Mossy Stone rolls again

Sly Stone, the Howard Hughes of the Woodstock scene, rolled up on a three-wheel custom chopper painted the colour of lemons. His straggly hair was tucked beneath a baseball cap and draped on his shoulders was a shirt emblazoned with images of gambler's dice and the $100 face of Ben Franklin.

“I'm sorry I'm late,'' he said as he pulled off his gloves.
Late? Stone was technically tardy by all of 13 minutes, but the apology had the ring of a larger truth.

Sly and the Family Stone became famous for making some of the most euphoric, genre-busting music of the late 1960s and early 1970s — Family Affair, Stand, Dance to the Music and I Want to Take You Higher. But he was also notorious as the slipperiest of stars.

Family Stone's music was transcendent in the 1960s, but, by the middle of the following decade, the dream was over and Stone was on his own and living on vapours.

There were comeback attempts and albums with pleading titles, but the arc of his story was turning grim and he became more and more reclusive. Now, he says, he wants to rejoin the world.

“I am ready to show people what I can do,'' Stone said, smiling that familiar toothy grin, although the 1960s towering afro is gone along with his funky saunter. His posture and movement show the damage of living hard.

Stone's chin never leaves his collarbone when he talks and there's a tremor and hitch to his collarbones. “I'm like this because I fell off a cliff,'' he said, referring to a spill he took “walking in my yard'' in Beverly Hills.

There is a sense that Stone, 65, went over the edge plenty of times.

Stone, who rarely gives interviews, had a reason for this one: He wants to mount a world tour with some of the original Family Stone members: trumpet player Cynthia Robinson, saxophonist Jerry Martini and Sister Rose Stone. More than that, he wants to return to the music industry, get in the studio with stars he has influenced and hook a young audience.

Stone's longtime manager, Jerry Goldstein, is still with him, but this year the singer brought in Charles Richardson, an old friend, to be his personal manager, and that led to new club shows.

Stone has also been active in the studio, including sessions with funk giant George Clinton and has, according to Richardson, “twenty years' worth of amazing material that he can work on''. Much of that work has been influenced by the hip-hop era.

Promoters have made it clear that Stone is a commodity if he can prove with the club shows that he and his band can bottle the old magic. “If Sly shows he can go the distance, we're told that the world is his oyster,'' Richardson said.

Sylvester Stewart was born in Denton, Texas, but he grew up in Vallejo in the Bay Area. He was the second of five children. His music career was a family affair from the get-go. He was part of a gospel group called the Stewart Four.

“When I was 4, I had a job singing with Sam Cooke on a church show in Oakland Auditorium,'' Stone said. “I remember people ran down the aisles, and I didn't know about the consequences or applause or celebration. I didn't know what music did to people.

"So I started running. That was the first chance I got to see the response you could get from an audience by performing. Since then, I got that same feeling in a way, sometimes.''

In the 1960s, Stone studied trumpet, composition and music theory at a junior college and immersed himself in the music scene of the Bay Area as a disc jockey at soul station KSOL in Oakland and as a producer in San Francisco.

He worked with Grace Slick's first band, the Great Society, as well as with Bobby Freeman and the Beau Brummels. All of this began to shape a music sensibility that was part soul and part psychedelic, a hybrid that would eventually, create an essential template for 1970s funk.

More than the music, the image of the Family Stone on stage was powerful. The ensemble was a mix of gender and race, an ideal collective for an audience eager to live the Age of Aquarius and hear message music that, as a bonus, had a great beat.

The golden moment for the band was at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. Sly performed a delirious call-and-response version of Higher and listened to the crowd of 400,000 sing his words back to him. Many say that set changed the course of music, melding rock with R&B in a liberating way.

“Everybody I saw was full of peace, it was a spirit there that was just peaceful and cool,'' Stone said.

Times got darker after Woodstock. The late 1970s and 1980s found Stone tumbling through a career trapdoor and cushioning the fall with drugs. Like that wide-eyed youngster back at the Oakland church show, Stone decided to run. As the years went on, people in his close circle advised him to be the hermit and bide his time for the big comeback. Eventually, though, he realised that that comeback had to be in his head, not on stage.

“If there is anyone I have influenced who wants me to help them record, I'm willing to do it. I want to go in the studio yesterday and get started. The reason I say that I want to hear from people is that I was influenced to stay underground for so long.''

The notion of a Stone comeback is intriguing. Ken Ehrlich, the executive producer of the Grammys says: “That music — no one had heard anything quite like it before. I know I want to see him play if he can do it again.''

Ehrlich gave Stone a chance a few years ago with mixed results. Stone made his first major public performance in two decades in February 2006 at the Grammys at Staples Centre.

The upcoming gigs and the reconstituted Family Stone will look back on that Grammys night as a preamble to the real comeback. “There are things that can't go wrong because there are so many people involved and on stage they are just galloping,'' he said.