When Sly Stone Traded His New Album For Cocaine

 

 

Sly Stone (March 15, 1943 – June 9, 2025) was frontman for the brilliant Sly and the Family Stone (formerly Sly and the Stoners). The audacious and playful musician behind such infectious funk-rock-soul hits as the often-sampled hit Everyday People (1969), the gospel-influenced Stand! (1969) and the riotous I Want to Take You Higher (1969) arguably set out his mantra for living in 1968’s Life, telling us (and himself), “You don’t have to come down!”

 

 

In Stone’s 2023 autobiography named after one of his biggest hits – Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) – he talks of his frequent and dedicated drugs use. In one episode he recalls the band’s stellar performance at the Woodstock festival.

I sang, “I want to take you higher”, and they sang back the last word, “higher”. All of them. Damn. We kept it going. I kept it going.

A euphoric Sly really kept it going, encouraging the crowd to give full throat to his call.

Higher went out. Higher came back. What the word meant widened. It wasn’t just keeping yourself up with a good mood or good drugs. It was defeating anything that could bring you down.

“If you throw the peace sign up and say ‘higher’, you get everybody to do it. There’s a whole lot of people here and a whole lot of people that might not want to do it, because if they can somehow get around it, they feel there are enough people to make up for it. We’re going to try ‘higher’ again, and if we can get everybody to join in, we’d appreciate it. It’ll do you no harm.”

The air fizzed with energy:

A wave crashing on to the shore of the stage. Way up on the hill …

“Want to take you higher!” / “Higher!”
“Want to take you higher!” / “Higher!”
“Want to take you higher!” / “Higher!”

The call, the response. It felt like church. By then the film crew was fully in place. The horns went up into the sky.

 

George Clinton’s Farm

 

In another episode, Sly recalls a meeting with musician George Clinton, someone Sly “always thought of as a human cartoon”. Clinton was heading up to his farm in Michigan. He invited Sly, who wanted to experience the “clean air and a lack of distraction”. Not that it was all about the wonders of nature. “We went fishing,” says Sly, “made music, and got high, not always in that order.”

Stone’s preferred drug was cocaine, whether as a powder, freebase or crack, the sedative Placidyl and PCP, of which he said: “It threw your perspective off, which I liked.” At the farm, Sly was after some crack:

We met a dealer who knew every song from every Family Stone record. We had to wait for the drugs while he asked detailed questions. Was it a harmonium on that song? What was the gear we used for the other one? One afternoon on the way over there George and I realised that we didn’t have money for dope. When we got there I didn’t wait for the dealer to start talking about my music. I went in on it myself.

And then I hit him with a bonus. “We’re light,” I said, “but I’ll give you a copy of the album I’m working on as collateral. You can’t listen to it, but you can keep it safe for me.” I went out to the car and came back with a tape. I think his hand was shaking when he gave us the drugs, he was so excited.

On our way home, George congratulated me on thinking fast. “Good idea to give him a copy of the record.”

“What record?” I said.

He was staring at me like I forgot something that had just happened.

“You know,” he said. “The tape. The music.”

“There’s no music on there,” I said. “There’s nothing. It’s empty.”

I don’t know how long George laughed, but it seemed like it was the whole ride home. He eventually told the dealer, who wasn’t even mad. “You have to respect that,” the dealer said.