NYC entertainers and creatives feel connected to LA. That link is driving cross-country fire relief
NEW YORK — The deadly Los Angeles wildfires had just begun when Comic Relief US' new CEO took the helm at the charity that uses entertainment to combat poverty.
Michele Ganeless noticed Hollywood's response all the way from New York. She saw late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel turn his show's backlot into a donation center. The Largo, an intimate nightclub featuring A-list comedians, hosted benefit performances. Inspired, Ganeless saw an opportunity to help out from the nation's other cultural hub through 'Stand-Up for LA.'
'The goal was to help the New York comedy community give back,' Ganeless said of the March 3 comedy event including Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Ramy Youssef and Hannah Berner at The Town Hall in Manhattan.
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UPI
3 hours ago
- UPI
Sly Stone's isolation shaped a generation of sound
Sly Stone turned isolation into inspiration, forging a path for a generation of music-makers The charismatic front man of Sly and the Family Stone died on June 9, 2025, at the age of 82. File Photo/David Silpa/UPI | License Photo June 13 (UPI) -- In the fall of 1971, Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" landed like a quiet revolution. After two years of silence following the band's mainstream success, fans expected more feel-good funk from the ensemble. What they got instead was something murkier and more fractured, yet deeply intimate and experimental. This was not just an album; it was the sound of a restless mind rebuilding music from the inside out. At the center of it all was front man Sly Stone. Long before the home studio became an industry norm, Stone, who died on June 9, 2025, turned the studio into both a sanctuary and an instrument. And long before sampling defined the sound of hip-hop, he was using tape and machine rhythms to deconstruct existing songs to cobble together new ones. As someone who spends much of their time working on remote recording and audio production -- from building full arrangements solo to collaborating digitally across continents - I'm deeply indebted to Sly Stone's approach to making music. He was among the first major artists to fully embrace the recording environment as a space to compose rather than perform. Every reverb bounce, every drum machine tick, every overdubbed breath became part of the writing process. From studio rat to bedroom producer Sly and the Family Stone's early albums -- including "Dance to the Music" and "Stand!" - were recorded at top-tier facilities like CBS Studios in Los Angeles under the technical guidance of engineers such as Don Puluse and with oversight from producer David Rubinson. These sessions yielded bright, radio-friendly tracks that emphasized tight horn sections, group vocals and a polished sound. Producers also prized the energy of live performance, so the full band would record together in real time. But by the early 1970s, Stone was burnt out. The dual pressures of fame and industry demands were becoming too much. Struggling with cocaine and PCP addiction, he'd grown increasingly distrustful of bandmates, label executives and even his friends. So he decided to retreat to his hillside mansion in Bel Air, California, transforming his home into a musical bunker. Inside, he could work on his own terms: isolated and erratic, but free. Without a full band present, Stone became a one-man ensemble. He leaned heavily into overdubbing -- recording one instrument at a time and building his songs from fragments. Using multiple tape machines, he'd layer each part onto previous takes. The resulting album, "There's a Riot Goin' On," was like nothing he'd previously recorded. It sounds murky, jagged and disjointed. But it's also deeply intentional, as if every imperfection was part of the design. In "The Poetics of Rock," musicologist Albin Zak describes this "composerly" approach to production, where recording itself becomes a form of writing, not just documentation. Stone's process for "There's a Riot Goin' On" reflects this mindset: Each overdub, rhythm loop and sonic imperfection functions more like a brushstroke than a performance. Automating the groove A key part of Stone's tool kit was the Maestro Rhythm King, a preset drum machine he used extensively. It wasn't the first rhythm box on the market. But Stone's use of it was arguably the first time such a machine shaped the entire aesthetic of a mainstream album. The drum parts on his track "Family Affair," for example, don't swing - they tick. What might have been viewed as soulless became its own kind of soul. This early embrace of mechanical rhythm prefigured what would later become a foundation of hip-hop and electronic music. In his book "Dawn of the DAW," music technology scholar Adam Patrick Bell calls this shift "a redefinition of groove," noting how drum machines like the Rhythm King encouraged musicians to rethink their songwriting process, building tracks in shorter, repeatable sections while emphasizing steady, looped rhythms rather than free-flowing performances. Though samplers wouldn't emerge until years later, Stone's work already contained that repetition, layering and loop-based construction that would become characteristic of the practice. He recorded his own parts the way future DJs would splice records - isolated, reshuffled, rhythmically obsessed. His overdubbed bass lines, keyboard vamps and vocal murmurs often sounded like puzzle pieces from other songs. Music scholar Will Fulton, in his study of Black studio innovation, notes how producers like Stone helped pioneer a fragment-based approach to music-making that would become central to hip-hop's DNA. Stone's process anticipated the mentality that a song isn't necessarily something written top to bottom, but something assembled, brick by brick, from what's available. Perhaps not surprisingly, Stone's tracks have been sampled relentlessly. In "Bring That Beat Back," music critic Nate Patrin identifies Stone as one of the most sample-friendly artists of the 1970s - not because of his commercial hits, but because of how much sonic space he left in his tracks: the open-ended grooves, unusual textures and slippery emotional tone. You can hear his sounds in famous tracks such as 2Pac's "If My Homie Calls," which samples "Sing a Simple Song"; A Tribe Called Quest's "The Jam," which draws from "Family Affair"; and De La Soul's "Plug Tunin'," which flips "You Can Make It If You Try." The studio as instrument While Sly's approach was groundbreaking, he wasn't entirely alone. Around the same time, artists such as Brian Wilson and The Rolling Stones were experimenting with home and nontraditional recording environments - Wilson famously retreating to his home studio during "Pet Sounds," and the Stones tracking "Exile on Main St." in a French villa. Yet in the world of Black music, production remained largely centralized in institutionally controlled studio systems such as Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, where sound was tightly managed by in-house producers and engineers. In that context, Stone's decision to isolate, self-produce and dismantle the standard workflow was more than a technical choice: It was a radical act of autonomy. The rise of home recording didn't just change who could make music. It changed what music felt like. It made music more internal, iterative and intimate. Sly Stone helped invent that feeling. It's easy to hear "There's a Riot Goin' On" as murky or uneven. The mix is dense with tape hiss, drum machines drift in and out of sync, and vocals often feel buried or half-whispered. But it's also, in a way, prophetic. It anticipated the aesthetics of bedroom pop, the cut-and-paste style of modern music software, the shuffle of playlists and the recycling of sounds that defines sample culture. It showed that a groove didn't need to be spontaneous to be soulful, and that solitude could be a powerful creative tool, not a limitation. In my own practice, I often record alone, passing files back and forth, building from templates and mapping rhythm to grid - as do millions of musical artists who compose tracks from their bedrooms, closets and garages. Half a century ago, a funk pioneer led the way. I think it's safe to say that Sly Stone quietly changed the process of making music forever - and in the funkiest way possible. Jose Valentino Ruiz is an associate professor of music business and entrepreneurship at the University of Florida. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
The Singer Who Saw America's Best and Worst
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. It's a real American moment out there: battle lines drawn, tear gas drifting, charity and gentleness on their heels. Turn inward, inside ourselves, and it looks even worse, the mind's landscape pocked and blackened with destruction. Can somebody please bring the beautiful music, to carry us up and out? Someone like Sly Stone, who died on Monday at the age of 82. Sly was a born transcender, a natural synthesizer of situations, a raiser of elements to their highest state of possibility. Black, white; R&B, rock; politics, carnival; great taste, screaming excess; heaven and Earth: He put it all together. On a tight curve of musical euphoria, he led his people—which was everybody, or so he claimed—out of conflict. The opposing force was in him too, equally strong as it turned out: drag, downwardness, drugs, isolation. Who in the world would ever have the power to shut him down? Only Sly himself. It's remarkable that he lived as long as he did. But in his glorious and self-consuming prime—'68 to '71, roughly—he harmonized the energies that were tearing and would continue to tear this country to pieces. Dangerous work, highly exposed, but he made it look like a party. And in the floating jubilee that was his band, the Family Stone, he gave America a vision of itself: racially and emotionally integrated, celestially oriented, if not healed then at least open to healing. What to listen to, right now, as you're reading this? You could start with 1969's 'Stand!' A circus crash of cymbal, a burlesque snare roll, and away we go: 'Stand, in the end, you'll still be you / One that's done all the things you set out to do.' The vocals are airy, haughtily enunciated in the high hippie style, and embellished with happy trills; the melody chugs along with a nursery-rhyme simplicity that is somehow underwired by knowingness: innocence and experience conjoined. (The Beatles were very good at this too, but Sly's true peer in this area, oddly, was a later songwriter: Kurt Cobain.) And the lyrics are classic Sly: a pinch of psychedelic double-talk—'You have you to complete and there is no deal'—and an ounce of street knowledge. The song rises and falls, jogging on the spot as it were, but with a building gospel crescendo of a half-chorus—'Stand! Stand! Stand!'—that seems to presage or demand release. And release is granted, unforgettably. It comes out of nowhere, with less than a minute of music left: a sudden loop of chiming, uplifted, militant, and taut-nerved funk, resolving/unresolving, tension and deliverance together, guitars locked; the drummer, Greg Errico, is thrashing out an ecstatic double-time pattern on his hi-hat (and doing it, if you watch the live footage, with one hand). [Read: The undoing of a great American band] From 'Stand!' you might go to 1970's 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).' Everything in America is one year worse, one year more violent and bummed-out, and although the music stays celebratory (with a finger-popping bass line from Larry Graham that famously invented the next two decades of funk playing), lyrically, Sly is darkening: 'Lookin' at the devil / Grinnin' at his gun / Fingers start shakin' / I begin to run.' He quotes himself, his own (very recent) hits, his own nostrums of positivity, in a charred-by-time kind of way, 'Different strokes for different folks' right next to a new observation, 'Flamin' eyes of people fear burnin' into you.' We're on course here for the Sly-in-ruins of 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On, his woozy sayonara to the years of greatness. Druggy and drum-machined, with a rippling American flag on the cover, Riot is the album that most directly connects him to the present situation. Decades of obscurity followed—which is a cliché, but he lived it, as durably and intensely as he had lived the cliché of superstardom. 'The pure products of America go crazy,' as William Carlos Williams said. And now he's left us, when once again brutality is massing behind its shields, and once again compassion has acquired the nobility of true folly. All very familiar to Sly the avatar. I can't stop thinking about these lines from 'Stand!,' so wistfully prophetic, so half-encouraging, so dead-on predictive of our mass retreat into the space behind our eyes: 'Stand, don't you know that you are free / Well, at least in your mind if you want to be.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Thank You, Sly Stone
Let us begin with gratitude. Thank you, Sly Stone, for being so generous with your music before your death on Monday at the age of 82 — for the wealth of durable hits that includes 'Stand!,' 'Sing a Simple Song,' 'Everyday People,' 'Dance to the Music,' 'Family Affair,' and, yes, 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again).' Thank you, Sly, for effectively inventing 1970s funk and the career of Prince with that last song. Thank you, Sly for pulling together the Family Stone, a band of players and singers Black and white, male and female, that served as a music-world version of the original Sesame Street cast, bright with the 1960s promise of a multicultural future unbound by racial or genre distinctions. More from The Hollywood Reporter Kendrick Lamar Was the Top Winner at the 2025 BET Awards Tyler Perry Calls Out Hollywood Studios at BET Awards: "This Is Not the Time to Be Silent" SHINee's Key on K-pop Stardom After 30 and Reuniting with U.S. Fans And thank you, Sly, falettin me into your life in 2007. Permit me to explain. I grew up besotted with the music of the man born Sylvester Stewart in 1943. His songs defined my primordial years, osmosing straight into my bloodstream. In 1996, the year I became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, I screwed up the courage to pitch the editor, Graydon Carter, the idea of my profiling Sly. Mr. Stone was in a bad place then. Actually, no one seemed quite sure what place he was in, having removed himself from public life after a bad 70s and 80s in which drugs and indolence robbed him of his joy and spark. It wasn't typical Vanity Fair material. But to my delight, Graydon said yes. Terrific! I started making phone calls. I got in touch with Greg Errico, the Family Stone's founding drummer, who invited me to watch him jam in a Bay Area rehearsal space with fellow original band members Freddie Stone (guitar, Sly's brother) and Jerry Martini (saxophone). Stonewalled by Sly's then manager, Jerry Goldstein, I reached out to his fellow record-industry machers Lou Adler and Richard Gottehrer, to advocate on my behalf. Despite their efforts, Goldstein was unmoved. Years passed. My wife and I welcomed two children into our family. A new millennium dawned. Then, early in 2007, I heard that the youngest of Sly's sisters, a singer born Vaetta and known as Vet, had coaxed Sly into performing a few dates with her band that coming summer. I contacted Vet and related to her my decade-plus of travails. She told me that if I was serious, I should get to Las Vegas pronto to see her band's show at the Flamingo Hotel. Sly, she said, was going to play. I asked her, given the predilection for no-shows that did in his career as a touring musician, if she was sure. 'All I can say is that I'm his little sister and he's never lied to me,' she said. Sly did show up — in a bizarre ensemble pulled from the Me Decade's dress-up bin, wearing platform boots, wraparound white sunglasses, and spangly newsboy knickers. It was a chaotic show in which he performed only a few songs. But when he sang a soft, unplugged version of 'Stand!,' with its affirming message In the end you'll still be you/ One that's done all the things you set out to do, he held the crowd rapt. It was evident that, whatever he had done to himself bodily and mentally, his voice and musicianship were intact. My reward for turning up was the first major interview he had granted in a couple of decades. We met in a motorcycle shop in his native Vallejo, California, called Chopper Guys Biker Products. I had a million questions. He answered them gnomically. When I asked him what he had been up to all these years, and if he was watching Seinfeld and American Idol like the rest of us, he said, 'I've done all that. I do regular things a lot. But it's probably more of a Sly Stone life. It's probably… it's probably not very normal.' The comeback that my Vanity Fair profile was meant to signal failed to materialize; he still had drug and business issues to sort out. But between then and now, he did finally get sober. Vet emailed me a photo of Sly contentedly dandling a grandson in his lap. In Questlove's excellent documentary released earlier this year, Sly Lives! (a.k.a. The Burden of Black Genius), his younger daughter, Novena, laughs at the unlikely circumstance to which she now regularly bears witness: 'He's kind of just like… a standard old Black man.' That he lived to become that is hope-giving. Sly is often upheld as as an avatar for how the utopianism of 1960s America curdled into solipsism, cynicism, and bad vibes. I am reminded of the title character's reproach of the Dude in The Big Lebowski: 'Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost!' But in the long run, Sly won. He found redemptive happiness. His library of music remains as alive and vibrant as ever and shall forever transcend the circumstances of its making and what came after. Once again, Sly, thank you. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Hollywood's Highest-Profile Harris Endorsements: Taylor Swift, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen and More
