Sly Stone, leader of funk revolutionaries Sly And The Family Stone, dies aged 82
Sly Stone, the revolutionary musician and dynamic showman whose Sly And The Family Stone transformed popular music in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond with such hits as Everyday People, Stand! and Family Affair, has died aged 82.
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South Wales Guardian
2 hours ago
- South Wales Guardian
Sly Stone, leader of funk revolutionaries Sly And The Family Stone, dies aged 82
Stone, born Sylvester Stewart, had been in poor health in recent years. His publicist Carleen Donovan said that Stone died surrounded by family after contending with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments. Formed in 1966-67, Sly And The Family Stone were the first major group to include black and white men and women, and well embodied a time when anything seemed possible – riots and assassinations, communes and love-ins. The singers screeched, chanted, crooned and hollered. The music was a blowout of frantic horns, rapid-fire guitar and locomotive rhythms, a melting pot of jazz, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, soul and the early grooves of funk. Sly's time on top was brief, roughly from 1968-1971, but profound. No band better captured the gravity-defying euphoria of the Woodstock era or more bravely addressed the crash which followed. From early songs as rousing as their titles – I Want To Take You Higher, Stand! – to the sober aftermath of Family Affair and Runnin' Away, Sly And The Family Stone spoke for a generation whether or not it liked what they had to say. Stone's group began as a Bay Area outfit featuring Sly on keyboards; Larry Graham on bass; Sly's brother, Freddie, on guitar; sister Rose on vocals; Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini on horns; and Greg Errico on drums. They debuted with the album A Whole New Thing and earned the title with their breakthrough single Dance To The Music. It hit the top 10 in April 1968, the week the Rev Martin Luther King was murdered, and helped launch an era when the polish of Motown and the understatement of Stax suddenly seemed of another time. Led by Sly Stone, with his leather jumpsuits and goggle shades, mile-wide grin and mile-high Afro, the band dazzled in 1969 at the Woodstock festival and set a new pace on the radio. Everyday People, I Wanna Take You Higher and other songs were anthems of community, non-conformity and a brash and hopeful spirit, built around such catchphrases as 'different strokes for different folks'. The group released five top 10 singles, three of them hitting number one, and three million-selling albums: Stand!, There's A Riot Goin' On and Greatest Hits. For a time, countless performers wanted to look and sound like Sly And The Family Stone. The Jackson Five's breakthrough hit I Want You Back and The Temptations' I Can't Get Next To You were among the many songs from the late 1960s that mimicked Sly's vocal and instrumental arrangements. Miles Davis' landmark blend of jazz, rock and funk, Bitches Brew, was inspired in part by Sly, while fellow jazz artist Herbie Hancock even named a song after him. 'He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewelry,' Questlove wrote in the foreword to Stone's memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), named for one of his biggest hits and published through Questlove's imprint in 2023. 'He was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.' In 2025, Questlove released the documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden Of Black Genius). Sly's influence has endured for decades. The top funk artist of the 1970s, Parliament-Funkadelic creator George Clinton, was a Stone disciple. Prince, Rick James and The Black Eyed Peas were among the many performers from the 1980s and after influenced by Sly, and countless rap and hip-hop artists have sampled his riffs, from the Beastie Boys to Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg. A 2005 tribute record included Maroon 5, John Legend and the Roots. 'Sly did so many things so well that he turned my head all the way around,' Clinton once wrote. 'He could create polished R&B that sounded like it came from an act that had gigged at clubs for years, and then in the next breath he could be as psychedelic as the heaviest rock band.'
BBC News
5 hours ago
- BBC News
Sly Stone: A funky life
Sly Stone, a funk-rock star who led the group Sly and the Family Stone, has died at the age of 82, his family statement.A statement said he had suffered a "prolongued battle" with the lung disease COPD. Stone, whose real name was Sylvester Stewart, grew up singing gospel with his siblings, and went on to play the Woodstock music festival in 1969. On the way, Stone was a San Francisco radio DJ, before he and his band hit the big time with hits including It's a Family Affair and If You Want Me to Stay. Stone was a giant of funk music, known for blending psychedelia, funk, rock and soul, his big style and even bigger hair. Here is a selection of images from his life.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Sly Stone was a trailblazer who changed the course of music – and an icon of both hope and pain
Even though he recorded three of funk's most foundational albums – four if you include 1970's Greatest Hits, as flawless a good time as pop ever delivered – Sly Stone's subsequent fall from grace was perceived as a grave betrayal of his talent. That Stone's unravelling was so conspicuous – his drug abuse apparent in every wasted chat show appearance, his infallible hit-machine waning after his Family Stone became estranged – only exacerbated the sting of this loss. But Stone's imperial era lasted almost a decade and delivered a discography that remains the acme of funk. He changed the course of pop and reconfigured the structure and essence of dance music, multiple times. He was an icon of hope, of pain, of pride. He was Icarus, for sure. But when it mattered, boy did he fly. On arrival, his brilliance was so audacious it was hard to believe it could ever be exhausted. He seemed to tease this himself on 1968's Life, promising, 'You don't have to come down!' Perhaps this confidence sprang from his knowledge that he'd already stumbled before he'd soared. The Family Stone's 1967 debut album A Whole New Thing – restlessly and inventively mashing psychedelia, soul, funk and rock into, well, a whole new thing – had been too much too soon, and baffled audiences. But the following year's Dance to the Music simplified the formula and brought new focus, its title track and the 12-minute Dance to the Medley sounding a call to funk the world couldn't resist. Soon, Sly was everywhere. There he was with his sister Rose, ice-cool but wholesome, sweeping into the audience of The Ed Sullivan Show and getting an America riven by racism, Vietnam and the generation gap to spell out 'L-O-V-E' together in their front rooms. There he was at Woodstock, glitter-daubed and wearing stack-heeled boots like they were ballet pumps, so wired and righteous the subsequent split-screen concert movie could barely contain him. A slew of killer singles sketched out Sly's polymorphous concept, but it was 1969's Stand!, his first perfect album, that gave it space to breathe. The title track was an anthem of Black power that could be sung by anybody, with a funk breakdown no body could resist. Everyday People was a hymn to the integrational dream the multi-racial, multi-gender Family Stone Call Me N*****, Whitey put voice to the resentments sparking uprisings across the nation. The deep funk epic Sex Machine was the source from whence Miles Davis's 70s electric output later sprang. The year closed out with a further triumph: the standalone single Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), on which the Family Stone's Larry Graham reinvented bass guitar by slapping and plucking his strings with percussive fury. This was heavy street music, Sly's homilies of peace and hope replaced by something more uncertain, more confessional. Stone had signalled the wind-change that July with Hot Fun in the Summertime, a candy floss cloud whose doo-wop croon doubled as an account of a summer torn up by protests and riots. But Thank You made the disquiet explicit, and detailed the riot going one within Stone, as he wrestled with the devil, ruminating that, 'Dyin' young is hard to take / Selling out is harder.' These were the stakes for Stone in 1969, facing down death and failure. Lesser artists would choke under such pressure; instead, Stone reached for his masterpiece. But the very height of his brilliance was itself symptomatic of what would bring him down. 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On was recorded as the Family Stone were drifting apart, Sly hanging out and getting so high with muso mates at his home studio over long, hazy sessions where no-one was sure who played what, or if they even played at all. Loose, funky chaos reigned. 'We never planned anything – I just walked in and saw a microphone there and a guitar, and started playing with him,' Stone's friend, soul legend Bobby Womack, told me in 2012. 'There was a riot goin' on, alright – it was at Sly's house!' On Riot…, much of what had previously defined a Sly Stone record – the brightness, the hooks, the hope – bled away, in their place a disorientatingly murky production, the tape itself disintegrating under the strain of compulsive overdubs. On the album's chart-topping hit, Family Affair, Stone's mush-mouthed croon distorts in the mix; you can't make out the words, but his warm, wise crackle spells out what he's saying. Elsewhere, his incisive gift for aphorisms remained intact, but now focused on a darkening world; Runnin' Away and (You Caught Me) Smilin' were as perfect as any pop song Stone ever wrote, but their sunshine hooks were stained with sadness. And a rerun of Thank You, now titled Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa, slowed Graham's formerly propulsive bass riff to a swampy slog, the chorus chants now recast as ghostly murmurs. The devil, it seemed, was now winning. Stone began to haunt his studio day and night, which was good because he was now habitually missing gigs. He kept overdubbing and remixing 1973's Fresh even after it had hit the shelves, paring away more and more instrumentation in search of skeletal funk perfection. Skin I'm In found Stone more at ease than he had sounded for years; If You Want Me To Stay was Stone finding peace in self-acceptance, a love song that doubled as a warning to take him as he was ('For me to stay here / I got to be me'). But the chaos surrounding Stone was increasing, much of it self-inflicted. The Family Stone disbanded following 1974's Small Talk, often cited as where Sly's genius left the stage. In fact, the album is located in a similar pocket to Fresh: the songs aren't as strong and it leans too hard on new Family member, violinist Sid Page, but the title track's squelchy funk is sparse and electrifying, while the Beastie Boys loved Loose Booty enough to lift its chorus for their Shadrach. The sleeve featured Stone with young son Sylvester Jr and wife Kathleen Silva in familial embrace; they'd married onstage at Madison Square Garden that June, and separate two years later after Stone's dog mauled Sly Jr. 'You don't have to come down,' Sly had sung back in 1968. Actually, of course you do. The slide began slowly – his 1975 solo album High On You was worth the price of entry for the synth-driven title track and the brilliantly discordant funk of Crossword Puzzle and the sinful howls of Who Do You Love? alone. But there's little to love on 1976's Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, purportedly a Family Stone reunion but, in truth, as much a one-man band as the one Stone portrayed on the hokey sleeve. A move to Warner Bros for 1979's inaccurately titled album Back On The Right Track delivered a last hit, Remember Who You Are, which tapped Stone's magic one final time. But by his farewell, 1982's Ain't But The One Way, the well had run dry; its 34 minutes drag. Then Sly pretty much disappeared, his life engulfed by crack cocaine, legal disputes and homelessness. He would occasionally resurface, stoking hopes for a final glorious act in the saga, the comeback record his legacy deserved. But, as Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson's documentary Sly Lives – subtitled 'the burden of Black genius' – argues, that was too much to ask of Sly Stone, who'd already given so much, and had earned the right to fade away and find his peace. As he sang over half-a-century earlier in Stand!: 'In the end, you'll still be you / one that's done all the things you set out to do.' His burdens had brought him down to Earth, hard and for good. But there were few who had flown so high.
