‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’: the Sly Stone epic that doesn’t actually exist
Sly Stone remains one of the most elusive people in music. He is a man so surrounded by mystery that many people assume he has passed away rather than lying low. Among the hits are also a lot of experimentation, addiction, and fallouts with band members. Despite the books and countless interviews with those close to him, his story is difficult to pin down. Working out his psyche and mindset throughout his career is nearly impossible.
Questlove is experiencing this situation as he is currently putting together a Sly Stone documentary and struggling to finalise everything. The issue is he wants to protrude past the celebrity that surrounds him and get into the more human aspects of him.
“Sly’s story is everybody’s story,” he said, “He is the first Black celebrity of the post-civil rights era. His success was different from Chuck Berry’s or Ray Charles’s, the acts that couldn’t stay in the hotels or eat in the restaurants where they played. The question is: what happens when you get everything you want?”
He continues, highlighting why his story is so difficult to wrap your head around, “It’s a hard story to tell. I want to get rid of the troubled drug-addict genius. We never ask ourselves, ‘Why do we self-soothe on cocaine? Why is this person a sex addict? Why does this person get drunk a lot?’ There’s a lot to unpack there, especially for Black artists.”
We don’t know the answers to why Sly Stone acted like he did; we only know the product of his actions. In 1970, Sly was taking a lot of drugs and not himself for a large portion of the year, to the point that he stopped attending gigs, became erratic and started driving a wedge between himself and the band.
Thanks to this wedge, he went on to make one of the band’s most polarising records of all time. In response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On?, Sly Stone wrote There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which was a much more brooding and low-sounding record. Sly made the majority of the album himself, and while many people didn’t like it because it was far removed from what they had expected from the band, others thought it was a masterpiece.
Cynthia Robinson, one of the band’s founding members, said she liked the album. “A lot of people consider Riot a dark album,” she said, “But it wasn’t. It just reflected what was going on at the time. Sly always tried to write something positive.”
While there are a lot of questions surrounding the album and how well it fits into The Family Stone’s catalogue, one of the most perplexing songs on the record is the titular track. The song ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ is listed on the record’s tracklist but doesn’t exist as a piece of music. There is one second of silence that makes up the song before the next one is played.
When asked about the song, Sly Stone was blunt in his response. He justified the silence as a call for peace, simply concluding, “I did it because I felt there should be no riots”.
