I don’t know that I’ve ever done this before, copying a post from Facebook to here. But this really seemed to strike a chord with people.
I tweaked it just a hair, because more room, and never give me more room! But, mostly, no.
Oh, I did, I do, love me some Sly Stone.
On the road between San Antonio and Corpus Christi out on the coast, there of the hermit crabs in rusty trash cans and the now-mythic Custard’s Last Stand, early 1970s, my classical music-minded career-Army dad would turn the radio to AM hits, to appease my teen sisters, certainly not for himself, and me then 6, 7, 8 years old in that damnable Buick station wagon, certain songs, certain artists, they just latched into me.
Steely Dan. CSN. Blood, Sweat and Tears. Joni Mitchell. The Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose. Free. Arlo Guthrie. Don McLean. The Isleys. CCR. Golden Earring. The Guess Who. The post-blues Stones. Cat Stevens. Tull. The psychedelic-period Temps. Simon, with and without Garfunkel. War. Badfinger. Argent.
And rising like cream to the top, Sly and the Family Stone.
Man that shit was good to my young soul.
Sly’s rich growl, and all those varied, fabulous voices jumping in; the fucking stellar song structures; trumpeter Cynthia Robinson shouting, in her mouse-that-roared voice, the very concept of hypeman Flava Flav into existence; Larry Graham’s pulsing bottom end, the very groundwork for what would become funk; the power-to-the-people vibes.
All I knew back then was wow.
“Sly,” real name Sylvester Stewart “Stone,” had no easy road through life. He struggled with some true devil shit, from repeated homelessness to a deep depression, the latter something I only later came to understand, when my own mind took its long midnight roads south.
Yet the music. The music is still fucking amazing, listening to it right this very now, like nothing ever from any other band.
It’s crazy to me how after all these years, that those few hours of travel both ways across south Texas, out of just a few select summers in my young life, clearly did so much to chart my direction forward, to shape my worldview toward compassion and inclusivity. And no tiny bit of that, no exaggeration, was Sly Stone.
Thanks, man. You gave my own life so very much along your own difficult way.
