At approximately 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 17, 1969 at the Woodstock Musical Festival, Sly and The Family Stone took it to the stage. These days, I can’t imagine doing much of anything coherent at 3:30 a.m., but here, during the smallest of the small hours, the members of the seminal soul/funk/rock group got up and rocked a crowd of approximately 400,000 people.
Sounding fresh and sharp as they would ever sound on stage, Sly and The Family Stone gave one of the best performances of the three-day festival and one of their greatest live performances as a band. At one point, they famously got the absolutely massive crowd chanting “HIGHER!” while throwing up the peace sign. Even listening to the audio, the electricity is palpable.
Countless historians and musicologists have written millions of words about the Woodstock concert and the associated sociological conditions that made it what it was, but I like to think those 50 minutes on stage by Sly and The Family Stone could be considered the high water mark of the high water mark of the late ’60s. During an event that’s become synonymous with music serving as the vessel of peace, love, and togetherness, Sly and the Family Stone radiated all three.
Part of what brought the collective to that moment in time was Stand!, the group’s fourth album, released 50 years ago. The San Francisco-based assemblage of musical pioneers had been releasing albums since the mid-1960s. The gathering of musical minds became proprietors of psychedelic soul in 1966, led by former DJ and overall genius multi-instrumentalist Sylvester Stewart a.k.a. Sly Stone. One of the first notable bi-racial bands that also featured men and women, their ranks included uber-talented bassist Larry Graham, as well as Stone brother and lead guitarist Freddie, and Stone sister Rose, as a vocalist and keyboard player. The line-up also included drummer Greg Errico, trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, and saxophonist Jerry Martini.
Prior to the release of Stand!, the group was best known for rollicking soul and rock jams like “Dance to the Music.” Though they had earned commercial and critical success, the band was coming off the release of their somewhat disappointing third album Life, which had hit shelves in July of 1968. Life was a solid, reasonably light album that was fun but didn’t really break any new ground or sell nearly as many copies as Dance to the Music.
Stand! was Sly and The Family Stone’s best and most commercially successful album of their career. It went platinum in less than a year, eventually selling three million copies and spawning the #1 chart-topping “Everyday People.” The album is one of the defining pieces of musical work of the late 1960s. Whereas the group had dabbled in themes of unity and peace on Life, these subjects became the super-text of Stand!
I was not alive when Stand! became a musical and cultural force. I learned about this album and Sly and The Family Stone from my father, who played it pretty frequently when I was growing up. Over the years, as I’ve come to learn about and listen to the music produced from that era, Stand! endures over all. Even within a year that featured as many great, important albums as 1969, Stand! remains at the top of the heap.
We live in deeply cynical times. We trade in sarcasm and skepticism as easily as we breathe oxygen. So it’s easy to perceive genuine sentiments expressed on Stand! with a jaundiced eye. But the album’s absolute sincerity is refreshing. Stand! is inspiring without ever being didactic, simplistic, or preachy.
Stand! crystallized the spirit of the late ’60s like few other albums have done. It’s a tribute to love, unity, optimism, and equality. Sly and The Family Stone express a deeply held belief that things could and would get better, that Black and white populations could love together in harmony. That you could stand up to the Goliaths in the government and make a difference. That people could make a difference in turning the world into a better place for everyone.
This worldview is typified in the album’s title track. The song leans hard into its message of empowerment, evoking imagery of little people standing tall and giants about to fall, all while encouraging people to remember that they’re free if they want to be. “Stand” is often remembered for its frenzied final third, where Stone decides to shift that tone of the song, recording a thrilling gospel-inspiration coda, with chanting vocals, blaring horns, and pulsing organs.
“You Can Make It If You Try” is another stirring call to action, designed to encourage the audience to work to fight against oppression in its many forms. The simple poetry of “Time’s still creeping, especially when you're sleeping / Wake up and go for what you know” is really hard to top. The song is also one of the most musically interesting compositions, with its plucky guitar, rugged horns, and energetic organ breakdown about halfway through the song. From: https://albumism.com/features/sly-and-the-family-stone-stand-album-anniversary
