Sly Stone’s testament

On Thursday, September 3, 1970, a few days after Sly and the Family Stone had appeared at the Isle of Wight festival, I had an appointment to interview him for the Melody Maker at the Londonderry House Hotel on Park Lane. He blew me out, and the appointment was rearranged.

I turned up again at the hotel promptly at 6.30pm on Monday, September 14. I was shown up to his suite and invited to take a seat in the drawing room, where I could wait for him to emerge. Then I was left alone.

The door to the bedroom was ajar. From inside I could hear the sounds of what sounded like two people. They were intimate sounds. Giggling. Gasping. Other noises. It was hard to know whether someone was putting on a show for my benefit, but I chose to assume it wasn’t an invitation to join in.

So I stayed in my chair and waited. The sounds continued. No one emerged. After what may have been 15 or 20 minutes, I gave up and left, without an interview. Two nights later I saw Sly and his band give a performance at the Lyceum that started late and lasted barely an hour but in the end comfortably overcame the handicap of a very poor PA system.

What had been going on? There’s a clue in Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Sly’s new autobiography. Writing about that visit to London, he mentions meeting up with Ginger Baker. “Ginger showed off some high-quality coke, pharmaceutical grade, and then he mentioned a big party that night where Jimi Hendrix would be. He had an idea of sharing the coke with Jimi, only the best for the best. I was eager to see Jimi. We were scheduled to have a jam session the night before, or maybe that night, but Jimi had gone to Ronnie Scott’s instead to jam with Eric Burdon and War. And Jimi wasn’t at the party either. ‘We’ll catch him tomorrow,’ someone said. As it turns out, there was no tomorrow, at least for Jimi.”

Most drug-related deaths of stars who came up in the ’60s happened fast, their lives ending while they were still shockingly young. By contrast, Sly’s happened in slow motion, killing first his concentration and then his creativity, and of course it isn’t over yet.

Now he’s 80, apparently freed from his long-term crack addiction and seemingly in good enough shape to have given a co-writer, Ben Greenman, the material from which to fashion a ghosted autobiography. I read it without, I’m afraid, much enthusiasm. You may feel differently about the blurred, indistinct story of a man whose most characteristic utterance, at least as far as the specificity of the narrative is concerned, is “I heard about it later, but it was too late.”

He was, of course, a genius. If you were around in 1967, you’ll know that “Dance to the Music” proposed nothing less than a new kind of pop music. The only other record of that year which brought black and white into such fruitful creative miscegenation was “Purple Haze”. Out of those two records came an entire universe. With another hit single, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”, Sly kicked funk up a gear. And There’s a Riot Goin’ On, in all its self-indulgence, is one of the key documents of the early ’70s. Nothing quite chills the blood like that rusted-out voice opening a No. 1 single with “One child grows up to be / Somebody that just loves to learn / Another child grows up to be / Somebody you’d just love to burn.”

So it made me sad to read this book, a chronicle of waste and unreliability. What might Sly Stone have achieved, had he grow out of his addictions much earlier in the way that, say, John Coltrane did? Some will respond that what he achieved was enough, that he could only do those things by being himself, and maybe that’s right. Many of those people will no doubt enjoy what he has to say, and I wouldn’t want to put them off.

His ghostwriter has clearly mined the cuttings file in order to provide the detail. That makes reading it an uneven experience, as passages of woozy semi-recall concerning family feuds or disputes with managers and record companies are suddenly interrupted by something curiously precise, whose source might be a TV interview preserved on YouTube. Sadly, my experience of failing to interview him means that I can’t tell you whether Greenman has found a way, as a good ghost should, to translate Sly’s authentic voice on to the page. But in the end I didn’t feel I’d been told anything surprising. It’s the book of the guy who, one September evening in 1970, wouldn’t come out of his bedroom.

* Sly Stone’s Thank You (Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin) is published in the UK by White Rabbit on 17 October.