Sly Stone: ‘Life is a record. But where do you drop the needle?’

In his memoir, Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen devotes an entire chapter to meeting Frank Sinatra. Sly Stone also met Sinatra but he doesn’t remember the occasion. It begs the question: what else does the man whose life story I’m reading not remember? He fills the Sinatra vacuum with a sentence that is probably more interesting than whatever he might have said to Sinatra: “When the spotlight was on you, blinding you, it was easy not to see people – even if those people had a bigger spotlight on them.” The Sinatra chapter in Springsteen’s book is tedious; the absence of Sinatra in Sly Stone’s book is great.

Who is Sly Stone?

I’m betting young Prince, at home in Minneapolis, was asking the same question when he first heard Sly and the Family Stone’s hit record, Dance to the Music, in 1968. Other hits followed – Stand, Everyday People, Family Affair, I Want to Take You Higher. It is a long and glorious list. Everyday People was a No1 hit in the USA when Hey Jude and I Heard It Through the Grapevine were in the charts. Sly Stone got married in Madison Square Gardens, in front of an audience of 25,000 people. “I could do a gig, get paid and get married at the same time.” He really was a household name, as famous for his cars, dogs, guns – he had a dog called Gun – and drug busts as he was for his music.

Listen to Sly and the Family Stone, and you will often think that you are listening to someone else, such has been his influence on popular music. You will hear him in Prince’s music, in Michael Jackson’s, in Talking Heads’, in Beyoncé's. The best of Sly’s music is timeless.

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So, why is it that so many music lovers haven’t heard of him?

Some time ago, I read a book called Sly & the Family Stone: An Oral History, by Joel Selvin. It was published in 1998 and featured Sly’s parents, his siblings, other band members, some of the mothers of his children, managers, record company executives, bodyguards, friends – everybody except Sly. It was an oral history, but Sly’s voice wasn’t in there. I was left with the impression that he’d dropped off the planet. He’d gone away and didn’t want to be found.

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So I thought, until I read Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Sly Stone’s memoir. The prologue gives a strong hint as to why Sly seemed to have disappeared. “People say that when you kick, you take it one day at a time. I didn’t. I just decided that I would quit and I did. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drugs. I liked them. If it hadn’t been a choice between them and life, I might still be doing them. But it was and I’m not.” He’d made the decision but he took his time; his grandkids came to see him in rehab. For much of his life, Sly Stone has been out of his head.

Before he was Sly Stone he was Sylvester Stewart. “Life is a record. But where do you drop the needle?” He was born in 1943, in Denton, Texas. Soon after, the family moved to Vallejo, about 30 miles northeast of San Francsco. “Vallejo was diverse: white, black, Hispanic, Filipino. But diverse didn’t mean fair.”

There were his parents and five children, including Rose and Freddie, who would later join him in The Family Stone. He was singing gospel songs in front of a congregation when he was five or six. “If they didn’t respond I would cry.”

He zips through the childhood years, perhaps because they never stopped. The teenager who discovered his stage name, Sly, when a fellow student misspelt his real name on the blackboard seems to be the exact same person – the exact same voice – as the 58 year old man who, when he heard about the planes going into the World Trade Centre, “bought camouflage clothes, more guns, gas masks”. It’s both a strength and a weakness of this book.

There’s a childlike quality to the best of his music and he, as a narrator, is at his most interesting when he is writing about music. There’s a touch of The Magnificent Seven as he describes how he assembled his band – men and women, black and white, and what each brought to the sound. “Funk” is the word most commonly used to describe that sound but the listener will hear hints of circus tunes, chants, show tunes, nursery rhymes and Sly, the author, loves bringing to life the big boy, Sly, playing in the studio. His account of the creation of Dance to the Music, the song and the album, how he homed in on the one word, “dance” and produced what he thought the world was waiting for – it’s wonderful.

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The book becomes less interesting as the music becomes less interesting. But the real problem is the drugs. When I read the late Mark Lanegan’s description of his heroin addiction in Sing Backwards and Weep, I had to stop and go out for a walk; it was frightening and brilliant. Drugs – cocaine, crack, angle dust – were Sly’s fuel from very early on: “my curiosity went up and my resistance went down”. He can be amusing about it, once or twice. But, very quickly, it becomes boring. There are too many drug busts, too many missed gigs, too many hair-raising incidents, but the damage done to himself and those around him isn’t really touched.

But maybe that’s the point – that’s been his life and he’s still alive to tell it.