Having achieved great success with their 1969 album Stand! and performance at Woodstock, Sly & the Family Stone were due to have submitted an album of new recordings to Epic Records by 1970. However, Sly Stone missed several recording deadlines, worrying CBS executive Clive Davis, and a Greatest Hits album was released in an eighteen-month stretch during which the band released no new material, By 1970, Stone had become erratic and moody, missing nearly a third of the band’s concert dates.A rift developed between Sly and the rest of the band, which led to drummer Gregg Errico’s departure in early 1971. There’s a Riot goin’ on is Stone’s darker, more conceptual work that was influenced by his drug use and the events that writer Miles Marshall Lewis called “the death of the sixties”; political assassinations, police brutality, the decline of the civil rights movement and social disillusionment.
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