I'm not sure what any of that has to do with cultural impact. You're mostly describing musical influence. As for the "mixed racial" stuff, the Jimi Hendrix Experience did that before Sly & the Family Stone.

Let's not forget that Sly & The Family Stone's shift to funk signalled the symbolic end of the 60's hippy ideal. Every decade seems to have its symbolic end somehow - Buddy Holly dying, Presley in the Army, Little Richard giving up rock, Chuck Berry hauled off to jail and Jerry Lee Lewis blacklisted and the payola scandals all seeming to end the 50's. The 60's had deaths too - Hendrix, Joplin, Redding - plus the Beatles breaking up, Ross leaving the Supremes,. But the IMAGE of the 60's, particularly the late-60's, which has come to define the entire decade to a lot of people, that idyllic world where race isn't supposed to matter, gender isn't supposed to matter, everyone living in harmony, had two symbolic endings. The headline grabbing one was the Stones at Altamont, clearly. The musical one was Sly abandoning his early style (Hot Fun In The Sumemrtime almost seems like an archaic fading snapshot of the era, like a sendup of it almost) and then coming out with Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin, Don't Call Me Nigger Whitey and Family Affair where it was obvious the peace, love and flowers had turned nasty, bitter, hostile and suspicious.

And how did the 70's rock scene turn out? With segregated "formatted" radio, audiences splitting on racial, gender and stylistic lines, cynical and aggressive styles of music coming to the forefront and the drug culture going from the psychedelic mind-expanding possibilities to paranoia and self-indulgence. All eerily presaged by Sly.

That seems like opinion, to me, and one I've never heard before. It's usually Altamont given the "credit" for that, in my experience.



I think Sly was reflecting the times, not shaping them. Cultural impact is shaping the times, not merely holding up a mirror to them.

Lots. Hendrix band was niche oriented...the peace & love crowd. Sly opened up the mixed race thing to a much wider mainstream audience. I remember my friend Paul Williams of The Temptations advising me to find white guys to play withy because the mixed race group was a dead end street. Also...how about the concept of female band members. I can't recall many, if any female horn players back then like Cynthia on the tgrumpet. Sly shook up a whole lot of things.

Niche?



Are you sure?



Isn't he right? How many mixed race groups have there been in the wake of the Jimi Hendrix Experience? I can think of a few. But not many.

Quite anicdotal. How many records did THAT band sell...how many arenas did they sell out, and who did they influence?

"Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" came out FOUR MONTHS BEFORE "Hot Fun In The Summertime."

Yes, "Cloud Nine" came out long before Sly ever did that type of thing. To give him credit for the Temps changing style is ludicrous.

Explain "that type of thing" musically, Bruce. Because that type of thing - tag-team vocals, the way the arrangement falls in - were all done first by Sly before "Cloud Nine". "Dance To The Music" came out almost a year before. Cloud Nine was recorded in October, '68, right after the Life album came out in September with such songs as Dynamite, Into My Own Thing and Love City on it, all musical templates for Cloud Nine. I know you're not into albums, but you'd have to be deaf not to hear the influence of it.

Oh, not to mention Norman Whitfield ACKNOWLEDGED Sly's influence for the Tempts new sound! Otis Williams introduced Whitfield to the Sly & The Family Stone sound first, Whitfield apparently claimed he wasn't impressed, but once Sly hit with Dance To The Music he changed his mind and he and Kenny Gamble listened incessantly to Sly that entire summer of '68 as Gamble convinced Whitfield to adapt that style to his work with the Tempts. This has been fairly well documented in numerous places, including the Temptations boxed set.

Bo Diddley? Are you kidding?

I'm referring to socially conscious angry songs like "Cloud Nine" and "Runaway Child," as opposed to love songs like "You're My Everything" and "All I Need," etc......The Temps songs were all about women and love until "Cloud Nine."

I think you're taking some random writing from the box set and jumping to conclusions. Here's what it says:

Edwards spent the summer breaking in. Sly and the family Stone was breaking through. Cops were breaking heads. A conversation with Kenny Gamble inspired Otis to pitch Witfield on the new vibe. "Aah, man, I don't want to get in on that craziness." But he must have checked it out. Because we came of the road and he was cutting "Cloud Nine."

So, they don't even know if Whitfield checked out anything at all. Like I've said, MOST of your knowledge comes from what you've read in liner notes and books, and you seem at times to not only take this stuff as gospel, but to even take it further than it is written and add your own conclusions. Conclusions which you speak of authorotatively as if they are absolute facts.

All it says is "Sly and the family Stone" was breaking through. It was just a time reference, just like "Cops were breaking heads."

"Cloud Nine" was recorded on Oct 1, 1968. It would have have been wriiten and rehearsed and everything for a while before that. The "Life" album was not on the charts until December. They would have had to have gotten the album immediately and written "Cloud Nine" right away if you were correct about it being released in September.

But you are not. The album was released in July, maybe even late June. Here's a review in Billboard, July 13, 1968.

http://books.google.com/books?id=xgoEAA ... 97&f=false

Well this is where it gets tricky.
But you can hear Sabbath sewing the seeds for thrash metal as early as the Master Of Reality album. They were indeed "sludgy", as you say, but they were already hinting at possibilities of faster metal with things like Black Sabbath (the ending), Into The Void (the middle), Under The Sun, Symptom Of The Univese, etc. Obviously Motorhead and Priest (among others) took it to the next level, but it's not like they created the concept of speed metal out of thin air.

I said "INCLUDING" the boxed set as merely one reference that alludes to it. MOJO magazine did a Norman Whitfield article years back in which Otis Williams, the last surviving original Temptation, talks about it as well (you can also find many of the same quotes on the internet if you choose). The basic gist of it all is that Sly breaks through with Dance To The Music and suddenly there's a new sound to be experimented with by others. Whitfield builds directly off that template. Remember, most influence taken by TALENTED artists/writers/producers such as Whitfield are not simply direct rip-offs of something, it's more the texture and the feel of things that influences their own approach. Whitfield used the wah-wah guitar on Cloud Nine to give it a different sonic fingerprint than much of Sly's stuff, so maybe to you that difference alone is enough to not let you hear it, but listen to the overall arrangements, the breaks, the utilizing the vocals of all five members darting in and out... the whole concept of it, obviously radically different than The Tempts doing My Girl or Beauty's Only Skin Deep, comes from the Sly Stone handbook. Then even if Whitfield and others hadn't verbally acknowledged it the timing of it is too obvious to miss.

The Sly-Tempts pyschedelic soul connection is very well-known throughout music, I never imagined this would be something you wouldn't be aware of.