‘I never lived a life I didn’t want to live’: Sly Stone on addiction, ageing and changing music for ever
In 2019, Sly Stone’s doctors presented him with a stark ultimatum. An addiction to crack that stretched back decades had ravaged his body, potentially to the point of no return. “They told me that if I kept smoking, I would ruin my lungs or I might die,” he says today.
In fairness, this couldn’t have come as news. It was, he says, the fourth time in recent years he had been taken to hospital in an ambulance, suffering from breathing difficulties: the most recent had occurred a mere two weeks prior to his meeting with the doctors. On each previous occasion, a doctor had presented him with the same ultimatum, which Stone had declined to believe, discharging himself from the hospital against their orders, going home and calling one of his many dealers, even if it took him an hour to struggle from his room to the hospital car park. After all, he was the legendary Sly Stone, and at least part of his legend rested on his disinclination to do anything he didn’t want to do.
At the height of his success, in the years immediately after he more or less single-handedly changed the face of soul – the release of 1967’s Dance to the Music ushered in the psychedelic soul era, causing a raft of major Black artists to alter their approach in his wake and even had the mighty Motown scrambling to keep up with his innovations – he was almost as famous, or infamous, for his my-way-or-the-highway approach as he was for his music. He would cancel gigs at the last moment if he didn’t think the equipment was up to standard or felt the vibe wasn’t right. He delivered his label not the album they had anticipated and had begun to advertise – called The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone – but 1971’s bleak, murky, experimental There’s a Riot Goin’ On. This was music for an era when, as Stone put it “the possibility of possibility was leaking out and leaving America feeling drained”, its sound muffled and laden with hiss. Stone had reportedly recorded and rerecorded so many times the tape was nearly transparent.
Some people thought his behaviour was admirable, a Black artist demanding agency in an industry built on denying Black artists’ agency. Some people just thought he was unbearably arrogant. “I am who I am when I am it,” he shrugged at one Rolling Stone reporter. In the long years after his star waned, he remained as unrepentant and intractable as ever. It didn’t matter how many lurid articles depicted him in all his ruin – a hopeless drug addict who hadn’t released an album of new material since 1982, when he allegedly vanished during the making of Ain’t But the One Way, leaving producer Stuart Levine to piece together the finished product as best he could – or how many loudly trumpeted comebacks never came to pass. Stone continued doing exactly what he wanted to do. “I never lived a life I didn’t want to live,” he tells me today.
But on his fourth hospital visit, something clearly changed. Perhaps he had a vision of mortality linked to the number of friends and former associates who had died in the preceding years: Bobby Womack, his former managers David Kapralik and Ken Roberts, and Cynthia Robinson, the Family Stone’s trumpeter and mother of Stone’s daughter, Sylvyette Phunne. Perhaps he was just so ill that the message got through. “I just decided,” he says. “From the way I was feeling, I took it serious this time. Once I decided, it just happened.”
It wasn’t quite as simple as that: Phunne and Arlene Hirschkowitz, the latter a former girlfriend from his lost years who more recently became his manager, seem to have spent a considerable portion of 2019 camped out on Stone’s front lawn, shooing away dealers, some of whom were connected to notorious Los Angeles gang the Bloods, threatening to call the police if they didn’t leave. At 80, Stone himself is clearly very ill. “I have trouble with my lungs, trouble with my voice, trouble with my hearing and trouble with the rest of my body, too,” he says, but it is the issues with his breathing that sound the worst: he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and has lost a large amount of his lung capacity. Certainly, he is too ill to talk in person: our interview is conducted via email.
But nevertheless, things seem very different. He has completed an autobiography named after one of his biggest hits, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), something I would once have told you was no more likely than Sly Stone being appointed US secretary of the treasury.
I have what the police would call “previous” with Stone – I interviewed him in 2013, around the release of Higher!, a lavish retrospective box set, and it remains the weirdest experience of my journalistic career. Negotiations to bring him to the phone went on for weeks. I called repeatedly at the appointed time, to be met by an answering machine: “You called. Or did you? We’ll call back,” it said, with no option to leave a message. Eventually, he picked up the phone and literally told me to fuck off – he wouldn’t do an interview unless he was paid in advance. After further negotiations, I tried again the following day. He spoke for 20 minutes, told me he wanted to form a new band made up of musicians with albinism that would “neutralise all the different racial problems”, then excused himself to go to the toilet: “You asked me about regrets – if I don’t take
a big shit now, I’ll regret that.” Shortly afterwards, his archivist called me. Stone wanted to know if I knew the British royal family, as he had a plan to earn money teaching music to their children.
This, his ghostwriter Ben Greenman tells me, was par for the course in the days when “drugs were the priority”. Greenman spent 10 years trying to make the book happen. Even after a personal introduction from their mutual friend, the funk musician George Clinton, demands would be made for Greenman to pay money upfront: “Someone would say, ‘OK, it’s going to be $1,000’ or whatever the going rate was at that time.”
This time around, however, the experience of interviewing Stone couldn’t be more different. No one asks for cash. His thoughtful answers arrive promptly in my inbox within 24 hours, complete with a correction to one of the questions that seems to suggest a new level of focus. I have asked him about the Bel Air mansion in which There’s a Riot Goin’ On was recorded – a notorious hub of drugs and guns, its grimly decadent mood encapsulated by an incident in which Stone’s pet pitbull savaged his pet monkey to death, then had sex with its corpse in front of the horrified residents – but apparently I have got the number of the house slightly wrong. “I always wanted to tell my story, partly because not everybody knew my side of the story on some things,” he says. “But the time wasn’t right and I wasn’t ready. When I got clean in 2019, that let the process start.”
And it is a remarkable story. Sly Stone, as Sylvester Stewart became in the mid-60s, was different from the start. He might have seemed like an archetype of the era – a jive-talking San Francisco radio DJ and sometime record producer – but behind the hipster facade lurked a man with an education in classical composition, courtesy of a teacher called Mr Froelich, who had taken him under his wing when he was a child back home in Texas. “I liked learning from him – he was cool and made so many things clear. That played into much that got made, the same way as radio school did or producing did. Learning basic music compositions like that helped me see inside of music in new ways.”
He formed the Family Stone in 1966, but initially, it looked like the ideas he had were too advanced: a racially integrated band playing music that existed somewhere on the cusp of soul and the burgeoning psychedelic rock movement, they encountered prejudice on tour (“some people weren’t into seeing different races having fun together,” as the late Cynthia Robinson told me in 2013), and their debut album, A Whole New Thing, flopped. “I knew the music worked, but I didn’t know if people would get it,” says Stone. “That’s what happened after the first album – I poured everything into those songs. Music people liked it, but not everyone was a music person. Dance to the Music came out as a simpler version, and more people understood that.”
It was the first of a string of incredible singles – Everyday People, Stand!, Hot Fun in the Summertime, I Want to Take You Higher, Family Affair – that turned Sly Stone into one of the most influential figures in soul music. He became the man who ultimately caused the Temptations to transform themselves from the performers of My Girl into the makers of Cloud Nine, Psychedelic Shack and Ball of Confusion; who cleared the path for Parliament-Funkadelic; whose uncompromising way of handling things paved the way for other Black artists, including Stevie Wonder, to wrest control of their careers. No, he says, he was “never annoyed” when he saw other artists changing their sound to something more like his own. “I was always happy if someone took the things I was doing and they liked them enough to want to do them on their own. I’m proud that the music I made inspired people.”
The Family Stone triumphed at Woodstock in 1969, but problems were looming. In the autobiography, he paints his increasing dependence on drugs – not just cocaine, but PCP as well – as a means of coping with the workload and the increasing expectations placed on him, but they seemed to make him more erratic. In 1970, the band missed 26 out of 80 dates they had booked. “The only thing I know that would have made life easier was to get booked into fewer shows, and get more information about when they were happening and where,” he says. “The thing about being late to shows or not coming out started to be a reputation, which wasn’t fair. A little of it was me, but most of it was the way the shows were organised or disorganised.”
They also contributed to souring intra-band relations. If you want an example of the dysfunction within Sly and the Family Stone, the departure of Larry Graham – the genius bassist who invented the “slapping” technique – seems as good as any. It’s one thing to leave a band because of musical differences or personality clashes, but it’s quite another to depart amid such acrimony that Graham and Stone apparently believed the other had taken out a contract to have them killed. According to Stone, it all spiralled out of control after Graham clashed with Hamp “Bubba” Banks – who, depending on your perspective, was either Stone’s PA or a gun-toting thug who did his bidding – over the affections of another band member, Stone’s sister Rose. “Larry and I did not have a disagreement that I can remember,” says Stone. “It turned out that Bubba had the disagreement with Larry – he didn’t want anyone paying special attention to Rose, especially Larry. Since Bubba was one of my right hands, it was assumed that Bubba had my blessing, which he didn’t. I heard about it later, but it was too late.”
Stone’s sales began to wane after 1973’s Fresh, by common consent the last truly killer album he released. By the end of the 70s, drugs had overtaken everything. His output slowed to a trickle of largely ignored albums, then stopped altogether. His life devolved into a round of temporary homes, runins with the police and ruthless dealers, fruitless visits to rehab and the constant scrabble for money to buy more drugs. It was then that Hirschkowitz first met him. She was 20, and “never involved in drugs”, she says. “But after three or four months with him I ended up trying them. It was kind of hard not to, being around him. The weird thing about him was that he wanted me to learn how to be an engineer in music, because he didn’t want someone around him that was just a girlfriend, or a groupie or someone who just got high. He wanted me to be productive, so he started teaching me how to work a mixing board, to make masters. In his mind, he felt like drugs gave him energy to do music, that was his excuse. It was ridiculous, but he always felt that drugs helped him, he was just so convinced of that in his mind.”
Certainly, his autobiography doesn’t depict those years quite the way you might expect. Its tone is equivocal, rather than racked with remorse; it isn’t, as Greenman notes, “the standard repentance story, the person who says, ‘Oh, how could I have been so blind?’”
“Even in those days I worked,” Stone reasons. “I didn’t like to be the kind of person who just drew the blinds and didn’t work. It was important to me that I was in a place where I could always create music. But,” he adds, “I might have stopped [doing drugs] sooner knowing what I know now.”
Of course, in a sense, Stone was ever-present in pop music throughout his lost years, albeit at one remove. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out that Prince had modelled the Revolution on Sly and the Family Stone – a multiracial lineup, music that existed on the cusp of soul and rock – and when hip-hop and sampling arrived, his influence was more obvious still. One website lists nearly 1,000 tracks that sampled his work (Stone says his favourite was Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, and that he also liked Arrested Development’s People Everyday). You could see why people wanted a fullblown comeback, but it never happened, and now it never will, his newfound sobriety notwithstanding. His health issues, he says, “haven’t stopped me from hearing music, but they have stopped me from making it”. Then he adds something else. I don’t know if it’s intended as such – it’s just a line in an email – but it seems rather sad and wistful: “I can hear music in my mind.”
Still, he has plenty to occupy him: not just the book and a forthcoming documentary, but the songs he amassed during the 80s, 90s and 00s – supposedly, there are thousands of them. He told me back in 2013 that he wanted to release them – “I want people to hear them because I know they’ll like them” – but nothing has emerged yet. “Still trying to sort all that out,” he says when I ask him again, “but my hope is sooner rather than later.”
And he’s understandably happy with his book. He enjoyed “the experience of reliving memories”. “Sometimes I had a very clear picture of exactly where and what was happening,” he says. “Other times we looked into history and I was surprised by how things ended up. But mostly it felt good. And it was a relief to finally tell it.”
•Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) by Sly Stone (Orion Publishing Co, £25). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
I always wanted to tell my story, partly because not everybody knew my side on some things