Stand!

Certain Songs #2258: Sly & The Family Stone – “Somebody’s Watching You”

January 5, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Stand!
Year: 1969

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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.

Certain Songs #2257: Sly & The Family Stone – “I Want To Take You Higher”

January 4, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Stand!
Year: 1969

. . .

And so the two singles that preceded Stand! had the same format: message song on the A-side; party banger on the b-side. Of course, the outcomes were totally different: the message song “Everyday People” became a standard while topping the charts, clearly overshadowing its party banger b-side, “Sing A Simple Song,” whereas the message song “Stand!” got its ass whomped by the party banger “I Want To Take You Higher.”

Which is hardly fair to “Stand!” of course, but even in its truncated 2:56 single version, “I Wanna Take You Higher” is irresistible. And that version is an absolute patch on the fully-crazed version that not only sits on Stand! but also leads off 1970’s fabulous Greatest Hits album.

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

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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.