At the start of the 1970s, Sly Stone and the members of the Family moved to Los Angeles. Flowers, weed and peace gave way to cocaine, guns and a hell-raising spirit. So long, smiles and spangles. Hello stress and the highway to hell! And welcome to the purgatorial There’s A Riot Goin' On. Funk, like all the entertainment of the period, was bound to find itself influenced by the era’s ever-greater consumption of drugs of all kinds. A masterpiece like There’s A Riot Goin' On is a prime example of a difficult birth. In Spring 1970, Sly Stone moved into a vast house in Coldwater Canyon, LA, and took offices for his Stone Flower Productions on Vine Street. For $12,000 a month, John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas rented him out a huge villa at 783 Bel Air Road. Coke on tap, concert cancellations by the boatload, his record label Epic losing patience and waiting on an increasingly improbable-looking new record... In the midst of all this, Sly, the prophet of funk, sank into a mire. Rumour had it that his voice had given out. He would spend whole days locked alone in his new villa, playing interminable basslines. Larry Graham was coming under heavy fire - after all, he hadn't made the move to Bel Air, preferring to stay in the East Bay city of Oakland.
Meanwhile, Sly Stone was stewing in a marinade of bad ideas and hard drugs, weaving around the graveyards of dead bottles that covered the floors of his bunker on Bel Air Road. One night, determined to recover his unpaid rent, Phillips turned up with a squad of Chicanos armed to the teeth and a pack of sharp-fanged dogs. In a state of deepening paranoia, Sly started going everywhere with one Hamp "Bubba" Banks, a shadowy ex-con that Sly took on as his bodyguard.
There’s A Riot Goin' On was recorded on a 16-track console that was set up on the first floor of the mansion. The musicians lined up. The groupies (selected by Bubba) joined the queue too. Sly hid. The Family was now a Family in name only. Their leader started by pushing away Larry, their five-star bassist and baritone-voiced charmer. He would still record all his parts for Riot, but as separate tracks to be overdubbed, without being present with the rest of the group in Bel Air. Worse, Sly wiped some of Larry's parts from the tapes and played bass himself on tracks like You Caught Me Smilin’. Drummer Greg Errico suffered the same fate: Sly himself takes over the Rhythm King drum machine for Family Affair. To cut a long story short, Errico was the first to jump ship. The madness of Riot is the work of a doubtful Sly. A Sly who appeared very minimalist, making extensive use of overdubbing. For Thank You For Talking To Me Africa, Sly, now unable to sing, slowed down the tape to record himself murmuring incomprehensibly. Dug in, deep in his bunker, he entertained guests like Bobby Womack, who described the apocalyptic scene: a Family keyed up on coke, while girls, buzzed themselves, who were hanging around for Sly Stone's amusement, circled around overhead.
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