Sly Stone: The funk-rock visionary who became an addict and recluse

Sly Stone was a musical alchemist, combining soul, funk, and psychedelic rock with elements of gospel, jazz, and Latin music to create the new sound of the 1960s. With his prodigious Afro and platform boots—a look that one critic described as "the wildest pimp on the block"—he was an onstage dynamo as leader of the multiracial, mixed-gender band Sly and the Family Stone. From 1968 to 1971, the group scored hits with buoyant songs such as "Dance to the Music," "Everyday People," "Hot Fun in the Summertime," and "I Want to Take You Higher," and influenced artists such as Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Miles Davis. But Stone, an eccentric whose songs of uplift were tempered by darker themes of struggle and disillusionment, had a fall as steep as his rise. He descended into drug abuse and bankruptcy, spending most of his later years living in a camper van in Los Angeles. A New York Post reporter who located him in 2011 described him as paranoid and disheveled. "Tell everybody, please, to give me a job, play my music," he said then. "I'm tired of all this shit, man."

Raised in Vallejo, Calif., Sylvester Stewart was a musical prodigy who "started making music with his siblings as a child," said Rolling Stone. Their father, a janitor, was also a Pentecostal deacon, and the siblings sang gospel harmonies, recording their first single when Sylvester was 9. Adept at keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums, he studied music at a junior college and DJed at a local radio station under the name Sly Stone, breaking the R&B format by playing white acts like the Beatles along with soul and funk. He got a job as a staff producer for Autumn Records and "became a familiar voice in the Bay Area's music scene" before starting the band in 1966 that would become Sly and the Family Stone. They were men and women, black and white—and two were Sly's siblings.

Their 1967 debut album "vanished without a trace," said The Telegraph (U.K.). Prodded by his label to make something more commercial, Stone released Dance to the Music, an "irresistibly pro-pulsive funk collage" whose eponymous single shot to the Top 10. The band became known for high-octane live shows, and "a string of Top 20 successes followed." In 1969, they released a triumphant fourth album, said The Times (U.K.). "With its thrilling mix of rousing horns, acid-rock guitars, and funky bass lines," Stand! yielded four hits, including the smash "Everyday People." The band's reputation soared further after their "ecstatic" 4 a.m. Woodstock performance, widely hailed as a festival highlight.

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"Then it all started to unravel," said The Washington Post. Strung out on cocaine and PCP, Stone missed a third of his shows in 1970. They all moved into a Beverly Hills mansion where recording sessions became "nonstop parties," with a drug-addled Stone flanked by "mobsters doubling as bodyguards." Stone "obsessively" overdubbed and erased tracks, degrading the master tape—allegedly, he would often tell a girl she could record backing vocals and then, once he'd bedded her, tape over her track. The result, There's a Riot Goin' On (1971), had a "bleak, dissonant" sound, said the Los Angeles Times. It "was the last significant music Stone released." He grew more isolated and erratic, and in 1974 married his 19-year-old girlfriend onstage at Madison Square Garden—she promptly divorced him, claiming abuse. Stone alternated drug arrests with stints in rehab and disappeared from the public eye.

In later years he "performed intermittently, and often bizarrely," said The New York Times. He surfaced at the 2006 Grammys sporting a "towering bleach-blond Mohawk," playing keyboards on "I Want to Take You Higher" but wandering offstage mid-song. In a shambolic 2010 appearance at Coachella, he told the audience he'd been kidnapped and would sue his manager. But in recent years "his musical legacy was fortified" when Questlove featured him in a 2021 documentary; another film followed this year. Finally drug-free, Stone moved into a house, wrote a memoir, and passed the time listening to records. Health problems had stopped him from recording, he said in 2023. But they "haven't stopped me from hearing music."