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Tuesday, June 10, 2025
IN TRIBUTE TO AND ETERNAL LOVE FOR SLY STONE (1943-2025)
AN OPEN LETTER TO AMERICA FROM THE LAST CENTURY
"Somebody's Watching You" Words and Music by Sly Stone (March 15, 1943—June 9, 2025)
Pretty, pretty, pretty as a picture Witty, witty, witty as you can be Blind 'cause your eyes see only glitter Closed to the things that make you free
Ever stop to think about a downfall? Happens at the end of every line Just when you think you've pulled a fast one Happens to the foolish all the time
Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you
Games are to be played with toys, et cetera Love is to be made when you are for real Ups and downs are caused by life in general Some are yours no matter how you feel
Shady as a lady in a moustache Feelings camouflaged by groans and grins Secrets have a special way about them Movin' to and fro among your friends
Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you
Live it up today if you want to Live it down tomorrow afternoon Sunday school don't make you cool forever And neither does the silver of your spoon
The nicer the nice, the higher the price This is what you pay for what you need The higher the price, the nicer the nice Jealous people like to see you bleed
Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody, somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you
Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you…
Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82
Leading Sly and the Family Stone, he helped redefine the landscape of pop, funk and rock in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Sly Stone in 1973. Though he eventually receded from center stage, his vibrant, intricately arranged songs left their mark on countless artists. Credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images Listen to this article · 15:25 minutes
Sly Stone, the influential, eccentric and preternaturally rhythmic singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose run of hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s with his band the Family Stone could be dance anthems, political documents or both, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 82.
The cause was “a prolonged battle with C.O.P.D.,” or lung disease, “and other underlying health issues,” his representatives said in a statement.
As the colorful maestro and mastermind of a multiracial, mixed-gender band, Mr. Stone experimented with the R&B, soul and gospel music he was raised on in the San Francisco area, mixing classic ingredients of Black music with progressive funk and the burgeoning freedoms of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll.
The
band’s most recognizable songs, many of which would be sampled by
hip-hop artists, include “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” “I
Want to Take You Higher,” “Family Affair,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime”
and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”
Mr. Stone, second from left, with the other members of Sly and the Family Stone in 1970.Credit...GAB Archive/Redferns
A Lasting Impact
Though
Mr. Stone eventually receded from center stage, his vibrant,
intricately arranged songs left their mark on a host of top artists,
including George Clinton, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Michael Jackson,
Outkast, Red Hot Chili Peppers and D’Angelo, as well as jazz musicians
like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. As the critic Joel Selvin said,
“There was Black music before Sly Stone, and Black music after Sly
Stone.”
His musical legacy was
fortified and refreshed in recent years, a push led by the musician and
music historian Questlove, who directed the Academy Award-winning
documentary “Summer of Soul,” from 2021, which included a performance by
Sly and the Family Stone during a Harlem cultural festival in 1969.
That film was followed in 2023 by a memoir by Mr. Stone, “Thank You
(Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” And last year, Questlove released a documentary devoted entirely to him, “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius).”
“He
had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will,”
Questlove wrote of Mr. Stone in the introduction to Mr. Stone’s
autobiography, which he also helped release as part of his publishing
imprint. “He had a look, belts and hats and jewelry. Everybody was a
star, as he said (and sang), but he was a special case, cooler than
everything around him by a factor of infinity.”
From
1968 to 1971, Sly and the Family Stone released a defining string of
albums — “A Whole New Thing,” “Dance to the Music,” “Life,” “Stand!” and
“There’s a Riot Goin’ On” — that were celebratory but also knowing
about the fragile state of the world, complicating the Summer of Love’s
themes of unity and its sounds of euphoria with a street savvy that
presaged the end of the party, even as the band played on.
The
group stomped, grooved and shouted its way into the national
consciousness in an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1968,
performing a medley of songs that are now regarded as classics. Sly and
the Family Stone soon dominated the charts and further established
itself as an era-defining act with similarly jarring, joyous appearances
the next year at the Newport Jazz Festival and the Woodstock festival.
“Stand!” (1969), the fourth album by Sly and the Family Stone, contained the group’s first No. 1 hit, “Everyday People.” Its success helped secure the band a spot at the Woodstock festival. Credit: Epic
“There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” released in 1971, marked a darker, more experimental progression in Mr. Stone’s music. Credit: Epic
Always a Standout
Mr.
Stone began isolating himself in the 1970s and ’80s with drug use and
increasingly unpredictable behavior, retreating to a mansion compound in
Los Angeles and often missing concerts.
But
he still could not help standing out, often innovating along the way.
He became one of the first mainstream artists to record with a drum
machine — one of his many influences on hip-hop — while becoming more
flamboyant in appearance (shiny vests, alien-eye glasses) and more
idiosyncratic musically. The title track on 1971’s “There’s a Riot Goin’
On” was silent, listed at zero minutes and zero seconds, because, as
Mr. Stone later said, “I felt there should be no riots.”
Pharrell
Williams, writing in The New York Times in 2003, said of Mr. Stone’s
legacy: “He spoke to a generation and ones that followed. He challenged
people’s perception of normalcy. He wore seriously fly clothes, and to
this day, I have no idea how he walked around in those platforms.”
Sly
and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame in 1993. Mr. Stone, who had by then gained a reputation as a
recluse, made a surprise appearance and a brief speech, ending with a
cryptic “See you soon.”
After
an absence of more than a decade, Mr. Stone made a surprise appearance
at the 2006 Grammy Awards, where he joined in during a tribute to his
old band. Credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for the Recording Academy, via Getty Images
But
it wasn’t until more than a decade later, at the 2006 Grammy Awards,
that most people caught another glimpse of him. In a silver get-up, dark
shades and a blond mohawk, Mr. Stone joined in during a tribute to his
old band, playing a synthesizer and singing on “I Want to Take You
Higher.” He departed the stage before the end of the song.
Mr. Stone performed intermittently, and often bizarrely, throughout his later years. At Coachella
in 2010, he played while seated in an office chair, wearing a long
blond wig “that hid most of my face, a police hat that hid the rest,” he
wrote in his memoir.
“I was dressed that way because I didn’t want anyone to recognize me,” he added.
He
remained an almost mystic presence in his rare public showings,
frequently arriving at concerts by family members and past collaborators
on a motorcycle, and only occasionally bothering to remove his helmet.
Though
he was rumored to be homeless, Mr. Stone wrote in his autobiography
that he lived for years in the 2000s, by choice, in a white Pleasure Way
R.V., which was “everything to me: dressing room, hotel room,
transportation, hide-out, office.”
In 2010, he sued his former managers, claiming that they had defrauded him of many millions. A jury eventually awarded him $5 million,
but the judgment was soon reversed. “I knew how the system worked,
meaning that I knew that often it didn’t work,” Mr. Stone wrote in his
book.
But he was insistent that
financial troubles were not responsible for his drifter lifestyle. “I
like my small camper,” he told an interviewer. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.”
Mr. Stone in 1973, the year Sly and the Family Stone released the album ”Fresh.” Credit: Urve Kuusik, via Sony Music
It Started in Church
Sylvester
Stewart was born in Denton, Texas, on March 15, 1943, the second of
Alpha and K.C. Stewart’s five children. Soon after, the family moved
west to Vallejo, Calif., north of San Francisco, where Mr. Stewart
worked as a cleaner and in maintenance at a department store. The couple
raised their children in the Pentecostal Church, where they first
became immersed in music.
In 1952, the
Stewart Family Four, a vocal group consisting of Sylvester and three of
his siblings, released a gospel single, “On the Battlefield,” with
“Walking in Jesus’s Name” on the flip side. The record planted the seeds
of the group harmonies for which the Family Stone would become known.
Even
as a child, Sylvester, who sang lead, was the star. “People were
hollering and wanting to touch him,” his mother recalled of the group’s
early performances, when he was as young as 5. “You had to hold them
back sometimes.”
It
went both ways: Mr. Stone recalled his mother saying that he really
came alive in front of a crowd. “If they didn’t respond, I would cry,”
he wrote.
In high school, Mr. Stone —
who picked up the nickname Sly thanks to a friend’s misspelling of his
first name — was a hot commodity as a guitarist for local doo-wop
groups. He learned new instruments with ease and moved from a Black
band, the Webs, to a more successful mixed-race act, the Viscaynes, with
whom he released a handful of singles and tasted his first morsels of
industry buzz.
After a brief stint
studying music theory, on and off, at Vallejo Junior College, Mr. Stone,
by then a fledgling commodity in the flourishing Bay Area music scene,
was tapped by some enterprising disc jockeys to work as a producer for
their new label, Autumn Records. There, he helped write Bobby Freeman’s “C’mon and Swim,” which became a Top 10 hit in 1964 and the catalyst of a dance craze.
Mr. Stone in 1967 at the San Francisco AM radio station KSOL. He was a popular disc jockey in the Bay Area from 1964 to 1967. Credit: via Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
Around the same time, Mr. Stone attended the Chris Borden School of Broadcasting in San Francisco, eventually making a name for himself as a D.J. at KSOL and KDIA, local AM stations aimed at Black listeners.
Never one to be boxed in, Mr. Stone varied his playlists with sounds of the day besides soul and R&B. “I played Dylan, Lord Buckley, the Beatles. Every night I tried something else,” he recalled in a 1970 Rolling Stone profile. “Everything was just on instinct. You know, if there was an Ex-Lax commercial, I’d play the sound of a toilet.”
On the radio, as in his musical career to come, Mr. Stone rejected racial divisions. “I found out about a lot of things I don’t like,” he said of his time on the air. “Like, I think there shouldn’t be ‘Black radio.’ Just radio. Everybody be a part of everything. I didn’t look at my job in terms of Black.”
By 1966, he was focused on his own music and was fronting a group called Sly and the Stoners. His brother Freddie was playing at the time with the white drummer Gregg Errico in Freddie & the Stone Souls. The two groups fused in 1967, becoming Sly and the Family Stone.
The act’s initial lineup featured Freddie on guitar — Sly turned his focus from guitar to organ so as not to double up — along with Larry Graham on bass and Vaetta Stewart, Sly’s younger sister, singing backup. The lineup would go on to include the trumpeter Cynthia Robinson and the saxophonist Jerry Martini, as well as the Mr. Stone’s sister Rose, who played keyboard and sang.
“We all quickly realized what Sly was doing when we looked around at each other,” Mr. Errico told Rolling Stone in 2015. “There were race riots going on at the time. Putting a musical group together with male and female and Black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to some people.”
“A
Whole New Thing,” released in 1967, was Sly and the Family Stone’s
first album. While it came to be seen as ahead of it’s time, it was
commercially unsuccessful. Credit: Epic
The
band’s debut album, “A Whole New Thing,” released in 1967 by Epic
Records, was indeed ahead of its time — so much so that it did not sell
well. But the follow-up, “Dance to the Music,” and its title track,
which became a Top 10 single, catapulted the band beyond the psychedelic
Bay Area scene, which had also given rise to contemporary acts like the
Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
Sly
and the Family Stone’s message always included acceptance and
togetherness. “Different strokes for different folks,” the band sang on
“Everyday People,” its first No. 1 record. “We got to live together.” At
Woodstock, early on a Sunday morning, Mr. Stone insisted on a
singalong, making sure to encourage those audience members who might
have considered such a feel-good exercise “old-fashioned.”
The
harmony didn’t last. As the band moved into a Beverly Hills mansion to
live and record in the early 1970s, drug use turned the Family Stone
dysfunctional. While the impactful songs were still there — “There’s a
Riot Goin’ On” marked a darker, more experimental progression — Mr.
Stone chronically missed concerts, burning bridges with promoters and
industry executives, even while the band reached the heights of its
popularity.
“Sometimes you don’t feel your soul at 7:30,” he told Rolling Stone after missing five straight shows in 1971.
Increasingly
reliant on stunts, Mr. Stone married Kathy Silva, an actress and the
mother of his first child, Sylvester Jr., onstage ahead of a concert at
Madison Square Garden in 1974. The marriage did not last. Credit...PL Gould Images, via Getty Images
The
uneven albums to follow, including “Fresh” in 1973 and “Small Talk” in
1974, showed more cracks in the foundation. Increasingly reliant on
stunts, Mr. Stone married Kathy Silva, an actress and the mother of his
first child, Sylvester Jr., onstage ahead of a concert at Madison Square
Garden in 1974. More than 20,000 people attended. The couple promptly
divorced. And while the band’s singular sound continued to spiral into
new, less radio-friendly directions, the original Family Stone lineup
had wilted by 1975, with Mr. Stone increasingly recording solo.
He would never marry again. In addition to his son, he is survived by two daughters, Sylvette and Novena Carmel.
In
the decades that followed, there were periodic attempts to keep the
Family Stone name alive and once again put Sly at the front of the
cultural pack; his 1979 album was titled “Back on the Right Track.” But
his idiosyncrasies and his legal troubles, including arrests for cocaine
possession, held him back.
While his
second and final solo album, “I’m Back! Family & Friends,” from
2011, was billed as Mr. Stone’s first release in three decades, he
dismissed it as mostly old hits remade with new guests. In 2019, he cut a
deal with Michael Jackson’s publishing company, Mijac, which allowed
him once again to collect payment from a minority interest in his music
catalog.
For his part, Mr. Stone said
he reveled in his break from fame, having executed a lifetime of musical
breakthroughs in less than a decade. “If you think about it, what could
I do after ‘Higher’ or ‘If You Want Me to Stay’?” he asked the
journalist Michael Goldberg in the early 1980s. “I wanted to go fishing,
man. Or drive my own car. For a long time, I didn’t understand anywhere
but hotel rooms, the inside of airplanes, and trying to figure out a
way that I didn’t come off wrong to human beings.”
Along
with Questlove, Mr. Stone’s longtime friend and manager Arlene
Hirschkowitz helped push a renaissance of recognition in recent years.
“Even if I stayed out of the spotlight, people managed to locate me,”
Mr. Stone wrote in his memoir.
He
eventually moved into a new house, where he passed time watching
television, visiting with family and listening to music. “I keep my ears
open for songs that connect back to my music,” he wrote. “I feel proud
when I hear it echoing in what other people make.” (As Mr. Clinton, who
inducted Mr. Stone into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, once said,
“Sly was like all the Beatles and all of Motown in one.”)
Asked
in the final pages of his autobiography if there was one thing that
people could take from his life, Mr. Stone replied, “Music, just music.”
He
added: “It’s been that always from the start. I don’t want to get in
people’s way, and I don’t want them to get in my way. I just want to
play my songs.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
Sylvester Stewart aka SLY STONE (b. March 15, 1943): Legendary, innovative, and iconic musician, composer, singer, songwriter, lyricist, arranger, and ensemble leader
Sly Stone was awarded $5 million in back royalties after his business partners were accused of "shady accounting." Martial Trezzini/Corbin
Sly Stone was awarded $5 million after a Los Angeles Supreme Court jury found that the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer was cheated out of over a decade's worth of royalties by his former manager and an entertainment lawyer. In the breach-of-contract lawsuit, Stone's lawyers argued that Gerald "Jerry" Goldstein and Glenn Stone had tricked Sly Stone into becoming an employee and co-owner of a company called Even St. Productions, which they then used to pocket Stone's royalties through "shady accounting."
"It's a good day for Sly, it's a good day for entertainers in general," Nicholas Hornberger, one of Stone's lawyers, told the press following the verdict. "This was an important verdict for people that are artists, entertainers, music composers, etc."
Lawyers for Goldstein, Sly's former manager, and Glenn Stone claimed that the rocker was hoping to "re-create his career" when he approached the company in 1989, the AP reports. They argued that Stone didn't see any royalty payments from 1989 to 2000 because the money that Even St. collected was used to pay off Stone's outstanding IRS debts. The defense put the figure in the $10 million range, the Wrap writes.
However, the jury disagreed with Glenn Stone and Goldstein's claims and returned a $5 million verdict in favor of Sly Stone, with Even St. ordered to pay the Family Stone rocker $2.5 million, Goldstein forced to pay $2.45 million and Glenn Stone $50,000. However, the decision gets murky given Sly Stone's status of a co-owner in Even St. Productions, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2013. A judge will sort out that and other issues when the case returns to court "in a few weeks," Hornberger said.
"Sly’s a deeply religious guy and he loves everybody and they just took him. It's sad that people would treat other people like that," Hornberger told the Wrap. "This is endemic of the entertainment industry. There are bad people who leech off people and this has got to stop."
The legal battle between Sly Stone and Goldstein had been waging since at least 2010, when Stone sued his former manager for $50 million. It was later discovered that Stone was living out of a white van in Los Angeles after being left broke from "financial mismanagement." The year before, Stone accused Goldstein of fraud and embezzlement during a long rant onstage at the Coachella Music Festival; Goldstein later sued Stone for slander over that incident.
Freddy Stone discusses Sly and the Family Stone’s Stand! on its 45th anniversary by Chris Williams Waxpoetics
By the end of the 1960s, Sylvester “Sly Stone” Stewart, Frederick “Freddie Stone” Stewart, Rosemary “Rose Stone” Stewart, Cynthia Robinson, Larry Graham, Greg Errico, and Jerry Martini had become cornerstones within the psychedelic soul genre, which would become the foundation that funk music was built on. Behind the scenes, Sly Stone was the lustrous architect behind this groundbreaking sound sweeping the nation. As the Civil Rights Movement came to a close, the group decided to embrace a different creative direction both musically and lyrically. After releasing A Whole New Thing (1967), commercially successful Dance to the Music (1968), and Life (1968), they tasted mainstream success once again a year later. On May 3, 1969, Stand! was released by Epic Records. The record would spawn four singles, including the hits “Sing a Simple Song,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Everyday People,” and “Stand!”
During the recording of the album, each member played an integral role in the success of it through their eclectic vocal techniques, masterful instrumentation, and production methodologies. Stand! set the stage for the group’s ascendancy to superstardom and led to their contemporaries following their musical footsteps for unparalleled success. It became their highest-selling album until the release of 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. For the album’s forty-fifth anniversary, we spoke with Frederick “Freddie Stone” Stewart about crafting one of the most definitive records in the history of music.
What is the story behind the forming of the group?
Freddie Stone: Well, my mother and father were both musicians. My father played the violin, a little guitar, and juice harp, and he made those instruments. My mother played piano and guitar. They were Christian people. So – we were bought up in the church. It was normal; at least it felt normal to us to play music. We loved church as kids. We used to be in church all the time. We grew up in a Pentecostal church. We played, played, and played, and by the time I was seventeen, church folks used to come to me and tell me, “You keep on playing for the Lord. He’s going to bless you.” I started playing music when I was twelve. One day, a guy approached me and asked me if I was interested in playing at a club one night. He told me I would make a certain amount of money. For a person that only went to church and went home, I felt that the Lord was going to bless me one day, but this guy was going to bless me tonight. [laughs]
So I started playing in clubs, and my brother Sly [Stone] was already playing and doing his disc jockeying thing. While he was playing, I formed a group called Freddie & the Stone Souls. This is how Greg [Errico] and I met. He was just getting out of high school in San Francisco. Sly came to me one night, and at that time, he had a group called Sly & the Stoners playing at the same club as my group. His group was made up of older cats, and some of them were lazy and my group was new on the scene. With me being four years younger, it made a difference as we were coming up together. My group was so energetic and excited to play. I had some great personalities in the group. Greg was a phenomenal drummer, Herb, Danny, and Ronnie Crawford were all great saxophone players, and I had Ted a great bass player from Oakland. We all had a great time playing together. So one day, Sly came up to me and said, “Hey, why don’t we get together and have one group? I’ll tell you what. If you get the best players from your group, I’ll get the best players from my group, and we’ll start a group.” I thought about it for a while. Now, at that time, Sly was dynamite at creating music. He was a genius in the making, and that’s just the way it was. He was like that before he was on the radio. When he was young, he was great. So, what he said carried a lot of weight with me. I thought we were ready to do something for real. So I thought about the group thing long and hard, and because Sylvester was so good, it changed the standard of who I picked had it not been him. Because he was so good, the only one I could see going with us was Greg. I talked with the rest of the group and told them what I decided to do. Greg was the only one that could keep up with Sly. Sly brought Cynthia [Robinson] from his camp and Jerry Martini knew Sylvester before I knew Jerry.
We heard about a bass player in Oakland that could play. So I went over to Oakland to hear him play, and low and behold, I see Larry Graham and his mother is playing piano and singing, and he was on the bass. He was so, so good that it was unbelievable. I thought to myself that this guy was special. We ended up talking to Larry, and we made arrangements and Larry came along. Now, my sister Rose had been singing every once in a while with Sylvester. She was kind of iffy, but I talked her into joining our group. After we got started, my youngest sister Vaetta came later on. Our family had been singing for all our lives. It was just natural for us. We were fortunate enough to have the kind of musicians that got along well together: black and White. The chemistry was natural, and it was just so easy until it was fun. It was always so, fun. We had no expectations on what we could accomplish. When we got together to start rehearsing on the first day, we realized that we sounded really good together. We were happy that we were in a band that sounded good. We liked playing and there were no expectations to do a record. We didn’t expect to do anything great, we were just a happy band. This was the way we were raised in this small town in Vallejo, California.
My mother babysat all the children in the neighborhood, and they were all colors. We didn’t know anything about racism or prejudice. It was uncommon to us. When we began to look for musicians, we just looked for musicians that could play. It just so happened that it turned out the way it did. It was amazing how it turned out. God had His hands on it all.
Coming off your group’s previous album, Life, it wasn’t a commercial as Dance to the Music. What direction was your group trying to take the sound for the Stand! album?
When I look back at the Stand! album and where it sits in relation to the others, I see the songs “Stand!” “Everyday People,” “Sing a Simple Song,” and “I Want to Take You Higher” and I put it up against the Dance to the Music album, Dance to the Music was an experiment. Because our first album was one of those things where Sly did what he wanted to do with it and not to say he didn’t do it with the others, but that first album was great. After that first album, we started to gain knowledge of commercialism. The task became to do our own thing, but make it commercial, if we wanted people to hear us. We grew as a group to do Dance to the Music and then Stand! For me, Stand! was where we reached our peak as a group. Stand! was the album that said this is what we’ve been wanting to tell you in the other albums, and we’re at a place now where we can, plus things were happening in our country at that time. We felt like we were taking a stand, and we wanted to encourage our fans to do the same, hence “Sing a Simple Song,” and we wanted people to remember who they were with a song like “Everyday People.”
How much did the influence of perils in American society contribute to the subject matter on this particular album?
It influenced us a lot. After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, I remember we were driving through Detroit and we were pulled over by the military. We were put up against the wall with rifles pointed at our heads, while they searched our car to find something in it. They ended up finding a gun, but it was a blank gun. I was scared to death, but they let us go. After his death, everything changed. That was just the type of impact that Dr. King had on the world. It was time for us to get a little bit more serious about things. Dance to the Music was about having fun and being happy, but when it came to Stand!, the things that were happening across the country changed us as people. It’s amazing because, as entertainers, you feel like you would miss a lot. We would go to places in the South, and we didn’t know what was going on in these Southern cities. We would always bypass it because we were entertainers. I didn’t know that there were certain doors black people weren’t allowed to go through. After this, we would begin having conversations amongst ourselves, and Sly being the genius that he is, he was putting these thoughts into songs. Sly was uncanny at knowing how to put together certain words and phrases to say what needed to be said. He used to call our mother to get pointers on certain things. [laughs] He would ask her spiritual questions, and she would give him the answers he needed to write the songs he wrote. He was truly gifted.
Around this same time, I tried drugs for the first time. I remember we were playing the Fillmore East in New York City in 1968, and Jimi Hendrix was on the marquee. We were going to go on, and Jimi was coming on after us. On that particular night, I had a very sore throat. Someone came to me and asked me, “How are you doing?” I replied, “I feel pretty good, but my throat is sore.” He said, “You should try this.” He laid down a couple of lines of cocaine, and that was the first time I took drugs of any sort in my life. I never heard any cursing in my home and there was never any alcohol there. We came from a Christian family. But I ended up trying the cocaine and, immediately, my sore throat was gone! Not only was my sore throat gone, but that particular night, I thought I played better than I ever played in my entire life. I thought I’d danced and sang better than I ever had that night, too. It was raining, and we ended up dancing outside the Fillmore East and people were following us and we ended up around the building. When I went back to talk to that guy, I asked him, “What was that you gave me for my sore throat?” He said, “Cocaine.” From that point on, I made excuses for why I needed to get more cocaine. For me, this lasted for ten years. I lost my family because of it. I didn’t get set free until 1980. It’s amazing the things that can happen to you when you’re naïve. When you’re dealing with things in the world, things can befall anybody, whether if you’re naïve or not.
Since you had a heavy background in gospel music before recording secular music, I wanted to focus on the influence that gospel music had on your group, and how it impacted your overall recording style on this particular record.
Whenever it came to recording, everyone pretty much did what they wanted to do. I know that Cynthia and Jerry really liked the horn parts that Sly would write for them. They could’ve done it on their own, but they wanted Sly to write it for them. Everyone else would play what they heard during our sessions. The way my sister Rose, Sly and I played, our mother and father had a great influence on us that we couldn’t shake, and we didn’t want to shake it. My mother and father came to California from Texas. They had this country style of playing music. On the one hand, their style was country, but on the other hand it was funky. My mom’s sister played piano and her other sister played guitar in church. Music was on both sides of my family. Billy Preston was the first musician that I played with when I struck out on my own, before I got my own band. Sly and Billy were close. I went to LA and played lead guitar with Billy. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around great musicians: Larry Graham, Jerry Martini, Cynthia Robinson, and Greg Errico. When you’re around great musicians like that, it just helps you become better. This is what they did and what Sly did. I’ve been blessed to be around some beautiful people. I played with Billy Preston for six months in Los Angeles. I remember one night I was playing a gig with him and Tina Turner walked in. When I left Billy, I formed my first group. I remember I met B.B. King when our group was in Cleveland. He said he had heard about us, but when I talked with him, he gave me one of the formulas by which he plays his solos. He didn’t have to do it, but he did. All these influences helped not only me, but our group in making this album.
Who was responsible in coming up with the melodies and harmonies for this album?
Ultimately, it was Sylvester. As far as the group contributions go, Sly, Rose, Vaetta, and I always sang a certain way with each other. So, some things were already set in place as far as the harmonies. We knew what parts I was going to take or what parts Sly was going to take and whether or not he was going to do any backgrounds or what part Rose or Vaetta was going to take. This was already set before the group started because of our vocal ranges. Sometimes, some group members felt like a certain note should’ve gone in one direction or a sound should’ve been on the bottom instead of on the top, but little did I know, the way we were doing it would turn out to be good musically. The same thing with the horns; Sly did the horns because he had the musical knowledge to make the horns sound more than they were. He knew how to space them. He took that and extended everything else to make sure they sounded the same way.
What was the methodology behind his spacing style?
Well, he used to talk about his college music teacher Mr. Froelich. By that time, Sly was already playing instruments, but Mr. Froelich gave him some musical insight on this spacing style.
Were the songs on this album constructed inside or outside of the studio?
For the songs on this album, most of them were written outside of the studio, while some were written in the studio, and the others were written off the cuff. On our first record, most of the songs were written in my mom’s basement. We rehearsed every day in her basement for about a year. People would come over in the morning, and we would rehearse all day long in the basement. But I remember working on “Sex Machine.” “Sex Machine” was recorded in the studio, because I remember the solo on it. Sly called me in to do the solo. This was in San Francisco at Pacific High Studios. I was in the studio with him for about an hour. During the process, he said, “Freddie, go home. Go home. Forget it. It ain’t happening. Go home. I’ll see you in the morning.” So, I left. I’m there first thing the next morning and he said, “Play the solo.” In one take, it was done. For most of the songs, I can say, there was always a skeleton done for them. We knew what the lyrics were, but the music was being worked out in the studio. When we all got together and played the songs, some things would be tweaked. The album that was different from this process would be There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
Can you describe the creative dynamic between group members during the making of this album?
At the beginning, Sly would do certain things on the drums to show Greg what he was feeling or what he was looking for or to get Greg off of his regular train of thought. He would do things like that, so he wouldn’t come in with any preconceived notions on how a song would go. He liked to change things up. Sly was pretty free about letting the musicians play what they wanted to play. There were certain songs where he wanted specific things for the group to play. We never had any problems as a group with creativity, but Sly had a structure about what he wanted to do. If you notice, each person in the group played a significant role in shaping our sound. It was more than the musical notes that we were playing; it was the way we hit the notes.
Take me through the making of each song on the album.
I have my own take on Sly and his genius. With me being the little brother and watching my older brother write, I have my take on certain things that I haven’t disclosed yet being that I am his brother. So, I couldn’t tell you. I’m going to save that for my book.
As you look back forty-five years later, you can see how much influence this album has made on popular culture. What are your feelings about the success you achieved with it, and its lasting legacy as one of the best albums ever recorded?
Well, we didn’t know that this particular album was going to do what it did. We didn’t know we had tapped into the pulse of the people. We didn’t know we had hit a homerun. We were just going up to the plate like we normally did and swing. We didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. It wasn’t what we had in mind, it was what God had in mind. It’s like when you write songs and play your music and someone will walk up to you and let you know you played well that night. It’s not so much about how you played it; it’s about how they heard it. Not in our wildest dreams, did we think we were going to have any type of impact. I was on my way to San Francisco one day and someone calls me to let me know that Sly & the Family Stone was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. When that happened, I didn’t know there was such a hall of fame and I wasn’t even thinking about it. I think we’ve received the recognition for our music because we made an impact. My sister Vaetta called me up one day to tell me that people were still playing our music. When people ask me questions about what was going on behind the scenes and how did you make such great music, I tell them it was Sly writing what was coming out of his heart and soul. He is a true genius. I just tell people to do what they love doing. That’s what we did.
Sly Stone on his custom three-wheeled chopper, outside his home, in Napa, California, on June 10, 2007. Photograph by Mark Seliger.
Sly Stone vanished into rumor in the 1980s, remembered only by the great songs ("I Want to Take You Higher," "Dance to the Music") he left behind. What's become of the funky leader of the Family Stone since he forsook his Woodstock-era utopianism for darkness, drugs, and isolation? After a few sightings—most notoriously at the 2006 Grammys—the author tracked the last of the rock recluses to a Bay Area biker shop, to scope out where Stone's been, where he's headed, and what's behind those shades.
I sure hope so. I have an appointment with him. I've flown across the country and quadruple-checked to make sure that we're still on.
To cynics and music-industry veterans, this very premise is laughable: an appointment with Sly Stone. Yeah, right. For 20-odd years, Stone has been one of music's great recluses, likened in the press to J. D. Salinger and Howard Hughes. And in the years before he slipped away, he was notorious for not showing up even when he said he would. Missed concerts, rioting crowds, irritated promoters, drug problems, band tensions, burned bridges.
But in his prime, Stone was a fantastic musician, performer, bandleader, producer, and songwriter. Even today, his life-affirming hits from the late 60s and early 70s—among them "Stand!," "Everyday People," and "Family Affair"—continue to thrive on the radio, magically adaptable to any number of programming formats: pop, rock, soul, funk, lite. He was a black man and emphatically so, with the most luxuriant Afro and riveted leather jumpsuits known to Christendom, but he was also a pan-culturalist who moved easily among all races and knew no genre boundaries. There was probably no more Woodstockian moment at Woodstock than when he and the Family Stone, his multi-racial, four-man, two-woman band, took control of the festival in the wee hours of August 17, 1969, getting upwards of 400,000 people pulsing in unison to an extended version of "I Want to Take You Higher." For one early morning, at least, the idea of "getting higher" wasn't an empty pop-culture construct or a stoner joke, but a matter of transcendence. This man had power.
He also had a compelling penchant for folly. In the jivey, combustible early 1970s, when it was almost fashionable for public figures to unleash their ids and abandon all shame—whether it was Norman Mailer's baiting a roomful of feminists at New York's Town Hall or Burt Reynolds's posing nude on a bearskin for Cosmopolitan—Sly was out on the front lines, contributing some first-rate unhinged behavior of his own. Like marrying his 19-year-old girlfriend onstage in 1974 at Madison Square Garden before a ticket-buying audience of 21,000, with Soul Train host Don Cornelius presiding as M.C. Or appearing on Dick Cavett's late-night ABC talk show while conspicuously, if charmingly, high. "You're great," Stone told his flummoxed host in 1971, in the second of two notorious visits to Cavett's soundstage. "You are great. You are great. You know what I mean? [Pounds fist on heart.] Booom! Right on! Sure thing. No, for real. For real, Dick. Hey, Dick. Dick. Dick. You're great."
Cavett, grasping for some sense of conversational traction, smirked and replied, "Well, you're not so bad yourself."
"Well," said Sly, eyes rolling up in contemplation, "I am kinda bad … "
Sly Stone is my favorite of the rock-era recluses, and, really, the only big one left. Syd Barrett, the architect of Pink Floyd's entrancingly loopy early sound, passed away last summer at the age of 60, having resisted all entreaties to explain himself or sing again. Brian Wilson, the fragile visionary behind the Beach Boys, has been gently coaxed out of his shell by his friends and acolytes, and now performs and schmoozes regularly. He doesn't count as a recluse anymore.
But Sly has remained elusive—still with us, yet seemingly content to do without us. I have been pursuing him for a dozen years, on and off, wondering if there would ever come a time when he'd release new material, or at the very least sit down and talk about his old songs. I've loved his music for as long as I've been a sentient human being—he started making records with the Family Stone when I was a toddler. And over time, as the silence has lengthened, his disappearance from public life has become a fascinating subject in and of itself. How could it have happened? How could a man with such an extensive and impressive body of work just shut down and cut out?
"I often tell people that I have more dead rock stars on tape than anyone, and they'll say, 'You mean Janis, Hendrix, and Sly?'" says Cavett today. "A lot of people think he's gone." Even if you're aware that Sly lives, you have to wonder what kind of shape he's in, projecting that beautiful but reckless man of 1971 into 2007, the year he turned 64. What of the dark rumors that he's done so much coke that his brain is zapped, and that he now exists in a pathetic, vegetative state? What of the more hopeful rumors that he's still writing and noodling with his keyboards, biding his time until he feels ready to attempt a comeback?
I had long dreamed of the latter scenario. Syd Barrett excepted, they do all come back. Brian Wilson did. The Stooges did. The New York Dolls did. Even Roky Erickson, the psychedelic pioneer from the 13th Floor Elevators, long presumed to be fried beyond rehabilitation by electroshock treatments he received in the early 1970s, has staged a robust return to the live circuit.
My hopes for a Sly comeback were highest in 2003. That year, in the back room of a music store in Vallejo, California, where Sly grew up, I sat in on a rehearsal of a re-united Family Stone led by Freddie Stone, Sly's guitarist brother. Freddie was intent on recording an album of entirely new material that he had written with his sister Rose, who played organ and shared lead vocals in the old group. "Sylvester's doing very well, by the way," Freddie told me, using his brother's given name. Gregg Errico, the band's drummer, who was also in on the reunion, explained that, while they weren't counting on Sly to join them, they had set a place for him just in case, like Seder participants awaiting Elijah. "We profess that the keyboard is on the stage, the [Hammond] B3's running, and the seat is warm for him," Errico said.
But that reunion quickly fizzled out. After that, my Sly search lay dormant; I pretty much gave up. He hadn't shown his face in public since 1993, when he and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Characteristically, Sly slipped in and out of the ceremony without saying much, barely acknowledging his siblings and bandmates. So why would he ever want to perform again, much less meet up with a stranger?
What to make of this? Was Sly's newfound quasi-visibility a sign that, at last, his return was nigh? Early this year, I managed to get in touch with Vet Stone, who confirmed that her brother was indeed planning a return: a show in San Jose on July 7 with her band (which, with Sly's blessing, has been renamed the Family Stone), and then some summer dates at festivals in Europe. After several telephone conversations in early spring and one meeting with me in person, Vet called one day with the news: Sly would speak. We would meet up on May 9 in Vallejo, his hometown, 25 miles north of Oakland.
Are You Ready?
On the designated day, Vet and I arrive early at the designated meeting place: Chopper Guys Biker Products Inc., a Vallejo business that manufactures parts and frames for custom motorcycles. Sly, who lived in L.A. on and off for 36 years but recently relocated to Napa Valley, gets his bikes serviced here. As Vet and I kill time chatting, we eventually notice that it's about 10 minutes past the appointed start time of our meeting. Nothing worrying, but a long enough period to have faint thoughts of Hmm, maybe this won't work out. Vet tells me how many doubters she's had to deal with in booking those summer European dates, "people who wouldn't take my call, people who hung up on me, people who think I'm a delusional woman." She has been the catalyst of Sly's tentative re-emergence, the one who pulled him out of L.A. and found him a home up north, who persuaded him to play with her band and get back out on the road again. It's exhausted her, and she's openly daunted by the logistics of planning for her brother, never the smoothest of travelers, to fly to Europe and then zip from Umbria to Montreux to Ghent.
But she's gotten this far, which fuels her faith. "All I can say," she says, and it's something she says a lot, "is that I'm his little sister, and he's never lied to me." Nevertheless, even Vet is starting to get a little nervous about the interview, checking her cell phone, stepping outside the front door of Chopper Guys with me to see if anyone's coming.
And then, like John Wayne emerging from 'cross the prairie in The Searchers … a strange form advances through the wavy air in the distance: some sort of vehicle, low to the ground, rumbling mightily as it turns off the highway and into the parking lot. As it comes closer, the shapes become clearer: a flamboyantly customized banana-yellow chopper trike, the front tire jutting four feet out in front of the driver. He sits on a platform no higher than 18 inches off the ground, legs extended in front of him, his body clad in a loose, tan shirt-and-pants ensemble somewhere between Carhartt work clothes and pajamas. His feet are shod in black leather sneakers with green-yellow-red African tricolor trim. Behind him, on an elevated, throne-like seat built between the two fat back tires, sits an attractive, 30-ish woman in full biker leathers. He always was good at entrances.
Sly Stone and his lady companion, who I learn is named Shay, disembark from the chopper and walk toward the shop. He applies pink baby lotion to his hands, which I notice are huge, with elongated, tapering fingers. He's still very slim—there was never a Fat Sly period—and he does not appear frail, as several recent reports have described him. In fact, he moves rather well, especially for a 64-year-old man who's just spent time scrunched into a custom-chopper cockpit. But he has the same hunched posture he had at the '06 Grammys—a bit like Silvio Dante's in The Sopranos—and he wears a neck brace.
We shake hands and say hello. I've heard he owns an old Studebaker, so I tell him I, too, own an old Studebaker. "Really, what year?" he says, looking up at me with a smile. He pulls two chairs together for our chat, a metal stool and an old barber's chair. As all these mundane things are transpiring, I realize I'm recording them in my mind like a doctor observing a patient recovering from brain trauma. He is aware of his surroundings. He is capable of participating in linear conversational exchanges. He is able to move chairs.
The only strange part: he is still wearing his helmet and shades when we sit down to talk. Good lord, I'm thinking, is he going to wear the helmet the whole time? Fortunately, without my prompting, Vet says, "Why don't you take your helmet off?," and Sly obliges, revealing a backward San Francisco Giants cap.
"Still sporting the blond Mohawk under there?" I ask.
"Naw, not now, it's very short," he says. Then, deadpan: "Most of it growing under the skin."
I start the interview in earnest with the most obvious question: "Why have you chosen to come back now?"
At this, he grins. "'Cause it's kind of boring at home sometimes."
"But it's bigger than just being bored at home, isn't it?"
"Yeah, I got a lot of songs I want to record and put out, so I'm gonna try 'em out on the road," he says. "That's the way it's always worked the best: Let's try it out and see how the people feel."
Stone tells me he has a huge backlog of new material, "a library, like, a hundred and some songs, or maybe 200." This subject, I come to understand, animates him like no other. With the old songs, he seems uninterested in analysis. When I ask him if he was consciously trying to do something different with his December 1969 single "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," which, with its chanted unison vocals and slap bass, effectively invented 1970s funk—without it, no Parliament-Funkadelic, no Ohio Players, no Earth, Wind & Fire—he replies simply, "Well, the title was spelled phonetically. That was one thing different."
Likewise, on more personal matters, such as what else he was up to in his awol years, he's evasive: "Just traveling—going around, jumping in and out, and up and down." He doesn't flinch when I broach the subject of his hunched posture and neck brace, but it's clear he doesn't want to break out the M.R.I.'s, either. "I fell off a cliff," he says. "I was walking in my yard in Beverly Hills, missed my footing, and started doing flips. But you know what? I had a plate of food in my hand. And when I landed, I still had a plate of food in my hand. That's the God-lovin' truth. I did not drop a bean."
But when I ask Stone to describe the new songs, he straightens up, rocks forward in his seat, and starts rhyming in an insistent cadence somewhere between a preacher's and a rapper's, the rasp suddenly gone from his otherwise low, throaty speaking voice. "There's one that says, 'Ever get a chance to put your thanks on? / Somebody you know you can bank on? / Even sometimes you might embarrass them by pulling rank on? / Now, whatcha gonna do when you run out of them? … Another holiday, you're drunk and curbing it / You can't face a noun, so you're straight adverbing it / You had an argument at home, and you had to have the last word in it / Now whatcha gonna do when you run out of them?'
"There's one that's called 'We're Sick Like That,'" he continues. "It says, 'Give a boy a flag and teach him to salute / Give the same boy a gun and teach him how to shoot / And then one night, the boy in the bushes, he starts to cry / 'Cause nobody ever really taught him how to die.'"
The obvious allusion to the current war jars me, and I soon realize why: Stone has been absent from the scene for such a duration that it's hard to imagine that he was with us all along, experiencing all the things we experienced over the years—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela's release from prison, the rise of the World Wide Web, the attacks on 9/11, the invasion of Iraq. It's almost as if he went into a decades-long deep freeze, like Austin Powers or the astronauts in Planet of the Apes. Except he didn't. "Did you do normal-person things?" I ask about the missing years. "Did you watch Cheers in the 80s and Seinfeld in the 90s? Do you watch American Idol now? Do you have a normal life or more of a Sly Stone life?"
"I've done all that," he says. "I do regular things a lot. But it's probably more of a Sly Stone life. It's probably … it's probably not very normal."
The Sly Stone life started getting abnormal shortly after his band's euphoric Woodstock performance. Joel Selvin, the veteran music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, published a thoroughgoing, book-length oral history of the group in 1998 (simply called Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History) that is as disturbing and chilling a version as you'll ever find of the "dashed 60s dream" narrative: idealism giving way to disillusionment, soft drugs giving way to hard, ferment to rot.
It's agreed upon by everyone Selvin interviewed—which is pretty much everyone in Stone's family, band, and circle of hangers-on, apart from Sly himself—that the bad craziness began when he forsook the Bay Area for Southern California, in 1970. Exit the music of hope and the gorgeous mosaic; enter firearms, coke, PCP, goons, paranoia, isolation, and a mean-spirited pet pit bull named Gun.
"There is a cloud flying over Sly from the time he moved down to Los Angeles," the Family Stone's original saxophonist, Jerry Martini, told Selvin. "Things really changed when he moved down there … It was havoc. It was very gangsterish, dangerous. The vibes were very dark at that point."
Before that, though, there was the Bay Area Sly of the 1960s, a different character altogether: a personable, outgoing, uncommonly talented young man who cut quite a swath through the region's music scene. He was born Sylvester Stewart into a loving, tight-knit family presided over by a father, K.C., and a mother, Alpha, whose marriage would last 69 years. K.C. ran a janitorial business in Vallejo and was a deacon in the local Pentecostal church. From an early age, Sylvester was performing with his siblings in a gospel group called the Stewart Four. Loretta, the eldest of the five Stewart children, provided piano accompaniment, while the four Stewarts of the billing—in birth order, Sylvester, Rose, Freddie, and Vet—harmonized on vocals. "We traveled around from church to church, all over California, performing concerts," says Vet. "We thought we were just like any other family. We had no idea."
The greatest prodigy of all the young Stewarts, Sylvester was also the most driven. He was barely into his 20s when he insinuated himself into the inner circle of San Francisco's biggest music macher, the disc jockey and impresario Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue. In 1964, Sylvester collaborated with Donahue on the song "C'mon and Swim," a Top 10 hit for the local soul star Bobby Freeman. Shortly thereafter, he became the house producer at Donahue's label, Autumn Records, working with, among others, the Great Society and the Warlocks, the precursor bands to, respectively, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. In the same period, under his new stage name, Sly Stone, Sylvester became a regional radio celebrity, hosting a soul show on the station KSOL from seven p.m. to midnight.
You Can Make It If You Try
It was all in place, the eclectic mishmash of sensibilities and influences that would inform Sly and the Family Stone: soul, gospel, pop, Haight hippiedom, sparkly showmanship. (In his D.J. days, Stone drove a Jaguar XKE he'd had custom-painted bright purple.) So when Sly decided to start up a band of his own, he knew exactly what he wanted. "It was very deliberate: men and women, different races, dressing different," says Larry Graham, the group's bassist. Martini, the saxophonist and one of the band's two white members (along with Errico, the drummer), recalls Stone playing an almost curatorial role in shaping the band's presentation. Pointing to an old publicity photo that shows him ridiculously attired in a piebald poncho, Martini says, "That was a rug! Sly saw a cow skin on the floor, got a rug cutter, cut a hole in it, and said 'Here, Jerry, this is gonna be your outfit.'"
"I remember having lunch with Sly in my dining room, right at the beginning," says Clive Davis, who was in his first year as president of CBS Records in 1967, when its Epic subsidiary signed the group. "I told him, 'I'm concerned that the serious radio stations that might be willing to play you'—by which I meant the underground FM radio stations—'will be put off by the costuming, the hairstyles.' It was almost Las Vegas–like in its presentation. Sly said, 'Look, that's part of what I'm doing. I know people could take it the wrong way, but that's who I am.' And he was right. I learned an important lesson from him: When you're dealing with a pathfinder, you allow that genius to unfold."
Musically, too, Stone orchestrated a theoretically unwieldy but ultimately ingenious fusion of styles. "It's one of the things I really admire about Sly—we were all allowed to use our creativity, to have freedom of expression in how we played," says Graham, whose percussive "thumpin' and pluckin'" bass style became practically a new musical genre unto itself. The band's first and most conventionally soul-like album, A Whole New Thing, was a flop, but the exhortative title song of album two, "Dance to the Music," became their first Top 10 hit, in 1968, and remains a party standard to this day.
The album Stand! (1969) represented the apotheosis of both the band's signature "psychedelic soul" sound and their status as positivity-preaching messengers from the Utopian, multicultural future. Five of the album's eight songs—"Stand!," "I Want to Take You Higher," "Sing a Simple Song," "Everyday People," and "You Can Make It if You Try"—ended up on the Greatest Hits album that came out the following year.
Stand!, tellingly, was the album that the band was touring behind at the time of Woodstock. Graham recalls the festival as a moment when the group's members "tapped into a new zone," achieving a musical power they hadn't realized they were capable of. "It's like when an athlete like Michael Jordan realizes the extent of his gifts and goes, 'Oh, I can do that,'" he says.
But rather than return to the studio to capitalize on this momentum, Stone bunched himself up into a shag-carpeted cocoon. The year 1970 came and went with no new album and, worse, a new penchant for missing shows—26 out of 80, to be precise. Stone's decision to move to Los Angeles didn't do much for band harmony, either. In 1971, Errico quit, fed up with being summoned to L.A. from his Bay Area home for sessions on the next Family Stone album, only to be kept waiting indefinitely for Stone to use him.
That same year, Stone started renting the Bel Air mansion owned by the debauched hippie king John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, which had been previously owned by Jeanette MacDonald, squeaky-clean star of corny 1930s MGM operettas. The L.A. music mogul Lou Adler, Phillips's best friend, recalls that the house across the street (which was used for exterior shots in The Beverly Hillbillies) was owned by a wealthy hotelier named Arnold Kirkeby. "The Kirkebys were a very conservative family," Adler says, "and they hated the flowing robes that John and his wife, Michelle, wore, the caftans and Nehru collars. They were very pleased that a 'Mr. Sylvester Stewart' was moving in. They liked the sound of that."
Needless to say, Stone and his new entourage left even John Phillips appalled. "There were lots of guns, rifles, machine guns, and big dogs" on his property, he later lamented.
"At some point, I started getting concerned about stories I heard about Sly's personal habits," says Clive Davis, who was also worried that his star artist might never deliver a new album. "But every time I met with him, he was on top of his game. I was somewhat innocent of the lifestyle going on around me, whether it was him or Janis Joplin."
Spaced Cowboy
Even though he had the Bel Air house and real studios at his disposal, Stone spent much of his time working on the new album, There's a Riot Goin' On, in a Winnebago motor home rigged up with recording equipment. ("There was a riot in that motor home," Stone says with a smile, not elaborating further.) The remaining Family Stone members played on the album, but no longer did so as a band, instead overdubbing their parts individually. They also had company, in the form of guest musicians Stone had brought aboard, among them the keyboardist Billy Preston and the guitarist Bobby Womack.
"We used to ride around in his motor home, getting high and writing songs and making music," Womack told the British rock journalist Barney Hoskyns. But what started as a lark for the soul and R&B singer-guitarist became a nightmare. "I became paranoid at everything," Womack said. "I was always thinking I was gonna get killed and that the feds were gonna bust in on Sly. Everybody had pistols. It got to the point where I said, 'I gotta get away from here.' Sly be talkin' to you, but he ain't there."
Somehow, the album that emerged from this chaos, which was finally released in November 1971, turned out brilliantly, if darkly. There's a Riot Goin' On is great "this is your brain on drugs" music. It sounds nothing like the chirpy albums that preceded it. Because Stone kept re-recording and overdubbing on the same master tape, wearing it out in the process, the overall sound is muffled and washed out—a bit of technical malfeasance that serendipitously suited the album's spacey, mid-tempo songs.
On many tracks, the air of dislocation is enhanced by the cold, metronomic gallop of the primitive drum machine that substituted for the departed Errico. And Stone's vocals are plain spooky—like a supine junkie's before he lapses into a coma. This is true even on the album's catchy, chart-topping single, "Family Affair." Listen to his ghoulish, meandering delivery of the line "Newly wehhhhdd a year ago / But you're still checkin' each other out / Yeahhh." It's like hearing a heat-warped 45 played at 33 r.p.m.
There's a Riot Goin' On has been as picked over and decrypted by rock critics as anything in Bob Dylan's catalogue. The opening line of the opening song, "Luv N' Haight"—"Feels so good inside myself / Don't wanna move"—is often interpreted as Stone's statement of retreat into solipsism, a repudiation of his flower-power "Everyday People" ethos of the 1960s. The late Timothy White, the Billboard editor and former Rolling Stone writer, called the album "a brooding, militant, savage indictment of all the decayed determinism of the '60s."
But Stone himself seems oblivious to the very fact of all this tea-leaf reading. "People say Riot is about Sly Stone's disillusionment with the 60s dream," I tell him.
"Oh, really?" he says, genuinely surprised.
"Yes, what do you make of that?"
"That may be true," he says.
"May be?" I say. "It's you! Is it true or isn't it?"
"I mean, I've never thought about it like that," he says. "I don't really feel like I'm disillusioned. Maybe I am. I don't think so, though."
I ask if his writing was impacted by any of the period's ugliness—the Kent State killings, the Attica prison riots, the M.L.K. and R.F.K. assassinations.
"Um, I paid attention to it," he says, "but I didn't count on it. I wasn't going on any other program or agenda or philosophy. It was just what I observed, where I was at."
Still, Stone doesn't totally dismiss those who ascribe loftier meanings to the album. When I ask him if he regards There's a Riot Goin' On in any way as a political statement, he says, "Well, yeah, probably. But I didn't mean it to be."
Runnin' Away
The success of There's a Riot Goin' On, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, obscured the fact that the band was further disintegrating and that Stone's unreliability was increasingly a problem to concert promoters. The no-show subject remains a sore one with Stone, who says he wasn't as bad as he was made out to be. "I got tired of going to concerts where I'd have to pay a bond, pay money in case I didn't show up," he says. Stone claims that some of his missed dates weren't his fault but acts of collusion between promoters and transportation people, who cynically exploited his reputation for flaking out. "I later found out that they had a deal going between the promoter and the guy that was taking me to the gig," he says. "So I would put up the $25,000 or the $50,000. The guy with me would help me be late, and I didn't realize that was what was going on until later. Then they'd split the money. That kind of stuff can play on your attitude a little bit. I wasn't so focused after a while."
Larry Graham bolted from the band in the tumultuous period after Riot's release, having grown estranged from Stone. If the witnesses in Selvin's oral history are to be believed, each man had developed an entourage of gun-wielding flunkies, and Graham feared for his life. Graham, now a devout and unrelentingly upbeat Jehovah's Witness, is reluctant to get into the details, except to say, "Maybe things were exaggerated in the past. During those periods of time, there were a number of elements I couldn't control. I wasn't the leader. Whereas Sly was the leader: he chose to have certain people around him. Sly and I were, and still are, a family. At some point, a member of a family needs to leave home."
With a new bassist, Rusty Allen, Stone managed to put out one more great album, Fresh (1973), and one more pretty good one, Small Talk (1974). But the fragmentation of the "classic" lineup was the beginning of the end, and a prelude to Stone's reclusive, unproductive years. From the mid- to late 1970s, his output was low in inspiration and didn't sell well, notwithstanding the desperate hopefulness of the titles he gave his albums: High on You (not on drugs; on You!); Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back; and Back on the Right Track.
By the 80s, the situation was just dire—too sad to qualify as gonzo Keith Richards druggy bravado or This Is Spinal Tap muso-comedy. Stone was arrested several times for cocaine possession. He missed several court dates. In 1984 he shortsightedly sold his publishing rights to Michael Jackson's publishing company, Mijac Music. And creatively he'd dried up. The last new music he recorded for commercial release came out in 1986: a duet with Jesse Johnson, of the Minneapolis group the Time, on Johnson's solo single "Crazay"—an acceptable but undistinguished slice of period shoulder-pad funk. "I don't even know what that song was about, to this day," Stone says. "I just happened to go in the studio."
His drug use is another one of those subjects that Stone won't delve into too deeply. But he reckons that he got serious about getting sober around 15 years ago. "I'm pretty cool," he says. "I drink now and then, a little bit—beer. And I smoke butts sometimes." When I probe about how he managed to "clean up," he responds with a shrewd bit of verbal cryptology that sounds like one of his lyrics: "I just looked around one day, and it was cleaned up. Just hardly was nothing there. Just … certain people were not around."
The Chopper Guys get-together was the first time I actually met Stone, but it was the second time this year I'd seen him in the flesh. On March 31, he played his first-ever scheduled concert with Vet's version of the Family Stone—which features only Robinson, the trumpeter, among the original members—at the Flamingo Hotel, in Las Vegas. By "scheduled concert," I mean that Stone was promised to the promoter and the ticket buyers as part of the show; he wasn't merely making an unbilled cameo, as he'd done in Anaheim in January.
It was a curious booking: a concert attached to the stand-up act of George Wallace, a veteran black comedian who routinely works Saturday nights in the Flamingo Showroom, a smallish theater with lounge-style banquettes and tables. The unconventional, low-wattage setup was an indicator of the industry's persistent wariness of Stone. Whereas Brian Wilson's comeback concerts at the turn of the decade were elaborately stage-managed affairs in posh venues, with an orchestra behind him and adoring fans in front of him, Stone finds himself in the position of having to earn back the public's trust. "Somebody had to take a chance," Wallace told EURweb.com, a black-entertainment news service, "so it's me."
As word leaked out about the Flamingo engagement, the skeptics raised their voices. "There are some doubters who bet Sly will be a no-show for his show," said an item in the New York Post's "Page Six" column, the day before the concert. "Our bookmaker says the odds are about even."
When I got to Vegas, I realized how jerry-rigged the Sly comeback machinery was. There were posters up in McCarran Airport and throughout the city advertising sly & the family stone at the Flamingo, but the photo displayed was a poor-quality screen grab of Stone, with his Mohawk, from the Grammy telecast—evidently the best the promoters could do in terms of getting a current publicity shot.
The morning of the show, I sat down with Vet Stone, Cynthia Robinson, and some other members of their traveling troupe. With the exception of myself and Skyler Jett, a young musician who sings Sly's leads in the prodigal leader's absence, everyone in the room was a woman. Among them were Lisa Stone, the pretty daughter of Rose, who sings her mother's old parts, and Novena, Sly's daughter, a petite, poised young woman of 25, who, when I asked, said, "My last name's not important." (Sly also has a daughter in her 30s, Phunn, with Robinson, and a son, Sylvester junior, also in his 30s, with Kathy Silva, the woman he married onstage at Madison Square Garden in '74 and divorced five months later.)
The matriarchal new configuration of the Family Stone makes sense—a bosomy, embracing, welcoming change of pace from the phallic tough-guy posturing of the old days. It's a forgiving group, too. It couldn't have been easy for Robinson in the 1970s, carrying and raising Sly's child while he was becoming an epic rock casualty, but here she was, telling me that Sly's tardiness to concerts was often the result of noble behavior. "Many times Sly was late because he came back and got the ones who were really late," she said. "You know, the first trip we ever made to New York, I missed the flight—and had never been on a plane before. And Sly stayed back, so I'd have somebody to ride with. I didn't ask him to, but he knew I'd never flown."
Vet Stone was never an official member of the original Family Stone, but she contributed backing vocals to their albums from the beginning and had some brief chart success in the early 70s with her own, Sly-produced group, aptly called Little Sister. As down to earth as her brother is interplanetary, she is the one who will go down in the annals as the hero in this happy coda to Sly's life, provided everything stays on track. "I was persistent. I prayed a lot," she told me of her effort to cajole her brother out of retirement.
Her campaign to reclaim Sly started in earnest with their parents' deaths, which occurred within 18 months of each other—K.C.'s in 2001, Alpha's in 2003. "They both died in my arms," Vet said, "and they both told me, 'Go get your brother.' Independent of each other—not knowing. That kind of stuck with me. And it was more than just physically 'go get him.' It was 'Support him.' So I started going to Los Angeles, maybe sometimes twice a week, to see him. I went and told him what our parents said. He said, 'Find me a house.' And I did."
Sly's new compound, which I get to see a couple of months later, is in a bucolic, isolated spot in Napa Valley. The setting is more Francis Coppola than MTV Cribs, with grape arbors and topiary, but it's been Slyed up. In the driveways and garage sits an eccentric array of vehicles: the yellow chopper; a second, still bigger chopper with lightning-bolt detailing; the Studebaker, a burnt-orange Gran Turismo; a London taxi in disrepair; a Hummer that's been haphazardly spray-painted silver; and an old Buick convertible that's been spray-painted black, its front grille replaced with a rectangular length of chicken wire.
Back on the Right Track
The night of the Vegas show, after George Wallace had concluded his routine, which included some choice jokes in the "Yo mama" genre (e.g., "Yo mama's so fat, she got a real horse on her Ralph Lauren shirt!"), I watched the Family Stone take the stage, minus Sly. They played a proficient revue-style set, effectively a long medley of Sly and the Family Stone's greatest hits. But the audience was growing palpably restless; the fellow next to me was rather belligerently shouting, "Where's slyyyyy! We want slyyyyy!"
Then, sometime around midnight—the stroke of April Fools' Day—a man who looked like an extra from a blaxploitation version of Buck Rogers sauntered onto the stage. He was wearing a black knit cap, wraparound white sunglasses, outrageous black platform boots with sneaker-style laces, spangly black trousers cut like newsboy knickers, a matching spangly black jacket, and a red spangly shirt. He sat down at the Korg synthesizer parked center stage and pumped his fist.
"I don't think it's him," said a woman near me, the companion of the impatient shouter. And she had a point. The figure before us was so swaddled, layered, shaded, hatted, be-scarved, and neck-braced, it really could have been anyone. But then he went into "If You Want Me to Stay," one of his later hits, from 1973, and everyone recognized that, Omigod, Sly made the gig. The place erupted in appreciative cheers, and Stone, tentative and seemingly nervous at first, grew more confident. On "I Want to Take You Higher," he got up from behind his keyboard and boogied down the center-stage catwalk, slapping hands with members of the audience.
It was not a tightly scripted show. Stone wandered the stage between songs, seemingly taking it all in, as if re-acclimating to performing life. He brought out his daughters for their own brief turns in the spotlight. Phunn performed a rap. Novena sat at a piano and played, incongruously but with great skill, "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum," a fast, heavily arpeggiated piece by Claude Debussy. Their father loitered behind them as they did their bits, shifting from platform boot to platform boot, beaming like a dad at a school assembly.
Stone's own segment lasted a little more than half an hour. Over the course of it, he proved that he is still a limber vocalist, ad-libbing some euphoric, gospelized melismas over "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" and re-creating the scary croak of "Family Affair." But there was one mesmerizing moment that seemed lost on the liquored-up, good-timey Vegas crowd. "Stand!" began not with the rousing drumroll you hear on the record but with Stone singing a cappella in a soft, deliberately fragile voice. ("I just felt like doing it like that—so everybody could really hear it properly," he later told me.) Some of the crowd chattered through it, but to hear him almost whisper these words—
*Stand
In the end you'll still be you
One that's done all the things you set out to do Stand
There's a cross for you to bear
Things to go through if you're going anywhere*
—and to know the things he went through, the things he set out to do, the things he achieved, and the things he threw away; and then, to see him there, hunched and older but still standing, onstage, surrounded by family … well, it got to me. I misted up.
Stone is intent on getting to work on the new album in the fall, when the European tour is over. He says it will be a Sly and the Family Stone album, not the solo album. Vet's version of the Family Stone will play on it, as will his siblings Rose, who lives in Los Angeles, and Freddie, who is now the pastor of the Evangelist Temple Fellowship Center, in Vallejo.
Which is all well and good, but still: it is a tenet of rock snobbery that the founding lineup of a group must be held sacrosanct. Jerry Martini, the Family Stone's original saxophonist, joked to me a few years ago about the sadness of "reunions" that lack crucial band members. "Think of Creedence Clearwater … Revisited," he said, relishing the ellipsis. "Where are they playing? Anywhere you see a Ferris wheel!" (That said, Martini has done time in outfits called the Family Stone Experience and the Original Family Stone.)
So I put it to the main man: Is there any chance that the whole lineup from the old days will gather to play on the new album?
"I'm sure that's gonna happen, yeah," Sly says.
It almost happened last year, at the Grammys. For the first time since 1993, the year of the Hall of Fame induction, the seven original members were in the same place, and, what's more, they were poised to play together for the first time since 1971. This time, though, while Sly and his Mohawk made it to the stage, Graham fell ill and dropped out at the last minute. (His successor, Rusty Allen, filled in.)
As it turned out, Graham fared the best of anyone that night. In a bizarre miscalculation, and an affront to anyone with an appreciation of soul and rock history, the awards show's producers barely acknowledged the original group's presence. As the musicians plowed through a medley of the old hits, the cameras stayed fixed on a series of guest vocalists, who ranged from the mildly credible (John Legend, Joss Stone [no relation], Steven Tyler of Aerosmith) to the verily D-list (Fantasia, Devin Lima).
"We just kept playing, because there was really no order," says Cynthia Robinson. "There was a stage band standing in front of us, so hardly anybody knew we were there." To make matters worse, Stone had flipped his motorcycle a few days before the broadcast, damaging tendons in his right hand and making him even more uneasy with the situation than he would have been on his best day. When I ask him why the whole performance seemed so discombobulated, he says, "That wasn't my gig. Really, that wasn't my gig. I was trying to, like, cooperate with someone else that … " He pauses to find the right words: " … had their turn."
The "someone else" he's most likely alluding to, though he won't comment on him any further, is a mysterious man named Jerry Goldstein. In the deep-freeze years when no one saw Sly Stone in public—roughly from the Hall of Fame ceremony until last year—Goldstein was the man you needed to go through to get to Sly Stone: a nebulously defined manager-gatekeeper-protector. He is listed as a co–executive producer of Different Strokes by Different Folks, the obvious promotional tie-in to the Grammy appearance: a turgid remix CD of old Sly Stone tracks that features such artists as Legend, Tyler, Lima, Joss Stone, and Maroon 5. It was initially sold exclusively at Starbucks.
In Goldstein's defense, he is also listed as a co–executive producer of Sony Legacy's long-overdue series of Sly and the Family Stone album reissues, spanning the 1967–74 period from A Whole New Thing to Small Talk. These are terrific, with thoughtful liner notes, crisply remastered sound, and great bonus songs. The only problem is, Stone claims the reissues were prepared and released without his knowledge.
For all I know, Goldstein, who runs a Los Angeles–based company called Even St. Productions, was a positive influence on Stone and helped him get on the path to where he is now. But the thing is, Goldstein is even more elusive a figure than Stone. I know. On several occasions over the course of my Sly search, dating back to the 1990s, I tried to reach him, to see if Stone might be available for an interview. He never responded to any of my calls or e-mail messages.
I tried every tactic I could imagine to persuade him to talk to me, including contacting his old 1960s songwriting partners, Bob Feldman and Richard Gotteher. The three of them scored big in 1963 with "My Boyfriend's Back," a No. 1 for the girl group the Angels. Two years later, they had a hit of their own with the original version of "I Want Candy," which they performed under the alias the Strangeloves.
But neither Feldman nor Gotteher was able to help. (Goldstein, after the trio's split, went into management and production, with the funk band War his most famous client.) Finally, four years ago, I made a bit of headway when Lou Adler, who far out-ranks Goldstein in the L.A.-music-biz hierarchy, agreed to call Goldstein on my behalf. Goldstein took Adler's call, but even Adler came up empty, telling me, "Jerry says there's nothing he can say, and there's no way Sly will talk."
Goldstein didn't return a phone message this time around, either. And, evidently, his mysterious services are no longer required. Stone has a new booking agent, Steve Green, and plans on releasing the new album on his own label, Phatta Datta. Green is the only person who will betray the slightest indication of the role Goldstein played in Stone's life. "Goldstein called me and told me him and Sly are connected at the hip," he says. "Jerry said, 'Sly's not capable of playing.'"
When I ask Vet Stone what the deal is with Goldstein, she says, "As far as I'm concerned, there is no deal with him." Greg Yates, Stone's attorney, gave me this carefully dictated statement when I called him on the matter: "I've been retained by Sly Stone to represent him regarding issues surrounding contracts with other third parties for his publishing rights. There are some significant questions about certain matters that we are investigating. We want to make certain that these things are in order, so that Sly is prepared for his return. We are concerned about certain matters that he was kept in the dark about."
So much has transpired over the last 40 years that there's bound to be some untidiness and skepticism—especially in the music business, and especially in the Sly Stone business. But then, there's also delighted disbelief that Stone has come even this far. "For me," says Green, who also represents the volatile Jerry Lee Lewis, "it's a gamble that seems less and less like a gamble."
"Certainly, I have great regrets that it's taken Sly all these years to return," says Clive Davis, "but the fact that there might be a happy ending to all this is a great feeling."
At the end of my face-to-face chat with Stone, I can't help but address something that's been nagging at me the whole time. At the Grammy Awards, he wore shades. In Vegas, he wore shades. Now, here in the front room of Chopper Guys, he's wearing shades. I'm feeling a twinge of doubt, like what that woman in Vegas felt.
"Can I see your eyes, Sly?"
"Yeah," he says, pulling down his sunglasses, revealing healthily white whites and a remarkably unlined face—the same face from Woodstock, Cavett, and the cover of Fresh. It really is Sly Stone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Kamp has been a Vanity Fair contributing editor since 1996, profiling such monumental figures of the arts as Johnny Cash, Lucian Freud, Sly Stone, and John Hughes.
This four-disc set of previously unreleased live performances will be released July 17th, featuring four energetic shows from the legendary New York venue. News
“We were at the top of our game then,” Greg Errico, drummer of Sly & The Family Stone says of the group’s 1968 stand at New York’s infamous Fillmore East. “The band was just killing it. There were moments that made my hair stand up, where that stage lifted off like a 747 and flew.”
… The entire four concert run – two shows each night in October 1968 – will be released on July 17th as Sly & The Family Stone – Live At The Fillmore East October 4th & 5th 1968, showcasing a band both fully formed and on the cusp of greatness. Exclusively at Rolling Stone, you can listen to the group’s intense and grooving rendition of “M’Lady,” from the October 5th early show.
Sly & The Family Stone is featured in the new issue of Uncut, dated August 2015 on sale in UK shops and available to download now. The magazine covers the early days of the band, as a boxset of their epochal Fillmore East shows from 1968 is due to be released July 17. “Sly Stone reinvented pop music in his own image,” says the Family Stone’s Cynthia Robinson.
Sly & the Family Stone harnessed all of the disparate musical and social trends of the late '60s, creating a wild, brilliant fusion of soul, rock, R&B, psychedelia, and funk that broke boundaries down without a second thought. Led by Sly Stone, the Family Stone was comprised of men and women, and blacks and whites, making the band the first fully integrated group in rock's history. That integration shone through the music, as well as the group's message. Before Stone, very few soul and R&B groups delved into political and social commentary; after him, it became a tradition in soul, funk, and hip-hop. And, along with James Brown, Stone brought hard funk into the mainstream. the Family Stone's arrangements were ingenious, filled with unexpected group vocals, syncopated rhythms, punchy horns, and pop melodies. Their music was joyous, but as the '60s ended, so did the good times. Stone became disillusioned with the ideals he had been preaching in his music, becoming addicted to a variety of drugs in the process. His music gradually grew slower and darker, culminating in 1971's There's a Riot Going On, which set the pace for '70s funk with its elastic bass, slurred vocals, and militant Black Power stance. Stone was able to turn out one more modern funk classic, 1973's Fresh, before slowly succumbing to his addictions, which gradually sapped him of his once prodigious talents. Nevertheless, his music continued to provide the basic template for urban soul, funk, and even hip-hop well into the '90s.
Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart, March 15, 1944) and his family moved from his home state of Texas to San Francisco in the '50s. He had already begun to express an interest in music, and when he was 16, he had a regional hit with "Long Time Away." Stone studied music composition, theory, and trumpet at Vallejo Junior College in the early '60s; simultaneously, he began playing in several groups on the Bay Area scene, often with his brother Fred. Soon, he had become a disc jockey at the R&B station KSOL, later switching to KDIA. The radio appearances led to a job producing records for Autumn Records. While at Autumn, he worked with a number of San Franciscan garage and psychedelic bands, including the Beau Brummels, the Great Society, Bobby Freeman, and the Mojo Men.
During 1966, Stone formed the Stoners, which featured trumpeter Cynthia Robinson. Though the Stoners didn't last long, he brought Robinson along as one of the core members of his next group, Sly & the Family Stone. Formed in early 1967, the Family Stone also featured Fred Stewart (guitar, vocals), Larry Graham, Jr. (bass, vocals), Greg Errico (drums), Jerry Martini (saxophone), and Rosie Stone (piano), who all were of different racial backgrounds. The group's eclectic music and multiracial composition made them distinctive from the numerous flower-power bands in San Francisco, and their first single, "I Ain't Got Nobody," became a regional hit for the local label Loadstone. The band signed with Epic Records shortly afterward, releasing their debut album, A Whole New Thing, by the end of the year. The record stiffed, but the follow-up, Dance to the Music, generated a Top Ten pop and R&B hit with its title track early in 1968. Life followed later in 1968, but the record failed to capitalize on its predecessor's success. "Everyday People," released late in 1968, turned their fortunes back around, rocketing to the top of the pop and R&B charts and setting the stage for the breakthrough success of 1969's Stand!
Featuring "Everyday People," "Sing a Simple Song," "Stand," and "I Want to Take You Higher," Stand! became the Family Stone's first genuine hit album, climbing to number 13 and spending over 100 weeks on the charts. Stand! also marked the emergence of the political bent in Stone's songwriting ("Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey"), as well as the development of hard-edged, improvisational funk like "Sex Machine." the Family Stone quickly became known as one of the best live bands of the late '60s, and their performance at Woodstock was widely hailed as one of the festival's best. The non-LP singles "Hot Fun in the Summertime" and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" b/w "Everybody Is a Star" became hits, reaching number two and number one respectively in late 1969/early 1970. Both singles were included on Greatest Hits, which became a number two record upon its fall 1970 release. While the group was at the height of its popularity, Sly was beginning to unravel behind the scenes. Developing a debilitating addiction to narcotics, Stone soon became notorious for arriving late for concerts, frequently missing the shows all together.
Stone's growing personal problems, as well as his dismay with the slow death of the civil rights movement and other political causes, surfaced on There's a Riot Goin' On. Though the album shot to number one upon its fall 1971 release, the record -- including "Family Affair," Stone's last number one single -- was dark, hazy, and paranoid, and his audience began to shrink slightly. During 1972, several key members of the Family Stone, including Graham and Errico, left the band; they were replaced by Rusty Allen and Andy Newmark, respectively. The relatively lighter Fresh appeared in the summer of 1973, and it went into the Top Ten on the strength of the Top Ten R&B hit "If You Want Me to Stay." Released the following year, Small Talk was a moderate hit, reaching number 15 on the charts and going gold, but it failed to generate a big hit single. High on You, released in late 1975 and credited only to Sly Stone, confirmed that his power and popularity had faded. "I Get High on You" reached the R&B Top Ten, but the album made no lasting impact.
Disco had overtaken funk in terms of popularity, and even if Sly wanted to compete with disco, he wasn't in shape to make music. He had become addicted to cocaine, his health was frequently poor, and he was often in trouble with the law. His recordings had slowed to a trickle, and Epic decided to close out his contract in 1979 with Ten Years Too Soon, a compilation of previously released material that had the original funky rhythm tracks replaced with disco beats. Stone signed with Warner Brothers that same year, crafting the comeback effort Back on the Right Track with several original members of the Family Stone, but the record was critically panned and a commercial failure. In light of the album's lack of success, Stone retreated even further, eventually joining forces with George Clinton on Funkadelic's 1981 album The Electric Spanking of War Babies. Following the album's release, Stone toured with Clinton's P-Funk All-Stars, which led him to embark on his own tour, as well as a stint with Bobby Womack. The culmination of this burst of activity was 1983's Ain't but the One Way, an album that was ignored. Later that year, Stone was arrested for cocaine possession; the following year, he entered rehab.
Stone appeared on Jesse Johnson's 1986 R&B hit "Crazay." The following year, he dueted with Martha Davis on "Love & Affection" for the Soul Man soundtrack; he also he recorded "Eek-a-Bo-Static," a single that didn't chart. Stone was arrested and imprisoned for cocaine possession by the end of 1987, and he was never able to recover from the final arrest. Stone continued to battle his addiction, with varying degrees of success. By his 1993 induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he had disappeared from public view. Avenue Records gave Stone a recording contract in 1995, but nothing would be recorded.
The Essential Sly & the Family Stone does what a double-CD best-of/career overview should do: it packs a lot of career highlights into a two-disc set for listeners who want more than the basic greatest hits, but don't want every last album. Of course, all of those greatest hits are here, including a few from 1970 that didn't make it onto album releases at the time. As you'd expect, the fattest slice comes from Sly & the Family Stone's late-'60s/early-'70s peak: in fact, most of the tracks from the Stand! and There's a Riot Goin' On albums are here. The fun extras come in the not-too-well-known tracks from pre-Stand! albums and Fresh (which is actually amply represented, with six cuts). This doesn't quite deserve the highest rating, as the post-There's a Riot Goin' On material doesn't keep up the momentum of the rest of the set. Small Talk and Sly Stone's 1975 solo effort, High on You, are wisely lightly plucked, though at least the hits from those albums are the three cuts selected. This deserves better annotation than the cursory liner notes, but otherwise it's an excellent summary of a major rock and soul band.
AllMusic Review
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Fresh expands and brightens the slow grooves of There's a Riot Goin' On, turning them, for the most part, into friendly, welcoming rhythms. There are still traces of the narcotic haze of Riot, particularly on the brilliant, crawling inversion of "Que Sera, Sera," yet this never feels like an invitation into a junkie's lair. Still, this isn't necessarily lighter than Riot -- in fact, his social commentary is more explicit, and while the music doesn't telegraph his resignation the way Riot did, it comes from the same source. So, Fresh winds up more varied, musically and lyrically, which may not make it as unified, but it does result in more traditional funk that certainly is appealing in its own right. Besides, this isn't conventional funk -- it's eccentric, where even concise catchy tunes like "If You Want Me to Stay" seem as elastic as the opener, "In Time." That's the album's ultimate charm -- it finds Sly precisely at the point where he's balancing funk and pop, about to fall into the brink, but creating an utterly individual album that wound up being his last masterwork and one of the great funk albums of its era.
Released in 1970 during the stopgap between Stand! and There's a Riot Goin' On, Greatest Hits inadvertently arrived at precisely the right moment, summarizing Sly & the Family Stone's joyous hit-making run on the pop and R&B charts. Technically, only four songs here reached the Top Ten, with only two others hitting the Top 40, but judging this solely on charts is misleading, since this is simply a peerless singles collection. This summarizes their first four albums perfectly (almost all of Stand! outside of the two jams and "Somebody's Watching You" is here), adding the non-LP singles "Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," and "Everybody Is a Star," possibly the loveliest thing they ever recorded. But, this isn't merely a summary (and, if it was just that, Anthology, the early-'80s comp that covers Riot and Fresh would be stronger than this), it's one of the greatest party records of all time. Music is rarely as vivacious, vigorous, and vibrant as this, and captured on one album, the spirit, sound, and songs of Sly & the Family Stone are all the more stunning. Greatest hits don't come better than this -- in fact, music rarely does.
THE MUSIC OF SLY STONE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. STONE:
Sly & The Family Stone - Dance To The Music (Audio) Music video by Sly & The Family Stone performing Dance To The Music. (P) Originally released 1968. All rights reserved by Epic Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment:
Sly & The Family Stone - "Dance to the Music" (Live at the Fillmore East 1968) [Audio]:
About the album:
Sly & The Family Stone-Live At The Fillmore East October 4th & 5th, 1968 is a never before released live album set by Sly & The Family Stone, which was recorded in 1968 at Bill Graham's legendary New York City venue The Fillmore East where the band performed for 2 nights. It will be released for thefirst time on a 4-CD set comprised of these concerts (two shows per night), each disc featuring one of the shows.
SLY & THE FAMILY STONE "Everyday People" & "Dance To The Music" performing LIVE on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' on CBS-TV--Fall, 1968:
Stand! is a 1969 album by soul/funk band Sly and the Family Stone. Written and produced by lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone, Stand! is considered an artistic high-point of the band's career. Released on May 3 by Epic Records, just before the group's celebrated performance at the Woodstock festival, it was the band's fourth album, and most commercially successful to date. It includes several well-known songs, among them hit singles, such as "Sing a Simple Song", "I Want to Take You Higher", "Stand!", and "Everyday People". It was published in the US as an LP record with a gatefold cover. It was reissued in 1990 on vinyl and CD and again in 2007 as a remastered numbered edition digipack CD with bonus tracks and, in the UK, as only a CD with bonus tracks.
In 2015, the album was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for inclusion in the National Recording Registry
Track listing:
All songs written, produced and arranged by Sly Stone for Stone Flower Productions.
Side one:
"Stand!" – 3:08 "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey" – 5:58 "I Want to Take You Higher" – 5:22 "Somebody's Watching You" – 3:20 "Sing a Simple Song" – 3:56
Side two:
"Everyday People" – 2:21 "Sex Machine" – 13:45 "You Can Make It If You Try" – 3:37
Personnel
Sly and the Family Stone:
Sly Stone - vocals, organ, guitar, piano, harmonica, vocoder, bass guitar on "You Can Make it if You Try" Freddie Stone - vocals, guitar Larry Graham - vocals, bass guitar (except on "You Can Make it if You Try") Rose Stone - vocals, piano, keyboard Cynthia Robinson - trumpet, vocal ad-libs, background vocals on "I Want to Take You Higher" Jerry Martini - saxophone, background vocals on "I Want to Take You Higher" Greg Errico - drums, background vocals on "I Want to Take You Higher" Little Sister (Vet Stone, Mary McCreary, Elva Mouton) - background vocals on "Stand!", "Sing a Simple Song", "Everyday People" and "I Want to Take you Higher"
Music
video by Sly & The Family Stone performing Thank You (Falettinme Be
Mice Elf Again) -Performance Clip (1973). (C) 2013 Sony Music
Entertainment:
Sly and the Family Stone - "Everybody is a Star":
Sly & the Family Stone 6/29/69:
Sly and the Family Stone live at the Harlem Cultural Festival, Mount Morris Park, Harlem, NY June 29th, 1969.
Doesn't get much better than this...
Sly and the Family Stone was an American band from San Francisco. Active from 1967 to 1983, the band was pivotal in the development of soul, funk, and psychedelic music. Headed by singer, songwriter, record producer, and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone, and containing several of his FAMILY MEMBERS and friends, the band was the first major American rock band to have an "integrated, multi-gender" lineup.
Brothers Sly Stone and singer/guitarist Freddie Stone combined their bands (Sly & the Stoners and Freddie & the Stone Souls) in 1967. Sly and Freddie Stone, trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, drummer Gregg Errico, saxophonist Jerry Martini, and bassist Larry Graham comprised the original lineup; Sly and Freddie's sister, singer/keyboardist Rose Stone, joined within a year. They recorded five Billboard Hot 100 hits which reached the top 10, and four ground-breaking albums, which greatly influenced the sound of American pop, soul, R&B, funk, and hip hop music. In the preface of his 1998 book "For The Record: Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History", Joel Selvin sums up the importance of Sly and the Family Stone's influence on African American music by stating "there are two types of black music: black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly Stone". The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.
During the early 1970s, the band switched to a grittier funk sound, which was as influential on the music industry as their earlier work. The band began to fall apart during this period because of drug abuse and ego clashes; consequently, the fortunes and reliability of the band deteriorated, leading to its dissolution in 1975. Sly Stone continued to record albums and tour with a new rotating lineup under the "Sly and the Family Stone" name from 1975 to 1983.
SLY & THE FAMILY STONE-- 'Stand'- (THE ALBUM) 1969:
Sly & The Family Stone - Dance To The Music (Audio): Music video by Sly & The Family Stone performing Dance To The Music. (P) Originally released 1968. All rights reserved by Epic Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment: Sly & The Family Stone - "Dance to the Music" (Live at the Fillmore East 1968) [Audio]: About the album: Sly & The Family Stone-Live At The Fillmore East October 4th & 5th, 1968 is a never before released live album set by Sly & The Family Stone, which was recorded in 1968 at Bill Graham's legendary New York City venue The Fillmore East where the band performed for 2 nights. It will be released for thefirst time on a 4-CD set comprised of these concerts (two shows per night), each disc featuring one of the shows.
SLY & THE FAMILY STONE "Everyday People" & "Dance To The Music" performing LIVE on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' on CBS-TV--Fall, 1968: Sly and the Family Stone - "Everybody is a Star" Sly & the Family Stone 6/29/69: Sly and the Family Stone live at the Harlem Cultural Festival, Mount Morris Park, Harlem, NY June 29th, 1969.
