There are surprisingly few good bootleg recordings for Sly and the Family Stone in their prime years. Heck, surprisingly few live recordings, period, other their their classic performance at the 1969 Woodstock festival. After hearing Stone died, I looked around bootleg sharing sites, and found this bootleg concert. It's an audience boot, which often isn't up to my sound quality standards. However, it's an unusually good audience boot. That's still not as good as a soundboard or radio show boot, but it's pretty close.
To sweeten the pot a bit, I made a couple of fixes. For one, I reduced the crowd noise during the songs (while keeping it at the ends of songs) using the UVR5 audio editing program. I also boosted the lead vocals in some places, though it didn't need fixing for some songs. And there were a couple of drop outs where the music stopped for a second or two, and I fixed those as well. Plus, I cut out several minutes that were pretty boring at the beginning. Some of that was just lots of cheering. But also, Sly Stone gave kind of a speech at the beginning, and I chopped that down to just the more interesting parts.
By the way, this boot was recorded by someone named Joe Maloney. According to the notes that came with the version I found, the audience had to wait an hour and a quarter between the opening band and Sly and the Family Stone going on stage. This wasn't surprising, because by 1970 Sly Stone had become famous for being late to his own concerts, or missing them altogether, usually due to drug use. According to the Wikipedia article on Stone, in 1970, one fourth of the band's concerts were cancelled, while many of the others started very late.
Maloney claims it was later found out that Stone was caught using heroin by the police during that wait time, but they ultimately decided to let him go on stage anyway to prevent the crowd from possibly rioting. I don't know if that's true - how would audience members know what happened behind the scenes, anyway? But that sort of thing did happen to Stone sometimes during this time period, because his drug use was out of control. However, Maloney claims that "As soon as the music started,
it was like a switch had been flipped and Sly and the band came to life, turning in a performance that I still consider one of the ten best shows I've ever seen."
Sadly, the most surprising thing about Stone's death in 2025 is probably that he lived that long. He released a lot of great music in the 1960s and early 1970s, despite having a serious drug addiction from 1969 on. But drugs eventually took control of his life, and his great musical talent was largely wasted. He wrote an autobiography (or had it ghost written, probably) which was published in 2023, and a majority of it is an account of his life-long struggle with drug addiction. But still, he did great things when he was at his peak, which is amply shown in this concert.
This album is an hour and six minutes long.
01 talk (Sly & the Family Stone)
02 Thank You [Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin] (Sly & the Family Stone)
03 M'Lady (Sly & the Family Stone)
04 talk (Sly & the Family Stone)
05 Sing a Simple Song (Sly & the Family Stone)
06 Stand (Sly & the Family Stone)
07 You Can Make It If You Try (Sly & the Family Stone)
08 Dance to the Music (Sly & the Family Stone)
09 Music Lover (Sly & the Family Stone)
10 I Want to Take You Higher (Sly & the Family Stone)
11 Hot Fun in the Summertime (Sly & the Family Stone)
12 I Want to Take You Higher [Reprise] (Sly & the Family Stone)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/h4mV4Wjb
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/aRU1hZQcn3onmQ3/file
The cover is a close up of Sly Stone's head when he was young. I don't know any more details.
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