The Spanish Mission-style home at 783 Bel Air Drive in Beverly Hills had been built by Jeanette MacDonald, the screen actress who starred in all those '30s film operettas with boy tenor Nelson Eddy. It had been owned for a couple of years by John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, when Sly Stone rented the secluded mansion to do some recording in the fall of 1970. Phillips installed a recording studio in the roomy attic, reached only by a secret passageway hidden behind a bookcase on the main staircase. He tore out Jeanette MacDonald's cedar-lined walk-in closets to build a kind of waiting room for the studio. Terry Melcher, record producer, Doris Day's son and someone who was playing it a little scarce on the Hollywood scene since Charlie Manson and his gang went looking for him, introduced Sly to the Phillips. Sly agreed to pay $12,000 a month rent.
Sly and The Family Stone were flying high. After a breakthrough third album, ''Stand!'', and practically stealing the Woodstock festival (and subsequent movie and million-selling soundtrack album), the band followed up with two album-less singles. ''Hot Fun In The Summertime'' was, almost predictably, a summer song that arrived late. Released in August 1969, as the summer waned, the record went to #2. The next single, ''Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)'', a protracted piece of thunderstruck funk, a one-chord rampage of unprecedented savage power, gave the band its second #1. There had never been greater demand for a new Sly & the Family Stone album.
At the same time, however, Sly's personal life was tumbling out of control. He was doing huge amounts of drugs. He surrounded himself with thugs. He spent like a rajah and lived like decadent royalty on two terraced acres across the street from the instantly recognizable mansion used in the opening credits of ''The Beverly Hillbillies''. (Everybody who visited 783 Bel Air always thought that was funny.) He also started showing up late for concerts. Or not showing up at all. Sly cancelled 26 out of 80 shows in 1970, and missed five concerts in a row on a Southern swing in February 1971. He skipped network television appearances. He left the other band members waiting backstage for hours wondering whether he was going to show up or not.
The musicians no longer lived together, as they did in their early days in Las Vegas and New York. Sly installed his brother, guitarist Freddie Stewart, in the Bel Air mansion. He gave the pool house to saxophonist Jerry Martini and found room for trumpeter Cynthia Robinson. Bassist Larry Graham still lived in Oakland and drummer Greg Errico stayed in Marin County. Errico flew down to play on endless sessions that went nowhere, little better than jams really, but at least he got to play with other musicians. Bassist Graham found himself overdubbing his parts when he came down. Sometimes he would find his parts later erased and re-recorded with Sly playing bass.
Outside of the two hit singles, very little was heard from Sly on records at the height of his demand. On his own Stoneflower label, he snuck out a couple of singles he produced with Little Sister, the gospel group his younger sister Vaetta had sung with since high school (and who sweetened background vocals on Sly and the Family Stone records since the first one). Unlike the polished, compressed, bright and shiny sound of ''Stand!'', these singles were stark, ominous, burbling productions. Sly used an early drum machine called Rhythm King instead of Errico and he played bass himself, abandoning the signature thump-and-pluck style Graham pioneered on Sly and the Family Stone albums. He cut an even darker, garbled two-part piece of minimalist funk with Joe Hicks, one of the characters known to frequent 783 Bel Air.
Bobby Womack was also around. Sometimes they worked on Sly's songs and sometimes they worked on Bobby’s. Jim Ford was another regular visitor. A Southern country and western kind of guy who had a small hit called ''Harlan County'', Ford was a good-humored, amiable musical accomplice who wrote ''Harry The Hippie'' with Womack. Ike Turner hung out.
Herbie Hancock checked it out. So did
Miles Davis. Billy Preston had been a friend and musical associate since he was the organ player in the
Ray Charles band and Sly was a San Francisco boss soul jock and record producer turning out Top 40 hits with British-sounding rock groups such as the Beau Brummels and the Mojo Men.
Sly would corral musicians upstairs and keep them there, recording, literally, for days. The cast of players changed. Tapes disappeared. Songs were worked on one day and lost forever the next. Things were done over at different tempos. There were no clocks anywhere in the house. Sometimes the party would shift to the Record Plant. Among the many exotic motor vehicles Sly kept was a large Winnebago, which he would park in the lot behind the Hollywood studio and party for days while tapes rolled. He left miles of tape in his wake. Some days he would get things done. Some days nothing would get done. The record company never heard anything from the sessions.
Slowly an album began to emerge. From a raucous outtake of the entire band playing ''Thank You'' from almost two years earlier to the eerie ''Family Affair'', nothing more than drum machine, Billy Preston on keyboards, Sly and sister Rose singing through cupped hands, the album spanned the possibilities of the anonymous cast. A collage of a hundred snapshots on the back cover of the LP pictures -- but does not name -- many of the participants. The cover came from a flag that hung over the living room fireplace.
''There's A Riot Goin' On'' was a masterpiece of dark, simmering grooves and visions from the other side. Sly tapped the chaos and utter blackness of his own life to extract timeless art -- a personal statement that ranked with the greatest of the day, lifting him into realms of candor and audacity that ranked only with his hero
Dylan. With this record, he paved the way for
Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder,
George Clinton and all the other black musicians who followed.
It was like music brought back from another planet. Sly recorded his voice without effects and ganged up the background vocals. The tracks sound like nothing ever heard before, stunningly original results that might have almost justified the long, elaborate experiments in the studio, if they hadn't been conceived in madness. The label lists the title track: ''There's A Riot Goin' On - 0:00". It was Sly's little joke. The riot was going on in his life.
In September 1971, Sly's manager David Kapralik was able to convince one last promoter to present Sly and the Family Stone for three nights at Madison Square Garden. Days before the show, Sly delivered the finished tapes to the label. Kapralik grabbed a couple of dozen publicity photos of the band, scrawled on them in felt pen "Two years is a short time to wait" and plastered them all over the Columbia Records office. Sly sold out all three nights at the Garden and broke the box office records. ''Family Affair'', the album's first single, was the group's third #1 single.
But when it came time to play the Garden, on the morning of the first show, Sly missed six flights from Los Angeles before he finally made it. Some things never changed.
