By November of the same year, Sly Stone seemed to pose an answer: “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” At the time that album was released, Stone, who died this week, at the age of eighty-two, was facing a make-or-break career inflection point.

It took the bandleader, who died Monday, just a few years beginning in the late 1960s to write a new language of rock, soul and pop.