By 1973, it had been two years since
Sly & the Family Stone had released the provocative, dope-fueled, and ambivalent
There's a Riot Goin' On. Epic wanted an immediate follow-up, and the Black Panthers were pressuring Sly -- as they had
Jimi Hendrix before him -- to be more political in his songwriting. Stone was using more drugs than ever and had lost -- due to the quitting of drummer Greg Errico and the firing of legendary bassist
Larry Graham -- the backbone of his rhythm section. Drummer Andy Newmark replaced Errico, and Rusty Allen took over the bass chair. As writer Touré points out in his fine liner essay, in 1972 the country was being ripped apart, the Vietnam War was still raging, Watergate took place and was coming to the fore, athletes were killed by terrorists at the Olympic games in Munich, and the British Army slaughtered 13 unarmed protestors in Northern Ireland. The 1960s were over, and through his narcotic daze, Sly knew it too. He reassembled the band in the summer of 1972 and recorded
Fresh. The set yielded one of the most amazing singles Sly had ever issued -- and considering the track record, that's saying plenty -- in "If You Want Me to Stay." In addition, there's the slow-burn gospel chorus funk of "Let Me Have It All" (that reflected the shouted immediacy of "Let Me Take You Higher"); the fist-pumping bubble-up soul in "Keep on Dancin'" (it echoes the band's first hit), and the strangely wonderful and bluesy reading of Ray Evans and Jay Livingstone's "Que Sera Sera" that came from the
Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Doris Day Show's theme song, sung by
Day in both cases. It's a spiritual sung in soul-drenched grit with sweet choruses and laid-back minimal bass and drum lines. The set closes with a dirty funk groove in the cautionary and sadly revelatory tale "Babies Makin' Babies." The message is a bleak one, but the groove is funky as hell. Issued in 1973,
Fresh interestingly turned out to be the last truly great
Sly & the Family Stone album. There was one more for the bale, in
Small Talk in 1974, before leaving the label for Warner Brothers. [The 2007 Legacy edition is beautifully remastered and contains alternate mixes of "Let Me Have It All," "Frisky," "Skin I'm In," and "Keep on Dancin'," and a different version of "Babies Makin' Babies."] ~ Thom Jurek