I wanna thank you for the party.

Sly and The Family Stone - 'Thank You for Talkin' To Me Africa' (There's A Riot Goin' On - 1971)

With our focus on endings here at The Run Out Grooves, we come today to an album symbolic of a more significant ending - the death of the 1960s.

Sly and The Family' Stone’s previous studio album was released in May 1969, the sixties dream had started to sour before that point, but there were still events like Altamont, the official break up of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix’s death over the next few months to bookend the decade even if the hangover of both the Nixon presidency and the war in Vietnam carried on in for another few years.

As the decade ended, Sly Stone started working on material slated for a new album to come out within the year. "Hot Fun in the Summertime", "Everybody Is a Star", and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" would all end up on a 1970 greatest hits package that was released during a period that the band’s Wikipedia describes as “Internal problems and a change of direction” so that the record company could keep them in the public’s eye.

Like Wikipedia says, this was a period of intra-group tension. Band relationships deteriorated, gigs were missed, and the elevated drug use moved to PCP and cocaine. Sly Stone even brought in session musicians Ike Turner, Billy Preston, Bobby Womack replaced band-mates on what was going to be called Africa Talks to You, a name that would have said something about how the 1960s counter-culture had started to ebb away and hints at the declining, arguably failing, civil rights movement and how that gave way to the rise of the Black Power movement.

By the time of the album’s eventual release, 1970 had become late 1971 and spurred on to answer Marvin Gaye’s question of that year What’s Going On they answered; There’s A Riot Goin’ On.

Despite all this trouble, the album still had two big singles, including another number one, and was a #1 album to boot. It is one of the strangest US number one records based on the left turn in subject and style, one of the nearest approximations I can think of is a record like Radiohead’s Kid A succeeding despite (or because of) its oddness. Great chunks of the record were recorded at Stone’s home studio. Despite the songs on the album being amongst the first to use a drum machine, he manually overdubbed the drum sounds, giving the whole record a muddy, dank, gritty feel, accentuated but his slow and mumbling vocals in many places.

The final track is a cover or reinterpretation (delete as appropriate) of their earlier song and number one single, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)". This version is a slower and drugged-out version of that song. With references to “Everyday People”, “Sing A Simple Song”, “You Can Make It If You Try”, and “Dance To The Music”. The song is heavy and dense, even in the context of what has gone on before. The other record that I and others feel it has a kinship with is The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St., which has that air of participants who’ve had sunglasses on all month but haven’t been exposed to any natural light.

The song itself might not leave much in the way of an impression on you throughout the runtime - if you are familiar with the earlier song, that will always colour your interpretation. As per most of the album, it is a song that has an atmosphere, a vibe and a mood that are hard to pin down but the takeaway you have is of a piece that encapsulates the voyage that the band had gone on over the two years from Psychedelic soul to one of the first funk records - providing a template for the rest of the 1970s, providing a framework for the likes of Parliament/Funkadelic to run with.

As an ending, it invites you into a world that is paranoid, drugged-out, rigid with racial tension and social fracturing. In other words, welcome to the 1970s.