Sly Stone Tribute with Ben Greenman

In a special one-on-one episode, Ben Greenman sits down with longtime writing collaborator Questlove. Having just published the Sly Stone memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) alongside the music legend, Ben speaks about the process. He and Quest' compare their favorite songs in an episode that features a snippet of a previously unreleased Sly song.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. Ladies and Gentlemen.
This is a you know something, just hit me.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
I'm certain if someone does a super cut, all they're
gonna get is if you just take the first twelve
seconds of this podcast, it's always gonna start with ladies
and gentlemen.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
This is a special. You're all right, I'm gonna do
the opposite. Ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
How you That's how you kick it off each time here.
That's how you get a character.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
I don't know, it's it's to me. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Maybe maybe every episode is my dream episode, or every
episode is an amazing you know something, there's something unique
about each episode. Yeah, this is Quest Love Supreme. I'm
doing the solo stufle. I don't mind this. I wish
I could do more of these, you know. I will
say to our listeners out there, if you are committed

(01:09):
to this podcast, and nine times out of ten, I
would like to think that you guys have purchased the
tangible roots albums, complete with a gazillion liner notes. Not
to mention to follow me on Instagram is to also
complain about my inside baseball speak, of which I will

(01:33):
say that this gentleman here is kind of the equivalent
smacking me on the back of the hand, Like, no,
that's a run story project.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
Right off the top. It's a mix of slapping you
on the back of the hand and patting you on
the back of the back, which is to say it's
a yeah. I mean, they're just different things. But no,
we inside baseball away at any at any time, we just.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Uh yeah, right, but clearly we clearly know that my
propensity to rabbit hole, yes that's true, and to rabbit
hole and just to delve off into uncharted territory like
a person needs a GPS.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
And I'm actually shocked.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
There's some friends of mine since the pandemic, you know,
they're like, Okay, I'm gonna start getting to my my
memoir and whatnot.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
And I think they kind of treat it like the
rap game.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Like I'd see them like going off with their computers
and I'm like, wait, you're doing this on your own
without like adult supervision, and they're kind of like, yeah,
that's that's the way it should be.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
And I'm like, no, it isn't.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
So you don't make a movie running around. It's also
it's just it's like we have to it's just Baby
Jessica and you out of the well, that's.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
See, and that that reference alone is how I'm gonna.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Because you think it's fun, that's great, It's just that.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Then what and then so this is the fact that
you mentioned baby Jessica, who I'm certain now is like
thirty seven years old. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been greeman.
If you purchased any of mine what is it now,
seven books?

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, by the way, let me just say I think
she is thirty seven because I looked up the other day.
The fact that you hit her age exactly is a
long wow.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
That Yeah, I'm scared of myself. Wait, baby, I'm looking
right now Baby Jessica today. See even now we're supposed
to be talking about sly Stone. Really, Oh my gosh,
she's like seven feet tall. She's married with a husband,
and she's like seven feet tall.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Well, well, well the Baby Jessica podcast.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
All right, So let me explain Ben's role in my life.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
You know right before, I mean, if you're a longtime
die hard Roots follower, you will know that it's takes
a crazy soul to figure out things in real time.
And when you're dealing with so many personalities and so
many I wouldn't know the proper term to call like

(04:14):
a person with my brain and a person with Tarik's brain,
and a person like just dealing what he has to
deal with. Kind of the last three years of Richard
Nichols's life, of which he knew his exit was going
to happen, he wanted to be more prepared and really
prepare us so that his work doesn't go in vain.

(04:36):
Speaking of Richard Nichols, the longtime manager and sort of
brain trust of the Roots of which you know his
ability and his gift to take the creative out of
me and mold it and to take the creative out
of Tarik, and really for all of us in the circle,
even members not of the group, like people that work

(04:57):
in the circle, it takes it takes a crazy figure
to figure this all out, like to juggle eighteen plates
at the same time. And our guest today, Ben Greenman,
rich basically was like, you know this writer from The
New Yorker. Richard said that I guess implanning the what

(05:20):
is called the A Mirror Book, which basically kind of
while he was in as sort of state you know,
he had leukemian was in the hospital for a long
time and even though his brain was there, like he
really wasn't fully functional, but he you know, he can
still type in text and all those things. And he
said that there's a writer I really like and I

(05:40):
want him to sort of play my role in your
life for your books.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
And I'm like, wait, what books. He's like, yeah, You're
going to write books.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
And then every everything that I'm doing now, Like Richard
basically put on the A Mirror Book of Life and
it's kind of his last words on the book was like,
if you're broke by seventy five, then I can't help you.
So Richard basically spent the last six months of his
life planning me in Tarik's next fifty years, which everything

(06:14):
on that list I absolutely detested.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
I'm like, I'm not writing a book Quest Love, What
the hell's that? Quest loves Food, I'm not I'm not
investing in food, Like, what the hell is that?

Speaker 2 (06:24):
And literally everything I'm doing now, teaching movies, directing, produce.
You know, he knew that I had a gift to
me that I didn't know. So this is how Ben
Greeman came into our lives.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
Rich is at the genesis of in a weird way,
at the genesis of this book that we're talking about too,
which I can I'll get right.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Well, that's that's what I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
I gave you a long ten minute introduction to basically
say that, you know, I wanted to know, like your
best writing style, like I saw the New Yorker stuff.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
But there's book, I guess a fictional book. He explain.
This book to me was sort of like a fictional
lines version of Sly.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
Okay, So this is sort of the weird, the bizarre
genesis of this project, which is that I was obsessed
with sling the Family Stones music since I was a kid,
you know, eight and nine, ten years old. I bought
greatest hits on cassette. I wore it out. I what
do you call that little brush at the bottom on
the metal of the cassette. I when you double stick
tape it because it falls off and you have to

(07:26):
put it back off, right. I repaired the cassette so
I could keep hearing it.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
And what year did you buy this?

Speaker 3 (07:33):
Seventy eight, seventy nine, whatever I was when I was
seventy seven, seventy eight seventy nine something like that.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
And you brought it or like was it in your house?

Speaker 3 (07:41):
No, No, I was starting to buy cassettes, my first
set of cassettes whatever was coming out around then, like
it was probably Hall and Oates and Elton John and
I got onto the slot Billy Joel, and I just
got the slide like I had heard the songs, the
biggest songs on the radio, and I love the cover photo,
and the cover photo we can get back to as

(08:01):
a sort of end cap, because to me, that is
the kind of metaphor. It's this one guy sitting in
the car and then all these iterations of other people
just flowering from his head, and it's a kind of
amazing metaphor for what the project was. But I just
heard the music and I loved all the hugest hits.
And then as I explored, as I got to be

(08:23):
twelve thirteen, and I was buying all the other records,
and I just got obsessed. The way I put it
is that with most pop music, if you hear enough
of it, if I play you a minute and then
I paused the song and I say, okay, tell me
what you think the next ten seconds will be you know.
I mean, you certainly know, and I know in most
cases you have a sense of the rhythm, you have

(08:44):
a sense of the structure. The idiosyncrasies of Sly, even
within a pop music context, were amazing. Like you can
hear a minute of thankful and thoughtful hit the pause.
I don't really know what's gonna happen, you know, from
down to like the actual rhythms of the song and
drumming over the machines, to there's a lyrical left turn

(09:05):
or some bizarre resurfacing of another song. I just he
was very surprising and very I was fascinated that somebody
could not be predictable. And then, as I later found
out in life as well as on the music, so
my early twenties mid twenties, I thought about writing a
straightforward biography, just like this is the story. I'm a journalist,

(09:27):
this is what happened. As I researched it, I would
find things that upset me, and I was too young,
and I didn't really know how to do it, and
I didn't want to do it in that way. I
didn't want to be the one to say I found
out all these negative things about this person who I
idolize and here they are. So I stopped and I
converted it to a novel, which was a composite really

(09:51):
of Sly and Marvin Gay, a little bit of Curtis Mayfield,
dustings of swamp Dog and Deronto and whoever else you know.
Just it was like a funk star in large part
Sly and a large part Marvin Gay, because there I
kind of mashed up the different aspects of the tragedies
of their life. That novel it's sold okay, but it

(10:14):
seemed to find its way to music people. One of
those people was rich and one of those people was
someone in George's camp, George Clinton's camp, so around the
same time, I think you're a year ahead of George.
I think your book came out in thirteen and George's
in fourteen. Pretty soon after we wrote Mometa, I got

(10:35):
a call that George wanted was looking for a co
writer for his memoir, and that was also in his equation.
So he had been like, Wow, the sensibility here is
kind of interesting, and it's a different kind of storytelling,
and it's it really seems to be presenting a voice
rather than just analyzing, and it's I don't know, non
judgmental about certain aspects of the lifestyle, and something about it.

(10:59):
He liked it. And then when I met him, I
just made a couple of jokes and he liked the jokes.
Like the joke I made is with George. He was
going through some legal stuff and I said, he had
all this paperwork and I said, you should print it
all on underwear and then just wear that on stage
and sell them and call them legal briefs. And he said,
oh my god, that's so funny. He didn't do it,
but I think he liked that idiotic idea.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
I was going to say, that's such a George Clinton
thing to that's how you had him.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
It's like entrepreneurial insanity. And he's like, oh and so
so something about it he liked. So I did that book.
We did all of our books and George, and as
I finished up that book, I remember sitting in the
car with Archiivy, George's right hand guy, and when we
were finishing up George's book and saying, I'd really love

(11:44):
to do Slies book. And the feeling at the at
that point was, I don't know, man, like, it's not
like a super constructed situation over there right now. The
architecture is weird. He's still using obviously at that time,
which means that most of the goal in an average

(12:06):
day is to manage that part of life. And I
was connected to his camp and the people were great.
They were very nice, and he was very receptive. It
just didn't come together in a structured way. We would
make agreements. I think journalists have written about this, so
I'm not telling tales out of school. But to do
an interview, someone would say we need a thousand upfront,
and I would say, no, no, no, no, no, We're talking

(12:29):
about a partnership on a book deal. I'm not This
is not how this works. I'm not buying today's you
know delivery.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
You're basically saying that artists now charged for interviews.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
I think they needed money so he could score. I mean,
this is just my interpretation, and that they knew, as
the people who were helping him, that the main goal
was to get cash for that day. And it was
very shortsighted and very short term. So we wrote up
a bunch of agreements and they all collapsed. We'd start
toadline them to make them more professional, and I'd say well,

(13:02):
I'll gree to this, but not to this, and then
it just never happened, and I would say my wife
every year, I'm still trying for this. I mean, George
is still optimistic. He says he'll connect me to this
new guy who's with him or this person, but I
don't know. It just doesn't seem like it's a doable thing. Then,
in twenty nineteen, Arlene, who had been Sly's girlfriend in

(13:23):
the eighties and sort of re entered the camp. She
had broken up a Sly gone and worked in the
legal industry, gotten married, built a straight life such as
it was, and then came back in as a kind
of management helper. So she was able to help him
execute certain kinds of correspondence, or to process things, or
to say to him the practical part. She was really strong,

(13:46):
I'm like, you can't forget to do this thing by Thursday,
or if you can't, we got to ask for send
a note saying we need more time, you know that
kind of stuff. So she called me in twenty nineteen,
and I guess it had come to her attention that
this book had been on the table, and she was
very positive about it. And then I hung up and
told my wife, Oh my god, I think it might happen,
like there's a real infrastructure. Then they disappeared for six months,

(14:09):
and I was despondent and I thought, okay, well, this
is the final nail in the coffin. I later learned
that when they resurfaced that it was because he was
getting clean, and she didn't think there was any way
he could do the book if he was still using.
Plus he had immediate health issues as he was trying
to get clean. When he got clean at the end
of nineteen she called me again, so we agreed. We

(14:30):
got contract ready, We signed to do the book and
immediately into COVID and I thought COVID would kill it
and it's in the crib. As it turned out, COVID
really helped it because everyone was in one place. She
didn't have to go to her office every day, so
she could be with Sly more at his house, keeping
him focused and explaining to him what it would take

(14:52):
to do this. And it was a different process than
the usual book. If you and I do a book,
or I do a book with George, it's a certain
number of long conversations. Because of Sly's health and his energy.
We were capped at fifteen twenty minutes sometimes, so we
had to do a lot of conversations that were shorter,
which I don't think would have happened without her, because

(15:13):
she would, you know, remind him we got to do
this for the book, this is important, Let's keep doing this.
And we got a runway in that first six months
inside of the COVID cylinder where he really committed to
the process, which was great. I mean, she has a
credit on the book for that reason. It says created
in collaboration with her, because truthfully, had she not helped

(15:34):
to keep him focused in those early months, it could
have easily dissipated. And that was how it happened. I mean,
that's sort of the backstory. And the weird part, like
you said initially, is that the weird fiction book that
came out of my not wanting to confront this person's
real life ended up very round about leading me back
to the door of this memoir, so that it was

(15:58):
It's strange. It's one of those things in life that
you know, who knows. I like to think that Rich knew.
My theory is that Rich knew all this stuff fifteen
years ago and he figured it all out and he
had it all mapped, and he's like, Ben wrote this novel,
but if I do this, a mirror will be able
to do this, and eventually Ben, we'll get back to
the memoir. So in my mind, this is already planned.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
Yeah, you probably knew it was going to happen. This
is so weird.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Even after I finished reading it, I was like, well,
I guess he'll really do Slies book, like for real.
Like I always knew it was going to happen, which
I don't know if you ever felt like it was
never going to happen or whatever.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
So I thought it wouldn't. And then again because of
the nature of his life now, which I didn't really know.
I had heard all the stories that you had heard,
and we had heard them all. I didn't know what
the person would be able to do, and I was
really pleasantly surprised. I mean, his physical condition is iffy.

(17:01):
Mentally he was good. I had heard all the stories
that you had heard of him. One sentencing journalists or
you know, having an answering machine message that said did
you call and then it would just hang up on
the people or whatever. Not a super accessible guy. But
I think that double gatekeeper thing of George and Arlene
made him at least provisionally trust the process, which is

(17:23):
always his issue being ill used or feeling like he
was ill used by media for so many years and
made the poster boy of you know, junkie failure and
lost promise and all this kind of stuff that really
bugged him. I think he needed to understand that it
wasn't coming from that side because his back was up.

(17:44):
I think his back was up for decades in some ways.
And then to get to the real guy, who can
be kind of gentle and funny and playful as well
as all those other things. I mean, he certainly can
be difficult and stubborn. That provisional trust was really important.

Speaker 2 (18:07):
For those of us that aren't familiar with how memoirs work.
Is this the same as an autobiography? Like, you know,
because even when you first approached me, I was dead
set against it because I was like, well, dude, like
I just turned forty, Like why am I at the
end of my life now? Like I'm thinking that autobiographies

(18:28):
are for anyone that has a six on the left
digit of their age and they have something worthy to
look back at and I'm like, why am I looking
in the rear view mirror, you know, right right after
undone comes out or whatever.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
Like, I think that the question is more about it
partly is what you're saying about how much of the
life that there's memoirs that focus on one aspect of
the life. Patti Smith's books are a great example, where
she's going to focus on her relationship to Downtown and
maple Thorpe at a certain period in her life, but

(19:05):
it informs the larger story. Autobiographies, generally speaking, are taken
to be the whole life, as much of the life
as you can do. But I don't know. There's probably
a very smart academic distinction that I don't know. I
just know it from the actual books that I've worked
on with you and with other people. And the best

(19:26):
way I can describe the sly one is that I
did George's and then I did Brian Wilson's book with him,
and those it's not I wouldn't say in a kind
of glib way that it's a combination of those two,
but there are some ways in which it is an
interesting midpoint between those two. Obviously, I thought for funk purposes,

(19:47):
George is the New Testament slies the Old Testament. So
there's that kind of idea too of your you go
backwards in time and you do the New Testament version
with George, you get p funk and highly conceptual narra
driven funk, and a lot of characters and a real
good awareness of how cartoons work in Davy Crockett caps
and all that kind of stuff. George's version and then

(20:08):
sly version was the version that was the Old Testament
that's maybe a little bit more earnest and yoke to
the time and had to burn out so something new
could exist. So I thought about George a lot. And
then Brian Wilson was somebody who had very clear mental
illness that he was struggling with as well as substance problems.

(20:29):
I think for Slyes more substance issues, but it really
changed the shape in the nature of his memory. And
so in the Brian book, we said, right at the beginning,
we're gonna have to deal with that forthrightly. We're gonna
have to talk about in some way how memory works
and doesn't work. Because you, for any of us, I mean,

(20:50):
you were young and you have a great memory, but
the fact of the matter is I don't remember many,
many things of my own life, and I'm I live
a relative of the clean, boring life, and there's a
lot that I just can't recover as I get older.
Let alone, if you're eighty and you had sixty years
of fame and drugs, it's not the worst drug in

(21:10):
a way, is fame. And so I really wanted to
think through that with him. And so going back and
asking an eighty year old to reimagine what was the
sixty year old you? What was the forty year old you?
What was the twenty year old you? That's a bizarre exercise.

Speaker 1 (21:30):
Do you remember the first question that you asked him?

Speaker 3 (21:33):
The first question that I asked him when we were
writing the proposal was I was just trying to loosen
him up, and I asked about Woodstock and it didn't
take because it was I don't think it's that interesting
to him in some way, because there's the life lived
and then the life remembered. And I don't know if
he knew, you know, you just played the gig and
then later it's a legend.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Like did he not know that that was the paradigm
shift of his life?

Speaker 3 (21:56):
He knew the next day, he knew the concert was
a big deal. But one of the things he said
that was interesting is that when the movie came out
the next year and he was a movie star, that
was a secondary acceleration that maybe people now don't fully
understand that they Yeah, the movie for us is the concert.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
The movie is what Mae Woodstock Woodstock. I don't think
Woodstock made woodstuck at all. I totally agree, and I
think the idea of Woodstock he felt.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
That in the moment, like to us, we see through
the movie like your film, to the event, and so
we're we're thinking, we're seeing how important the event was.
What we're actually seeing is that the movie brought it
to people's attention. The first question I asked him where
I got a real answer was we were just kind
of loosening him up, and I said, just tell me
a random story, just something funny that happened. And he

(22:44):
told me a story that I didn't think would make
the book at the time it did, which is about
giving a stolen car to Eda James, where he I
didn't know she was part of his story. I mean,
I knew that was another drug troubled, you know, superstar,
but I didn't. I wasn't aware of any crossover between them.
I knew weird crossovers like her singing you know Paul

(23:04):
Simon songs, or laying on the floor of the studio
as people would walk by for sugar on the floor,
but I didn't. I didn't know that she can slide crossover.
And evidently they were friendly and she dropped by and
they were hanging out and probably using and she asked
if she could borrow a car, and he said, no,
I'll just give you one. So he went out and
he gave her a car. She was driving with a
boyfriend to Texas. I believe I may get some details

(23:27):
of this wrong. It's in the book. And then he
gets a call a couple weeks later and they're in
Texas and she says, I got pulled over. The car
was stolen. And he's like, oh, I didn't know that,
And he said, you didn't mention me, did you, And
she said no, no, no e. The boyfriend I was
driving with like, he was very straight about it, but
didn't mention you. He just said, we bought this from someone.

(23:49):
We had no idea, we have the right papers. And
then I said so you didn't know it was stolen.
He's like, no, I probably knew. I just got a
lot of cars. I didn't think of come up, like,
you don't think that that's gonna happen. You just the papers.
I don't know how it worked back then in California,
but whatever the fake papers were to make it look

(24:10):
like title had been transferred, he thought they were good enough.
And so it was a very random story to me,
and I thought at the time, I don't think this
is gonna make it, because I don't really know where
this fits into the larger story. It turned out that
it did fit into this kind of craziness period where
fame just takes you. You don't have introspection. It's like somebody,

(24:33):
I try very hard not to read for any of
our books. If I do with you a book I
do with anyone else, not to read any reviews, because
in my mind, you can choose who you are as
a writer, as a musician, as a filmmaker. I try
not to read anything because I think once I'm done,
I kind of don't care about people's opinions, and I
know some will be good, some will be bad. Sometimes

(24:54):
people will get it. Sometimes they won't, but one slipped
through and it was kind of irritating, and I won't
say where. And I don't begrudge. I mean, I don't care.
People can like things or not. Some people are loving
it and some people have problems with it. Right, somebody
talked about the middle and how they felt like the
middle was kind of They didn't say uninsightful, but they said,

(25:15):
this is just like rehearsing or restaging talk show appearances.
In my mind, there was a real good reason for that,
because when you get mega famous like he got mega famous,
so much of it is you're seeing yourself how you
are seen. You're trying to control the stories that are

(25:36):
told about you and thinking every day, well is that me?
Is that true? And I'm sure even like, I mean, look,
you're famous, you know, And then you think back to
him on the couch next to Muhammad Ali, and you think,
I'm paraphrasing what you would think. You think I'm famous
now in twenty twenty three, think of being those guys

(25:57):
in nineteen seventy five, when there's three channels, there's a
finite number of black celebrities, and these are the two
arguably biggest. I mean, maybe Stevie wonder. But at that time,
at that place, this is a fame of like I
can't even fathom it, you know, to be Muhammad Ali
in sly fighting over what the responsibility of a black

(26:19):
entertainer is on Mike Douglas is like mind boggling to me.
So I think that he really wanted to and he
was interested in seeing old appearances, going back and looking
at old performances. He really wanted to think, well, what
was it to be me?

Speaker 2 (26:38):
Then you're saying that he looked that he had to
recap and watch old interviews and all that stuff to
sort of jog his memory.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Well, that's not just jog memory. Even before me, he
would do it, he Arlene said. He always was kind
of interested. I think to try to be to whatever
degree someone is a student of their own existence. Like
he would always watch when things started to appear on
YouTube twenty years ago. He'd be really interested. He'd be like, oh,
that's the midnight special show when we watch, Oh I

(27:06):
remember there was this camera person who kept darting back
and forth and tessing me off, you know, like I
couldn't focus, or oh I remember there was a person
in the audience that I thought looked like this person,
not to jog his memory, but to think I was
so documented for a period of my life in print,
on radio, on TV. What was that? It just was

(27:31):
so weird, you know, like, was that even me? It's
a kind of interesting existential question. And then folded into
that the fact that he took arguably the most private
thing being getting married, and he did it in the
most public forum that you could ever imagine. So he
both embraced and was at the mercy of a lot

(27:52):
of this kind of fame thing. I mean, you know,
obviously when you and I talk, you have many versions
of this all the time, and so I also wanted
to be very clear in the book that certain things
could not be remembered clearly. And sometimes he would say, well,

(28:13):
I've heard this story from other people. That's not how
I remember it, you know, I heard that this is
how this went down, or this is what happened at
this place. I don't either I don't remember it or
I remember it differently, and it is all part of
the story. But when you write a memoir, you're not
doing journalistic research in the sense that I'm not asking everybody.

(28:36):
I'm asking him and so same thing with Brian. When
I did Brian Wilson's book, Mike Love had a book
coming out at the same time. Well, Brian's book was
Brian's version, Mike's book was Mike's version. They differed on
quite a bit because they remember it differently for a
variety of reasons. So yeah, that's the interesting thing to

(28:57):
try to kind of.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Let me ask you a question. What if you're given
a recollection that you know didn't happen in that particular way,
and I mean something factual, like you know, so Riot
came out in nineteen seventy four, and like, do you correct.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
The person like no, actually came out in seventy or.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
To some degree, I would correct them to some degree.
I mean, I don't you here's the problem You're You're
I serve at the pleasure of the king. I'm co writing.
It's not about me, It's about that person. And so
they are. They tell me, either overtly or sometimes they
don't articulate it overtly, but they explain that they want

(29:41):
to tell their whole life and sometimes that this book
was definitely not like this. But sometimes books are score
settlers where they say I got to get back at
that guy who wronged me. Sometimes they say, I want
people to understand how.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
People would do that. Yeah, I mean a Gene Simmons thin.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Yeah, I mean he not really, I mean I think Gene.
I think Gene was not a score settler. I think
Gene's it just as a side note, he wanted to reiterate. No,
I don't I didn't find him that petty, but I
think he always wanted to reiterate that Kiss had a
clean half and a not clean half. You know, there
were members of the band that drank and used, and

(30:21):
then there were two members of the band that did not,
And Jane was one of the.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
Clean and Tho he was a.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
Non user, straight edge, And so in his mind he
wanted to be clear that a lot of the decisions
got made just the way the decisions got made. To say, yes,
a lot of things were equal. We were abandoned in
some ways, we were not abandoned equals because when sane
strategy had to happen that you know, I did that,
But no, I mean, I think everyone gives you a charter.

(30:48):
So for example, Mometa, when you and Rich talked to
me about it, it was exactly what you said a
few minutes ago, I'm forty what am I doing? And
so as we strategized that through, we came to this
idea of the meta, which was, well, let's make a
book and blow up a book at the same time.
Let's do a book. But rich will be in there

(31:09):
telling you this didn't happen in New York. What are
you talking about. We were in California, don't you remember.
And we've put a Rich getting on you about memories.
Riches in the book is a kind of like second voice.
We also put in emails between me and the absurdly
similarly named Ben Greenberg, the publisher, where we were talking

(31:29):
about where I would say to him in an email,
and they were the real emails where I would say
to him, Amir is an amazing memory. But one of
the things he's worried about is do people care what
records he was listening to in ninety two? And then
he would write back and say, yeah, of course, maybe
we could do them as a sidebar, and then we
would do that. So every book has that kind of
pre planning stage. I feel like in this book, I

(31:51):
think he knew, of course that there were things that
were fuzzier to him, and things that were sharper I
was surprised by how sharp they were. Things that were sharp.
Like he sometimes would say, oh, we were staying in
this hotel in New York and the eighteenth floor, and
I would say what, and he remembered the room number,

(32:11):
you know, and then like maybe the next time you
would have to kind of say to him. You'd say, oh,
remember the show on Milwaukee just before Grant Park and
he would say where, And then you'd say Milwaukee, you
played the show and and then he would say, oh, Ryan, right,
I remember it's the one where they brought me out
in the boat. Okay, fine, so then we're there. A
lot of it is that you got to situate it.
I mean, you know, it's a strange task. You don't

(32:35):
just say to somebody nineteen seventy three go. They're like,
maybe you would you have that kind of memory, but
like you don't say to somebody nineteen seventy three go
and they say okay. So on January first, I remember
I was buying a room and at this dollar, it's
not unless you're Mary Lou Henner, you can't really.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Do that right exactly, So most people.

Speaker 3 (32:54):
You know, Yeah, So I would correct, I guess just
the quick answer to the question is, yeah, you don't
want the person to be in embarrassed if he slipped
up and said while I was doing stand in nineteen nineteen,
yeahly that But like some things are some things are
interesting why they're misplaced, and then you might leave it
slightly misplaced because it's interesting why he sees it that way.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
So I believe maybe in nineteen ninety six, nineteen ninety seven,
maybe there was an author. His name is Joel Salvin,
and he released an oral history book basically talking to
everyone in Sly's world except for Slye. And this includes

(33:36):
like Bubba, like you know, like what they would call
the handlers. And it's sort of weird because I took
Selvin's kind of book as law, and now that I'm
doing my own unearthing with this slide documentary, I'm now realizing, like, oh,

(33:58):
wait a minute, maybe this person wasn't a villain that
I was led to believe. Like I kind of came
into my own research, would sly you know, sort of
holding Selvin's oral history book, which is a very considerary
and kind of fiery story, like that version of Sly's

(34:21):
life to me was like the last half of Boogie
Nights If you will. Do you know if he was
at all aware of that book or what his response was.

Speaker 3 (34:31):
I think he definitely was aware, And I had the
same weird process that you did, but maybe in reverse,
which is that as a mega fan, a super fan
of flies, I read everything in its day, So I
read every article, every oral history, every I would find
scraps of things on the Internet where somebody's like this kid,
John Dax, who we mentioned in the book because it

(34:52):
was an interesting thing. He had a fan site. I
think he was a student, so I flew him out.
Was trying to figure out He had this label Fatta
Data at the time, and he was trying to figure
out can I release my own records on the internet?
What is the Internet? So he flew John out, and
so I just tracked all that stuff. I think I
actually interviewed John for a magazine at the time because

(35:14):
it was so fascinating, and I was obsessed with Sly
for this book, I had to try to strategically forget
all that. Now it's all in my mind, so I
have all those stories in there. Anyway, when I was
talking to Sly, Sometimes I would ask him, not ask
him directly about the stories, but I would say exactly
what you just said, like, oh, there's this, you know,

(35:37):
there's a version of this where so and so had
a gun at this place. And he would either pick
up in the thread of it, in which case it
was really interesting because it would mean that he did
remember it. Sometimes he would say, oh, I know that
person told that story, but that's not how it happened,
which would keep me into the fact that might not
have been literally Joel's book. Maybe someone told him that

(35:58):
after the book came out. Oh Eddie Chin saying that
this thing happened or whatever, and so yeah, I mean
I think he definitely. One thing to think about the
Oral History is that it's a reflection of stories that
were being told. It's not. I mean, Joel did a
great job. I really liked that book for what it is,
But as you say, it's a snapshot. Those are stories

(36:21):
that people were dining out on, some of them for
decades anyway. Like if you were if you were Bobba,
you were telling that story to every girl you met
and every person who you were waiting in an airport with,
you know, like that was your thing. Then Joel does
the project and you also tell it in the book
where it becomes.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
Formal, your stick, your fae, I.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
Mean, because that's their claim to fame. One thing I
find with all these books is that everybody remembers being
with famous people, but famous people don't remember being with anyone, meaning.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
That oh my god, you know you you know.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
But there's a billion people that come up with these
like crazy, crazy like recollections of things that we've done,
and all I can be is like, oh yeah, and
they're just like, you don't remember, do you? And it
makes me feel bad because I feel like, then in
their eyes, I seem inauthentic, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
It's not inauthentic, it's the opposite. I mean, I think that.
So I tried, like I said, to not I think
your film is very different. And we talked about this before.
We keep a wall between them because one is Sly's
version of what he remembers in his events. And then
you're obviously reaching out like Joel did, but in a
different way to a variety of people. First of all,

(37:41):
everybody is literally a different perspective. You're standing here, they're
standing there, They're looking this angle. You're looking this angle,
So they might say, oh, it was the day of
that helicopter crashed because they see the helicopter going down
on this side. You never saw, so it's not part
of your experience. Everyone, if anyone ever met Sly, they
they know it, they remember it, it's meaningful to them,

(38:02):
and they start to build from it. He only remembers
a fraction of those. He remembers some when he was young,
when the people were more famous than him. That's interesting,
you know, like if he was writing Come On and Swim,
he's dealing with people. He's a kid. He's dealing with
artists and producers and label executives who are above him.
So those memories are clear in a certain way. But

(38:23):
at some point, there's no traction on most of these stories.
And sometimes, like you just explained, you can recharge that
memory if you give context and you say, oh, no,
this was just before that show where the cops came
in and arrested you, and he'll say, oh, yeah, yeah,
that lady on the court. I do remember that conversation,
but what did we talk about? And then other times

(38:46):
they these people are possessive of those stories because they're
so important to them. I have my own version of that,
which is Eric Bagosian, the playwright and monologist, and he
was an actor. He was in talk radio with Oliver Stone.
Movie years and years years ago. I was a young
reporter and he came to Miami to do some kind
of event and I went to his hotel and did
the interview. This was a junket and we had extra time,

(39:09):
and on the spot, I thought it would be funny,
just just I don't know why. I just thought it
would funny to go out on the balcony of his
hotel and take a bunch of pictures like we were
friends on vacation. So we held beers and we looked
like we were laughing, and he pointed out and I pointed,
in just stupid shit. Ten years later, I was in
New York and he had a book signing and I
took those photos and I went to the book signing

(39:30):
and I got to the front and I a purpose,
like as a performance, I said Eric, And he looked
at me and clearly he didn't have any idea who
I was, and he said I'm sorry, and I said,
I looked Crestfall and I said, Eric, it's me and
I showed him the pictures that I said, we're friends.
You don't remember, and then after like ten sears, after

(39:51):
ten seconds, I said, I'm just walking with you. I
was a reporter in Miami and we took these pictures.
I thought it was really funny and like a good
illustration of this. And then the funny anything I was
thinking about the other day is he has almost certainly
forgotten that, because even that, which to me is like
the end of a great story, to him was probably nothing.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
Again, do you remember that moment at all?

Speaker 3 (40:13):
I think when I showed in the pictures and I
explained to him, He's like, yeah, I do, I do remember.
I don't know if he was telling the truth. He
probably did, but then he's probably forgotten it all over again.
And so it's it's such an interesting thing with fame.
And this is what I was saying before about Sly
at the height of his fame, because you almost become
one of those people you don't remember meeting. I don't.

(40:34):
I don't know if that's too spacey a way to
put it, but when you are who's famous everywhere all
the time, you don't necessarily remember. I mean, I know,
you don't and you have the best memory of anybody.
I know every stage you've been on, every media you did,
every person you saw, every radio you know, conversation you've had.

(40:57):
You remember a lot of them. But how can you
remember them all they blend together? You need space for like,
what are the names of the people in my family?

Speaker 1 (41:06):
You know?

Speaker 3 (41:06):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yeah, that's that's that's the setback.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
Like I can tell you the entire season thirteen color
scheme of the way that the Soul train lights blinked.
But if you were to put me right now in
front of like all my first cousins.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
Yep, I think that's exactly that. And the weirdness of
flies memory. The other thing, just the last thing I'll
say here is that as a fan, one of the
things that I wanted more of and didn't get, I
wouldn't say I was disappointed. And you said something about
this recently that really struck me is that I wanted huge,

(41:44):
brilliant insights about how every song was created. The one
thing I've realized over time is that artists make the work.
They don't necessarily analyze the work. If you are Elton
John or Paul McCartney, or you're Brian Wilson, which I know,
and I say, hey, let's talk about album and this song,
and they say, oh, is that song on that album?

(42:04):
I thought it was on this other album, And I think,
oh my god, they're old, they're faltering. They don't know
which record this song was on. The truth is that no,
they just made the song and a bandmate or a
producer or a label executive or somebody said, let's up
put that out this year, let's hold that for this
thing because we think it pairs well with this, or
who knows it's a B side, and later it's released.
They're not the marketers of their own life. To some degree,

(42:28):
they aren't. Some degree they're not. And I've known this,
even with you for doing liner notes, Like you said,
ninety percent of the things you remember perfectly. And then
sometimes you'll say, oh, wait, let me check. I think
that came out on this compilation. I'm not positive. Hold on,
let me check. And then you check and you come
back and you say, yay, yeah, that's what it was.
I remember now. So that's really interesting. The artist is

(42:50):
not necessarily the best critic of the artist's work. That's
left to nerd me to listen to every record and say,
oh man, did you hear that thing? And let me
have it all? He drops his voice out for a
tenth of it. He was just making the record. So
it is that's very interesting, and I've learned that with
every creative artist. I think some are more You and

(43:12):
Little Stemen are more on the analytical side, just because
of personality, meaning that you do both things. There is
a part of you that is analyzing as you make.
Then there's people maybe.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
And George, why I get accused of that. There's a
part of me that things about mine.

Speaker 3 (43:28):
I think that's that's one said.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
I think about my Wikipedia entry as I.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Creates, just why you're making a choice, like like, it's
not like I don't go to this. I don't consider
it to be like this person who's a primitive talent.
One thing about Slide that struck me throughout is that
this is the most trained rock star in the history
of rock stars. Before Sliding the family Stone. He's a
producer of hits, a DJ, a hugely popular DJ, and

(43:53):
a composition student. So when you go to like Beetlestones,
who kinks you know whatever, John Fogerty, Dylan, anybody else.
Those people were like naive stumble in with their guitar
like elements like the Woods. You know, this guy was trained.
This is like a professional person before the band ever.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
Hit, Arlene said, three hundred interviews.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
Yeah. So one of the things that happened is that
because of his energy, as I said, for you, you know,
you can talk obviously for ninety minutes at a time.
His energy, and I think just the newness of the process.
And frankly, I don't know if this was the case
for you as much, but it's traumatic to do a
life story. You are revisiting things. You're thinking of old
girlfriends and old friends and oh shit, I love that

(44:45):
house right, Oh my god, that house, and they can
just think about that. So the way it worked out
is that we did fifteen to twenty minute sessions for
the most part. Sometimes he would beg out early say
I don't feel well or I'm tired. She'd go back.
I'd say to her, then you got to go back later.
He was right on the brink of talking about Jim
Brown coming to the apartment in LA and calling the

(45:09):
girls out, and he had to go out and tell
Jim Brown go away, these aren't your girls, or you
know whatever, the story was he started telling that and
he didn't finish. Can you go back later and get that?
And she'd say, yay, I could do that. So she'd
go back. While she was talking to him about whatever,
you know, planting planters outside of his house, she'd say
to him, can you tell me the James Brown story again?

(45:29):
And she'd get tape on that and send it to me.
So she would sometimes go back and complete. We ended
up with hundreds of sessions. They're just very short and
not very short. They're fifteen to twenty five for the
most part. Sometimes he'd got a lot of energy, and
sometimes he'd get one question in and something would bug him.
The interesting thing is he'd get in something would bug him,

(45:52):
he'd stop, and then the next day or the day after,
I would see what it was that would bugg who
was bugging him, because he'd have a really interesting story
about Rudy love or something, you know, like just go
back to him. So, yeah, that's so a lot of short.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Sessions you've done, George Clinton, You've done sly. Yeah, we
briefly mentioned, but like you know, the Little Stephen story
is probably my favorite, only.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
Because when you hear the audio book, you.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
Know, it's it's really like he's talking to you, you know,
that sort of thing, and Brian Wilson like, what else
is left for you?

Speaker 3 (46:29):
I mean, little Stephen was great. And that's a case
where I'm credited as an editor, not a co writer,
because he's a real writer. He writes political pieces and
he writes, you know, songs, obviously. But so his take
on it, when we were talking before about what a
memoir is was a little different when you say, how
can you do this without adult supervision? In his mind,

(46:52):
he is the adult supervision because he's and he also
has that part of the brain we said, where he's
an analyst of himself as he goes. But he was great,
and he his whole point was, well, what does any
of this mean. We're doing all these things, We're making songs,
we're touring like the world is in crisis, dude, Like
we gotta we gotta figure this out. And he also
was he's a historian, obviously, you know, he's done rock

(47:16):
and roll Hall of Fame stuff. You know, he's a
real serious historian of everything. So he was really interested
in how rock and roll changed through the sixties and
then the monoculture exploded and you have all these subcultures,
and what does that mean. It doesn't just mean that
you're a boomer classic rocket here. You're actually looking at
a time when there was one thing that affected everybody
and then that stopped happening. In terms of for me,

(47:39):
I just don't know. I mean, there's so many I
want to do plenty of memoirs outside of music as well,
but in the music space. I think about the great books,
the memoirs that I love, and there's a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
You know.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
I don't know if I'm allowed to say omatic because
we did the book, but that's.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
A great I forgot about us a certain take.

Speaker 3 (47:59):
Dylan's book Chronicles, Neil Young's book Shaky, Keith Richard's book,
Patty Smith's book are great. Ray Davies, Oh there's a
million miles Davis. When I was thinking about the kinds
of things I would like to do, the three that
kind of rose in my mind are The Mingus Beneath
the Underdog a great book. I mean, it's outspoken, it's angry,
it's hurt, there's a lot of you know, injury in it,

(48:22):
and it kind of pairs like if you're dining with
the assum Mingus book Tonight at Noon. It's named after
a Mingus song. It's her story about her life with
Mingus and that she didn't do until the two thousands,
but she was with him from I think sixty four
to when he died, and it's about maintaining the legacy
and trying to get your head around this incredibly difficult,

(48:43):
brilliant person. So that would be as if then Arlene
wrote a book or whatever you know about this, like,
this is how this person saw but let me tell
you what it was to make this person happy in
their life or try to keep them from being their
own worst enemy or whatever. It was right the vill
of Albertine, viv Albertine. It's called She's from the Slits,

(49:04):
the punk band. I think her book is called Close
Close Closed music music, music, Boys, Boys, Boys, and it's great.
It's it's such a good book about how you get
inside and outsider. You know what it means to be
like a perennial outsider and pullink and fashion and everything.
And then but in the book you have to bring
people in in, So how do you do that? That's weird.
There's an element of that with Sly, where Sly is

(49:26):
such a singular person and such a glorious weirdo in
a way like I use that word of people think
I'm being critical, but I'm not. I'm being complimentary.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
No, that's a compliment.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Compliment. There's an interview in the book and the guy
from the Guardian ended up interviewing me about this book,
and he said, oh, I make a cameo in your
book because I'm the journalist that Slide called and said
he wanted an all albino rock band, and so I
was laughing with him about it, and Sly's theory was
that that's how you eliminate racism with an all albino
rock and that kind of wavelength. The viv Albertine is

(50:03):
a version of that, but just being so singular, there's
no one like you, and how do you then you
become embraced. And then the third when I was thinking
of him as this very strange book, there's this twentieth
central composer named Alec Wilder, and he was a classical composer.
He did some film and some musicals and some popular
song and I think the book is called Letters I

(50:24):
Never Mailed, So the whole book is Letters. He wrote
to people in his life who he was too afraid,
never never said. And there's this it's a really interesting book.
And there's this Frank Sinatra letter where they were friends
and then Frank became Frank as famous as Sly becoming
Sly and just walled off, couldn't deal with anybody. So
he writes this very moving letter like how he just

(50:45):
wants to hang out with him and laugh and laugh
at how people are stupid and you know, just wanna
be his friend. And it ends with this line, which
is just so moving. He says to Sinatra, believe it
or not, I'm still available. All it needs is your
request and my survival. That's the end of the letter
to Frank. And I just thought, like, it's such a

(51:07):
great book because it's all the things that you don't
get to say to people. And so I think a
lot about this. There's stars that I want to work with. Still,
you know, it would be great if whoever, if Stevie
Wonder really did a real book, if Jagger did a memoir,
if you know, I mean a lot of people did
first ones that they got older. Maybe you'll do another book,
another memoir. I mean you've done seven. Maybe another proper memoir.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Maybe I got I got to live a life first.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
First you'll be eighty, then one.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
I've exhausted the first forty years. So they but in.

Speaker 3 (51:38):
Terms of like the whales of stardom to get to
you know, a lot of people have done books. It's
just interesting. I started to think with this sly book
that there are so many different kinds of books. When
I first went to him with this project, and I
was thinking, because he's such a weirdo, well what if
he pitches me back a book that he says, it's

(52:00):
just a thousand sentences broken and I'm just gonna say
a phrase and then you write that down and that's
the whole book, and I won't do anything else. And
I would have to say, like, yes, sir, mister Stewart,
because you know, like I'm not so one of those
There's this line that it sounded like it's a line
that he knew he had said before, but it's so great.
It's like it sounds like the kind of thing you

(52:22):
say and then you think that was smart. Later you
say it again. And we used it as the last
line where he said it's something like human beings would
come and go some of us have not gone yet,
and it was just such a wait.

Speaker 1 (52:35):
Is he still full of those idioms?

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Yes, but I think that here's a there's a tension
there he is. And then part of him is like
I said it already.

Speaker 4 (52:46):
Like like you know, yeah, like so one quick code
to the songs that sometimes I would ask what songs meant,
and he did this thing that kind of frustrated me,
But the more I went on, it fascinated me where
he would say.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
This, the song means what the song means, like every
day people, What does that mean? That's what it means
everyday people? And I would think, are fucking with me?
Like come on? But then when you think about it,
he's kind of right that when you get to boil down,
you know, he has a whole new thing and it's
a very complicated record, doesn't hit. Then he does dance

(53:21):
to the music, and he realizes the kind of genius
of simplicity. You know, he resists that song a little
because he thought it was kind of dumb for his
pay grade, you know whatever, like it's a hit, what
am I doing here? Like I'm not the twist.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
So he's the master of simplicity, and we overlook it really.

Speaker 3 (53:38):
In simplicity in some of those songs. I like the
complexity too. I mean, I like, I don't know if
we have time to talk about, you know, the couple
favorite songs, but in time is like not simple and
it's a fantastic song and everyday people is simple. But
he would say to me, the song means what it means,
and I would think, God, you know, you gotta like
song and dance me a little or tell me something.

(53:59):
But then I thought, well, yeah, that is kind of
what a painter would say or a sculptor would say,
or is like, it's not your job to go and
analyze it.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
You made it.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
It's my job to then say what it means, not yours.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
And then in this book, I can't even say a
lot of that, like he Weirdly, the mid seventies records
he was a little bit more analytical, because I think
they were more like kind of mission records like heard
you missed me from the top down or back on
the right Track from the top down. They're kind of

(54:33):
mission records like hey, I'm still here right so they
have a message, and those he was able to say
a little more about that, even though he didn't always
like it. I think back on the right track, there's
a kind of like a cleaned up slide, like a
Smiley cleaned up vest slide that he thought, like, man,

(54:54):
how many the headlines for that album are all kind
of insulting like a well behaved sly Stone.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
He's like, come on, for those that might be listening
that are new to sly or whatever, briefly tell me
what are your three favorite SLI songs?

Speaker 3 (55:15):
Okay, Well, as you know, it's an impossible task.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
That's why I always limited it to three, because.

Speaker 3 (55:21):
I can't deal with the big hits. They're too big
to get my head around.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
No one deals with the hits real real music fans
like the Filler.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
So I'd say, okay, if I had to pick three,
I'd say we Love All, which is an outtake from
It's a sixties high psychedelia high Echo. But it's he
writes the lyrics that later I would come to see
as these very compressed, weird sly lyrics like like the
Funk get Stronger type lyrics where he says it's like

(55:51):
he does everything, and he says unlike the police and
his gone, unlike the judge and his son, unlike the
local meter man, unlike the late scam, and so they
are listing out all these things that aren't embracing of everything,
and that song is such a big, weird spacey sixty sound,
lots of echo, and so that's really interesting. It doesn't

(56:11):
sound like anything else they were doing at the time,
very spare in some ways. Second one is probably Sylvester,
which is this tiny little.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Thing that's not even second right.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
It's this fragment on the last proper album that he
did on Input. The one way, it probably was a
piece of tape that someone recovered at the thing. He
his memory of it was he remembered making it and
he remembered what it was about, but he didn't he
wasn't one hundred percent sure that it made a record,
because he's like, yeah, that that little thing I recorded,
And it's this incredibly weird similar to a lot of

(56:47):
the songs he made when he was then not famous.
There's really weird meditation on Identity where he's going past
a mirror and he sees himself and his mother remembers
his name, and it's very very intense really for what
it is. But it's just him playing a little electric
pan On singing for thirty seconds.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
That's one of my three.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
It's great, And then the third one was a tie.
I think in my mind between what was I thinking?
In my head? Which is the second song. I like
it for this reason.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
I'm mad that I can't resist it.

Speaker 3 (57:20):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
I'm mad. I hate.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
I hate that only comes from I'm mad I can't
resist it. And yet those lyrics are a little are
are very clever, and I hate that.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
I like that song for me.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
The reason that I love it is that in my
head because when you say what was I thinking, we
know where it's happening. It's in your head. That's where
people think, right to add that little part. Whether it's
redundant or brilliant or drug album, I don't know for sure.
In my head which in the song when you hear
it becomes this bizarre hook like you can't you can't
get it out of your own head. And it's very

(57:57):
catchy and it's kind of simplest but psychologically complicated. So
I don't know's I have a weakness for that. But
then when I picked he recorded throughout his absence, and
he and a lot of them are bedroom demos, and
then some of them he would run into a friend
or a co creator who would say, oh, I like that,

(58:17):
let's do that. So in the eighties when he would
have a song with the barka is a song with
Earthwind and Fire. He had the Jesse Johnson song obviously,
which is not an original. That's a song he comes
on to as a duet. There's a song called the
Yellow Light that he did that kind of trickles out
on this giant Funkadelic record called First You Got to

(58:38):
Shake the Gate. It's a triple record from twenty fourteen
ish and it's heavily treated vocals and just like this
weird groove song and he's probably saying something but I
can't make it out, and he can't make it out anymore,
and it's just like this bizarre experiment and kind of incomprehensible,
really deep funk that I love. It's so weird, weird,

(59:01):
and it just appears. It's like those funking Elic records.
Those late ones are like party records, like for how
late do you have to be before You're absent? Where
George was just pulling in everyone. You believe it was
song and uh, you know whatever, there's some old songs,
some old zap demo and here somebody finish it. So
they're kind of like compilations, not the family series, but

(59:21):
the big records and so that one so so what
are so? So? Sylvester's one of your three? And then
what are your other two?

Speaker 1 (59:28):
I like, I love Life of Fortune and Fame. I'm
very upset that.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
My version of it on the roots is Game Theory
was passed up like my I have a version of
it where I did all the music myself that I
think is light years ahead of what wound up being
the title track of Game Theory. They basically took my
track and in added other stuff to it, which whatever.

(59:54):
So Life of Fortune and Fame, and you know, we're
probably even now one of the reels. We cannot find
any of the reels from the Life sessions. And I
gotta know what happens at the end of I'm An Animal.
I'm An Animal. It's just a weird song, and so

(01:00:16):
it's not like I'm gonna and I've asked the band
members about it, and they don't have many memories about
you know again, it's just like we won the studio
and we recorded it, But for me, that song says
everything about Sli's weirdness. It's like a kid sing along,
but it's also psychological, like psychedelic. And you know Larry

(01:00:39):
is doing exemplary work on his base that's not thumb related.
And you know Cynthia shows off her jazz chops like
a lot's happening in that song, which is a filler,
but it's still super brilliant to me, so I like
it a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
I love that song too, and I think same thing
where people it's a long time ago, people don't remember
what you're hearing on the reels. Is sort of lost
the time except that it's recorded. To me, that song
and this is just me as a fan is I
always thought those are kinds of reaction songs to dance
to the music in a way, in a way, and

(01:01:15):
that to me, I always heard that song as like,
I'll do what you want. I'll song and dance. I'll
be your song and dance man. And then he has
something in there. I forget the exact line where he
says my conscience will die I'll be an an. I
think he says my conscience. Does he say my conscience
will will die? Off?

Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
Something, my conscience is my guide, or now I got
it wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
I might and maybe the lyric is vague, but I
always heard it as this weird thing of him saying
for my purposes, of him saying, I'll dance. What is it?
I'll dance like a kangaroo, so to me, And when
I thought about it, I love that song. It was
always like him saying, I did hold only thing. I'm
a composer. I studied composition. I I'm working in the

(01:02:06):
rock space and the pop space and the soul space
in the whatever the funk space is becoming, but I'm
a composer. And then it kind of falls flat. And
then it's like, as we know, dance to the music
is a massive hit, but also kind of a walk
in the park for him in a little annoying like
why is that how I have to introduce myself to America?
That don't you know who I am or what I'm

(01:02:28):
capable of? And so a lot of that tension of
that third record is I think those two things, and like.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
Life is him fighting back like I'm smart and you're
gonna take me on my own terms, and it doesn't work.

Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
Totally, And a lot of musicians that's their favorite record
life because it's so It's kind of like what I
was saying at the very beginning, just to bring this
full circle, which is that you try not to make
the work and you don't care about its reception. I
don't care. I mean, ego care, but I don't really

(01:03:03):
care to about it. You make your thing, right. That
is the rare case where someone's so smart is able
to share with you. Well, no, it kind of does matter,
or at least when there's a tension created between all
my people telling me how Tayomi Saro loved the first record,

(01:03:25):
you know, fell over himself, and yet the audience didn't
embrace it. Then I do this record and the audience
embraces it. Music people are like, eh, not the first record, right,
And so you got to get back to that space.
And finally Stan synthesizes everything. I mean, you know, I
don't know how you feel about this and what you're finding,
but I find some of the most fascinating answers about

(01:03:45):
Like he said something kind of weird and cool, like
you couldn't be an artist in nineteen sixty eight and
not make stand in nineteen sixty nine, you know, like
you're an antenna when you're an artist, so you're seeing
and hearing everything, you're bringing it all in. And I
thought that was kind of fascinating. And that speaks to
what we think about Riot, which is that is it

(01:04:06):
his depression and his darkness or is it the sixties
hangover that he's channeling, or is it a mix of
those things?

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
I'm still trying to come to grips with my feelings
on Riot, because you know, the one the one theme
of this movie that I'm doing, which is, you know,
something happened in those two years that threw sly off
and the result is Riot. And everyone just keeps talking
about how beautiful this record is, how it's their bible,

(01:04:37):
how it's and for me, I don't know, Like if
you listen to Space Cowboy, that to me is that's
my uncle Willie just pissing his pants drunk, like not
just giving zero fucks, And I want to know.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
What he's rebelling against.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
So is Life? We can end with this, Is life
your favorite as a musician, That's the one that you
get the most kind of joy, excitement, frustration, productive frustration
from it?

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
Yeah, I mean life, Life is the first non greatest
hits record that I gravitated towards.

Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
It just sounded fun like Dynamite.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
You hear Great going crazy on the drums, and it
sounded funny to me, And like Dynamite, sounds like Greg
falling down the stairs, you know, like the Chevy Chase.

Speaker 3 (01:05:26):
I think Great Beats record too. I mean that for
for a lot of reasons, right people, people.

Speaker 1 (01:05:30):
Can go to love you like I love.

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
So what's so funny is that the musician writer divide,
I think is exactly illustrated here, which is that I
moved off of Riot at some point and went to
Fresh and I kind of stayed on Fresh. And the
reason I stayed on Fresh is that in time, you know,
you put that record on. That first song is just
like an unbelievable piece of writing. The density of puns

(01:05:58):
and his getting his head or around two years too
long to wait, you know, his own frustration with the
label waiting for him switch from Coke to PEP. I
mean that thing is like I've never seen or heard
lyrics like that, And then it's in the service of
these very complicated you know, you're stretching out, stretching out,
but not really losing form, yet they're not like jams.

(01:06:23):
They're still songs, but they're weird songs. Frisky is a.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Weird Frisky was probably the first last song that I
sang as a kid.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31):
Yeah, yeah, and then it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:33):
Has one extremely straightforward if you want me to stay.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:06:37):
I asked him about that is that He's like, no,
that's what it is, if you want me to stay?
Like does my audience and the people in my life
want me around? I hear a lot about how I'm
a problem miss shows like you want me to do this?
And so in going to Fresh, I always thought, in
a way my theory, which he didn't necessarily agree with,
is that I think Fresh is a darker album than

(01:07:00):
Riot because it's a forced smile. Because Riot hits and
everybody's like, whoa, I don't know what to do with this,
Like Family, it's a huge pop hit. The records sold great,
but people listen and it makes them money easy. It's
too spare, it's too sparse. There's some throwaways like you
say that get caught up in the legend, but they're
not really in my mind full songs even maybe some

(01:07:22):
of them. Then you go to Fresh, and I think
it did so well riot that Fresh is like the afterglow.
But to me, it's kind of fake happy, and I
love that. It's such a weird and in case Asurah
is so weird, it's like such a bizarre cover. He
left the mistake in you know the Mistake. It's so

(01:07:45):
I think it's so interesting in that period. And then
of course as we go there's a lot of songs
I love and a lot that I've learned to appreciate
for different reasons. But it's so funny to me that
around that heart of greatest hits, And I think this
is probably true. Musicians might lean a little earlier when
it's the whole band and it's everybody doing everything at

(01:08:06):
the highest end, and then writers might lean a little
later because he's starting to think it through in a
different way, like he you know, he's that song. Fresh
also has quotes of earlier songs like there are He
starts to work in bits of earlier songs, like he
did with the slowdown thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
Yeah, well, just dance to the music in There's. You know,
he's very self referential to this. We can get lost
in sly circles to the cows come home.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
Yeah, they keep on Dancing is exactly. And then do
you remember nineteen ninety one or so, Epic put out
Fresh and they put out the wrong version, right, they
took all the wrong masters. And I was after college
at that time, and I remember going to get it
and thinking, listening to it and in times mostly the same,
think if you want me to stay, it's mostly the same.
And then whoever was pulling the reels pull the wrong one.

(01:09:00):
So every song after that's different.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
No, I won't mean to say is different. The answer
is way different.

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
Yeah, oh yeah, they interest different, right, And then but
I remember listening to Babies Making Babies, which is a
whole different song.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
Yeah, that's way better.

Speaker 3 (01:09:13):
And thinking, oh my god, like because again, when he
reconstructs all that, he's being asked to reconstruct the album
that came out right that we know of, and like
you say, you go back and hear the other frisky,
the other thingful and thoughtful, the other skin I'm in.
All these things that are different, takes different vibes, different feels,

(01:09:37):
and so yeah, that's really the process. Pieces is interesting,
and he did do some of it, Like there's one
cool story where he's recording and he doesn't like the guitar,
and he tells the guy who's recording, I need a
different guitar, and the guy says okay, and he's waiting
for Slide to go get a different guitar. So I
was like, no, the one I wants down in La.

(01:09:57):
So they have to close up shop and go down
tell he gets the right instrument, and the guy says,
so I'll patch you him form the beginning, and so
I was like, no, no, just in the middle, and
the guy says, what's going to sound totally weird. One
sound here and then in the middle it switches. I
don't think that's right, and sly says, trust me, and
slies right. I forget which song, but it's it just
creates that weirdness where he had this vision of what

(01:10:20):
to risk and what to change and what to take
chances on. And that's how we got all this music.
And he can tell the story and you can figure
out what it all means.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Well, there it is, ladies and gentlemen, you can see
for yourself. Ben Greenman's book with sly Stone, thank you
for letting me be myself again said and spelled, and
it's and it's Manda green Glory out October seventeenth on
our publishing. Now that I now that our company's real,

(01:10:49):
I'm not going to say the way Prince would.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Annunciated to do the actual bird caller.

Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
Now I'm tired of doing it. I've been doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:59):
Now just kind of flatten into our instead of Oh,
I'm tired of yelling it. But thank you for talking
to us, man, I really appreciate. And then, you know,
congratulations on this, on this awesome book, man, Thank.

Speaker 3 (01:11:12):
You, thank you, And I want to congratulate sly On
Arlene as well for making this happen. And you're the publisher.
And here we go into the world.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
Here we go.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
By the way, ladies and gentlemen. We don't do this
this often, but you know, this is a special moment
for us. So as a bonus to this episode, we're
proud to present a clip from an unreleased Slidestone song
called coming Back for More. And this was recorded, I
believe in the mid eighties, and it's set up by
the song's engineer and the book's co author Arlene Hirschowitz,

(01:11:46):
whose voice you're going to hear before the snippet. Thank
you guys so much. I appreciate it, and We'll see
you next go around on quest Love Supreme.

Speaker 1 (01:11:54):
Thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:11:56):
Hi. This is Arlene and I was Slyes recording engineer
in nineteen eighty five. He used a Yamaha d X
seven and a rolling drum machine to create the song
coming Back for More. At this time, sly was trying
to figure out whether he was going to come back
into the limelight or not, and so he always put
his thoughts into his songs. I hope you like the

(01:12:19):
song as much as I do.

Speaker 6 (01:12:22):
Feels so high, Hutch the sky and the sky.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
Finally growing the signs.

Speaker 6 (01:12:42):
It makes it easier too, Blacky.

Speaker 3 (01:12:49):
But.

Speaker 1 (01:13:03):
What's Love Supreme? Is a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
Wherever you listen to your favorite shows.