Thank you for the party, but Sly could never stay. Sly Stone was always the ultimate mystery man of American music, a visionary genius who transformed the world with some of the most innovative sounds of the Sixties and Seventies. With Sly and the Family Stone, he fused funk, soul, and acid rock into his own utopian sound, in hits like “Family Affair” and “Everyday People.” Yet he remained an elusive figure, all but disappearing in the 1970s. When he died on Monday, it seemed strange he was “only” 82, because he seemed even older — as if he’d outlived himself by decades. Yet his music sounds as boldly futuristic and influential as ever, which is why the world is still reeling from this loss.
Nobody ever sounded like this man. Sly could write inspirational songs of unity, anthems like “I Want to Take You Higher” that would turn a live crowd into a euphoric tribe, or uplifting hits like “Stand!” or “Everybody Is a Star” that can catch you in a lonely moment and make you feel like the rest of your life is a chance to live up to the song’s challenge.
But that went side by side with his streetwise sense of betrayal and rage. “Everybody Is a Star” comes on like a love song to human hope, so radiant in every tiny sonic detail, with Sly chanting, “Shine, shine, shine!” But it’s also got the weird question, “Ever catch a falling star? Ain’t no stopping till it’s in the ground.” Sly Stone wanted to remind you that you were the star of hope in the sky — but you could also be the star that comes crashing down into a crater.
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All his contradictions come together in his greatest song, the 1970 funk blast “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” with the hardest bass-versus-guitar staccato slash attack on Earth. The chorus sounds cheerful on the surface: “Thank you for letting me be myself again!” But the closer you listen, the more dread and anger you hear. For Sly, with all of his fame and fortune, this is what it all comes down to: Lookin’ at the devil. Grinnin’ at his gun. Fingers start a-shakin’. I begin to run. It’s a death haiku that’s all the scarier for being delivered as a party chant. Bullets start a-chasin’. I begin to stop. We began to wrestle. I was on the top. The groove keeps churning, but with no resolution. There’s no victory in Sly’s battle with the devil — just the temporary triumph of not being defeated, at least not yet.
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The Family Stone was his ideal of a band as a self-contained community, uniting musicians of different races, different genders, some friends, some relatives — but with everyone lending a voice. His Family Stone built the template for countless music collectives, whether it was the Native Tongues, Prince’s Revolution, Afrika Bambaata’s Zulu Nation, the Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast and the Dungeon Family, or beyond.
“The concept behind Sly and the Stone,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970, “I wanted to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat. 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.”
Some of the Family were virtuoso singers, others just filling in for a line or two at a time, but there was always that utopian tribal spirit. His band was a visionary blend of James Brown/Stax/Muscle Shoals funk teamwork, but with the anarchic jamming of the hippie bands from the San Francisco acid-rock scene where he made his first converts. As Sly put it in the title of their debut album, it was A Whole New Thing — a radically democratic sound where everybody was a star.
Sly’s tough charisma made him a unique presence in Seventies pop culture — remote, cool, unknowable, hiding behind a smile that gleamed like bulletproof glass. You could always see him show up in places like the sitcom Good Times, set in a Chicago housing project, where the cool teenager Thelma had posters of Sly and Stevie Wonder on her bedroom wall, almost like good-angel/bad-angel twins. There was a comedian on BET who used to do a hilarious routine about growing up in the Seventies and watching Soul Train. “When I was a kid, I didn’t know what drugs were. I just knew there was something wrong with Sly.”
Those contradictions were always built into his music. “If It Were Left Up to Me” is one of his funniest, nastiest gems ever, a Fresh funk quickie from 1973, where the singers chant sardonic promises full of sleight-of-hand wordplay, until it ends with a sarcastic, “Cha-cha-cha!” There’s “Que Sera Sera,” also from 1973, refurbishing an old Doris Day chestnut about how everything always works out for the best, except that Sly turns it into a slow-motion dirge full of dread, a warning that fate is out to get you. “Que Sera Sera” took on a new life in 1989 as the perfect closing theme for Heathers, as Winona Ryder struts through her high school, covered in soot and ashes. When Shannen Doherty gasps, “You look like hell,” Winona smirks, “I just got back.” A very Sly line — so it’s fitting that Heathers made “Que Sera Sera” the closest he got to a comeback hit in the Eighties or Nineties.
Sly Stone was born in Texas, but raised in the blue-collar Bay Area town of Vallejo. He was just five years old when he cut his first record with his family gospel group, the Stewart Four. But he was already a musical prodigy, mastering piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Barely out of his teens, he became a radio DJ on KSOL (“Super Soul”), where he honed his eclectic musical tastes. “I played Dylan, Lord Buckley, the Beatles. Every night I tried something else,” he said in 1970. “I really didn’t know what was going on. Everything was just on instinct. You know, if there was an Ex-Lax commercial, I’d play the sound of a toilet flushing. It would’ve been boring otherwise.”
But he got bored with the strictures of genre formatting. “In radio,” he said, “I found out about a lot of things I don’t like. Like, I think there shouldn’t be ‘Black radio.’ Just radio. Everybody be a part of everything.”
He became a house producer at the local label Autumn Records, producing Bobby Freeman’s huge 1964 dance hit “C’Mon and Swim.” But he also worked with the wildly innovative folk rock of the Beau Brummels — he helmed their 1965 classics like “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “You Tell Me Why,” and “Not Too Long Ago” with the melancholy tinge he would bring to his own band. He also produced one of the Bay Area’s first hippie bands, Grace Slick’s pre-Jefferson Airplane group, the Great Society. For their classic debut single — “Free Advice” on one side, the original “Somebody to Love” on the other — he famously drove the band through 286 takes.
But one of his most crucial learning experiences at Autumn was watching everybody get ripped off. It was his first time getting burned in the music business, and he made sure it would be the last. He never again got involved with projects he didn’t control. So he began putting together his own band, inspired by the local free-form rock scene happening at places like the Family Dog and the Fillmore. “The concept was to be able to conceive all kinds of music,” he said in 1970. “Whatever was contemporary, and not necessarily in terms of being commercial — whatever meant whatever now. Like today, things like censorship, and the Black-people/white-people thing. That’s on my mind. So we just like to perform the things that are on our mind.”
Once the world heard “Dance to the Music,” nobody could resist, as the hits kept coming: “Everyday People,” “M’Lady,” “Stand!,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” The Family stole the show at Woodstock, turning “I Want to Take You Higher” into a massive hippie chant. People always wanted more-more-more from Sly, based on the utopian promises of his songs.
But he became the first major star who made an artistic flourish out of pulling back, whether it was going onstage late — he made that one of his trademarks — or simply blowing off shows. He made a point of being combative in interviews. That also meant long delays between records — after Stand!, he kept everyone waiting an unimaginable 18 months for new music, forcing his record company to drop the utterly perfect Greatest Hits. (The delay also gave Motown time to whip up the perfect Sly and the Family Stone substitute: the Jackson 5, who filled the gap with their doppelganger hits like “I Want You Back” and “The Love You Save.”)
After the wait, he stunned everyone with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, his radically negative refusal to play the commercial game, with its low-fi beatbox avant-funk. It was the prototype for independent swerves like Radiohead’s Kid A or Nirvana’s In Utero — yet like those albums, it was a sales blockbuster, hitting home with an audience that idolized him for going his own way. “Family Affair” is the best-known classic, with Bobby Womack’s virtuoso blues guitar, in a heartbreaking tale of newlyweds falling apart. But it also has stunners like “Spaced Cowboy,” sounding uncannily like Young Marble Giants with its basement drum-machine clank, before it builds into a cocky drug boast with ironic Wild West yodels. “I can’t say it more than once, because I’m thinkin’ twice as fast,” Sly growls. “Yodel-ay-hee, yay-hee-hoo!”
But the toughest, bleakest moment is “Africa Talks to You (The Asphalt Jungle),” where the chorus chants, “Timberrrrr! All fall down!” “I wrote a song about Africa because in Africa the animals are animals,” he told Rolling Stone at the time. “The tiger is a tiger, the snake is a snake, you know what the hell he’s gonna do. Here in New York, the asphalt jungle, a tiger or a snake may come up looking like, uhhh, you.”
He switched gears with Fresh in 1973 — his most exuberantly upbeat funk, jumping right out with “In Time.” It’s as flamboyantly cheerful as Riot was hostile, which isn’t to say it’s any less brash in its confrontational spirit. “Let Me Have It All” is the most openhearted love song he ever did, rhythmically and vocally. Yet it’s also an album about drugged-out euphoria on the verge of crashing. “If You Want Me to Stay,” with its drowsy pimp strut of a bass line, warns you not to be foolish enough to count on him or expect anything out of him — especially if you bought a ticket for one of those shows where he didn’t turn up.
After Fresh, his music suddenly fell off a cliff, with depressing comeback efforts like Small Talk, High on You, or Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back, with its faux anthem “Family Again.” Everyone was still stealing ideas from Sly — most notably Miles Davis — but the man himself ghosted. The tabloids kept reporting the bad news: He was wasted on drugs, broke, living out of a car. His final albums barely got noticed, with smarmy titles like Back on the Right Track or Ain’t but the One Way, ending with “High, Y’All.” His final highlights came with George Clinton, his most outspoken disciple, on Funkadelic’s 1981 The Electric Spanking of War Babies. “FREE SLY!” Clinton declared in the liner notes, having recently gotten busted with Stone. Sly also shone on Clinton’s 1983 robot-funk hit “Hydraulic Pump,” from the P-Funk All-Stars’ album Urban Dance-Floor Guerillas. “Hydraulic Pump” was a prophecy of the Detroit techno to come, but it also turned out to be Sly’s final moment of glory on wax.
When Stone died on June 9, it was just a few days after the 51st anniversary of his most famous celebrity stunt: getting married onstage at Madison Square Garden, in a sold-out 1974 show. In so many ways, that wedding event was his farewell to his public life, as he became a reclusive figure for his final decades. “Dying young is hard to take, selling out is harder,” he warned in “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” still just in his 20s. The ultimate epitaph for Sly is that he managed to avoid doing either.
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Yet the world never came close to forgetting about Sly Stone. The excellent Questlove documentary Sly Lives! (The Burden of Black Genius) was a reminder of why he still loomed so large, years after he’d seemingly said his goodbyes. You can hear that legacy everywhere, even in young punk rockers like Turnstile, who turned “Thank You” into their own “T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection).” “Everyday People” has to be the only song that’s ever gotten covered by both Tom Jones and Joan Jett. “We gotta live together,” the song goes, even though its author made a point of living apart.
But he went out as a musical revolutionary who owed the world nothing. Every goodbye he ever had to say was already there in “Thank You”: “We began to wrestle, I was on the top.” Sly Stone defined that sense of lifelong struggle in his music. But he managed to turn that struggle into songs that will keep right on changing and challenging the world forever. The message in the music is clear as always — everybody is a star.
