Back On the Right Track

Performer: Sly & the Family Stone
Engineer: Joseph Baker; Serge Reyes
Distributor: Alternative Dis. Alliance

Notes: Sly & The Family Stone: Sylvester Stewart (keyboards, harmonica); Freddie Stewart (guitar, background vocals); Hamp Banks, Joseph Baker (guitar); Cynthia Robinson, Pat Rizzo, Steve Madalo, Gary Gerbig (horns); Mark Davis, Walter Downing (keyboards); Keni Burke (bass); Alvin Taylor (drums); Ollie E. Brown (percussion); Rose Banks, Lisa Banks, Jo Baker (background vocals); . Recorded at The Sound Factory, Hollywood, California. Originally released on Warner Bros (3303). Personnel: Joseph Baker (guitar); Gary Herbig, Steve Madaio (horns); Rose Banks, Joe Baker (background vocals). By the late '70s, Sly Stone had been so thoroughly written off as a has-been that few listeners checked out Back on the Right Track. Nor have listeners been inspired to rediscover the album, since his late-'60s/early-'70s classics cast such a huge shadow over his subsequent work. It comes as somewhat of a surprise, then, to find the basic Stone soul/rock/funk foundation still firmly in place here. There were two problems: the foundation didn't make any notable advancements on the territory he'd already mapped out by the early '70s, and the songs themselves weren't that special, sounding more like basic vamps or promising scraps than fully baked ideas. Judged solely on its own terms, it's actually a respectable slice of funk; it's only when stacked against Stone's other works that the disappointment becomes intense. ~ Richie Unterberger

Uncut (8/01, p.89) - "...The sound is clean and funk itchy-tight..."

Sylvester Stewart, known to the world as Sly Stone, had a musical vision that coalesced quickly in the late 1960s and sadly disintegrated after half a decade. As the leader of Sly & the Family Stone, he and his combination hippie commune/soul revue melded funk with psychedelia in a revolutionary manner. Sly's lyrical themes shifted from peace and love to scathing social commentaries that made for some of the strongest political statements of the era. Unfortunately, by the turn of the decade he began to lose himself in a netherworld of drug addiction from which he never really recovered.

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