I am no better and neither are you
We are the same whatever we do
You love me you hate me
You know me and then
Still can’t figure out the scene I’m in
I am everyday people
In the end, Sly was still Sly.
U2 and American Idol pop star Kelly Clarkson might have walked home with the hardware, but the buzz following the 48th Annual Grammys centered around a 2-minute appearance by the reclusive Sly Stone, two minutes more than we’ve seen of him in the past 13 years.
The architect of 70’s funk whose music helped inspire Miles Davis to go electric and George Clinton to land the Funkadelic mothership on Planet Earth graced us with his presence Wednesday night, doing it in typical Sly fashion. At the end of a star-studded tribute to his music (ostensibly a gimmick to draw him out of wherever he is – reports vary), Sly strutted out on stage at the behest of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, only to leave as quickly as he came.
At his apex, Sly took us higher than anybody. His Woodstock performance stands to this day as one of the seminal moments of the entire festival. He was one of the first artists with an integrated band and featuring women in lead roles. His calls for social justice and equality were perfect anthems for the turbulent 60s.
Sly and the Family Stone turned the music world upside down in 1967 when they released “Whole New Thing,” then followed it up with another critically acclaimed album, “Dance to the Music.” The masterful “Stand!” in 1969 featured songs such as “Stand!”, “I Wanna Take You Higher” and “Everyday People” that sound as fresh today as they did nearly 40 years ago. Things started deteriorating in the early-70s as Sly plunged into mountains of cocaine. Drummer Greg Errico and pioneering funk bassist Larry Graham abruptly quit during the recording of “There’s a Riot Going On,” leaving Sly to finish the album on his own. He laid down a lot of the bass and drums tracks himself, mostly alone in the studio in the dark of night. It became his only number one album and featured one of his most recognizable songs, the haunting and curious “Family Affair.”
After moving on with a new band, Sly’s “Fresh” signaled what seemed to be a continuation of his genius, but album sales slumped with “High On You” and “Small Talk.” By the late-70s, Sly was out of the game and had gone underground, paranoid and alone from years of drug abuse. He surfaced briefly in the early 80s on a George Clinton album, but a series of arrests in the 80s for cocaine possession drove him further underground.
His brother Freddie tried to sum it up in the early 80s when he told Spin magazine that Sly “didn’t want to be out in front anymore. The glamour didn’t mean anything anymore. He wanted to be normal.”
Sly’s reclusiveness has become legendary on the level of J.D. Salinger. He hasn’t granted an interview since 1987 and until Wednesday, he hadn’t been seen in public since 1993. One thinks he’s probably enjoying the irony of fame due to being invisible, but like everything else in trying to figure out what he’s thinking, it’s just a guess.
Wednesday night, artists like Fantasia, Maroon5, and the Black Eyed Peas’ Will.I.Am – none of them alive the last time the original Sly and the Family Stone played together – were onstage singing tributes to him, then watched with awe while the platinum-mohawked master, replete with a silver sequined jacket and a huge “SLY” belt buckle, sauntered uncomfortably to his huge center stage keyboard. Errico, Rusty Allen (filling for Graham who decided not to be a part of the show), and the rest of the band beamed as he sang a few lines of “I Wanna Take You Higher,” grabbed the microphone as if he were going to break out with something special, then saluted the audience and walked into the darkness offstage.
We should have known this was coming. After a bizarre rehearsal on Monday when a late-arriving Sly showed up wearing a camouflage rain slicker with the hood pulled up, Sly left before finishing the third run-through. An LA Times story quotes John Cossette, executive producer of the show, as saying afterwards “He’s not doing this, he’s not hiding out for 15 years to do what you just saw.
That’s exactly what he’s doing, my man. Why should we expect any different from a man who so vehemently refused to compromise that he decided to run away and hide?
We can take this one of two ways:
- That’s just Sly being Sly
- That’s just Sly being Sly
A one-word email I received this morning simply asked the question “Why???” Yeah, Sly … why? Why did you leave us hanging only to come back in 1993 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards, make a surprise drop-in on stage as the original Family Stone was accepting their induction, then say “see y’all soon” if you had no intentions of seeing us anytime in the near future, if at all? Rumors of a reunion were smoking at the time and everybody assumed there was fire.
Thirteen years later, word began to surface that Sly would show up at the Grammys as part of a celebration of his music. People said he’d been living in a homeless shelter, that he had a fly pad in Malibu, that he had erased 20 years worth of music he had on the shelf, that he’d been seen riding his motorcycle down Santa Monica Boulevard sporting a yellow mohawk. We didn’t know what we’d get at the Grammys, much less if we’d get anything at all. I wanted to see him jump into the audience, run up and down the aisle, stop and do the hambone and high-five Jamie Foxx. Personally, though, I would have been happy with him just walking slowly across the stage and flashing that famous Sly grin, which is pretty much what we got.
Even Maroon5’s Adam Levine, whose version of “Everyday People” was easily the best of any of the tributes, gushed at just seeing a glimpse of the man.
“Can you really argue with an unbelievable looking mohawk and a silver jacket?”
Agreed, Adam: can we blame him? I mean, here’s a man who is the poster boy for Just Say No. When my 10-year-old daughter (a huge Sly fan herself) calls me up after his frail, hunched over appearance and says “dad, is that what happens when you do all of those drugs?” I know that Brother Sly is having a positive effect on a new generation.
Sly, I want to thank you for being yourself. Your might be the result of paranoid, chemical and mental instability, but there are plenty of fossils from the 60s who are still hanging on trying to be rock stars (Mick Jagger, your pharmacist is on Line 2) and squeeze out another few dollars from a music audience who is numb from watching American Idol auditions. You never compromised who you were and from what we saw Wednesday night, you still won’t. In my mind, you took a peek at the shenanigans onstage with those kids screeching through your songs without even knowing the lyrics, knew that this wasn’t your bag and made a graceful exit.
Sly, I want you to come back. My selfish regret is that I didn’t record your performance thanks to technical glitches on my end (operator error gets you every time). However, I somehow think that I don’t want to see it again and instead just remember it for what it was. I think you’d like it that way, too.
If you come back, I know we’re going to get the real Sly because there is only one. I don’t want you to do it just for me or for the sake of doing it, though I want you to do it because it’s the right thing. If you do it, I want it to be a whole new thing.
Brother Sly, in the end, we all just want you to be you.
