Sly & the Family Stone - The Midnight Special, NBC Studios, Burbank, CA, 8-9-1974

Here's a short concert by Sly and the Family Stone from "The Midnight Special" NBC TV show.

Recently, I've discovered so much music worth posting that I'd never come across before that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. Just last week, I found most of the episodes of the "Old Grey Whistle Test" BBC TV show (as I write this in late October 2025). And a couple of days ago, I found out that all the episodes of "The Midnight Special" TV show from 1973 to 1975 have been posted on YouTube, with more being released every month. 

In 1972, there were no TV shows in the U.S. consisting of actual live performances. But producer Burt Sugarman had an idea. He knew that the three big TV networks at the time (ABC, NBC, and CBS) went off the air at 1:00 A.M. There was nothing but static for several hours after that. He suggested young people would stay up past one o'clock for a rock music show. None of the networks believed this idea would work. So Sugarman bought an hour and half of TV time from NBC, from 1:00 until 2:30, using his own money. He signed up a bunch of stars to perform on it, and got some sponsors to pay for the commercials. This pilot episode was shown in late 1972, and got enough viewers for NBC to make it a weekly show at that time slot in 1973.

The show was a big success for many years, running from 1973 to 1981. ABC quickly made their version, called "In Concert," which only lasted two years. But the CBS version, "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert," also went from 1973 to 1981. All three shows put on lots of good music. But most of the music seems to be lost, except for the occasional performances that stood out in some special way and were widely bootlegged. It's only starting in 2023 that episodes of "The Midnight Special" has started to get released on YouTube, and I only just discovered what a musical treasure trove that is.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia page for the "Midnight Special," if you want to know more:

The Midnight Special (TV series) - Wikipedia 

Most episodes were hosted by DJ Wolfman Jack. But it seems he didn't actually say that much, and each episode was also hosted by one of the musical acts performing in that show. The host act would get to perform more songs than the other acts. This album comes from an episode hosted by Sly and the Family Stone. Also on the show were Little Feat, Roger McGuinn, Elvin Bishop, and Henry Gross.

Looking to the future, I want to post a lot of music from these Midnight Special episodes. But I don't want to just post whole episodes. A lot of the musical acts that happen to be on the same show don't make for good stylistic matches. So instead I'm going to try to gather up enough songs from one particular act, even getting them from multiple episodes of the show, and lump them together into a single album. 

In this case, everything is from this one show. Sly and the Family Stone actually hosted another episode of the show, in 1973. But they played a smaller number of songs then, and all of them were the best known ones, like "Dance to the Music" and "I Want to Take You Higher." I find this 1974 episode much more interesting, because they played some different songs. There aren't a lot of live recordings from this band, and most of them contain the same few songs, generally from 1969 and 1970. The band had declined in popularity by 1974, but this performance showed they could still impress.

I don't know the name of the instrumental that starts the concert. If anyone knows the name, please let me know so I can fix that. Also, "Loose Booty" abruptly after less than two minutes, due to the show ending. The chorus was just starting when it was cut off. So I patched in the chorus from earlier, extending it by about half a minute. Then I added in some applause to give it a proper sounding ending. I also sometimes patched in applause between songs to smooth transitions. In reality, there were performances by other musical acts between nearly all of the songs here.

The music is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent. 

As an aside, it turns out I had already posted two albums from "The Midnight Special," ones by Al Green and Marvin Gaye. I just added a label for the show to make it easier to find them as I post more. 

This album is 29 minutes long. 

01 Instrumental (Sly & the Family Stone)
02 Thank You [Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin] (Sly & the Family Stone)
03 Time for Livin' (Sly & the Family Stone)
04 Family Affair (Sly & the Family Stone)
05 Dance to the Music - Music Lover - I Want to Take You Higher (Sly & the Family Stone)
06 If You Want Me to Stay (Sly & the Family Stone)
07 Stand (Sly & the Family Stone)
08 Loose Booty [Edit] (Sly & the Family Stone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/33DMJGwG

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/DC8HeURsd83rFpT/file

The cover image of Sly Stone is a screenshot I took from a video of this exact concert. Also, in the bottom left corner is a logo from the TV show that I plan to include for all the albums I post from the show.

Texas International Pop Festival, Dallas International Motor Speedway, Lewisville, TX, 9-1-1969, Part 10: Sly & the Family Stone

Finally, we come to the tenth and last album from the third and last day of the 1969 Texas International Pop Festival. The closing act was Sly and the Family Stone.

Like fellow festival stars Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter, Sly Stone was born in Texas. In fact, he was born quite close to the festival, on the outskirts of Dallas, just as the festival was on the outskirts of the city. However, the media didn't notice this. That's probably because he moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay area by the time he was a teenager. 

In 1969,  Sly and the Family Stone hit it big, with multiple hits that year. Even as the festival was going on, one of their songs, "Hot Fun in the Summertime," was Number Two in the U.S. charts. That was fitting, since the festival took place at the tail end of summer, and it was very hot for all three days.

Sly Stone was notorious for going on stage late, if he managed to make it at all, often due to heavy drug use. That was a problem with this festival too. The band's set started well after midnight, and over an hour after the previous musical act left the stage. But once the band started playing music, they put on an excellent performance. The next day, the Dallas Morning News reported that "because of the later hour, they could not perform nearly as long as the audience wanted them to." However, "Although the crowd was long on its feet, the mood continued to soar," with the song "Higher" being a highlight, as it usually was. 

Note also that the band the Nazz performed at the festival, and a little bit of their music has survived. However, I haven't included it for a couple of reasons. For one, the bootleg of it is an audience boot, and it sounds worse than the other audience boot sections of the festival. But also, the main singer and songwriter in the band was Todd Rundgren, and he'd left the band by the time this festival happened. But if you want to hear what they did, you can find 18 minutes of their set on YouTube. 

This album is 50 minutes long.

01 M'Lady [Edit] (Sly & the Family Stone)
02 Sing a Simple Song [Edit] (Sly & the Family Stone)
03 You Can Make It If You Try [Edit] (Sly & the Family Stone)
04 Stand - Love City (Sly & the Family Stone)
05 talk (Sly & the Family Stone)
06 Everyday People [Edit] (Sly & the Family Stone)
07 Dance to the Music - Music Lover [Edit] (Sly & the Family Stone)
08 Higher - I Wanna Take You Higher [Edit] (Sly & the Family Stone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/E4b5oEgb

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/qiYBztR8McLSotF/file 

The cover photo of Sly Stone is from this exact concert.

Sly & the Family Stone - Portland Campus Gym, University of Maine, Portland, ME, 10-24-1970

I'm posting this today because I heard that Sly Stone, leader of the band Sly and the Family Stone, died yesterday, June 9, 2025. He was 82 years old. 

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. 

Isle of Wight Festival, Afton Down, Isle of Wight, Britain, 8-27-1970 to 8-30-1970 - 8-29-1970: Part 8: Melanie & Sly & the Family Stone

By the time these acts played on the August 29, 1970 bill for the 1970 Isle of Wight, it was well after midnight. (Technically, I should date these performances to August 30th, but if I did that it would get messy since I often don't know which acts went on after midnight.) The still massive crowd was getting very sleepy.

With that in mind, it seems bizarre that the next acts to follow the Who were Melanie, a sensitive female singer-songwriter, and then the energetic funksters Sly and the Family Stone. But that's what happened.

In retrospect, it looks like Melanie got the shaft. She had been an unknown newcomer until she got widespread attention with her performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. Since then, she'd had a big hit in early 1970 with her song "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" about her Woodstock experience. 

Melanie later described her experience at the Isle of Wight Festival: "I had to follow The Who's performance of 'Tommy.' Nobody wanted to do it. Jim Morrison from the Doors turned it down. I don't know how I got it. I was the path of least resistance, I guess. I was all by myself. [Who drummer] Keith Moon announced me. We had spent a lot of time together that day and had become friends. He realized my situation and helped to break the ice. It was [getting near] dawn. The Who had played throughout the night. There was a friendly atmosphere but, [the audience] finished. They had just seen 'Tommy'; [Who singer] Roger Daltrey in his prime. Here I was, with just my guitar and my voice. I started to sing. The dawn was coming and the sun was rising. Little by little, I see heads popping up. I woke everybody up! I played one of my best concerts. After I did the Isle of Wight, I had two hit albums in England."

Unfortunately, I was unable to find much of Melanie's set in worthy sound quality. I've only included three songs, and I'm probably pushing it with a couple of these. Her song "What Have They Done to My Song Ma" sounds the best, because the full version was later shown in a French TV documentary.

By the time Sly and the Family Stone started their set, the sun had already come up! (You can see this with the cover photo.) The band's music is about as lively and danceable as music can be. It seemed most of the crowd did rouse themselves for the performance. However, most were too exhausted to dance and just watched.

Jerry Martini, saxophone player Jerry Martini for Sly and the Family Stone, later recalled about their set: "It was good. I just remember us playing our concert, going over well, and having a great time at the nightclub they had there – it was jam-packed. I remember leaving that with a good feeling." However, he added, "I don't think it was as good as Woodstock for us. Woodstock did the most for us, but it was way up there."

Their set ended on a down note, however. After playing about 45 minutes, the band left the stage, and didn't return for an encore. According to one account, an empty beer can was thrown and hit the lead guitar player. Lead singer Sly Stone was so upset by this that he refused to return for the encore. But another account says the people running the concert cut things off due to the schedule being so wildly late. There was a public announcement that the area near the stage had to be cleared and cleaned up. 

The good news is that what exists of the Sly and the Family Stone set sounds great, because it was released on the box set "Higher!" The bad news is that it is known the band played three more songs at the start of their set: "Thank You [Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin]," "M'Lady," and "Sing a Simple Song." I've read that worthy versions of these songs are publicly out there, but are very hard to find. If you have them, please let me know so I can add them in.

This album is 30 minutes long.

133 What Have They Done to My Song Ma (Melanie)
134 Birthday of the Sun (Melanie)
135 Good Book (Melanie)
136 Stand (Sly & the Family Stone)
137 You Can Make It If You Try (Sly & the Family Stone)
138 Dance to the Music (Sly & the Family Stone)
139 Music Lover - I Want to Take You Higher (Sly & the Family Stone)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15911802/IsleofWghtFestivlAftnDwnIsleofWghtBrtain__8-29-1970_Pt8_MlanieSlyFmilyStne.zip.html

The cover photo of Sly and the Family Stone comes from this exact concert.

Sly & the Family Stone - Harlem Cultural Festival, Harlem, NY, 6-29-1969

The posting of this album had an unusual origin. A couple of days ago, I was reading a newspaper article about new movies coming out later this year, now that people are starting to go back to movie theaters again. One of the movies mentioned is a music documentary called "Summer of Soul." It's mostly lost film footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of concerts in Harlem, New York, in the summer of 1969. I was surprised that I'd never heard of this concert before, because it featured a stellar list of soul artists, including B. B. King, Stevie Wonder, the 5th Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mavis Staples, Mahalia Jackson, David Ruffin, Hugh Masekela, and many more. It was nicknamed the "Black Woodstock," which makes sense because the more famous Woodstock took place a few hundred miles away later that same month. Apparently, 40 hours of footage was shot, but most of it just sat in some archive, forgotten until the rights were secured to make this documentary. It's coming out on July 2, 2021, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it.

You can see the Wikipedia entry about it here:

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) - Wikipedia

Anyway, while reading up on this documentary, it was mentioned that some of the footage from was aired on TV at the time, but that footage, and the concert series in general, seems to have slipped into a memory hole for decades. However, the article mentioned there was one exception, in that Sly and the Family Stone's film footage that was broadcast on TV at the time was saved and eventually made it onto YouTube. 

Naturally,  I went looking for that. I'd been looking for a good Sly and the Family Stone concert to post here for a long time. The band did a great set at Woodstock, but I don't want to post that because it's widely commercially available. Other than that, there are very few bootlegs of the band, and each one I found have some kind of issue, making them all unworthy for posting.

It seems YouTube took this film footage down a long time ago. But I found a different copy of the same footage on SoulseekQT. (SoulseekQT is amazing, people!) So, after watching it, I converted it to mp3s and cut it up into individual songs. The result is posted here. The sound quality isn't the greatest, but it's pretty good, and this bootleg beats the pants off the other bootlegs I've found.

I've read a few articles about "Summer of Soul," and I haven't found any mention of an album being released to go with the movie. I sure hope there will be one, though. Since there are hours and hours of footage, I hope they release entire sets from the major stars, just as this is the entire Sly and the Family Stone set. If and when that ever happens, I'll take this down. But for now, here it is.

This album is 40 minutes long. It includes the band's entire set. The "talk" tracks all feature the announcer. I edited down his comments some, since he talked about some less interesting stuff.

UPDATE: On January 15, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. I discovered the songs were badly mixed. The main problem was the vocals were too low in the mix. (That's such a common problem.) So I fixed that with the UVR5 program. But also, the overall volume was low. So I fixed that too. I also sharpened up the cover image with the Krea AI program.

01 talk (Sly & the Family Stone)
02 M'Lady (Sly & the Family Stone)
03 Sing a Simple Song (Sly & the Family Stone)
04 You Can Make It If You Try (Sly & the Family Stone)
05 Everyday People (Sly & the Family Stone)
06 Dance to the Music (Sly & the Family Stone)
07 Music Lover (Sly & the Family Stone)
08 I Want to Take You Higher (Sly & the Family Stone)
09 talk (Sly & the Family Stone)
10 I Want to Take You Higher [Reprise] (Sly & the Family Stone)
11 talk (Sly & the Family Stone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/YgFbjEYH

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/IOSSK2TzIuaEeNq/file

The cover photo of Sly Stone is a movie still from the upcoming documentary, from the exact concert in question. I found it with one of the articles about the documentary.

Sly & the Family Stone - The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone - Non-Album Tracks (1968-1970)

In May 1969, the Sly and the Family Stone album "Stand!" was released. In November 1971, that band released the album "There's a Riot Goin' On." Both albums are great, and are on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the top 500 albums of all time. But that's two and a half years between albums. Today, a gap like that would be typical, or even slightly speedy. But in that era, that was an eternity. Most bands released an album a year. Heck, in 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival released three hit studio albums of mostly original material!

It turns out there were plans for an album in between. In the March 19, 1970 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, an article about band leader Sly Stone stated: "Now he's finishing up an album, the most optimistic of all, with Sly Stone having gauged his power around the country. He'll call it 'The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone.' It's a line out of one of Epic's publicity releases last year." 

But the months passed, and no new album emerged. However, the band was still very popular. They released three hit singles in late 1969 that didn't appear on any album: "Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Everybody Is a Star," and "Thank You "Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin." But at the same time, Sly Stone was falling deeper and deeper into serious drug addiction, and was becoming increasingly erratic and unproductive.  For instance, he became notorious for showing up late to his band's concerts, if he showed up at all.

As a result of a lack of progress on a new album, the record company decided to put out a "Greatest Hits" album to give the fans something while everyone waited for a new album. It contained the three stand-alone hits, plus earlier hits, and was a huge seller. 

I've decided to try to put together a 1970 studio album instead. But even though the proposed album had a title, I don't think it ever got to the point of having a song list. There already has been a big Sly and the Family Stone box set, but only one relevant unreleased song appeared on it. So what I've done is taken pretty much every good song from the band I could find up through and including 1970 and gathered them into an album. It's not THE lost album spoken of in that Rolling Stone article, but it's full of quality songs and makes for a great listen just the same.

I started with the three hit songs mentioned above. Then I added in outtakes from the previous two albums which have since appeared as bonus tracks and/or on the box set, plus the song from the box set. All those songs make up most of the album. I also added "This Is Love" from the band's 1974 album "Small Talk." I could be wrong, but I understand the band was running low on new material at the time, as Sly Stone's drug problem got worse, so they used this track that was actually recorded in 1969 or 1970.

But on top of that, I've added in three songs that technically aren't Sly and the Family Stone songs at all. What was a band song is somewhat fluid. Although Sly Stone was the leader, it was a genuine band, and many songs had prominent lead vocals by other band members. I figured if a song was written or co-written by him, was produced by him, and was performed and sung by him and/or other members of the band, that was good enough for me. He actually spent some of his energies during that long gap between albums coming up with songs for his female vocalists, who were called "Little Sister." I've included the two songs they released that he wrote. I've also included one song by Abaco Dream, which wasn't a real band at the time, but instead was the name for a collaboration between soul singer Joe Hicks and Sly and the Family Stone.

If you add up all those songs, it makes 43 minutes of music, which is an ideal album length for the era. Even though many of the songs are album outtakes, I think most or all of them are as good as the songs from those albums. So this makes for a very good album, especially with the three classic singles included. If the record company was smart, they should have put together an album just like this.

Note that there's another music blog that has made an album with the same name and general idea. You can find that here:

Albums Forgotten Reconstructed 2.0: Sly & The Family Stone - "The Incredible and Unpredictable". (Unreleased 1970 album).

The song list is significantly different though, for both double album and single album versions. Some different outtakes were used, and live versions were used too. Many of the songs used date back to 1967. I limited my choices to just songs from 1968 to 1970.

01 Hot Fun in the Summertime (Sly & the Family Stone)
02 Pressure (Sly & the Family Stone)
03 Seven More Days (Sly & the Family Stone)
04 Only One Way Out of This Mess (Sly & the Family Stone)
05 What's That Got to Do with Me (Sly & the Family Stone)
06 Sorrow [Instrumental] (Sly & the Family Stone)
07 Everybody Is a Star (Sly & the Family Stone)
08 You're the One [Early Version] (Little Sister [Sly & the Family Stone])
09 Life and Death in G & A (Abaco Dream [Joe Hicks & Sly & the Family Stone])
10 Thank You [Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin] (Sly & the Family Stone)
11 Soul Clappin' II (Sly & the Family Stone)
12 This Is Love (Sly & the Family Stone)
13 Stanga (Little Sister)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/SrCPnSep

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/CYZsQTdHwWcdn8u/file

Luckily, I made an album cover before my recent computer troubles. I took a promotional photo of the band from around 1969 and added a fish-eye lens effect to distort it. Then I added some psychedelic lettering which I also warped. Hopefully, the result mimics the "psychedelic soul" album covers of that era.