Track Listing

1. In Time
2. If You Want Me to Stay
3. Let Me Have It All
4. Frisky
5. Thankful N' Thoughtful
6. Skin I'm In
7. I Don't Know (Satisfaction)
8. Keep on Dancin'
9. Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)
10. If It Were Left Up to Me
11. Babies Makin' Babies

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117345 in Music
• Released on: 1991-07-01
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Stripped down and funky beyond words, 1973's Fresh is quite simply the last great album by Sly & the Family Stone. Funkadelic guru George Clinton, a man who knows something about genre cross-wiring, tabbed Fresh as one of his all-time favorites and convinced the Red Hot Chili Peppers to cut "If It Were Left Up To Me" for their 1985 Clinton-produced LP Freaky Styley. Jazz icon Miles Davis reportedly sat his band down to soak up inspiration from multiple playings of Fresh, a work ranked #186 in Rolling Stone's top 500 rock albums of all time. "If You Want Me To Stay," "Frisky" and "If It Were Left Up To Me" all got plenty of airplay and chart action, the last of Sly's works to score such treatment. Following the almost-scary political manifesto of 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On, Fresh seems particularly, well, fresh! And a little nasty too!

Amazon.com
Coming as it did on the heels of the utterly whacked There's a Riot Goin' On, 1973's Fresh surprised a lot of Sly fans by actually living up to its name. The weariness and paranoia of Riot are totally missing in action, replaced by a relaxed optimism that seems to shine from every note of tracks like "If You Want Me to Stay" and "In Time." The band--newly buttressed by the rhythm section of Rusty Allen and Andy Newmark--plays it loose and funky, and Sly's oddball sense of humor resurfaces on a cover of Doris Day's "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)." Sadly, Sly would never again make a record even half as fresh as Fresh. --Dan Epstein

Customer Reviews

Larry Graham is one hard man to replace
The 4 stars are only 4 when compared to "There's a Riot Going On," the greatest and purest Pop-Rock-Funk record of the '70s, and my all-time favorite thoroughly transcendent popular music achievement after Hendrix's "Band of Gypsies," Peter Gabriel's "Security," and the 1972 opus "Close to the Edge" from Yes; compared to almost everything else though an easy 5 stars.

The main problem is the absence of Larry Graham, one of the baddest cats to ever play the bass guitar. Rusty Allen does a competent job in his place, but competent doesn't cut it: since Graham's style is personality driven through the technique as much as Jack Bruce's or Jaco Pasorious's. In fact, without Graham's influence Jaco Pasorious, Alphonso Johnson, Stanley Clarke, Ralphe Armstrong, and all those other super-technical funk-based bass players of the '70s would've lost maybe half the main licks that form the basis of their playing. Everything funky in the '70s came directly from Graham who opened up what the bass players in James Brown's bands did all the way through and adapted it to the much more complicated Sly compositions.

What many people don't realize because the music sounds so 'natural,' is that Sly was actually a trained musician. He studied music for 3 years in college in the early '60s and had a comprehensive knowledge of all types of music which he drew on. The stuff he composed, as 'natural' as it sounds, is way more sophisticated and subtle than what most jazz players of the period did: string a few interesting chord changes together and improvise over it. Not that improvisation can't be called composing: but only at its absolute best. No wonder Miles Davis started playing fusion in this period! Sly and Hendrix and all the other brilliant rock acts of the period forced him to. It wasn't any type of 'sell-out,' it was an artistic necessity. How can you not want to keep up in some way when revolutionary records of pop-culture sophistication are being made all around you? And there's no purer form of pop-culture sophistication than the dense miniature universes of Sly's tunes from the heydey of the Family Stone: Prince sure had a good model to strive towards when he started his bands.

Graham had had enough of Sly's ego-tripping eccentricities, and Sly had had enough of Graham's, in fact, they bitterly hated each other at this point and both had bodyguards to protect them and intimidate the other, sort of like some gangsta rap stars these days! After a particulary hairy incident described in Joel Selvin's book on Sly and the 'Family," Graham left forver to form his own band Graham Central Station. This very scary, thoroughly drugged-out period of the band's demise is documented in Selvin's book through conversations with members of the band and those around them, the only one to deal honestly with the mysteries of what happened. Some 10 years after this period Sly and George Clinton were busted together for drug posession, though according to some reports in the early '90s Bobby Womack had helped Sly get clean and yet another 'comback album' was in the works. At the Rock 'n' Roll hall-of-fame induction, Sly did not speak to any of the other former members of the band present, including his brother and sister. This was maybe the saddest irony of all, that the most unifying, barrier-transcending band of the '60s should even now after 25 years only exist as yet another tragic demonstration of alienated fragmentation. Sly's 'comback' albums have all been either disappointing or just plain embarrassing, and the latest project supposedly entitled "Phuture Phunk" has been 'in the works' since 1997. Judging by his output in the past 20 years, I wouldn't hold my breath that it'll drop anytime soon, nor that it would match the Grahamless but still excellent last gasp of a once awe-inspiring group: "Fresh."

And, it goes without saying that anyone out there who likes this kind of 'dated' and superior-as-hell 'old school' music from the '70s, should check out the reissue of "Inspiration Information/Freedom Flight" by Shuggie Otis, Sly's label-mate, one of the great forgotten masterpieces of the '70s.

Aptly titled
"Stand" and "Riot" are better known and arguably more "important" albums. But "Fresh" is in some ways Sly's loosest and most accessible album and might be my favorite. It's certainly the one that sounds the least dated today. All the tracks have an easy funkiness to them, though I must admit I still can't quite get into his bizarro cover of "Que Sera, Sera." Sly would never again make an album this good, due in part to the drug problem he cleverly refers to here ("I switched from coke to pep, and I'm a connoisseur") and the fact that the group was falling apart.

If you really want some fun, seek out the rare alternate version of this disk, which Epic mistakenly pressed when the album was first put on CD. They quickly recalled it, but there are still copies out there. All the songs but "In Time" are different in some way - generally they seem to be in earlier stages of production or have different arrangements. Many have VERY different vibes as a result. They all sound great, though, and fans of this album will love the alternate takes.

Sly and the Family's near masterpiece.
To me, nothing represents the true essence of funky R&B like Sly and the Family--except mebbe some of that early Parliafunkadelic thang. This was Sly's last entry in what was known as his "Trilogy of Funk"; the first two albums were "Stand" and "There's A Riot...". Superstar bassist, basso profundo (barotone profundo?) Larry Graham went on to do his own thing, Andy Newmark replaced the original drum guy, and Sly was maybe gettin' a little bit too snowed in for his own good...but nevermind all that, listen to how great this album is. The band was as tight as Dick's hatband. Sly's vocals were somewhere between a church preacher's fire and brimstone rantings and the friendly neighborhood drunk everyone knew--like everyday people. Although mebbe some of the cuts were too inaccessible for radio play, but I remember hearing "Frisky"--the album's not-too-well-hidden-double-entendre-d(!?!)piece on pop radio at that time. The most recent Epic records release of the album on CD has outtake mixes, rather than the final product I remember hearing in '73-74, but that's ok, too. That's one of the things that makes "Fresh" very compelling--from the gospel-blues tinged Doris Day classic,"Que Sera, Sera" to the confessional grooves, "Thankful and Thoughtful" and "In Time". A near masterpiece.