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By Root 332 0

pulse of protest against the old, the tired, and the just plain wrong. The groups booked throughout the weekend of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair had already helped set the accompaniment for the late sixties and the coming early seventies. The motley but consistently exciting and often rebellious acts included Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, and Carlos Santana. But Sly & the Family Stone stood out against the happy haze. They not only played to the times, but they actually looked like the ideals held dear by their fans: black and white, male and female stood side by side on the stage, arrayed in fantastic fashions and hairdos, rallying the crowd to get "higher." All their songs, in fact, were rhythmic and uplifting, bass and drums providing an irresistible foundation for the flights of horns, guitar, and keyboards, and for the catchy vocals of sexy sister Rose and her sibling Sly-part shaman, part preacher, part trickster, part soul brother. His lyrics raised messages that might serve as musical picket signs: up with love, down with racism, turn on, free your mind!

To seek out the story of this man and this band, we need to look beyond the brief, bright glow of Woodstock. We go back to Sly's beginnings, as Sylvester Stewart, in gospel music, and through the Family Stone's start as a rhythm-and-blues cover band in San Francisco. And we continue past Woodstock on to a confusing time with darker messages, influenced by drugs and the other indulgences of celebrity, by the dissolution of the band, and by Sly's subsequent struggle to keep his gifts and his person from being extinguished by his loneliness and bad judgment.

There's much mystery and apparent contradiction in this story, not all of which can be resolved within any literary discourse on it. Sly is a black man, whose scrutiny by and punishment under the law may have been prejudiced by his race. Yet he rarely testified to his ethnicity or to contemporary civil rights struggles. Sly formed one of rock 'n' roll's most vital and visible ensembles, and partnered them in a set of high-energy performances and in hits that continue to live in movie soundtracks and commercials. Yet Sly was party to the premature end of that ensemble, and opted instead for a solitary, synthesized sound and a succession of pickup groups.

And now, after decades in which Sly & the Family Stone's legacy helped fertilize the blossoming of rock, jazz, funk, rhythm and blues, and urban musical styles, the mystery persists. The sexagenarian Sly has outlived some of those rockers who shared and succumbed to the same bad habits, among them Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, as well as those like Marvin Gaye and John Lennon, who were victims of violence. But Sly has been slow to deploy the Family Stone in the sort of successful comeback enjoyed by such other veterans as the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Police. Sly's own appearances with several Family Stone spin-offs have usually fallen short of the standard set by the original band. Yet he keeps making music and maintaining, "It'll all come together, and there will be a lot of help."

This suggests the story is still playing out. Old hits and old crimes must be examined for what they suggest about the people directly responsible and about the times in which they occurred. But this book is also about relationships, a sort of extended "Family Affair," and about how the good and bad vibes of some of these relationships continue into the present alongside the music.

My own first contact with Sly & the Family Stone came over the radio during my first months covering topics like civil rights and antiwar protests as a student journalist at San Francisco State, in the year of Woodstock. I loved every one of their new, surprising singles that made it onto the airwaves over the next few years: "Dance to the Music," "Stand!," "Sing a Simple Song," "Everyday People," "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," "Family Affair," "If You Want Me to Stay," and so forth. Soon after the last big hit, like many fans, I lost track of