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he loves being inaccessible, he loves the idea that nobody knows who he is, where he is, or what he's doing and what his music is like. He loves being a legend." From a slightly different but equally amiable angle, George Clinton referred to his fellow performer and substance abuser as a "funny, witty, crazy, clever, halfass would-be pimp," and noted that "he had to be what he was: father, preacher, he had the best of all the things they needed to do what they did." Billy Preston, interviewed in his kitchen, revealed, "It's always a dream, to get this long keyboard that we both play. If you ever see Sly," he told the filmmakers, pounding his chest and smiling, "tell him that I love him from the heart!" Billy passed away in 2006.

As aired on the Showtime cable television network, The Skin I'm In appeared in a version significantly edited by network func tionaries, and was closer to the "sorry crawl" associated by Nina with Joel's oral history than to the sprightly, respectful time trot intended by her and Dennis. "When we gave it to Showtime, what we thought was one of the best things we had ever done got cut up into something else altogether, like a rag story from a tabloid," she laments. "It was really a cheapening of Sly: Sly the bad boy, Sly the drug addict, without really any human or social dimension. We were very, very, very shocked." So, yet again, were some of the interviewees. The filmmakers were put in the position of having to disseminate apologies and explanations, which were generally accepted, though the experience may have revived suspicions about interviews and media exposure. Sly himself has not registered any opinion about the Showtime documentary. About Joel's book and the print media in general, he proclaims, "I don't read all of that. I don't even know about Joel Selvin."

Keeping to his private music making, and far away from the public in an L.A. hillside home during the later '90s, Sly came to depend upon Mario Errico, the older brother of his former drummer Greg, as factotum and confidante. Mario, six years Greg's elder, got to know Sly while roaming San Francisco's North Beach nightlife in the mid-'60s. By the time the Family Stone, including Greg, had launched their performing career at Winchester Cathedral down the Peninsula, Mario was married and a father and thereby somewhat constrained in his night moves. Through several marriages, Mario held a variety of day jobs, while keeping contact with his brother and with Sly, and responding to occasional calls for help from the latter, until he became something of a livein helpmate in L.A. "There's lots of times I inspire him to do certain things, and it works," says Mario, "'cause he loves a lot of the things I love," including "music, motorcycles, and cars." The elder Errico was one of Sly's few acquaintances invited to extended stays in his abodes. Like many men in middle age, both Sly and Mario ultimately became restless to head down new roads in search of some of what had excited them long ago on the old ones.

As nostalgic pop music, by the turn of the twenty-first century, Sly & the Family Stone's oeuvre received ever-wider (and newly lucrative) exposure in TV shows, ads, and dozens of films. Crossover to the youngest generations was powered by the presence of the Family Stone on soundtracks of the popular Shrek movies, A Knight's Tale, and more recently the retro comedy SemiPro. Jerry reports that he and other band members have reaped particularly bountiful benefits from commercial mechanical royalties for repeated usage of their songs for selling Toyotas ("Everyday People") and Carnival Cruises ("Hot Fun in the Summertime"). With attribution but not compensation, pithy messages and catch phrases embedded within Sly's lyrics show up daily in media worldwide, even when the stories have nothing to do with music. Commenting on the problems and potential of humanity, Sly seems to have created his own gospel.

The band's irresistible integration of kaleidoscopic soul and get-down funk forged templates for pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop. Those in their