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This week, pop music lost a pair of world builders: Sly Stone, who created visionary psychedelic rock, soul and pop that helped integrate popular music and captured harsh social realities under the guise of big-tent cheer; and Brian Wilson, the macher of the Beach Boys, whose ear for elevated harmony helped create some of the defining sounds of the 1960s. Both men were 82.
Wilson and Stone excelled in a moment in which the country was shaking off the staidness of the 1950s. Wilson’s work with the Beach Boys initially took on themes of American freedom before evolving into a more complex outfit on “Pet Sounds.” After that album, Wilson descended into mental instability, and remained largely out of view for decades. Stone had his commercial peak in the early 1970s with up-tempo funk numbers riven deep with social meaning. But he, too, lost his grip on his career, and was heard from only intermittently in subsequent years.
On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Stone’s improvisational genius, how he channeled his social moment through music, and what it took to turn the life stories of Stone and Wilson into books and film.
Guests:
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Ben Greenman, a longtime journalist who collaborated with Stone on “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir” and Wilson on “I Am Brian Wilson”
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Joseph Patel, a producer of the documentary “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)”
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Vernon Reid, a rock musician who was the founder of Living Colour and a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition
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The post Remembering Sly Stone and Brian Wilson appeared first on New York Times.
