When it came to the mundane formalities of everyday life, multi-hyphenated music giant Sly Stone made the pedestrian defiantly joyful. Even his answering machine greeting opened with his trademark irrepressible, eye-winking wit: “You called. Or did you? We’ll call back.”
Yet Stone, who died Tuesday June 9 in Los Angeles at 82, was more than just a quirky genius whose work influenced generations of artists, eschewing rigid genre categorizations with glee. As the leader of the groundbreaking seven-piece band, Sly and the Family Stone, the enigmatic singer, songwriter, producer, instrumentalist, and composer was the ultimate futurist.
Stone and his explosive Bay Area unit took R&B and mixed it with San Francisco’s psychedelic scene in their bombastic 1968 single “Dance to the Music.” The Temptations’ Otis Wilson was among the millions turned on by Stone’s new sound. He told the group’s producer, Norman Whitfield, to inject some of Stone’s unbridled get-down into the mix. The Temptations’ answer, the gritty “Cloud Nine,” would sell more than 500,000 copies, winning Motown’s first Grammy.
Born Sylvester Stewart, the former Oakland radio DJ and in-house producer at Autumn Records, along with his powerful band, was the rare crossover act that could command an audience with The Dick Cavett Show and Soul Train. The group’s show-stealing set at the landmark 1969 Woodstock performance remains one of that era’s most storied you-had-to-be-there moments.
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Sly and the Family Stone’s makeup mirrored their idealistic songs. Their striking multi-racial, multi-gender lineup — which featured Stone’s brother Freddie Stewart (vocals/guitar); sister Rose Stewart (vocals/keyboards); Larry Graham (vocals/bass); Greg Errico (drums); Cynthia Robinson (vocals/trumpet); and Jerry Martini (saxophone) — was a brazen declaration of cultural unity during a time when America was being torn apart by the Vietnam War and the fight for civil rights.
Stone’s hopeful lyricism (“Stand/You’ve been sitting much too long/There’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong…”) was more than just empowering words. It was a utopian philosophy.
“The concept behind Sly and the Family Stone… I wanted to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat,” Stone explained in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview. “By that I mean… if there was anything to be happy about, then everybody’d be happy about it. If there was a lot of money to be made, for anyone to make a lot of money. If there were a lot of songs to sing, then everybody got to sing. That’s the way it is now. Then, if we have something to suffer or a cross to bear — we bear it together.”
From 1967 to 1973, the group’s run of gold and platinum classics not only dominated AM radio, it changed the course of popular music. “Stand!,” “Everyday People,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Everybody Is A Star,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (“Que Sera, Sera),” “If You Want Me To Stay” it was as if Stone was as intrinsically tapped in his church roots as he was to rock, avant-garde electronic music and pop standards.
Indeed, Sly Stone’s impact hit like an asteroid. George Clinton and his Parliaments vocal group had dreams of becoming the next Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. But once Sly came on the scene, the future Parliament-Funkadelic ringleader and his mates left Berry Gordy’s Hitsville USA, took off the suits, got freaky and followed Sly’s anything-goes ethos.
“He’s my idol; forget all that peer stuff,” Clinton said in a Washington Post piece following the reclusive artist’s surprise appearance at the 2006 Grammy Awards. “I heard ‘Stand!,’ and it was like: Man, forget it! That band was perfect. And Sly was like all the Beatles and all of Motown in one. He was the baddest thing around. What he don’t realize is that him making music now would still be the baddest. Just get that band back together and do whatever it is that he do.”
Of course the usual write-up on Sly Stone has long painted him as a gifted yet troubled, tragic figure who reached his peak in the late ’60s as an unifying bridge between uncompromising Black soul brothers and sisters and white hippy, free love children. For a long stretch his absurd penchant for missing shows, struggles with drug addiction, various arrests and a rehab stint in the ’80s overshadowed his immense legacy.
But there was a lot more to the man.
Stone created the template for the bedroom artist. His adventurous home recordings laid the groundwork for other one-man-band prodigies like Stevie Wonder, Prince, D’Angelo and H.E.R. to flex their artistic freedom. When Stone dropped “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” he remade James Brown’s regimented, hard funk in his own freewheeling image. Propelled by Graham’s revolutionary slap bass technique, the Billboard 100 chart topper found the effortlessly cool Stone once again ahead of the pack.
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Yet by 1971, the optimistic rebel had grown increasingly disillusioned. Sly and the Family Stone’s landmark million-selling album There’s a Riot Goin’ On encapsulated the rage, introversion, and dark mood of a country still healing from the trauma of war and the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Stone recorded much of the low-fi concept album alone in his Bel-Air mansion, alienating band members who he now relegated to using as session players. Cocaine and PCP only added fuel to the front man’s paranoia as Stone’s entourage now included gun-toting gangsters and drug dealers.
Stone, however, still knew how to deliver an infectious hit. “Family Affair,” the group’s third No. 1 single, was prophetic. His usage of the early drum machine, the Ace Tone Rhythm Ace, was a precursor to the work of hip-hop beat masters like Marley Marl, DJ Premier, RZA, Mannie Fresh, and J Dilla.
Jazz legends Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock publicly thanked Stone for inspiring them on their respective funky turns On The Corner (1972) and Head Hunters (1973). Even as Stone’s erratic behavior dragged down record sales, his DNA was all over the new funk wave he ignited back in ’69. The Jackson 5, the aforementioned Parliament, LaBelle, Tower of Power, Earth Wind & Fire, the Ohio Players, Rufus/Chaka Khan, and Rick James were just some of the artists who were inspired by Stone.
There were several Sly Stone comeback miscues as well as a surprising return to the R&B charts on the 1986 Jesse Johnson single “Crazay.” The Grammy-winning guitar virtuoso, who first rose to prominence as an original member of the Prince-conceived funk outfit the Time, said Stone was one of the most influential artists of his time.
“When we finished shooting the video for ‘Crazay’ we were at A&M just jamming, coming up with stuff,” Johnson told Andscape. “Sly was in the studio and I was in the control room playing bass and he was playing keys. All of a sudden, he just stopped playing and said, ‘That’s my s–t. What do you know about that?’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Who do you think we were trying to be?’ Prince, myself, everybody… we were trying to be Sly Stone from the clothes that we wore to how we approached music.”
It’s apropos that Sly Stone’s untethered catalogue has been sampled and covered by a disparate range of artists from Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Queen Latifah, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Janet Jackson and LL Cool J to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, OutKast, Brand, Madonna, Missy Elliott, and Duran Duran.
In one of his last interviews in 2023, Stone, who was still a prolific songwriter even during the period when he was homeless and living in a van, lamented to The Guardian of his various health struggles.
“Haven’t stopped me from hearing music,” he opened up, “but they have stopped me from making it. … I can hear music in my mind.”
But leave it to Stone to have a happy ending. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer spent his final years clean, watching western movies and surrounded by his three children. He lived long enough to see the world once again celebrate his brilliance, thanks largely to The Roots’ Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
Sly and the Family Stone was the centerpiece of Thompson’s Oscar winning 2021 documentary Summer of Soul. In 2023, He published the singer’s memoir bestseller Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). And just this year he helmed the critically acclaimed Hulu doc Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius).
“[Sly Stone] dared to be simple in the most complex ways — using childlike joy, wordless cries, and nursery rhyme cadences to express adult truths,” Thompson wrote in tribute to his hero. “His work looked straight at the brightest and darkest parts of life and demanded we do the same.”
Johnson has more to say about the man he glowingly calls the best mentor.
“Sly is the only person I’ve ever known in my life that would walk into a place and go, ‘Baby boy, baby boy, listen to this,’” he said. “And he’d put in a cassette and make you never want to f–king play again. Sly never lost it.”