A story about the band that changed my music listening life.
Cover designed by John Berg
By Charlotte Morgan
When Sly (Sylvester Stewart. March 15, 1943–June 9, 2025.) Stone recently died, I read musicians and music critics rave about his work and one album in particular. This released me from the humiliation I had felt in high school. Never one to fit in (as I would learn, I didn’t belong) because I was different. I knew more about music than the average teenager. Why? Because my father was a musician and we talked about music and musicians when we spent time together. He had me playing the clarinet and guitar. I played the autoharp, bongos, and harmonica at one time or another. And in a fit of delusion (thinking my classmates wanted to know what I thought) fueled by copious amounts of marijuana, I felt the courage to do something stupid. The first album I reviewed was in high school at an Ooja Omega (our class social club) meeting. I brought my 1971 copy of Sly and the Family Stone’s fifth recording, There’s A Riot Goin’ On to share my insights on what I knew would become a classic album. My classmates ridiculed and shut me down because they were the cool kids–the athletes and cheerleaders in our club. No one was interested in the album or what I had to say.
Sly’s time on top was brief, roughly from 1968-1971, but profound. No band better captured the gravity-defying euphoria of the Woodstock era or more bravely addressed the crash which followed. From early songs as rousing as their titles — “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Stand!” — to the sober aftermath of “Family Affair” and “Runnin’ Away,” Sly and the Family Stone spoke for a generation whether or not it liked what they had to say. – The Associated Press, June 9, 2025
This was the same reaction I got from my little brothers when I picked up my folk guitar and began playing out of Carole King’s Tapestry songbook–nowhere in our house was safe to practice. I knew the album, which I got from the Columbia Record Club, would be a classic and my father had bought me the sheet music like he had purchased the first guitar lesson book. He liked King because she was a talented musician and songwriter. But my brothers only ridiculed me. Where were the black folk singers at the time? Richie Havens?
British bands had not only invaded but conquered America. I went in 1964 with my sister to see the Beatles’ “A Hard Day's Night.” I was completely out of step as far as my classmates were concerned. The latter loved the Temptations, Stylistics, Chi-lites, Marvin Gaye, the Sylvers, Al Green and even the Jackson 5–they had gone to see them in person. But there were rock and roll kids at school who loved the Glam Rock of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople; they welcomed the former when his Ziggy Stardust tour hit Cleveland in the fall of 1972. And Gary Glitter, whose “Rock and Roll Part 2”, became our marching band’s rallying cry on Saturday afternoons at high school football games. Also among these British acts was Elton John whose “Bennie and the Jets” became a hit among my friends and me. On WGHS, our school radio station played rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, and Yes. But I remember at our annual talent show, a band fronted by a girl performed Sly’s “Sex Machine.”
With so many breakthrough recordings, this made finding my musical identity difficult. I didn’t want my classmates to bully me for my musical tastes and that meant moving on from Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze”, Carly Simon’s “Anticipation”–folk music like America’s “Horse with No Name.” I loved Neil Young’s solo album, Harvest, and the songs, “Old Man”, and "Heart of Gold” because I could play them. But during this period there was solo work from John Lennon whose “Imagine” and Paul McCartney’s new band Wings to listen to. I had never even gone to a live concert. To fit in, I needed to have the same rite of passage experiences.
Charles Henry Morgan, Jr. lived his taste by collecting albums by the great musicians and singers of the era and having a good sound system and religiously practicing his saxophones and piano. He never tried to fit in his musical family–he was a leader of it. He had his own orchestra. But his daughter was a short kid who had to wear thick glasses because of amblyopia and an Afro wig because she lost her hair due to a bad perm. She read novels and magazines and listened to music differently because she had attended a prototype of extracurricular training at a local warehouse space called the Supplementary [Educational] Center located at 12th and St. Clair Avenue in downtown Cleveland.
Each Saturday, I traveled carrying my sheet music with me on the bus to join kids from all across the city. We gathered in the auditorium to enjoy dissecting Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach music. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in training for a job at a regional entertainment magazine in the city of the home of rock and roll where I would review some of the greatest albums of our lifetime. The Department of Education used the facility as a lab to stimulate our creative abilities and expand our interests. “Exciting new instructional techniques are leading students to discover the city in which they live; the science of space, flight, and meteorology; and their musical heritage.”
Everyone knew about Sly and the Family Stone from the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. They were completely different from anything I had ever seen. There were guys and girls, and black and whites. Their sound was different–pop, rock, and soul. But my father discouraged us from listening to that kind of music. He had respect for Paul McCartney and John Lennon as songwriters and musicians, but none for any Motown songwriters. While I listened to him, I began a quiet rebellion and began to explore music on my own. I remembered Sly and the Family Stone on television on the “Dick Cavett Show,” the “Midnight Special,” “Soul Train,” and “In Concert.”
Yet by 1971, the optimistic rebel had grown increasingly disillusioned. Sly and the Family Stone’s landmark million-selling album There’s a Riot Goin’ On encapsulated the rage, introversion, and dark mood of a country still healing from the trauma of war and the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. – Keith Murphy
Credit: CBS via Getty Images. Copyright: 1969 CBS Photo Archive.
There was his little sister Vaetta Stewart’s group, Little Sister who had a recording produced by Sly called “Stanga.” I bought a 45 rpm copy of it at the downtown Woolworth’s basement record store department. And years later, “Somebody’s Watching You,” another funky gem with an unusual (for the period) drum machine and psychedelic vocals. No one sounded like Sly Stone.
In 1971, Tim Russert was president of John Carroll’s University Club and he was Student Union President. He booked Sly and the Family Stone at Gymnasium on Saturday, March 18, 1972. Me and my friend Valerie King were there. I don’t remember how we got there or got home. All I remember was at age 16, this was my first teenage age concert, and it was memorable–life changing.
Valerie and I, dressed in blue jeans and Army jackets purchased from the Goldfish Army/Navy store, sat on the bleachers surrounded by long-haired and mustached guys who offered us weed. Never one to pass on a joint, we got higher as we awaited the arrival of the band—Sly was notorious for being late. When the lights in the gymnasium finally went down, we screamed. The band made up for it with an extraordinary display of musicianship. We were emboldened to make our way from the bleachers to the front of the stage. Watching Larry Graham’s thumb rhythmically slapping the strings of his bass and Freddie Stone’s fingers moving up and down the fret boards while working his Wah Wah or Fuzz (I could only guess) effects pedals was mesmerizing.
When Graham left the group in 1972, he would go on to form Graham Central Station, and I followed and bought the 1974 eponymous titled album. But in between, in 1973, Sly and the Family Stone released, Fresh, a lighter album in theme. Soon we were out of high school and enrolled at Tri-C Metro, a local junior college. Free from peer pressure, my former classmates listened when I told them about a band. Michelle Wilson drove me with her cousin from Chicago to see Graham Central Station at the Allen Theatre. Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters opened. Their self-named album featured a track called, “Sly”, dedicated to Sly Stone, the musician who had inspired Hancock.
Late in 1971, he released “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” one of the grimmest, most uncompromising records ever to top the album charts. – The Associated Press, June 9, 2025.
Fresh. 1973. Photo by Richard Avedon. Graham Central Station. 1974. Photo by Herb Greene.
His groundbreaking album, There’s A Riot Goin’ On provided a soundtrack for America and not just for blacks. There were the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King–the riots that followed. The Vietnam War protests and the deaths of four Kent State students. The unrest was unsettling. There were other actual soundtrack albums. Curtis Mayfield with “Superfly” and Isaac Hayes with “Shaft”. While Hayes and Mayfield’s music was rooted in the urban experience, none wrote lyrics quite like Sly Stone. It was through his music and lyrics that the 1960s’ idealism with the 1970s’ complex changing social and cultural norms had caused the broadening of my musical tastes—this was made in part by the technological advancements in recording and drugs.
Lookin' at the devil, Grinnin' at his gun.
Fingers start shakin', I begin to run.
Bullets start chasin' I begin to stop.
We begin to wrestle I was on the top.
want to
Thank you f-lettinme be mice elt Agin.
– “Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa”. Lyrics by Sylvester Stewart.
When I learned that Slyvester Stewart had passed, it brought back memories. I realized how he had impacted my music listening life. The last time I saw him in concert was in 1975 at Cuyahoga Community College’s Metro Campus gymnasium. That night, Valerie and I walked through Forest Hills Park and a police car chased us all because we wanted to relive our high school days and get high on the way to the show. When we arrived at the college, Sly’s buses were outside, and we got to watch the band walk in.
What followed, I was a budding audiophile thanks to my father and his pursuit of optimal sound. The humiliation of that first record review had disappeared. My music collection steadily grew. I joined my college newspaper and began reviewing concerts featuring acts I knew were groundbreaking like Labelle and their Nightbirds, and Minnie Riperton’s “Perfect Angel”. I took my clippings and left college and weed behind to become a professional music journalist–the first black female music journalist in the region. Scene Magazine paid me to explore new music, see live shows, and interview the artists.
PS: When I finally went back to college, I met NBC’s Tim Russert in 2008 at the Democratic Debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the Cleveland State University Wolstein Center. I was there as a journalist for the college newspaper, The Cauldron. Later while working on this memoir, I learned Russert was a CSU and John Carroll alumni and of his marvelous connection to my first concert experience.
Charlotte Morgan is a writer in Cleveland, Ohio. As a journalist during the heyday of vinyl music, she covered all genres of music and defied racial and gender norms. Her music memoir, None of My Idols Were Worth Worship is underway. This writing is an amalgam of a chapter from the text.
