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The Warmth Of The Sun: “Hot Fun In The Summertime” by Sly & The Family Stone

By Marcello Carlin



Fresh from their triumph at Woodstock, the Family Stone immediately set to work on a new conceptual album, although for one reason or another only three tracks were completed; this one, and the 1970 double-sided number one “Thank You (Falettin’ Me Be Mice Elf Again)”/”Everybody Is A Star,” all of which appeared on their 1970 Greatest Hits album (this was very much a last-minute substitute for a new LP, but is one of the least dispensable LPs of which I can think).

Hence “Hot Fun” could be seen as an attempt by the band to reach out to their new, wider audience – or perhaps to disturb them in deeper ways. On its surface, “Hot Fun” is a rolling, anthemic thing with some trademark jazz changes which must have inspired the youthful Prince, complete with a 6/8 staccato piano which could have emerged from a fifties Platters record. The record seems to fit in with that period’s general move towards sunshine pop, but is actually a very subtle subversion of it.

Over fanfares of brass and strings which make one expect Donny Osmond to enter any moment, the group sings in bucolic harmony about those lazy, hazy, crazy days of old – even if they were only four years old. The clue is how late in the year the song hit, and its general aura of the autumnal (“First of the fall and then she goes back/Bye, bye, bye, bye there/Them summer days”).

If the latter sequence of lyrics reminds you of “Fall Breaks And Back To Winter” then that is probably no accident. Greil Marcus rather sniffily says that “the Beach Boys did summer better,” but this is a very Wilsonian way of approaching the subject of summer – think of the purple sunset of regret running through “All Summer Long” (“We’ve been having fun all summer long”) and how naturally it slows to the funereal pace of “The Warmth Of The Sun.”

But the song is said actually to be about the Watts riots, and Sly Stone’s notion of “hot fun” is perhaps not that of sodas and pretzels and beer. Note how when the individual Family members step up for their individual lines, the benign lining is irrupted, particularly when Rose Stone exclaims: “I ‘cloud nine’ when I want to!” and we realise what the song is actually about. Given that Norman Whitfield had just reinvented The Temptations with “Cloud Nine,” in great part under Stone’s influence, it is perhaps fitting that “Hot Sun” should settle in the charts directly beneath “I Can’t Get Next To You.” One only has to proceed two winters to There’s A Riot Goin’ On to appreciate how much of the pain running through the latter is consequent to the memories of the recent past expressed in this song.

Date Record Made Number Two: 18 October 1969
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “I Can’t Get Next To You” by The Temptations
UK Chart Position: None

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