Sly and the Family Stone leader Sly Stone dead at 82

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Legendary Bay Area music icon Sly Stone has died at the age of 82. As the leader of the influential psychedelic funk and rock group Sly and the Family Stone, Stone carved a string of groundbreaking hits in the late ’60s and early ’70s with records like “If You Want Me to Stay,” “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” and “Stand.”

Born Sylvester Stewart, Stone grew up in Vallejo. Before launching the groundbreaking interracial group, Stone was a songwriter, radio DJ and producer. The band’s signature sound was a blowout of frantic horns, rapid-fire guitar and locomotive rhythms, a melting pot of jazz, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, sound and the early grooves of funk.

Stone’s group began as a Bay Area sextet featuring Sly on keyboards, Larry Graham on bass; Sly’s brother, Freddie, on guitar; sister Rose on vocals; Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini on horns and Greg Errico on drums. They debuted with the album “A Whole New Thing” and earned the title with their breakthrough single, “Dance to the Music.” It hit the top 10 in April 1968, the week the Rev. Martin Luther King was murdered, and helped launch an era when the polish of Motown and the understatement of Stax suddenly seemed of another time.

Stone, the group’s flamboyant frontman, was a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, known for sporting leather jumpsuits, goggle shades, a mile-wide grin and a mile-high afro. Sly and the Family Stone were captured at their peak with a show-stopping performance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival in Upstate New York.

Although Sly and the Family Stone’s time at the top was brief, the group, and more directly Stone himself, had a profound and lasting impact on music for decades to come.

“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewelry,” Questlove wrote in the foreword to Stone’s memoir, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” named for one of his biggest hits and published through Questlove’s imprint in 2023. “He was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”

“Sly did so many things so well that he turned my head all the way around,” funk pioneer and Stone-collaborator George Clinton once wrote. “He could create polished R&B that sounded like it came from an act that had gigged at clubs for years, and then in the next breath he could be as psychedelic as the heaviest rock band.”

Stone had been in poor health in recent years. According to his publicist, Stone died Monday while surrounded by family after contending with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.