By David Fear. You know every one of these tracks. Trust us. Sly and the Family Stone were a multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi-genre group when such concepts still seemed impossibly utopian on both the charts and the streets, led by a songwriter who deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as Mozart, Miles and McCartney.
He was born Sylvester Stewart, adopted the name Sly Stone , revolutionized music several times over, and eventually became defined more by his absences than his stage presence. Sly Lives! Should you somehow still doubt that they were groundbreaking, a dozen or so talking heads can attest in detail to the exact acres of ground they broke. Sly the Slippery Recluse, known for blowing off gigs and and cracked public appearances, gets more ink than the six years between and Sly the Once-in-a-Generation Artist too often gets short shrift.
This doc sets the scales straight. It favors the albums themselves over the criminal record. Having reached the sort of popularity that goes beyond crossover status and into the realm of the iconic, Stone is peaking when he decides to move operations from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. Which gives Questlove the opportunity to pose a question.
Stone was the first artist in his estimation to suffer the burden of having to do what he did while carrying a lot of baggage, at a level virtually unprecedented from other Black musicians of the day. Using that as a starting point, how does one define Black genius? The musical lessons they and too many others to count took from Sly are self-evident — more than one person echoes the sentiment that with no Sly and the Family Stone, there is no Prince and the Revolution.
How did him becoming Black Elvis lead the way for others to walk their own pitfall-laden path? The one that arguably sticks with you the most, however, belongs to Family Stone saxophonist Jerry Martini. It nearly killed him.
