of the even more immortal “Everyday People,” it showed just how much chewy goodness Sly & The Family Stone could pack into a single 45.
“Sing a Simple Song”
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