You didn’t get to hear much of Sly and Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On when the album was new in 1971-72, certainly not if you were stuck out in suburbia. But what little you did hear was enough to make it clear: the 1960s were over, with only crushed and dying flowers left in their wake. A darker, meaner time was on us, even if many were still pursuing deep space extraterrestrial explorations of a personal kind.
We’ll give this one to Lester Bangs, because without his review, Philip Random would never have been on the lookout for a copy of Live at the Paramount, which he found at yard sale, 1980s sometime. Cost him at least a dollar. “The Guess Who have absolutely no taste at all, they don’t even mind embarrassing everybody in the audience, they’re real punks without ever working too hard at it […] In case you wondered about the drug commercial, it’s in a song called Truckin Off Across The Sky, the main character of which is the Grim Reaper. There he is … grinning, outstretched arms holding bags of you-know-what. Positively the best drug song of 1972. And this may well be the best live album. F*** all them old dudes wearing their hip tastes on their sleeves: get this and play it loud and be first on your block to become a public nuisance.”
“Nobody’s ever going to care that much about what happened in 1997 unless they were born or maybe they lost their virginity, or they saw God on some acid trip. But the rest of us were all fixed on the End by then – the turning of the millennium, the future if we had one. Maybe that’s why Tranquility Bass’s mega double album Let The Freak Flag Fly made so much sense. Techno-hippie types getting lost in the music and likely a whole lotta drugs (a full thirty years after the Summer of Love) on some unnamed Gulf Island, mixing everything up, wondering what god must look like. Someone had to.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 
