Book excerpt: Sly Stone's memoir, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"
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Music legend Sly Stone, front man for the pop-rock-funk group Sly and the Family Stone, has crafted a memoir that encompasses both his revolutionary music of the late 20th century and his addictions which took him out of the spotlight for far too long.
Taking its title from one of Sly's most popular songs, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" (co-written with music journalist Ben Greenman and published October 17 by AUWA) is an account of the meteoric rise of one of music's most revelatory and mysterious artists.
Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Kelefa Sanneh's report on Sly Stone on "CBS News Sunday Morning" October 8!
"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" by Sly Stone
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(1943–1955)
Life is a record. But where do you drop the needle? You can put it down near the beginning, where a young boy in Northern California starts to discover how much music moves him. You can put it down a little later, when he assembles a band, or a little later than that, when the band appears onstage, first in front of small crowds in clubs, then in front of larger crowds, including one of the largest in history. Those are good tracks.
Or you can play the flip side of this bright and stirring story: the young boy, now a young man, facing the harsh light of fame; the young man, now a star, making his way through a house crowded with drugs and guns; the star, now letting his light be crowded out by those drugs and guns.
Or is it better to start right at the start? Find the lead-in groove. That's the outer edge of the record before the first song. Put the needle down there. You may hear some static. Pay close attention to it. It's giving you a chance to get ready.
* *
*In the story before my story, there's Denton, Texas, a small city in a big state, north of Dallas and Fort Worth. In the 1920s, F.L. Haynes, Fred to those who knew him, went to Denton to set up the St. Andrew Church of God in Christ. The Church of God in Christ was a Pentecostal denomination with roots in Tennessee, only a few decades old at that point but gaining steam.
Fred's family included two girls named Alpha and Omega. In Fred's church, Alpha met a man named K.C. Stewart. Alpha and K.C. married in 1933 and brought a daughter, Loretta, into the world the following year. For a while that was the family, the three of them. Then, on March 15, 1943, a fourth face appeared. That was Sylvester Stewart. That was me.
The street where we lived in Denton is barely a memory for me. A cemetery was to the east. What was to the west? We all were, soon enough. A little while after I was born, we moved out to California. Denton went into the past and the future went into Vallejo, a city about thirty miles northeast of San Francisco on San Pablo Bay.
For a minute in the 1850s, Vallejo had been the state capital before Sacramento took over. Vallejo was a port, which meant that people were always coming in and out. They weren't just getting off ships and getting on them. They were also building them. There was a naval shipyard on Mare Island that needed workers, and that grew the town. When we arrived from Texas, Vallejo was in the middle of a boom.
Boom! There we were. Our first Vallejo address was 125 Denio Street. Back then it was just a few kids—me, Loretta, and the next sister down the line, Rose. My father, K.C., who we called Big Daddy, had a cleaning business. My mother kept the house. I never met grandparents on either side, never got any of that spoiling. When I was four, a little brother arrived, Frederick Jerome, who we called Freddie. He bunked in my room, at the bottom of my bed. New faces needed new spaces. My dad put up another house behind 125 Denio, at 127, and we moved there. And a few years after that, a fifth child, another girl, showed up—that was Vaetta, who we called Vet.
There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music. Even before children, my parents played. My father played washboard, guitar, violin, fiddle, harmonica. My mother played keyboards and guitar. Music was as much a part of our home as the walls or the floor. The piano was as prominent as the kitchen table. All of us sang from as early as I can remember, and the first songs we learned were gospel songs by Mahalia Jackson, Brother Joe May, the Soul Stirrers, the Swan Silvertones. We built our future in heaven. We dug a little deeper. We put our trust in Him.
We sang at home and then we sang in church. We all sang together but sometimes one of us would get a solo. I was put in front of the congregation to perform when I was only five or six. My mother said that I really came alive in front of a crowd. More than that: If they didn't respond I would cry. Once, I was up there, singing, feeding off the audience, hearing their shouts and applause, when pieces of the crowd broke off and women started running down the aisle, holding on to their hats, still shouting. Now I see that they were feeling the spirit in the song calling them toward the stage. Back then, I thought they were coming to grab me. I turned around, jumped off the table, and started running for my life.
I stopped running. I came back for the music. From the time I was very small I could tell that I was deeper into it than most because I was so often with an instrument. It might have been drumsticks first, and then I was out on the street with my mother and saw a man playing guitar. I asked her for one. She sent my father out the next day with instructions not to return empty-handed.
Learning was looking. There was a guy in the church who played guitar. What he did with it was amazing, six strings and an infinity of things. I watched him like a hawk. He wasn't a mentor. I don't even know if I spoke to him. I just saw what he did and tried to figure out how to do the same and more. Guitar stayed with me, but I was always looking to whatever was next, taking up the bass, picking out songs on the piano. I felt incomplete without an instrument, or maybe it's more to the point to say that I only felt complete with one. When I went out into the world, I was surprised to see people who weren't carrying instruments. I wasn't sure what they did instead.
Excerpted from "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" by Sly Stone, with Ben Greenman. Published by AUWA Books, October 2023. Copyright © 2023 by Sylvester Stewart. All rights reserved.
Get the book here:
"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" by Sly Stone
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For more info:
- "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir" by Sly Stone with Ben Greenman; foreword by Questlove (AUWA), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available October 17
- slystonemusic.com