Sly Stone Knew Why America Rioted Better Than Anyone

Fifty-five summers ago, a riot broke out in Chicago’s Grant Park, where Sly and the Family Stone was booked to play a concert. Sly was on en route, but the crowd, fearing that the erratic rock star wouldn’t appear, started throwing bottles and rocks onstage. This, in turn, provoked police to wade into the crowd, beating people with nightsticks. As the incensed crowd spilled out across the park, windows were smashed, and cars were overturned. Three people were shot, although it wasn’t clear by whom, and 160 more were injured.

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The dystopian scene was a far cry from a Sly concert the year before: Woodstock in ‘69, where the band, operating at the peak of its powers, had implored its 400,000 rapt attendees to take it higher into the wee hours of the morning. But the Summer of Love and the ensuing years had given way to disillusionment and rage, and Sly felt this shift acutely. “I had sensed a shadow was falling over America,” he wrote in his 2023 memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). “The possibility of possibility was leaking out and leaving the country drained.” 

Sly, who died on June 9 at the age of 82, wrung greatness out of this abyss. He channeled the Grant Park riot and larger national anxieties into the 1971 album There’s A Riot Goin’ On, now considered one of the best albums of all time. A swampy morass of funk grooves and murmured mantras, the album captured a sociopolitical undercurrent that America had long resisted acknowledging: a brew of exhaustion, trauma, resilience, and determined joy bubbling from the country’s dispossessed margins. And as America confronts a new era of unrest, there are few albums made today that capture an unyielding spirit that still courses through the country: of dogged individualism and collective civil disobedience.

Future Utopias

Stone was once the avatar of a more peaceful, unified future. In the mid-’60s, when anti-miscegenation laws were still being upheld in many states, he formed Sly and the Family Stone, one of the country’s first mainstream racially integrated bands. “There were race riots going on at the time,” Greg Errico, the band’s white drummer, told Rolling Stone in 2015. “Putting a musical group together with male and female and Black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to some people.”

The band’s diversity wasn’t just skin-deep, but also musical, as they fused funk, rock, soul, and psychedelia into up-tempo anthems with pure, motivational messages: Stand. Dance to the music. Everybody is a star. Their vision of America was a place where all sorts of outdated boundaries could be broken down; they embodied the long arc of the universe bending toward justice.  

But in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, as was Bobby Kennedy. One day, while the band was on tour and riots were unfolding across the nation, the band was accosted by guardsmen while stopping for gas in a Michigan town under curfew. One of the guardsmen called a white woman in their group a  “[N-word] lover,” and tried to provoke them into resisting, Sly writes in his memoir. “We got out of there without too much trouble, other than all the trouble,” he recounts dryly. 

As the Vietnam War dragged on and violence inside the country mounted, Sly grew increasingly disillusioned with the nation’s trajectory. “You couldn’t take turns with freedom. You couldn’t have one moment where freedom went with the majority and one where it went with the money and one where it went with one skin color or another,” he later recounted. His fame was also taking a toll: plagued by expectations, hangers-on, and feeling used by the industry, he soon turned heavily to drugs and drinking.

The riot begins

Stone channeled all of these discontents into There’s a Riot Goin’ On. It was a far cry from its predecessor Stand!, which commanded alertness and action. There’s a Riot, conversely, was not militaristic, but mutant. It did not press to impress, but forced the listener to adjust to its oozing pace, its fuzziness, its Blackness. Sly’s constant overdubbing and reworking of the tape caused it to disintegrate, giving its sound a gritty veil. On the record, he gasped and murmured, holding too long to opaque phrases, his words seemingly spilling out of a collective unconscious of unrest—“made by no one and everyone, made under the influence of substances and of itself,” he later wrote.

The album’s provocative title was a reference to several touchpoints: the 1954 song “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” by the Robins, which jubilantly depicts a prison uprising; Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released earlier in 1971, which lamented war and moral decay; and the Grant Park riot from a year earlier. It also represented, he wrote in his memoir, “the riot that was going on inside each person.” On its cover was a modified version of the American flag, suggesting that small and big riots alike had always been part of America’s legacy—and that the nation’s fabric was changing in fundamental ways.

The album, which confused some reviewers at the time, is now revered as an American classic. The record’s bass and drums influenced later funk icons like Parliament Funkadelic, as well as groundbreaking jazz-funk explorations from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Its stripped drum machine sounds created a blueprint for many hip-hop artists. “Listen close, because there’s no way in hell a major label will ever again let out this much horrible truth,” wrote Pitchfork’s Andy Beta while naming it the fourth best album of the ‘70s. 

“Yes, it's the very first funk album,” Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson told NPR this year, while promoting his new documentary Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden Of Black Genius). “But for me, it's probably 41 of the most painful documented minutes in a creator's life…I hear someone crying for help, but because the music is so awesome and so mind-blowing, you know, we wind up fetishizing his art, and you don't see the pain of it or the fact that Black pain is so beautiful.”

Read More: Questlove on Summer of Soul and the Oscars

After making the album, Stone slipped even further into addiction, depression, and paranoia, sometimes going for years at a time without public appearances. But while he may not have been a role model, he was a “real model,” he liked to say. And there will never be another album like There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which is the sound of a genius straining against the edges of convention; of a teeming mass fighting for freedom; of love being found in a hopeless place. 

In 2023, TIME conducted a written interview with Sly, who was struggling with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and near deafness. TIME asked him how the summer of 2020 compared with other summers of protest that he had lived through. “I still watch the news and still think about what could make things better in America,” he wrote. “There are days when it feels like things are going in the wrong direction, that every good thing has two bad things behind it. Black and white, rich and poor, we have to find some way to live together without hurting each other. It’s not simple but it's important.”

Read More: Sly Stone Reflects on the Past and His New Memoir in a Rare Interview