Making Sly Fresh Again

'Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius)'

Sly Stone (Courtesy of Hulu)

For starters, let’s hear it for Ahmir Thompson, the drummer, bandleader, filmmaker, music historian, memoirist, Jimmy Fallon major domo, did I mention filmmaker, and blurber of Is It Still Good to Ya? better known as Questlove. Without Questlove, I would not be sitting here at midnight reflecting on the great lost genius and early Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Sly Stone, government name Sylvester Stewart. That’s because, having published Sly’s 2023 Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) memoir through his Auwa imprint—run with Ben Greenman, the co-author of both Sly’s book and Questlove’s superb Hip Hop Is History—Thompson has just devoted his second film (the first being 2021’s Oscar-winning 1969 lookback Summer of Soul) to Sly Stone. Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius) is the no-nonsense title, as well it should be. Streamable on Hulu. Very much worth seeing.

Very much worth mentioning is a redolent fact that’s at best an abstraction for anyone under 70, which is that Questlove is a second-generation bizzer: his father, born Arthur Lee Andrews Thompson, led a doowop group called Lee Andrews and the Hearts that rode the 1957 hit “Long Lonely Nights” and several even bigger follow-ups for much of Ahmir’s youth—until A Tribe Called Quest inspired him to rename himself at 19. You can see why the guy has such an acute sense of black pop history. Summer of Soul, about the forgotten, music-heavy 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, took place a year before he was born. Sly Lives! has a not dissimilar mission, because Hall of Fame or no Hall of Fame, the man born Sylvester Stewart in 1943 all but outlived what legend he had, and as Thompson sets out to prove, that’s not right.

In my critical judgment back then, Sly’s legend was still major as of 1980, when I was assembling the enlarged CG compendium dubbed Rock Albums of the ‘70s: A Critical Guide, where when I checked last week I was reminded of something I’d forgotten: Sly’s first three albums of that decade, 1970’s Greatest Hits, 1972’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and 1973’s Fresh, followed two A plusses with a full A, whereupon his four subsequent ‘70s albums clocked in at C, B minus, B minus, and B. If I’d been doing Consumer Guides in the ‘60s, there’d be other artists similarly honored: Beatles and Monk for sure, maybe Miles and Rolling Stones, and now I’ll stop playing this game. As things stand, Sly’s two A plusses followed by a full A are all but unmatched. And yet somehow the renown of these albums faded. Looking back without recollecting many details, I surmise that as coke and scag replaced psychedelics as musicianly mindfucks of choice and Sly added angel dust and other variants to the combo, his mental deterioration fueled a notoriety even more extreme, disheartening, and musically disabling than most. Coke and angel dust seemed his special faves, but he wasn’t picky.

Questlove’s film doesn’t minimize Sly’s drug abuse, although my by now faint memories of the details I picked up back then gossiping with designated experts as the ‘80s came and went were even more depressing, tragic, and at times grotesque than Sly Lives! is inclined to be too completist about. If you can follow its mind-blown ins and outs, the Greenman-assisted memoir is more detailed. Well before the ‘80s were over, no one in my world, which of course isn’t Questlove’s, felt obliged to keep him on their radar: although a film soundtrack is scheduled to surface May 9, his last true studio album I find in the record book, Ain’t but the One Way, was released 43 years ago. But the film does report, with sufficient force if not unexceptionable detail, that by now he’s been clean for a while of unspecified but meaningful duration. Does that mean decades? I hope so but wouldn’t bet on it.

What’s more important, as Sly Lives! does a superb job of excavating, is the man’s huge talent, which begins not with his remarkable musical gifts but with his considerable IQ. Quietly but also pointedly, his memoir reports the details of his early education, where he rose through a public school system that wasn’t all that DEI even in the liberal Bay Area. For a drug casualty, his sparse face-to-face interviews, most if not all of them coherent and articulate albeit very much less than current, are relatively flattering. But as the memoir ends, he and/or his amanuensis Greenman puts it this way: “I hear from people from childhood, from bandmates, from people I met along the way. Some of them want to see me or talk to me. I feel bad but I just can’t do it anymore. My health makes it impossible—I have COPD and reduced lung capacity.” Of course, this leaves unaddressed the matter of just how much the vast quantities of dope his body has processed have also damaged not just his stamina but the high IQ his parents bequeathed him. He gets to talk a fair bit in this film—enough that when I first watched it, the editing convinced me without specifying as much that while Sly looked “frail” at times, the genius who speaks for himself in old interview clips that complement the savvy insights of Vernon Reid, Dream Hampton, and many others has reached the age the two of us share: 82. My bad: further research and reflection indicate that most and probably all of Sly’s spoken commentary was recorded decades ago.

But then there’s that other thing: his extraordinary musicality. Even for someone who heard those consecutive A plus albums dozens of times back in the day, how articulately Sly Lives! both celebrates them and breaks them down not only renews them but persuades me that I failed to fully comprehend their genius at the time. In this the details contributed by Questlove’s hand-picked, racially and sexually integrated commentariat play a crucial role—musically, guitar great Reid is the star of this part of the show, with Hampton also notable for her political vision and cultural detail—are always acute and occasionally revelatory, isolating for full-on elucidation licks or beats or both-at-onces you’d enjoyed so thoroughly long ago that for all practical purposes they’d been imprinted on your aural muscle memory. Adding detail, Duke professor Marc Anthony Neal homes in on what he sees as Stewart’s utopianism; Chaka Khan honors him for making her entertainment career and hence her place in music history possible.

And yet, as the film does not shy away from recognizing, Stewart’s unmitigated greatness was alarmingly short-lived, from circa 1967 to 1973. Which suggests among other things that all those rumors and scare stories I found so dismaying and off-putting back then were pretty much true and could have been even worse. In the end, Sly Stone was a drug fiend for a lot longer than he was any kind of icon. One of this film’s many virtues is that it never considers soft-pedaling that tragic and unseemly fact.

Nonetheless, that’s ultimately secondary, because this is above all an engrossing film about music music music. In no need of drug warnings myself—I’ve done cocaine half a dozen times at most, and seldom touch pot anymore—I was fine with its terseness in re dope while treasuring its wealth of rich, expert, sometimes revelatory musical detail. I came away feeling that Sly & the Family Stone weren’t just black music visionaries—they were pop music visionaries who deserve rediscovery along those lines. And I also came away believing that in the just world this isn’t, Questlove has earned another Oscar.

Correction: This piece as originally published mistakenly referred to “Sly Lives!” containing recent interviews with Sly Stone. As David Vawter pointed out in the comments below, the documentary does not, and this error has been corrected.