Album: Stand!
Year: 1969
. . .
Because Sly Stone already had a surfeit of hit singles either written or on the horizon, a song as great as “Somebody’s Watching You” got relegated to “deep cut” status, sandwiched between “I Want To Take You Higher” and “Sing A Simple Song” on side one of Stand! (Side two would start out with “Everyday People” but be dominated by the 13:46 blues fuckjam “Sex Machine,” which is fun, but also more of a nod to the zeitgeist than the rest of of the record.)
Anyways, “Somebody’s Watching You” starts of with a quick burst of Freddie Stone guitar, and then almost instantly zips into the first verse, featuring some lovely harmonies by Sly and Rose Stone (I think), alternating lines with Larry Graham and Freddie Stone (I think) while Freddie plays funk rhythm licks. The point being that the verses almost play out as a call-and-response, even though they’re all addressing the same person.
Pretty, pretty, pretty as a picture
Witty, witty, witty as you can be
Blind ’cause your eyes see only glitter
Closed to the things that make you free
Ever stop to think about a downfall?
Happens at the end of every line
Just when you think you’ve pulled a fast one
Happens to the foolish all the time
I’m not sure who Sly is addressing here, but it could almost be himself, especially when they all sing the chorus.
Somebody’s watching you
Somebody’s watching you
Somebody’s watching you
Somebody’s watching you
Naturally, there’s all sorts of great crazy detail in the lyric: sticking the guitar and bass in one speaker and the drums and horns in the other is prime late 60s, but it also means that every time you listen hard, you discover some cool new detail, like how the horns play around with the melody, or Sly’s organ burbling up and down in the mix, or how all of the lovely harmonies totally obscure the dark words.
Live it up today if you want to
Live it down tomorrow afternoon
Sunday school don’t make you cool forever
Neither does the silver of your spoon
The nicer the nice, the higher the price
This is what you pay for what you need
The higher the price, the nicer the nice
Jealous people like to see you bleed
In the end, the vocalists all sing the title over and over and over in a myriad of different ways — harmonizing and wailing and calling and responding — as Sly’s organ whirrs and the horns blast over a song that starts and stops and stops and starts.
At the time, “Somebody’s Watching You” probably seemed like a weird little diversion, a weird little paranoid moment in the middle of a mostly up and positive album. But now it seems like a precursor of the coke-fueled paranoia that dominated There’s A Riot Going On — yeah, I know, I say that as if it’s a bad thing — though it doesn’t really sound like that record. But we’ll talk about Riot soon enough, after we discuss the utter monster singles which preceded it.
“Somebody’s Watching You”
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