Henry Blanke in New York
Different strokes for different folks… We got to live together
Don’t call me nigger, whitey! Don’t call me whitey, nigger!
Sly Stone, 1969
As anyone who has read Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers Of Evil should know, there is a terrible beauty to be found in decay. The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi describes an appreciation for flawed beauty and natural deterioration. And anyone who experienced the shattering of the countercultural dreams of the 1960s understands decay, dissolution and demise.
The utopian Yellow Submarine crashed on the shoals of assassinations, riots and drug addiction. Though we associate the rock music of that period with youthful idealism and optimism, I have always felt that the songs which best express the disillusionment with hippie ideals have a certain tragic poignancy. As late as 1969 at the Woodstock Festival half a million young people grooved to their music oblivious to the impending catastrophes. Just four months later at another free festival at the Altamont Speedway a young black man was stabbed to death only feet from the stage where the Rolling Stones were playing Sympathy For The Devil.
That same year the Stones recorded the apocalyptic Gimme Shelter. After a howling harmonica solo by Jagger and Keith Richards’ razor-blade guitar part, back-up singer Merry Clayton belts out: ‘Rape, murder/ It’s just a shot away/ It’s just a shot away.’ She sings those lines three times with increasing power and elicits a ‘Whoo!’ from Jagger. Not exactly peace, love and understanding. And remember, 1969 was the year of Nixon’s savage bombing of Cambodia. ‘War, children, it’s just a shot away.’
Buffeted by the external events of war, riots and civil strife, many of the Sixties generation saw friends ravaged by drugs. Listen to Neil Young’s The Needle And The Damage Done about the heroin addiction of his bandmate Danny Whitten. ‘I’ve seen the needle and the damage done/ A little part of it in everyone/ But every junkie’s like a settin’ sun.’ And the lyrics of the Beatles’ brutal Helter Skelter were interpreted by Charles Manson as a coded message inspiring the murder of five people. Also, on his first post-Beatles solo record John Lennon sang: ‘The dream is over/ What can I say.’
However, the song which best expresses the implosion of the counterculture is Sly Stone’s Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa. To comprehend the nasty buzz of that song the listener must appreciate the jubilant inclusivity of Sly And The Family Stone’s earlier music. The titles of their string of hits from 1967 to ’69 tell the story: Hot Fun In The Summertime, Dance To The Music, Everybody Is A Star. But not for long.
Just as visions of new ways of living and loving seemed to be born overnight, Sly And The Family Stone exploded on to the scene as the very embodiment of utopian idealism. This was an interracial band of men and women (and Cynthia Robinson and Rose Stone played instruments. They were not just sexy appendages to male talent). They played ebullient music that was democracy and equality in action: often four members would take turns singing bars of a tune’s verses. Their unique blend of soul, funk and hippie psychedelia would have an enormous impact on popular music.
Then in 1971 Sly came out with There’s A Riot Goin’ On and the party was over. On this album he sounded stoned and not in a good way. His voice comes to us in a narcotic haze drifting in and out of the hard funk instrumental mix. Sly is no longer dancing to the music, but is disillusioned and paranoid.
The first side of Riot ends with a track that is four seconds of silence. The album ends with seven minutes of slow, woozy, grinding funk with Sly’s voice insinuating itself in a slurry skulk. ‘Lookin’ at the devil/ Grinnin’ at his gun/ Fingers start shakin’/ I begin to run.’ This is Thank You For Talkin’ To Me, Africa and it is instructive to compare it with its earlier incarnation, Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again. The latter is a euphoric, funky celebration of dancing with a diverse crowd of everyday people while the former is a dirge of dissolution and the decay of hope.
Even bassist Larry Graham’s innovative thumb plucking, so evident in the earlier version of Thank You is now a dull thump. And on the second version the lyric ‘Mama’s so happy / … Papa still singin’/ You can make it if you try’ is belied by Sly’s hazy, narcoticised vocals. It is as if he is exhausted from the effort of pioneering the new. Furthermore, he was under pressure by the Black Panther Party to make his music more militant and replace the band’s two white members with black musicians. As critic Greil Marcus wrote with great understatement, ‘this music was no fun’ and was not easy to listen to.
The Baby Boomers eventually morphed into the Me Generation which eased itself into the tepid bath of self-help and consumerism. Experiments with free love, psychedelic drugs and communal living faded into atomised nuclear families whose parents occasionally sought titillation in wife-swapping and marijuana along with their Martinis.
Nearly 60 years after making some of the most exciting and influential music of his generation, Sly Stone now lives a sober reclusive life in a Los Angeles suburb and by all reports has found a measure of inner peace. After years of coping with the pressures of stardom and a ferocious cocaine habit, he would probably say that it’s better to fade away (after glory) than to burn out.
Henry Blanke has been listening to rock music since he first heard Honky Tonk Women on the radio at the age of 12. His writing has appeared in Refuse Journal, Speculative Non-Buddhism, Religious Socialism and The Tattooed Buddha. He lives in New York where he walks the city in order to experience it.
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