Whatever Happened To? Sly Stone

Music in the 60’s was pretty segregated. Motown was black. The British Invasion was white. Soul, blues, R+B? Black. AOR, psychedelic, progressive? White. But then there was Sly. Sly was for everybody.

Sly was Sly Stone, née Sylvester Stewart, the driving force behind Sly and the Family Stone. The ‘Family’ part of the name was represented by his brother Freddie who played guitar and his sister Rose on keyboards. Sly and the Family Stone was black and white, male and female. They seemed the living embodiment of songs like “Everyday People” and “Stand.” Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot (April 27, 2008) summed it up like this: “For a decade, this multiracial co-ed septet from northern California broke down barriers of how a band should look and sound.”

How broad was their appeal? Consider that in August of 1969, Sly and the Family Stone, produced what is widely considered one of the finest performances at Woodstock despite taking the stage at 4 a.m. That was two months after they were equally enthusiastically embraced at the Harlem Cultural Festival. Documentaries from both of those festivals capture their performances.

Sly also challenged the prevailing norm of how black performers appeared on stage. Most of the Motown groups wore suits. Some singers like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding wore stylish leisure wear. Not Sly. He’d come out in fringe, floppy hats, shiny leather pants, bangles and sparkles.

I was fortunate enough to see Sly and the Family Stone . They came to play at my college gym In 1969. Memorial Gym at Kent State wasn’t like one of those gyms where the Big Ten teams play basketball. We sat on wooden bleachers. The 7,000 ‘seat’ gym was packed. And it was hot. It was a 10 p.m. show but long past that time we were waiting….and waiting. But then Sly showed up! All that other stuff was long forgotten and no one would sit down again for the rest of the night.

Late arrivals at concerts were normal for Sly. Even worse, he sometimes didn’t show. In 1970, 26 of his 80 scheduled concerts were canceled (per Wikipedia). And that’s to say nothing of the shows starting two or three hours late, or when he walked off the stage early.

Many of the great rock bands of the era suffered from the unholy trinity of drugs, toxic band relationships and financial mismanagement. Sly hit all three. While the band remained active into the 80’s, shuffling through 18 members, by 1984, Sly and the Family Stone were no more. That same year he reportedly made the dubious decision to sell his music publishing rights. The buyer was Michael Jackson.

A story last year in the Houston Press by Bob Rugguero summed it up this way. “Maybe things started to get out of hand when the cocaine magically appeared on every possible spare bathroom countertop and mirror. Or when the huge amounts of cash arrived in suitcases. Or when the heavy dudes with gangster vibes and big fists started hanging around. Or the guns. Lots of guns. Or that old standby, Inter-Band Power Struggles for Creative Input.”

The web site Rock and Roll Globe tells this story

“Sly’s nose found its way to cocaine in 1969 and he was thus enraptured with (or ensnared by) the devil’s dandruff. It could be apocryphal but there’s the story about Sly, so desperate to find a crack pipe while at his label’s office he locked himself in the rest room and tried to unscrew some of the plumbing to fashion a pipe.”

Following the disintegration of the band, Stone generally kept out of the public view. In 1993 he showed up for the band’s induction ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2006 he made a brief appearance at the Grammy Awards, sporting a crazy blond Mohawk, and performing with the original band members.

Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times caught up with Stone in 2008:

“Sly Stone, the Howard Hughes of the Woodstock scene, rolled up on a hulking three-wheel custom chopper painted the color of lemons.”

Boucher described him as “sipping a double margarita and smiling that familiar toothy grin, although the 1960s towering afro is long gone along with his funky saunter. His posture and movement show the damage of the years when he was living especially hard. Stone’s chin never leaves his collarbone when he talks and there’s a tremor and hitch to his collarbones…’I’m like this because I fell off a cliff,’ he said, referring to a spill he said he took ‘walking in my yard’ in Beverly Hills.”

Perhaps Sly bottomed out in 2011 when the New York Post found him on an LA street:

“Just four years ago, he resided in a Napa Valley house so large it could only be described as a ‘compound,’ with a vineyard out back and multiple cars in the driveway.

“But those days are gone.

“Today, Sly Stone — one of the greatest figures in soul-music history — is homeless, his fortune stolen by a lethal combination of excess, substance abuse and financial mismanagement. He lays his head inside a white camper van ironically stamped with the words ‘Pleasure Way’ on the side. The van is parked on a residential street in Crenshaw, the rough Los Angeles neighborhood where ‘Boyz n the Hood’ was set. A retired couple makes sure he eats once a day, and Stone showers at their house. The couple’s son serves as his assistant and driver.”

In 2015, a Los Angeles jury awarded Stone $5 million for a decade worth of royalties that he claimed had been stolen from him by his former manager Gerald Goldstein and entertainment lawyer Glenn Stone. Goldstein appealed and a judge overruled the jury decision, saying Stone knowingly signed over the rights to his music.

In March of this year, Sly Stone celebrated his 80th birthday. Against all odds, you’d have to say. A biography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), written by Ben Greenman, is scheduled to be published in October. Maybe we haven’t heard the last from Sly after all. There’s not much in Sly’s resume in the last 40 years or so worth celebrating. But we can always remember this…