Day 80: Sly & The Family Stone – Stand!
Today is a day when I’ll be engaging in some light getting together of the shit before my long weekend away. How I’ll manage to do my daily albums while I’m on holiday, I don’t know yet, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Starting on Friday, they might just be a little bit short and possibly slightly wine-soaked, but if I’m going to do this for 365 days, surely I’m allowed a few stinkers here and there, surely.
Album cover courtesy of Epic Records
I needed something that’s high-energy and interesting to see me through the necessary admin that I need to do in order to go have fun, so I went for Stand! by Sly & The Family Stone.
The band was formed in San Francisco in 1966 by singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone with his siblings Freddie and Rose Stone, as well as Cynthia Robinson, Greg Errico, Jerry Martini and Larry Graham. They became a pioneering band both socially and musically, as they were among the first mainstream bands that had both black and white artists with men and women together, and they were a major influence in both funk and psychedelic soul, largely because of the genius of Sly Stone.
Stand! was released in 1969, and it was written, arranged and produced by Sly Stone. It features rock, soul and psychedelic funk songs with political and socially conscious lyrics professing the flower power ethos of peace, love and unity. It’s joyful but defiant, not filled with utopian waffling but more something that hits you in the face with its message: that things can and should be good in the world so you should stand up for what you believe in.
By their next album, Stone had lost some of his optimism. The album There's a Riot Goin' On was named as a response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and it features Stone coming to terms with his disillusionment with ‘60s counterculture, the backslide of the civil rights movement and the political atmosphere that was prevailing in America.
Against that backdrop, you want to sink in and enjoy the optimism of Stand! even more. It’s a perfect time capsule to the spirit of brotherly love and unity that some people once had, which couldn’t really be further from where we are today. Listening to something like “Everyday People” from a 2025 lens makes me think that saying something like that today would get you put on a watchlist. It just seems so distant to where we are today. But if there was a booming counterculture centred around ideas like that once, it means it could happen again.
It’s an uplifting record, like a hug in auditory form. I love the instrumental track “Sex Machine”, I feel like I could listen to it all day without getting bored. Bit of a masterpiece of funk, rock and soul, really. 9.5/10 — it’s a good record to have in your back pocket for when the world is making you sad. It almost deserves a 10 just for making the words “And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby” sound cool.