In the fall of 1971, Sly Stone delivered a box of tapes to the Epic Records offices and quietly ended the most optimistic run in American popular music. The album those tapes became, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” opened with “Luv ‘n’ Haight” and its half-swallowed vocal, and that was the thesis. The Family Stone had once made you want to move more than anything on earth. Now Sly was telling you he had stopped. What he built in that stillness was a new architecture for funk: slower, murkier, more interior, and so deeply influential that you can hear its shadow in D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” in the low-end philosophy of Dr. Dre’s G-funk, in virtually every piece of music that has since treated the groove as a psychological state rather than an invitation to dance.
Sly Stone died on June 9, 2025, at age 82, and the tributes that followed kept returning to this one album, the one that confused everyone at the time and has since been studied more than almost anything else in the funk and soul canon. That return of attention is earned. “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” is not a comfortable record. It is a necessary one, and the story of how it got made is inseparable from what it sounds like.
The conditions that produced the album are well documented and genuinely strange. After the triumph of “Stand!” in 1969 and a legendary set at Woodstock, Sly and the Family Stone were one of the most important bands on the planet. Then the band began to fracture. Sly moved to Los Angeles, into a mansion in Bel Air formerly rented from John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, and his cocaine and PCP use accelerated sharply. He missed nearly a third of the band’s concert dates. Drummer Gregg Errico, fed up with the drugs and the canceled shows and the endless waiting, left the band in early 1971. Tensions between Sly and bassist Larry Graham had been building for months. The Black Panther Party was reportedly urging Stone to fire his white bandmates, Errico and saxophonist Jerry Martini. Epic Records, unable to get new material, released a Greatest Hits compilation to fill the gap. By the time Sly finally settled in to record, the band he had built was mostly somewhere else.
What he did with that absence is the whole story. Sly built a studio in the attic of the Bel Air mansion, and he largely worked alone, or in the deep hours with whoever happened to be around. Band members flew down from the Bay Area intermittently to record individual overdubs, which Sly would then frequently record over. The key instrument was a Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2 drum machine, a preset device originally designed as little more than a metronome for home organ players. Sly heard something else in it entirely. He layered the machine’s sounds manually, building them until the mechanical pulse became something dense and hypnotic, a beat that felt like it was coming from inside a sealed room. The tape hiss that coats the album is the direct result of all that overdubbing and erasure: the tapes wore thin, and the thinning became part of the sound.
The album credits list the full Family Stone alongside guests Bobby Womack on guitar, Ike Turner on guitar, and Billy Preston on electric piano, but the reality is that most of those contributions were minimal, recorded piecemeal and often buried or erased. “Family Affair,” the lead single, captures the method exactly. The sessions were so layered and hazy that no one has ever been fully certain of exactly who played what, but what is clear is that Sly programmed the Rhythm King beat himself, Rose Stone sang alongside him, and Billy Preston contributed keyboards. That drum machine pulse made history: “Family Affair” became the first number-one single ever built on a programmed drum machine beat. It hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for three weeks, and it held the top spot on the R&B Singles chart for five weeks. It is one of the most unsettling number-one records ever made: a hymn to dysfunction delivered in Sly’s lowest, most exhausted register, the joy of “Everyday People” replaced by something that sounded like a man reporting from the wreckage. “Family Affair” was the band’s third and final number-one pop single, and it arrived sounding nothing like the band that had earned the first two.
The album’s original working title was “Africa Talks to You.” It changed to “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” in direct response to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” released six months earlier. Where Gaye asked a question, Sly answered with a statement, and then, on the title track itself, answered with four seconds of silence.
The music that surrounds that silence is some of the most rhythmically sophisticated funk ever recorded, and it rewards the kind of listening this community brings to the canon. “Poet” is a slinky groove built on programmed drums and percolating keyboards, Sly slurring his own words as if the act of articulation costs him something. “Africa Talks to You ‘The Asphalt Jungle’” opens with a beatbox pulse and a bass riff that goes somewhere new with every repetition. “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” takes the band’s own earlier hit “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and slows it to a crawl, replacing Larry Graham’s signature slap bass with a thudding low-end that sounds like a different instrument entirely, the joy of the original scraped away to reveal something rawer underneath. Robert Christgau, writing in 2007, called it “the prophetic 1971” album, its “drum-machine beats throwing knuckleballs at Miles Davis and James Brown.” That description is precise. Sly was stress-testing the funk tradition, finding out what it could hold.
“There’s a Riot Goin’ On” topped both the Billboard Pop Albums and Soul Albums charts, and the singles “Runnin’ Away” and “(You Caught Me) Smilin’” both charted, though neither came close to “Family Affair.” The album was received with confusion by many at the time, but it has grown into one of the most studied records in the entire funk and soul canon, and for good reason. Long before the home studio became standard practice, Sly Stone proved that one person in a room with a drum machine and a pile of overdubs could make something that sounded like nothing else. Long before sampling defined hip-hop’s vocabulary, he was treating tape as a compositional material, erasing and re-recording until the music carried the texture of its own making. Sly Stone is gone now, but the isolation that produced this record was real and painful, and the music that came out of it is a gift the genre is still spending.
