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Summary
Summary
Not many memoirs are generational events. But when Sly Stone, one of the few true musical geniuses of the last century, decides to finally tell his life story, it can't be called anything else.
As the front man for the sixties pop-rock-funk band Sly and the Family Stone, a songwriter who created some of the most memorable anthems of the 1960s and 1970s ("Everyday People," "Family Affair"), and a performer who electrified audiences at Woodstock and elsewhere, Sly Stone's influence on modern music and culture is indisputable. But as much as people know the music, the man remains a mystery. After a rapid rise to superstardom, Sly spent decades in the grips of addiction.
Now he is ready to relate the ups and downs and ins and outs of his amazing life in his memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) . The book moves from Sly's early career as a radio DJ and record producer through the dizzying heights of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s and into the darker, denser life (and music) of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles. Set on stages and in mansions, in the company of family and of other celebrities, it's a story about flawed humanity and flawless artistry.
Written with Ben Greenman, who has also worked on memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson, and in collaboration with Arlene Hirschkowitz, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a vivid, gripping, sometimes terrifying, and ultimately affirming tour through Sly's life and career. Like Sly, it's honest and playful, sharp and blunt, emotional and analytical, always moving and never standing still.
Author Notes
Sly Stone was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, in 1943. He had brief careers as a doo-wop singer, a radio DJ, and a record producer before founding and fronting Sly and the Family Stone. Mercurial, idiosyncratic, and inimitably brilliant, Sly Stone is a true American original. He lives in Los Angeles. This is his first book.
Ben Greenman is a New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker contributor who has written both fiction and nonfiction. His novels and short-story collections include The Slippage and Superbad ; he was Questlove's collaborator on Mo' Meta Blues and Something to Food About ; and he has written memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson. His writing has appeared in numerous publications.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Funk legend Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart revisits the ups and downs of his life in this electric tell-all. One of the most creative and controversial musicians of the 1970s, Sly went from singing gospel in his Vallejo, Calif., church ("My mother said that I really came alive in front of a crowd. More than that: If they didn't respond I would cry") to getting married on the main stage at Madison Square Garden in 1974. With a unique groove and swooning swagger, his band--Sly and the Family Stone, formed in 1966 and disbanded in 1983--revolutionized popular music and helped shape funk, soul, and R&B with such hits as "Everyday People," "Stand!" and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." Though the narrative sags when Sly rehashes variety show interviews verbatim, readers will be captivated by the candid renderings of his struggles with a range of mind-altering drugs across a 50-year period and his accounts of interactions with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Doris Day, Jimi Hendrix, and George Clinton. By the end, this chronicle of how a man can go from being "High on life. High on coke. High on everything" at Woodstock through living in his car "by choice" to now, in his 80s, keeping "my ears open for songs that connect back to my music" strikes a melancholy and poignant note. It's unadulterated, unapologetic Sly. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
In 1964, 21-year-old Sylvester Stewart of Vallejo, California talked his way into a job at San Francisco's KSOL radio and adopted the hipster alias Sly Stone. "Sly was strategic, slick," he explains in his peculiar memoir. "Stone was solid." You would have to say that most of his life has been neither sly nor stone. For a couple of years at the end of the 1960s, Sly and the Family Stone were the world's most transcendentally exciting band: black and white, male and female, a show-don't-tell advertisement for the ecstasy of unity. Look up their 1968 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show and see Sly and his sister Rose shimmy like the future through the very white, very square audience. Yet within three years that dream was dead. Stone flew so high and crashed so hard that he became a living metaphor for thwarted hopes and foreclosed utopias. Stone is 80 now, his health wrecked by decades of crack addiction. He hasn't released an album of new material since 1982; his comeback shows in the late 2000s ranged from disappointment to fiasco. So it's unclear how much of this book is his and how much is down to his seasoned co-author Ben Greenman. While it's conceivable that Stone insisted on quoting extensively from old album reviews and talk show appearances, and diligently ticking off every major news event of the late 1960s, it feels more like tactical padding. Stone's authentic voice flares up in his love of paradoxes (jazz "could be interesting even if it was boring") and wordplay: "Contradiction, diction, addiction." Perhaps due to his slippery conception of both time and memory, he is not a natural storyteller. His reminiscences of Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor and Stevie Wonder are strangely bland, bar his sharp assessment of Jimi Hendrix's aloof cool: "It frustrated me. It was like he didn't know what the world could do to him." Presumably Stone knew, but that was no protection. The young Sly Stone was an outrageous talent. By the time he formed Sly and the Family Stone in 1966, he had already been a doo-wop singer, a star DJ and a staff producer for Autumn Records. The group he designed embodied the 1960s' highest hopes. They were an everything band - soul, funk, jazz, rock - whose example psychedelicised Miles Davis and Motown. Stone himself was Prince before Prince. They wowed Woodstock. So what went wrong? Everything. Stone seems to endorse the conventional wisdom that the mind-warping effects of fame and addiction mirrored the national zeitgeist. His 1971 album There's a Riot Goin' On, framed as a salty response to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, was the sound of implosion. Notorious for blowing out shows (he blames shady promoters), he holed up in his Bel Air mansion, the paranoid patriarch of a disintegrating family. Bassist Larry Graham became convinced that Stone had taken out a contract on his life and took to checking beneath his car for bombs. Stone dismisses that idea but confirms one hair-raising rumour: his terrifying pitbull Gun did indeed kill his pet baboon and then have its way with the corpse. Alarmingly, Stone describes Gun as his "best friend". Stone's career didn't collapse overnight. There's a Riot Goin' On shot to No 1 and his next two albums went gold. His 1974 wedding to actor Kathy Silva at Madison Square Garden was a media sensation, covered at length in the New Yorker. But the albums became less and less impactful before fizzling out all together: fans of the movie Boogie Nights will find the book's 1980s section familiar. Stone complains that journalists were only interested in drugs and decline, but that's what happens when the music stops. A cleaned-up Stone signs off with some watery opinions about politics and music - a wan conclusion to a frustrating book. Did he really meet Frank Sinatra one night? Is it true that he once interrupted a party by waving a gun while freaked out on angel dust? He can't be sure. "The details in the stories people tell shift over time," he muses, "in their minds and in mine, in part or in whole, each time they're told." It might have been more rewarding to play with his mysteries and evasions instead of trying to wrestle his life into a conventional narrative: let Sly be sly.
Kirkus Review
An autobiography by the recording artist who scored numerous hits with his band, Sly and the Family Stone. Sylvester Stewart (b. 1943) was born in Texas but moved to California at an early age. In this memoir, written in collaboration with Greenman and Stone's manager, Arlene Hirschkowitz, Stone writes about his upbringing in a musical family, chronicling his experiences singing in church with his parents and siblings and teaching himself to play instruments. Bored in school, he began to focus entirely on music, writing songs and working as a session player with other musicians. Stone adopted his stage name while working as a DJ at a local radio station. "I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone," he writes. "I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right. I was already smoking marijuana. And there was a tension in the name. Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid." Along the way, he met various musicians who would become members of his band, which began playing gigs in 1966. At this point, too much of the text becomes a list of venues with vague comments on events the author remembers from several decades earlier. Stone offers interesting commentary on individual songs the band recorded, and his recollections of various offstage incidents offer insights into the era--especially given the band's racially mixed personnel. The author is candid about his full embrace of the rock-star lifestyle and time lost to jail or rehab. After the mid-1970s, when the hits were slower to appear and the original personnel began to fall away, the book becomes unfocused. Stone's voice isn't sufficiently compelling to compensate for the shift to largely non-musical material, too much of it finger-pointing at those he blames for his troubles. Questlove provides the foreword, and the book includes a discography. An inside look at an important band and its music, but it loses interest when the music is no longer central. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Funk pioneer Sly Stone famously retreated from public life, so his memoir is a gift to fans, a forthright telling of his extraordinary rise from musical prodigy to genre-bending superstar, followed by a decline wrought by the intense pressure of success and heavy drug use. The ascent of Sly and the Family Stone is joyous. Stone writes about the band's deliberate embodiment of integration, "White and Black together, male and female both, and women not just singing but playing instruments." After a string of unforgettable hits like "Dance to the Music" and "Everyday People," the band reaches new heights with an electrifying performance at Woodstock. In describing these heady years, Stone's language is vibrant, laced with playful rhymes and clever turns of phrase: "when a song is knocking at your head, you have to open as many doors as possible to try to let it out." He addresses the escalating drug-fueled chaos of his later life as best he can, with coauthor Greenman's expert backing, and the account of Stone's decline is painful, with arrests, unsuccessful rehabilitation, and creeping paranoia. But the book ends with 80-year-old Stone in a comfortable apartment, gold and platinum records on the wall, finally free of drugs and enjoying visits from his grandchildren. Thank You is as complicated and beautiful as Stone himself.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Not only does the great Sly Stone tell his story for the first time, but his memoir is also the first book in a new imprint directed by the multitalented, Academy Award--winning Questlove.
Library Journal Review
Stone created one of the most influential and revolutionary groups of the 1960s and '70s, Sly and the Family Stone. His story of music and fame is at the heart of this engaging memoir, coauthored with Ben Greenman, who also cowrote Questlove's Mo' Meta Blues and Brian Wilson's I Am Brian Wilson. Stone, born Sylvester Stewart in 1943 in Denton, TX, moved with his family to Vallejo, CA, in 1950. As a young adult, he became one of the most popular DJs and songwriters in the Bay Area. In 1966, he assembled a multiracial group of talented men and women musical artists to create Sly and the Family Stone. Their music incorporated funky beats, candid wisdom, and playful wordplay, all of which united masses of people and fans. This book is full of remembrances of songwriting, performances, and collaborations with other musicians such as Bobby Womack and George Clinton. The authors also offer much insight and do not shy away from stories about Stone's many years of excessive partying and drug abuse. VERDICT Stone's memoir will certainly appeal to curious readers and fans of this icon of rock and soul music.--Leah K. Huey
Table of Contents
| Foreword | ix |
| Prelude: Sly, Say Hi | 3 |
| Prologue: If I Want Me to Stay | 5 |
| Part 1 A Whole New Thing | |
| 1 Family Affair (1943-1955) | 13 |
| 2 Sing a Simple Song (1955-1963) | 19 |
| 3 You Can Make It If You Try (1964-1966) | 29 |
| 4 Underdog (1966-1967) | 41 |
| 5 Dance to the Music (1968) | 57 |
| 6 I Want to Take You Higher (1969) | 71 |
| Part 2 Listen to the Voices | |
| 7 Hot Fun in the Summertime (1969-1970) | 91 |
| 8 Everybody Is a Star (1970-1971) | 105 |
| 9 You Caught Me Smilin' (1971-1972) | 115 |
| 10 In Time (1972-1973) | 135 |
| 11 Say You Will (1974) | 145 |
| 12 Small Talk (1974) | 155 |
| Part 3 Remember Who You Are | |
| 13 Crossword Puzzle (1975-1979) | 171 |
| 14 Funk Gets Stronger (1980-1983) | 189 |
| 15 Crazay (1984-1986) | 201 |
| 16 Time to Modulate (1987-2001) | 219 |
| 17 Coming Back for More (2001-2011) | 239 |
| 18 If This Room Could Talk (2012-Present) | 257 |
| Postlude: Right Now! | 267 |
| Selected Discography | 269 |
| Acknowledgments | 277 |
| Index | 279 |
