Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On by Miles Marshall Lewis

Author:Miles Marshall Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2007-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

What’s Goin’ On?

Africa Talks to You by Sly and the Family Stone was due for release in 1970. The group put out their previous four albums with less than twelve months between each. But after the triple-platinum Stand! Epic would wait over two years to receive the group’s latest. Eventually hitting stores November 20, 1971 with TWO YEARS IS A SHORT TIME TO WAIT as a marketing tag, the album was nothing like what anyone expected.

By the time the record was turned in drummer Gregg Errico had left the group and been replaced by a beat machine and substitute Gerry Gibson. Africa Talks to You was produced, arranged, composed, and performed largely by Sly Stone alone. The LP marked the close of an era in American culture as well as the Family Stone band. By the bitter end, the album was retitled There’s a Riot Goin’ On.

All prior Sly and the Family Stone album covers featured photographs of the band. In 1970 Epic released A Whole New Thing with a fresh cover to satiate fans during the lull between LPs, adding recent photos. But the front of There’s a Riot Goin’ On showcases a stark red, white, and black American flag, with the customary fifty stars replaced by twenty-eight suns. (Technically stars are suns, but you know what I mean.) The closeup shot is such that only five red and four white stripes are visible. Some of the suns are blurry; the flag is slightly waving. Lord only knows how much coke was snorted off this image nationwide in the early seventies. Many fans mistook the suns for bullet holes, as nihilistic as the album sounded, or flowers, considering Sly’s sunny idealist image. Epic manufactured three of these special flags to order. Sly kept one, A&R man Stephen Paley kept one, and the company kept one (which was swiftly stolen). Sly’s flag hung over the fireplace of the living room at 783 Bel Air Road during the recording of the LP.

A photomontage by Lynn Ames adorns the back of Riot. The black-and-white and color images include all the band members, the Capitol, a grinning boy in plaid pants, another flag with the peace sign in place of stars, the Marina City twin towers of Chicago, a Department of Public Works CAUTION sign, a bit of the Gettysburg Address, the tail end of a seventies gas guzzler, Band of Gypsys drummer Buddy Miles, the Lincoln Memorial, Bobby Womack, a bulldog, a load of anonymous smiling faces, and Gun, Sly’s pit bull. Sly explained the cover concept to Jonathan Dakss, the webmaster of the official Sly and the Family Stone site:

I wanted the flag to truly represent people of all colors. I wanted the color black because it is the absence of color. I wanted the color white because it is the combination of all colors. And I wanted the color red because it represents the one thing that all people have in common: blood. I wanted suns instead of stars because stars to me imply searching, like you search for your star.

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