“Landscape” is just one of those words. It’s lost all mouthfeel. It implies a sort of vastness — “the landscape of history,” “the landscape of man,” “the commercial baking landscape.” As craft, it connotes comeliness: “landscape painting.” In action, it exacts beauty through order: a city’s landscaper.
Sly Stone died on Monday, at 82, and there it was again. He “redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” declared an official news release. It’s more like landscapes. But who’d deny the gist? I’m sitting here studying a photo of Stone and his band, the Family Stone, five dudes, two chicks, two white, five black. For a racially traumatized America, here was a landscape that redefined “landscape,” too.
The band was his idea, as were their songs. What they redefined was how much sound and rhythm you could pack into three minutes — often, into less. The opening 15 seconds of their first hit, “Dance to the Music,” are a blast, like from a launchpad: Greg Errico beats the skins off his drums while Cynthia Robinson screams for you to get up. The horns sound drunk; Freddie Stone’s guitar sounds like it’s responding to a 9-1-1 call.
Then at about the 16th second — mid-flight — the ascending party halts and a doo-wop parachute opens. Harmony and tambourine lilt to earth, whereupon we’re exhorted to … dance to the music. Lyrically, all that’s happening here is instruction, pronouncement. “I’m gonna add some bottom,” bellows Larry Graham, “so that the dancers just won’t hide,” before his motorific bass lick starts peeling wallflowers off the wall.
This, to paraphrase another Sly gemstone, is a simple song that, musically, teems with, to quote a different gemstone, a vital songwriting and performance philosophy: fun. What else is happening here? Well, the landscapers are celebrating the landscape of themselves. They’re warming up, warming us up, banging out their promise of redefinition. Motown, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, marching band, jazz, lullaby. For about three years, every one their hits was most of all of those: America’s sounds pressed together into radical newness by seven people who dared to embody a utopia that, come 1968, when the band was reaching it apogee, seemed otherwise despoiled. For three years, this band was disillusionment’s oasis.