The other night Ben and I watched the new Sly Stone documentary, Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius). Directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, it’s an exploration and celebration of Stone’s prodigious talent, but also an attempt to understand his downfall, and to place it in the wider context of being a black artist in America, with all the obstacles and traps that are placed in the way.
Sly and the Family Stone achieved unprecedented success in the late Sixties, with number one records, a star turn at Woodstock, a cover on Rolling Stone magazine. Sly was not just a musical genius but a progressive mastermind, insisting that the band be multi-racial and made up of both men and women. Everything about them embodied the notion of inclusivity, of reaching towards a better world in which – without wanting to sound too blandly idealistic – all people could get along together. In a song like “Everyday People”, he made the impossible sound easy.
Perhaps overwhelmed by his own success, and threatened by the demands it placed on him, from the Seventies onwards he spiralled downwards into such heavy drug usage and unreliable behaviour that his work, and the very existence of the band, was undermined. The film paints an unflinching portrait of how this happened.
In an extraordinary scene halfway through, we see him interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970. Cavett is the urbane chat-show host, secure in his role, blandly smiling in a suit and tie. Stone, meanwhile, is dressed in black leather, his lush curls escaping from beneath a decorative crocheted hat. He is also, as Living Colour’s Vernon Reid says on the voiceover, “high as a Georgia pine”.
Nonetheless, he is aware of what he’s saying and of the game that’s being played. And the game is an ugly one. Cavett begins by affecting not to know how to address the artist in front of him – “Mister S…Mister…what do I call you actually?” he asks. Sly brushes this off with humour, but the next patronising barb is worse. “I know you’re responsible for all the music that you do, and that you write it,” says Cavett, “but do you sit down and write it?”
What Cavett is implying, of course, is, “You don’t really ‘write’ this stuff, do you? Not like real musicians. You just make it up as you go along.” It may have been a good thing that Sly was so heroically stoned during this interview, because what he goes on to say is just amazing. He brushes off the insult with another quip, “Sometimes I stand up!”, and gets a laugh. Then, a few moments later, he says, “I write in the mirror.” The audience is silent. Cavett raises an eyebrow and asks what he means.
“Looking at a mirror,” Stone continues. “The reason why I do that is because I can somehow be a great critique [sic] for myself. You know, I can react spontaneously, before I realise that I’m going along with what I’m doing. And dislike it or like it before I realise that I’m doing it.”
Both audience and interviewer openly laugh at this, as though it’s all just the ramblings of a crazy man on drugs. But I found it incredibly insightful, and thought-provoking.
It seems to me that he was describing one of the fundamental conundrums of the creative process – how to step outside of yourself; how to catch that moment, which is almost pre-conscious, where you register whether something is good or bad, before you even fully know what you’re doing, or before you slip into the groove of doing what you always do. How to react innocently, as an audience might.
In the interview, Cavett comes back with a silly remark about how he wouldn’t fit in with their group, dressed in his suit and tie. “There’d be a pressure on me,” he jokes suavely, to which Stone, fixing him with heavily lidded eyes, replies deadpan: “There’s a pressure on all of us.”
It seemed like he really felt that pressure, and tried hard to push back against it, but didn’t always win. What an inspiration though.
[See also: A new Led Zepplin film complicates my feelings about Seventies rock]
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