Forever Fresh: Sly Stone Remembered
The funk/soul genius died this week at 82
Sly Stone’s passing isn’t just sad in the sense of a legend no longer being among the living, but as a reminder of how he’d already been gone in many ways.
Given his personal demons, it could be seen as a surprise that Stone lived until the age of 82, when he passed Monday from what his family called “a combination of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and other underlying health issues.”
Stone was basically done as an active presence before he turned 40. His final decades musically featured only sporadic output, a lot of seclusion (including reported homelessness) and attempted comeback gigs where attendees were as likely to gawk at an onstage car crash as much as enjoy an evening of great music.
But here’s the thing. Sly Stone is still a legend, because the music he created while he was still able to connect with his muse endures, not just in those singles and albums he created in less than a decade. It lives in so many of the future singers, musicians and rappers who got tuned into those classic righteous grooves, funky breaks and his knack for catchiness, then the artists of the next generation who absorbed that musical DNA from those directly influenced.
To this day, you can put on any number of his songs and be impressed by the freshness, the sheer musicality on display by Sly and his collaborators in the Family Stone.
He started early, growing up in the type of religious family where musicality was encouraged, rather than treated as an affront to God. With that encouragement, he and his siblings (only one of whom didn’t pursue music as a career) sang gospel.
Showing an ability to play at an age where most were, say, just learning how to ride a bicycle, Stone turned that into a number of bands that mostly went nowhere, as many do in their initial days.
One of those bands planted a seed in Stone’s mind for future success. A doo-wop group, the Viscaynes, didn’t get past the regional hit stage with “Yellow Moon,” but he noticed the chemistry potential of a multi-racial, mixed gender group.
AUDIO: The Viscaynes “Yellow Moon”
Then came Stone’s time as a disc jockey on KSOL, a soul station that, in those days before massive radio conglomerates, didn’t force its on-air talent to stick to tightly controlled playlists. So he mixed the Beatles, Stones and others in with the R&B, musical integration both fitting (considering how much the pop/rock acts were influenced by Black artists) and prescient.
Not content to just spin records, he helped make them. He produced, or attempted to, Grace Slick’s pre-Jeffersonian Great Society and had a couple of hits in that role for the Beau Brummels (“Laugh Laugh” and “Just a Little”).
His move from behind the scenes would soon happen, with the merger of two bands led by brothers. Sly had trumpeter Cynthia Robinson in his. Drummer Mike Errico and saxophonist Jerry Martini (whose idea it was) were in Freddie Stone’s. Sly recruited another local talent Larry Graham, the bassist who launched a thousand slap players. Vet Stone joined as part of the trio of three women backup singers, Little Sister.
It wasn’t long before the newly formed and rechristened Sly and the Family Stone, with Sly moving to organ after ceding lead guitar duties to Freddie, had a label deal with Epic.
“I was excited by the music from the very beginning,” Clive Davis said in the 2025 documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius). “In those days, music was very, very segmented. You had pop. You had R&B. You had rock. But with Sly, you get this totally unique blurring of genres.”
Their 1967 debut, A Whole New Thing, didn’t do much commercially, but it’s clear the ingredients were there. Lead track “Underdog”, with its staccato horns and determined lyrics about the realities of systemic racism (“I know how it feels to expect to get a fair shake/But they won’t let you forget/That you’re the underdog and you’ve got to be twice as good”) pointed where they were headed.
If the whole thing was a bit closer to conventional soul (as on the unintentionally ironic “Bad Risk”), it was clear this was a damn good band, tight as hell, and that Sly had something.
A fourth sibling, sister Rose, joined the band for the follow-up a most helpful addition.
Davis wanted something a bit more commercial the next time around, something Sly chafed at a bit, although he wasn’t about to butt heads with the label at that point. He knew the reality. He needed a hit song.
“I knew the music worked, but I didn’t know if people would get it,” Stone told The Guardian in 2023. “That’s what happened after the first album – I poured everything into those songs. Music people liked it, but not everyone was a music person. 1968’s Dance to the Music came out as a simpler version, and more people understood that.”
AUDIO: Sly & The Family Stone “Dance to the Music”
It was clear that he took Davis’ wishes on his own terms. The opening title track of Dance to the Music was a burst of sheer joy, giving showcases to different instruments and lead singers, unison singers and harmonies, all with that killer wordless vocal break.
The album was a step forward with more progress around the corner. “Higher” was fine on its own here, but it would take its superior final version the following year. “Dance to the Medley” was utterly infectious, but it was still just an extended vamp on the title track at the end of the same album side.
It wouldn’t be long before others took notice. It’s not difficult to see the connection between the psychedelic flavorings here and what Norman Whitfield would soon come up with for the likes of the Temptations.
In retrospect, Sly & The Family Stone were the perfect bridge in the holy trinity of funk from the latter half of the ’60s into the early ’70s. James Brown’s constant creative burst was guided by a hand willing to fine band members for daring to muff a note onstage. Sly was more open, throwing more into the mix, paving the way for George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic’s more out there funk explorations.
The third album, Life, arrived five months later in September, 1968. It didn’t contain any hit singles, as “Life”/”M’Lady” stalled at 93 on the pop chart, but it was a leap forward nonetheless, more focused on songs than vamps.
In retrospect, plenty of its songs sound like hits in a universe that got it right — the aptly-titled “Fun”, the libidinous “Dynamite”, the loose “Into My Own Thing” (with its intro familiar to Fatboy Slim listeners decades later) and the deceptively sunny “Life.”
Sly wasn’t slowing down. By year’s end, he’d come up with the band’s biggest hit.
VIDEO: Sly & The Family Stone “Everyday People”
Racial unity was certainly implied from the get-go in the band, especially at a time when integrated lineups weren’t common. But “Everyday People” was a call for unity, wrapped up in poppier trappings. Verses and chorus alike stuck in the brain, especially the way Cynthia and Rose sang the schoolyard taunt-like music and aware lyrics in the former (“There is a blue one who can’t accept the green one/For living with a fat one, trying to be a skinny one/Different strokes for different folks/And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby”).
“‘Everyday People’ was two minutes and twenty seconds, not much longer than ‘Hit the Road Jack.’ But I kept it short with the idea that it would have a long life,” Sly said in his 2019 memoir .”I didn’t just want ‘Everyday People’ to be a song. I wanted it to be a standard, something that would be up there with ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘Moon River.’ And I knew how to do it. It meant a simple melody with a simple arrangement to match.”
Mission accomplished. The song hit No. 1 in mid-February 1969, staying there for four weeks, setting the stage for Sly & The Family Stone’s best album — Stand!
The title song kicked it off with an ode to self-empowerment that sounds like a cousin to “Everyday People,” until it goes out on a funky gospel vamp. “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” reflects much of the preceding year’s turbulence through its cinematic mood as much as its repeated, unblinking title. The reworked “I Want To Take You Higher” is undeniably insistent, made for audience participation as the band would show at Woodstock later that year.
VIDEO: Sly & The Family Stone performs “I Wanna Take You Higher” on The Ed Sullivan Show 1968
“Sing a Simple Song” is one of Graham’s premier showcases, an unshakeable bassline married perfectly to a funky guitar riff.
The album holds up all the way to the end, closing with another classic should-have-been-a-single in “You Can Make It If You Try.”
One of the poignant aspects is how the struggles of Sly’s later life came in their contrast to the sheer positivity through much of his first four albums. But addiction doesn’t give a shit how upbeat you are.
1969 should have been a great year for Sly — his best album, one of the best Woodstock performances — but cracks began to show.
While he wasn’t the only one in the band to indulge in substances, he was the one who seemed most notably affected due to usage of both cocaine and PCP. It was when his reputation for blowing off gigs started.
The darkness was creeping through the edges, as on “Somebody’s Watching You” off Stand!, but it blew into the open on the standalone single “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” released that December.
Paranoia and doubt were taking over, from the devil with the gun to the bitter references to recent lyrics to that pointed line in the last verse — “Dyin’ young is hard to take, sellin’ out is harder.”
The song became Sly’s second No. 1 hit regardless. For all of Graham’s reputation for slap bass, it wasn’t a technique he employed much for the band in the ’60s. But it’s all over this song, the funkiest thing Sly ever cut, meshed with Freddie’s guitar and the title as hook.
VIDEO: Sly & The Family Stone “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”
Sly’s pace slowed, as the next album wouldn’t come out until 1971.Tensions were growing in the band, between the Stone brothers and Graham, then between Sly (who’d taken to surrounding himself with drug-procuring yes men) and everybody else. Errico was the first to leave, taking off early in 1971.
Epic put out a greatest hits album as a stopgap.
He had enough in the tank for another masterpiece — the drug-soaked There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
Much as the utopian ideals of the ’60s crashed at Altamont, at the hands of RFK’s and MLK’s assassins, at the heel of Richard Daley’s jackbooted thugs and at the slow collapse of American military intervention in Vietnam, it was clear that the Sly & The Family Stone of “Dance to the Music” and “Everyday People” was dead.
Sly was disillusioned and his addictions left him going between states of disinterest and disappointment.
There was nothing sunny about “Family Affair,” which became the lead single against Sly’s wishes. It was all but a solo song, as Rose’s backing vocals were the only appearance from anyone else in the band. That was Billy Preston on the Fender Rhodes and Sly himself on what was basically a primitive drum machine.
His gifts hadn’t completely disappeared, as the song would stay atop Billboard’s Hot 100 for five weeks.
There were moments where one could detect the old Sly, even through the muted tones and murk. There’s a slinky charm to “You Caught Me Smilin'” that plays effectively off the lyrical darkness. The same goes for “Runnin’ Away,” which plays like a commercial for his (or your) drug of choice, a white powder with a little story to tell (and no side effects disclaimers).
“Luv N’ Haight,” which he wanted to be the first single, leisurely rides its bass-and-wah-wah groove, although when you realize the majority of the lyrics are the repeated “I feel so good inside myself, don’t want to move. Feel so good inside myself, don’t need to move,” one knows the label made the correct call.
Sly changed the album title to be a response to Marvin Gaye’s classic What’s Going On earlier that year. “Africa Talks to You (Asphalt Jungle),” the original title track, shows some of the racial consciousness he was capable of feeling through the addictive haze and phalanx of enablers, its repeated cries of “Timber! All fall down!” intended as the opposite of the determination of “Stand!”
It could also be read as a statement of the alienation he felt due to those around him although, if that were the case, it would be fair to point out that if Sly was falling, he was the one wielding the axe.
“Thank You For Talkin’ To Me Africa,” which ends the album is nothing more than “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” played at a slower tempo. Stripped of any sense of a good time, even with Graham’s bass more prominent, it underscores the sense of resignation.
The album is undeniably brilliant, but unsettling. Even if one knew nothing of Sly Stone’s life behind the scenes, not to mention what awaited him, it would be clear that he was not in a good headspace.
Even with all that, it’s hard to deny its impact. It would be foolish, for example, to suggest there’d be no Prince without Sly Stone. But it wouldn’t be foolish to suggest that there would be a different Prince, particularly without There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
As producer Terry Lewis put it in the documentary, “Sly’s influence on Prince was infinite.”
Graham was the next to go, as his relationship with the bandleader had deteriorated professionally and personally, fomented by some of Sly’s sycophantic entourage. Music myth had it that both he and Sly thought the other was hiring a hitman to kill him.
“When you’re in a family, there just comes a point where you leave home,” Graham said in the documentary. “When it was time to go, I just left. It wasn’t complicated. It’s just, ‘I’m gone.'”
The bassist would go on to have the best post-Family Stone career with his funk outfit Graham Central Station and a Top 10 pop hit in 1980 with the adult contemporary ballad “One In a Million You.”
Sly had one great album left in him — 1973’s Fresh, which was a more accessible version of Riot. Graham makes one of his two appearances on the album on the wonderful cover of Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be),” sung by Rose. It sounds like church, if church were a small recording studio filled with a handful of people.
VIDEO: Sly & The Family Stone, “If You Want Me To Stay”
The slinky “If You Want Me to Stay” is as sexy as anything in Sly’s canon while showing a hint of vulnerability.
Clinton was a fan. Years later, he was the one who suggested the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover it, a deeply unsexy version on their second album, Freaky Styley, which he produced.
“Thankful n’ Thoughtful” holds the tempo down, but not the optimism (“Oh, Sunday morning, I forgot my prayer/I should have been happy, I still be there/Something could have come and taken me away/But the main man felt Sly should be here”). In retrospect, it’s easy to think that he was trying too hard to convince himself, if not the listener.
“Frisky” traverses similar turf to “If You Want Me to Stay,” only much, much, much hornier. Somewhere, a teenage Prince clearly took mental notes on it.
“In Time” lives up to the album’s title, funky and playful, with Sly sounding more engaged.
Fresh’s promise went unfulfilled. 1974’s Small Talk was less consistent, but would be the best of the bunch of the four albums he recorded before his last release in 1982.
“Time For Livin,” carries a sense of soulful hope, complete with strings. “Loose Booty,” famously sampled on the Beastie Boys’ 1989 single “Shadrach,” sounds as playful as Stone had in five years.
VIDEO: Beastie Boys “Shadrach”
On the whole, the songwriting wasn’t as consistent, as Sly was starting to drift. And it was hard to believe the album’s attempts at portraying domestic bliss when he and wife Kathleen Silva, pictured on the cover with their son Sylvester Jr., divorced three months after the album’s release and four months after their onstage marriage at Madison Square Garden.
The Family Stone went out with a whimper, booking an eight-night stand at Radio City Music Hall without any warmups to get back into good live shape. The 6,000-seat venue drew 1,100 officially on opening night and much, much less than that by eyewitness accounts. Per The New York Times review of that night, Sly phoned in a 45-minute headlining set that drew a smattering of boos at best.
“It was the worst show Sly & The Family Stone, in my opinion, ever played,” Martini said.
Having lost money, Stone scrounged up funds to get himself home, leaving the rest of the band stranded in New York, stuck with hotel bills they couldn’t afford.
Even though three of the albums to come would carry the band name, it would be Sly and whoever was on hand, an extension of how he’d become less collaborative with the key players going back to the Riot days.
1982’s Ain’t But The One Way held promise, as it started as a collaboration between Clinton and Sly. But Clinton and Funkadelic got into a dispute with Warner Brothers and left the project. Sly eventually stopped showing up to the sessions, leaving producer Stewart Levine the impossible task of trying to salvage what they had into a good album.
Released that September, 13 days before Lil Wayne was born, to give you an idea of how long ago this was, the album went nowhere and Sly went down the rabbit hole.
The truth is that addiction also doesn’t care who you are any more than cancer or any other disease does. Customer service, Wall Street, the farm, it doesn’t care, so it went with Sly.
The sad coda to all of it was that he did eventually get sober, but it was too late. By 2019, years of smoking crack had done a number on his lungs, robbing him of his ability to sing, ensuring the music he heard in his head stayed there.
But, oh, the music that got out. “Writing a hit song is almost impossible,” Nile Rodgers said in the Sly Lives! doc. “But Sly had an uncanny ability to make every part of the song hooky.”
If words like “legendary” and “iconic” get overused these days, Sly Stone earned the superlatives by mixing genres in a way at his peak that was unmistakably him, but always inviting, never insular.He was a flawed human, but genius is never a gift bestowed on the perfect.
Sly Stone’s gift was always present, even when he became a spectral figure for decades in the public consciousness. So it remains with his passing.
Rather than mourn the years that could have been, it feels right to celebrate the years we got, preferably by digging into the best of those years and turning it up.
That way, as it’s been for almost 60 years, Sly won’t be going anywhere.
VIDEO: Sly Lives! trailer
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