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Of the four figures on funk's Mount Rushmore, Sly Stone is the most elusive. He had the shortest peak period - a half-decade separates 1968's "Dance to the Music" and 1973's "Fresh." Afterward he plummeted, free-falling both commercially and critically, -- before essentially disappearing from the spotlight. (Compare this to a decade apiece for George Clinton and Prince, and two for James Brown -- the other faces that join Sly on funk's monument.) These three have also made successful comebacks of one sort or another after their initial commercial decline. Sly's have been mostly abortive, from 1976's sadly titled "Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back" to the 1986 single "Eek-a-Boo Statik" to 2006's weird Grammy Awards appearance in a silver outfit and yellow Mohawk. Also, Brown, Clinton and Prince have reams of catalogue readily available. Sly doesn't - or didn't, until Sony and Epic/Legacy recently re-issued his first seven albums.

Thing is, it's impossible to imagine a funk Mount Rushmore without Sly Stone. James Brown fundamentally altered the landscape of American pop (as a gratifying number of people pointed out after his passing), but the job of reshaping Brown's rhythms and merging them with the Beatles' and with Motown's kaleidoscopic pop innovations fell to Sly's Bay Area band, Sly & the Family Stone. It's as impossible to conceive of modern R&B without Sly Stone as it is without James Brown - and nearly as impossible to imagine modern pop and rock without Sly as without the Beatles.

He also gets points for the most brazenly titled debut in rock history: 1967's "A Whole New Thing." The album itself doesn't quite live up to its name - Sly would synthesize many elements more singularly in the records to come - but it's a very entertaining curio, not least of which he gives nods to "Frere Jacques" twice (in "Underdog" and "Run, Run, Run"). Actually, he nods to lots of things, notably Motown. Much of the album is a flashier variation on that company's template, though "Underdog" sets the tone for the brightest parts of Sly's career: shouted backing vocals, Morse-code horns, elastically funky drumming and a come-from-behind lyric.

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"Dance to the Music" is where the synthesis really happens -- mostly in the title single, a record as dramatically paradigm-shifting as JB's "Cold Sweat" had been the year before. The album's shortcomings are embodied in "Dance to the Medley: Music Is Alive/Dance in/Music Lover," 12-and-a-half minutes of shameless filler that is nevertheless crucial for attempting to expand soul in the same sort of freeform style that psychedelic rock bands were doing. But Sly's pile-it-on punch doesn't wear as well in this context; he was better at cramming just as much into a three minute single than into this longer piece. Still, there is one great, lesser-known song here, "Color Me True," which features some of Sly's best lyrics: "Do you take credit for somebody else's cooking? / Do you go to the park when you think nobody else is looking?"

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"Life," which later followed in 1968, contracts its song craft while expanding its grooves: These are short, concise songs that are rhythmically looser than the previous albums. Oddly, it yielded no hits, though three singles, "Life," "Fun" and "M'Lady," were released. Anyone who doubts the Family Stone were a rock band need only hear the opening bars of "Dynamite!" and, anyone who doubts they were a rock-and-soul hybrid needs only listen to the rest of it. It contains the early Family Stone's nadir, "Jane Is a Groupie" (who "makes whoopee," oy), and a number of tunes that sample-spotters will relish: The beginning of Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," for example, comes from "Into My Own Thing."

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I should note that some of the bonus cuts from the "Dance to the Music" and "Life" reissues outclass many of the album tracks. From "Dance," try "Soul Clappin'"; from "Life," try "Sorrow." But, Sony loses points for not including three crucial non-album singles as bonus material on 1969's remastered "Stand!": "Hot Fun in the Summertime" (1969), and the 1970 double-sided hits, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" / "Everybody Is a Star." It would have made a great album all that much better. "Stand!" is where Sly's synthesis gelled completely. Five of these tracks were hits, most notably: the title cut, which straddles the Motown/hard-funk divide by giving its lyric to a groove cut from the former and the coda from the latter; and, "Everyday People," at No. 1 for a month. Even the nearly 14-minute jam, "Sex Machine," is high-grade filler.

Sly ended "Stand!" with an affirmation: "You Can Make It If You Try." For his next album, he led off by enumerating the joys of not making or trying anything. By the time "Luv N' Haight," -- the opening song for 1971's "There's a Riot Goin' On," -- finishes its run, it turns entropy into a mockingly swinging chorus, encompasses some of the most uncomfortably jaunty piano-playing on record, and ends with a defiant anti-affirmation: "Don't need to move." This is the opposite of "Stand!" Sly might have called it "Sit!" or, maybe, "Lie There!" Even the funkiest moments here ("Brave & Strong," "Luv N' Haight" and the hit, "Family Affair") emit a sense of entrapment; cocaine-and-cannabis paranoia-made-flesh via overmodulated bass; creeping-vine organ; spider-web guitar (frequently played by Sly's friend, Bobby Womack); and, voices so raw-nerved they cut open music that's already frayed, exposing its veins. (Even the yodeling on "Spaced Cowboy" sounds weary and pissed-off.) Every minute of "Riot" bears up under an obscene amount of listens. If somebody tells you the greatest album ever made isn't this one, they're lying.

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"Fresh" was issued in 1973, and it was more optimistic on the surface, but old demons die hard. (Anyway, Sly's lyrics had been fairly sardonic from the beginning.) Really, though, it's his singing that undercuts the up-front cheer here, from the slurred lead vocal on the crisp horn and organ groove of "If You Want Me to Stay" ("I've got to be me") to the sneered "cha-cha-cha" that ends "If It Were Left Up to Me." The Family Stone of the '60s had dissolved decisively by now - notably, Larry Graham (who invented the technique of thumb-popping bass playing) had quit during "Riot." As Sly became more and more lyrically self-referential, the illusion of the band as anything other than a vehicle for his songwriting faded; "Fresh," like "Riot," is essentially solo work. The grand exception, and maybe the most brilliant gesture of his career, is a duet between Sly and sister/keyboardist Rose Stone on Doris Day's "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)," that states, "The future's not ours to see."

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Hear "There's a Riot Goin' On" | Love this album? Hate it? Discuss

... Or, to make -- as it turned out. "Small Talk," from 1974, is a decent enough groove record -- ask the Beastie Boys, who swiped "Loose Booty" nearly wholesale for their "Shadrach" -- but the spark of the earlier work was largely gone; he released his last full album in 1983. He's mostly been a recluse since, though a recent Los Angeles Times story reported that he's in good health and recording new material. It's a small consolation, and not likely to be more than a footnote, but when you've made as much history and as much great music as Sly did during his prime, it's better than nothing.

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