Optimal Saint
10-06-2023, 08:13 AM
In 2019, Sly Stone’s doctors presented him with a stark ultimatum. An addiction to crack that stretched back decades had ravaged his body, potentially to the point of no return. “They told me that if I kept smoking, I would ruin my lungs or I might die,” he says today.
In fairness, this couldn’t have come as news. It was, he says, the fourth time in recent years he had been taken to hospital in an ambulance, suffering from breathing difficulties: the most recent had occurred a mere two weeks prior to his meeting with the doctors.
On each previous occasion, a doctor had presented him with the same ultimatum, which Stone had declined to believe, discharging himself from the hospital against their orders, going home and calling one of his many dealers, even if it took him an hour to struggle from his room to the hospital car park.
After all, he was the legendary Sly Stone, and at least part of his legend rested on his disinclination to do anything he didn’t want to do.
At the height of his success, in the years immediately after he more or less single-handedly changed the face of soul – the release of 1967’s Dance to the Music ushered in the psychedelic soul era, causing a raft of major Black artists to alter their approach in his wake and even had the mighty Motown scrambling to keep up with his innovations – he was almost as famous, or infamous, for his my-way-or-the-highway approach as he was for his music.
He would cancel gigs at the last moment if he didn’t think the equipment was up to standard or felt the vibe wasn’t right. He delivered his label not the album they had anticipated and had begun to advertise – called The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone – but 1971’s bleak, murky, experimental There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
This was music for an era when, as Stone put it “the possibility of possibility was leaking out and leaving America feeling drained”, its sound muffled and laden with hiss. Stone had reportedly recorded and re-recorded so many times the tape was nearly transparent.
Some people thought his behaviour was admirable, a Black artist demanding agency in an industry built on denying Black artists’ agency. Some people just thought he was unbearably arrogant. “I am who I am when I am it,” he shrugged at one Rolling Stone reporter.
In the long years after his star waned, he remained as unrepentant and intractable as ever. It didn’t matter how many lurid articles depicted him in all his ruin – a hopeless drug addict who hadn’t released an album of new material since 1982, when he allegedly vanished during the making of Ain’t But the One Way, leaving producer Stuart Levine to piece together the finished product as best he could – or how many loudly trumpeted comebacks never came to pass.
Stone continued doing exactly what he wanted to do. “I never lived a life I didn’t want to live,” he tells me today.
But on his fourth hospital visit, something clearly changed. Perhaps he had a vision of mortality linked to the number of friends and former associates who had died in the preceding years: Bobby Womack, his former managers David Kapralik and Ken Roberts, and Cynthia Robinson, the Family Stone’s trumpeter and mother of Stone’s daughter, Sylvyette Phunne.
Perhaps he was just so ill that the message got through. “I just decided,” he says. “From the way I was feeling, I took it serious this time. Once I decided, it just happened.”……
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/06/i-never-lived-a-life-i-didnt-want-to-live-sly-stone-on-addiction-ageing-and-changing-music-for-ever?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
In fairness, this couldn’t have come as news. It was, he says, the fourth time in recent years he had been taken to hospital in an ambulance, suffering from breathing difficulties: the most recent had occurred a mere two weeks prior to his meeting with the doctors.
On each previous occasion, a doctor had presented him with the same ultimatum, which Stone had declined to believe, discharging himself from the hospital against their orders, going home and calling one of his many dealers, even if it took him an hour to struggle from his room to the hospital car park.
After all, he was the legendary Sly Stone, and at least part of his legend rested on his disinclination to do anything he didn’t want to do.
At the height of his success, in the years immediately after he more or less single-handedly changed the face of soul – the release of 1967’s Dance to the Music ushered in the psychedelic soul era, causing a raft of major Black artists to alter their approach in his wake and even had the mighty Motown scrambling to keep up with his innovations – he was almost as famous, or infamous, for his my-way-or-the-highway approach as he was for his music.
He would cancel gigs at the last moment if he didn’t think the equipment was up to standard or felt the vibe wasn’t right. He delivered his label not the album they had anticipated and had begun to advertise – called The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone – but 1971’s bleak, murky, experimental There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
This was music for an era when, as Stone put it “the possibility of possibility was leaking out and leaving America feeling drained”, its sound muffled and laden with hiss. Stone had reportedly recorded and re-recorded so many times the tape was nearly transparent.
Some people thought his behaviour was admirable, a Black artist demanding agency in an industry built on denying Black artists’ agency. Some people just thought he was unbearably arrogant. “I am who I am when I am it,” he shrugged at one Rolling Stone reporter.
In the long years after his star waned, he remained as unrepentant and intractable as ever. It didn’t matter how many lurid articles depicted him in all his ruin – a hopeless drug addict who hadn’t released an album of new material since 1982, when he allegedly vanished during the making of Ain’t But the One Way, leaving producer Stuart Levine to piece together the finished product as best he could – or how many loudly trumpeted comebacks never came to pass.
Stone continued doing exactly what he wanted to do. “I never lived a life I didn’t want to live,” he tells me today.
But on his fourth hospital visit, something clearly changed. Perhaps he had a vision of mortality linked to the number of friends and former associates who had died in the preceding years: Bobby Womack, his former managers David Kapralik and Ken Roberts, and Cynthia Robinson, the Family Stone’s trumpeter and mother of Stone’s daughter, Sylvyette Phunne.
Perhaps he was just so ill that the message got through. “I just decided,” he says. “From the way I was feeling, I took it serious this time. Once I decided, it just happened.”……
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/06/i-never-lived-a-life-i-didnt-want-to-live-sly-stone-on-addiction-ageing-and-changing-music-for-ever?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other