Dance to the Music, Sly and the Family Stone (1968)

Yesterday I couldn't have told you how I could possibly link guitar god Richard Thompson, who I saw in concert last night for the first time, and Sly & the Family Stone, but it turns out there's a perfectly legitimate linkage, and I'm about to make it.

The advent of Dance To the Music changed the game for my generation's music scene. Fusing psychedelia, pop and soul into a new genre characterized by a front-and-center rhythm section and high-energy vocal arrangements, funk music had arrived in the mainstream and there was no turning back.

Certainly it was impossible to remain in any kind of emotional funk when that song's horns blared and the beat pulsed. I was reminded of this just last week when it appeared on the playlist for a group of women who get together to shake their groove thing once a month at a local dance studio. (Thanks, DJ Dolli!)

Oddly, the group was reportedly never all that enthralled with Dance. When their debut album A Whole New Thing failed to capture the public's imagination, their producers urged Sly to orient their material more commercially. I suppose feeling somewhat railroaded into fitting into some sort of mold, the song ended up completely self-referential, but it doesn't change the fact that it was an extravaganza of sounds by a rainbow coalition of artists who, together, shook up the music industry, captivated young audiences and influenced other artists for years to come. (Just months later, Norman Whitfield used the success of Sly's Family - some of whom were actually family - as the inspiration for Cloud Nine, which began a run of psychedelic soul hits that extended the Temptations' performing life for years.)

Family Stone bassist Larry Graham - who began his career at 13 when he was brought onstage at the Fillmore West with Ike and Tina Turner to play Clarence Gatemouth Brown’s Okie Dokie Stomp - is credited with originating the slap bass form of playing, a gymnastic sort of fingerwork that creates a percussive groove that sounds like, well, percussion. To use his words, he "would thump the strings with my thumb to make up for the bass drum, and pluck the strings with my fingers to make up for the backbeat snare drum. It made sense to me because I had been a drummer in the school band."

The technique, which he called 'thumpin' and pluckin', became the defining underpinning of all funk music, and was epitomized in their later hit, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). Hearing it is one thing - seeing it done is another.

Which brings me to Richard Thompson (a member, during the late '60s, of the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention). This is a guy whose insane virtuosity with his instrument is suggestive of one man playing multiple guitars at once - at least you'd think so if you closed your eyes. When you open them, you actually have no idea what it is he's really doing. Last night, I now realize, he definitely had a slap bass beat going on in several songs. Using a pick on low strings and fingerpicking on high strings as is his signature technique, Thompson had my jaw dropping as he effortlessly created what could only be described as output with funk-like overtones.

Hard to believe, but later this summer will be the 40th anniversary of Sly and the Family Stone's performance of I Want To Take You Higher at Woodstock. If you haven't seen it in awhile, fire it up. No matter how you do it, finding your inner funkster is time well spent. Sly, Larry and the rest of the Family taught us how.

Lookin' for a Love, Bobby Womack (1974)

I'm lookin' here and there ... I'm searchin' everywhere ... and I'm lookin' ... I'm lookin' ... I'm lookin' ... I'm lookin' ...

I have been trying valiantly to identify one song from 1974 - any song - that I could say I really liked. Something was in the water that year and nothing at all from the playlists looks good to me.

I had only to look locally - Bobby Womack's interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air a week ago reminded me of the seductive gospelesque rhythms and vocals of Lookin' for A Love which, as luck would have it, was released in 1974! The Womack family was from Cleveland and caught the eye of Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers when the brothers were singing gospel in church under the watchful eye of their father.

Lookin' for a Love was originally released in 1962 by the brothers, who by that time were named the Valentinos, recording for Cooke's label and touring with James Brown. (The song was also recorded and released by the J Geils Band before Womack re-released it in 1974, a version completely devoid of soul.)

When Womack was 15, he and his sister-in-law Shirley wrote and the Valentinos recorded It's All Over Now, later to be covered by the Rolling Stones in a much more well known version that launched their career. In his interview with Gross, he makes no secret of his disdain for the fact that, in those days, it generally took white recording artists to ignite the creative output of black artists as far as the commercial marketplace was concerned.

So when informed that the Stones were interested in recording the song, having heard an advance copy, he described his reaction: they should "get their own song." He came to be convinced, by Cooke himself, that allowing the cover to go forward - and beat his version to the charts - would be a good career move from a royalty perspective. He still emphasizes in the interview, however, that "Mick Jagger can't out-sing me!". Tell it, Bobby!

The left-handed Womack's many talents include playing guitar upside down, and the wah-wah line in Sly & the Family Stone's It's A Family Affair is his. I realize that I don't know as much about this multi-talented artist as I should; the fact that Cooke hand-picked him to play guitar in his band and for all intents and purposes made Womack his protege until his violent death in 1964 was all new to me. I'm going to check out the recent CD compilation, The Best of Bobby Womack: The Soul Years, to see what I've missed.