Sly Stone gives first interview in 25 years
Posted on July 4, 2007
Filed Under News
In the Vanity Fair’s August issue, the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone talks about his music, his disappearance from public view and his long-awaited return.
Stone, 64, who made a brief, awkward appearance at the 2006 Grammys with giant blonde mohawk, says he plans to start work on a new album in autumn.
“It’s kind of boring at home sometimes,” he tells the magazine. “I got a lot of songs I want to record and put out, so I’m gonna try ‘em out on the road. That’s the way it’s always worked the best: Let’s try it out and see how the people feel.”
Stone says he has “a library, like, a hundred and some songs, or maybe 200″ that he’s been sitting on at his Napa Valley compound, also home to an eclectic collection of cars that includes an old London taxicab.
He is humble when asked about his contributions to music and unapologetic when pressed about his reputation for missing gigs. And though he has been isolated, he says he’s been enjoying life.
“I do regular things a lot,” he says. “But it’s probably more of a Sly Stone life. It’s probably … it’s probably not very normal.”
As songwriter, producer, bandleader and singer, Stone dazzled the world of pop music more than 35 years ago with a string of superlative anthems – timeless songs, including Dance to the Music, I Want to Take You Higher, Hot Fun in the Summertime, Family Affair and Everyday People.
George Clinton was forced to rethink his approach to music after hearing Sly and the Family Stone’s landmark 1969 album, Stand!
“He’s my idol; forget all that peer stuff,” Clinton said. “I heard Stand!, and it was like: Man, forget it! That band was perfect. And Sly was like all the Beatles and all of Motown in one. He was the baddest thing around. What he don’t realize is that him making music now would still be the baddest. Just get that band back together and do whatever it is that he do.”
Among the first fully integrated groups on the American music scene, with blacks and whites and men and women together onstage, the seven-piece San Francisco band played the world’s biggest venues while cranking out hit after cutting-edge hit.
But as Stone’s star was ascending, he was deteriorating personally – skipping concerts (he missed a third of the band’s shows in 1970), blowing off record-label deadlines, acting increasingly ornery. By 1975, the hits had dried up, and Stone’s downward spiral quickened.
“He was so creative, one of the most talented guys I’ve ever met,” said R&B great Bobby Womack. “It was inspirational being around him. He made some great music. He just wasn’t happy in his personal life. He got to the point he wouldn’t even listen to his own stuff. That’s paranoia. As the drugs set in, the warm, creative side went away. And then it got worse and worse. He was a person out of control.”
Stone, who’d once earned a reported $2 million per album, was cut loose by Epic Records in 1978. Warner Bros. offered a half-million-dollar contract, and in 1979, the label released Stone’s Back on the Right Track. It didn’t even crack the Top 150 – a disastrous showing for an artist who was once a fixture at the top of the charts.
Stone summarily retreated from the studio and the spotlight. His brother Freddie told Spin magazine several years later that Stone had “wanted to get away from the fast pace. He just kicked back. . . . He didn’t want to be out in front anymore. The glamour didn’t mean anything anymore. He wanted to be normal.”
In 1981, Stone – who’d been raised in a strict Pentecostal household and grew up singing gospel songs with his siblings – reemerged to work with Clinton on a Funkadelic album, a summit that resulted in both artists getting arrested for possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia.
As Stone’s career faltered, his legal problems mounted. In 1983, he was charged in Illinois with possessing a sawed-off shotgun; was found barely conscious in a Florida hotel room, apparently a result of a cocaine overdose; and was then arrested during the middle of a show in Fort Lauderdale on charges that he’d stolen a ring from a hotel owner. (During one court hearing that year, bailiffs had to shake Stone awake.)
In November 1987, on the eve of a two-night comeback engagement at a small club in Hollywood, Stone told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he was clean, saying: “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m straight, I’m clean. What else can I say?” The night after the first show – which was declared a disaster by a Times critic – Stone was arrested outside the club for having failed to pay $2,856 in child support. He was also charged with cocaine possession.
In 1989, after failing to show up for a court date in Los Angeles, Stone was declared a fugitive. The FBI arrested him in Connecticut and extradited him to Los Angeles, where, in a two-week span at the end of the year, Stone pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of cocaine and then guilty again to two counts of cocaine possession.
Since then, the world has heard very little from – or about – Sly Stone. Just the 1993 appearance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, where the six original members of Family Stone (drummer Errico, bassist Graham, saxophonist Jerry Martini, trumpet player Cynthia Robinson and the siblings Freddie and Rose Stone) walked onto the stage, sang a bit of “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” said their thanks . . . and then waited for Sly to surface.
“As usual, it’s just us,” Rose said, looking at her watch. Sly finally materialised, in an electric-blue leather jumpsuit, and gave a brief speech, which concluded: “See you soon.”
Bucking Hall of Fame tradition, he didn’t stop afterward to pose for pictures with his band mates, instead disappearing into the night – and into the ether, for 13 years of radio silence until the 2006 Grammys.
“It’s amazing he’s still here,” Errico said in an interview recently. “But he is. I always say that a cat has nine lives, and Sly has nine cats. He’s a character in every respect.”
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Now you forget just what a tight great band they were. The music still sounds great!