Sly Stone Painted Black Music in Strokes of Revolution
Sly Stone’s artistic contributions continue reverberating through all of Black music.
Photo from Michael Ochs Archives, Getty Images. Photo illustration for Okayplayer.
It was Sly Stone’s mission to alter the pathways in our brains. His vision was of soulful, transcendental music that could lead us into new dimensions — not just those colorful, kaleidoscopic walkabouts spurred by good vibes and better substances, but higher planes where caste systems and division ceased to be. He viewed existence in all its strange, mutable glory as sacred and worthy of celebration, each life a fascinating amalgamation of cyclical chemical interactions and deep spiritual interrogation. Sly Stone didn’t just predict the future — he helped define it.
Born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, in 1943, Sly lived in service of music from his earliest days. After the family moved to Vallejo, California, a small, racially and culturally diverse city in the North Bay region of the Bay Area, Sly began singing in his family’s gospel chorus. He studied music theory, composition, and trumpet at Vallejo Junior College in the early ‘60s and, in 1961, at the tender age of 17, joined a Vallejo doo-wop group, The Viscaynes. Their single “Yellow Moon” was a modest hit, selling well enough on the West Coast to attract the attention of Autumn Records co-founder Tom Donahue, who signed Sly to the label as a producer and songwriter. Concurrently, Sly worked as a radio DJ, first at KSOL and later at KDIA, where he adopted the moniker Sly Stone. In 1966, Sly merged his band, Sly & the Stoners, with his younger brother Freddie’s band, Freddie & the Stone Souls, to form the multi-racial, mixed-gender supergroup Sly & the Family Stone. It would become one of the funkiest and most radical groups of the Vietnam War era, completely rewiring the way we listen to pop music.
There’s a lot to dissect in the San Francisco band’s unparalleled 1967-1973 run: the constantly shifting textures of 1968’s lysergic Life, the eccentric funk of 1973’s revolutionary hangover Fresh, the disgusted, world-weary commentary on the perennial 1971 protest classic There’s A Riot Going On!. Under Sly’s direction, the group learned to color outside the guidelines of traditional songwriting, turning soul and AM-radio pop into constantly molting, rainbow-hued forms. Even at its angriest, Sly & the Family Stone’s music imparted hope that despite the chaos of the times, a better world was possible — maybe even inevitable. "Just look at us as proof," they seemed to say, "we’re weaving a beautiful tapestry of humanity, no matter who tries to stop us." The tunes first made you move, then made you think, then, hopefully, made you act.
“Dance To The Music,” the group’s November 1967 Billboard-charting hit, was the world’s first taste of what Sly and his menagerie had to offer. They weren’t keen on recording the single, having been pushed by CBS Records’ Clive Davis to abandon the psychedelic sound of their 1967 debut, A Whole New Thing, for something a little more commercial-friendly. Sly and company reluctantly acquiesced, but found a middle ground, resulting in an incredibly catchy, undeniably strange pop masterpiece. After the horn-blaring, James Brown energy of its opening vamp, the song veers into a complex, polyphonic a capella scat, a thread Bobby McFerrin would pick up in the ‘80s. It’s ostensibly a party record, but each element feels pulled from a different genre: gospel organ, Motown drums, bluesy guitar riffs, pulsing one-note bassline. It sounded like the future, one that celebrated and drew from disparate origins to create something exquisite and new. “Listen to the voices,” Sly implores.
The group’s other most enduring hit, “Everyday People,” its first single to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, was released almost exactly a year after “Dance To The Music.” It was a simple but profound entreaty to society’s better angels, a call to step back and recognize that what we have in common is far more abundant than what divides us. Sly lays out his politics in uncomplicated terms: “I am no better, and neither are you,” he declares in the second verse. “We are the same, whatever we do.” The music mirrors the straightforwardness of the lyrics, stripping the Family Stone’s usual jubilant maximalism down to a choogling rhythm section, Stax Records horns, a gospel-tinged chorus, and the occasional acid-fried guitar lick. The bridges sound like schoolyard taunts, but instead of bullies throwing hands, it’s comrades offering hugs. “Everyday People” stayed at the top of the charts for four weeks, a testament to how much of the era’s public desperately hoped for common ground. Its message endures today, and once you get past the record’s ubiquity, you realize how remarkable it is, a composition that feels ecstatic and joyful, cramming an entire philosophy into less than three minutes.
The group’s lasting influence can’t be overstated. You can trace a direct line from Sly & the Family Stone’s adventurous, trippy view of funk and soul to D’Angelo’s luscious R&B experiments. Without their dismissal of boundaries and conventions, you wouldn’t have OutKast’s southernplayalistic excursions into hip-hop’s outer reaches, or Prince and the Revolution’s paisley-patterned pop. And the message behind their music endures to this day: We don’t have to look hard to see ourselves in everyone around us, and it’s more beautiful than we can imagine.
