He went from the towering highs of the 60s and 70s, where he changed the face of music, to the shambolic lows of a decades-long addiction. But interviewing the music genius over the years showed me a man who was awed, revered and strangely shy
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Sly Stone, pioneering funk and soul musician, dies aged 82
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A trailblazer and icon of hope and pain
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Sly Stone – a life in pictures
In 2013, there didn’t seem much point in requesting an interview with Sly Stone. It was 31 years since he had released an album of new material, Ain’t But the One Way, which he had abandoned midway through, vanishing completely from the studio and leaving the producer Stewart Levine to patch together what he could. It was longer still since he had produced any music that was even vaguely close to the standard he had set himself in the late 60s and early 70s – a six-year period bookended by the release of the groundbreaking single Dance to the Music in 1967 and his last truly classic album, Fresh, in 1973 – when he could justifiably have claimed to have changed the face of soul music. Sly and the Family Stone, the multiracial band he had formed in 1966, released a string of classic singles in that time: not just Dance to the Music, but also I Want to Take You Higher, Everyday People, Stand!, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Family Affair, If You Want Me to Stay.
By contrast, his most recent release, 2011’s I’m Back! Family and Friends, was a desultory collection of rerecordings of old hits, terrible remixes (a dubstep version of Family Affair!) and three new songs. Occasionally, something flickered in the original tracks, a faint trace of his former greatness, but they sounded suspiciously like unfinished demos. It felt of a piece with the handful of gigs he had played with various former members of the Family Stone a few years before: nights where something would spark fleetingly, mixed with disasters such as their 2010 appearance at Coachella, where Stone stopped and started songs at random and launched into a rant about his former manager that subsequently occasioned a lawsuit.
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