The story of Sly and the Family Stone

Gospel roots and a Bay Area DJ

Sly Stone was born Sylvester Stewart on the fifteenth of March 1943 in Denton, Texas, the second of five children of K.C. and Alpha Stewart. His parents belonged to the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal church where music was part of worship, and K.C. was a deacon who ran a janitorial business. The family settled in Vallejo, a working town north of San Francisco, and the house was full of instruments. The children sang gospel together as the Stewart Four, traveling from church to church across California, and they even cut a local seventy eight record. Sly later said that as a boy he assumed everybody in the world played music. His parents' marriage lasted sixty nine years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sylvester was a prodigy. By seven he was at home on keyboards, and by eleven he could handle guitar, bass and drums as well. His famous nickname came from a mistake. A fifth grade classmate wrote his name on the board as Slyvester, and it stuck for life. In high school he sang in a doo wop group called the Viscaynes, where he and his Filipino friend Frank Arellano were the only members who were not white, and he cut a few solo singles under the name Danny Stewart. After school he studied music theory and composition at the local junior college in Vallejo, sharpening the arranging skills that would later make his records sound so crowded and so clear at the same time.[1] [2] [3]

In 1964 he talked his way onto the air at KSOL, a San Francisco soul station, hosting an evening show from seven until midnight. The station wanted to call him Sly Sloan. He hated it and simply introduced himself as Sly Stone instead. On a black radio station he played the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan next to Ray Charles, and he dropped silly sound effects into the commercials to keep himself entertained. He later worked at KDIA in Oakland too. Sly said radio taught him how much he disliked the idea of separate black radio, because he believed everybody should be part of everything. In those days he drove a Jaguar XKE painted bright purple.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At the same time Sly was the staff producer at Autumn Records, the label run by San Francisco disc jockeys Tom Donahue and Bobby Mitchell. In 1964 he wrote and produced the dance craze single C'mon and Swim for Bobby Freeman, and it reached number five in America. He produced the folk rock of the Beau Brummels, and he worked with the Great Society, the band Grace Slick sang in before Jefferson Airplane, on their original version of Somebody to Love. He even produced a single by the Psyrcle, a group that later evolved into Neil Young's backing band Crazy Horse. Autumn ran out of money in 1966, and Sly left having learned how easily musicians got ripped off.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A whole new thing

In 1966 Sly was leading a club band called Sly and the Stoners, with a trumpet player named Cynthia Robinson. His younger brother Freddie had his own group, Freddie and the Stone Souls, with drummer Greg Errico. The saxophonist Jerry Martini, who had played with Sly in the Bay Area band Joe Piazza and the Continentals and dropped by the radio station every week, kept pushing him to start something new. In November 1966 the two bands merged. Since both brothers played guitar, Sly handed that job to Freddie and taught himself organ. For bass he recruited Cynthia's cousin Larry Graham, who had been playing in a duo with his mother. They started out as Sly Brothers and Sisters, then became Sly and the Family Stone after their first gig at the Winchester Cathedral club in Redwood City.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band was built on purpose. Larry Graham later said it was very deliberate, with men and women, different races, everyone dressing differently. Errico and Martini were white, at a time when mixed bands were almost unknown, and Cynthia Robinson and later Rose Stone played instruments on stage instead of just singing. Sly styled everyone himself. Martini remembered Sly spotting a cowhide rug, cutting a hole in it and telling him it was his new outfit. Clive Davis, the head of CBS Records, once told Sly over lunch that the costumes might put off serious radio stations. Sly answered that the look was part of what he was doing. Davis later said the lesson he learned was to let a pathfinder's genius unfold.[1] [2] [3]

Sly's little sister Vaetta, known as Vet, sang in a teenage gospel group called the Heavenly Tones with her friends Mary McCreary and Elva Mouton. Sly recruited them straight out of high school as the band's backing singers, renamed Little Sister. A fourth Heavenly Tone, Tramaine Hawkins, turned down the tour because she wanted to finish school, and later became a gospel star. After a show at the Winchester Cathedral, the CBS executive David Kapralik signed the band to Epic Records. Their debut, A Whole New Thing, came out in 1967. It was recorded live in the studio and fellow musicians like Tony Bennett and Mose Allison loved it, but it failed to chart and the band was stuck playing small clubs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Epic wanted something simpler. Pushed by Clive Davis and David Kapralik, Sly came back with Dance to the Music, and the band hated it. Jerry Martini called it glorified Motown beats and an unhip thing to do. Questlove later argued that Sly saw it as his sellout song and made it almost sarcastically, yet it pulled everyone in. Released in November 1967, it became their first hit, reaching number eight in America and the top ten in Britain. It introduced the band's trick of four lead voices, Sly, Freddie, Larry and newcomer Rose, trading lines. Rose had joined just before its release, after first refusing to give up her steady job at a local record store.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Stand! and the summer of 1969

The third album, Life, came out in September 1968 and sold poorly, though it produced minor hits in its title song and M'Lady. That same month the band made its first overseas trip, to England, but it was cut short when Larry Graham was arrested for marijuana possession and the band fell out with promoters. Then, at the end of 1968, came Everyday People, a gentle plea against prejudice of every kind. It gave the language a catchphrase that later named the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, and it sat at number one for four weeks from the ninth of February 1969. Graham has said it was the first record with his slap bass. Sly wrote that he hit the piano so hard on the session that he broke a finger.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album Stand! followed on the third of May 1969. Much of it was cut at Pacific High Recording in San Francisco, and the band's photographer Stephen Paley remembered Sly working with total focus, constantly checking Walter Piston's textbook on orchestration. When Sly played an early pressing of the title song in a San Francisco club and the reaction was only polite, he went back and added a fiery gospel ending, played mostly by session musicians. The record also held a blunt song that turned racial slurs back on both sides, and Sex Machine, a thirteen minute jam. Stand! stayed on the chart for nearly two years, sold more than three million copies, and in 2015 joined the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty ninth of June 1969 the band headlined a free Sunday concert at Mount Morris Park in Harlem, part of the Harlem Cultural Festival that people came to call Black Woodstock. The New York police declined to provide security for their show, so members of the Black Panther Party did it instead. The festival was filmed on videotape by Hal Tulchin, but the tapes sat in a basement for about fifty years. Questlove finally turned them into the documentary Summer of Soul, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2022, and the Family Stone's set became one of its highlights, introducing the band to a new generation.[1] [2] [3]

Seven weeks later came Woodstock. The Family Stone went on in the early hours of the seventeenth of August 1969, after Janis Joplin and before the Who. They fought equipment problems, then took over the field, leading a crowd of hundreds of thousands in a call and response chant during I Want to Take You Higher at around three in the morning. It became one of the high points of the Woodstock film. That song had grown out of an earlier Sly tune called Advice, written for Billy Preston in 1966. Released the same month, Hot Fun in the Summertime climbed to number two, peaking in October after summer was over, held off the top only by the Temptations.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Los Angeles, guns and cocaine

In the autumn of 1969 Sly moved to Los Angeles, and nearly everyone around him dates the trouble from there. He and several bandmates became heavy users of cocaine and PCP, and Sly was said to carry a violin case full of drugs wherever he went. Jerry Martini described the scene as havoc, gangster like and dangerous. Political pressure arrived too. The band's manager David Kapralik, who was Jewish, said Sly's sister Loretta and the Black Panther Party urged Sly to replace him with a black manager, and the Los Angeles Times reported that the Panthers also lobbied Sly to replace the band's two white members. Sly kept a pit bull named Gun, which became a fixture of those years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The only new music for almost two years was one single, released in December 1969. It was Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin, backed with Everybody Is a Star. The strange title was a deliberate phonetic spelling of thank you for letting me be myself again, and years later Sly joked that the spelling was the one thing different about it. Behind the party groove the words were bitter, and Larry Graham's thumping slap bass pointed straight at seventies funk. It reached number one on the fourteenth of February 1970 and stayed two weeks. With nothing else coming, Epic released a Greatest Hits album that November. It reached number two and eventually sold more than five million copies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Sly's reliability collapsed in 1970. Of eighty concerts booked that year, twenty six were cancelled, and many others started hours late. Crowds rioted when he failed to show or walked off early. On the twenty seventh of July 1970 a free show in Chicago's Grant Park turned into a riot before the band even played, and more than a hundred people were hurt, police officers among them. Sly also made two famously spaced out appearances on Dick Cavett's talk show. He hired his street friends Hamp Banks, known as Bubba, and J.B. Brown as personal managers, and they brought in gangsters, Edward Elliott, called Eddie Chin, and a Mafia figure named J.R. Valtrano, as bodyguards against people Sly now saw as enemies, including his own band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There were still flashes of brilliance behind the scenes. With Kapralik, Sly ran a production company and a small label called Stone Flower, distributed by Atlantic. He wrote, produced and played on its singles, and he gave Little Sister two top forty hits of their own, You're the One and Somebody's Watching You. The second is often named as the first top forty single built on a drum machine. Sly soon lost interest and the label closed in 1971. That same year Greg Errico became the first original member to quit. He was tired of being summoned to Los Angeles for sessions and then left waiting indefinitely. Gerry Gibson took over the drums for about a year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There's a Riot Goin' On

The next album was recorded through 1970 and 1971, partly at the Record Plant in Sausalito and partly at home. Sly was renting a Bel Air mansion owned by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, once the home of the film star Jeanette MacDonald, and Phillips later complained about the guns and big dogs on the property. Sly also worked in a Winnebago rigged with recording gear, and often sang lying in bed into a wireless microphone. Band members no longer played together but overdubbed one at a time, joined by guests such as Billy Preston, Ike Turner and Bobby Womack. Womack later said everyone had pistols and he became convinced he would be killed or raided.[1] [2] [3]

Without a regular drummer, Sly leaned on a cheap rhythm box, the Maestro Rhythm King, the kind of machine meant for a lounge organist. He did not like its preset sounds, so he started patterns on unusual beats and layered drum sounds over it by hand. He bounced and overdubbed the same tapes so many times that the sound turned murky and hissy. The working title had been Africa Talks to You, but it changed after Marvin Gaye released What's Going On. The cover showed a redesigned American flag in red, white and black, with suns instead of stars. Sly explained that black stood for the absence of color, white for all colors, and red for the blood everyone shares.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Epic had waited so long that Clive Davis froze Sly's royalties to hurry him up, and he was shocked when the tapes finally arrived in the autumn of 1971. The lead single, Family Affair, came out on the sixth of November. It was sung low and slow by Sly with his sister Rose, over Billy Preston's electric piano and a drum machine made to pulse like a heartbeat. It went to number one for three weeks and stayed at the top of the rhythm and blues chart for five. In his memoir Sly said it was inspired less by his own family than by his future wife Kathy Silva and her sister. The album followed in November and topped the Billboard album chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Critics were split. The Los Angeles Times said there was little on it worth your attention, while Greil Marcus called it Muzak with its finger on the trigger. Robert Christgau heard the bitterest ghetto pessimism and a whole greater than its parts. Over the decades it came to be seen as one of the great albums of the century, ranked eighty second in Rolling Stone's 2020 list and fourth best of the seventies by Pitchfork. Its home studio method and drum machine helped shape funk, jazz funk and hip hop. Sly himself shrugged at all the analysis. In 2007 he said he had never thought of it as disillusionment, and that it was political, probably, but he did not mean it to be.[1] [2] [3]

Fresh sounds and a wedding at the Garden

The band kept shrinking. In early 1972, when Jerry Martini asked questions about his share of the money, Sly hired saxophonist Pat Rizzo as a possible replacement, though both ended up staying and became friends. The worst rupture was with Larry Graham. After a concert that year a brawl broke out between the two men's entourages. Bubba Banks and Eddie Chin had heard a rumor that Graham had hired a hit man to kill Sly, and they attacked Graham's associates. Graham and his wife escaped by climbing out of a hotel window, and Pat Rizzo drove them to safety. Graham quit on the spot. Bobby Womack filled in briefly before nineteen year old Rustee Allen, Graham's own pick as successor, took over bass.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With a new rhythm section, Sly released Fresh in June 1973. Andy Newmark, recommended by Pat Rizzo, played drums, and Sly later called him the best drummer he ever worked with. The sound was sparer and bouncier than Riot, with vocals often sped up on tape, and Richard Avedon shot the cover. The hit was If You Want Me to Stay, which reached number twelve and grew out of an apology Sly wrote to Kathy Silva after a fight. Rose sang a slow gospel version of Doris Day's Que Sera, Sera, the only cover on an original Family Stone album. Sly had met Day through her son, the producer Terry Melcher, and the two of them once sang that song together at her piano.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fresh sold less than Riot but its influence ran deep. Miles Davis reportedly made his band listen to its opening track, In Time, over and over for half an hour, and Brian Eno later said the album marked the moment when bass drum and bass guitar became the most important instruments in a mix. On the road the chaos continued. In October 1973 a young reggae group, Bob Marley and the Wailers, was booked to open seventeen American dates for Sly. They played only four before being dropped because they did not connect with his audience, and they were left stranded in Las Vegas. Within a decade Marley would be an international star.[1] [2] [3]

On the fifth of June 1974 Sly married Kathy Silva, a young woman from Hawaii, on stage at a sold out Madison Square Garden before about twenty thousand fans. Their son Sylvester Junior had been born the year before. Halston designed the clothes, Soul Train host Don Cornelius was master of ceremonies, and tickets cost eight dollars and fifty cents for the wedding and the concert. Plans for doves were dropped after animal welfare objections, and the bishop accidentally called the bride Cynthia. The reception was held at the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria, and the new magazine People put Sly's name on its cover. Silva filed for divorce that October, only months later.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last album by the original core, Small Talk, came out in 1974 with a cover photo of Sly, Kathy and the baby. It was mellower, with strings and a violinist, Sid Page, credited as a band member, and studio chatter left between songs. Time for Livin' became the band's final top forty single, and Loose Booty stalled at number eighty four. Reviews were poor, and Robert Christgau wrote that it sounded as if Sly's sense of rhythm had abandoned him. Later listeners have been kinder, and NPR singled out the drowsy Wishful Thinkin' as proof he still had moments of brilliance. But sales were weak, and bookings were drying up because promoters feared he would not show.[1] [2] [3]

The band falls apart

In January 1975 the band booked itself into Radio City Music Hall in New York. Only about one eighth of the seats were filled, and the musicians had to scrape together money to get home. That was the end of Sly and the Family Stone as a real band. Bubba Banks, by then Rose's husband, pulled her out, and she made a solo album as Rose Banks in 1976. Freddie joined Larry Graham's Graham Central Station for a time. Little Sister broke up, and Mary McCreary married Leon Russell and recorded with him. Andy Newmark became one of the busiest session drummers in the world, later playing on John Lennon's final album, Double Fantasy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Sly kept going under the old name, but the records were essentially solo projects. High on You came out in 1975 under his own name, and its single I Get High on You reached number three on the rhythm and blues chart. Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back followed in 1976 with Cynthia Robinson as the only original member. His backing singers Dawn Silva and Lynn Mabry, Lynn being his cousin, left him during a joint tour in 1976 and joined George Clinton, who turned them into the Brides of Funkenstein. Epic released Sly from his contract in 1977 and later put out a disco remix album of his hits. He signed with Warner Brothers and made Back on the Right Track in 1979, with Freddie and Rose helping out.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

His private life was darker still. Kathy Silva later told People magazine that he beat her, held her captive and pressured her into sex with others, and that she did not want that world of drugs and weirdness. They kept separating and reuniting until 1976, when his dog mauled their two year old son, and she left for good. In December 1975 Cynthia Robinson gave birth to Sly's daughter Sylvyette, who later went by Phunne. Despite everything, Cynthia stayed loyal, the only original member to keep working with him after the band fell apart. She later insisted that he was sometimes late only because he had gone back for bandmates who had missed their ride.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

George Clinton, one of his biggest disciples, took Sly under his wing around 1980. Sly toured with Funkadelic and sang on their 1981 album The Electric Spanking of War Babies, whose sleeve demanded freedom for Sly after the two men were busted together. Their joint album stalled when Clinton left Warner Brothers and Sly disappeared into seclusion, and producer Stewart Levine finished it alone as Ain't but the One Way in 1982. In June 1983 Sly was arrested for cocaine possession in Fort Myers, Florida, and sent to court ordered rehab. In 1984, Vanity Fair reported, he sold his publishing rights to Michael Jackson's company Mijac. His last new recording of the decade was a 1986 duet with Jesse Johnson called Crazay.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The arrests kept coming. Sly was convicted of cocaine possession in 1987, and after that he stopped releasing music of his own. In 1989 FBI agents arrested him on a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, and Rolling Stone reported that he spent fourteen months in a rehab center starting that year. In the same year he signed a management deal with Jerry Goldstein, a former hitmaker with the Strangeloves and producer of the band War, and assigned his songwriting royalties to their new company, Even Street Productions, in exchange for half ownership. That arrangement would haunt him for the rest of his life. By the end of the eighties the adjective reclusive had become permanently attached to his name.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The vanishing act

In 1993 Sly and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The original members stood at the podium without him. Then, just as they began to accept, Sly suddenly appeared, said a few words ending with see you soon, and vanished again, barely acknowledging his siblings. It was his last major public appearance for thirteen years. In 1995 a former landlord accused him of trashing a Beverly Hills mansion, with gold paint smeared in the bathrooms and broken windows. His son said nobody had damaged it on purpose. In 1996 Sly finished a forty five day stay in rehab, and his son said his father had problems because he had never been able to grow up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His family never stopped trying. In 2003 Freddie led a reunion of the old band in the back room of a music store in Vallejo, with a keyboard left running in case Sly showed up. He did not, and it fizzled. Their father K.C. died in 2001 and their mother Alpha in 2003, and Vet Stone said both of them, separately, told her with their last words to go get her brother. She started driving to Los Angeles to see him, and when he asked her to find him a house, she did, in the Napa Valley. In August 2005 Sly gave Vet a ride on his chopper motorcycle to her gig at the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles, and kept his helmet on for the whole show.[1] [2] [3]

The plan for the Grammy Awards on the eighth of February 2006 was a surprise reunion of the original band during a tribute. Larry Graham fell ill and dropped out, so Rustee Allen filled in. Guest stars sang the hits while the cameras mostly ignored the Family Stone. Then Steven Tyler shouted for Sly, and he walked out in a towering blond mohawk, sunglasses and a silver suit, with a cast on his right hand from a recent motorcycle crash. He sang and played keyboards for about three minutes, waved, and walked off before the song ended. The Associated Press called him the J.D. Salinger of funk. It was his first performance with the original band since 1971.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2007 Vet coaxed him back on stage. In January he joined her band at the House of Blues in Anaheim, and just after midnight on the first of April he appeared at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, bundled up in a knit cap, white sunglasses and a neck brace, and played for a little over half an hour. He told Vanity Fair he had a library of a hundred or maybe two hundred new songs. That summer's European tour went badly. He played about twenty minutes at the Montreux Jazz Festival before leaving, and the Guardian later wrote that the shows were widely ridiculed. In October 2008 in Santa Rosa he played twenty two minutes, said he needed a bathroom break, and never came back.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lawsuits, a camper van and a quiet ending

In 2009 a Dutch filmmaker, Willem Alkema, claimed in his documentary Coming Back for More that Sly was broke, living on welfare in cheap hotels and a camper van, after Jerry Goldstein cut off his payments. At Coachella in 2010 Sly came on hours late and rambled about being cheated and kidnapped by managers, a set the Los Angeles Times summed up as confused. Goldstein sued him for slander. In 2011 Alkema wrote that Sly was living in a white van on a street in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles, where a retired couple fed him and let him shower. That same year he released I'm Back, Family and Friends, remakes of his hits with guests such as Jeff Beck and Ray Manzarek.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2010 Sly sued Goldstein and the lawyer Glenn Stone, no relation, for fifty million dollars, saying he had received no songwriting royalties between 1989 and 2009. In January 2015 a Los Angeles jury agreed he had been cheated and awarded him five million dollars. The defense argued the money had gone to pay off his large tax debts. In December 2015 a judge ruled he could not collect, because he had signed his royalties over to the production company in exchange for half ownership. His son said he was devastated and that his father had not seen a dime when he needed it most. That November, Cynthia Robinson died of cancer in Carmichael, California.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Recognition kept arriving even as money did not. In 2017 the Recording Academy gave Sly a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, crediting him with a critical role in the development of soul, funk, rock and psychedelia. Slowly he found stability. Questlove said Sly had been clean for close to a decade by 2025 and was living an everyday life, playing with his grandchildren. The Guardian reported that his daughter Sylvette and a new manager, Arlene Hirschkowitz, worked to keep drug dealers away from him. In October 2023 he published a memoir written with Ben Greenman, titled Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin, which opens with him deciding to get clean on the fourth visit, and admits he should have stopped much sooner.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In January 2025 Questlove premiered his documentary Sly Lives, subtitled The Burden of Black Genius, at the Sundance Film Festival, and it reached Hulu that February. It used Sly's story to ask why so many gifted black artists end up sabotaging their own success. A few months later, on the ninth of June 2025, Sly Stone died at his home in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, at eighty two, after a long battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other health problems. His family said he died peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family, and that he had just finished a screenplay of his life story.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

What Sly left behind

The tributes that followed his death were full of love. Larry Graham, who had once fled through a hotel window, said Sly had changed his life by inviting him into the band, and summed it up as no Sly, no me. Jerry Martini said a piece of his heart had left, that they had been best friends for sixty years, and that Sly always credited him with starting the band. Critics repeated the verdict the San Francisco writer Joel Selvin had offered years before, that black music could be divided into before Sly Stone and after him. Between 1968 and 1973 he had changed the direction of popular music twice, first with joyful unity, then with the dark funk of Riot.[1] [2] [3]

His fingerprints are everywhere. Motown producer Norman Whitfield took the Temptations psychedelic with Cloud Nine, which was inspired by Dance to the Music, and the Jackson Five's early sound owed him plenty. Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock went electric and funky partly because of him. Prince, Rick James, George Clinton, D'Angelo and Outkast all drew on him, and Larry Graham's slap bass became the backbone of funk. Hip hop mined his records endlessly. Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation is built on a guitar sample from Thank You, Arrested Development turned Everyday People into People Everyday, and Fatboy Slim sampled the band on Weapon of Choice. Greg Errico's drum breaks remain some of the most sampled ever.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The honors stacked up. Beyond the Hall of Fame, Rolling Stone ranked the band forty third among the greatest artists of all time, and Dance to the Music, Stand!, Thank You and Riot have all entered the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2005 a tribute album, Different Strokes by Different Folks, was released through Starbucks, and its version of Family Affair by John Legend, Joss Stone and Van Hunt won a Grammy in 2007. The Family Stone's horn section even toured with Prince in 1997. Questlove said Sly invented the alphabet that pop and black music would write from for the next sixty years, and that musicians are still writing from his dictionary.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

As of 2026, several of the original family carry the story on. Freddie Stone became a pastor in 1988 and leads the Evangelist Temple Fellowship Center in Vallejo, where Rose Stone has worked in the music department. Rose spent decades as a sought after backing singer, touring with Elton John in 2011 and 2012 alongside her daughter Lisa. Larry Graham found success with Graham Central Station, became a Jehovah's Witness, introduced Prince to the faith and was named seventh greatest bassist by Rolling Stone in 2020. Jerry Martini kept touring as the Family Stone, and Greg Errico moved to Las Vegas in 2023. Cynthia Robinson died in 2015, and Pat Rizzo in 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The people around Sly and the Family Stone

Sly Stone and Larry Graham. Graham's thumping bass defined the band's sound, and he was one of its four lead voices. But tension with the Stone brothers grew after the move to Los Angeles, and in 1972 a rumor that he had hired a hit man led Sly's men to attack his associates. Graham escaped through a hotel window and founded Graham Central Station. He later played down the story, and after Sly died he said simply, no Sly, no me.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sly Stone and Cynthia Robinson. Robinson played trumpet in Sly's pre fame band the Stoners and became the Family Stone's voice of command on stage. She was the only original member to keep working with Sly after 1975, and in December 1975 she gave birth to his daughter Sylvyette, known as Phunne. She stayed fiercely loyal, defending his lateness decades later, and toured with his revived band until her death in 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sly Stone and Kathy Silva. Sly married Kathy Silva, a young woman from Hawaii, on stage at Madison Square Garden on the fifth of June 1974. Their son Sylvester Junior was born the year before, and she appears on the cover of Small Talk. She filed for divorce within months. Silva later told People he beat her and held her captive, and she left for good in 1976 after his dog mauled their son.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sly Stone and Freddie Stone. Sly's younger brother led the Stone Souls, whose merger with Sly's band created the Family Stone. Sly made him the guitarist, and his sharp rock guitar lines were copied across soul music. Freddie stayed until 1975, helped on Back on the Right Track in 1979, then left music, was ordained in 1988, and became pastor of the Evangelist Temple Fellowship Center in Vallejo. He always called his brother a true genius.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sly Stone and Vet Stone. The youngest Stewart sibling led Little Sister, the band's backing singers, and scored hits Sly produced for her. After their parents died, both telling her to go get her brother, Vet made it her mission to bring Sly back. She found him a house in Napa, renamed her tribute band the Family Stone with his blessing, and coaxed him onto stages in 2007. She later wrote a book about it.[1] [2] [3]

Rose Stone and Hamp Banks. Hamp Banks, known as Bubba, was one of Sly's street friends who became his personal manager during the dark Los Angeles years, bringing in hard men as bodyguards. He married Rose Stone in February 1973, and when the band collapsed in 1975 he pulled her out. She recorded a solo album as Rose Banks in 1976. Banks also co wrote Remember Who You Are with Sly in 1979.[1] [2] [3]

Sly Stone and Jerry Martini. Martini knew Sly from the Bay Area club scene and suggested the band in the first place. He clashed with Sly in 1972 after asking about his earnings, which led Sly to hire Pat Rizzo as a replacement, though Martini stayed. He later led the Family Stone for decades. When Sly died, Martini said they had been best friends for sixty years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sly Stone and David Kapralik. The CBS executive signed the band to Epic and pushed Sly toward simpler songs, which produced Dance to the Music. He managed the band and co founded Stone Flower with Sly. Kapralik claimed the Black Panthers pressed Sly to replace him with a black manager. Sly was sometimes seen wearing a Star of David, which some took as a nod to him. Kapralik died in Maui in 2017.[1] [2] [3]

Sly Stone and Jerry Goldstein. The former Strangeloves hitmaker became Sly's manager in 1989, taking over his royalties through their company Even Street Productions. For years he was the gatekeeper to the reclusive star. Sly later accused him of cheating him and sued for fifty million dollars. A jury awarded five million in 2015, but a judge ruled Sly could not collect because he had assigned his royalties to the company.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sly Stone and George Clinton. Clinton was one of Sly's most devoted disciples and took him on tour with Funkadelic around 1980. Sly sang on The Electric Spanking of War Babies, and after they were busted together Clinton printed a demand to free Sly on the sleeve. Their planned joint album fell apart when Clinton left Warner Brothers. Sly also lost two of his backing singers to Clinton, who turned them into the Brides of Funkenstein.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sly Stone and Questlove. Questlove made the Family Stone the stars of his Oscar winning Summer of Soul, then devoted a whole film to Sly, Sly Lives, released in 2025. He wrote the foreword to Sly's 2023 memoir and argued that Sly invented the alphabet modern pop and black music still write from, while seeing his decline as a warning about the pressure placed on black genius.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Sly and the Family Stone

• Sly got his nickname when a fifth grade classmate misspelled his name as Slyvester on the school board. It was a simple spelling mistake by a classmate, but it followed Sylvester Stewart for the rest of his life and became part of his stage name.[1] [2]
• His first radio station wanted to call him Sly Sloan. He hated it and renamed himself Sly Stone. When he joined KSOL in 1964 the station christened him Sly Sloan. He refused the name and began introducing himself on air as Sly Stone.[1]
• Sly co wrote C'mon and Swim with the DJ Tom Donahue, credited under Donahue's birth name, Thomas Coman. The 1964 Bobby Freeman hit reached number five in America. Its writing credit went to Thomas Coman and Sylvester Stewart, and Coman was the real name of Autumn Records boss Tom Donahue.[1] [2]
• As a producer Sly worked with the band that later became Crazy Horse, Neil Young's backing group. At Autumn Records he produced a single for a group called the Psyrcle, which regrouped as the Rockets and eventually became Crazy Horse.[1]
• During his DJ days Sly drove a Jaguar XKE custom painted bright purple. Vanity Fair described the young radio star cruising the Bay Area in a purple Jaguar, an early sign of the flamboyance that would define the Family Stone.[1]
• Sly made Jerry Martini's stage outfit by cutting a hole in a cowhide rug. Martini recalled Sly spotting a cow skin rug on the floor, cutting a hole in it with a rug cutter, and handing it over as his new costume.[1]
• Gospel star Tramaine Hawkins was nearly one of the band's backing singers. She sang in the Heavenly Tones with Vet Stone, Mary McCreary and Elva Mouton, but declined to tour with Sly because she wanted to finish school.[1] [2]
• Rose Stone at first refused to join the band because she did not want to quit her job at a record store. Her brothers invited her from the start, but she only joined just before Dance to the Music was released in late 1967.[1]
• Sly said he played piano so hard on Everyday People that he broke his finger. He tells the story in his 2023 memoir, as reported by Rolling Stone. Everyday People became the band's first number one single in 1969.[1]
• The gospel ending of Stand! was added after the song got a lukewarm reception in a San Francisco club. Sly tested an early pressing in a club, then recorded a new fiery coda, mostly with session musicians because the band was unavailable.[1] [2]
• Hot Fun in the Summertime peaked in October 1969, after summer was already over. It reached number two, held from the top by the Temptations' I Can't Get Next to You, and is unusual among the band's hits for its string section.[1] [2]
• At the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, the Black Panthers provided security for the band's show. The New York police refused to police their June twenty ninth concert in Mount Morris Park, so Black Panther Party members handled security instead.[1]
• I Want to Take You Higher began life as Advice, a song Sly co wrote for Billy Preston in 1966. It then became Higher on the Dance to the Music album before its famous Stand! version. Ike and Tina Turner's 1970 cover charted higher than the original.[1]
• Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation is built on a guitar sample from Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin. The 1969 song topped the Hot 100 in February 1970, and two decades later its guitar lick became the foundation of Janet Jackson's 1989 hit.[1]
• Before Riot, the album was going to be called The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone. Rolling Stone said the title was a sideways joke about Sly's habit of skipping gigs. The album was later titled Africa Talks to You before becoming There's a Riot Goin' On.[1] [2]
• The title track of There's a Riot Goin' On lasts zero minutes and zero seconds. It is listed on the album but contains no music. Sly said in 1997 that it had no running time because he felt there should be no riots.[1] [2]
• Only three of the custom red, white and black flags from the Riot cover were made. One went to Sly, one to Epic Records and one to Steve Paley, the band's photographer, who took the cover picture.[1]
• Sly recorded many of his Riot vocals lying in bed with a wireless microphone. He worked at home in Bel Air and in a Winnebago rigged with recording gear, while bandmates came in one at a time to overdub.[1] [2] [3]
• Sly's Bel Air house was rented from John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. It had once belonged to film star Jeanette MacDonald. Phillips later complained about the guns, rifles and big dogs Sly's entourage kept there.[1]
• The Riot sleeve collage included a picture of Sly's pit bull, Gun. The collage by Lynn Ames mixed American images of the early seventies with photos of the band, Bobby Womack, drummer Buddy Miles and the dog.[1]
• Little Sister's Somebody's Watching You is often called the first top forty hit to use a drum machine. Sly produced it for his sister Vet's group on his Stone Flower label, just before using the same approach on Family Affair.[1] [2] [3]
• Sly's memoir says Family Affair was inspired by Kathy Silva and her sister, not by his own family. The 1971 song was the band's biggest hit, spending three weeks at number one on the Hot 100 and five weeks atop the rhythm and blues chart.[1]
• Miles Davis reportedly made his band listen to the Fresh track In Time over and over for thirty minutes. Davis was deeply impressed by Fresh. Brian Eno later said the album marked the moment bass and bass drum became the most important parts of a mix.[1]
• In 1991 Sony accidentally released Fresh on CD with alternate takes of almost every song. Only In Time was unchanged. Sony let the mistaken version sell out before issuing the standard album, and fans still argue over which is better.[1]
• Larry Graham, uncredited, played bass on Que Sera, Sera, the only cover on an original Family Stone album. Rose Stone sang lead on the gospel style version of the Doris Day song, recorded for Fresh after Graham had officially left the band.[1]
• Bob Marley and the Wailers were fired as Sly's opening act in 1973 after only four of seventeen shows. They did not connect with Sly's audience and were left stranded in Las Vegas before making their way to San Francisco and Los Angeles.[1]
• Tickets to Sly's 1974 wedding and concert at Madison Square Garden cost eight dollars and fifty cents. The invitations asked guests to wear something gold. Halston designed the outfits, and the officiating bishop accidentally called the bride Cynthia.[1]
• Rustee Allen used to pencil on a mustache to get into bars where he played while underage. Allen later became Larry Graham's hand picked successor in the Family Stone, playing bass on Fresh and Small Talk.[1]
• Andy Newmark, the Family Stone's drummer on Fresh, later drummed on John Lennon's Double Fantasy. Sly called Newmark the best drummer he ever worked with. Newmark went on to play with Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Roxy Music and George Harrison.[1]
• After leaving the band, Greg Errico drummed on David Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour in 1974. He also toured with the jazz group Weather Report and played on and off with the Jerry Garcia Band for a decade.[1]
• Larry Graham introduced Prince to the Jehovah's Witness faith, and he is the uncle of the rapper Drake. Graham became a Witness in 1975 and later co produced an album with Prince and toured in his band from 1997 to 2000.[1]
• Larry Graham invented slap bass because his mother's band had no drummer. Playing in a duo with his mother, he used his thumb on the low strings like a kick drum and plucked the high strings like a snare.[1]
• Cynthia Robinson's first trumpet came from a beatnik who gave it to her if she would play his party. She said it smelled bad and was full of green crud, so she soaked and cleaned it until it was hers.[1]
• Sly's daughter Novena Carmel hosts Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW, the show that aired a rare Sly interview in 2009. Sly spoke to host Chris Douridas on the program that year. His daughter later became a host of the same show.[1] [2]
• Vanity Fair reported that Sly sold his song publishing rights to Michael Jackson's company Mijac in 1984. The magazine described it as a shortsighted sale made during the worst years of his addiction.[1]
• At the 2006 Grammys Sly wore a cast on his right hand after crashing his motorcycle days earlier. He had damaged tendons in the accident, which added to his unease during the brief and chaotic tribute performance.[1] [2]
• Dick Cavett once joked that people thought Sly was dead, because Cavett had so many dead rock stars on tape. Sly's two famously high visits to Cavett's show in the early seventies made him one of the talk show's most memorable guests.[1]
• Freddie Stone was expelled from Vallejo High for fighting, then became student body president at his new school. At Benicia High he was also most valuable player of his basketball team in his junior year.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.