Sly Was His Own Kind of Rolling Stone
Keith Richards or Sly Stone?
Similar challenge, different resolution.
I’ll explain.
Say you’re an exceptional musician who has created great rock ’n’ roll records while also developing a disturbing dependence on problematic illegal drugs. But you survive, somehow, and you’ve still got a lot of years to live. It’s a long-term aftermath and there are a couple of ways to handle it.
You could go the Richards route and become a beloved rock ’n’ roll icon whose wit and candor make him incredibly engaging — don’t ever pass up a chance to interview him — and whose continuing passion for the music cemented his legacy as a man of wealth and taste. This December, defying all conventional wisdom about tending to one’s physical well-being, Keith will turn 82.
The other option would be Sylvester “Sly” Stone, who by coincidence was also 82 when he died Monday. In contrast to Richards, Stone became less a living tribute to human resilience than an object of morbid fascination, someone who until his final years seemed to permanently reside in self-induced purgatory.
Richards and Stone shared some achievements and attitudes. Both were musically brilliant. Both appreciated and absorbed a vast spectrum of great music that preceded them and on which they beautifully drew. Both would later summarize their drug years more with explanation than apology, acknowledging the perils of excess while defending the impetus and framing the consequences as not all bad.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, a couple of years past the likes of “Brown Sugar,” “Dance to the Music,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Everyday People,” they had moved to opposite corners.
Richards and his fellow Rolling Stone Mick Jagger went all-in on the biz, adding fortune to their fame. They became masters of merch. They packaged their remarkable catalog into a seemingly timeless stadium spectacle.
Stone took a different, darker path. Immersed though he had always been in music, he never liked the business that sold it. As a popular radio disk jockey in California, he bent R&B formats to play rock tunes that sounded compatible. As a producer he understood what would sound great on the radio, like the two fine Beau Brummels singles “Just a Little” and “Laugh, Laugh,” but for his own recordings he created something he wasn’t hearing on the radio — a category-defying mix of rock, R&B, psychedelia, funk, gospel and whatever else flew onto his musical radar.
Unfortunately, the joyful exuberance of records like “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)” didn’t carry over to the rest of Stone’s life. He was renowned for missing or delaying shows and then blaming the promoters or the equipment rather than, say, his drug habit. His first wife filed for divorce after six months, accusing him of abuse. He broke up his band, The Family Stone. His last major hit, “Family Affair,” took a disturbingly dark turn.
Happily, the music world has of necessity gotten pretty good at separating the art from the artist. While Stone’s post-stardom years became a litany of rehab failures and stalled comebacks, his vintage music became increasingly revered. Hip-hoppers sampled him the way they sampled James Brown, and artists from the Temptations and Stevie Wonder to P-Funk and Prince went to school on Stone’s exploration of music without borders.
All of us, inside and outside the music game, know people like this. You love what they can do, but having to deal with them would drive you crazy.
Sly Stone insisted that in many ways his life took the path it should have taken. We’d like to think he was that Zen about it. From the outside, all we know for sure is that we can dance to the music.
