Sly Stone

Sly Stone was one of the most innovative musicians of the twentieth century, and one of its most luminous and saddest stories at the same time.

As the leader of Sly and the Family Stone he took the funk James Brown had invented and perfected it, fusing it with soul, rock, gospel and psychedelia.

But his contribution was not only musical. It was also, and above all, a decision about who got up on stage with him.

He died in June 2025, after decades of silence.

A band that was the message

In November 1966, in San Francisco, Sly put together something that looks normal today and was a provocation then: a band with men and women, Black and white, playing as equals.

There was his brother Freddie, and very soon his sister Rose; the bassist Larry Graham; the trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, one of the first women to play that instrument in a major American band; the saxophonist Jerry Martini and the drummer Greg Errico, both of them white.

It was the first major American rock band integrated both by race and by gender. In a country still torn apart by segregation, that was not a casting detail: it was a political act.

And the pressure came from both sides. The Black Panthers pressed him to get rid of Martini and Errico for being white, and to change his manager. Eldridge Cleaver also asked him for a six-figure donation. Sly refused it all.

There is no need to say "the story goes": Martini told it in interviews and Sly himself recounted it in his memoir, in 2023.

His band preached unity without speeches. By existing, up on stage, as proof that it could be done.

The man who perfected funk

Musically the contribution is enormous. AllMusic put it down in a single sentence: James Brown may have invented funk, but Sly Stone perfected it.

His songs were a party of frantic horns, fast guitars, hypnotic rhythms and choruses where everyone sang, against a background of social conscience.

His bassist, Larry Graham, played by striking the strings with his thumb and plucking them with his index finger — the slap — and in the Family Stone that became the basis of the funk sound forever. It was not born there: Graham had worked that way of playing out years earlier, in the duo he played in with his mother, where he had no drummer and needed the bass to sound like percussion too.

At Woodstock, at half past three in the morning on 17 August 1969, Sly and the Family Stone woke up half a million exhausted, muddy people and got them jumping with "I Want to Take You Higher".

All the Black music that came after drinks from there: from the Jackson 5 to Prince, from funk to hip-hop.

The fall

The second part of the story has to be told carefully.

The euphoria of his early songs faded out. In the early seventies, disillusioned with the ideals he had preached and sinking ever deeper into drugs, Sly changed.

His 1971 album, "There's a Riot Goin' On", reflects that turn: dark, intimate, exhausted, the B-side of the earlier party.

From then on he faded away. He began missing concerts, turned erratic, and in time disappeared almost completely.

In 2011, the man who had set Woodstock alight was living and writing inside a van parked in the Crenshaw neighbourhood of Los Angeles, after losing his house.

It is one of the saddest falls in music: the genius who sang to the hope of an entire generation, burnt out inside just as that collective hope was also going out.

But that is not where it ends. Around December 2019 he got off drugs — his manager said so in 2023 — and he spent his last years lucid, at home and with his family.

In October 2023 he published his memoir, written with his daughter Phunne and with Ben Greenman. The man who had been silent for decades got to tell his own version.

What to remember

Sly Stone is proof that music can be pure party and pure message, and that sometimes the most political gesture is not a slogan but simply who you decide to bring up on stage with you.

Put on "Everyday People", "Dance to the Music", "Family Affair" or "I Want to Take You Higher", and you will hear funk in its most joyful form, songs that make you dance and that, without ever stopping, speak of equality and of accepting one another as different.

Behind them you will find a man who dared, at the worst possible moment to do it, to put white and Black, men and women, into a single musical family, and to defend it against everyone.

He died in 2025, at the age of eighty-two, after a life split between the highest glory and the deepest darkness.

He left us the soundtrack of a dream, and the bitter lesson of how fragile that dream can be. Listen to him, and dance: it is what he would have wanted.

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Sources

Sly Stone, real name Sylvester Stewart (Denton, Texas, 15 March 1943 – Granada Hills, Los Angeles, 9 June 2025), musician, singer, songwriter and producer, leader of Sly and the Family Stone. The band formed in San Francisco in November 1966 and is considered the first major American rock band with a line-up integrated both racially and by gender; it comprised his brother Freddie Stone, his sister Rose Stone (who joined in late 1967), the bassist Larry Graham, the trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, the saxophonist Jerry Martini and the drummer Greg Errico, the last two white. The Black Panther Party pressed Sly Stone to drop Martini and Errico for being white and to change his manager, and Eldridge Cleaver requested a six-figure donation; Sly refused. The episode is documented in interviews with Jerry Martini and in Sly Stone's own memoir, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" (2023). AllMusic noted that "James Brown may have invented funk, but Sly Stone perfected it". Larry Graham developed the slap technique to make up for the absence of a drummer in an earlier band. They had five singles in the American Top 10, three of them number one: "Everyday People" (1969), "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" (1970) and "Family Affair" (1971). Their Woodstock performance took place at around 3:30 in the morning of 17 August 1969. The album "There's a Riot Goin' On" (1971) marked a darker turn. His drug addiction led him into a long retreat; in 2011 he was living in a van parked in the Crenshaw neighbourhood of Los Angeles, after losing his Napa house in 2009. He died at 82 after a prolonged chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. His influence reaches Prince, the Jackson 5, George Clinton, hip-hop and a good part of later Black music. James Brown and Prince have their own profiles in this series. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from AllMusic, Best Classic Bands, AP, Wikipedia and other coverage.