I Want to Take You Higher...

The word "funk" was already in circulation by 1968, when Sly & the Family Stone released "Dance to the Music." But with the sassy, bass-heavy track, funk as we know it today was born. Jeff Kaliss examines the man who called himself Sly Stone from his childhood roots in black gospel churches through his afterlife as an oldies act. Of most interest is that fertile period, 1968 through 1971, when Stone revolutionized music at the head of a band fully integrated in race and gender that brought soul and rock together under a groove. Band bios are mostly assembly-line hackwork nowadays, but Kaliss manages for the most part to write well and with insight. Stone turned Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis toward funk, though the thump 'n' pluck of his music would be dumbed down as disco and endlessly sampled in hip-hop. Sly Stone's vision of '60s utopia disintegrated rapidly when wine and pot gave way to cocaine and harder drugs.