I need to qualify things first: while I read Sly Stone’s book as soon as it hit the shops this was not because I had been looking forward to it – or even thought I’d review it. Instead, it was due to a professional obligation: I’d written a stock obituary on Stone for The Guardian a few years ago (obituary desks have stocks for all famous/infamous public figures: which is why, if you were wondering, obits of Shane McGowan and Alistair Darling sprang up on news websites as soon as the passing of these very different men was announced on November 30) and the obits desk asked me to update my stock to mention the book and Sly’s supposed sobriety. I say “supposed” because this isn’t the first time we’ve been told Stone’s no longer stoned.
I needed to read the book, essentially, to see if there were any other revelations that would change the obit. Thankfully, there weren’t – while I’m sure there is information on the musician born Sylvester Stewart that could have been useful to me its not in Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir, because conveying information about his life and music is not what Sly and his ghost writer (Ben Greenman) aim to do here. In essence, Thank You is an extended press release from a musician who, as the 1960s turned into the 70s, appeared to be a talisman (of sorts) for popular American music.
Thank You’s slight and sloppy, nasty in tone and rarely informative. For anyone interested in Stone’s music – or the US in those fermenting times – it is a frustrating read as there’s so little focus on the creativity and society that that shaped Sly’s best music. Thus it’s unworthy of anything but the most cursory of reads. This said, by revealing so little about himself – and with its narrator still attempting to play the role of Super Fly/Mr Bad Ass or whatever other tired blaxploitation schtick he embraced over 50 years ago – Thank You does offer up a mirror to the man. The reflection offered up is ugly, rancid, a wretch.
Anyway, I can hear you lot going “but you said you weren’t going to review it!?!” Right, I wasn’t but then I saw a tornado of hype stating how The Sunday Times, Uncut, Mojo and Rough Trade (record shop chain) had all listed it as Music Book of the Year. Now, I don’t expect much from the first three publications – all being written by dull chaps who revel in worshipping rock stars (the more sleazy the stories the more excited they get) while Rough Trade want to sell books and surely found Sly’s sullen posturing easier to market towards their hipster vinylz customers than a more considered tome. To say such annoyed me is, well, putting things mildly. Not just in a “don’t believe the hype” thing. No, more because Thank You’s a very poor book with good marketing – and my fellow hacks, and record store owners, should offer better consumer guidance.
Sly Stone once was a remarkable talent and his fall from grace and subsequent existence as pop music’s Gollum is a sad spectacle: if he had died in 1972 he would likely be held as an iconic artist, comparable to, say, Jimi Hendrix. Instead, he’s become an embarrassment – a wasted talent (in every sense) who lingers like a bad smell, unwilling to either die or go down the approved route of rehab (followed by a return to entertaining alongside giving interviews where ex-addict is now suitably chastised).
No, Sly’s an unrepentant wastrel and, in our age of public confessional, this truculence is almost admirable. But it doesn’t make Thank You any better – unlike Art Pepper or Miles Davis’ autobiographies, both of which involve insane amounts of drug addiction, there’s no insights into creativity and/or addiction, no wit or wisdom, no warmth. Here a shell of a man demonstrates that’s all he is - a shell. I’ve been listening to Sly & the Family Stone since I was a kid in the mid-1970s – back then several of their hits would still get airplay on Kiwi radio - and, by the 1980s when I started digging crates, used copies of Sly LPs were easy to come by.
By then Sly was already popular music’s resident phantom, only making the news when busted for coke or playing a rare, shambolic gig, no longer releasing new music, a sad spectacle akin to, say, former New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders, who was also by then more noted for his drug addiction than his music. But Sly had once commanded both commercial success and critical acclaim while Thunders had always been a marginal figure – that Stone could throw it all away and seemingly not care added to the mystery. Fellow LA 60s casualties Brian Wilson and Arthur Lee and John Phillips could all be listed alongside Stone as MIA – this noted, Wilson’s severe mental health issues were widely documented.
What all four men shared (beyond addiction problems) was a complete and irreversible talent collapse after their peak work – yet early this century Brian and Arthur would enjoy playing their 60s classics to adoring audiences, an extended encore they’d never really had the opportunity to enjoy before. John, like Sly, was too messed up to ever capitalise on his former glories then died in 2001(aged 65) – that Stone rented Phillips’ Bel Air mansion in 1970 certainly suggests Hollywood’s vampires shared certain bonds (and surely dealers). This relationship ended when the Papa, bolstered by a sizeable number of hatchet waving Mexican heavies, evicted Sly post-Riot.
What I should note is, at his peak, Sly had been a more commanding artist than all of the aforementioned trio (brilliant as their best recordings might have been) – he was a superstar, an entertainer who commanded a vast audience of young, racially diverse fans – and he fell the furthest, a pensioner crackhead reduced to living in his van.
As mentioned, Sly’s LPs were easy to find and cheap so, having first purchased Greatest Hits, I went about collecting all I could find. While there’s A Riot Going On is widely regarded as his masterpiece, his follow-up effort Fresh is a more enjoyable album – Riot startled listeners as it was such a contrast to the bright, optimistic sound Sly had previously sold to the American public: its stoned, sluggish, ill tempered, lo-fi mood somehow fitting a nation now aware the Vietnam war was a brutal quagmire and the promises of the 60s were being shredded. That said, much of Riot’s a messy listen, endorsed largely by rock writers and stoned musicians, both of whom are enthralled by its disoriented murk. Yes, Family Affair is a memorable (if muted) single and the likes of You Caught Me Smiling, Time and Poet possess a spacey, stoned quality that lingers after they finish. But that’s about it.
Here’s Time – stoner blues.
As for the 1960s albums, Sly and the Family Stone’s unsung debut, 1967’s A Whole New Thing, is arguably the best of them – while it features no hits, Whole New Thing is well crafted, its blending of funky R&B with contemporary pop-rock flavours means it sounds not just of its time but also reminiscent of early 90s outfits like De-Lite and the Chilli Peppers (who were then trying to do similar). Tunes like Underdog and Trip To Your Heart hold up well. Sly, obviously disappointed that Whole New Thing failed to find an audience, listened when Clive Davis – head of Columbia – instructed Sly to create a hit.
Here’s Underdog.
How young and innocent they all were – Sly’s hair is still straightened, in two years time he would sport a giant afro and be held up as a symbol of Black Power.
He did with the November 1967 release of Dance To The Music. Ironically, Sly and band hated this tune – "glorified Motown beats. Dance To The Music was such an unhip thing for us to do," said saxophonist Jerry Martini – which proves how wrongheaded artists can be as Dance is one of the most exciting 45s of that febrile era, a great advertisement for what was – in their mixing of men and women, black and white, rock and soul – truly a whole new thing for US popular music. And it went Top 10 US Pop and R&B – Sly had arrived and 1968 albums Dance To The Music and Life both demonstrated him working hard at creating a lively, hyper-positive pop-funk. Yet the songwriting across these albums often sounded forced and formulaic and no further hits were evinced.
The band were developing a reputation as a remarkable live act but they needed a big hit, something fresh, and Sly delivered it in spades with Everyday People, a gentle anthem to unity that topped the US Pop and R&B charts in early 1969. With the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy fresh in mind and so much civil strife across the US, Everyday People’s plea for tolerance and understanding resonated widely. Its also simple in structure and lyric, an easy song to singalong with – actually, I’m surprised its not a tune you hear children’s choirs singing. Follow-up single Stand! was also a call to unity overcoming dark forces - it features one of Sly’s finest vocals but only a minor hit.
No matter, the Stand! album broke the band as an album’s act, connecting with the FM radio rock audience who deigned to listen to Top 40 while buying Hendrix and Cream LPs. This noted, I’m not keen on Stand! as an album – the aforementioned 45s are great but You Can Get It If You Try is Sly espousing the kind of hectoring “bootstraps” nonsense Richard Nixon was then telling the downtrodden while Sing A Simple Song sounds like a leftover from the Life album. Somebody’s Watching You is the first sign of Sly’s paranoia – by now cocaine had entered the band as their drug of choice and Sly had relocated to Los Angeles – and sounds better when he produced a downtempo version on Little Sister in 1970 (who were a female vocal trio led by his sister Vet).
Here’s Little Sister.
Their couple of 45s (written and produced by Sly) are worth checking out and can be found on the superb Ace Records compilation Listen To The Voices: Sly Stone In the Studio 1965-1970.
Then there’s I Want To Take You Higher – a remake of Higher from the Dance To The Music album (Sly having shaped subsequently shaped it into a stadium anthem – it would provide the band with their Woodstock highlight as the audience, damp and exhausted, all embraced the sentiment). Subsequently, the Woodstock movie featuring of Sly and the Family Stone’s extremely vivid performance helped hook them the vast rock audience so many black artists struggle to connect with.
Higher is effective stadium fodder but little else while Sex Machine and Don’t Call Me Nigger Whitey are both lengthy jams with eye-catching titles but lacking structure, cut surely to fill out another album recorded in a rush – that said, the latter’s title suggested Sly was channelling rising discontent in the black community. That this aggrieved slice of psych rock existed on the same album as Everyday People marks a dichotomy between Sly as feel good entertainer espousing social and racial unity and a spokesman for an angry, sour militancy.
His next 45 – Hot Fun In The Summertime – suggested Sly wanted to be the popular entertainer but his final 45 of 1969 - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)/ Everybody Is A Star – represents the dichotomy perfectly: Star is melodic, sonorous, espousing Hallmark greeting card values (“I love you for what you are”) while Thank You is tense, agitated funk, a tune that opens with the line “Lookin' at the devil, grinnin' at his gun” and closes with “Dyin' young is hard to take, sellin' out is harder” so suggesting counter culture rhetoric and cocaine paranoia were chewing on his mind. That Thank You topped the US Pop and R&B charts in February 1970 – surely the hardest funk 45 ever to do so - suggests just how big Sly had become.
Here’s Everybody Is A Star, the last outing of the optimistic, loving Sly of the ‘60s.
I find Everybody Is A Star beautiful (if slight), the melody and voices blending effortlessly, while Thank You is unsettling – its relentlessly twitchy, harsh listening (at a wedding I once attended the DJ dropped it and, within a minute, the dance floor cleared and the bride ordered the DJ off the turntables: its definitely not a feel good tune). At a time when famous rock stars were expected to have the “answers” Sly must have felt several degrees of pressure from fans and militant organisations (Black Panthers and such demanding – as they did of Hendrix – that he lead an all black band) and his escalating consumption of cocaine and angel dust may have reflected a desire to blank out voices he didn’t want to hear while cocooning him in egocentric bliss.
If Thank You (the book) found Sly detailing what it was like to find himself one of the most popular and venerated musicians in the USA at this tense time it would be worth reading. But it doesn’t. Essentially, Sly doesn’t offer up reflections on what he lived through, instead he simply offers skimpy outlines of situations. Here he’s always at the centre of things and fuck ups are never his fault – relaying the awful tale of when his feral pit bull Gun took his baby son’s head in its jaws, Sly’s unmoved by how traumatic this was for infant and mother (his then wife Kathleen Silva), instead goes into a bullshit rap about demanding Gun apologise for said incident and, when no apology is forthcoming, shoots the dog.
As for his refusal to play something like a third of the concerts he was booked for at the start of the 1970s he makes excuses about being owed monies and other such bullshit. Sly was so far into his own power trip he enjoyed creating chaos, the rock star as malignant messiah.
Throughout Thank You Sly reveals himself as profoundly uninterested in other people – unless they are celebrities: he name checks every famous person he’s surely ever met, often describing them as a “friend”, yet if Mohammad Ali – a strict Muslim with zero tolerance of drugs – really was a “friend” what the fuck did he chat with Sly about? Certainly not the quality of Colombian flake currently on the market. Sly never really engages in discussion with his huge addiction to cocaine, PCP, crack and other shitty street drugs – that would be admitting he lost control, rather he appears indifferent to everything around him. That he went from the top of the US charts to a music industry untouchable – publicly derided by such contemporaries as James Brown and Miles Davis, both of whom once looked to him – is never discussed.
Stone’s condition is, I diagnose, that of a man seemingly suffering from cancer of the soul. He killed his own career, alienated everyone around him, is contemptuous of friendship, love, trust, compassion, affection – all the stuff that makes humanity work. Indeed, he’s oblivious to the world outside his own drug addled mythos. Like a perpetual sulky adolescent, he seems determined to continue posturing as “cool” and “bad” while ignoring the mess of his own making.
A far better telling of Sly’s rise and fall is Joel Selvin’s Sly And The Family Stone: An Oral History. This 1998 publication features interviews with almost all of the main players (except Sly) – band members, management, lovers, Clive Davis and several of the gangsters Sly surrounded himself with, human pit bulls who terrorised all and everyone. It details how Sylvester, a talented geek, transformed into Sly who, as soon as he achieved a degree of fame/wealth, hired thugs to give him an aura of “toughness” – “my life is what he was fascinated with – he wanted to be that tough guy and I was that tough guy,” says Homer “Bubba” Banks, Sly’s main enforcer. “His involvement was not street. I was street.”
The successful creative wanting to be seen as a badass is a perennial in celebrity culture – Tupac Shakur, a stage school brat who took to playing a gangster so far it got him shot, imprisoned, then killed, being an obvious example. Early on in Thank You Sly mentions wanting to fight, then adding he wasn’t a fighter, and you sense even as an elderly man he’s still hung up on being less virile than the tough boys he went to school with. Actually, the only time he does boast of hitting anyone is dealing to a girlfriend who displeased him. And he seems very proud of himself for doing so.
Thugs and drugs – these are the two core elements that Sly embraced circa 1969 and this toxic combination would poison everything. The voices in Selvin’s book tell of a man who insisted musicians and lovers join him in drugging so causing carnage. Jerry Martini observes how he and his wife became “cocaine zombies” through such while others – often girlfriends – ended up hospitalised.
Paradoxically, 1973’s Fresh is an album of light relief, funky and dirge free. If You Want Me To Stay offers a gorgeous bass line and nonchalant vocal. In Time is off kilter funk. Que Sera Sera affectingly bluesy and could be seen as Sly reflecting on the wreckage he’d left strewn – but Sly wasn’t given to reflection. Other tracks are pleasant if often not fully realised. That Fresh is the last music of note Sly would ever release appears fitting as there’s a ghostly feel to the album, as if his spirit was weary and no longer capable of creating.
Here’s Sly singing Doris Day’s most famous tune – its his last great recording.
As it would prove: Sly released several more albums over the next nine years but none are worth investigating (I once tried) and the public once so enamoured with him had moved on. More than forty years have passed since new Sly songs appeared and, even if the rumours of him having hundreds of unreleased songs prove true, I doubt they will be of worth. The creative energies that briefly illuminated Sylvester Stewart are long extinguished.
Thank You does allow occasional insights into the creative process - “Bob Dylan did it his way. It made sense. I liked the sound,” he says of listening to Dylan (and Beatles) when a DJ in his early 20s. “He pushed his mind at you through his music.” Its this innate understanding of what marked out Dylan and The Beatles as special that he employed to ensure the Family Stone would stand out from the R&B pack. But there’s far too few examples to make reading Thank You anything but a chore.
His ghost writer here is Ben Greenman, an aide to Questlove and its Questlove who got Thank You green lit and published via his imprint– he writes the Foreword, here he mentions the documentary feature he is making on Sly and, thus, the book seemingly exists so he can mark out his territory. Yet things seem to have gone quiet regarding this doc’ – initially it appeared to be scheduled for release around the same time as the book – and Sly’s notorious unreliability and dislike of engagement may have made filming very difficult. This is hinted at right at the start of Thank You where there’s a mocking page before the Foreword called Prelude: Sly Say Hi. This reads “I have some questions, not too many.” says an unnamed interviewer. “No,” replies Sly. “We don’t have to do them all,” says interviewer. “We don’t have to do them at all,” responds Sly.
This is the ghostwriter taunting his readers, hinting that the subject is unwilling to share. And so it turns out - Sylvester Stewart, forever lost in cosplay as Sly Stone, obviously never wanted to have a memoir (its too slight to call it an autobiography) out. Thank You reinforces this – a book about a talented youth who won far more fame and money than he ever dreamt of and, thus, became one of pop music’s Icarus figures – his talent and money squandered, health ruined, all Sylvester can now do is play mind games. And that’s what Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir exists as, a final mind fuck for any fans still foolish enough to think he might have wanted to tell the truth.
What a great piece, Garth — I also am tired of the “Top Music Books of the Year” kudos (in music it happens with Neil Young’s endless exhuming of his archives, always contenders for albums of the year) and wonder if they actually read the book. The two music writers who I most trust (you and Richard Williams) both found the book wretched.
Thanks Erin. Addiction does often fell the mighty - although in Sly's case I think even if he'd been straight edge he probably would have been a nasty individual: fame is often toxic and can distort an individual's behaviour/personality. Funny how he and band evolved out of the Bay Area - and the openness there welcomed a black/white-male/female lineup - then he shifted to LA and became a figure akin to Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond (just much nastier).