Latest news with #FamilyStone
Forbes
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Sly And The Family Stone Owns Half Of A Billboard Chart After The Singer's Death
Following Sly Stone's passing, Sly and the Family Stone return to Billboard's R&B Digital Song Sales ... More chart with five tracks, including 'Everyday People' at No. 2. Headshot of American singer and songwriter Sly Stone performing with his band Sly and the Family Stone on the television series 'Midnight Special, ' circa 1974. (Photo by Fotos International/NBC Television/Courtesy of Getty Images) Sly Stone, one of the most innovative musicians in recorded music history and the leader of Sly and the Family Stone, passed away on June 9 at the age of 82. Throughout his storied career, Stone was responsible for some of the catchiest R&B and pop tracks ever, which stormed the charts throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following his passing, Americans began buying some of the group's most famous singles once more. All that renewed love has led to quite the chart takeover for Sly and his namesake group. Sly and the Family Stone claim five spots on the R&B Digital Song Sales chart this week. The musicians occupy half of the entire 10-position ranking of the top-selling R&B-only tracks in the U.S. Most of the band's current wins are new to the tally, while one returns and reaches a new peak position. 'Everyday People' ranks as Sly and the Family Stone's biggest win on the R&B Digital Song Sales chart this frame. The track returns for just its second stay on the purchase-centric list, arriving at No. 2. Sly and company are held back from the summit by 'Type Dangerous,' Mariah Carey's latest launch, which conquers the R&B Digital Song Sales ranking. The other four Sly and the Family Stone tunes that land on the R&B Digital Song Sales roster this week are all new entries. 'Dance to the Music,' 'Hot Fun in the Summertime,' 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),' and 'Family Affair' debut at Nos. 4, 5, 7, and 10, respectively. It's a crowded week for debut appearances on the R&B Digital Song Sales chart, as 60% of the spots on the 10-position list are occupied by tracks that have never landed on this roster before. In addition to Sly and the Family Stone and Carey, Keith Sweat and Athena Cage launch 'Nobody' at No. 8. Before this week, Sly and the Family Stone had only landed one hit on the R&B Digital Song Sales chart, and it was 'Everyday People.' Now, the group is up to five career placements on the tally. The band likely would have dominated this kind of ranking during its heyday had this specific Billboard tally existed decades ago.
Calgary Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Calgary Herald
14 notable deaths in the first half of 2025
Article content The year may only be half over, but already the list of notable people who have passed away in 2025 is significant. Here's a look at some of the well-known people and celebrities who died in the first half of 2025. Article content Michelle Trachtenberg: This Gossip Girl and Harriet the Spy actress passed away at age 39, from complications related to diabetes on Feb. 26. Val Kilmer: An acclaimed acting talent, Kilmer was lauded for his roles in movies such as The Doors, Tombstone and Top Gun, before passing away at age 65 of pneumonia on April 1. Wayne Osmond: The second oldest brother in the pop singing sensation Osmond Brothers, Wayne Osmond was also known for his musical prowess, playing eight instruments while in the group. He suffered a stroke on Jan. 1 and died at age 73. George Foreman: Foreman — a world heavyweight boxing champ, Olympic gold medallist and creator of the infamous George Foreman Grill — was 76 when he died on March 21. George Wendt: Nominated six times for an Emmy for his role of Norm on the TV show Cheers, Wendt died of cardiac arrest May 20 at age 76. Marianne Faithfull: A leading female singer who was part of the British invasion of the 1960s, Faithfull was 78 when she died Jan. 30. David Lynch: A renowned director, writer and multiple-Oscar nominee for films including The Elephant Man, Lynch was 78 when he died Jan. 16, suffering from emphysema complications. Sly Stone: At age 82, Stone — the musical genius behind Sly and the Family Stone — passed away June 9, after battling chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other health problems. Brian Wilson: A co-founder of the Beach Boys and pop music icon, Wilson was 82 when he died of an undisclosed illness on June 9. Loretta Swit: The Emmy-winning Swit, known for her Margaret 'Hot Lips' Houlihan role on M*A*S*H, died May 30 at age 87 of still-unannounced natural causes. Pope Francis: The head of the Catholic Church, Argentina-born Pope Francis, became revered for his moderate approach and accepting nature before dying April 21 at age 88. Roberta Flack: This Grammy-winning Killing Me Softly with His Song songstress died Feb. 24 of cardiac arrest at age 88. Richard Chamberlain: The Emmy-nominated actor, known for roles in Dr. Kildare and The Thorn Birds, died at age 90 on March 30 after suffering a stroke. Gene Hackman: One of Hollywood's great actors, Hackman won two Oscars (for the French Connection and Unforgiven) and received a myriad of other awards before dying Feb. 26 at age 95 of heart disease.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sly Stone Believed Everybody Is a Star: The Massive Legacy of an Avant-Funk Revolutionary
Thank you for the party, but Sly could never stay. Sly Stone was always the ultimate mystery man of American music, a visionary genius who transformed the world with some of the most innovative sounds of the Sixties and Seventies. With Sly and the Family Stone, he fused funk, soul, and acid rock into his own utopian sound, in hits like 'Family Affair' and 'Everyday People.' Yet he remained an elusive figure, all but disappearing in the 1970s. When he died on Monday, it seemed strange he was 'only' 82, because he seemed even older — as if he'd outlived himself by decades. Yet his music sounds as boldly futuristic and influential as ever, which is why the world is still reeling from this loss. Nobody ever sounded like this man. Sly could write inspirational songs of unity, anthems like 'I Want to Take You Higher' that would turn a live crowd into a euphoric tribe, or uplifting hits like 'Stand!' or 'Everybody Is a Star' that can catch you in a lonely moment and make you feel like the rest of your life is a chance to live up to the song's challenge. More from Rolling Stone 'He Would Be in the Top 10': Ben Fong-Torres on Writing Sly Stone's Rolling Stone Cover Story Vernon Reid on Why Sly and the Family Stone Were the Greatest American Band Chuck D Explains How Sly Stone Influenced Public Enemy But that went side by side with his streetwise sense of betrayal and rage. 'Everybody Is a Star' comes on like a love song to human hope, so radiant in every tiny sonic detail, with Sly chanting, 'Shine, shine, shine!' But it's also got the weird question, 'Ever catch a falling star? Ain't no stopping till it's in the ground.' Sly Stone wanted to remind you that you were the star of hope in the sky — but you could also be the star that comes crashing down into a crater. All his contradictions come together in his greatest song, the 1970 funk blast 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),' with the hardest bass-versus-guitar staccato slash attack on Earth. The chorus sounds cheerful on the surface: 'Thank you for letting me be myself again!' But the closer you listen, the more dread and anger you hear. For Sly, with all of his fame and fortune, this is what it all comes down to: Lookin' at the devil. Grinnin' at his gun. Fingers start a-shakin'. I begin to run. It's a death haiku that's all the scarier for being delivered as a party chant. Bullets start a-chasin'. I begin to stop. We began to wrestle. I was on the top. The groove keeps churning, but with no resolution. There's no victory in Sly's battle with the devil — just the temporary triumph of not being defeated, at least not yet. The Family Stone was his ideal of a band as a self-contained community, uniting musicians of different races, different genders, some friends, some relatives — but with everyone lending a voice. His Family Stone built the template for countless music collectives, whether it was the Native Tongues, Prince's Revolution, Afrika Bambaata's Zulu Nation, the Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast and the Dungeon Family, or beyond. 'The concept behind Sly and the Stone,' he told Rolling Stone in 1970, 'I wanted to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat. By that I mean … if there was anything to be happy about, then everybody'd be happy about it. If there was a lot of money to be made, for anyone to make a lot of money. If there were a lot of songs to sing, then everybody got to sing. That's the way it is now. Then, if we have something to suffer or a cross to bear — we bear it together.' Some of the Family were virtuoso singers, others just filling in for a line or two at a time, but there was always that utopian tribal spirit. His band was a visionary blend of James Brown/Stax/Muscle Shoals funk teamwork, but with the anarchic jamming of the hippie bands from the San Francisco acid-rock scene where he made his first converts. As Sly put it in the title of their debut album, it was A Whole New Thing — a radically democratic sound where everybody was a star. Sly's tough charisma made him a unique presence in Seventies pop culture — remote, cool, unknowable, hiding behind a smile that gleamed like bulletproof glass. You could always see him show up in places like the sitcom Good Times, set in a Chicago housing project, where the cool teenager Thelma had posters of Sly and Stevie Wonder on her bedroom wall, almost like good-angel/bad-angel twins. There was a comedian on BET who used to do a hilarious routine about growing up in the Seventies and watching Soul Train. 'When I was a kid, I didn't know what drugs were. I just knew there was something wrong with Sly.' Those contradictions were always built into his music. 'If It Were Left Up to Me' is one of his funniest, nastiest gems ever, a Fresh funk quickie from 1973, where the singers chant sardonic promises full of sleight-of-hand wordplay, until it ends with a sarcastic, 'Cha-cha-cha!' There's 'Que Sera Sera,' also from 1973, refurbishing an old Doris Day chestnut about how everything always works out for the best, except that Sly turns it into a slow-motion dirge full of dread, a warning that fate is out to get you. 'Que Sera Sera' took on a new life in 1989 as the perfect closing theme for Heathers, as Winona Ryder struts through her high school, covered in soot and ashes. When Shannen Doherty gasps, 'You look like hell,' Winona smirks, 'I just got back.' A very Sly line — so it's fitting that Heathers made 'Que Sera Sera' the closest he got to a comeback hit in the Eighties or Nineties. Sly Stone was born in Texas, but raised in the blue-collar Bay Area town of Vallejo. He was just five years old when he cut his first record with his family gospel group, the Stewart Four. But he was already a musical prodigy, mastering piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Barely out of his teens, he became a radio DJ on KSOL ('Super Soul'), where he honed his eclectic musical tastes. 'I played Dylan, Lord Buckley, the Beatles. Every night I tried something else,' he said in 1970. 'I really didn't know what was going on. Everything was just on instinct. You know, if there was an Ex-Lax commercial, I'd play the sound of a toilet flushing. It would've been boring otherwise.' But he got bored with the strictures of genre formatting. 'In radio,' he said, 'I found out about a lot of things I don't like. Like, I think there shouldn't be 'Black radio.' Just radio. Everybody be a part of everything.' He became a house producer at the local label Autumn Records, producing Bobby Freeman's huge 1964 dance hit 'C'Mon and Swim.' But he also worked with the wildly innovative folk rock of the Beau Brummels — he helmed their 1965 classics like 'Don't Talk to Strangers,' 'You Tell Me Why,' and 'Not Too Long Ago' with the melancholy tinge he would bring to his own band. He also produced one of the Bay Area's first hippie bands, Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane group, the Great Society. For their classic debut single — 'Free Advice' on one side, the original 'Somebody to Love' on the other — he famously drove the band through 286 takes. But one of his most crucial learning experiences at Autumn was watching everybody get ripped off. It was his first time getting burned in the music business, and he made sure it would be the last. He never again got involved with projects he didn't control. So he began putting together his own band, inspired by the local free-form rock scene happening at places like the Family Dog and the Fillmore. 'The concept was to be able to conceive all kinds of music,' he said in 1970. 'Whatever was contemporary, and not necessarily in terms of being commercial — whatever meant whatever now. Like today, things like censorship, and the Black-people/white-people thing. That's on my mind. So we just like to perform the things that are on our mind.' Once the world heard 'Dance to the Music,' nobody could resist, as the hits kept coming: 'Everyday People,' 'M'Lady,' 'Stand!,' 'Hot Fun in the Summertime.' The Family stole the show at Woodstock, turning 'I Want to Take You Higher' into a massive hippie chant. People always wanted more-more-more from Sly, based on the utopian promises of his songs. But he became the first major star who made an artistic flourish out of pulling back, whether it was going onstage late — he made that one of his trademarks — or simply blowing off shows. He made a point of being combative in interviews. That also meant long delays between records — after Stand!, he kept everyone waiting an unimaginable 18 months for new music, forcing his record company to drop the utterly perfect Greatest Hits. (The delay also gave Motown time to whip up the perfect Sly and the Family Stone substitute: the Jackson 5, who filled the gap with their doppelganger hits like 'I Want You Back' and 'The Love You Save.') After the wait, he stunned everyone with There's a Riot Goin' On, his radically negative refusal to play the commercial game, with its low-fi beatbox avant-funk. It was the prototype for independent swerves like Radiohead's Kid A or Nirvana's In Utero — yet like those albums, it was a sales blockbuster, hitting home with an audience that idolized him for going his own way. 'Family Affair' is the best-known classic, with Bobby Womack's virtuoso blues guitar, in a heartbreaking tale of newlyweds falling apart. But it also has stunners like 'Spaced Cowboy,' sounding uncannily like Young Marble Giants with its basement drum-machine clank, before it builds into a cocky drug boast with ironic Wild West yodels. 'I can't say it more than once, because I'm thinkin' twice as fast,' Sly growls. 'Yodel-ay-hee, yay-hee-hoo!' But the toughest, bleakest moment is 'Africa Talks to You (The Asphalt Jungle),' where the chorus chants, 'Timberrrrr! All fall down!' 'I wrote a song about Africa because in Africa the animals are animals,' he told Rolling Stone at the time. 'The tiger is a tiger, the snake is a snake, you know what the hell he's gonna do. Here in New York, the asphalt jungle, a tiger or a snake may come up looking like, uhhh, you.' He switched gears with Fresh in 1973 — his most exuberantly upbeat funk, jumping right out with 'In Time.' It's as flamboyantly cheerful as Riot was hostile, which isn't to say it's any less brash in its confrontational spirit. 'Let Me Have It All' is the most openhearted love song he ever did, rhythmically and vocally. Yet it's also an album about drugged-out euphoria on the verge of crashing. 'If You Want Me to Stay,' with its drowsy pimp strut of a bass line, warns you not to be foolish enough to count on him or expect anything out of him — especially if you bought a ticket for one of those shows where he didn't turn up. After Fresh, his music suddenly fell off a cliff, with depressing comeback efforts like Small Talk, High on You, or Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, with its faux anthem 'Family Again.' Everyone was still stealing ideas from Sly — most notably Miles Davis — but the man himself ghosted. The tabloids kept reporting the bad news: He was wasted on drugs, broke, living out of a car. His final albums barely got noticed, with smarmy titles like Back on the Right Track or Ain't but the One Way, ending with 'High, Y'All.' His final highlights came with George Clinton, his most outspoken disciple, on Funkadelic's 1981 The Electric Spanking of War Babies. 'FREE SLY!' Clinton declared in the liner notes, having recently gotten busted with Stone. Sly also shone on Clinton's 1983 robot-funk hit 'Hydraulic Pump,' from the P-Funk All-Stars' album Urban Dance-Floor Guerillas. 'Hydraulic Pump' was a prophecy of the Detroit techno to come, but it also turned out to be Sly's final moment of glory on wax. When Stone died on June 9, it was just a few days after the 51st anniversary of his most famous celebrity stunt: getting married onstage at Madison Square Garden, in a sold-out 1974 show. In so many ways, that wedding event was his farewell to his public life, as he became a reclusive figure for his final decades. 'Dying young is hard to take, selling out is harder,' he warned in 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),' still just in his 20s. The ultimate epitaph for Sly is that he managed to avoid doing either. Yet the world never came close to forgetting about Sly Stone. The excellent Questlove documentary Sly Lives! (The Burden of Black Genius) was a reminder of why he still loomed so large, years after he'd seemingly said his goodbyes. You can hear that legacy everywhere, even in young punk rockers like Turnstile, who turned 'Thank You' into their own 'T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection).' 'Everyday People' has to be the only song that's ever gotten covered by both Tom Jones and Joan Jett. 'We gotta live together,' the song goes, even though its author made a point of living apart. But he went out as a musical revolutionary who owed the world nothing. Every goodbye he ever had to say was already there in 'Thank You': 'We began to wrestle, I was on the top.' Sly Stone defined that sense of lifelong struggle in his music. But he managed to turn that struggle into songs that will keep right on changing and challenging the world forever. The message in the music is clear as always — everybody is a star. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
UPI
6 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
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Funk-rock music pioneer, frontman of revolutionary band dies at 82
Sly Stone, the frontman of the revolutionary band Sly and the Family Stone, has died following several health issues. He was 82. 'It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved dad, Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone,' his family said in a statement, according to PEOPLE. 'After a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend, and his extended family,' the statement continued. '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.' Born March 15, 1943, in Denton, Texas, Stone helped pioneer the emerging psychedelic soul movement in the 1960s and '70s with his genre-blending group. Sly and the Family Stone is considered rock's first group to incorporate the sounds of funk, soul, R&B, rock and psychedelic music. 'James Brown may have invented funk, but Sly Stone perfected it,' AllMusic wrote. 'His alchemical fusion of soul, rock, gospel, and psychedelia rejected stylistic boundaries as much as his explosive backing band the Family Stone ignored racial and gender restrictions, creating a series of euphoric yet politically charged records that proved a massive influence on artists of all musical and cultural backgrounds.' Sly and the Family Stone is also considered the first major American rock group to have a racially integrated, mixed-gender lineup. Originally formed in 1966, the group's core lineup consisted of Stone alongside his brother, Freddie Stone, sister Rose Stone, Cynthia Robinson, Greg Errico, Jerry Martini and Larry Graham. Sly and the Family Stone racked up more than a dozen songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including five top 10 hits. The group's three No. 1 hits are 'Everyday People,' 'Family Affair' and 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)'/'Everybody Is a Star.' The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 and were ranked 43rd on Rolling Stone's list of the '100 Greatest Artists of All Time' in 2010. Three of the group's albums — 'Stand,' 'There's a Riot Goin' On' and 'Greatest Hits' — were also included on Rolling Stone's most recent list of the '500 Greatest Albums of All Time.' Despite Sly and the Family Stone fizzling out by 1975, Stone continued to record and tour with a new rotating lineup. He released his debut solo album 'High on You' that same year. Stone remained active in the industry until drug problems forced his effective retirement in 1987. His final solo album, 'I'm Back! Family & Friends,' was released in 2011. Founding member of chart-topping '80s R&B group dies at 68 Legendary hip-hop duo's first US tour in 15 years to start in Mass. Festival fans demand refunds after headliner's set slashed over weather delay Live Wire: Two Northampton music series return in time for summer 'Devastated' music legend cancels more shows due to health issues Read the original article on MassLive.
