Sly Stone’s Memoir Is Fascinating

Very few artists have changed the course of popular music, and far fewer have managed to do so twice within a five-year span. Sylvester Stewart, better known to the world as Sly Stone, is in the latter category. In late 1967, Sly and his band, the Family Stone, released the thunderous single “Dance to the Music,” which reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, a chart position that does not begin to do justice to its impact. For the rest of the 1960s, Sly and the Family Stone were the bleeding edge of pop music, cresting in a performance at Woodstock that was one of the high points of the three-day festival. Then, after a (for the time nearly unfathomable) two-and-a-half-year hiatus between new albums, Sly returned in late 1971 with There’s a Riot Goin’ On, a dark, vexing, groundbreaking work that to no small degree gave birth to the future of R&B music.