Sly Stone, the revolutionary musician and dynamic showman whose Sly and the Household Stone remodeled widespread music within the Sixties and ’70s and past with such hits as “Everyday People,” “Stand!” and “Family Affair,” died Monday at age 82
Stone, born Sylvester Stewart, had been sick lately. His publicist Carleen Donovan mentioned Stone died in Los Angeles surrounded by household after contending with continual obstructive pulmonary illness and different illnesses.
Based in 1966-67, Sly and the Household Stone was the primary main group to incorporate Black and white women and men, and properly embodied a time when something appeared attainable — riots and assassinations, communes and love-ins. The singers screeched, chanted, crooned and hollered. The music was a blowout of frantic horns, rapid-fire guitar and locomotive rhythms, a melting pot of jazz, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, soul and the early grooves of funk.
Sly’s time on high was transient, roughly from 1968-1971, however profound. No band higher captured the gravity-defying euphoria of the Woodstock period or extra bravely addressed the crash which adopted. From early songs as rousing as their titles — “I Want To Take You Higher,” “Stand!” — to the sober aftermath of “Family Affair” and “Runnin’ Away,” Sly and the Household Stone spoke for a era whether or not or not it appreciated what they needed to say.
Stone’s group started as a Bay Space sextet that includes Sly on keyboards, Larry Graham on bass; Sly’s brother, Freddie, on guitar; sister Rose on vocals; Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini horns and Greg Errico on drums. They debuted with the album “A Whole New Thing” and earned the title with their breakthrough single, “Dance to the Music.” It hit the highest 10 in April 1968, the week the Rev. Martin Luther King was murdered, and helped launch an period when the polish of Motown and the understatement of Stax instantly appeared of one other time.
Led by Sly Stone, together with his leather-based jumpsuits and goggle shades, mile-wide grin and mile-high Afro, the band dazzled in 1969 on the Woodstock competition and set a brand new tempo on the radio. “Everyday People,” “I Wanna Take You Higher” and different songs had been anthems of group, non-conformity and a brash and hopeful spirit, constructed round such catchphrases as “different strokes for different folks.” The group launched 5 high 10 singles, three of them hitting No. 1, and three million-selling albums: “Stand!”, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” and “Greatest Hits.”
For a time, numerous performers wished to look and sound like Sly and the Household Stone. The Jackson 5’s breakthrough hit, “I Want You Back,” and the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You” had been among the many many songs from the late Sixties that mimicked Sly’s vocal and instrumental preparations. Miles Davis’ landmark mix of jazz, rock and funk, “Bitches Brew,” was impressed partly by Sly, whereas fellow jazz artist Herbie Hancock even named a music after him.
“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewelry,” Questlove wrote within the foreword to Stone’s memoir, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” named for one in every of his largest hits and revealed by way of Questlove’s imprint in 2023. “He was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”
In 2025, Questlove launched the documentary “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius).”
Sly’s affect has endured for many years. The highest funk artist of the Seventies, Parliament-Funkadelic creator George Clinton, was a Stone disciple. Prince, Rick James and the Black Eyed Peas had been among the many many performers from the Eighties and after formed partly by Sly, and numerous hip-hop artists have sampled his riffs, from the Beastie Boys to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. A 2005 tribute document included Maroon 5, John Legend and the Roots.
“Sly did so many things so well that he turned my head all the way around,” Clinton as soon as wrote. “He could create polished R&B that sounded like it came from an act that had gigged at clubs for years, and then in the next breath he could be as psychedelic as the heaviest rock band.”
A dream dies, a profession burns away
By the early ’70s, Stone himself was starting a descent from which he by no means recovered, pushed by the pressures of fame and the added burden of Black fame. His document firm was anxious for extra hits, whereas the Black Panthers had been urgent him to drop the white members from his group. After shifting from the Bay Space to Los Angeles in 1970, he grew to become more and more hooked on cocaine and erratic in his conduct. A promised album, “The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone” (“The most optimistic of all,” Rolling Stone reported) by no means appeared. He grew to become infamous for being late to concert events or not displaying up in any respect, usually leaving “other band members waiting backstage for hours wondering whether he was going to show up or not,” in keeping with Stone biographer Joel Selvin.
Across the nation, separatism and paranoia had been setting in. As a flip of the calendar, and as a frame of mind, the ’60s had been over. “The possibility of possibility was leaking out,” Stone later defined in his memoir.
On “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” Stone had warned: “Dying young is hard to take/selling out is harder.” Late in 1971, he launched “There’s a Riot Going On,” one of many grimmest, most uncompromising information ever to high the album charts. The sound was dense and murky (Sly was among the many first musicians to make use of drum machines), the temper reflective (“Family Affair”), fearful (“Runnin’ Away”) and despairing: “Time, they say, is the answer — but I don’t believe it,” Sly sings on “Time.” The quick, funky tempo of the unique “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” was slowed, stretched and retitled “Thank You For Talkin’ to Me, Africa.”
The working time of the title observe was 0:00.
“It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger,” critic Greil Marcus referred to as the album.
“Riot” highlighted a rare run of blunt, hard-hitting information by Black artists, from the Stevie Marvel single “Superstition” to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” album, to which “Riot” was an unofficial response. However Stone appeared to again away from the nightmare he had associated. He was reluctant to carry out materials from “Riot” in live performance and softened the temper on the acclaimed 1973 album “Fresh,” which did characteristic a canopy of “Que Sera Sera,” the wistful Doris Day music reworked right into a rueful testomony to destiny’s higher hand.
By the top of the last decade, Sly and the Household Stone had damaged up and Sly was releasing solo information with such unmet guarantees as “Heard You Missed Me, Well I’m Back” and “Back On the Right Track.” A lot of the information he revamped the next many years was of drug busts, monetary troubles and mishaps on stage. Sly and the Household Stone was inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 1993 and honored in 2006 on the Grammy Awards, however Sly launched only one album after the early ’80s, “I’m Back! Family & Friends,” a lot of it up to date recordings of his previous hits.
He would allege he had a whole lot of unreleased songs and did collaborate occasionally with Clinton, who would recall how Stone “could just be sitting there doing nothing and then open his eyes and shock you with a lyric so brilliant that it was obvious no one had ever thought of it before.”
Sly Stone had three kids, together with a daughter with Cynthia Robinson, and was married as soon as — briefly and really publicly. In 1974, he and actor Kathy Silva wed on stage at Madison Sq. Backyard, an occasion that impressed an 11,000-word story in The New Yorker. Sly and Silva quickly divorced.
A born musician, a born uniter
He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California, the second of 5 kids in an in depth, non secular household. Sylvester grew to become “Sly” by chance, when a instructor mistakenly spelled his identify “Slyvester.”
He beloved performing a lot that his mom alleged he would cry if the congregation in church didn’t reply when he sang earlier than it. He was so gifted and bold that by age 4 he had sung on stage at a Sam Cooke present and by age 11 had mastered a number of devices and recorded a gospel music together with his siblings. He was so dedicated to the races working collectively that in his teenagers and early 20s he was enjoying in native bands that included Black and white members and was turning into identified across the Bay Space as a deejay equally keen to play the Beatles and rhythm and blues acts.
Via his radio connections, he produced a few of the high San Francisco bands, together with the Nice Society, Grace Slick’s group earlier than she joined the Jefferson Airplane. Together with an early mentor and champion, San Francisco deejay Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, he labored on rhythm and blues hits (Bobby Freeman’s “C’mon and Swim”) and the Beau Brummels’ Beatle-esque “Laugh, Laugh.” In the meantime, he was placing collectively his personal group, recruiting relations and native musicians and selecting the identify Sly and the Household Stone.
“A Whole New Thing” got here out in 1967, quickly adopted by the one “Dance to the Music,” during which every member was granted a second of introduction because the music rightly proclaimed a “brand new beat.” In December 1968, the group appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and carried out a medley that included “Dance to the Music” and “Everyday People.” Earlier than the set started, Sly turned to the viewers and recited a short passage from his music “Are You Ready”:
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
