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New York Post
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Nile Rodgers recalls becoming 'really close' with the late Sly Stone
It takes one music icon to know one. Nile Rodgers, the legendary producer and Chic bandleader, worshiped Sly Stone long before he became friends with the funk pioneer, who passed away at 82 on Monday, June 9. And he has the receipts to prove it. 5 Songwriters Hall of Fame chairman Nile Rodgers helped welcome the class of 2025 on Thursday night. Getty Images for Songwriters Hall Of Fame 5 Sly Stone was the genius behind Sly & the Family Stone classics such as 'Everyday People' and 'Family Affair.' Getty Images for Songwriters Hall Of Fame 'I still to this day have my ticket [from when] I saw Sly & the Family Stone at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park,' Rodgers, 72, exclusively told The Post on the red carpet of the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Thursday at NYC's Marriott Marquis. 'Check this out — the price of the ticket? One dollar. General admission was one dollar. I still have it. It was that great of a day to me,' he said. And that's not the only way that Stone took a young Rodgers higher. 'I remember when he released, I don't know if it was the second album or the first album, I remember going to my friend's house — he was the only one who could afford the album — and we all sat around smoking hash and listening to the record all day,' he recalled. 5 Jimmy Jam (left) and Nile Rodgers joined Songwriters Hall of Fame president/CEO Linda Moran on the red carpet. Redferns As fate would have it, the Songwriters Hall of Fame chairman would end up meeting and bonding with the genius behind Sly & the Family hits such as 'Dance to the Music,' Everyday People,' and 'Family Affair.' 'Later on in life, I became friends with Sly in California. It was really sad for me because he was living in a car,' he said. 'So every night we would meet at the China Club when it moved to Los Angeles, and we would talk, and for some reason, we became really close.' In fact, Stone asked Rodgers to be the music director for the Sly & the Family Stone tribute at the 2006 Grammys that included Maroon 5, John Legend, Steven Tyler and Joss Stone — as well as a brief appearance by the funk god himself. 5 With Sly & the Family Stone, Nile Rodgers said that the late Sly Stone 'changed music.' Redferns Another legendary producer, Jimmy Jam, recalled sampling Sly & the Family Stone's 1970 chart-topper 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)' on Janet Jackson's 1989 hit 'Rhythm Nation.' 'I don't think people really put that together,' he told The Post. 'For me, it was so obvious that it's Sly. But he was a tremendous influence, [and] still continues to be. His music is singular. 'And his influence [was] not only me but certainly on Prince in the way that he made his band up — like, it was multiracial, multi-gender,' said the former Prince protégé. 'All of that came from Sly.' 5 Sly Stone of Sly And The Family Stone performs on stage in London on July 15, 1973. Getty Images Stone's impact on Rodgers was formative, too. 'Honestly, to me, Sly is on the same level as [John] Coltrane, Miles [Davis], Charlie Parker, Nina Simone, all the people I grew up with. Sly was my R&B example of that,' he said. Indeed, with Sly & the Family Stone, Rodgers said that Stone 'changed music.' 'They changed the way that America saw black musicians,' he said. 'They changed everything.'
UPI
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- UPI
Sly Stone's isolation shaped a generation of sound
Sly Stone turned isolation into inspiration, forging a path for a generation of music-makers The charismatic front man of Sly and the Family Stone died on June 9, 2025, at the age of 82. File Photo/David Silpa/UPI | License Photo June 13 (UPI) -- In the fall of 1971, Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" landed like a quiet revolution. After two years of silence following the band's mainstream success, fans expected more feel-good funk from the ensemble. What they got instead was something murkier and more fractured, yet deeply intimate and experimental. This was not just an album; it was the sound of a restless mind rebuilding music from the inside out. At the center of it all was front man Sly Stone. Long before the home studio became an industry norm, Stone, who died on June 9, 2025, turned the studio into both a sanctuary and an instrument. And long before sampling defined the sound of hip-hop, he was using tape and machine rhythms to deconstruct existing songs to cobble together new ones. As someone who spends much of their time working on remote recording and audio production -- from building full arrangements solo to collaborating digitally across continents - I'm deeply indebted to Sly Stone's approach to making music. He was among the first major artists to fully embrace the recording environment as a space to compose rather than perform. Every reverb bounce, every drum machine tick, every overdubbed breath became part of the writing process. From studio rat to bedroom producer Sly and the Family Stone's early albums -- including "Dance to the Music" and "Stand!" - were recorded at top-tier facilities like CBS Studios in Los Angeles under the technical guidance of engineers such as Don Puluse and with oversight from producer David Rubinson. These sessions yielded bright, radio-friendly tracks that emphasized tight horn sections, group vocals and a polished sound. Producers also prized the energy of live performance, so the full band would record together in real time. But by the early 1970s, Stone was burnt out. The dual pressures of fame and industry demands were becoming too much. Struggling with cocaine and PCP addiction, he'd grown increasingly distrustful of bandmates, label executives and even his friends. So he decided to retreat to his hillside mansion in Bel Air, California, transforming his home into a musical bunker. Inside, he could work on his own terms: isolated and erratic, but free. Without a full band present, Stone became a one-man ensemble. He leaned heavily into overdubbing -- recording one instrument at a time and building his songs from fragments. Using multiple tape machines, he'd layer each part onto previous takes. The resulting album, "There's a Riot Goin' On," was like nothing he'd previously recorded. It sounds murky, jagged and disjointed. But it's also deeply intentional, as if every imperfection was part of the design. In "The Poetics of Rock," musicologist Albin Zak describes this "composerly" approach to production, where recording itself becomes a form of writing, not just documentation. Stone's process for "There's a Riot Goin' On" reflects this mindset: Each overdub, rhythm loop and sonic imperfection functions more like a brushstroke than a performance. Automating the groove A key part of Stone's tool kit was the Maestro Rhythm King, a preset drum machine he used extensively. It wasn't the first rhythm box on the market. But Stone's use of it was arguably the first time such a machine shaped the entire aesthetic of a mainstream album. The drum parts on his track "Family Affair," for example, don't swing - they tick. What might have been viewed as soulless became its own kind of soul. This early embrace of mechanical rhythm prefigured what would later become a foundation of hip-hop and electronic music. In his book "Dawn of the DAW," music technology scholar Adam Patrick Bell calls this shift "a redefinition of groove," noting how drum machines like the Rhythm King encouraged musicians to rethink their songwriting process, building tracks in shorter, repeatable sections while emphasizing steady, looped rhythms rather than free-flowing performances. Though samplers wouldn't emerge until years later, Stone's work already contained that repetition, layering and loop-based construction that would become characteristic of the practice. He recorded his own parts the way future DJs would splice records - isolated, reshuffled, rhythmically obsessed. His overdubbed bass lines, keyboard vamps and vocal murmurs often sounded like puzzle pieces from other songs. Music scholar Will Fulton, in his study of Black studio innovation, notes how producers like Stone helped pioneer a fragment-based approach to music-making that would become central to hip-hop's DNA. Stone's process anticipated the mentality that a song isn't necessarily something written top to bottom, but something assembled, brick by brick, from what's available. Perhaps not surprisingly, Stone's tracks have been sampled relentlessly. In "Bring That Beat Back," music critic Nate Patrin identifies Stone as one of the most sample-friendly artists of the 1970s - not because of his commercial hits, but because of how much sonic space he left in his tracks: the open-ended grooves, unusual textures and slippery emotional tone. You can hear his sounds in famous tracks such as 2Pac's "If My Homie Calls," which samples "Sing a Simple Song"; A Tribe Called Quest's "The Jam," which draws from "Family Affair"; and De La Soul's "Plug Tunin'," which flips "You Can Make It If You Try." The studio as instrument While Sly's approach was groundbreaking, he wasn't entirely alone. Around the same time, artists such as Brian Wilson and The Rolling Stones were experimenting with home and nontraditional recording environments - Wilson famously retreating to his home studio during "Pet Sounds," and the Stones tracking "Exile on Main St." in a French villa. Yet in the world of Black music, production remained largely centralized in institutionally controlled studio systems such as Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, where sound was tightly managed by in-house producers and engineers. In that context, Stone's decision to isolate, self-produce and dismantle the standard workflow was more than a technical choice: It was a radical act of autonomy. The rise of home recording didn't just change who could make music. It changed what music felt like. It made music more internal, iterative and intimate. Sly Stone helped invent that feeling. It's easy to hear "There's a Riot Goin' On" as murky or uneven. The mix is dense with tape hiss, drum machines drift in and out of sync, and vocals often feel buried or half-whispered. But it's also, in a way, prophetic. It anticipated the aesthetics of bedroom pop, the cut-and-paste style of modern music software, the shuffle of playlists and the recycling of sounds that defines sample culture. It showed that a groove didn't need to be spontaneous to be soulful, and that solitude could be a powerful creative tool, not a limitation. In my own practice, I often record alone, passing files back and forth, building from templates and mapping rhythm to grid - as do millions of musical artists who compose tracks from their bedrooms, closets and garages. Half a century ago, a funk pioneer led the way. I think it's safe to say that Sly Stone quietly changed the process of making music forever - and in the funkiest way possible. Jose Valentino Ruiz is an associate professor of music business and entrepreneurship at the University of Florida. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Thank You, Sly Stone
Let us begin with gratitude. Thank you, Sly Stone, for being so generous with your music before your death on Monday at the age of 82 — for the wealth of durable hits that includes 'Stand!,' 'Sing a Simple Song,' 'Everyday People,' 'Dance to the Music,' 'Family Affair,' and, yes, 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again).' Thank you, Sly, for effectively inventing 1970s funk and the career of Prince with that last song. Thank you, Sly for pulling together the Family Stone, a band of players and singers Black and white, male and female, that served as a music-world version of the original Sesame Street cast, bright with the 1960s promise of a multicultural future unbound by racial or genre distinctions. More from The Hollywood Reporter Kendrick Lamar Was the Top Winner at the 2025 BET Awards Tyler Perry Calls Out Hollywood Studios at BET Awards: "This Is Not the Time to Be Silent" SHINee's Key on K-pop Stardom After 30 and Reuniting with U.S. Fans And thank you, Sly, falettin me into your life in 2007. Permit me to explain. I grew up besotted with the music of the man born Sylvester Stewart in 1943. His songs defined my primordial years, osmosing straight into my bloodstream. In 1996, the year I became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, I screwed up the courage to pitch the editor, Graydon Carter, the idea of my profiling Sly. Mr. Stone was in a bad place then. Actually, no one seemed quite sure what place he was in, having removed himself from public life after a bad 70s and 80s in which drugs and indolence robbed him of his joy and spark. It wasn't typical Vanity Fair material. But to my delight, Graydon said yes. Terrific! I started making phone calls. I got in touch with Greg Errico, the Family Stone's founding drummer, who invited me to watch him jam in a Bay Area rehearsal space with fellow original band members Freddie Stone (guitar, Sly's brother) and Jerry Martini (saxophone). Stonewalled by Sly's then manager, Jerry Goldstein, I reached out to his fellow record-industry machers Lou Adler and Richard Gottehrer, to advocate on my behalf. Despite their efforts, Goldstein was unmoved. Years passed. My wife and I welcomed two children into our family. A new millennium dawned. Then, early in 2007, I heard that the youngest of Sly's sisters, a singer born Vaetta and known as Vet, had coaxed Sly into performing a few dates with her band that coming summer. I contacted Vet and related to her my decade-plus of travails. She told me that if I was serious, I should get to Las Vegas pronto to see her band's show at the Flamingo Hotel. Sly, she said, was going to play. I asked her, given the predilection for no-shows that did in his career as a touring musician, if she was sure. 'All I can say is that I'm his little sister and he's never lied to me,' she said. Sly did show up — in a bizarre ensemble pulled from the Me Decade's dress-up bin, wearing platform boots, wraparound white sunglasses, and spangly newsboy knickers. It was a chaotic show in which he performed only a few songs. But when he sang a soft, unplugged version of 'Stand!,' with its affirming message In the end you'll still be you/ One that's done all the things you set out to do, he held the crowd rapt. It was evident that, whatever he had done to himself bodily and mentally, his voice and musicianship were intact. My reward for turning up was the first major interview he had granted in a couple of decades. We met in a motorcycle shop in his native Vallejo, California, called Chopper Guys Biker Products. I had a million questions. He answered them gnomically. When I asked him what he had been up to all these years, and if he was watching Seinfeld and American Idol like the rest of us, he said, 'I've done all that. I do regular things a lot. But it's probably more of a Sly Stone life. It's probably… it's probably not very normal.' The comeback that my Vanity Fair profile was meant to signal failed to materialize; he still had drug and business issues to sort out. But between then and now, he did finally get sober. Vet emailed me a photo of Sly contentedly dandling a grandson in his lap. In Questlove's excellent documentary released earlier this year, Sly Lives! (a.k.a. The Burden of Black Genius), his younger daughter, Novena, laughs at the unlikely circumstance to which she now regularly bears witness: 'He's kind of just like… a standard old Black man.' That he lived to become that is hope-giving. Sly is often upheld as as an avatar for how the utopianism of 1960s America curdled into solipsism, cynicism, and bad vibes. I am reminded of the title character's reproach of the Dude in The Big Lebowski: 'Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost!' But in the long run, Sly won. He found redemptive happiness. His library of music remains as alive and vibrant as ever and shall forever transcend the circumstances of its making and what came after. Once again, Sly, thank you. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Hollywood's Highest-Profile Harris Endorsements: Taylor Swift, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen and More
The Sun
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Pioneering funk and soul artiste Sly Stone passes on aged 82
FUNK master and innovator Sly Stone, whose music drove a civil rights-inflected soul explosion in the 1960s, sparking influential albums but also a slide into drug addiction, has died, his family said Monday. He was 82. The multi-instrumentalist frontman for Sly and the Family Stone – rock's first racially integrated, mixed-gender lineup – 'passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,' after a prolonged battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other health issues, his family said in a statement. 'While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come,' it added. With his vibrant on-stage energy, killer hooks and lyrics that often decried prejudice, Stone became a superstar, releasing pivotal records that straddled musical genres and performing a set that enraptured the crowd at Woodstock. But he retreated to the shadows in the early 1970s and his personal struggles ultimately led to the group's disintegration. He emerged sporadically for unfulfilling concert tours, erratic TV appearances and a flopped 2006 reunion on the Grammy Awards stage. An effervescent hybrid of psychedelic soul, hippie consciousness, bluesy funk and rock built on Black gospel, Stone's music proved to be a melodic powerhouse that attracted millions during a golden age of exploratory pop – until it fell apart in a spiral of drug use. Over the course of just five years, his diverse sound cooperative left an indelible impact on American and world music, from the group's debut hit Dance to the Music in 1967 and their first of three number one songs, Everyday People a year later, to the 1970s rhythm and blues masterpiece If You Want Me To Stay. For many, Sly was a musical genius creating the sound of the future. It was 'like seeing a Black version of the Beatles,' funk legend George Clinton told CBS News of his longtime friend's stage presence. 'He had the sensibility of the street, the church, and then like the qualities of a Motown,' Clinton added. 'He was all of that in one person.'
The Sun
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Sly Stone succumbs to chronic health issues
FUNK master and innovator Sly Stone, whose music drove a civil rights-inflected soul explosion in the 1960s, sparking influential albums but also a slide into drug addiction, has died, his family said Monday. He was 82. The multi-instrumentalist frontman for Sly and the Family Stone – rock's first racially integrated, mixed-gender lineup – 'passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,' after a prolonged battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other health issues, his family said in a statement. 'While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come,' it added. With his vibrant on-stage energy, killer hooks and lyrics that often decried prejudice, Stone became a superstar, releasing pivotal records that straddled musical genres and performing a set that enraptured the crowd at Woodstock. But he retreated to the shadows in the early 1970s and his personal struggles ultimately led to the group's disintegration. He emerged sporadically for unfulfilling concert tours, erratic TV appearances and a flopped 2006 reunion on the Grammy Awards stage. An effervescent hybrid of psychedelic soul, hippie consciousness, bluesy funk and rock built on Black gospel, Stone's music proved to be a melodic powerhouse that attracted millions during a golden age of exploratory pop – until it fell apart in a spiral of drug use. Over the course of just five years, his diverse sound cooperative left an indelible impact on American and world music, from the group's debut hit Dance to the Music in 1967 and their first of three number one songs, Everyday People a year later, to the 1970s rhythm and blues masterpiece If You Want Me To Stay. For many, Sly was a musical genius creating the sound of the future. It was 'like seeing a Black version of the Beatles,' funk legend George Clinton told CBS News of his longtime friend's stage presence. 'He had the sensibility of the street, the church, and then like the qualities of a Motown,' Clinton added. 'He was all of that in one person.'
