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.
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