(Credits: Far Out / Chris Hakkens / Sly Stone Music)
Fri 2 January 2026 22:30, UK
When you have someone like Sly Stone, the work speaks for itself. You can’t really question the genius of such a brilliant creative mind; however, the means by which he arrived at that music were often strange.
Questlove had the unenviable job of trying to tell Sly Stone’s story in a recent documentary. While the end product was a success, Questlove said it was the process of making the film where the difficulty lay. He was a complicated man, a musical genius, sure, but not without his flaws. Questlove wanted to explore these different sides of Stone but from a human perspective, as opposed to the perspective of a fan.
“Sly’s story is everybody’s story,” said The Roots drummer, “He is the first Black celebrity of the post-civil rights era. His success was different from Chuck Berry’s or Ray Charles’s, the acts that couldn’t stay in the hotels or eat in the restaurants where they played. The question is: what happens when you get everything you want?”
He continued, “It’s a hard story to tell. I want to get rid of the troubled drug-addict genius. We never ask ourselves, ‘Why do we self-soothe on cocaine? Why is this person a sex addict? Why does this person get drunk a lot?’ There’s a lot to unpack there, especially for Black artists.”
While Questlove did a great job in unpacking the true Sly Stone, it’s always going to be difficult to understand what was going on inside someone’s head without asking them directly. Sly Stone worked in mysterious ways; he was always difficult to truly work out, and as such, a lot of his music has been left open to interpretation. One of the best examples of this is his album There’s A Riot Going On.
Allegedly a response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On, Sly Stone made the album more or less in complete isolation. Compared to some of the more funk-infused music that he and his band had made in the past, this album was a lot more brooding, to the extent that many considered it one of his darkest offerings.
While many had this opinion, Cynthia Robinson, one of the founding members of Sly and the Family Stone, said that she always thought this was a common misconception. “A lot of people consider Riot a dark album,” she said, “But it wasn’t. It just reflected what was going on at the time. Sly always tried to write something positive.”
The elusive nature of Sly’s creativity manifested not only in his work, but the means by which he worked. It wasn’t just some of his music that was difficult to understand, but those who wanted to work with him were also subject to the musician’s elusive nature. Jeff Beck was on the receiving end of this once, as what was supposed to be a recording session with the legendary musician wound up being an elongated stretch in a hotel room and two hours of pointless jamming. Despite the strange means by which the session came about, Beck kept a copy of the recording and was always happy to have done it.
“Carmine [Appice, drummer with Beck, Bogert & Appice] knew that I was a big fan of Sly so he arranged the session. We went to San Francisco to do some recording and we were stuck in a hotel for 10 days and never saw him,” recalled Beck.
“Eventually we got into the studio and Sly saw Carmine’s drums and said: ‘You can take half of that away, we don’t need that’. Then he disappeared into a back room and never came out again.”
He continued, “He eventually called me through his microphonic system. I remember sitting in his office cross-legged, with his wife giggling, and we played for about two hours. I’ve got it on tape somewhere.”
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