There's A Riot Going On!

 Brian Wilson and Sly Stone in the same week. Not an obvious pairing - other than being Californians having drug and mental health issues that obscured their genius.

I do not think myself a Beach Boys fan; I never did hear all of Pet Sounds. They were big just before I got conscious of music on the radio, and when I did get old enough, the band was a parody of themselves. However, who doesn't know The Beach Boys songs? Who denies the brilliance of "Good Vibrations"?

Sly and The Family Stone were everywhere on the radio when I was young. Those were the days of AM radio, before the racial segregation of FM radio arrived on the scene. This white boy thought they were great. These were records I wanted and bought.

Better eulogies than I what my talent could provide have popped up like mushrooms after the rain.

Brian Wilson was made for these times (Engelsberg ideas)

Surfing, sunshine and sand dominated the first ten studio albums released by The Beach Boys and it wasn’t until the eleventh, Pet Sounds, that form and content merged in the Wilson oeuvre.

Three songs in particular signalled that his own voice  had broken through. God Only Knows is a poignant and ambiguous song about the possibity of lost love and I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times with the opening line, ‘I keep looking for a place to fit in’, was explicitly autobiographical.

And then came a single – Good Vibrations – the complex composition of which effectively created entirely new styles for pop. This has been described as ‘the most influential pop recording in history.’ Wilson had turned the studio into a single instrument, an innovation that introduced psychedelia into rock and roll. His equals acknowledged the depth of his talent.

Bob Dylan remarked, ‘That ear! I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.’

That singular ‘ear’ was unintentially ironic. Wilson had lost much of his hearing in his right ear, possibly as a result of a blow from his father. This made him speak from the side of his mouth giving people the impression he had experienced a stroke.

Paul McCartney, meanwhile, described God Only Knows as ‘the greatest song ever written’, and of Pet Sounds he said ‘I figure no one is educated musically until they’ve heard that album.’ Wilson admitted ‘The Beatles inspired me, they didn’t influence me.’ He was an almost exact coeval of McCartney – they were born two days apart in 1942.

In truth, the Beatles drove him to ever greater efforts in the studio. He clearly wanted to make the Beach Boys the greatest band in the world; equally clearly, he often succeeded. Speaking in 1966, he said, ‘The Beatles invasion shook me up a lot… So we stepped on the gas a little bit.’

The problem that haunted the Beach Boys in the sixties was Wilson’s instability. In 1964 on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston – it was the start of a two week tour – he broke down, sobbing uncontrollably. He played Houston but was replaced by Glen Campbell for the rest of the tour. In 1966, he said it was ‘the first of three breakdowns’.

There was a sense in which Wilson’s talent thrilled everybody else but seemed to trouble him. He believed that all music ‘starts with religion’ and spoke of a ‘high being who is better than we are’ while insisting that he was not ‘traditionally religious.’ The effects of LSD were to enhance the sense of something beyond. He certainly thought of it as a religious experience: ‘I learned a lot of things, like patience, understanding. I can’t teach you, or tell you what I learned from taking it.’

‘The joy shot out of his voice’: Ray Davies, Graham Nash and others on Brian Wilson’s songwriting genius (The Guardian)

Twelve of Brian Wilson’s greatest songs – from surf to psychedelia and beyond  (The Guardian)

Whether wistful or euphoric, Brian Wilson made pop’s most overwhelmingly beautiful music (The Guardian)

They enabled him to complete a new version of Smile, provoking more shows performing the album in full. Incredible as it would once have seemed, Brian Wilson spent most of the 21st century as a touring artist, a dependable bringer of joy to festivals and high-profile shows. Occasionally, concerns were raised about Wilson’s wellbeing – he could appear disengaged and confused onstage – but in interviews he insisted that it was where he wanted to be.

It was a happy ending of sorts to a story that, at one point, seemed destined to end horribly. But, for a moment, let’s try and forget the story – the myth of Brian Wilson, if you like – entirely. Instead, just play Good Vibrations, or Don’t Worry Baby, or California Girls, or Caroline No, and marvel at what he achieved, rather than what lurked behind those achievements. Pop music as perfect as pop music is ever likely to get: music you can bathe in.

Brian Wilson Is My Brick - by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker) 

Brian Wilson’s Symphony of Life (Pitchfork)

Sly Stone turned isolation into inspiration, forging a path for a generation of music-makers 

In the fall of 1971, Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” landed like a quiet revolution. After two years of silence following the band’s mainstream success, fans expected more feel-good funk from the ensemble.

What they got instead was something murkier and more fractured, yet deeply intimate and experimental. This was not just an album; it was the sound of a restless mind rebuilding music from the inside out.

At the center of it all was front man Sly Stone.

Long before the home studio became an industry norm, Stone, who died on June 9, 2025, turned the studio into both a sanctuary and an instrument. And long before sampling defined the sound of hip-hop, he was using tape and machine rhythms to deconstruct existing songs to cobble together new ones.

As someone who spends much of their time working on remote recording and audio production – from building full arrangements solo to collaborating digitally across continents – I’m deeply indebted to Sly Stone’s approach to making music.

He was among the first major artists to fully embrace the recording environment as a space to compose rather than perform. Every reverb bounce, every drum machine tick, every overdubbed breath became part of the writing process

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Music scholar Will Fulton, in his study of Black studio innovation, notes how producers like Stone helped pioneer a fragment-based approach to music-making that would become central to hip-hop’s DNA. Stone’s process anticipated the mentality that a song isn’t necessarily something written top to bottom, but something assembled, brick by brick, from what’s available.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Stone’s tracks have been sampled relentlessly. In “Bring That Beat Back,” music critic Nate Patrin identifies Stone as one of the most sample-friendly artists of the 1970s – not because of his commercial hits, but because of how much sonic space he left in his tracks: the open-ended grooves, unusual textures and slippery emotional tone.

You can hear his sounds in famous tracks such as 2Pac’s “If My Homie Calls,” which samples “Sing a Simple Song”; A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Jam,” which draws from “Family Affair”; and De La Soul’s “Plug Tunin’,” which flips “You Can Make It If You Try.” 

Sly Stone, pioneering funk and soul musician, dies aged 82 (The Guardian)

How Sly & the Family Stone's "Thank You Falettin Me" Hit No. 1 (Billboard)

Sly Stone, the artist who changed music history and disappeared: ‘He had everything and almost deliberately threw it away’ (EL PAÍS English)

Sly Stone’s Funky Revolution (Pitchfork)

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson both revolutionized music (AP News), but their stories had a divergence, too. Was it something personal to them, or is it that one was white and the other black, or some combination of the two? Or is like Funkadelic

But there is another thing. Sly did an album called There's a Riot Going On, and The Beach Boys did this song:

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