Sly Stone, who died this week, once wrote a song called “Time,” which included this lyric: “Time needs another minute at least/Take your time, but you’ve got a limit.”
He was right about that. The limit has been reached.
Before there was a funk Picasso, before Sly changed the way that everyone heard pop music and then changed it again, before he flashed his trillion-dollar smile a trillion times, there was a baby in a family.
Sly was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas in 1943; moved with his family to the Bay Area as a small child; grew up in Vallejo, a racially diverse if not exactly racially equitable city about 30 miles north of San Francisco; played music at home and in church and in school and everywhere else; studied composition in college and Ray Charles on the radio; worked at Autumn Records as a staff songwriter and producer; gigged as a bandleader; popped up on the radio as a DJ (that’s where he first took on the Sly Stone moniker, rejecting the one they wanted for him, the pointlessly tongue-tripping “Sly Sloane”); and then eventually formed a band, bringing together various local musicians (Cynthia Robinson, Larry Graham, Greg Errico, Jerry Martini) and Stewart siblings (brother Freddie, sister Rose, sometimes sister Vet) to form the black-and-white, male-and-female Sly & the Family Stone, which was scouted and then signed to Epic Records by Dave Kapralik.
The group’s first album, 1967’s A Whole New Thing, was hailed by music critics and those in the know, but it didn’t catch on fire commercially. A retooling ensued, and the group broke big with the single “Dance to the Music,” a kind of metafunktional treatise about how to make a song that moved a crowd, and the album of the same name. After a third album, Life, Sly & The Family Stone released Stand! in the spring of 1969, and carried songs from that album to the Woodstock festival, where the group went from stars to superstars.
Sly was everything for the next half-decade: chart-topper, prophet, a great talk-show interview, an increasingly mercurial presence (or non-presence) at his own concerts, and generally the coolest man on Earth. The 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On was dark and dense, largely the creation of one cracking psyche, an album that needed to be digested slowly and carefully—though it also spawned the enormous hit “Family Affair”— and after Fresh in 1973, which had a Richard Avedon cover photo that showed Sly leaping up into the air and music that maintained that altitude (“In Time,” the leadoff track, is among the most complex, twisty, and pleasurable moments in pop-music history, from its intricate rhythms to its wordplay-dense lyrics), Sly started to slip.
He married Kathy Silva onstage at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1974, and put out an album, Small Talk, whose cover photo showed the two of them with their infant son, but Small Talk wasn’t quite the equal of what had come before it. It was, rather, the beginning of the end, both for the Family Stone, which was in the process of a slow dissolve, and for Sly’s muse—the albums that followed are beyond rewarding for diehard fans and beyond frustrating for everyone else.
By the early ’80s, labels were releasing Sly & the Family Stone albums without much input from Sly, who was spending most of his time and energy tending to his drug addiction. He still recorded music, and much of it was brilliant, but he wasn’t capable of maintaining a real career as a recording or touring artist. What followed were decades of reclusive silence punctuated by tantalizing moments of re-emergence. There he is at the band’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction! There he is on a Bar-Kays album! There he is, releasing a pair of songs on the Soul Man soundtrack!
That’s the rat-a-tat of his life and work. Beneath that, there’s a broader and deeper story about Sly as a thinker and a prophet, able to push youth culture forward and build bridges across racial and regional lines, and also Sly as a genius, an artist who was capable of writing and arranging songs that had the veneer of simplicity while in fact drilling all the way down. It’s a mouthful. It’s a mindful. I want to be mindful.
I want to be mindful because while I can write this as a rabid fan, as a music critic, as a novelist who once wrote an entire novel about a Sly-like character, none of that makes sense without an additional disclosure, which is that I also collaborated with Sly on his memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), named for what is probably his most powerful and propulsive anthem and published by AUWA books in 2023.
Let me back up. About a decade before that, I was a magazine editor and fiction writer getting into the business of collaborating with musicians I respected. I worked with Questlove on his memoir, Mo Meta Blues. I was set up to work with Brian Wilson on his, I Am Brian Wilson. Then I was offered the chance of a lifetime, which was collaborating with George Clinton on his autobiography. I never considered saying no. How could you pass up something like that? It was an incredible experience, thanks almost entirely to George. Put yourself near a brain like that for a while. It’ll do you good. The eventual title: Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You. (Were you expecting perhaps something more demure?) Toward the end of the process, I worked up the courage to ask him if he could introduce me to the Sly Stone camp. George and Sly went way back, musically, personally, pharmaceutically.
He made the introduction. I started pitching a Sly memoir. At the time, Sly was, uh, not of the mind to undertake a project of that nature. I spoke to his camp often, and enjoyed doing so, but it didn’t seem as though there was the necessary infrastructure or focus.
Then, in 2019 or so, I was contacted by Arlene Hirschkowitz, who had been Sly’s girlfriend back in the early ’80s and had, after time away, rejoined his inner circle as a manager and friend. She was organized, fiercely protective, and clear that Sly wanted to do a book only if it was the right process resulting in the right product. And it also needed to eliminate the wrong product: Sly could not start in on a memoir until he had stopped using drugs. When that finally happened, we started working.
People will say that a thing is amazing without thinking about what the word really means. It was astonishing to be working on a memoir with Sly, and it was also startlingly and bracingly strange. We were limited somewhat by Sly’s declining health, but there were regular reminders of his quicksilver mind, his sense of humor, his philosophical expansiveness, and his artistic vision. He couldn’t play music anymore, but he had great timing. He would tell a story, pause, and then deliver a perfect punchline. Other times he would start to answer a question, get a sentence in, and then just let the room breathe. Talking to him was unlike talking to anyone else, in that he was not like anyone else.
All of the stories he told about his life are in that book, which is to say, they are already in the world. They happen on stages and in recording studios and in houses with drugs piled up high and in apartments inhabited after most of the spotlights had been switched off. But there he was, turning the corner of 80, worse for wear somewhat, but also—there he was.
And now he is not there. A great artist leaves the Earth but never really dies because the work persists. Sly’s work was, while he was making it, whether with the band or on his own, already larger than one single life, and that does not and will not change simply because he has departed. So many people who came after Sly—George, of course, but also Kool and the Gang, and also the Commodores, and also Earth Wind and Fire, and also Prince, and also Michael Jackson, and also Janet Jackson, and also Lenny Kravitz, and also Public Enemy, and also D’Angelo, and also name ‘em—remain in his debt, whether they know it or not. Since we are in the YouTube era, many of Sly’s performances are easy to see, and not just the musical ones. I highly recommend checking out his many talk-show appearances; he was especially good on Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas, and his appearance on the latter show alongside Muhammad Ali in 1974 is a master class in the different ways to be a Black celebrity with limitless intelligence and charisma and social awareness.
Sly lived a long life, got to shine it on, got to think and write and play in ways that few other people did. His life wasn’t cut short like the lives of Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon, which was great, but also meant that he wasn’t lionized as a brilliant comet gone too soon. He remained here long enough to become an old man who, I hope, truly understood the enormity of his achievement. I can’t speak to that. What I can speak to, a little, is the bond between him and his children. There are three of them from three different mothers, but they were a family. When the people who know you the best love you the most, you’re doing something right.
People always ask me to name my favorite Sly Stone song. This is an impossible task. Check out “Frisky,” from Fresh. Check out “Somebody’s Watching You,” from Stand! Check out “Time.” If you go looking for great songs, you’ll be gone a while. But I usually go to a moment late in his career, a less-than-a-minute-long fragment called “Sylvester” that is a meditation on identity, fame, family, faith, and more. It’s just Sly and electric piano, just a sketch, but also larger than the big picture.
I send my best to Sly’s family—his siblings Rose and Freddie and Vet, his children Sly, Jr. and Phunne and Nove—and to the Family Stone, America's best band for that heady half-decade, and to Arlene, and to his friends, and to all the people whose life he touched with his art, whether they know it or not, meaning everyone.