Warner Theatre presents new Beatles themed multimedia show
A revolution of sorts is coming to the Warner Theatre this weekend as the music of The Beatles takes over the stage.
Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, Beatles fans of all ages can enjoy a multimedia experience at the Warner with rare photos, videos, animations and of course, the music by the Beatles you know and love.
Leaving their mark — Inked Comedy makes return during Flagship City Comedy Festival
Vocalists and a rock band will be accompanied by the Erie Philharmonic Orchestra.
Doors open Saturday at 6 p.m. and Sunday for a matinee at 2 p.m.
For tickets, click here.
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The musical world that Sly Stone made for us still spins
Not even in a world this big, bad, beautiful, wonderful, horrible, overstimulated and hyperbolic can we begin to overstate the importance of Sly Stone. His death on Monday at 82 feels too enormous, too unwieldy for whatever tools we have to measure it. He's one in a tiny handful of 20th-century visionaries who created the musical reality we've lived in ever since, standing shoulder to shoulder with his peer influences (the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, all of Motown) and the star students he inspired (Parliament-Funkadelic, Prince, Janet Jackson, Outkast, all of hip-hop, all of everything). Pop's utopian impulse might not begin with him, at least not in a tidy, big bang way, but it doesn't grow so vast — so quickly — without the immensity of his imagination. When we grieve Sly Stone, we grieve a sense of what's possible in all music.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
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Sly Stone: influential funk pioneer who embodied the contradictions at the heart of American life
There's immense variety in popular music careers, even beyond the extremes of one-hit wonders and the long-haulers touring stadiums into their dotage. There are those who embody a specific era, burning briefly and brightly, and those whose legacy spans decades. Straddling both of those, and occupying a distinctive space in popular music history, is Sylvester Stewart, better known as Sly Stone, who died at the age of 82 on Monday June 9. A pioneer of funk whose sound spread far beyond the genre, his band Sly and the Family Stone synthesised disparate strands of American popular music into a unique melange, tracking the musical and social shifts as the 1960s wore into the 1970s. Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here. A musical prodigy and multi-instrumentalist from a young age, Stone was born in Texas in 1943 and raised in California, in a religious Pentecostal family. He had put out his first single aged 13 – a locally released gospel song with three of his siblings, who would later join him in Sly and the Family Stone. A record producer and DJ by his early twenties, he imbibed the music of British acts like The Beatles and Rolling Stones, and applied his eclectic tastes and musical versatility to producing local psychedelic and garage rock acts in the emergent San Francisco scene. By the time commercial popular culture had flowered into a more exploratory 'counterculture' in 1967's Summer of Love, the ebb and flow of personnel across local bands had coalesced into a line-up including the Stone siblings – Sly, Freddie, and their sister Vaetta, with their other sister Rose joining in 1968. Pioneering socially, as well as aesthetically, Sly and the Family Stone had diversity at its core – a mixed sex, multi-racial and musically varied band. This was notable for a mainstream act in an America still emerging from the depths of segregation, and riven with strife over the struggle for civil rights. While their first album in 1967 A Whole New Thing enjoyed comparatively little traction, 1968's Dance to the Music presaged a run of hits. Their sonic collision of sounds from across the commercial and social divide – psychedelic rock, soul, gospel and pop – struck a chord with audiences simultaneously looking forward with hope to changing times, and mindful of the injustice that was still prevalent. Singles like Everyday People, Stand, and I Want to Take You Higher, melded a party atmosphere with social statements. They were calls for action, but also for unity: celebratory, but pushing the musical envelope. While the band wore its innovations lightly at first, their reach was long. Bassist Larry Graham was a pioneer of the percussive slap bass that became a staple of funk and fusion. And their overall sound brought a looser, pop feel to the funk groove, in comparison to the almost militaristic tightness of that other funk pioneer, James Brown. Where Brown's leadership of his group was overt, exemplified by his staccato musical directions in the songs, and the call and response structure, Stone's band had more of an ensemble feel. Musical lines and solos were overlaid upon one another, often interweaving – more textured rather than in lock-step. It was a sound that would reach an almost chaotic apogée with George Clinton's Funkadelic later in the 1970s. The party couldn't last. As the optimism of the 1960s gave way to division in the 1970s, Stone's music took a darker turn, even if the funk remained central. 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The handclaps and joyous shouts harked back to his gospel roots, but his embrace of electric instruments aligned soul with rock and pop. He was a funk artist who played at the archetypal hippie festival, Woodstock, and a social commentator whose party sounds were shot through with urgency. He paved the way for the likes of Prince and Outkast, but also informed jazz and fusion. Jazz pioneer Miles Davis acknowledged Stone's influence on his own turn towards electric and funk sounds in the late 1960s and early 1970s on landmark albums like Bitches Brew. Sly Stone's joyful provocations may not have lasted at the commercial centre, but his mark was indelible. His struggles were both personal and social, but his sense of groove, and of a collective voice, demonstrated the value of aligning traditions with new ideas – a musical America that was fractious, but still a family affair. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Washington Post
19 hours ago
- Washington Post
Sly Stone taught pop stars how to dress wild
In 1968, the Temptations were still performing in matching suits and the Beatles had just shed their pin-neat tailoring for the whimsical trappings of Carnaby Street. That same year, Sly Stone and his newly formed band, multiracial and mixed gender, posed in outfits as wild as those groups' seemed scripted: hippies and dandies and bohemians in peacock prints, optimistically borrowing garments and accessories from the Middle East and South Asia. Even amid this style splendor, Stone stood out: In the middle, he was stoic as a toreador prefight, his chest bare beneath an embroidered vest and a pile of chains. On his legs was a pair of breeches over knee-high socks and gladiator sandals. In one look, he combined ancient Roman battle gear, the snobbery of equestrianism, a then-trendy fervor for Indian styles and a prescient taste for hip-hop's gold chain obsession — a seemingly nonsensical mix that altogether, with Stone's prodigious touch, just worked. Stone dressed the way he made music. He grabbed at influences but understood them intuitively, never superficially, which allowed him to create songs — and outfits — that were so original that they made you feel good before you even understood what was happening to you. Jimi Hendrix shared and almost certainly influenced Stone's flamboyance, wearing large hats and decorating his bare chest with a long scarf and jewels. But if Hendrix was soft and romantic, with his tie-dyes and bell-bottom jeans, Stone was more mercurial, integrating glam, Edwardian melodrama and African diasporic styles into his foundation of funk. He wore his big sunglasses not, as Greta Garbo did, to shield, but to invite your gaze. Stone wanted your ears and your eyes. For a 1969 television performance, he dressed in a satin ocher blouse with a Draculoid collar, tying up the front to expose his chest and fabulous abs, seducing the audience at the piano with 'Hot Fun in the Summertime.' A few minutes later, he stood up for 'I Want to Take You Higher,' revealing that the shirt's bishop sleeves were festooned with lengthy black fringe that shimmied as he punched his arms through the air like a preacher sermonizing. We may not have seen that live fusion between clothing and music — not a marriage of music and aesthetic, as David Bowie pioneered, but a synergy between a song's message and a shirt's purpose — again until Beyoncé stepped onstage during her Renaissance tour in 2023, razzing her audience with mirrored alien wear as she wiggled between those robot arms. Before Stone, you could either assuage your audience with clothes — as many of Motown's acts did, as Black artists who sought to appeal to White audiences — or scare them, as Hendrix did with his ripped jeans, or Janis Joplin with her unkempt hair. Stone sketched out a third possibility: Your clothes could open up your music. His band was not focused on looking 'cohesive' visually; rather, its members' disparate and sometimes clashing ensembles emphasized their universe of inspirations. His own ensembles had the same smooth tension. The hippie style that Stone took to an intergalactic other place was about rebellion: that you could reject the values of your parents, of the clean-cut establishment, by wearing your jeans frayed, by not buying new things but patching or mending what was old, by wearing clothes from another time to show you longed for a simpler (if imagined) past. Stone's style was about freedom — the freedom to mix pieces from different centuries and cultures that seem to have little in common and to make them work, even sizzle. He could put on a rastacap and a black fringe suede suit and it just made sense. When he walked onstage in the mid-1970s, wearing a purple sequin jacket with orange flames and a silver sequin baker boy cap and little silver pants — well, that was wilder than anything the Sex Pistols or the New York Dolls were wearing at that time. Ripped jeans and safety-pinned T-shirts are nice poetry, but they don't require the courage that Stone's clothes did. A male rock star in women's clothes is often a gimmick. A male rock star in clothes that seem to defy the orders of mens- and womenswear but are undeniably sexy? That's bold. The door Stone karate-kicked open would shape the looks of some of the biggest pop stars of the late 20th century and early 21st. There was Prince and his feminized, feline sex appeal, then Rick James in his total commitment to exuberance. Then Beyoncé, of course, who, like Stone, is less interested in flouting her connections to designers or trends and instead committed to wearing clothes than enhance the experience of seeing her onstage. Perhaps the musicians most influenced by Stone are Andre 3000 and Big Boi, formerly of Outkast, who started off weird — Andre wore a lace-up skirt and T-shirt, and Big Boi a snakeskin short suit, to the Source Awards in 1999 — and then just kept getting freakier even as they became household names. As he moved beyond his musical prime in the 1960s and '70s and struggled with addiction, he remained glamorous. He wore furs and metallic jeans, Dior sunglasses and a big belt spelling out 'SLY' in silver studs. In 2010, he played Coachella, dressed in a police officer's uniform and a blond wig. It was weird, but it was like nothing else. Unlike Hendrix or Gram Parsons, who worked with Michael & Toni and Nudie Cohn, respectively, to create their custom pieces, Stone was never associated with a particular designer or store. Nor did he think about clothes the way Bowie or Madonna did — as tools to help create an era or mood that would mark a new stylistic experimentation. For Stone, dressing was something deeper than a designer or an exercise. He didn't just play with style. He lived it.
