https://www.theatlantic.com/
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
THE UNDOING OF A GREAT AMERICAN BAND
Sly and the Family Stone suggested new possibilities in music and life—until it all fell apart.
Is there a way to look at Sly Stone—a musical genius and, for a couple of years, an avatar of spiritual freedom—that isn’t dualistic, split-brained, one thing in opposition to another? That isn’t about light versus darkness, up versus down, Logos versus Chaos, good drugs versus bad drugs, having it all versus losing it all, and on and on? “Without contraries is no progression,” William Blake said, but still—I find myself groping for another plane of understanding. I want to see him as the angels do. We might need to evolve a little bit to get a handle on this man.
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To the binary American eye, certainly, he soared and then he smashed. Sly Stone held the ’60s in the palm of his hand. He had the plumage and vibration of Jimi Hendrix and the melodic instinct of Paul McCartney. His music married ballooning hippie consciousness to the tautest and worldliest and most street-facing funk: Its end product, its neurochemical payload, was an amazing, paradoxically wised-up euphoria. A rapture petaled with knowingness, with slyness.
Live, he could bend time to his will like James Brown. His band Sly and the Family Stone—polyracial, polygendered, poly-freaking-phonic (you could never quite tell which voice was Sly’s, and he himself had several)—was a crucible of joy, a crucible of possibility, an experiment that took on the character of a proof: People could live together. America could work. Love and justice were real. For about a minute. “I can’t imagine my life without Sly Stone,” Cornel West says in the 2017 documentary On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone. “Sly created a music that became a place where we could go to have a foretaste of that freedom, of that democratic experience. Even though we couldn’t live it on the ground.”
And by 1975 it was essentially over: his creativity squandered, his reputation in tatters, cocaine and PCP and paranoia everywhere. Decad
But Sly lives. And the resourceful Greenman, whose publishing credits include the co-writing of a memoir by George Clinton, has coaxed, wheedled, massaged, used God knows what processes of titration and palpation to extract a fascinating book from him. “I have some questions, not too many,” he tells his subject in the moody snippet of transcribed conversation that prefaces Thank You. “We don’t have to do them all.” “We don’t have to do them at all,” answers Sly.
Pretty much the definition of an unreliable narrator, Sly nonetheless has some clear memories. Young Sly, at home in Vallejo, California, watches the cowboys on TV: “I liked Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. My favorite was Lash LaRue. There was no one cooler. He wore all black and used a whip. What for? To keep himself from shooting a motherfucker.”
Middle-school, churchgoing Sly is mesmerized by the high-energy soul singers—Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson—who come out of gospel. “They kept what was holy and added in what was earthy … I wanted to sing like them, control the stage like them.” Student Sly, at Vallejo Junior College, has a great teacher: Mr. Froehlich, who explains music theory to him with vision-inducing clarity. “I could see the melodic lines, watch them intertwine. It’s wrong to say that it was like shoelaces but it’s also wrong to say that it wasn’t at least a little like that.”
Career-building Sly was a radio DJ in San Francisco, honing his patter, and also a record producer, bedding down in the acid wisps of Haight-Ashbury, tweaking the beat music of the Beau Brummels, tuning up the thumping psych-pop of the Mojo Men, cracking the whip like Lash LaRue. (He forced the Great Society, Grace Slick’s pre–Jefferson Airplane band, through 50 takes of “Somebody to Love.”) The Family Stone, he tells Ben Greenman, was “a concept—white and black together, male and female both, and women not just singing but playing instruments. That was a big deal back then and it was a big deal on purpose.”
Woodstock was a peak. Just past four in the morning, Sly and the Family Stone played “I Want to Take You Higher,” and Sly initiated a call-and-response routine that was like heaven talking to Earth: “Just say higher and throw the peace sign up,” he exhorted a rained-on, worn-out, crawling-around-in-its-
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Entropy was already at work. As beautifully as he had realized and organized the Family Stone, Sly was also an arch-orchestrator of turmoil: the control of no control. Endless brinkmanship—Would he show up for the gig or not? And in what condition?—pitched his band into despair. There was a devouringly out-of-it appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Gangsterhood enveloped his household: guns, drugs, sketchy people. At the center of Thank You, like a gyre of disruption, is the image of Sly’s as-good-as-feral pit bull, Gun, whirling around in pursuit of his own tail. “He was my best friend. He was crazy. He would chase his tail in circles, not for a minute or for an hour but forever.” Gun ends up mauling Sly’s toddler son, Sylvester Stewart Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
For some people, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sly’s itchy, woozy, drum-machined bummer of a 1971 album, is a masterpiece. For me the drug vibes are too heavy, the flashes of self-awareness too sour and fleeting, the music too much like Gun chasing his own tail. It was certainly groundbreaking: through the crust and downward. The two albums that followed it—Fresh (1973) and the insufficiently listened-to Small Talk (1974)—were probably better records, better art, but with Riot, Sly had cast a long, evil spell on himself and his audience. The Family Stone was falling apart. A disastrous showcase at Radio City Music Hall, in January 1975, had the smell of the end.
So what is it, the Sly Stone story? Utopia colliding with reality? Not that, because Sly was his own kind of realist all along. The slow death of the ’60s? Not that either. The ’60s were about conflict, and conflict, as far as we can tell, never dies. The space created by Sly and the Family Stone, the blast radius of delight—that, too, will never die. Genius undone by addiction, then: Is that it? Too small, way too small. Look on him rather as a supreme artist, elected and condemned to expand actuality, and thereby to experience himself fully and on the grandest scale—his flaws writ large, his glory almost dazzling, all simultaneous, all one.
If you have a favorite Sly tune, let's hear it... or maybe one about the agony and the ecstasy... Bring it guys!
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