There are any number of performers who, historically, didn’t mind keeping an audience waiting. At the top of the list are George Jones (“No-Show Jones”), Axl Rose (“Insufferable Douche Bag”) and, in a league of his own, Sly Stone, who, during his heyday, combined the worst habits of Jones and Rose, either declining to show up at the gig or, in the best of all possible worlds, starting the concert several hours late.
Anyone seeking explanations or answers for Stone’s perpetual tardiness will not find them in his recent autobiography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) (mega sic) (320 pp., $30, AUWA Books). Though he acknowledges many failures, among them missing gigs, Stone is vague on this matter, as he is vague on just about everything in the book.
Co-author Ben Greenman – an avowed Stone fan – must have been seething during the interviews that provided content for the volume. Greenman includes brief transcripts to introduce and conclude the book, possibly so that the reader can feel his pain. An example:
Greenman: So are you ready to talk?
Stone: About?
Greenman: About the past.
Stone: (Shakes head.)
Greenman: What do you feel like talking about? What don’t you feel like talking about?
Stone: Not anything. Not everything. Not yet.
Greenman: Okay, so we’ll come back. All right. We’re going to come back.
If nothing else, Greenman does seem to capture Stone’s distinctive manner of speaking, which includes a generous amount of obfuscation, avoidance and evasion. Stone is also fond of rhymes and homonyms, along with pretzel logic like, “A drug is a substance and so the question has substance. A drug can be a temporary escape, so I will temporarily escape the question.”
It is undeniable that Stone is one of the most original musicians in the past 60 years. He profoundly influenced both funk and rap. His band (the Family Stone) had the distinction of including not only members of different ethnicities, but both male and female musicians as well.
And there was no one better than Stone when it came to laying down a deep groove and developing it into a hit song. “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Everyday People,” “If You Want Me to Stay” and others defined a musical epoch and are still played on a regular basis. Audiences today still enjoy his show-stealing performance in the Woodstock film.
But, like so many talented musicians before and after him, Stone was eventually ruled by the monkey on his back. As far as subject matter goes, drugs may have an edge over music in Thank You. In one story, Stone claims that he got out of a crack possession charge by saying that there was no way he was holding, because he was on his way to buy drugs when he was arrested.
Many musicians and celebrities – among them Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Dick Cavett, Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton and Michael Jackson – are mentioned, but we never get to know much about Stone’s relationships with them beyond the brief encounters that he describes. In some cases, Stone raises the reader’s hopes and then delivers no payoff. “We [Stone and Hendrix] were scheduled to have a jam session the night before, or maybe that night,” Stones says, “but Jimi had gone to Ronnie Scott’s to jam with Eric Burdon and War.”
One exception is George Clinton (Stone describes him as “a human cartoon”), founder of Parliament-Funkadelic and a pioneer of funk. Clinton had enormous respect for Stone and frequently cited him as influence. Not surprisingly, the two musicians eventually got together, hanging out and recording at Clinton’s farm in Michigan. “We went fishing, made music, and got high,” Stone writes, “not always in that order.”
Houston enters the narrative during Stone’s tales of his time with Clinton. On Halloween in 1976, Clinton and P-Funk played at the Summit, with Stone opening the concert and later joining the band onstage. The show was released on DVD over 30 years later as George Clinton: The Mothership Connection, and it is worth checking out.
The typical story arc of a show biz autobiography (success / failure / redemption) is not present here. While the book’s early chapters present a reasonably detailed account of Stone’s formative years and his entry into the music business, the rest of it reads as a sad description of one fuck up after another. And even when Stone gets clean after his fourth trip to rehab, the story sounds hollow, and the reader wonders when Stone is going to run out and score again.
Stone didn’t just march to a different drum; it was more like a whole marching band. Tragically, his uniqueness did not serve him well, at least in the long run. And unfortunately, Thank You does not provide much in the way of insight into one of the most influential artists of the ’60s and ‘70s. As is the case with so much surrounding Stone, it only represents a missed opportunity.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
