In recent years, for those who had trained an ear for even a hint of a signal, it seemed we might have hit the run-out groove when it came to tracking Sly Stone.
The run-out—a record’s last lap—indicates a pause. But did that silence mean there might be a flip side? Not necessarily an ending but a curtain: a cameo, a collaboration or brand-new incarnation. Time would tell.
If you trusted press reports, what you heard was dire: Stone was out of money, living in a van, wandering Los Angeles.
In fact, his time out of frame was more nuanced, as chronicled in his memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). That van was his studio, a means to an end. “It was a white camper with green stripes,” he writes, “a Pleasure Way, that was everything to me: dressing room, hotel room, transportation, hideout, office.”
In the absence of elucidation, speculation crescendoed. “When a newspaper report claimed I was homeless,” Stone writes, “I tried to explain the difference between living in a vehicle by choice and doing so because there were no options.” Dogged by fighting (or filing) lawsuits against people hired to manage his money and career, and facing the consequences of his own choices and extravagances, he found himself trying to dig out of a hole that proved to be quicksand. “I was frustrated that everything I was doing—the gigs I was playing, the old records that were still selling—didn’t seem to be bringing enough money,” he admits. While he may have been down, though, he hadn’t lost his wit or swagger.
“I offered them a comment if they would pay to repaint my gold Studebaker,” he remembers. “That seemed like it answered the question all on its own.”
In Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Stone sets the needle down on a different groove. He’s finally speaking for himself.
Frank, illuminating, and at turns harrowing, the book tracks a momentous arc. It’s a wild ride through heady excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, while also a rose-colored journey back to a brief niche in time threaded with unity and hope.
That territory now feels like another planet.
Stone put pumped-up funk front and center on the dance floor, on record charts, and within youth consciousness. His band blended soul, rock, and R&B to make a revolution on wax—loud, fluorescent, and fresh. Shot through with bright horns and the sinew of bass and drums, the group led with a spirit of togetherness, a multiracial ensemble that featured men and women. The music telegraphed possibilities. The band also symbolized a particular vision of California, looking toward the future, balanced on the Pacific Rim. For me, Stone’s songs wrapped tightly around my childhood, a soundtrack for the social experiment we were living, the hopeful world we would be inhabiting—“We got to live together.”
The harmonized refrain was part of the atmosphere.
Stone cosigns that spirit of fellowship throughout his memoir. “Music didn’t have a color,” he writes. “All I could see was notes, styles, and ideas. I tried to learn from it.”
Born Sylvester Stewart in 1943, he moved with his family from Denton, Texas, to Vallejo, California, as part of the second wave of the Great Migration. The family was close-knit, and “the piano was as prominent as the kitchen table.” Stone found his voice while singing in church, and fell into the spirit of the music and its ability to minister to the soul.
Though rooted in that sound, his ear was also pulled by R&B and early rock ’n’ roll—Little Richard, Clyde McPhatter, Sam Cooke. “These from-the-church singers were something,” he remembers. “They kept what was holy and added in what was earthy, and the combination landed on me hard.”
Picking up different instruments, refining his ear, Stone set about looking for opportunities, players, a scene. The sobriquet Sly emerged early, when a student in an elementary school spelling bee transposed the l and the y on the chalkboard.
It stuck.
Enrolling in a radio-tech course, Stone worked his way into an on-air job at AM station KSOL. It was primarily a soul format, but Stone’s playlist reflected his curiosity: the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Mose Allison. As well, his on-air recitations of “The Nazz” (an homage to comedian Lord Buckley) solidified his commitment to the offbeat. “I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone,” he writes. “I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right.… Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.”
It also reflected the dawning tune-in/turn-on zeitgeist.
Stone’s memoir channels this persona. The book’s voice is the purr and pacing of clever DJ patter and artful wordplay, as if he is back-announcing the sweep of his life. There are the ultra highs (playing Woodstock, collecting cars) and the basement lows (predatory industry practices, the deleterious intrusion of drugs). All mark a supercharged career that shaped the sounds to come. “We were going for something more than ‘my baby loves me,’ ” Stone writes, and this extended to the bold, patched-together way the band dressed. “White and black together, male and female,” he tells us, “that was a big deal back then and it was a big deal on purpose.”
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) winds us through those Bay Area salad days. Between his on-air gig and producing for Autumn Records, Stone meticulously built a powerhouse band—some blood relations; others, found family. By 1969, they had scored a No. 1 single on both the R&B and Billboard Hot 100 charts. That song, “Everyday People,” offered more than a catchy hook; it was an anthem. His life would never be the same.
Yet, even as early as 1968, after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, Stone sensed a “shadow”—not just in regard to the band but also to the country.
He had trouble keeping the pace: “Fame speeds everything up and you have to speed yourself up too or you get left behind.” This slip-sliding progressed, as pressures mounted, for decades. “There was a culture and a mindset,” he recalls, “and there were also demands.… How did that fuel make me feel? A drug can be a temporary escape and so I will temporarily escape that question.”
Stone comes to the page candidly, even if, at first, it comes served with a curve. Still, for all of the text’s discursiveness—the two Sylvesters vying—Stone interrogates himself and lets us in. Some of the anecdotes peel off like snapshots strewn across a table, asides about his wide and intersecting circles: Bobby Womack, Issac Hayes, Terry Melcher, Carol Doda, and Miles Davis. Others lead to longer reveries, as Stone revisits decades-old television appearances (most compellingly chat shows alongside Muhammad Ali and Richard Pryor). These moments feel less like a mirror than a portal, a chance to fully see the moment and himself and reassess.
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a reclamation. Its reward: a centering of Stone’s inimitable voice, a showcase for the flair with which he makes language dance, especially on the subject of music—technique, feeling, and meaning. “The organ bounced like the rest of the arrangement was a trampoline,” he observes of 1971’s “Poet,” a cut that, prophetically, begins with the declaration “My only weapon is my pen…”
We haven’t hit dead wax, Stone’s book assures us. Instead, he has turned the record over—the stories flowing, vivid and reflective. Now 80, he offers commentary on the world we’ve inherited, rife with intolerance and divisiveness, that comes filtered through a voice that was a dynamic symbol of what might have been. It takes a toll, Stone admits: “Being an artist meant more than just traveling through events. It meant channeling them.” As long as he’s standing—a trickster, a survivor—he reminds us that the body and mind keep score.•
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
