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Glenn’s tribute to Sly
An acclaimed pioneer of psychedelia, funk, soul, and racial integration in music, Sly Stone (real name Sylvester Stewart) of the Sly and the Family Stone fame has passed away at the age of 82. Louder Sound quotes Glenn Hughes in their obituary:
The big turning point for me was when I first went over to America with my band Trapeze in the very early 70s. I turned on the radio and heard Sly & The Family Stone. The likes of Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding and Donnie Hathaway had influenced me vocally, but Sly Stone’s music had a deeper resonance. Especially on [fifth album] There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Thank You For Takin’ To Me Africa, Family Affair… songs like that. It sounded just superhuman to me.
When Sly sang he used two or three different voices, which influenced the way I started to sing, from real deep down to kinda screamy – that was just me. Well, it was going to be me.
When you play Stormbringer and you listen to You Can’t Do It Right, Hold On and Love Don’t Mean A Thing – the way Ritchie played, it’s funky. The way Ritchie hooked in with me, Paicey and Lordy, that’s some funky stuff. We didn’t use the word ‘funk’ then because that might’ve offended some rock fans. But it’s the whole core of who I am. Thanks to Sly Stone, when I joined Purple I added a swagger that wasn’t there before. I feel good about that.
Thanks to MacGregor for pointing this out.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Glenn’s first solo album, Play Me Out, the first song on that? Basically a Sly Stone tribute:
https://youtu.be/FMMTvg426Y0
That Woodstock performance by Sly was legendary stuff too:
https://youtu.be/tQ0PSpHFV_s
June 11th, 2025 at 04:45Thanks for that Sly and the Family Stone clip Uwe. The Ed Sullivan one, kicking serious butt there, quite a bouncy tune. Before all the shite of drugs etc kicked in, a shame as we often say. That drummer Greg Errico, an excellent player indeed and still going to this day. Rest easy Sly, where ever you are.
June 11th, 2025 at 07:29Great stuff indeed. I always thought it a pity that there are not that many artists around that combine funky grooves with a bit hard edged sounds and heavy riffing. GH did it with Trapeze and in DP, Mother’s Finest spring to mind, who were excellent but never made the big time, Dan Reed Network too… I never understood why many bands (or rather their fans obviously) prefer a steamhammer approach to their rhythm. Why not groove and blast at the same time? It can be done. Just ask Ted.
June 11th, 2025 at 08:56I think it was Simon Robinson who “mistakenly” named Stormbringer “Deep Purple in Funk”…
June 11th, 2025 at 10:54@1…Uwe that first album with Glenn is so different then the next two, i need a woman 👩🏻
June 11th, 2025 at 11:31You know what’s definitely weird? That throughout all his decades of making music, Glenn who has soaked up Black Music so much was never seen with Black musicians much. Sure, he met Stevie Wonder and auditioned for Earth, Wind & Fire (turned down for being “too rock”), but you never saw him with Black cats in one of his bands. He’s championed all-Black band Living Color and even his sartorial style owes as bow to Black fashion, but he regularly surrounds himself with only white musicians.
I’m far from asserting any racial bias with him – I remember a German review of Play Me Out that stated: “Former DP bassist Glenn Hughes embraces Black Music on this record with so much sweaty sincerity and true soul, you cannot help but applaud him. And be touched by it.”, but is he maybe overawed by the people that have musically influenced him so much? He has said he lives in fear of rejection, yet I’m pretty sure that even an artistic recluse such as Prince would have jammed with him given the chance (Prince regularly had white people in his backing bands as did Rick James).
Just wondering. If I ever met him, that is the one question I would ask him. Sort of “Why did you never create your own Mother’s Finest?”
I’m with my long lost twin brother Max, I don’t get the funk-antagonism prevailing in rock either – some of it permeates even this site here, all that accusatory moaning of “But Glenn brought funk to DP!” as if it was some kind of venereal disease. Christ, even a band as white bread heavy metal as Judas Priest dabbled with funk:
https://youtu.be/KATlCwKZKp4
And the guys from whiter than white AOR outfit Night Ranger, Brad Gillis (who followed Bernie Tormé in Ozzy’s band) and Jack Blades, used to play with ex-Sly & the Family Stone members (Jerry Martini) in San Francisco local heroes Rubicon
https://youtu.be/r6kkcN2dZBI
https://youtu.be/l31O6whUdGk
Yup, same two guys you see here rock in’ out, singing + playing bass and playing lead guitar (on the right – Jeff Watson, who would go on to play with JoLT and Bob Daisley in Mothers Army, is the guy on the left):
https://youtu.be/GSWPTU_krTY
And those well-rehearsed Rubicon Black Funk dance band choreo moves & routines always stuck with them too @02:58 … 🤣
Lovely band, Night Ranger, great fan of theirs.
You know, not all good energy music needs to be rock:
https://youtu.be/nMb1i88BkMM
June 11th, 2025 at 15:31@ 6 – Shame on Uwe, it is Living Colour, the correct spelling. When asked about that by Robert Fripp (who admired the band) in a 1990’s guitar interview, Vernon Reid simply said, because that is the correct spelling man, ha ha ha. I could put that down to a simple little ‘typo’ though Uwe, we all make them, however the jury is still out on that one at present! Cheers.
June 11th, 2025 at 22:24Just listen to Glenn’s solo album Feel, and you get the Funk and Soul sound of say, maybe… Play Me Out.
June 12th, 2025 at 11:50In this particular theat(r)e(r) of expression, I labo(u)r with all that weird archaic m(o)ustached Brit spelling much as I am enamo(u)red with Brit culture. 🫣
Honestly, I didn‘t know Vernon‘s men spelled themselves with an ‘o’, they’re friggin’ Yanks, not Limeys! I went to an American school, wrote and spoke American English for most of my professional life, have my autocorrect set to American English and even have an American accent when speaking – duh! 😂
But Brit expressions creep in all the time too – that comes from having worked in a Brit law firm for so long, reading Brit music magazines in the past and present plus also The Guardian as one of my dailies.
June 12th, 2025 at 13:15Yes Feel, Play Me Out and F.U.N.K. are his three funkiest solo outings – none of them however sold particularly well! 🙁
June 12th, 2025 at 13:27@ 9 – I am well aware that your younger school days were in America Uwe. That is why I gave you an ‘out’ with the possible ‘typo’. However, research ole son research…………….says the pupil to the ‘master’. Cheers.
June 12th, 2025 at 22:42It goes back even more deeply: I come from the more southern part of Germany that is the former American Occupation Zone (the British Occupation Zone was farther up north and to the west). We were under the influence of American English for decades, AFN (the American Forces Network radio) and there were American garrisons everywhere, the GIs mingling a lot – every larger town had clubs and discos frequented by chiefly US personnel.
And even most British bands sang with/faked what they believed was an American accent, bands such as The Small Faces, Cockney Rebel/Steve Harley and Status Quo who sang with a cockney slant were rare, at least in the 60s and early 70s. Gillan never sang with a London accent, Hughes never with a Brummie one (except for a on-sentence hilarious spoken quip in First Step Of Love: “You’re not to blame.” 😆) and Coverdale never with a Yorkshire Coast one (though they all made announcements with their local inflections).
I really didn’t have a lot of contact with Brit accents in one-on-one communication until we had our merger with a Brit firm in 2000. And I have to say that initially I found British accents quite a bit harder to understand than American ones – I simply wasn’t used to them and Yanks, even New Yorkers, generally speak slower than Limeys. I remember watching an early Harry Potter movie in the noughties and it was so drenched with the weirdest Brit accents, I only understood like 80% of it. 🙄
It’s no longer an issue, 25 years in a Brit law firm and UK origin NETFLIX series helped a lot. I still find it amusing though how US critics get worked up about (badly) fake(d) American accents by British actors and their Brit counterparts about UK accents attempted by Yanks – it seems to be a national sport on both sides. 😎
And when we spent four weeks in NZ that was quite a transition too initially!
Finally, I didn’t know that Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid was Brit-born (I dutifully researched, isn’t it terrible how my subconscious racial bias automatically regarded Vernon as an American simply because he is black and speaks English? 😑) and that Brit spelling of the band name hence yet another underhanded attempt by those arrogant Limeys to challenge their Atlantic neighbors! 😂
June 13th, 2025 at 14:01I actually didn’t see the States until a 1981 visit to – of all places – Detroit. Other people think of Manhattan, Florida and Big Sur when they hear “USA”, I think of Detroit and the Amtrak rails that went by the house of the family where we lived. I loved that industrial vibe Detroit oozed – this kiddies, was truly the heartland of rock and soul!
https://youtu.be/Dz4EFziVkNE
https://youtu.be/Ja-GVZ-jKac
It was like seeing a film to a Bob Seger record.
The other intense memory I have of the US is Brooklyn because I lived there for a while when I worked in Manhattan in the late 80s – I preferred Brooklyn to Manhattan, it was “more American”.
My school days under American influence were from 1972 to 1976 in Kinshasa, former Belgian Congo. “Only” an American school, but you know how the Yanks are, they create their own little world wherever they go so I was immersed in North American teenage high school culture.
https://youtu.be/Xk2NHZukTYg
I assimilated quickly, but being the steadfast character type I drew a line at succumbing to Led Zeppelin, even a young man must have principles! But to this day I have a penchant for certain US rock and pop artists that never meant a thing in Germany or Europe for that matter, but were hugely popular among American teens in the early 70s: Grand Funk Railroad, Bread, Rare Earth, Loggins & Messina & Three Dog Night. Of course Purple, Sabbath and Alice Cooper were very popular at TASOK (The American School Of Kinshasa) too.
https://emilioincongo.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/kin-tasok11-walkway-ss01.jpg
By the time I had finished this walkway up to the lockers rotunda every morning, I always knew what new albums you had to hear – and my co-students were imbued with the daily gospel according to Deep Purple! “Uwe likes heavy metal. He’s a Kraut, they all do.” 🤣
June 13th, 2025 at 17:40@ 12- “Finally, I didn’t know that Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid was Brit-born (I dutifully researched, isn’t it terrible how my subconscious racial bias automatically regarded Vernon as an American simply because he is black and speaks English.” I do hang my lowly head in shame Uwe, as I thought the same. Reid was born in London and the family moved to the USA within a year. I know, I know I should NOT have berated my master in regard to lack of ‘research’ when I did just that. As a fan of the band Living Colour (correct spelling, again), surely that is allowed, or perhaps not. Anyway, I await my due punishment with honour (honor?) and will try to promise that this will never happen again, unlike Uwe spelling of the word color (colour) for the second time. Oh well, we split hairs, we carry on in a pedantic manner attempting to score a few points here and there. Oh and I have autocorrect spelling set on Australian English or English Australian, if that means anything at all. Cheers.
June 14th, 2025 at 03:12Australian English, is that a language or a condition? 🤣
June 14th, 2025 at 12:45@ 15 – both Uwe, he he he. Cheers.
June 16th, 2025 at 01:32