SONG OF THE DAY

“If You Want Me To Say” by Sly & The Fam­ily Stone (Fresh, Epic Records, 1973). Writ­ten and pro­duced by Sly Stone.

MY TAKE

Well, it’s hard to say any­thing pro­found about as critically-acclaimed a song and album as this, but I’ll tell you how it fits into my world and maybe that will add some­thing to your under­stand­ing of the song. I didn’t dis­cover this song until recently, but, as it turns out, I have been lis­ten­ing to the music it influ­enced all my life. This is the ORIGINAL of some of my favorite music. I have ALWAYS loved bass lines, they’re the groove, they’re the move­ment, they’re what I sing along to/ point out to people/ play over and over again/ attempt to dance to—in fact, I have this ongo­ing list of amaz­ing bass lines that serves as my way of cat­a­loging those amaz­ing moments of bass genius for me. I bet that 100% of the songs on my list were directly influ­enced by this band, maybe even by this song. I mean, this is a CRITICAL point in the his­tory of the bass gui­tar. The more I delve into Sly & The Fam­ily Stone, the more they are truly becom­ing one of my favorite bands. It’s sick how good they were, and genre-creating, discrimination-fighting, funk-making, to boot. This band just screams top 10 all-time favorite songs list, so I’ll give in.

MY TOP 10 ALL-TIME FAVORITE Sly & The Fam­ily Stone SONGS

1. “If You Want Me To Stay”
2. “Dance To The Music”
3. “Fam­ily Affair”
4. “Hot Fun In The Summertime”
5. “Thank You (For Let­ting Me Be Myself)
6. “Stand!”
7. “I Want To Take You Higher”
8. “Every­day People”
9. “Life”
10. “Are You Ready?”

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- “If You Want Me to Stay” is a 1973 hit sin­gle by Sly & the Fam­ily Stone, from their album Fresh. The sin­gle was the band’s final Top 20 pop hit, and is the best-known of its post–There’s a Riot Goin’ On recordings.

- Stone recorded the song with­out much input from the rest of the band; by the early 1970s, he had begun craft­ing most of his mate­r­ial by himself.

- An alter­nate ver­sion of “If You Want Me to Stay”, as well as most of the rest of the Fresh album, was com­pleted before Stone decided to scrap the mas­ters and re-record the album. These alter­nate ver­sions have sur­faced in under­ground mar­kets, online auc­tions, and spe­cialty shops. How­ever, in Epic’s 2007 reis­sue of Fresh, 5 bonus tracks are included, all of which are directly from the alter­nate mix of the album.

- “If You Want Me to Stay” reached #12 on the Pop Chart, and #3 on the Bill­board R&B Sin­gles Chart.

- The song has been cov­ered exten­sively since its intro­duc­tion, by artists rang­ing from the Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, to Etta James, to Eric Benet, to Vic­tor Wooten, to Soulive. The song has also been fea­tured in the movies Made in Heaven, Talk to Me and Dead Pres­i­dents.

- The lyrics of “If You Want Me to Stay” fea­ture front­man Sly Stone inform­ing his lover that she has to let him be him­self, oth­er­wise he feels that he would have to leave. The com­po­si­tion has its ori­gins in an apol­ogy Stone wrote to his future wife, Kath­leen Silva, after a fight. How­ever, the mes­sage of the song is also con­sid­ered to be pointed com­men­tary from Stone towards detrac­tors who had begun to crit­i­cize his then-recently pub­lic prob­lems of drug abuse and pro­fes­sional unreliability.

- Dur­ing the 1970s, Sly or one of the band mem­bers would often miss the gig, refuse to play, or pass out from drug use. This had an adverse effect on their abil­ity to demand money for live book­ings; live book­ings also declined as a result. At many of these gigs, concert-goers rioted if the band failed to show up, or if Sly walked out before fin­ish­ing his set.

- A tran­scrip­tion of the bass part for this song appears in the Octo­ber 2006 issue of Bass Player mag­a­zine (pages 78–81). Accord­ing to the arti­cle accom­pa­ny­ing the tran­scrip­tion, writ­ten by Chris Jisi: “The ambi­tiously named Fresh hit the streets in early July. A stripped-down, more raw out­ing than pre­vi­ous Sly albums, the 11-track set was boosted by the bass waves of Graham’s hand-picked replacement, Rustee Allen. Sly him­self laid down some of the album’s bass tracks, but it was Rus­tee whose lilt­ing line drove “If You Want Me To Stay,” the disc’s hit single”

- Sly and the Fam­ily Stone are an Amer­i­can rock, funk, and soul band from San Fran­cisco, Cal­i­for­nia. Active from 1966 to 1983, the band was piv­otal in the devel­op­ment of soul, funk, and psy­che­delic music.

- This col­lec­tive recorded five Bill­board Hot 100 hits which reached the top 10, and four ground-breaking albums, which greatly influ­enced the sound of Amer­i­can pop music, soul, R&B, funk, and hip hop music.

- In the pref­ace of his 1998 book For the Record: Sly and the Fam­ily Stone: An Oral His­tory, Joel Selvin sums up the impor­tance of Sly and the Fam­ily Stone’s influ­ence on African Amer­i­can music by stat­ing “there are two types of black music: black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly Stone”.

- In 1987, Sly Stone was arrested and sen­tenced for cocaine use, after which he went into effec­tive retirement. However, Sly and The Fam­ily Stone were announced as being in the line-up for the 2010 Coachella Val­ley Music and Arts Fes­ti­val in Indio, CA., USA.

– The lyrics for the band’s songs were usu­ally pleas for peace, love, and under­stand­ing among peo­ple. These ral­lies against vices such as racism, dis­crim­i­na­tion, and self-hate were under­scored by the lineup for and on-stage appear­ance of the band. Cau­casians Gregg Errico and Jerry Mar­tini were mem­bers of the band at a time when inte­grated per­for­mance bands were vir­tu­ally unheard of; integration had only recently become enforced by law. Females Cyn­thia Robin­son and Rosie Stone played instru­ments onstage, rather than just pro­vid­ing vocals or serv­ing as visual accom­pa­ni­ment for the male members. The band’s gospel-styled singing endeared them to black audi­ences; their rock music ele­ments and wild costuming—including Sly’s large Afro and tight leather out­fits, Rose’s blond wig, and the other mem­bers’ loud psy­che­delic clothing—caught the atten­tion of main­stream audiences.

- The work of Sly and the Fam­ily Stone was also a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on the music of Michael Jack­son, George Clin­ton & Parliament-Funkadelic, Arrested Devel­op­ment, The Black Eyed Peas, Her­bie Han­cock, Miles Davis, Ste­vie Won­der, and even John Mayer.

- Despite the loss of the orig­i­nal rhythm sec­tion and Sly’s esca­lat­ing cocaine use, the band’s next album, Fresh, was released in 1973. By this time, Sly’s sound had become more stripped down, yet more syn­co­pated and rhyth­mi­cally complex. Sly obses­sively over­dubbed the mas­ters, as he had done with Riot.

- Although the record received mixed reviews at its release and did not receive the atten­tion that the band’s ear­lier work had, Fresh has become rec­og­nized as one of the most impor­tant funk albums ever made.

VIDEO OF THE DAY