Spin's Sly Spin on My Spin on Sly Stone

Spent four glorious days last week in my original NYC home sweet home. Swung by the offices of Vibe and Spin (still a building apart after all these years) last Friday. Wrote something in the latest 15th anniversary issue of Vibe, a “best songs of the Vibe era” thing with some of the illustrious mag’s other bygone music editors: Erik Parker, Jon Caramanica, Danyel Smith (currently head editor-in-chief). I’ll write reams one day about writers’ and readers’ love/hate relationship with Vibe since its inception, but for now: happy anniversary, guys. I popped by Spin for a copy of their old April 2006 issue with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Never got to see writer Sean Howe’s review of my 33 1/3 book on Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. They gave it a B-, and I was a pretty B- student, so there it is. The Spin review:

In 1971 Sylvester Stewart (a.k.a. Sly Stone) took an unlikely approach to creating utopian pop: In a Bel Air mansion he mixed PCP and cocaine, surrounded himself with shotguns, an ex-pimp turned bodyguard, and drum machines, and produced a darkly brilliant record that made “Everyday People” sound like a sham. But in this entry in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of classic album dissections, Lewis retreads too much backstory from Joel Selvin and Dave Marsh’s superior Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History (which details baby-eating pit bulls and twin-sister threesomes), leaving himself a mere 20 pages to riff on the record itself.