Different Strokes For Different Folks

A few thoughts about the late, great Sly Stone

As most of you surely know by now, Sly Stone passed away this week at the age of 82. While it’s sad to see him move on to a presumably funkier plane, it’s kind of incredible that he made it to that relatively advanced age, especially given his history of (shall we say) misadventure. It’s also wonderful that he lived long enough to get his flowers via Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s excellent documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), which not only celebrates Sly’s work (and, yes, his genius) but places it in a greater cultural context. If you haven’t seen it yet, I heartily recommend give it a viewing or three…

One of the most important musical figures of the last 60 years, Sly brought so much to the table. He was a sonic visionary, an envelope-pushing producer, a savvy bandleader, a brilliant musician who could play just about any instrument you threw at him, a sage, a warrior, a preacher, a philosopher, a showman, a shit-stirrer, a fashion icon, a clown, and — not least by a long shot — a tremendously gifted songwriter who had the innate ability to wrap uncomfortable truths in irresistibly catchy hooks.

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Many of these qualities are on beautiful display in this incredible 1969 clip from The Ed Sullivan Show. “Love City” doesn’t even land in the outer circle of Sly’s best songs, but the performance tore the top of my head clean off when I first saw it 30 years ago on a friend’s VHS mixtape, and even today it still has the power to make me weep tears of joy and sheer amazement. If you’ve never seen this clip before, I’d suggest you strap yourself in…

There is really so much to say about Sly — his musical influence alone is worthy of an entire book — but I made an attempt to scrape the tip of that massive iceberg this past week. For FLOOD magazine, I took a look at ten artists who were hugely impacted by his talent, music and vision…

While over at The Forward, I zeroed in on the most “Jewish” moment in the entire Sly discography — his cover of Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera” from 1973’s Fresh LP. (And no, Doris wasn’t Jewish… but the guys who wrote the song sure were!)

Brian Wilson, another California star who burned impossibly bright during the 1960s, and whose life and career were similarly derailed by personal demons and music-biz pressures, also passed away this week, and also at the age of 82. I’ll be writing more about Brian in the next week or so, as my book deadlines allow. But it must be said that, while Brian was unquestionably a pop genius, so was Sly; as significant as his contributions were to the genres of soul and funk, the man clearly knew how to make a great pop record — and to remember him solely as a “soul-funk pioneer” or whatever is to severely undersell his prodigious musical gifts.

Sure, the first national hit Sly was ever involved with was Bobby Freeman’s incredible R&B raver “C’mon and Swim” — which he produced and co-wrote as part of his house producer gig at Autumn Records, and which made it all the way up to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964. But Sly also worked with a number of white pop and rock n’ roll groups at Autumn, including producing the first two albums and first four singles by The Beau Brummels, all of which are still justifiably venerated as holy relics of the original US folk-rock boom.

Check out “Just a Little,” the Brummels’ Top 10 hit from the spring of 1965 — there isn’t one iota of Sly Stone-style funk apparent in its grooves, and that was completely intentional. As an AM radio DJ and avid student of pop music, Sly knew exactly what was needed to put the band’s song across on the airwaves at the time, and to push the Beau Brummels to the public as the Bay Area’s answer to The Beatles.

(It should also be noted that Sly reportedly walked out of a 1966 recording session with The Great Society — the band that would bequeath Grace Slick to The Jefferson Airplane, along with the songs “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” — after they took 50 takes to get their song “Free Advice” down on tape. Sly was never the sort to gladly suffer fools or inept musicians.)

And then there’s “Everyday People”. Released in late 1968 on the heels of three largely funk- and soul-oriented albums, the song had a soulful groove and gospel-tinged harmonies, but its melody and hooks were pure pop, scientifically designed to put the song’s mantra of coexistence — “We got to live together!” — across to as many listeners as possible. The strategy worked so well that the song gave Sly and the Family Stone their first Number One single. As Sly wrote in his recent Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir…

“Everyday People” was two minutes and twenty seconds, not much longer than “Hit the Road Jack.” But I kept it short with the idea that it would have a long life. I didn’t just want “Everyday People” to be a song. I wanted it to be a standard, something that would be up there with “Jingle Bells” or “Moon River.” And I knew how to do it. It meant a simple melody with a simple arrangement to match. I think Larry played a single note through the whole song.

Writing a standard also meant writing lyrics that people would remember even when the song ended. That’s how I got to lines like “Different strokes for different folks.” Even more than the title, that was the phrase that stuck, to the point where the label put it on the record sleeve of the single, right under the name of the song. I don’t know where it came from. I think I thought of it. It could have been in the air. But it carried the same message I had been conveying since “Underdog,” since the swimming pool in Vallejo, since always. You couldn’t take turns with freedom. 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’s pop suss was also apparent in Family Stone songs like “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” a song the 5th Dimension could have easily covered (and from which Phil Collins later knicked the main riff for the Genesis hit “Misunderstanding”), and the heartfelt “Everybody is a Star,” which could have easily been a Broadway show tune. But the one that really stands out to me with its subtle pop brilliance is his 1969 hit “Stand!”

I had heard of the song before I’d ever actually heard it, and assumed from its exclamatory title that it would be some sort of militant funk anthem. It turned out to be an anthem, all right, but one with a gentle melody and a chord progression that turns around on itself in unexpected ways. Again from Sly’s book:

It was the right time and place for a big leap forward. It was America in 1968, a year where everything happened — Khe Sanh and Tet, King and the riots, Bobby Kennedy, the Democratic National Convention, Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their fists up in Mexico City. There was no shortage of circumstance. The trick was not to become a victim of it. Being an artist meant more than just traveling through events. It meant channeling them.

That’s what had led me to “Everyday People.” I busted up my finger while we were recording that song. I hit the piano too hard and my finger just went out of its socket. It hurt so bad that my eyes bulge out just remembering it.

That’s also what led me to “Stand!,” which became the second single and the album’s title song. Snare drum in, and then it was lift and uplift.

The funky “na-na-na” breakdown at the song’s end was added after the fact at a separate studio session, once Sly realized he needed to send the song out on a celebratory note. It’s further evidence of Sly’s compositional genius that I must have heard the song hundreds of times before learning of this fact — and in those hundreds of listens, I never once questioned what such an oddly mismatched coda was doing there. Some have suggested that “Stand!” would have been as big a hit as “Everyday People” if the rest of the song had been harnessed to something as funky as its ending (the single only made it to #22), but I think the calm, matter-of-fact way that Sly croons the verses really makes their lyrics hit home.

Stand, in the end, you'll still be you
One that's done all the things you set out to do
Stand, there's a cross for you to bear
Things to go through if you're goin' anywhere

Stand for the things you know are right
It's the truth that the truth makes them so uptight
Stand, all the things you want are real
You have you to complete and there is no deal

Stand, you've been sitting much too long
There's a permanent crease in your right and wrong
Stand, there's a midget standing tall
And a giant beside him about to fall

Stand, they will try to make you crawl
And they know what you're sayin' makes sense at all
Stand, don't you know that you are free
Well, at least in your mind if you want to be

I’ve been thinking a lot about these lyrics this past week, along with those of “Everyday People”. Over 55 years later, they — unfortunately — feel just as appropriate for this moment as they did when they were released.

At a time when ICE agents (or yahoos dressed like them) are kidnapping people across this country without due process or accountability… When our own military is being unnecessarily called in to Los Angeles to face off against its residents over the objections of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor… When a US Senator is dragged out of a Homeland Security press conference for having the temerity to question the DHS Secretary about her coup-like assertion that the DHS and the military would be staying in L.A. to “liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country”… When the current occupant of the Oval Office is throwing a multi-million-dollar military parade to celebrate himself… When our country is shedding longstanding allies left and right because of our current administration’s utter lack of seriousness or reliability… When we’re being asked to absorb financial pain and shrug off funding cuts to everything from Medicaid to FEMA to the FAA to the Smithsonian to our national parks just so billionaires can hoard even more of their riches… When DEI programs and journalists and immigrants of color and trans people and peaceful demonstrators are all being viciously demonized to distract us from the real problems we’re facing as a nation… When empathy for other human beings has become as unfashionable in some circles as doing The Macarena… There is no better time to stand with your fellow everyday people for the things you know are right.

Here in America, we still have the right (as laid out in the First Amendment of the Constitution) to protest and assemble peaceably, as well as to petition the government. Let’s make the most of that right today at the thousands of “No Kings” protests scheduled around the US, and push back loudly against the authoritarian shitbags who want to deprive us of the liberty that this country was founded upon, who think the president should wield the same sort of unchecked power that the American Revolution was fought to free us from, and who want to eradicate the “different strokes for different folks” diversity that has long been the best thing about this nation of immigrants. If that’s not what you want, it’s time to resist and speak out — after all, as Sly put it, “It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight.”

Be safe out there, folks, and be peaceful, but be out there if you can. And thank you, Sly, for all the inspiration.

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