THANK YOU (FALETTINME BE MICE ELF AGIN)

An autobiography by the recording artist who scored numerous hits with his band, Sly and the Family Stone.

Sylvester Stewart (b. 1943) was born in Texas but moved to California at an early age. In this memoir, written in collaboration with Greenman and Stone’s manager, Arlene Hirschkowitz, Stone writes about his upbringing in a musical family, chronicling his experiences singing in church with his parents and siblings and teaching himself to play instruments. Bored in school, he began to focus entirely on music, writing songs and working as a session player with other musicians. Stone adopted his stage name while working as a DJ at a local radio station. “I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone,” he writes. “I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right. I was already smoking marijuana. And there was a tension in the name. Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.” Along the way, he met various musicians who would become members of his band, which began playing gigs in 1966. At this point, too much of the text becomes a list of venues with vague comments on events the author remembers from several decades earlier. Stone offers interesting commentary on individual songs the band recorded, and his recollections of various offstage incidents offer insights into the era—especially given the band’s racially mixed personnel. The author is candid about his full embrace of the rock-star lifestyle and time lost to jail or rehab. After the mid-1970s, when the hits were slower to appear and the original personnel began to fall away, the book becomes unfocused. Stone’s voice isn’t sufficiently compelling to compensate for the shift to largely non-musical material, too much of it finger-pointing at those he blames for his troubles. Questlove provides the foreword, and the book includes a discography.

An inside look at an important band and its music, but it loses interest when the music is no longer central.