This month is Sly September here on Edge of the Line, in honour of 2026 marking 60 years since the formation of Sly and the Family Stone.

Fresh arrived in 1973, two years after There's a Riot Goin' On. It was widely interpreted as lighter, and closer to the Family Stone’s early work, but is quite far removed from from cheery pop hits like ‘Dance To The Music’ and ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’.

Sly had taken longer than the label wanted to hand in Riot (although two years after Stand!, by today’s standards, is hardly extreme), and he took another couple of years to work on Fresh.

There is perhaps no track that better symbolises Sly’s unhurried sense of time than the opening song, ‘In Time’. He even pokes fun at the record’s supposed delay (“Two years, too long to wait”).

The song starts with a deep bass sound, mixed up front and central to both Riot and Fresh. The first 40 seconds are instrumental, before the bass, and then the organ, play chords that beg for a resolution. And then to the verse groove – the one infectious enough to sustains a 5-plus-minute song with few other chord changes. Drums, guitar, staccato organ chords and stabs of trumpet play interlocking rhythms that even keen listeners struggle to comprehend.  

Miles Davis was a big fan of ‘In Time’. According to Sly (who knew Miles), and many others, the jazz great “played it over and over again for his band, trying to work out the rhythms of it, failing.”

One thing that’s a little easier to understand is the bass’s emphasis of the One. Sly had quickly picked that up from James Brown, and hadn’t forgotten it despite his adventures into looser realms of funk. Considering they are two of the three foremost forefathers of funk, along with George Clinton, Brown and Sly rarely acknowledged each other.

In his autobiography, Brown only mentions Sly and his band when both were playing the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969 and the Festival of Hope in 1972. In Sly’s own memoir, there are only similarly brief mentions of Brown (the Godfather of Soul called Sly when the latter was rehabbing at a mental health clinic on judge’s orders).

Sly does acknowledge Brown’s influence, calling him one of the artists “who had made me want to swing in the first place”, along with Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Jackie Wilson.

Sly described ‘In Time’ as “Funky as hell” and one of his favourite songs. He had the organ part in his mind, and then the guitar. Sly programmed beats, still working with the Rhythm King that he’d used all over Riot, and then added Andy Newmark (who had replaced Greg Errico) “over the top of the programmed beats”. Sly taught Newmark the drum part “and then let him loose to play it.”

(For any Sly fans, his memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), is a thoroughly entertaining, funny, and sometimes frustrating read. In typical Sly fashion, he explains what he wants to, and avoids explaining what he doesn’t. He makes no apologies for his questionable and occasionally indefensible behaviour. It was written in collaboration with Ben Greenman, who also collaborated with Clinton on his memoir.)

Sly explained ‘In Time’’s lyrics more explicitly than most others.

“There’s a mickie in the tasting of the disaster / In time, you get faster.”

This was Sly saying, “Fame speeds everything up and you have to speed yourself too or you get left behind”.

That theme was in another line, Sly said, sung later in the opening verse:

“Switched from Coke to Pep / Now I’m on a connoisseur”,

which plays on Coca-Cola and Pepsi, as well as his cocaine and amphetamines habit.

Elsewhere, Sly sings about “getting in your own way and the intoxication of fame:

“I felt so good I told the leader how to follow.”

And he sings about “seeking wisdom” and “the weight of waiting on yourself”:

“Harry Hippie is a waste if he hasta / Procrasti...nating.”

‘Harry Hippie’ was a Bobby Womack song (Sly and Bobby were friends) that Jimmy Ford had penned. Harry Womack was the bassist brother to Bobby. Harry also got a shoutout in ‘Love City’, on Life (1968).

Sly wrote that ‘Dance to the Music’, written in recognition that audiences hadn’t quite caught on to the Family Stone’s debut LP, A Whole New Thing (popular among contemporary musicians and those that followed), “hadn’t meant much except itself.” Now, according to Sly, ‘In Time’ “was a song that maybe meant too much. It was a question of where the meaning stopped.”

Top image from Discogs.