Sly Stone, the influential, eccentric and preternaturally rhythmic singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose run of hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s with his band the Family Stone could be dance anthems, political documents or both, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 82.
The cause was “a prolonged battle with C.O.P.D.,” or lung disease, “and other underlying health issues,” according to a statement from his representatives.
As the colorful maestro and mastermind of a multiracial, mixed-gender band, Mr. Stone experimented with the R&B, soul and gospel music he was raised on in the San Francisco area, mixing classic ingredients of Black music with progressive funk and the burgeoning freedoms of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll.
The band’s most recognizable songs, many of which would be sampled by hip-hop artists, include “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Family Affair,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”
A Lasting Impact
Though Mr. Stone eventually receded from center stage, his vibrant, intricately arranged songs left their mark on a host of top artists, including George Clinton, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Michael Jackson, Outkast, Red Hot Chili Peppers and D’Angelo, as well as jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. As the critic Joel Selvin said, “There was Black music before Sly Stone, and Black music after Sly Stone.”
His musical legacy was fortified and refreshed in recent years, a push led by the musician and music historian Questlove, who directed the Academy Award-winning documentary “Summer of Soul,” from 2021, which included a performance by Sly and the Family Stone during a Harlem cultural festival in 1969. That film was followed in 2023 by a memoir by Mr. Stone, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” And last year, Questlove released a documentary devoted entirely to him, “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius).”
“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will,” Questlove wrote of Mr. Stone in the introduction to Mr. Stone’s autobiography, which he also helped to release as part of his publishing imprint. “He had a look, belts and hats and jewelry. Everybody was a star, as he said (and sang), but he was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”
From 1968 to 1971, Sly and the Family Stone released a defining string of albums — “A Whole New Thing,” “Dance to the Music,” “Life,” “Stand!” and “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” — that were celebratory but also knowing about the fragile state of the world, complicating the Summer of Love’s themes of unity and its sounds of euphoria with a street savvy that presaged the end of the party, even as the band played on.
The group stomped, grooved and shouted its way into the national consciousness in an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1968, performing a medley of songs that are now regarded as classics. Sly and the Family Stone soon dominated the charts and further established itself as an era-defining act with similarly jarring, joyous appearances the next year at the Newport Jazz Festival and the Woodstock festival.
Always a Standout
Mr. Stone began isolating himself in the 1970s and ’80s with drug use and increasingly unpredictable behavior, retreating to a mansion compound in Los Angeles and often missing concerts.
But he still could not help standing out, often innovating along the way. He became one of the first mainstream artists to record with a drum machine — one of his many influences on hip-hop — while becoming more flamboyant in appearance (shiny vests, alien-eye glasses) and more idiosyncratic musically. The title track on 1971’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” was silent, listed at zero minutes and zero seconds, because, as Mr. Stone later said, “I felt there should be no riots.”
Pharrell Williams, writing in The New York Times in 2003, said of Mr. Stone’s legacy: “He spoke to a generation and ones that followed. He challenged people’s perception of normalcy. He wore seriously fly clothes, and to this day, I have no idea how he walked around in those platforms.”
Sly and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Mr. Stone, who had by then gained a reputation as a recluse, made a surprise appearance and a brief speech, ending with a cryptic “See you soon.”
But it wasn’t until more than a decade later, at the 2006 Grammy Awards, that most people caught another glimpse of him. In a silver get-up, dark shades and a blond mohawk, Mr. Stone joined in during a tribute to his old band, playing a synthesizer and singing on “I Want to Take You Higher.” He departed the stage before the end of the song.
Mr. Stone performed intermittently, and often bizarrely, throughout his later years. At Coachella in 2010, he played while seated in an office chair, wearing a long blond wig “that hid most of my face, a police hat that hid the rest,” he wrote in his memoir.
“I was dressed that way because I didn’t want anyone to recognize me,” he added.
He remained an almost mystic presence in his rare public showings, frequently arriving at concerts by family members and past collaborators on a motorcycle, and only occasionally bothering to remove his helmet.
Though he was rumored to be homeless, Mr. Stone wrote in his autobiography that he lived for years in the 2000s, by choice, in a white Pleasure Way R.V., which was “everything to me: dressing room, hotel room, transportation, hide-out, office.”
In 2010, he sued his former managers, claiming that they had defrauded him of many millions. A jury eventually awarded him $5 million, but the judgment was soon reversed. “I knew how the system worked, meaning that I knew that often it didn’t work,” Mr. Stone wrote in his book.
But he was insistent that financial troubles were not responsible for his drifter lifestyle. “I like my small camper,” he told an interviewer. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.”
It Started in Church
Sylvester Stewart was born in Denton, Texas, on March 15, 1943, the second of Alpha and K.C. Stewart’s five children. Soon after, the family moved west to Vallejo, Calif., north of San Francisco, where Mr. Stewart worked as a cleaner and in maintenance at a department store. The couple raised their children in the Pentecostal Church, where they first became immersed in music.
In 1952, the Stewart Family Four, a vocal group consisting of Sylvester and three of his siblings, released a gospel single, “On the Battlefield,” with “Walking in Jesus’s Name” on the flip side. The record planted the seeds of the group harmonies for which the Family Stone would become known.
Even as a child, Sylvester, who sang lead, was the star. “People were hollering and wanting to touch him,” his mother recalled of the group’s early performances, when he was as young as 5. “You had to hold them back sometimes.”
It went both ways: Mr. Stone recalled his mother saying that he really came alive in front of a crowd. “If they didn’t respond, I would cry,” he wrote.
In high school, Mr. Stone — who picked up the nickname Sly thanks to a friend’s misspelling of his first name — was a hot commodity as a guitarist for local doo-wop groups. He learned new instruments with ease and moved from a Black band, the Webs, to a more successful mixed-race act, the Viscaynes, with whom he released a handful of singles and tasted his first morsels of industry buzz.
After a brief stint studying music theory, on and off, at Vallejo Junior College, Mr. Stone, by then a fledgling commodity in the flourishing Bay Area music scene, was tapped by some enterprising disc jockeys to work as a producer for their new label, Autumn Records. There, he helped write Bobby Freeman’s “C’mon and Swim,” which became a Top 10 hit in 1964 and the catalyst of a dance craze.
Around the same time, Mr. Stone attended the Chris Borden School of Broadcasting in San Francisco, eventually making a name for himself as a D.J. at KSOL and KDIA, local AM stations aimed at Black listeners.
Never one to be boxed in, Mr. Stone varied his playlists with sounds of the day besides soul and R&B. “I played Dylan, Lord Buckley, the Beatles. Every night I tried something else,” he recalled in a 1970 Rolling Stone profile. “Everything was just on instinct. You know, if there was an Ex-Lax commercial, I’d play the sound of a toilet.”
On the radio, as in his musical career to come, Mr. Stone rejected racial divisions. “I found out about a lot of things I don’t like,” he said of his time on the air. “Like, I think there shouldn’t be ‘Black radio.’ Just radio. Everybody be a part of everything. I didn’t look at my job in terms of Black.”
By 1966, he was focused on his own music and was fronting a group called Sly and the Stoners. His brother Freddie was playing at the time with the white drummer Gregg Errico in Freddie & the Stone Souls. The two groups fused in 1967, becoming Sly and the Family Stone.
The act’s initial lineup featured Freddie on guitar — Sly turned his focus from guitar to organ so as not to double up — along with Larry Graham on bass and Vaetta Stewart, Sly’s younger sister, singing backup. The lineup would go on to include the trumpeter Cynthia Robinson and the saxophonist Jerry Martini, as well as the Mr. Stone’s sister Rose, who played keyboard and sang.
“We all quickly realized what Sly was doing when we looked around at each other,” Mr. Errico told Rolling Stone in 2015. “There were race riots going on at the time. Putting a musical group together with male and female and Black and white, to us, it felt really natural and cool and comfortable, but it made a statement that was definitely threatening to some people.”
The band’s debut album, “A Whole New Thing,” released in 1967 by Epic Records, was indeed ahead of its time — so much so that it did not sell well. But the follow-up, “Dance to the Music,” and its title track, which became a Top 10 single, catapulted the band beyond the psychedelic Bay Area scene, which had also given rise to contemporary acts like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
Sly and the Family Stone’s message always included acceptance and togetherness. “Different strokes for different folks,” the band sang on “Everyday People,” its first No. 1 record. “We got to live together.” At Woodstock, early on a Sunday morning, Mr. Stone insisted on a singalong, making sure to encourage those audience members who might have considered such a feel-good exercise “old-fashioned.”
The harmony didn’t last. As the band moved into a Beverly Hills mansion to live and record in the early 1970s, drug use turned the Family Stone dysfunctional. While the impactful songs were still there — “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” marked a darker, more experimental progression — Mr. Stone chronically missed concerts, burning bridges with promoters and industry executives, even while the band reached the heights of its popularity.
“Sometimes you don’t feel your soul at 7:30,” he told Rolling Stone after missing five straight shows in 1971.
The uneven albums to follow, including “Fresh” in 1973 and “Small Talk” in 1974, showed more cracks in the foundation. Increasingly reliant on stunts, Mr. Stone married Kathy Silva, an actress and the mother of his first child, Sylvester Jr., onstage ahead of a concert at Madison Square Garden in 1974. More than 20,000 people attended. The couple promptly divorced. And while the band’s singular sound continued to spiral into new, less radio-friendly directions, the original Family Stone lineup had wilted by 1975, with Mr. Stone increasingly recording solo.
He would never marry again. In addition to his son, he is survived by two daughters, Sylvette and Novena Carmel.
In the decades that followed, there were periodic attempts to keep the Family Stone name alive and once again put Sly at the front of the cultural pack; his 1979 album was titled “Back on the Right Track.” But his idiosyncrasies and his legal troubles, including arrests for cocaine possession, held him back.
While his second and final solo album, “I’m Back! Family & Friends,” from 2011, was billed as Mr. Stone’s first release in three decades, he dismissed it as mostly old hits remade with new guests. In 2019, he cut a deal with Michael Jackson’s publishing company, Mijac, which allowed him once again to collect payment from a minority interest in his music catalog.
For his part, Mr. Stone said he reveled in his break from fame, having executed a lifetime of musical breakthroughs in less than a decade. “If you think about it, what could I do after ‘Higher’ or ‘If You Want Me to Stay’?” he asked the journalist Michael Goldberg in the early 1980s. “I wanted to go fishing, man. Or drive my own car. For a long time, I didn’t understand anywhere but hotel rooms, the inside of airplanes, and trying to figure out a way that I didn’t come off wrong to human beings.”
Along with Questlove, Mr. Stone’s longtime friend and manager Arlene Hirschkowitz helped push a renaissance of recognition in recent years. “Even if I stayed out of the spotlight, people managed to locate me,” Mr. Stone wrote in his memoir.
He eventually moved into a new house, where he passed time watching television, visiting with family and listening to music. “I keep my ears open for songs that connect back to my music,” he wrote. “I feel proud when I hear it echoing in what other people make.” (As Mr. Clinton, who inducted Mr. Stone into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, once said, “Sly was like all the Beatles and all of Motown in one.”)
Asked in the final pages of his autobiography if there was one thing that people could take from his life, Mr. Stone replied, “Music, just music.”
He added: “It’s been that always from the start. I don’t want to get in people’s way, and I don’t want them to get in my way. I just want to play my songs.”
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
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