UB In Memoriam: Legendary Trailblazer Sly Stone

Legendary Sly Stone passed away yesterday June 9th, 2025, during Black Music Month.

Cited as underlying health issues, he was 82. His family released the following statement;

“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved dad, Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone. 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. 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.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your unwavering support.”

“What I write is people’s music. I want everybody, even the dummies, to understand what I’m saying — that way, they won’t be dummies anymore.”

Sly & The Family Stone was one of the most innovative groups popular music has ever known, a band that instigated a musical revolution.

Led by Sly Stone, The Family Stone consisted of boys and girls, both black and white.

Sly and the Family Stone were credited as one of the first racially integrated bands in music history, belting their message of peace, love and social consciousness through a string of hit anthems that fused R&B, soul, funk and rock n roll.

Back in 1967, when the interracial, mixed-gender combo burst onto the scene with their debut album, the burgeoning rock & roll subculture was, as always, hungry for fresh kicks and different sounds.

But no one was quite prepared for the magical, multi-faceted musical mix Sly and company served up.

Their music was an inspired blend of rock, soul, pop, jazz, and an emerging genre soon to be dubbed funk.

It packed a powerful, joyous wallop, delivering all the things one hoped to find in music: The thrill of the new, the excitement of the unexpected, a galvanizing groove, and lyrics that actually said something.

Like our Twin Cities own, legendary Prince, Sly had taught himself to play over a dozen instruments, including organ, piano and guitar.

At the age of 16, he had a tiny hit with a song called “Long Time Away.”

Rock bloomed on the radio, and in the Jazz clubs, artists like Miles Davis blew cool elegance and ice blue moods out of a horn, while Art Blakey and Horace Silver were experimenting with a gritty, lowdown old-timey Jazz that was smoky, rough and hot.

Those players even called it by the bad-boy name: “the funk.”

The group was organized by Sly Stone who, although he was only in his early twenties, he had achieved notable success in the pop music world as a writer (Mojo Man” and “The Swim”), as a producer (the Beau Brummels, The Mojo Men, Bobby Freeman and other artists on the Autumn label) and as a DJ on the top R&B station in San Francisco.

Of the group’s initial organization, guitarist Freddie “Pyhotee” Stone (Sly’s brother) recalled, “We all got together in the basement of Sly’s house. It seemed like a little miracle the way we all got together: it was as if fate had a hand in the situation.”

Common musical objectives, coupled with that “little miracle,” enabled Sly And The Family Stone to be called “the first fusion of psychedelia and rhythm and blues.”

Sly, who composed and arranged the majority of the group’s songs, preferred to call it simply “the best music we can play.”

Organizer of the group Sly Stone was born on March 15th, 1944, and raised “everywhere my family went.”

From the age of four, he was in a family gospel group, and the strong, spiritual coming together that exists in the best gospel–the yelling out, the testifying, the harmonies of repeated words–all those elements infused Sly‘s sound and were a basic part of the group’s soul excitement.

He attended college for three years and studied musical theory and composition.

Sly decided to form the group while he was a disc jockey. “I just looked around at the people I knew and sought the best musicians I could find among them. It turned out very well and to this day, we’ve never had an argument.”

Sly was a top DJ, first on KSOL, then on KDIA, where he was one of the first to break away from tight station programming to play album cuts by Dylan and other artists.

Before this he produced most of the performers on San Francisco’s Autumn Records (Beau Brummels, Mojo Men, Bobby Freeman) and wrote Gold Record hits for them (“The Swim,” “Mojo Man”).

Sly eventually determined to get his own group together to perform his original material and formed The Stoners.

But The Stoners couldn’t put down the sound Sly wanted–that perfect sound he already had in his head–and were disbanded.

On his second try, in the autumn of 1966, Sly did find the right combination of talented musicians whose ideas about music meshed with his own: Sly and The Family Stone.

Of its members, only Cynthia Robinson (trumpet) remained from The Stoners.

The others in the Family Stone came in from different directions. Sly‘s brother Freddie (lead guitar), who had also studied music, had his own group, playing, as were most of the others, the standard R&B material of the time.

Larry Graham (bass) is a cousin to Sly and Freddie and previous to joining forces with Sly, had been performing on organ as well as bass (and singing in his rich, deep bass) with his mother, Dell Matthews, in a small group.

Saxophonist Jerry Martini, a longtime friend of Sly‘s, was into music at San Francisco City College where Freddie also studied and had travelled with other bands.

Gregg Errico (drums) is Jerry‘s cousin.

An entity, Sly and The Family Stone recorded their first Epic album, rightly titled “A Whole New Thing,” entirely written and produced by Sly (as are all the other albums) and released in October of 1967.

As an energetic and articulate young man, Sly defined the group as a “dance and concert combination” adding that “what looks like choreography when you see us perform is really the spontaneous feelings of people who just naturally belong together.”

Singer and guitarist Freddie “Pyhotee” Stone was born in Dallas, Texas, on June 5, 1946, and was raised in San Francisco.

He traced his interest in music back to his childhood when he recalled hearing “my father, who used to play the guitar and sing in church After graduating from high school, Freddie went on to study music theory at San Francisco City College.

Adept on all kinds of instruments ranging from the guitar to the clarinet, Freddie also composes and does some arranging. His favorite instrumentalists are George Benson, Howard Roberts and Wes Montgomery.

Freddie’s ambitions were “to be a great musician” and to be able to “stay away from all kinds of hassles and just be alone and think anything I want. ”

Cynthia “Ecco” Robinson, the girl with the trumpet, was born in Sacramento, California, on January 12, 1946. She learned the fundamentals of music from her mother, who was a concert pianist. While in high school Cynthia played with the marching band and mastered the bass and sax.

Before her association with Sly, she was a student at Sacramento City College. Remarking on the first time the group got together, Cynthia once recalled how “We all met at Sly’s house and started rehearsing and something started to click right from the beginning.”

Singer and bass player Larry Graham Jr. is a native of Beaumont, Texas, where he was born on August 14, 1946. Raised in California, Larry graduated from Hayward High School and attended Chabot College for a year and a half.

Coming from a musical family, Larry traced his interest in performing back to his mother and grandmother.

Prior to becoming a member of Sly And The Family Stone, Larry performed with his mother for nearly four years: “My mother played piano and doubled on organ while I played bass and doubled on organ. Sometimes we had a drummer. We all sang.”

Larry had appeared with such notables as Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hocker, The Drifters and Jackie Wilson. His special hobbies are car racing and traveling.

Drummer Greg “Hand Feet” Errico was born in San Francisco on September 1, 1946, and it was there that he spent his childhood.

When asked if he was musically influenced by a member of his family, he smiled and said, “Well, my brother used to tease me that he was going to buy me a drum set but he never did. That’s about the extent of it.”

Greg was especially fond of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles; his favorite composers are Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. When not listening to records or performing, Greg “likes to see new and different things.”

Rosie Stone, was born in Vallejo, California, on March 21, 1945, and was a student at Vallejo Junior College prior to joining Sly And The Family Stone.

In addition to playing the electric piano, Rosie was also adept on the organ and the harmonica and a featured vocalist with the group. She was a guest on numerous television and radio programs originating in Chicago and has appeared with such notables as The Coasters, Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley.

Saxophonist Jerry Martini was born in Colorado on October 1, 1943, and grew up in San Francisco. After graduating from Balboa High School, he went on to study music at San Francisco City College. In addition to the sax, Jerry plays the accordion, piano and clarinet.

A longtime friend of Sly’s, Jerry became a member of the group after becoming dissatisfied with other bands with which he had been performing. “I went to the radio station where Sly was a DJ,” Jerry recalls, “and he told me of his plans for a new group. That’s how it began.”

Like the other members of Sly And The Family Stone, Jerry had appeared on radio and television programs. Among his favorite composers are John Lennon and Sly Stone; he enjoys the performances of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan.

While Sly Stone was on tour, he had been sitting quietly for almost an hour, in New York’s Gorham Hotel, occasionally tapping his feet, when he abruptly looked up and asked, “Do you want to hear it?” Without waiting for an answer, he snatched up four tape recorders and by imitating an instrument vocally or beating the sound out on the furniture, he taped four separate instrumental parts, for horns, drums, bass and organ.

Taking up his guitar and turning on the recorders simultaneously, he played a line that fit jigsaw puzzle-like into the rest. It was a song, a little raggedy, but a fully realized song nevertheless, with every part of the band accounted for.

As Freddie once stated, “Sly is always fifty songs ahead of the group: they are stored up in his head.”

Sly once stated; “I want everybody to understand my songs. I want even dummies to understand so they won’t be dumb anymore. And you got to talk to them in a way that they can understand. And those people that get bugged by being talked to loud, then you’ve got to talk soft; if you can still tell the truth and talk soft.”

In the beginning, Sly wrote songs about music and taught us to ride the rhythm.

At the same time, reaching us through our bodies, he got into our heads and subtly began changing them: “When you’re through with what you think you have to do..or pursue. When you’ve gone where you have to go, let me know, I wanna take you higher.”

While Sly and the group were taking everyone higher, they were also telling us about our life. Groupies. Plastic people. Everyday people.

For their sophomore release, they signed to Epic Records in 1968 and their first release for the label “Dance To The Music” hit the Top 10 in England as well as the US.

That song might have been the granddaddy of the disco era to come.

In the summer of 1968, the group was featured on an NBC variety show, “Showcase ’68,” and when the national audience got a gander at those crazy get-ups and the lush, creative music the group had created, the group spawned a series of imitators.

Their album, “Life,” featured one of the great Sly Stone compositions, a double sided sizzler, “Everyday People” b/w “Sing a Simple Song,” and went #1 Pop and R&B.

Increasingly, Sly mixed social commentary with wit and ironic humor.

The iconic album “Stand!” is eloquent, funky, danceable, thought provoking and contains cuts that could pop right out of today’s headline: “Don’t Call Me Nigger Whitey,” “Sex Machine,” “Somebody’s Watching You” and the spirit-lifting, “I Wanna Take You Higher.”

In the period between 1967 and 1971, there were 19 songs carrying the term “funk” in their titles, “Funky Broadway,” “Funky Judge,” “Funky Nassau,” “Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On,” but it was James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and Sly Stone, the Godfather of Psyhedelic Funk, that were the undisputed masters of that well-worked sound.

Ten months after Sly‘s “Dance To The Music” had abandoned the time-honored call-and-response gospel-blues format of most Black popular music,

Berry Gordy‘s writer-producer wonderkid, Norman Whitfield, created the first of his acid soul recordings for Motown — The Temptations, “Cloud Nine.”

Sly‘s stuttering brass, waves of rhythm and counter-rhythm, and sprawling conceptual themes, saw reflections in the work of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis.

Lazy yet lively gems like “Hot Fun In The Summertime” (#2 Pop, #3 R&B) and the tense dance-romp, “hank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” b/w “Everybody Is A Star” established the group at America‘s pop music summit and while their Greatest Hits album rose to the #2 position on the Pop charts, “Stand” was enjoying an eight-week reign on the charts, with most of the Top 10 singles certified gold.

In 1971, “There’s A Riot Goin’ On,” produced their last double #1 single, the reflective “Family Affair” (#1 Pop & R&B).

By 1972, Sly had lost some of his magic.

Rumors of his reckless lifestyle and his bizarre and luckless behavior washed his face from public view.

Sly‘s been sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg, Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, Fatboy Slim, Ice Cube and Public Enemy to name only a few.

Sly Stone was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1992, and is the recipient of the 2002 R&B Foundation Pioneer Award.

The Grammy‘s held a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone in 2006.

The group was also inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2007.

Sly was one of the first of that new breed of artists who arrived on the national scene in the middle ’60s when America was discovering in her midst dark new treasures of possibility, not only in the hearts and minds of her great women and men, but in those of her unfathomable faceless numberless everyday people.

UB Sends Our Condolences to the Family, Friends and Fans of Sly Stone!