Joel Selvin October 12, 2023 (datebook.sfchronicle.com)

“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” by Sly Stone, with Ben Greenman.Photo: AUWA Books

Sly Stone has been MIA for so long, many people will probably be surprised to learn that he is still alive. Actually, at age 80, the incredible and unpredictable funk music pioneer has, once again, surprised us all by producing a frisky, remarkably vivid and cogent account of his life and career.

Beyond being one of the stars of the fabled Woodstock festival and subsequent motion picture, Sly & the Family Stone — the six-member rock group he assembled in San Francisco in the 1960s that featured men and women, Black and white people — changed the sound of all Black music with his brilliant blend of pop, rock, R&B, jazz and soul, from the sound of Motown Records to the progressive jazz of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. After the dissolution of the original group in 1975 — when Sly became better known for not showing up at concerts than incendiary performances like Woodstock — he plummeted out of the pop scene, quickly reduced to guest appearances on other people’s records after a few desultory, second-rate solo albums.

By the time he was arrested by the FBI as a fugitive from justice in 1991, at the bottom end of a dizzying downward spiral of drugs, guns and problems with the law, he had practically destroyed what had been one of the great reputations of pop. Since then, he has made sporadic, spectral-like reanimations — a disastrous Grammy Awards appearance in 2006, a halfhearted Coachella festival show in 2010 — before returning to his reclusive existence in seedy Hollywood motels or RVs parked in friends’ driveways, in and out of rehab, pursuing fruitless legal cases for back royalties.

More Information

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
By Sly Stone with Ben Greenman
(AUWA Books; 298 pages; $30) 

Then out of this murky silence comes “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” a full-fledged, surprisingly forthcoming and witty memoir that is the first offering from the new publishing imprint from drummer and filmmaker Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who contributes a foreword and whose Academy Award-winning documentary, “Summer of Soul,” helped set the stage for this return to public consciousness by the once great and mighty wizard of rock and soul (director Questlove plans to debut his Sly & the Family Stone documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in January). No doubt great credit goes to co-author Ben Greenman, a onetime editor at the New Yorker magazine and novelist who has previously coaxed autobiographies out of such challenging subjects as Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic.

And while Sly Stone — raised in Vallejo as Sylvester Stewart — doesn’t necessarily detail his most reckless irresponsibilities, neither does he excuse or defend himself especially. No excuses, no apologies. The text is riddled with the kind of self-effacing honesty and clever wordplay that sparkled in his song lyrics. Like when he told David Letterman in a 1982 TV appearance that his reputation for missing concerts came from his “impetuous youthfulness,” which is as close as he comes to explaining how he came to miss 26 out of 80 engagements in 1970 alone.

Sly Stone’s memoir is “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” co-written with Ben Greenman.Photo: Family photo courtesy Sly Stone

But it is an amazing, epic story — how he went from a Seventh-day Adventist Church background to teenage record producer and San Francisco soul radio DJ to one of the biggest stars of the 1969 Woodstock festival with his groundbreaking band and threw it all away in his subsequent, Dostoyevskian fall from grace — a story that has been told many times before, including the 1998 oral history that I authored featuring interviews with every member of the original group except Sly, “On the Record: Sly & the Family Stone” (recently republished by Permuted Press). It is hardly surprising that Sly does not remember things the same way other people did. It is more surprising that he remembers anything at all.

Sly knew what he was doing, putting together his mixed-race, bigender group, dressing them in mod fashions instead of the standard soul music uniform of matching suits. He mixed musical elements from the broad diversity of his background — he started in gospel and doo-wop, made British Invasion rock records with San Francisco’s Beau Brummels, used to play Beatles and Dylan on his soul radio show, and recited the Beat monologist Lord Buckley. He suited his songs like “Everyday People” to a humanitarian message perfectly in tune with the times.

“You couldn’t take turns with freedom,” he writes in “Thank You.” “You couldn’t have one moment where freedom went with the majority and one where it went with the money and one where it went with one skin color or another. Everyone had to be free all the time or no one was free at all.”

“Sly has lived a hundred lives,” writes Questlove in his introduction to the book, “and they are all here.”

Joel Selvin is a freelance writer.