The Isle of Wight Festival, created in 1968, reached its peak in 1970, when nearly 600,000 spectators gathered on this piece of land in the south of the United Kingdom. Fifty years later, Europe 1 looks back on the various concerts given for what was, one year after Woodstock, one of the last great hippie meetings. This Thursday, how Sly and the Family Stone managed to wake up the Isle of Wight audience.
Sly Stone, a miracle
Sly Stone is a miracle drug addict. Since Woodstock, he's got into the nasty habit of missing an average of every third gig, for a variety of reasons: bad vibes, lethargic or hysterical. And yet, what a character! A sort of black, flamboyant, extravagant Elvis Presley, wearing a fringed suit, Indian chief looks, sunglasses, and a sort of big white woolen cloche hat on his head.
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Accompanied by his five musicians, this singular and highly disreputable character has become a world star in the space of a few months. Woodstock has been there. It is therefore in conquered territory that he advances on stage on Sunday, August 30 in the early morning. He is the headliner of a hallucinating day which saw Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis or Jim Morrison's Doors on the same stage.
Stand , or how to wake up a hitherto indifferent audience. The instruments were poorly tuned. Almost nothing worked. This track saved the concert and the band came out to acclaim.
A winding trajectory
Two years earlier, such a triumph would have been impossible to predict, as the personal trajectory of its leader was sinuous. Before being Sly Stone, there was once Sylvester Stewart, second in a family of five. Coming from the middle class, brought up in a Pentecostal religious education near San Francisco, he quickly found a passion for music. At the age of 8, the young Sylvester engraved with his brothers and sisters a 78rpm gospel record pressed to a few dozen copies. He is already the leader. The following years will only confirm it.
Musician and radio host
Versatile musician, then prominent radio host in San Francisco, the man who now calls himself Sly Stone is firing on all cylinders. He multiplies his experiences in groups, drinks from the source of new trends, including folk, rock and pop. He even produced a then fashionable Californian group, the Beau Brummels.
A revolutionary training
In 1967, he took the leap and returned to his origins, 15 years after the famous 78 rpm. "Sly And The Family Stone" was born around his brother Freddie, his sister Vet, and other musicians from his inner circle. It is a revolutionary formation, 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", was not a success. The world is probably not ready yet, because the music is already great.
Underdog, in other words "the outsider", the one you don't expect, who has to do everything twice as well as the others but who one day or another will end up winning the bid, is a very autobiographical title.
If the track is reminiscent of James Brown, "it's because it's part of Sly Stone's influences. But it's still very surprising that this unstoppable track didn't launch the band's career. We'll have to wait for the the following year with "Dance to the music" and then especially "Everyday People", the first n ° 1, so that it finally takes off.
Counter-culture and freedom
Rose, her talented second sister, has just joined the "Stone family". The music, now called "psychedelic soul", is more and more catchy. The group responds exactly to the ideals of the counterculture of the time, it preaches both for equality between races, between the sexes, for the end of the war in Vietnam, for individual freedom, sexual, and Sly Stone's charisma does the rest. Until the unfortunately foreseeable explosion in the early 1970s.
Until the explosion
Already subject to the whims of a star, the singer becomes unlivable. His delusional use of cocaine does not help. He hires mobsters as managers, mafiosi as bodyguards. The Black Panthers ask him to radicalize his music. The two white musicians leave the ship. But the group will still have time to burn a masterpiece before breaking up: "There's a Riot Goin 'On", or there is a riot in the corner, with its famous cover where the stars of the American flag are replaced by suns.
A last pioneering funk track
Ironically, Sly And The Family Stone's latest # 1 is called A Family Affair . For the record, it is one of the first pieces recorded with a rhythm machine, in 1971. Bobby Womack is on guitar.
50 years later, this title, pioneer of what we will call "funk", has not aged a bit. Iggy Pop himself picked it up for his birthday last April.
A great inspiration for Prince
Countless artists have drawn from the source of this music which mixes jazz, rock, soul, folk, Latin rhythms, and this extraordinary character. Among them, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Nile Rodgers, the brilliant guitarist of Chic, or a young multi-instrumentalist from Minneapolis, who will take more or less the formula of his elder to become a huge star in the 80s, with flashy outfits and mixing in his group men, women, black and white: Prince.
As for Sly Stone, despite his excesses and failing sanity, he is still alive at 76. Ruined, homeless, fallen to the bottom of the ladder, he recently won a lawsuit over the rights to his music, recovering five million dollars in the process. As unlikely as it sounds, the story goes on.