Sly Stone, the multitalented musician whose path-finding, psychedelia-laced funk enraptured Woodstock Nation in the late ’60s and early ’70s, has died. He was 82.
“After a prolonged battle with COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” a statement from his family reads. “While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.”
The family statement added that Stone “recently completed the screenplay for his life story, a project we are eager to share with the world in due course.”
As songwriter, producer, arranger, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and showman supreme, 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Stone led his group Sly and the Family Stone to the top of the charts with a series of energetic, oft-experimental singles and albums, which fused forward-looking, bottom-heavy soul with rock power.
His life and career were documented earlier this year by Grammy and Oscar-winning “Summer of Soul” director Questlove in “Sly Lives: aka the Burden of Black Genius,” which also features unfiltered commentary from multiple Black artists about the pressures that come with success.
Questlove said, “One of the strongest quotes from the movie is that Sly created the alphabet that we are still using to express music. He was the first to take advantage of being a bedroom musician, multi-track recording, the wah-wah, the drum machine, and doing everything by himself. We praise Stevie Wonder and Prince for these things, but Sly was the prototype. He also single-handedly revived hip-hop with all of the samples that came from him.”
“Sly’s sound was totally integrated, not just musically, but sexually and racially,” critic Dave Marsh wrote in “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.” “Here was a band in which men and women, black and white, had not one fixed role but many fluid ones. The women played, the men sang, the blacks freaked out, the whites got funky, everyone did something unexpected, which was the only thing the listener could expect.”
Beginning with the breakout 1968 Epic Records single “Dance to the Music” and peaking with the 1969 album “Stand!,” which contained four chart singles (including the No. 1 pop and R&B hit “Everyday People”), Stone successfully built an enthusiastic, diverse fanbase of black and white listeners.
Vibrant and full of lyrical and musical wit, Stone’s prophetic sound later had a potent influence on such performers as George Clinton, whose Parliament-Funkadelic combine owed its outrageous style to the Family Stone’s example, and Prince, another singular, multifaceted talent who leaped across genre categories.
With the rise of rap and hip-hop, Stone’s music was widely sampled and adapted, with performers like De La Soul, Public Enemy, Ice Cube and the Beastie Boys taking a page from his book.
His influence extended far beyond expected boundaries. In his 1989 autobiography, trumpeter Miles Davis credited Stone with the inspiration for “On the Corner,” his 1972 mating of jazz and streetwise funk. Keyboardist Herbie Hancock tipped his hat to Stone with “Sly,” a track on his bestselling 1973 fusion set “Head Hunters.”
However, even as Stone captured the collective imagination of musicians and fans, he was poised to plunge from the pinnacle of popular success, his descent hastened by crippling drug abuse.
David Kapralik, the musician’s manager at the apex of his career, told biographer Jeff Kaliss that as he watched film footage of Stone’s fabled 1969 appearance at the Woodstock festival, “I knew that this was Icarus, his wings made of wax, and [the spotlight] was the sun he flew too close to.”
Stone’s dark 1971 album “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” — largely cut solo — reached No. 1, but the Family Stone began to disintegrate during its recording sessions. Subsequent releases on Epic and Warner Bros. saw diminishing commercial returns, and by 1983 Stone’s major-label career was over.
Thereafter more prominent on the police blotter and the court docket than the record charts, Stone sporadically re-emerged after the turn of the millennium for a bizarre public appearance or chaotic concert date. In 2011, the New York Post reported he was homeless and living in a van in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district.
He told the Post, “Please tell everybody, please, to give me a job, play my music. I’m tired of all this s–t, man.”
He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and moved with his family at the age of six months to Vallejo, Calif., northeast of San Francisco. Reared in the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, he was active in gospel music at an early age; he made his first appearance on record at the age of 9 on a sacred single by the Stewart Four, a unit that also included his brother Freddie and sisters Rose and Vaetta.
Active in music throughout high school – where he acquired the nickname “Sly,” a play on his abbreviated given name Syl — he was fluent on keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums, and played in several semi-pro groups. He went on to study music theory at Vallejo Junior College.
His appearances on a local “American Bandstand”-styled TV dance party with his group the Viscaynes led to a production job in 1965 at Autumn Records, an independent imprint founded in San Francisco by local underground radio DJs “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell. For the company, he produced R&B singer Bobby Freeman’s No. 5 dance hit “C’mon and Swim.”
He also helmed Autumn sessions by local rock bands, producing the Beau Brummels’ national hits “Laugh, Laugh” and “Just a Little” and the Great Society’s “Somebody to Love,” later a smash in a new version by vocalist Grace Slick’s subsequent band Jefferson Airplane.
Now rechristened “Sly Stone,” he became a popular disc jockey at the Bay Area stations KSOL and KDIA. While both were putatively R&B outlets, Stone spun the soul hits of the day side-by-side with tracks by contemporary rock bands.
Fired by a vision of a band that mated soul and rock, Stone founded his own group in August 1966. Its ultimate lineup included his brother Freddie on guitar and sister Rose on keyboards; a pair of Italian-Americans, Greg Errico and Jerry Martini, on drums and saxophone, respectively; a black woman, Cynthia Robinson, on trumpet; and Larry Graham, who contributed uniquely popping, fuzzed-out bass. Stone played keyboards and guitar and shared vocals with most of the other players.
The brazenly rocking, flamboyantly dressed Sly and the Family Stone scored an immediate hit at their shows at Winchester Cathedral, a club in Redwood City south of San Francisco. A former promotion man for Columbia Records attracted the interest of Kapralik, then head of A&R at Columbia’s sister label Epic. Instantly impressed, Kapralik not only signed the act but assumed managerial control of the act.
The group’s 1967 debut LP, the aptly titled “A Whole New Thing,” failed to chart, and Kapralik urged Stone to craft a radio-friendly single. The resultant number, “Dance to the Music,” was launched into the top 10 of the pop and R&B charts, fired by the band’s call-and-response vocals, stabbing horn charts, and infectious, jubilant energy.
While neither the single’s eponymous follow-up album nor its successor “Life,” both released in 1968, made significant chart impressions, the group hit a peak with 1969’s “Stand!” The collection, which climbed to No. 13 nationally, sported the ebullient “Everyday People” and three other pop hits, “Sing a Simple Song,” the title cut, and the number that became the Family Stone’s storming concert signature, the eruptive “I Want to Take You Higher.”
The immense success of “Stand!” and its attendant 45s turned the Family Stone into a top concert draw. An appearance in Rhode Island at the July 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, for which promoter George Wein expanded the lineup with rock acts, sparked a disturbance as fans vaulted the venue’s fences, and led to the barring of similar groups at future fests.
However, Stone’s stand at the Woodstock Art & Music Festival in Bethel, N.Y., that August marked what was probably the triumphant pinnacle of the group’s career. Appearing amid a 3:30 a.m. downpour before a sleepy, mud-caked crowd of 500,000, the Family Stone galvanized its audience. The performance became a highlight of Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning 1970 documentary about the festival.
However, Sly and his bandmates’ escalating drug use helped scuttle the act’s reputation as a live unit. In the year 1970, the Family Stone cancelled 26 of their 80 concert dates. Failure to appear at a make-good show (after three previous no-shows) in Chicago’s Grant Park that July resulted in a riot that pitted enraged concertgoers against Windy City police.
Epic would wait two years for a follow-up to “Stand!” The label filled the gap with a pair of non-LP singles — the blissfully swinging “Hot Fun in the Summertime” (No. 2, 1969) and the massively funky “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Again)” (No. 1, 1970) — and the No. 2 compilation “Greatest Hits” (1970).
In the meantime, Stone, whose use of cocaine and the street drug angel dust was skyrocketing, holed up in a home studio at John and Michelle Phillips’ former residence in L.A.’s high-priced Bel Air enclave. Sometimes recording in a mobile home on the mansion’s grounds, he surrounded himself with a coterie of high and heavily armed hangers-on and dealers. He largely dispensed with the services of his band, but sometimes employed guests like R&B stars Bobby Womack and Billy Preston.
The resultant album, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” was a mainly introspective and claustrophobic affair, its drowsy rhythms driven by the mechanical beats of the Ace Tone Rhythm Ace, an early drum machine. It did top the LP chart and spawn a No. 1 single, “Family Affair,” but many critics found the set drained of the joy that marked the band’s previous releases and exemplary of both America’s Vietnam War-era malaise and Stone’s apparently deteriorating mental state.
Graham (who went on to found his own popular funk unit, Graham Central Station) and Errico both exited the Family Stone, and the bandleader cut the 1972 album “Fresh” with new players and the remaining core members. The more upbeat, rhythmically dense and lyrically lively collection became Stone’s last top-10 release, peaking at No. 7.
Stone attempted to depict himself as a happy family man on the cover of his 1974 album “Small Talk,” appearing on the cover with his girlfriend Kathy Silva and their infant son Sylvester Jr. That June, Stone and Silva married at a public ceremony at New York’s Madison Square Garden, with the Family Stone playing to 23,000 assembled “guests.” The attendant publicity lifted the album no higher than No. 15.
Silva filed for divorce within six months of the wedding, accusing her husband of drug abuse and spousal violence. The split was only finalized years later, following the disclosure that Stone had fathered a daughter, Sylvette, with Family Stone trumpeter Cynthia Robinson in 1976.
Stone’s tenure at Epic wound down with a pair of poorly received albums, “High on You” (billed as a solo release) in 1975 and the hopefully titled “Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back” in 1976. The latter album was the first Family Stone collection since the band’s debut a decade earlier that failed to reach the charts; by its release, only Robinson remained from the original lineup.
Two half-hearted titles on Warner Bros., “Back on the Right Track” (No. 45, 1979) and “Ain’t But the One Way” (1982), followed. The second set, which failed to chart, would be the last album to bear Sly Stone’s name for 29 years.
During the ’80s and ’90s, Stone was largely absent from the public eye, except for occasional press reports of his arrest on drug and weapons charges. In 1987, he was busted for nonpayment of child support just before the second show of a two-night stand at a Hollywood theater that was billed as an attempted comeback. He reportedly underwent several unsuccessful stints in drug treatment centers.
He guested on Funkadelic’s 1981 album “The Electric Spanking of War Babies” and tracks like former Time guitarist Jesse Johnson’s “Crazay” (a No. 2 R&B hit in 1988) and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Good Time.” He contributed songs to the 1987 films “Soul Man” and “Burglar.”
In 1993, Stone appeared, visibly uneasy and nearly mute, with the founding members of the Family Stone at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in L.A.
A career renaissance appeared to be in the offing during the first decade of the new millennium. In 2006, he made a jaw-dropping appearance at the Grammy Awards; sporting a glued-on fauxhawk atop his shaved pate, he briefly fronted a group that included his old bandmates and such stars as Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry and R&B singer John Legend during a medley of Family Stone hits.
The following year, an appearance in San Jose with an incarnation of the Family Stone led by his sister Vaetta resulted in a series of European concert dates that included a stop at the Montreux Jazz Festival. But critics complained that Stone’s participation in the shows was too limited, and many of the shows were plagued by its star’s typical tardiness.
He took the stage again in 2010, in the company of his brother Freddie (now a Pentecostal minister) and former Family Stone members Robinson and Martini at the enormous Coachella Festival in Indio, Calif. Arriving onstage hours late, Stone regaled the astonished crowd with a diatribe against Jerry Goldstein, his manager since the early ’90s. Goldstein responded by lodging a slander suit against his charge.
Stone soon filed suit against Goldstein for $50 million, claiming the manager had wrongfully withheld millions in publishing royalties. (In early 2015, a Los Angeles jury awarded Stone $5 million in the case.)
In August 2011, a month before the New York Post claimed he was living on the streets, Stone’s solo album “I’m Back! Family and Friends” was issued by the independent L.A. label Cleopatra Records. The set, which included guests like Jeff Beck, Bootsy Collins, Johnny Winter and the Doors’ Ray Manzarek, contained remakes of seven Family Stone hits (and remixes of three remakes), plus two new original songs and a version of the gospel number “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Universally dismissed by the press, it failed to reach the charts.
Besides his children with Silva and Robinson, Stone is survived by another daughter, L.A. musician Novena Carmel.
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