The United States Just Bombed Iran. Was That the Right Course of Action?

PLUS: Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, and the end of the 1960s

Jun 22, 2025

I put the finishing touches on this article Saturday afternoon before Trump announced early Saturday evening that the United States had bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Given time constraints, rather than spike the article or amend it, I’m just going to run it as it was originally written, as the main points still hold up.

News broke Saturday afternoon that multiple B-2 bombers had taken off from their base in Missouri and were flying west over the Pacific Ocean. Those planes are the only aircraft in the American fleet equipped to carry the bunker-buster bombs Israel needs to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, a stated objective of Israel’s week-old war against Iran. Perhaps their deployment is a feint, a way to push Iran to the negotiating table. Or maybe it’s a sign the United States is about to enter the war.

The stakes of this conflict are incredibly high. It has the potential to alter the balance of power in the Middle East and hobble a regime that has antagonized Israel and the United States for the past forty-five years, or it could end up dragging the US into another quagmire in the Middle East against a nation that many believe has the capacity to carry out attacks on American soil. It could eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program, or encourage Iran to officially become a nuclear power.

Let’s take some time today to dig into this conflict: What the roots of this war are, why this war is happening right now, what options are on the table as far as an American response is concerned, and what the United States should do.

Israel considers Iran its greatest threat. That may seem strange to those who have grown accustomed to seeing Israel engaged in an ongoing conflict with the Palestinians right there in the Levant, but (to speak euphemistically) Israel believes it can manage its Palestinian problem.

Iran is the bigger threat because it has the potential to turn the simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict into an existential crisis for Israel. Iran’s Shia Muslim theocracy, which came to power in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, does not recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state and is an avowed enemy of Israel’s main benefactor, the United States, which Iran considers an imperialist power. Iran has funded paramilitary groups like Hamas (in Gaza) and Hezbollah (in Lebanon), whose forces are situated right across the border from Israel. Without Iran’s backing, the threat those organizations pose to Israel would be diminished.

Additionally, Iran has sought to spread its influence throughout the Middle East. After the United States invaded Shia-majority Iraq in 2003, Iran supported anti-American militias in that country. Its influence over Iraqi politics increased significantly following the drawdown of American forces there. Many analysts consider Iran the ultimate winner of that war, and some have described Iraq as a client state of Iran. Iran also counted the Assad regime in Syria as one of its closest allies. By allying themselves with Syria and Iraq, Iran effectively created a land bridge between itself, Hezbollah, and Israel. Finally, Iran has supported the Houthis in the Yemeni Civil War, providing the paramilitary organization with missiles they have fired at Israel and ships in the Red Sea.

Iran’s regional ambitions have unsettled other Arab nations in the Middle East. Its main rival is Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia. The Saudis view Iran as a destabilizing agent, one whose militant support for the Palestinian cause threatens to inflame civil unrest throughout the region. This is a delicate matter for the Saudis and other Middle Eastern nations. As Arab Muslims, the Saudis and their neighbors sympathize with the Palestinians. Doing so also makes for good domestic politics, given their very pro-Palestinian citizenry. But their support only goes so far, as these autocratic regimes would also prefer to keep a lid on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since every time it heats up, it tends to rile their already restive citizenry. In these moments, the Arab street begins to wonder not only why their leaders aren’t more committed to the Palestinian cause but if their leaders are actually siding with Israeli and American interests. It also casts the pro-Palestinian leaders in Iran and the revolutionary groups they support throughout the region in a more positive light, which threatens to stir discontent with and unrest within these unpopular Arab regimes.

The other critical factor in all this is Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Before analyzing Iran’s nuclear program, though, it should be noted that Israel possesses nuclear weapons (although it has never officially admitted so.) Israel uses its stockpile of nuclear bombs as the ultimate deterrent: Israeli military doctrine holds that it will respond with overwhelming force if another nation attacks Israeli territory and will use nuclear weapons against an aggressor if Israel’s existence is imperiled. Those threats have mostly kept state actors from attacking Israel since 1973. Israeli military doctrine also holds that it will prevent other regional actors from acquiring nuclear weapons of their own so that Israel alone controls the ultimate trump card. Accordingly, Israel has destroyed nuclear reactors in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Iran has maintained a nuclear program for decades. Iran insists the program exists only for peaceful civilian purposes, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has disputed such claims, while Israel contends Iran is developing nuclear weapons. In 2006, the international community imposed sanctions on Iran that crippled its economy after Iran refused to halt its uranium enrichment program. Four years later, the United States and Israel carried out a cyberattack that severely damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. Over the years, Israel has also assassinated a number of scientists working for the Iranian nuclear program. While an agreement was reached in 2015 for Iran to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from that deal in 2018 for no good reason and reimposed sanctions, leading Iran to accelerate its enrichment efforts. It is believed Iran does not yet possess weapons-grade uranium but has acquired a large stockpile of the material and may be able to quickly turn it into a bomb. This is obviously very concerning for Israel.

That sets up the current crisis, which is fallout from Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,200 Israelis. It is believed Hamas—which had been prepared to attack for years—carried out their plan when they did to sabotage a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would have normalized relations between the two countries. That deal would have sent shockwaves through the region, as it would have stitched Israel into the economic and political fabric of the Middle East and marginalized Iran and the militant Palestinian organizations it supported. Hamas couldn’t accept that and therefore launched their surprise attack. (U.S. intelligence found Iran knew Hamas was planning such an attack, was generally supportive of it, and had been asked by Hamas to participate, but was still surprised when Hamas decided to go it alone.)

Everyone knows what happened next: Israel invaded Gaza, resulting in widespread destruction, the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and an ongoing humanitarian crisis. What is often overlooked are the broader geopolitical consequences, most notably Iran’s diminishment on the international stage. Israel significantly degraded Hamas’s military capacity in Gaza, while operations in Lebanon and subsequent political developments in that nation have debilitated Hezbollah; in other words, Israel weakened Iran’s most important military proxies in the Levant. After Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus in April 2024, killing two Iranian generals, Iran responded with a missile barrage that Israel easily fended off. Iran even experienced a serious setback resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led Russia to cut back on support for the Assad regime in Syria. Without Russia’s backing, Assad’s rule crumbled in December 2024, costing Iran a valuable ally.

As Iran’s influence in the Middle East recedes and its military might—or at least its capacity to strike Israel from distance—appears as fearsome as a paper tiger, Iran may have concluded the only way it can reassert its strength in the region is by building a nuclear bomb. Nuclear weapons grant nations greater freedom of action, as other nations fear pushing them to a point where they may respond with overwhelming force. For example, a nuclear Iran may feel more emboldened to intervene directly in Iraq or Syria or close off the Strait of Hormuz linking the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean (which would send the price of oil into the stratosphere.) Nuclear weapons would also cause any nation to think twice about regime change in Iran. Additionally, they would scramble Israel’s calculations when it comes to self-defense. It’s not just that Iran might use its newfound clout to place its armies as a tripwire on the Israeli frontier, allowing Hamas and Hezbollah to build up armies that could be used to invade Israel. It’s that a messianic ayatollah may at some point simply decide to strike first and wipe Israel off the map.

It’s not in the United States’ interests for Iran to get a nuclear weapon, either. While it’s unlikely Iran would use a nuclear weapon against the American homeland, the U.S. has plenty of bases in the Middle East that could be targeted. A nuclear Iran would also limit the United States’ freedom of action in a crucial region of the world. If Iran used the leverage of a nuclear weapon to increase tension with Israel, the U.S. may find itself drawn into a conflict in the Levant. But perhaps most significantly, should Iran go nuclear, it would likely set off a new nuclear arms race, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Turkey scrambling to develop their own atomic weapons programs. The world has too many nuclear weapons as it is, and we definitely don’t want them in the hands of regimes lacking the legitimacy and popular support that lend themselves to long-term stability.

A couple weeks ago, as the United States was obsessing over a military parade, the IAEA adopted a resolution that found Iran in violation of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations. Iran responded by cutting off cooperation with the agency and activating advanced centrifuges critical to the weapons-grade enrichment process. That was too much for Israel, which launched airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities, destroyed Iran’s air defenses, and killed a number of Iran’s top generals and scientists. (Trump reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.)

Now both countries are lobbing attacks at one another, with Iran bearing the brunt of the destruction. But Israel has encountered a major problem: Iran’s most important nuclear enrichment site is buried inside a mountain. Israel’s missiles can’t reach it. But the United States has a weapon most experts believe could. Israel really wants the US to use its bunker-busting bomb to destroy that facility.

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So what should the United States do?

To figure this out, the first thing we should do is consult our intelligence agencies. Back in March, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei had not given the go-ahead to restart its nuclear weapons program. That may very well be true, but the problem with Gabbard is that she is ideologically non-interventionist and does not trust the intelligence community. To a certain extent, that’s fine: I also think the decision to intervene militarily anywhere in the world should pass a high bar, and intelligence reports should be scrutinized. But Gabbard is the type of person who believes something and then gloms onto whatever facts or spin that’s out there to reinforce her convictions. It could be there are people in the intelligence community telling her Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which she would interpret as proof Iran actually isn’t. On top of that, Gabbard is an apologist for Putin and, more distressingly in this case, Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad. Who knows what kind of crazy stuff people in her circle are whispering in her ear. I don’t trust Gabbard, and she’s not the sort of person the nation needs as national intelligence director.

The New York Times reported this week that American intelligence agencies believe Iran has yet to give the go-ahead to resume development of a nuclear weapon but would likely do so if the United States entered the conflict to destroy its underground nuclear facility or if Israel assassinated Iran’s supreme leader. The reporting affirmed what we already knew about Iran’s nuclear program—that it possesses enough material to make multiple nuclear weapons—but that there is some question about how long it would take for Iran to make a weapon: Israeli intelligence, which the US considers credible, believes Iran could make a weapon in 1-2 weeks, while the American intelligence community thinks it would take several months to a year. American officials also doubt Iran currently has the technology to deliver a bomb via missile, which would complicate any effort to use it. This assessment is not based on new intelligence gathered since the outbreak of war, however. Still, it recommends against intervening.

The situation calls for wise, thoughtful leadership. Unfortunately, the United States is currently led by an idiot. Trump has said the intelligence agencies are “wrong” about Iran and doesn’t care if they’ve reached a different conclusion than he has. The worst-case scenario here is that Trump doesn’t believe anything the “deep state” intelligence community tells him and is just following his gut. That would be a weird reaction, though, because the intelligence community is basically urging caution, which is something Trump and the MAGAverse believe the intelligence community doesn’t do. Or maybe the intelligence community is being “weak” when Trump wants to be “strong.” I don’t know; trying to figure out what’s going on inside Trump’s brain is like gazing into an infinity mirror.

The best-case scenario is that Trump is just gaming this out. Was Iran in the process of converting their nuclear program into a nuclear weapons program? Maybe they weren’t. Maybe they hoped that by defying the IAEA, they could spook the international community into re-engaging with them as an assertive regional power rather than one that had been backed into a corner. But how about after Israel bombed the hell out of them, killed numerous high-ranking officials, and established supremacy over their air space? That turn of events may have led Iran to conclude it has no choice but to build a nuclear weapon now. Perhaps that’s Trump’s thinking, and it wouldn’t necessarily be off-base.

But there’s another scenario Trump needs to account for: That he’s getting played by Netanyahu. Not content with a strategically degraded Iran, it may be Netanyahu is seizing this opportunity to take out the threat posed by Iran once and for all. Expanding Israel’s current crisis to a conflict with Iran might also help shore up Netanyahu’s tenuous domestic political standing. While it may be in America’s interest to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, it is not in America’s interest for Iran and Israel to go to war with one another. Had Israel asked for the United States’ blessing (and active support) to go to war with Iran, we probably would have said no. So maybe the only way Netanyahu figured he could get the US to fight alongside him was to first start the war, making American intervention a fait accompli, since the war would inevitably push Iran to do something (build a nuclear weapon) that the US would want to prevent from happening.

Two things suggest to me that that’s the scenario we’re dealing with. First, Israel isn’t acting like it’s only out to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, it’s waging all-out war on Iran’s military and government. If this was only about containing Iran’s nuclear program, Israel wouldn’t be doing that. Secondly, if Israel wanted to destroy Iran’s nuclear program knowing Iran had buried a big part of it beneath a mountain, wouldn’t they have wanted to have the bunker-busting bombs necessary to carry out that mission ready to go before starting the war? Maybe they figured the US would have no choice but to give them those bombs once the war started (or drop them itself), but it seems crazy for Israel to pick a fight with a country it considers an existential threat without the weaponry it insists it needs to eliminate the most-important thing that makes that country an existential threat.

Two other news stories from Saturday that add to this analysis:

From Reuters: After Trump announced he would take two weeks to decide whether or not to bomb Iran, Israeli officials told the administration it could not wait that long and were prepared to take action on their own.
From the Washington Post: Israel’s foreign minister said Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have already set Iran’s nuclear program back 2-3 years.

If I were the president, I’d tell Netanyahu that if he wanted to take out that nuclear facility, he should find a way to do it himself. The Israelis surely have plans in place to do that. That may require a high-risk and potentially costly Israeli military operation, but that’s on Netanyahu. It shouldn’t be our job to clean up his mess.

If we do decide to intervene on Israel’s behalf, I would put a major caveat on our involvement: That Netanyahu step aside and never seek office in Israel again. If he agreed to that, we would have a sense that this was more about Israel’s security than Netanyahu’s political prospects. It would also mean we would be working with a more trustworthy Israeli leadership team. Finally, getting Netanyahu to step aside would take one of the most destabilizing forces in the Middle East off the board.

Top Five Records Music Review: Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, and the End of the 1960s

We lost two titans of rock and roll music recently: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone. It is impossible to imagine the sound of the 1960s without their work. Yet both artists’ careers were ultimately derailed by the times they are now so closely associated with: Wilson by the 60s cultural revolution, and Stone by its demise.

As a child of the 1980s, I am among the last generation of Americans who grew up believing California—specifically Southern California—was heaven on Earth. That image of a paradisiacal L.A. would be tarnished in the late-1980s/early-1990s by Guns N’ Roses, west coast rap, the Rodney King riots, and the O.J. Simpson trial. Yet for much of the twentieth century, people from both the United States and around the world wanted to get themselves to Los Angeles, whether temporarily or permanently. In 1900, there were 250,000 people living in the L.A. metro area; one hundred years later, nearly 16.4 million called the region home. L.A. had jobs in the prosperous oil, citrus, automobile, aerospace, and shipping industries. L.A. had movie stars, and with them, an abundance of glamour. L.A. had lots of land for housing, and as communities spread out across Southern California, so did freeways, turning Los Angeles into the center of American car culture. By 1955, L.A. had Disneyland. In 1958, they got the Dodgers. And, of course, L.A. had palm trees, beaches, and perfect weather year-round. New York, Philadelphia, Boston: These were crowded, dingy, often chilly cities. Old cities. The history of the United States—the world’s smiling, optimistic superpower—read right to left. Los Angeles was America’s destiny manifested.

That mythical vision of Southern California peaked in the early 1960s just as the Beach Boys’ first singles, set in L.A.’s surfing and hot rod youth cultures, hit the charts. Drawn from Chuck Berry, doo-wop, and twelve-bar blues—styles of music, it should be noted, that were black in origin—songs like “Surfin’ Safari”, “Surfin’ U.S.A.”, “Surfer Girl”, and “Little Deuce Coupe” were idealizations of 50s-era rock and roll. Wilson’s intricate vocal arrangements and harmonies seemed to polish and purify rock and roll, making his band’s music acceptable for high school talent shows. The characters he and bandmate Mike Love wrote about, like the girl in “Fun, Fun, Fun” who lies to her father and takes his T-bird for a high-speed joyride, may not have been angels, but they weren’t delinquents either. They were just carefree teenagers having, well, fun in the dreamy Edenic playground America created for itself in Southern California as if it was their birthright.

But an Eden is not something to be discovered, created, or kept; rather, it is something that is inevitably lost. Americans have never really understood that. For centuries, they believed they would find their Eden somewhere out West. In the twentieth century, they found it in Los Angeles. Wilson and the Beach Boys sang about an Eden that was as far west as anyone in the lower 48 could go: On the sunny beaches of Southern California, where Adam and Eve were beautiful, tanned, and forever seventeen; where they could paddle a surfboard out into an infinite ocean that always brought them back to shore; where the eternal now morphed into a perfect future. But that story is way too good to be true. It should come as no surprise that Wilson’s Kennedy-era idyll would not last.

The first event that rocked Wilson to his core was the release of “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes in August 1963. Wilson first heard the song while driving through Los Angeles. Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production so stunned Wilson he had to pull his car over to the side of the road. He became obsessed with the song, likely listening to it hundreds if not thousands of times. Wilson insisted for the rest of his life it was the greatest record ever made. He would spend the 1960s trying to top it; he claimed he never did.

The second event was the onset of Beatlemania in the United States in early 1964. Initially, the popularity of those early Beatles records irritated Wilson, who considered the British band’s music crude, simpleminded, and unsophisticated. But Wilson soon realized the Beatles had completely rewired American youth culture and that he would need to up his game if he hoped to compete. He began moving his band away from its focus on surf music, doubled-down on his obsession with Spector’s grandiose production style, and retired from touring to concentrate on studio work. The competition sharpened Wilson’s craftsmanship, but at a price.

How Brian Wilson recorded Pet Sounds and reinvented music | Louder — Brian Wilson circa 1966

Outside Motown, few American acts survived the British Invasion. The Beach Boys did, though, as evidenced by their seven top ten hits in 1964 and 1965 (“Fun, Fun Fun”, “I Get Around”/“Don’t Worry Baby”, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”, “Dance, Dance, Dance”, “Help Me, Rhonda”, “California Girls”, and “Barbara Ann”.)

But the pressure wasn’t just coming from the Beatles now, who had demonstrated a greater musical sophistication with the release of Rubber Soul in late 1965. There were also other British Invasion bands, like those who emulated the Beatles’ Merseybeat style (i.e., the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits) as well as rougher, more blues-based groups (i.e., the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Rolling Stones); Bob Dylan and folk rock acts like the Byrds and the Turtles (both of whom were based in L.A.); the infectious R&B/soul groups on the Motown label; and numerous garage rock bands like Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, the Beau Brummels, and the Sir Douglas Quintet that mixed and matched the diverse sounds of mid-60s rock and roll in unexpected ways across hundreds of singles. Before the Beatles, pop perfection seemed within Brian Wilson’s grasp. By the end of 1965, it had been swept inside an ever-strengthening and ever-changing whirlwind.

Wilson responded by creating a record that is now universally acclaimed as a masterpiece: Pet Sounds. Released in May 1966, the album is the work of a producer (not a band) using the recording studio not to capture a performance but as an instrument itself. Featuring dense, multi-layered tracks containing complex vocal harmonies, classical orchestral arrangements, unusual instrumentation, and found sounds that together defied reproduction in live settings, Pet Sounds was pop music and rock and roll conceived as art, a concept album that directly influenced and predated the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by a full year. The next time you listen to the record, rather than hearing it as a complete composition, try instead to figure out how Wilson assembled it. Pay attention to the songs’ component parts, what possibly went into their creation, and where they sit in the mix. It will likely change the way you think about music and musicmaking, which in turn should key you in to why Pet Sounds is considered such a groundbreaking record.

Wilson and the Beach Boys would cap the year with the #1 hit “Good Vibrations”, a 3:35 slice of psychedelic SoCal pop drawn from over 90 hours of tape. Because it was recorded in snippets, the song’s musicians had no idea what the finished product was supposed to sound like. Featuring the sounds of an electric theremin and synthesizers, “Good Vibrations” shimmers and glows like an orange sun setting and dissolving out over the ocean. It remains the hippest song the Beach Boys ever made.

“Good Vibrations” was also the last Beach Boys song to crack the top ten during the 1960s. Wilson intended to include it on Smile, the follow-up to Pet Sounds, but Wilson’s perfectionism, mental health issues, and drug use had caught up with him, and that album was never released. Wilson would spend much of the next twenty-five years struggling with his personal issues.

Looking back, it’s rather amazing the Beach Boys were able to remain relevant from 1964 through 1966. Wilson, who stood at the pinnacle of American youth culture prior to the arrival of the Beatles, had to push himself beyond the breaking point to keep up with the rapidly changing post-British Invasion music scene of the mid-1960s. He had already taken an introspective turn in 1963 on “In My Room”, but after the Beatles made their initial splash, for every effervescent pop single like “I Get Around” or “California Girls”, there was a more melancholic song like “Don’t Worry Baby”, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (which dreamt of growing older with someone “in a world where we belong”), “Caroline, No”, and “God Only Knows” (one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded, with an opening line that is an absolute gut punch.)

Suddenly, the Beach Boys weren’t singing about paradise, but about watching a paradise spoil and slip away. From this perspective, Pet Sounds sounds less like an adventurous experiment than a desperate attempt to corral and reset mid-60s rock and roll. It wouldn’t work; by the end of the decade, rock and roll had only grown more unruly and cacophonous. The irony is that many of the bands at the forefront of that change were heavily inspired by the Beach Boys.

In the early 1960s, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys aimed to tame and perfect rock and roll. They set their songs in the most-ideal part of an idealized America, one brimming with youth and vigor and beauty, where everyone sang in harmony. This was the utopia Brian Wilson created for himself and his listeners. What more could anyone want? As it turns out, a lot. In this sense, Wilson was the first casualty of the 1960s, the first cultural figure the decade left behind, the first to discover paradise wouldn’t last. As he sings near the end of Pet Sounds, “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times”.

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On the other hand, Sylvester Stewart, aka Sly Stone, most definitely was made for those times. Born in Denton, Texas, in 1943, Stewart’s family moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1950, where they lived a middle-class lifestyle. The Stewarts encouraged their sons and daughters to take up music and attended a black church that nurtured their children’s musical talents. Sylvester was proficient on piano, guitar, bass, and drums by the age of eleven. In high school, he was a member of multiple bands and at times was the only black member in those groups. By the mid-1960s he was working as a popular DJ for a San Francisco soul radio station, where he played the Beatles and the Rolling Stones alongside singles from Motown and Stax Records. He also worked as a back-up musician for acts like Marvin Gaye and the Righteous Brothers when their tours rolled into town, and produced records for the Beau Brummels (“Just a Little”) and the Great Society (Grace Slick’s first band.)

San Francisco was quite the place for an aspiring musician in the mid-1960s to come of age. The city was the center of the LSD-fueled psychedelic rock scene, which pushed rock and roll in wildly experimental directions. Its Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was the home of the free-spirited hippie movement. The New Left Free Speech Movement that shaped campus activism in the 1960s began across the bay at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Power Black Panther Party in Oakland in 1966. Tens of thousands of free-spirited flower children migrated to San Francisco in 1967 for the Summer of Love, essentially a coming-out event for the nation’s counterculture. Sly Stone watched all this unfold before his eyes. He decided to channel its energy, synthesize its sounds, become the movement’s avatar.

Sly Stone at Woodstock 1969 : r/OldSchoolCoolMusic — Sly Stone at Woodstock (1969)

Within a matter of twenty months beginning in October 1967, Stone would release four albums, each progressively better, with the band he led, Sly and the Family Stone. Their debut, A Whole New Thing, flopped; it’s brimming with ideas and is probably underappreciated given its ambition, but it lacks punch and is at times too beholden to its stylistic wellsprings. (One track, “Trip to Your Heart”, would supply the hook for LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out”.) The band removed its restraints and embraced a more commercial sound on their second LP, Dance to the Music. Released in April 1968, the album isn’t a fully formed work but it’s far more energetic and carries the listener away. The record is distinguished, of course, by its exuberant title track, a how-to-funk manual that became a top-ten smash and a template for progressive soul. (Along with the studio recording, I’ve included a live version below as a reminder of how a song we now take for granted could set an audience on fire.)

“Dance to the Music” is a celebration of the inclusive potential of 1960s America. It singles out its constituent parts, which together add up to a powerful, uplifting ensemble. There’s a rock drummer, a bluesy acid rock guitarist, a funky bass player, a gospel organ, an R&B horn section, and a soul singer. When combined, they blow Motown away and open up new avenues for musical expression. The scat singing recalls pre-rock jazz vocal records, while Cynthia Robinson beats Flavor Flav to the punch by about two decades when she tells “All the squares go home!” What Sly and the Family Stone’s mere presence communicated to its audience was equally powerful: A group composed of both friends and family, of women and men, of whites and blacks dedicated to working together and getting people to dance together.

Sly and the Family Stone would follow up Dance to the Music with Life in September 1968 and Stand! in May 1969. Because 60s-era Sly and the Family Stone is often regarded as a singles band, Stand! is frequently overlooked as one of the decade’s great albums. Nearly every theme that would animate the 1960s youth movement—conscious-raising, equality, anti-racism, sex, drugs, rock and roll—is present in its grooves. You can listen to it as a rock record, then again as a funk record, then as a soul record, even a bubble-gum pop record.

Or you can hear it as an undeniable and ridiculously creative fusion of all that, an artist showing off not only his mastery of every musical trend the decade threw his way but his ability to deconstruct, reinvent, and reassemble them. Stand! is the album Sly and the Family Stone would ride to Woodstock, where they placed themselves in the firmament of countercultural icons alongside Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Sly and the Family Stone would close the decade with “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”, a #1 hit that proved pivotal for multiple reasons. To begin with, it’s the first song to feature bassist Larry Graham’s slap technique, a sound that would become definitional to funk. Furthermore, along with various tracks from Stand! and other records like “It’s Your Thing” by the Isley Brothers, the song demonstrated how funk rhythms could be used for more than dance tracks but as the basis for radio-friendly pop singles, which in turn ushered in one of the most innovative phases of musicmaking in the rock and roll era.

But “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” also marked a shift in Sly Stone’s own musical outlook. “Thank You…” had darker undertones than the typical Sly and the Family Stone song. There’s a gun-wielding devil hounding Sly, and while Stone comes out on top and is grateful to his fans for supporting him and his message, he acknowledges the struggle isn’t as inevitable or effortless as he’d made it out to be. In fact, the forces aligned against him and the movement he was a part of may be just as potent, and it was weighing on him. “Dyin’ young is hard to take,” he sings, “but selling out is harder,” suggesting his days as a happy warrior were over.

Stone intended to include “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” on an album alongside “Everybody is a Star” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime”, but he ended up abandoning that work. Twenty months after the release of Stand!, Sly and the Family Stone released its follow-up, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Critics hail it as the band’s masterpiece. It’s also scary as hell. A response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a bleak, drugged-out record. The slower-tempo songs are strung-out beyond what should be their runtime and buried in murk, while the vocals sound like they’re being sung too close to the mic by a junkie who has overstayed his welcome. The tracks that would have been sugary pop songs on other Family Stone albums now drip with cynicism, mocking the optimism of Nixon’s America as bankrupt and phony. At one point, Stone yodels, and it isn’t pretty.

What happened? Well, there is the drug abuse, which Stone would struggle with for nearly the rest of his life. Stone was also coping with the burden of being one of the biggest and most innovative rock stars on the planet. But the album is also the sound of a man realizing his dreams of a multicultural, countercultural utopia had been dashed—at Altamont, by Charles Manson, in the jungles of Cambodia, on the campus of Kent State, by black militancy and white backlash, by the increasingly desperate conditions of life in black inner city America, by both squares and hippies who had grown tired of the endless social tumult. It is the sound of Stone’s disappointment and disillusionment. Of an exhausted, jaded nation. Of a man betrayed.

Sly and the Family Stone would release one more well-regarded album—Fresh, in 1973, which contains a mournful, soulful cover of “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”—but then Stone lost his touch. It wasn’t because the style of music he pioneered had reached a musical dead end. It was quite the opposite, in fact, as Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Earth, Wind and Fire would pick up where Stone left off, as would his greatest devotee—Prince—who, like Stone, established his own reign over the pop music world by blending the disparate sounds of rock and roll into one electric and inimitable style.

No, Stone lost his touch because he had wedded his music to the aspirations of the 1960s. When the nation turned its back on those aspirations, Stone’s artistry suffered. It no longer made sense to be himself, but he could not become someone else, either. To listen to a Sly and the Family Stone song today is to listen to both boundless possibility and a dream deferred.

For more on Sly Stone, I highly recommend watching Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), which was released earlier this year and is currently streaming on Hulu. It’s a great film that helps viewers appreciate Stone’s musical gifts. The section on Stone’s connection to Janet Jackson is excellent filmmaking.

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Reason to Believe

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PLUS: Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, and the end of the 1960s

Signals and Noise

From The Atlantic:

From the New York Times:

From the Washington Post:

From Vox:

From The Guardian:

From Slate:

From Military.com:

Top Five Records Music Review: Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, and the End of the 1960s

Exit Music: “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” by Sly and the Family Stone (1973, Fresh) and “Summer’s Gone” by the Beach Boys (2012, That’s Why God Made the Radio)