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Otago Daily Times
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Funk pioneer Sly Stone dies
Sly Stone, the driving force behind Sly and the Family Stone, a multiracial American band whose boiling mix of rock, soul and psychedelia embodied 1960s idealism and helped popularise funk music, has died at the age of 82, his family said on Monday. Stone died after a battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other health issues, a statement from his family said. "While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come," the statement said. Stone was perhaps best known for his performance in 1969 at the historic Woodstock music festival, the hippie culture's coming-out party. His group was a regular on the US music charts in the late 1960s and 1970s, with hits such as "Dance to the Music," "I Want to Take You Higher," "Family Affair," "Everyday People," "If You Want Me to Stay," and "Hot Fun in the Summertime." But he later fell on hard times and became addicted to cocaine, never staging a successful comeback. The confident and mercurial Stone played a leading role in introducing funk, an Afrocentric style of music driven by grooves and syncopated rhythms, to a broader audience. James Brown had forged the elements of funk before Stone founded his band in 1966, but Stone's brand of funk drew new listeners. It was celebratory, eclectic, psychedelic and rooted in the counterculture of the late 1960s. "They had the clarity of Motown but the volume of Jimi Hendrix or The Who," Parliament-Funkadelic frontman George Clinton, a contemporary of Stone and another pioneering figure in funk, once wrote. When Sly and the Family Stone performed, it felt like the band was "speaking to you personally," Clinton said. Stone made his California-based band, which included his brother Freddie and sister Rose, a symbol of integration. It included Black and white musicians, while women, including the late trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, had prominent roles. That was rare in a music industry often segregated along racial and gender lines. Stone, with his orb-like Afro hairstyle and wardrobe of vests, fringes and skin-tight leather, lived the life of a superstar. At the same time, he allowed bandmates to shine by fostering a collaborative, free-flowing approach that epitomized the 1960s hippie ethic. "I wanted to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat," he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1970. DISC JOCKEY TO SINGER Born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, he moved as a child with his family to Northern California, where his father ran a janitorial business. He took the show business name Sly Stone and worked for a time as a radio disc jockey and a record producer for a small label before forming the band. The band's breakthrough came in 1968, when the title track to their second album, "Dance to the Music," cracked the Top 10. A year later, Sly and the Family Stone performed at Woodstock before dawn. Stone woke up a crowd of 400,000 people at the music festival, leading them in call-and-response style singing. Stone's music became less joyous after the idealistic 1960s, reflecting the polarization of the country after opposition to the Vietnam War and racial tensions triggered unrest on college campuses and in African American neighborhoods in big US cities. In 1971, Sly and the Family Stone released "There's a Riot Goin' On," which became the band's only No. 1 album. Critics said the album's bleak tone and slurred vocals denoted the increasing hold of cocaine on Stone. But some called the record a masterpiece, a eulogy to the 1960s. In the early 1970s, Stone became erratic and missed shows. Some members left the band. But the singer was still a big enough star in 1974 to attract a crowd of 21,000 for his wedding to actress and model Kathy Silva at Madison Square Garden in New York. Silva filed for divorce less than a year later. Sly and the Family Stone's album releases in the late 1970s and early 1980s flopped, as Stone racked up drug possession arrests. But the music helped shape disco and, years later, hip-hop artists kept the band's legacy alive by frequently sampling its musical hooks. The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 and Stone was celebrated in an all-star tribute at the Grammy Awards in 2006. He sauntered on stage with a blond Mohawk but bewildered the audience by leaving mid-song. In 2011, after launching what would become a years-long legal battle to claim royalties he said were stolen, Stone was arrested for cocaine possession. That year, media reported Stone was living in a recreational vehicle parked on a street in South Los Angeles. Stone had a son, Sylvester, with Silva. He had two daughters, Novena Carmel, and Sylvette "Phunne" Stone, whose mother was bandmate Cynthia Robinson.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sly Stone, leader of funk revolutionaries Sly and the Family Stone, dies at 82
NEW YORK (AP) — Sly Stone, the revolutionary musician and dynamic showman whose Sly and the Family Stone transformed popular music in the 1960s and '70s and beyond with such hits as 'Everyday People,' 'Stand!' and 'Family Affair,' has died. He was 82 Stone, born Sylvester Stewart, had been in poor health in recent years. His publicist Carleen Donovan said Monday that Stone died in Los Angeles surrounded by family after contending with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments. Formed in 1966-67, Sly and the Family Stone was 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 sextet featuring Sly on keyboards, Larry Graham on bass; Sly's brother, Freddie, on guitar; sister Rose on vocals; Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini 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 No. 1, 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.' A dream dies, a career burns away By the early '70s, Stone himself was beginning a descent from which he never recovered, driven by the pressures of fame and the added burden of Black fame. His record company was anxious for more hits, while the Black Panthers were pressing him to drop the white members from his group. After moving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in 1970, he became increasingly hooked on cocaine and erratic in his behavior. A promised album, 'The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone' ('The most optimistic of all,' Rolling Stone reported) never appeared. He became notorious for being late to concerts or not showing up at all, often leaving 'other band members waiting backstage for hours wondering whether he was going to show up or not,' according to Stone biographer Joel Selvin. Around the country, separatism and paranoia were setting in. As a turn of the calendar, and as a state of mind, the '60s were over. 'The possibility of possibility was leaking out,' Stone later explained in his memoir. On 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),' Stone had warned: 'Dying young is hard to take/selling out is harder.' Late in 1971, he released 'There's a Riot Going On,' one of the grimmest, most uncompromising records ever to top the album charts. The sound was dense and murky (Sly was among the first musicians to use drum machines), the mood reflective ('Family Affair'), fearful ('Runnin' Away') and despairing: 'Time, they say, is the answer — but I don't believe it,' Sly sings on 'Time.' The fast, funky pace of the original 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)' was slowed, stretched and retitled 'Thank You For Talkin' to Me, Africa.' The running time of the title track was 0:00. 'It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger,' critic Greil Marcus called the album. 'Riot' highlighted an extraordinary run of blunt, hard-hitting records by Black artists, from the Stevie Wonder single 'Superstition' to Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On' album, to which 'Riot' was an unofficial response. But Stone seemed to back away from the nightmare he had related. He was reluctant to perform material from 'Riot' in concert and softened the mood on the acclaimed 1973 album 'Fresh,' which did feature a cover of 'Que Sera Sera,' the wistful Doris Day song reworked into a rueful testament to fate's upper hand. By the end of the decade, Sly and the Family Stone had broken up and Sly was releasing solo records with such unmet promises as 'Heard You Missed Me, Well I'm Back' and 'Back On the Right Track.' Most of the news he made over the following decades was of drug busts, financial troubles and mishaps on stage. Sly and the Family Stone was inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 1993 and honored in 2006 at the Grammy Awards, but Sly released just one album after the early '80s, 'I'm Back! Family & Friends,' much of it updated recordings of his old hits. He would allege he had hundreds of unreleased songs and did collaborate on occasion with Clinton, who would recall how Stone 'could just be sitting there doing nothing and then open his eyes and shock you with a lyric so brilliant that it was obvious no one had ever thought of it before.' Sly Stone had three children, including a daughter with Cynthia Robinson, and was married once — briefly and very publicly. In 1974, he and actor Kathy Silva wed on stage at Madison Square Garden, an event that inspired an 11,000-word story in The New Yorker. Sly and Silva soon divorced. A born musician, a born uniter He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California, the second of five children in a close, religious family. Sylvester became 'Sly' by accident, when a teacher mistakenly spelled his name 'Slyvester.' He loved performing so much that his mother alleged he would cry if the congregation in church didn't respond when he sang before it. He was so gifted and ambitious that by age 4 he had sung on stage at a Sam Cooke show and by age 11 had mastered several instruments and recorded a gospel song with his siblings. He was so committed to the races working together that in his teens and early 20s he was playing in local bands that included Black and white members and was becoming known around the Bay Area as a deejay equally willing to play the Beatles and rhythm and blues acts. Through his radio connections, he produced some of the top San Francisco bands, including the Great Society, Grace Slick's group before she joined the Jefferson Airplane. Along with an early mentor and champion, San Francisco deejay Tom 'Big Daddy' Donahue, he worked on rhythm and blues hits (Bobby Freeman's 'C'mon and Swim') and the Beau Brummels' Beatle-esque 'Laugh, Laugh.' Meanwhile, he was putting together his own group, recruiting family members and local musicians and settling on the name Sly and the Family Stone. 'A Whole New Thing' came out in 1967, soon followed by the single 'Dance to the Music,' in which each member was granted a moment of introduction as the song rightly proclaimed a 'brand new beat.' In December 1968, the group appeared on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' and performed a medley that included 'Dance to the Music' and 'Everyday People.' Before the set began, Sly turned to the audience and recited a brief passage from his song 'Are You Ready': "Don't hate the Black, don't hate the white, if you get bitten, just hate the bite.'
