• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 291 0

creative debt, acknowledged or not, include the Beastie Boys, Living Color, Lenny Kravitz, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose extravagantly thump in'-and-pluckin' bassist Flea has borrowed Larry's bass brilliance. The Chili Peppers ably covered Fresh's seductive "If You Want Me to Stay" in 1985, as did four-string luminary Victor Wooten on a live medley with "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" in 2001. Hip-hoppers Arrested Development fashioned "People Everyday" as a sharp rewrite of "Everyday People," doubling the take with a bonus "Metamorphosis Mix" on their 1992 album. With the advent of digital, snippets of Sly & the Family Stone's songs seemed to emerge everywhere as backbeats, riffs, and fanfares on the tracks of Everlast, Too Short, De La Soul, Fatboy Slim, Janet Jackson, the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and others. The enduring influence of Sly extended even further. In the sophisticated and demanding arena of jazz, from which he'd long ago attracted the innovative Miles Davis, Sly became the co-subject of a seminar conducted at New York's Symphony Space in 2000 by irrepressible jazz clarinetist Don Byron, titled Contrasting Brilliance: The Music of Henry Mancini and Sly Stone. Several years later, "Stand" (with plenty of punch but no exclamation point) was extended to become the longest track, at eleven minutes, on trumpeter Wallace Roney's simply-titled album Jazz. And Jamie Davis sang a suave "If You Want Me to Stay" on his 2008 big-band album Vibe Over Perfection, produced and with drumming by Greg Errico.

In 2001, over the waves in Holland, a pair of thirty-something Dutch twins, Arno and Edwin Konings, embarked on a massive long-term project (still in process) to annotate every detail of every year of Sly's life and every track he'd ever recorded. Their research made them aware of the primarily sensationalist approach of most journalists and other writers to the subject of Sly, "especially how he wasted his life," says Edwin. "I was stunned," he continues. "Here was one of the greatest groups ever, in our opinion, and everything that people talk about is the not showing up, the drugs, and they don't talk about the greatness of the music."

The Rhythm and Blues Foundation presented Sly & the Family Stone with its Pioneer Award in 2001, for "lifelong contributions [which] have been instrumental in the development of rhythm and blues music." Sly didn't join his bandmates at the ceremony in Philadelphia.

Love You for

Who You Are

2002-

There should be someplace that we sit down and say, "Hey, let's work it out, let's get on the good foot together. Let's let bygones be bygones."

-JAMES BROWN 1993 interview with Jeff Kaliss

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

-BONNIE RAITT

OST OF THE ORIGINAL MEMbers of the Family Stone convened in the back of a music store in Vallejo, California, in 2002, with the intention of recording again under the Family Stone name. Larry, who, with Greg, had been declared, in June of that year, one of the "25 Greatest Rhythm Sections of All Time" in Drumming magazine, expressed interest in a band reunion during the Rhythm and Blues Pioneer Award induction, but neither he nor Sly showed up in Vallejo, and Rustee Allen took over the bass duties. Activity extended into 2003 and to a studio in L.A., but Freddie declined to join a follow-up tour and funding dried up. The project was dropped, but not before the participants made a spirited appearance on funk scholar Rickey Vincent's annual Sly birthday radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley.

Eager to maintain momentum, Greg accepted an invitation from a couple of local promoters to assemble a band for the San Francisco Funk Festival in 2004. "We did it as the San Francisco Funk All-Stars," he says. "I called Vet [Stewart] and Tiny [Mouton, both from Little Sister], and I got Jerry and Cynthia, Fred Wesley on trombone.... My intentions were just to bring the music, the integrity and the spirit of it, on the stage. I wasn't trying