Growing up in a bastion of white Protestant wealth, opportunities to hear really good funk or soul music were severely limited. The radio stations in the 1970s were either awash with disco, pseudo-intellectual rock, or vacuous pop music. Everybody was either listening to that stuff, or just as bad, strutting white boys trying to make as much noise as possible while still calling it music. So it wasn't until one fateful night in a second run movie theatre which showed a battered print of Woodstock on alternating nights with The Rocky Horror Picture Show that I received my first real dose of funk.
Okay reading that back I know it sounds bad, but I can't think of any other way of describing what happened when Sly & The Family Stone invaded the movie screen that night. By the time they show up on screen in the movie you've already been sitting for a couple hours and for any number of reasons you've descended into a bit of a stupor. In those days you didn't even have to bring your own dope to get high at the movies as sooner or later one of the clouds drifting through the theatre would land on you head and you'd be gone. Then all of a sudden the screen explodes in a burst of sound and colour as Sly and company burst onto stage bedecked in a bedazzling array of colours and material.
After a few moments of preening the bass starts churning, horns start blaring, and the guitar and keyboard are pounding out a rhythm that wakes up your blood - and that's only the intro. That first time watching "The Family" was a blur of horns and vocal pyrotechnics as Sly reached out and grabbed those hundreds of thousands of people in the dark beyond the stage by the throat and shook them awake (They went on stage at three in the morning). On the original soundtrack and in the movie all you get is a taste of what they performed that early Sunday morning, and even just the medley of "Music Lover/Higher" was enough to rouse even the most stoned of us sitting in that run down theatre. Now that I've heard their entire set as part of the Legacy Recordings' release Sly And The Family Stone: The Woodstock Experience, I'm trying to imagine what it must have like for those in the audience at Woodstock to have that thrust in front of their eyes at 3:00 am.
As well as the disc containing the live recording of their set at Woodstock, also included in this package is a reissued version of the studio recording the band had released earlier that year, Stand!. Like all of their music, it contained a mixture of high stepping funk music that would knock your socks off and political messages like the song "Don't Call Me Nigger Whitey". While they didn't play that particular track at the Woodstock festival, the majority of their set was drawn from that album, including their hit "Everyday People", as well as "Stand", "Sing A Simple Song", "You Can Make It If You Try", and "I Want To Take You Higher".
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