STORY
There was a before, there was an after. Fifty years ago, the Woodstock wave swept the world. Europe 1 makes you relive, at the time of the festivals of the summer, the history of this revolution, not only by what it brought, but also by those which incarnated it. Today, Sly and the Family Stone.
Imagine a sort of black Elvis Presley, a tight white suit, long sleeves disproportionately fringed like pelican wings, redheads that eat her face almost as much as extravagant mauve glasses. This is the image that festival-goers in Woodstock had at around 4 am on Sunday. The singular character who has just invested the stage with his five musicians is Sly and the Family Stone. And while the 400,000 festival goers only think about sleeping after Janis Joplin's show, a sonic tornado will hit them.
He does not want to go on stage, it ends up in collective trance
Yet all of this has almost never happened. Sly Stone did not want to go on stage. He did not "feel the vibrations", as it was said at the time, and the director of the festival had to threaten him physically so that it runs and offers with his group this moment of anthology. Punctuated by three reminders, the concert has created, in the opinion of those who have lived, a hallucinatory collective trance. The title of the first song sets the tone: "I want to take you higher", shouts the black shaman.
And the crowd responds, always stronger, to this group that defies all prejudices and all conveniences. For Sly and The Family Stone, Woodstock is clearly a triumph. Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist, will often tell how difficult it has been for him to follow behind what he sees as the festival's best concert.
Musician and radio host
But this triumph was difficult, even impossible to predict a few months earlier, as the trajectory of the leader of the group was sinuous. Before Sly Stone, there was Sylvester Stewart, second in a family of five. Coming from the middle class, the youngest receives a Pentecostal religious education near San Francisco and soon develops a passion for music. At the age of 8, the young Sylvester engraves with his brothers and sisters a 78s of gospel pressed to a few tens of copies. He is already the leader at the time, and the following years will only confirm it.
Versatile musician, then host on a radio San Francisco, the one who is now called Sly Stone fires all wood. He multiplies the experiences in groups, drinks at the source of new trends, including folk, rock, pop. He even produced a Californian band then in vogue, the Beau Brummels.
The first mixed group
In 1967, it crosses the cape and returns to its origins, fifteen years after the famous 78 turns. There is his brother Freddie, his sister Vet, and other musicians from his first circle. Sly And The Stone Family was born. A revolutionary training, the first of its kind to mix not only blacks and whites but also men and women.
The first album, A Whole New Thing, a "completely new thing", is not a success. The world is probably not ready yet, because the music is already great. It begins with an astonishing reinterpretation of Brother Jacques: the very autobiographical Underdog, in other words "the Outsider", the one we do not expect, who must do everything twice as well as the others but who, one day or the other, will eventually win the bet.
Psychedelic soul
If it makes you think of James Brown, it's normal, the king of soul is part of the influences of Sly Stone. Surprisingly, this unstoppable piece did not launch the band's career. It will be necessary to wait the following year with Dance to the music and then especially Everyday People, the first n ° 1, so that it takes off finally.
Rose, Sly's talented second sister, has just joined the "Stone family". And music, now called "psychedelic soul", is more and more eye-catching. The group responds exactly to the ideals of the counterculture of the time, preaching both for equality between races, between the sexes, for the end of the war in Vietnam, for individual freedom, sexual ... The charisma of Sly Stone does the rest. Until the explosion, alas predictable, in the early 1970s.
An uncontrollable singer ...
Already subject to the quirks of star, the singer becomes uncontrollable. His delusional cocaine use does not help. He hires gangsters as managers, Mafiosi as bodyguards. When the Black Panthers ask him to radicalize his music, the two white musicians leave the ship.
But the group will still have time to engrave a masterpiece before breaking up: There's a Riot Goin 'On, "there is a riot in the corner", with his famous cover where the stars of the American flag are replaced by suns. Ironically, Sly And The Family Stone's latest No. 1 is called A Family Affair, a family affair. We are in 1971 and this is one of the first tracks recorded with a drum machine. Ideal for an early evening in summer.
... who inspired the biggest stars
Forty-eight years later, the title, pioneer of what will be called funk, has not aged a bit. Countless artists will draw from the source of this music that mixes jazz, rock, soul, folk and Latin rhythms, and take inspiration from Sly Stone. Among them, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Nile Rodgers, the great guitarist Chic, or a young multi-instrumentalist from Minneapolis, who will resume more or less the formula of his eldest to become a huge star in the 1980s. the same flashy outfits, always a group mixing men and women, black and white: Rogers Nelson, later known for the name of Prince.
As for Sly Stone, despite his excesses and poor mental health, he is still alive at 75 years old. Ruined, homeless, fallen down the ladder, he won last year a lawsuit on the rights of his music broadcast on the Internet. And a documentary about his life, his work and his legacy is expected this fall.
Find all the other episodes of our series "Woodstock, 50 years later":
> Episode 1: The origins of the most iconic festivals
> Episode 2: Richie Havens, the story of a fate that topples
> Episode 3: Tim Hardin, dubbed by Bob Dylan, destroyed by drugs
> Episode 4: Joan Baez, the consciousness of a generation
> Episode 5: Santana, and the legend was created
> Episode 6: Canned Heat, as long as the blues live
> Episode 7: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the essential casting error
> Episode 8: Janis Joplin, the pearl of the sixties