Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) by Ben Greenman
Sylvester Stewart copped his stage name, Sly Stone, when he was still DJing at KSOL in San Francisco. “And there was a tension in the name,” he writes in his new memoir. “Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.” It’s a creative juxtaposition, like the music he made in the ‘60s. He was true to the name he chose for his band, Sly and The Family Stone, which reunited R&B with rock and brought together a multi-racial lineup that included women playing instruments rather than swaying and singing in the background. It was a good family, until dysfunction spread.
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) starts with his reemergence from the flipside of fame, a black hole of dangerous drugs and deadly sycophants. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drugs,” he insists. “If it hadn’t been a choice between them and life, I might still be doing them.”
Written with the New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, Thank You is mostly about music and the music business. He debuted at age five in his parents’ church choir and kept on singing, learning songs and instruments with a savant’s ease. He’s grateful to the formal instruction he received; already in high school, Stone took charge of a school project that brought kids from different backgrounds together by singing. His radio gig led to work with San Francisco’s Autumn Records, writing a hit for Bobby Freeman and producing the Beau Brummels. Before long, the Family Stone were drawing attention from locals and record labels as well.
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“Drugs came in. There were reasons,” he insists, enigmatically. But in the ‘60s no substance could drain the joy from hits such as “Dance to the Music” and “Everyday People.” Nowadays, he reflects on the past. “I mostly measured the time remaining in terms of music,” he writes. His accomplishments from half a century ago are an enduring element in the musical DNA of our time.
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