Sly Stone Memoir

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It is difficult to convey just how astoundingly unlikely it is that this book exists. Sly Stone is one of pop music’s truest geniuses and greatest mysteries, who essentially disappeared four decades ago in a cloud of drugs and legal problems after recording several albums’ worth of incomparable, visionary songs. Fleeting, baffling, blink-and-you-miss-him appearances at his 1993 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction and a 2006 Grammy tribute only served as reminders that he was still alive and still not well.

Which makes it almost impossible to set expectations for this memoir.

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“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” — named for Sly & the Family Stone’s monumentally funky 1969 No. 1 hit — is the first title from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s new publishing imprint, and even the drummer/author/filmmaker acknowledges that it isn’t a definitive story. “There is plenty, too, that is not here,” writes Questlove, who is currently working on a Sly Stone documentary, in the foreword. “Some of the musical questions that I would have loved to talk about with the 30-year-old Sly, or the 40-year-old Sly, seem harder for him to recapture, mountains in the mist.”

Artists from the Jackson 5 to Prince, Miles Davis to D’Angelo borrowed elements of Stone’s sound and style, and his songs have been sampled hundreds of times, by the likes of Janet Jackson, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, but no one else has fully conjured the remarkable balance of virtuosity and universality, joy and pain, rhythmic sophistication and nursery rhyme singalongs of “Everyday People” or “Family Affair.”
One thing that remains intact for Stone at age 80 is the sense of wordplay and fun-house language that distinguished his lyrics (read the song/book title out loud), and some of the biggest pleasures in “Thank You” come when we witness him teasing out a theme. His response to other people telling his story and analyzing his struggles: “They’re trying to set the record straight. But a record’s not straight, especially when you’re not. It’s a circle with a spiral inside it. Every time a story is told it’s a test of memory and motive. … It isn’t evil but it isn’t good. It’s the name of the game but a shame just the same.”

Sylvester Stewart was born into a musical family (“There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music”), and he started singing and recording with his siblings at a young age, soon joining a series of high school and regional bands. He talked his way into a radio job in San Francisco, where he took on his new moniker. “There was a tension in the name,” he writes. “Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.”

The band had a concept — white and Black together, male and female both, and women not just singing but playing instruments,” Stone says. “That was a big deal back then and it was a big deal on purpose.”
It took a couple of albums to distill all of his influences and ambitions, and then came an explosion. A fleet of hit singles between 1967 and 1973 turned the Family Stone into one of America’s top touring bands, especially after their show-stopping performance at Woodstock became a highlight in the immensely popular film documenting the festival. “I didn’t see it but someone told me I was the star,” he writes — while elsewhere he notes that “after Woodstock, everything glowed.”

Stone breezes through the making of such earthshaking albums as “Stand!” and “Fresh,” though he looks a bit closer at “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” (1971), a hazy, slowed-down and reflective set that felt like the hangover following the exuberance of the ’60s. “I was digging down into a place where people hadn’t been before,” he writes.

By the time of “Riot,” though, drugs had also entered Sly Stone’s life, and they would define the many years that followed. He was feeling pressure to write, to record, to tour. “All of that needed to be fueled,” he says wryly. “But how did that fuel make me feel? A drug is a substance and so the question has substance. A drug can be a temporary escape and so I will temporarily escape that question.”

He’s actually at his least cagey talking about the drugs. He presents his experiences matter-of-factly, whether blowing off court dates, blowing up his bathroom in a freebasing accident, or forgetting his false teeth in a McDonald’s. Stone expresses pride that he finally got clean on his fourth visit to rehab, but he makes no excuses or apologies for his years of addiction. “I would say that drugs didn’t affect me too much,” he writes, “but I didn’t have to be around me.”

Written with Ben Greenman (whose previous collaborations with Brian Wilson and George Clinton have established him as the go-to guy for brilliant, eccentric musicians) and “created in collaboration” with Stone’s current manager and former girlfriend, Arlene Hirschkowitz, “Thank You” gives a strong sense of this giant’s voice and sensibility, even as it sprints too quickly through his experiences, padding out background with lengthy transcripts from his TV interviews with the likes of Dick Cavett, Geraldo Rivera and Mike Douglas.
When Sly started missing concerts and seemed increasingly surrounded by darkness, the conventional wisdom became that Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone were two distinct people — one bright and fun, the other chaotic and antagonistic. “I didn’t agree with the two-persons-in-one theory,” writes Stone. “In my mind, there was only my mind, with different facets and edges like anyone’s, and that was the mind that minded being probed and prodded, put to someone else’s test.”

Looking back at his notorious, frustrating, reclusive life, Sly Stone feels no need for explanation or contrition. “There’s no point in blaming the mirror if your face looks strange,” he writes. Which sure sounds as if it could be a line from a Sly & the Family Stone song.