- Record Label: High Moon
- Release Date: Jul 18, 2025
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Classic Rock MagazineAug 18, 2025As this once-fabled recording attests, the Family Stone's chops and their leader's startlingly innovative tropes (including scat singing and testifying) were already in place that March. [Sep 2025, p.85]
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Record CollectorJul 17, 2025A compelling snapshot of the group in their infancy, but already on their way to being fully formed, it captures then in a joyous mood. [Aug 2025, p.94]
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Jul 17, 2025The sound quality is akin to a great bootleg – vocals suffer during I Ain’t Got Nobody, the only Sly original here – but the energy and impact of the group is brilliantly intact. [Sep 2025, p.94]
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Jul 21, 2025What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
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The WireSep 10, 2025The First Family isn't for Sly & The Family Stone beginners, but it gives aficionados a fascinating glimpse of their origin story. [Oct 2025, p.72]
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Jul 21, 2025The First Family: Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967 offers a fascinating and exciting glimpse of them in their embryonic stage.
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UncutJul 17, 2025The recording quality isn't the great, but the Family sound like the funkiest, most exhilarating house band you ever heard. [Sep 2025, p.47]
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Jul 17, 2025This tape was originally discovered over 20 years ago, and it has clearly been cleaned up considerably — the vocals are fairly faint on a few numbers — but not distractingly so (particularly after decades of low-fi as a working pop aesthetic). The First Family shows us just how fully formed one of the greatest bands ever was, right at the brink of going public. It’s a major rediscovery.