Sly Stone, visionary musician and pioneer of the crossing between funk and soul with psychedelic pop and rock that put an interracial soundtrack to a United States in full change, died Monday at age 82. His time came “after a prolonged fight against chronic lung disease and other underlying health problems,” the family explained in a statement. “He died in peace, surrounded by his three children, his best friend and his family.” He did not transcend the place of his death, although the musician lived in Los Angeles for a long time.
The passage to the immortality of black music won it during the seven years in which, at the head of his band, Sly and The Family Stone, he chained a lasting series of albums, whose pinnacles were Life (1968), Stand! (1969) y There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971). The latter, with its iconic cover with the American flag, is a gloomy work of political dyes and already appears the beginning of its decline. That year, the band canceled 26 of the 80 concerts they had hired.
Despite that erratic personality and despite drug and weapons stories he soon enjoyed the recognition of his talent. And it is really difficult to exaggerate the influence of extraordinary music that was capable at that time. His unruly songs invited trumpeter Miles Davis to take another step in the electric revolution of his music, and record On the Corner (1973), while Herbie Hancock titled Sly One of the songs of his Jazz Rock masterpiece Headhunters.
There is some Stone in the adventurous spirit of the Stevie Wonder of the time, and that subgenre known as soul Psychodel, with artists such as The Temptations or Undisted Truth, as well as the work of producer Norman Whitfield, drank from their songs. It is also difficult to think about the career of other African -American musicians without the ease with which Stone introduced the extravagance in his proposal: from Prince to Outkast, and Rick James to Erykah Badu. The rap also gave good account of his legacy. According to the web Who Sampled?about 1,100 themes of hip-hop They have taken their songs in these years to sample them.
After that brief fogonazo, Stone, vertex of the triangle originally from the funk with James Brown and another visionary eccentric, George Clinton (Parliament and Funkadelic), slipped through the abysses of cocaine addiction and tranquilizers. Overwhelmed by fame and the responsibility of being had for a visionary, he dynamited his own career. He disappeared little by little from public life. He was arrested several occasions for possession of narcotics and his attempts to return to the stage did not transcend the disappointing attempts to make their past glories make.
In 2011, the Tabloid New York Post He located him living in a van in a suburb of Los Angeles. Then, he asked the reporter: “Please tell everyone to give me work and touch my music. I’m fed up with this shit.” In 2019, after his fourth admission to the hospital he accepted the advice of the doctors: or ceased to smoking crack or would not tell him.
In recent years, Stone enjoyed an unexpected rescue. First was his appearance in the Oscarizar Documentary Summer of Soul (2001), in which the battery and student of black music Ahmir Questlove Thompson rescued the lost ribbons of a Harlem festival in 1969. SLY & The Family Stone’s performance was one of the main film dishes, and served for a new generation of a new generation of fans He discovered the experience of his direct, beyond his speech at another festival that marked time: that of Woodstock.
Last year, Questlove premiered a documentary focused on his figure. Sly Lives!: The legacy of a genius It is available in Disney+.
In 2023, Stone published his memoirs, even without Spanish translation. He titled them, in a wink to one of his best known songs, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir. The statement in which his family accounts for death reveals that he was currently working on a film script based on that book.
His intention, he writes in him, was to “teach people the life” that he lived and “the decisions” he made. And that sounds to the reader to a large extent the effort to make memory: to a justification of his mistakes, especially in his last part, when he recounts his dark years.
From Texas to Vallejo
Sylvester Stewart was born in 1943 in Denton, Texas, but his family soon moved to Vallejo, near San Francisco, a city with which his music would be indissolubly linked in the late sixties. His first steps remember that of many other African -American musicians of the time: flirting with the gospel in the family, the formation of a group of doo wop (The viscaynes) and the first moderate success, when he was only a teenager, with the song Long Time Gone. He was an announcer of a musical radio that was heard in the bay, and studied trumpet, composition and theory at the Vallejo Junior College.
His first work in the industry was as a producer of the autumn records, team for which he recorded his own songs, in addition to working for others, such as the singer of soul Bobby Freeman, or the Rockers The Beau Brummels or The Mojo Men.
In 1966, he founded the band with which he would reach fame. Sly and The Famiy Stone was, as one of his most memorable songs said, “a family issue.” His brother Freddie played the guitar, and his sister Rose, the piano. There were other interpreters, white and black, but the only possible protagonist was Sly. Talented multi -encompass, dared with everything else: keyboards, guitar, bass and drums. He was also the composer, arranger and producer of the entire work of the band.
At his death, according to British musical journal Alexis Petridis, from The Guardian, In one of his last interviews, unpublished “thousands of songs”. He wrote them, apparently, in the “eighties, ninety -two thousand,” when the world was no longer listening.