Sly & The Family Stone
 Sly
And The Family Stone were formed in 1966 with Sly's sister Rose on
keyboards and vocals, brother Freddie on guitar, cousin Larry
Graham on bass, Cynthia Robinson on trumpet, Jerry Martini on
saxophone and Greg Errico on drums. Sly handled lead vocals,
keyboards, songwriting and producing.
As the grinning showman with a penchant for outlandish shades
and giant afros, Sylvester 'Sly Stone' Stewart represented
everything great about late-60s psychedelic soul: wild,
free-spirited music intent on moving people's feet and blowing
their minds.
Nobody wanted to take you higher than Sly Stone. Archive
footage of his early performances depicts a smiling precursor to
both Prince and Outkast. His pop songs
were pep pills that took the sanguine utopianism of hippiedom at
its word.
The group made the charts in 1968 with their energetic debut
single, Dance To The Music. But 1969 was to be the
group's breakthrough year, with a Number One hit single (Everyday
People), one of the era's most influential albums (Stand)
and an epic performance at Woodstock.
It seemed The Family Stone could do no wrong, but this proved
to have been their pinnacle and the band began falling apart. Sly's
disenchantment with touring, and crucial personnel changes (such
as the departure of bassist Larry Graham) only dissipated their
versatility.
Much had been made of The Family Stone's multi-racial soul and
rock fusion, but thanks to bass player Graham they had also been
one of the first groups to realise the power of the funk.
By the time of There's A Riot Goin' On (1971),
Stone had sunk into drug addiction and Bacchanalian squalor. It
was as if the faded Aquarian dawn of the 60s, the betrayal of
African-Americans, the riots, assassinations and unkept promises,
had been absorbed by Stone and taken their toll.
Holed up in a Bel Air mansion with a mountain of drugs and some
bad company, he was perpetually stoned. Riot is decay
music, toxic and oozing. And decadent - the tapes sound fuzzy
because they were worn out from Sly recording over and over them
with vocal tracks of women he wanted to bed.
Once, his music was about reaching out to a bright new beyond.
Now he was pawing about in a dark inner-space, heavy-lidded and
given to random bursts of narcotic ecstasy - like the scream at
the end of Family Affair.
Throughout the 70s the formerly flamboyant Sly became a
recluse, recording to less effect than in the 60s. But despite his
prodigious cocaine intake, Sly's fall from grace in the mid-70s
involved no grand follies or crazed flights of fancy.
The truth was more prosaic than that, as Stone spent the decade
after There's A Riot Goin' On tiresomely insisting that
everything was OK and that he was the same old Sly. In truth he
was becoming his own tribute act, and switching labels from Epic
to Warner's did nothing to stop the rot.
When the band finally broke up in 1975, Sly's career
disintegrated. Despite its wafer-thin songwriting, 1979s
desperate-to-convince Back On The Right Track was a
solid-enough funk record (ironically, a collection of his older
songs remixed for disco came out at the same time and sold
better), but 1983s justly neglected Ain't But The One Way
really was the end of the line, with its unbecoming 80s sheen and
baffling version of The Kinks' You Really Got Me.
After this: coke bust, rehab, hermitage. Perhaps it was for the
best.
Sly and The Family Stone were inducted into the Rock & Roll
Hall Of Fame in 1993.
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