A record like this lends itself well to images from gothic novels about mad scientists so completely invested in their work that they cede every waking moment and every moral principle over to it in pursuit of that one immortalizing creation; yet, in so doing, they lose control of their creations, and indeed, they often lose their lives as well. Like a hippie-era Henry Jekyll, Sly Stone (ne Sylvester Stewart) had finally made a name for himself inventing a new sonic elixir called "funk" in his lab - songs like "Stand", "Everyday People", "Hot Fun in the Summertime" emitting intoxicating love-steams of solidarity, tolerance and living joy with singalong chant choruses, plucked and popping basslines, jazzy organ solos, party shout-outs and a zillion other dazzling feats of studio wizardry for the good of all mankind.

But at the peak of his success, he could most always be found in a state of super-fazed highness, given to all sorts of erratic behavior, most often of the "disappearing act" variety (anyone who bought a ticket to one of his shows stood a 2/3 chance of actually seeing him play), and it would be nearly two years after the 1969 release of his most popular album Stand! before he would manage to follow it up. And that follow-up, entitled There's a Riot Goin' On, despite yielding three hit singles, including the Billboard #1 "Family Affair", is the darkly magical handiwork of Sly's own drug-addled and driven Dr. Hyde - an artistic (and personal) catastrophe, full of failed and purposeless experiments, rudderless wanderings, voices that are buried in, then indelicately exhumed from the mix, all dressed up so convincingly as a perplexing masterpiece - behind a bastardized American flag whose blue field has gone undeniably black, whose stars are graphic African suns but could just as easily be interpreted as bullet holes, and whose stripes are obscured by deepening, stormy shadows - that, over the course of the more than 35 years since its initial release, it has become that perplexing masterpiece, one of the most celebrated records in all of rock n' roll.

The result of nearly two years sequestered in his laboratory (and I use that word broadly - this lab was musical, of course, but also social and very, very chemical), an old Hollywood starlet's mansion he rented from the Mamas and the Papas' John and Michelle Phillips for $12,000 a month, equipped with a recording studio Phillips built deep within the house behind a secret passageway, and located across the street from the Beverly Hillbillies' house, the album was financed by the voluminous proceeds of the Stand! album and a pair of high-charting non-album singles ("Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Again)" and "Hot Fun in the Summertime"), as well as a slew of recordings and production jobs Sly was putting out under various aliases (on the Sly, so to speak) for his dubious Stoneflower label (distributed by Atlantic Records in a deal that surely scandalized the execs at Epic Records, with whom Sly and the Family Stone were contracted at the time), many of which, incidentally, turn up on Rhino Records' marvelous recent 4-CD various artist box set What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves 1967-1977.

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At a time when the most ambitious pop and rock artists were increasingly conceptualizing their records, the concept behind There's a Riot Goin' On - a reference to an old Lieber-Stoller doo-wop tune recontextualized to the violent political climate and, presumably, Sly's state of mind - was that there was no concept. The album wasn't assembled so much as accumulated. Conceivably, it could have ended up as any number of wholly unidentical records made up of recordings from the very same time period. What was finally released in the late summer of 1971 is merely a minute distillation of an epic-scale chaos: a document of division and disintegration in which Sly and The Family Stone become increasingly un-Family-like as their brilliant, fearless mastermind descends into irreparable confusion and isolation; of a time when Sly would shun a crack drummer like Gregg Errico for the artificial flavorings of a vintage Rhythm King beatbox, and tape over or otherwise lose Larry Graham's distinctively percussive bass parts and substitute them with his own (Graham and Errico both left the group after this album); when even the performances Stone would ultimately keep for the record were recorded on such battered tape that the sound of the album is as uneven and unreliable, as damaged and hazed as Stone himself.

The hard-weathered grooves of songs like "Luv N' Haight" and a defeated out-take of "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Again)" re-titled as "Thank You For Talking To Me, Africa" emerge as hulks of deepest, hardest, blackest obsidian coated in a fuzzy blanket of white-hot, freshly-fallen pumice dust. If Stand! was a commercial Vesuvius for the group, then here was the Pompeii of the aftermath - a magnificent ruin, not just of the exuberant creativity that had marked their first four records and made them rich and famous, but also of the youthful peace-and-love idealism of San Francisco's hippie culture, the anti-war and civil rights movements, all then in the same state of rot and decay as Sly Stone himself, and for largely the same reasons.

Where previously, even their longer songs felt well-constructed and tight, even the shortest songs here evoke a desolate sprawl. The singalong choruses are still there, but they are less structurally sound. Where the background vocal arrangements once felt complex and orchestrated, here they're haphazard and improvised. The horn section - indeed, the band itself - often feels eerily absent; and near non-songs like "Poet" in which Stone slurs his way through a meandering verse and chorus before apparently passing out at the wheel, and "Spaced Cowboy" which finds the man yo-de-lay-hee-hoo-ing himself into a chemically-induced oblivion, are woozily self-involved and have a delirious, overtired, waking dreamlike quality to them. "Like a Baby" features a wrecked, falsetto gospel outcry, the vocal equivalent of an undressed wound, over a bed of slick, icy cool bass, drums that sound like they're being played through tin foil, and a haunted mellotronic hush laying over the song's horizon like a distant storm.

Even the most songy songs here have an undeniably off-kilter quality to them. That "Family Affair" might even have been considered as the album's lead single and then, that it became such a huge hit are almost unfathomable, given the song's state of undress (as opposed to mere nudity). Over a burbling bassline and little else, Rose's voice on the chorus sounds like it's coming through a paper towel tube, and Sly's voice a dried husk of itself - his lyrics about newlyweds who're still checkin' each other out undermined by his sickly croak on the verses. The song doesn't even really end - it just sort of peters out. It feels unfinished and anticlimactic, like an excerpt or artifact from something larger that no longer exists. "(You Caught Me) Smilin'" has a sinister horror movie creak about it, and the staccato, doubled up vocals of the album's second Top 40 single, "Runnin' Away", lend the song an intimately quirky, paranoiac vibe.

The album's centerpiece is an eight-minute jam called "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle'", which briefly works itself into a sexy band-sung falsetto verse and a classic Sly Stone chorus - Timber-err! All Fall Down! - but then gradually decays to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of canned rhythm, endless pasta bowls of ad-libbed guitar noodles, and compulsive synthesizer riffing that speaks more to inertia than inspiration. The song fades out. There's a brief moment - no more than a second - of silence between tracks 5 and 7 - and that moment is the album's title track.

Listed on the back cover: There's a Riot Goin' On (0:00).

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Epic Legacy's long overdue reissue of the album comes in a cardboard digipak, and faithfully (necessarily, I presume) reproduces the damaged sound of the original vinyl; and unlike the previous CD issue of the album, it faithfully reproduces the record's iconic, stormy cover art as well - the flag on the front, and a frenzied mosaic of snapshot faces on the back. It boasts a nice, though smallish, booklet full of photos and relatively brief but well-written historical notes, and four bonus tracks - the somewhat clarified single mix of "Runnin' Away", along with three instrumental session remnants of little consequence. Given what has been added to album's original tracklist for this reissue, it seems almost criminal (and possibly a little self-defeating) not to have included the two gigantic non-LP singles that preceded the album, but this complaint is far outweighed by the mere fact of this long-awaited reissue's existence. This is a numbered, limited edition reissue, and it is available both individually and as part of a seven disc box set containing similar reissues of all the band's studio albums recorded for Epic between 1967 and 1974 when the band dissolved. (For those interested, the band would later record a pair of albums for Warner Bros., and these are available from Rhino Handmade as a single disc compilation called Who In The Funk Do You Think You Are?)

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"There's a Riot Goin' On" by Sly and the Family Stone
Epic-Legacy Records
Originally Released 1971
Reissued 2007

Produced by Sly Stone
64 min.

SONGS: Luv N Haight - Like a Baby - Poet - Family Affair - Africa Talks To You "The Asphalt Jungle" - There's a Riot Goin' On - Brave and Strong - (You Caught Me) Smilin' - Time - Spaced Cowboy - Runnin' Away - Thank You For Talking To Me Africa /BONUS: Runnin' Away - My Gorilla is My Butler - Do You Know What? - That's Pretty Clean

Recommended: Yes