The First Family: Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967 shows Sly and the Family Stone as a killer soul band on the cusp of developing the pungently progressive style that would make them one of the most vital acts of the hippie era. This is the band that debuted with 1967’s A Whole New Thing—stylistically tricky enough that it’s clear why Epic Records got dollar signs in their eyes during the Bay Area’s psychedelic ’60s, but not quite the laboratory of genius the group would become on the following year’s Dance to the Music. Taped seven months before the release of A Whole New Thing, the live recording features just one original, opener “I Ain’t Got Nobody (For Real),” which would show up on Dance to the Music. The rest are contemporary soul covers the audience might’ve recognized, some of them very fresh to the charts at the time.

The stakes are high for this release: This is the first archival Sly release following his death in June at the age of 82. These recordings have been cherished by fans ever since the tapes began floating around in 2002, and snippets showed up in Questlove’s Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) documentary from earlier this year, but anyone hoping for a revelatory postmortem opening of the floodgates should adjust their expectations.

Better to understand The First Family in the context of what High Moon Recordings has been doing for quite some time—unearthing high-quality rarities from the hippie era, most auspiciously Love’s lost ’70s album Black Beauty. The First Family comes with a lovely booklet that reveals much about the Family Stone’s pre-Dance to the Music early days, opening with the disclaimer that “the story of the Winchester Tapes does not concern the creative spurt that came once Sly & the Family Stone ascended the charts and crossed over into the consciousness of music fans the world over.”

But the audience can’t see into the future, and at a show like this—and at a time when popular music was only just starting to be taken seriously as high art—the audience is ultimately what matters. “In church, this goes on,” Sly says in one of the interviews included with the booklet. “If you’re talking about something and people will feel it, then boom, everybody claps right on time, it’s unbelievable.”

The Stone (né Stewart) family belonged to the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal denomination whose influence on Christian music has been incalculable. Artists with COGIC roots include Sister Rosetta Tharpe, CCM legend Andraé Crouch, and the Winans gospel dynasty. Sly and his siblings Freddie, Rose, and Vet grew up singing in church, and so strong was the link between the church and Black pop that even secular performers at the time were said to be “holding church” during performances.

These literal and metaphorical definitions of communion blend together on The First Family in a performance lusty enough to make room for a cartoon-wolf version of Junior Walker’s “Pucker Up Buttercup” but otherwise fitting Sly’s definition of “church” to a T. Given the level of energy on display, it seems incredible that this was a seated show, let alone that people weren’t ripping their chairs out of their seats during a dazzling stop-and-start rendition of Ben E. King’s “What Is Soul?” that’s the heart and centerpiece of this disc. It seems even more incredible that the song was only two weeks old at the time, but as Sly’s beloved Beatles taught us, there’s nothing like a grueling residency to coax the flowering of genius.

One of the most crucial differences between this Family and the one most people know is that Sly’s sister Rose hadn’t joined yet. Her exuberant vocals are crucial to the communal feeling that made the Family feel so much like a family on record, even deep in Sly’s despondent solo-auteur period during the ’70s. If you want to present yourself as a utopian community, it’s best to have as many voices joining in as possible, and Rose and Sly’s interplay was essential to the all-hands-on-deck spirit that made Dance to the Music and its deliriously goofy follow-up Life so exciting.

On The First Family, the communal aspect comes instead from the audience, which can be heard clapping and voicing approval, and which seems especially jazzed about their eight-minute rendition of “Baby I Need Your Loving,” a 1964 Four Tops single whose cover by white rocker Johnny Rivers had entered the charts less than two months before. Funnily enough, Rivers claims to have auditioned Sly on bass for his band, but Sly didn’t show up until the gig was already over—an early instance of a pattern of belated arrivals and no-shows from the singer that frustrated collaborators and crowds throughout his career.

The sound quality leaves a lot to be desired. The drums are way up in the mix, which is great when you’re trying to hear what drummer and inexhaustible sample source Greg Errico is doing, but not so great when you’re trying to hear Sly sing. To be fair, though, it doesn’t sound that much worse than the shambolic Fillmore tapes recorded 18 months later, which include a version of “St. James Infirmary Blues” that’s almost identical to the one here. Unlike Bay Area contemporaries Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead, this is not a band whose live recordings you need to seek out to get the full picture.

What 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. This was a world that prioritized skill over inspiration, where bands had to learn the latest hits to keep the crowd happy and got paid handsomely enough to master them on short notice. It might seem like a quaint world today, but tell that to the crowd at the Winchester Cathedral, itching to burst out of their seats.