Rock ’n’ Soul: The Amazing Story of Sly & the Family Stone
Which makes it almost impossible to set expectations for this memoir. If Amelia Earhart or the Loch Ness Monster released an autobiography tomorrow, would we complain about the unanswered questions or devour any glimpse we get into such mythic characters?
“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” — named for Sly & the Family Stone’s monumentally funky 1969 No. 1 hit — is the first title from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s new publishing imprint, and even the drummer/author/filmmaker acknowledges that it isn’t a definitive story. “There is plenty, too, that is not here,” writes Questlove, who is currently working on a Sly Stone documentary, in the foreword. “Some of the musical questions that I would have loved to talk about with the 30-year-old Sly, or the 40-year-old Sly, seem harder for him to recapture, mountains in the mist.”
Artists from the Jackson 5 to Prince, Miles Davis to D’Angelo borrowed elements of Stone’s sound and style, and his songs have been sampled hundreds of times, by the likes of Janet Jackson, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, but no one else has fully conjured the remarkable balance of virtuosity and universality, joy and pain, rhythmic sophistication and nursery rhyme singalongs of “Everyday People” or “Family Affair.” (...)
Sylvester Stewart was born into a musical family (“There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music”), and he started singing and recording with his siblings at a young age, soon joining a series of high school and regional bands. He talked his way into a radio job in San Francisco, where he took on his new moniker. “There was a tension in the name,” he writes. “Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.”
Soon, he assembled the men and women, friends and relations, who made up the Family Stone, very intentionally a mixed-race and -gender ensemble. “The band had a concept — white and Black together, male and female both, and women not just singing but playing instruments,” Stone says. “That was a big deal back then and it was a big deal on purpose.”
Stone breezes through the making of such earthshaking albums as “Stand!” and “Fresh,” though he looks a bit closer at “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” (1971), a hazy, slowed-down and reflective set that felt like the hangover following the exuberance of the ’60s. “I was digging down into a place where people hadn’t been before,” he writes.
By the time of “Riot,” though, drugs had also entered Sly Stone’s life, and they would define the many years that followed. He was feeling pressure to write, to record, to tour. “All of that needed to be fueled,” he says wryly. “But how did that fuel make me feel? A drug is a substance and so the question has substance. A drug can be a temporary escape and so I will temporarily escape that question.” (...)
When Sly started missing concerts and seemed increasingly surrounded by darkness, the conventional wisdom became that Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone were two distinct people — one bright and fun, the other chaotic and antagonistic. “I didn’t agree with the two-persons-in-one theory,” writes Stone. “In my mind, there was only my mind, with different facets and edges like anyone’s, and that was the mind that minded being probed and prodded, put to someone else’s test.”
Artists from the Jackson 5 to Prince, Miles Davis to D’Angelo borrowed elements of Stone’s sound and style, and his songs have been sampled hundreds of times, by the likes of Janet Jackson, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, but no one else has fully conjured the remarkable balance of virtuosity and universality, joy and pain, rhythmic sophistication and nursery rhyme singalongs of “Everyday People” or “Family Affair.” (...)
Sylvester Stewart was born into a musical family (“There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music”), and he started singing and recording with his siblings at a young age, soon joining a series of high school and regional bands. He talked his way into a radio job in San Francisco, where he took on his new moniker. “There was a tension in the name,” he writes. “Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.”
The D.J. gig led to songwriting and producing work. His sense of discipline is striking: studying music theory at community college, rehearsing nonstop, jumping to an in-studio piano and playing along to every song he spins on the airwaves (and always announcing the temperature as 59 degrees; “I am not sure why except that it was cool”).
It took a couple of albums to distill all of his influences and ambitions, and then came an explosion. A fleet of hit singles between 1967 and 1973 turned the Family Stone into one of America’s top touring bands, especially after their show-stopping performance at Woodstock became a highlight in the immensely popular film documenting the festival. “I didn’t see it but someone told me I was the star,” he writes — while elsewhere he notes that “after Woodstock, everything glowed.”
By the time of “Riot,” though, drugs had also entered Sly Stone’s life, and they would define the many years that followed. He was feeling pressure to write, to record, to tour. “All of that needed to be fueled,” he says wryly. “But how did that fuel make me feel? A drug is a substance and so the question has substance. A drug can be a temporary escape and so I will temporarily escape that question.” (...)
When Sly started missing concerts and seemed increasingly surrounded by darkness, the conventional wisdom became that Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone were two distinct people — one bright and fun, the other chaotic and antagonistic. “I didn’t agree with the two-persons-in-one theory,” writes Stone. “In my mind, there was only my mind, with different facets and edges like anyone’s, and that was the mind that minded being probed and prodded, put to someone else’s test.”
by Alan Light, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Alarmy; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; AP[ed. Sly/Prince, flamboyant flip sides of the same creative coin. Check out his Wikipedia. See also: Sly Stone lives to tell the tale of his lifelong journey to heaven, hell and back (LA Times); and, Sly Stone Returns With Alternately Riveting and Horrifying Memoir (Variety).]
“It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drugs,” he writes. “If it hadn’t been a choice between them and life, I might still be doing them. But it was and I’m not.”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drugs,” he writes. “If it hadn’t been a choice between them and life, I might still be doing them. But it was and I’m not.”
