Sly Stone, a funk pioneer whose affect and impression as chief of the musical group Sly and the Household Stone was as enduring as his profession was transient, has died. He was 82.
An agent of change earlier than he vanished from the general public eye, Stone died “after a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues,” in line with a press release from his household, which didn’t specify when or the place he died.
From his beginnings in a household gospel group and his time as a energetic San Francisco DJ, Stone grew to become one of many main innovators in R&B, rock and pop music. There was a eager curiosity, even a restlessness, in the best way he stored altering his group’s sound throughout its quick, spectacular stint on the prime.
Stone had a capability for summing up the zeitgeist of an America in social transition, from collective pleasure (“Dance to the Music”) to racial concord (“Everyday People”), and from the seek for transcendence (“I Want To Take You Higher”) to the damaged idealism wherein the Nineteen Sixties ended (“Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”), a timeline wherein he created a template for future generations of funk-rock hybrids.
After a musical peak that lasted six years, Stone launched a couple of inconsequential information, spent many years mired in addictions to cocaine and sedatives, was arrested for possession of crack and lived in a camper van, a husk of his youthful, vibrant self.
However a number of latest documentaries and Stone’s 2023 memoir “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” made a renewed case for the relevance of his bountiful imaginative and prescient, even amidst a tragic life.
“When Sly comes on stage, you see older people looking like, ‘What’s this?,’ and younger people losing their minds,” stated Questlove, the director of “Summer of Soul” and “Sly Lives! (Aka The Burden Of Black Genius),” in an interview with the Occasions in 2021. “It’s an absolute lesson in how transformative they were.”
Stone fashioned Sly and the Household Stone in 1966, bringing in his brother Freddie (guitar) and sister Rose (piano). Stone performed keyboards, guitar, bass and drums and wrote, organized and produced the entire group’s music. The nice funk bassist Bootsy Collins as soon as referred to as Stone “the most talented musician I know.”
Sly conceived of the Household Stone as a rainbow coalition of soul, with female and male, white and Black members. Conventional R&B was coming into an expansive, transformative part, which Stone accelerated together with his improvements in funk, rock and psychedelia, to not point out vogue: He got here to at least one interview, a reporter famous, in “knee-high fox fur boots, cut velvet knickers and a red satin shirt with 20-inch fringe on the sleeves.”
Between 1967 and 1973, Sly and the Household Stone had 9 singles within the High 40. “Dance to the Music,” the exuberant title tune to their second album, hit No. 8 on the Billboard Sizzling 100. The hits that adopted included three No. 1 songs — “Everyday People,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)” and “Family Affair” — in addition to a No. 2, “Hot Fun in the Summertime.”
The mass of musicians he influenced ranges from Miles Davis to Janet Jackson, Herbie Hancock to Ice-T. “Everyday People” alone was coated by Aretha Franklin, Joan Jett, the Staples Singers, the Supremes and Pearl Jam, and it was interpolated by Arrested Improvement on the 1992 hit “People Everyday.” John Legend gained a Grammy in 2007 for his cowl of “Family Affair.” Prince, who was lavish in his reward of Stone, employed the Household Stone’s horn part to tour with him in 1997.
The group achieved maybe their best renown in August 1969, after they landed a prestigious second-day gig on the Woodstock music competition, taking part in after Janis Joplin and earlier than the Who.
Like many teams that weekend, they’d gear issues in the course of the set, however resolved them with a bang-up 20-minute medley of “Everyday People” and “Dance to the Music.” “The delirium peaked during Sly & the Family Stone’s set,” journalist Ellen Sander wrote within the liner notes of the 2019 field set “Woodstock — Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive.”
In his occasional interviews, Stone made it clear that he was what, on the time, was referred to as a race man. “Everybody in our group is neutral about race,” he informed the New York Occasions in 1970. “Everybody in the group knows that Blacks have been screwed over by whites — that most whites are prejudiced.”
The band moved to L.A. not lengthy after Woodstock, and shortly discovered bother. The Black Panthers lobbied Stone to exchange the 2 white band members with Black musicians. Some band members have been doing cocaine and PCP. “It was havoc. It was very gangsterish, dangerous. The vibes were very dark at that point,” Household Stone saxophonist Jerry Martini informed writer Joel Selvin. Their concert events routinely began hours late, or by no means began in any respect.
When the group returned in 1971 with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” (the title was a reply to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”), the exuberance of their music had curdled. The songs had a flinty exterior and a troubled tone. Stone wove drum machines into the dense thickets of sound. The quilt confirmed a crimson, white and black American flag; “Africa Talks to You” was lethargic — funk with none swing. The tone is bleak, dissonant, even static.
Years later, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” was acknowledged as a prophetic document, considered one of just a few that described the tip of the Nineteen Sixties’ idealism. It was the final important music Stone launched.
Sylvester Stewart was born March 15, 1944, in Denton, Texas. When he was 3 months previous, his dad and mom, Okay.C. and Alpha Stewart, moved the household to Vallejo, within the Bay Space. The household sang gospel music and have been energetic within the Church of God in Christ, the place Okay.C. was a deacon. “I thought everybody in the world played music,” Stone later stated.
Whereas nonetheless a youth, Stone minimize his first document, a gospel 78 RPM disc with brother Freddie and sisters Rose and Vaetta, because the Stewart 4. A fifth-grade classmate misspelled Sylvester’s identify on the varsity chalkboard, and the error became a prophetic nickname: Sly.
Earlier than he reached puberty, Stone had mastered a number of musical devices. In his teenagers, he recorded sporadically with varied doo-wop and R&B teams. He studied music idea at Vallejo Junior School, then attended the Chris Borden Faculty of Trendy Broadcasting. In 1964, he obtained a job on the R&B station KSOL, the place he introduced the Beatles and Rolling Stones into the station’s playlist and confirmed off his slick patter. The station christened him Sly Sloan, however he hated the identify, so he launched himself to listeners as Sly Stone — a style of stubbornness to return.
By 1966, after taking part in music in matches and begins, Stone had fashioned a brand new band by plucking one of the best musicians from his band, Sly and the Stoners, and his brother Freddie’s band, which included drummer Gregg Errico and saxophonist Jerry Martini. The brothers Stone enlisted bass guitar marvel Larry Graham, who’d been taking part in in a neighborhood jazz duo together with his mom.
Their first album, “A Whole New Thing,” didn’t chart. Clive Davis, the president of CBS Data, who oversaw Epic, suggested Stone to strive for a extra industrial sound. His first try was a bull’s-eye: “Dance to the Music,” a shared-vocal funk exercise on which Graham begins to introduce his influential “thumping and plucking” model of bass, and trumpeter Cynthia Robinson warns, “All the squares, go home!”
The group’s third album, “Life,” was one other dud, although it included prime tracks “Life” and “M’Lady.” Quickly after it disappeared, Stone recorded “Everyday People,” a jolly tune about tolerance that featured an uncommon one-note bassline by Graham, and popularized the phrase “different strokes for different folks.” Along with “Everyday People,” 1969’s “Stand!” included the title observe, “Sing a Simple Song,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “You Can Make It If You Try.” and the playful however pointed six-minute observe “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” which used a vocoder, delay and distortion to create a menacing artificiality that caught on shortly with Parliament-Funkadelic and was revived by T-Ache.
Stone described the band’s fifth album, 1971’s ominous “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” as “a very truthful album, made and then released at a very truthful moment in time. That’s what it was all about, because I know the truth always prevails. And that’s exactly what my music is all about.”
However there have been different truths, significantly about drug habit that Stone tried to maintain hidden. Band members stop: first Errico, then Graham (who based the funk act Graham Central Station), and later, Freddie Stone and Martini.
“Fresh,” in 1973, included the band’s remaining top-20 chart tune, “If You Want Me to Stay.” Producer Brian Eno cited “Fresh” because the pivotal and irreversible manufacturing second when “the rhythm instruments, particularly the bass drum and bass, suddenly become the important instruments in the mix.” `”Small Discuss,” the next yr, had a minor hit, “Time for Livin’,” and a canopy picture of Sly, spouse Kathy Silva (a Hawaiian actress whom he married onstage at Madison Sq. Backyard) and their younger son, Sylvester Jr.
The smiling household picture was misleading, nevertheless. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Silva later informed Individuals journal. “I didn’t want that world of drugs and weirdness.” She left him in 1976 when his pit bull mauled Sylvester Jr., who was 2 on the time. Stone additionally had a daughter, Sylvette Phunne Robinson, with Household Stone trumpeter Robinson, and a second daughter, Novena Carmel, now a number for KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” program.
Sly and the Household Stone’s subsequent two albums, “High on You” and “Heard You Missed Me, Well I’m Back,” bought poorly. “Back on the Right Track,” in 1979, defied its hopeful title. There was one other album in 1983. The adjective “reclusive” grew to become completely hooked up to his identify.
Rumors persistently popped up, fostered by his absence: He’d recorded new songs, he’d labored with Prince, he had 100 new songs — no, 200 — he was on the verge of a comeback, all the time on the verge of it. He was convicted on expenses of possessing cocaine in 1987. Two years later, he was arrested by FBI brokers on a federal cost of illegal flight to keep away from prosecution on the fees. He was arrested once more for cocaine possession in 2011, after which he claimed he’d been to rehab seven instances.
When Sly and the Household Stone have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame in 1993, Stone stepped to the microphone, stated, “See you soon,” and break up. It was years earlier than the general public noticed him once more.
The Grammys paid tribute to Stone in 2006. After a medley of his hits, sung by John Legend, will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, amongst others, Stone got here onstage in a white mohawk, sun shades and a metallic duster, with a solid on his proper hand. He hunched over a keyboard, sang a little bit of “I Want to Take You Higher” in a distracted method, appeared to overlook a couple of cues and walked off earlier than the tune was over.
He was booked to play Coachella in 2010, shortly after he was reported to be homeless, however he performed “an abysmal, confused set,” the Guardian stated. Stone got here on stage 3½ hours late, and when he talked, he both mumbled or stopped in the course of sentences. He stated he’d been kidnapped and cheated by managers. He began songs, held on for a couple of bars, then drifted away. “To say that he seemed high was an understatement,” a New Yorker author noticed. The L.A. Weekly referred to as it a “sad spectacle.”
Not often had a fantastic music artist suffered such a extreme, speedy and irreversible downfall. Individuals struggled to elucidate it.
“He’s had problems because he hasn’t been able to grow up,” Sylvester Stewart Jr., his son, stated in 1996, after Stone completed a 45-day keep in rehab. “He’s meant no harm to anyone.”
“Sly never grew out of drugs,” his ex-wife, Silva, stated. “He lost his backbone and destroyed his future.”
Nonetheless, the story of his musical exuberance and deep private ache continued to encourage – and hang-out – the inheritors of his imaginative and prescient. Along with his pair of documentaries, director and musicians Questlove used Stone’s life story to probe weighty questions on Black genius and the way it’s embraced, exploited and uncared for by the tradition. The ability of Stone’s music is sure up in his non-public ache.
“Soul music is releasing a demon that turns into a beautiful, cathartic exercise,” Questlove informed the Occasions in 2025. “We never just see it as ‘I’m watching someone go through therapy.’
“Only time will tell,” he stated, “if I had to make the Sly story to save my own life.”
His 2023 memoir, largely a research of his adolescence and craft, alluded to the toll that his drug use took on his output. “I should have stopped sooner,” he wrote. “Much sooner: less dust and powder, fewer rocks and pipes, enough days given back that might have added up to years.”
Within the final years of his life, Stone labored on sobriety and lived quietly within the San Fernando Valley. His household, together with brother Freddie, have been left to talk up for Sly.
“When people ask me questions about what was going on behind the scenes and how did you make such great music, I tell them it was Sly writing what was coming out of his heart and soul,” he informed the web site Wax Poetics. “He is a true genius.”
