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The overwhelming majority of humans alive now aren’t old enough to feel the shell shock from the musical paradigm shifts of the 1960s. We were born in a world that always had the Beatles and Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix. The deaths of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson at 82 (they were born months apart) feels especially cataclysmic. The parallels between the two artists are in some ways uncanny; both hailed as songwriting giants well before they turned 30, Stone and Wilson broke musical boundaries with Stand!, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Pet Sounds, and Smile and faced initial critical resistance when they released their most innovative work. They both struggled to balance their aspirations and fans’ expectations, falling out of favor the further inward their critical lenses peered. But it’s in the disparate fortunes in the latter part of their careers — post-breakdowns and reclusive periods — where the stories part in ways that illuminate the different stakes for Black and white geniuses of the time. Brian Wilson got a grace period and was making great music well into the 2010s; Sly Stone tried but never entirely rebounded.
The Beach Boys and the Family Stone represent divergent visions of America that came into acrid conflict over the course of the ’60s. Both bands presented as kin. The suburban SoCal Wilsons — brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl — were encouraged to write and sing by their father, Murry, who sidelined his own musical ambitions when the children arrived but nudged them imposingly into the industry instead. Their early songs spoke to and of the America of Beach Blanket Bingo and neighborhood singing groups; Hendrix famously quipped that the Beach Boys sounded like a “psychedelic barbershop quartet.”
The Stone clan landed in the Bay when Sly’s parents moved west from north Texas to Vallejo in the ’40s. Falling in love with singing in church as a child, Sly infiltrated rock and pop circles as a session hand and songwriter before funneling what he learned into his own racially integrated outfit. The inaugural Beach Boys chart topper, 1964’s “I Get Around,” mixed surf-rock sonics and ambitious vocal harmonies all in celebration of a breezy Saturday drive. Sly & the Family Stone’s first, 1968’s “Everyday People,” fused rock, soul, and nursery rhymes in a call for an end to prejudice and division. In the late ’60s, the quieter, cozier existence typified by the former single caught on fire as civil rights and antiwar movements interrogated the assumption that ours is a nation of the best intentions. The pregnant first-person pronoun of the chorus of Stone’s hit — “I am everyday people” — begs the listener to demolish the old idea of what’s all-American in a way the geographically and genealogically placable Wilsons never have to. But both men reached stratospheric heights with their late-’60s masterworks: the Beach Boys’ 1966 Pet Sounds and the Family Stone’s seminal 1969 album, Stand! These albums moved beyond the borders of pop, rock, and soul and set a bar so high that labels used it to market them. The pressure in each case was almost immediately crushing.
Pet Sounds’s conglomeration of Phil Spector bombast, symphonic teen ennui, and choral excellence was just as much a product of the vast, scintillating dream America of Broadway composer Leonard Bernstein as the commercial-jingle perfection of the girl-group era. Sometime Beatle publicist Derek Taylor pushed the idea that the album certified Brian Wilson as a genius, and this worked wonders for his reputation with British listeners and songwriters. Lennon and McCartney were famously bowled over by an early listen, but the record Wilson poured his time into wasn’t an immediate critical or chart success back at home. He’d later admit to seeing it as a kind of failure. Stone had the inverse problem. Stand! had been so encouraging and inviting, and so committed to angling toward a brighter future by embracing freedom and unity in the moment, that anything less than another clarion call for peace and justice would scan as disappointment. When he took over two years cooking the full length that would follow up the rousing “Stand!” and the frenetic “I Want to Take You Higher,” burning off goodwill won in a fierce Woodstock set, his label ran a lofty ad: “2 & ½ years is a short time to wait for a work of genius.” The industry struggled to find the language to convey to fans that, like the Beatles, the two studio explorers were holed up improvising new recording techniques and increasingly disinterested in being performing entities. Success offered not less but only new and different responsibilities. The money was nice, but chafing with label brass and adhering to a tight touring regimen did not feel like freedom. Retreating deeper into the mind and spaces of comfort and budding habits did.
The druggy conception and lengthy gestation period of both songwriters’ comeback classics — the Beach Boys’ long-shelved would-be 1967 album Smile and Sly and the Family Stone’s brusque and insular 1971 milestone There’s a Riot Goin’ On — earned reclusive-genius signifiers. Dropping out of sight to tinker with writing, arranging, and producing put both artists in tension with frustrated majors and bandmates while priming listeners to expect flawlessness. The ongoing prosperity of the familial business organization hung on the auteurs’ ability to synthesize their passion and innovation into the digestible shape of a hit record. They did so in ways that managed to befuddle. Wilson’s 1966 smash “Good Vibrations” struck an easy balance between lysergic observation and straightforward adulation, peering at the aw-shucks romanticism of past work through the lens of more recent psychotropic dabbling. Elsewhere, the trippy absurdism that Wilson and songwriting partner Van Dyke Parks wanted to unleash in the aftermath of the Summer of Love wasn’t as well received. The time-traveling gunslinger anthem “Heroes and Villains” threw some listeners off with its winding changes; this was the one on the charts Hendrix said he didn’t care for the band. Wilson sabotaged tapes in a fit of paranoia and released the pared-down Smiley Smile, and his mental health suffered not just from the feeling of rejection but the lure of mind-altering substances trickling into his life and muddling the creative process.
The same is true of Riot’s tumultuous genesis. The optimism of Stand! was miles away; Stone edged the band out of the recording process as he experimented enthusiastically with synthetic keys and drums but also with cocaine and PCP. The darkly sleek “Family Affair” and the grim but groovy “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” Stone’s second No. 1 single, put him at ground zero for the birth of funk at the cost of losing the admiration of white rock critics. For a window into how exclusivist the crowd was, revisit Greil Marcus’s swimming Riot review in Creem, prefaced by an editor’s note justifying the rock magazine focusing on Stone to begin with: “There is little around right now that is worthy of such thorough coverage.”
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Stone and Wilson learned while tapping into the musical Zeitgeist of the 1960s that people were only ever so out there in the first place. A combination of hopeful politics, vital art, and sometimes very drug-fueled epiphany blew some minds, but the machine remained straitlaced and capitalist. Your ideas needed to be accessible to even see release, and the music these titans made at their peak couldn’t be quickly unpacked. It didn’t help at all to brand them as perfect and elusive beings. Far from it, they sunk to desperate, lonesome places seeking to escape the expectant, observant eye of the public while crafting something good enough to wear their breathless praise comfortably. The pressure spelled their undoing: Addiction undercut Stone’s reputation as a reliably captivating performer and slowed the hit parade to a crawl, just as Wilson struggled to reconcile his capabilities and hype with the not unilaterally rapt reception of his greatest work in its time. They spent much of the ’70s scaling back and self-medicating through mounting mental and financial woes progressing into arrests in the ’80s.
Throughout Stone’s and Wilson’s comebacks in later decades they were urged to atone. Speaking candidly on The Mike Douglas Show during a 1976 publicity push between the Beach Boys’ 15 Big Ones and The Beach Boys Love You albums, Wilson, goaded to get into detail about old habits, renounced the substance-assisted introspection of the ’60s: “I did my dose of LSD, it shattered my mind, and I came back … thank God, in I don’t know how many pieces.” Stone came back around a few years later to advertise 1982’s Ain’t But One Way, the patchy final studio album under the Family Stone moniker, completed by a producer when Stone flaked on the sessions. The precarious junction is documented in an early 1983 Late Night With David Letterman appearance where Sly promises to make it to all his tour dates because promoters stipulated that his pay would be docked if he repeated the notorious latenesses of the ’60s and ’70s. Fitfully, he performed “If You Want Me to Stay” from 1973’s Fresh, a jam about being around for a good but not a long time, covered by everyone from Etta James to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In the summer of 1983, Stone was arrested for cocaine possession and sentenced to probation; he fell asleep after calling room service during a Florida hotel room drug binge, drawing an unadvantageous law-enforcement wellness check. Wilson was kicked out of the Beach Boys after a 1982 overdose; he sought therapy with a dodgy doctor the same year Stone took a court-mandated trip to rehab.
The problems didn’t end there: Wilson narrowly avoided an illegal trespass case after being picked up at the 1984 Republican National Convention with other men reportedly carrying a worrying amount of pills. His charges were dropped. But Stone saw no such break, his crack and coke habits held up as cautionary tales. In Questlove’s excellent February doc, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), D’Angelo — funk alchemist whose balance of talent and evasiveness takes after Stone — stresses the different rules for Black artists also highlighted by Black singer-songwriters featured in last year’s Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary. A Black artist pushing into pop and rock spaces was an unwitting representative of the people and waded upstream against the idea that those scenes were not designed to cater to them. Stone had to tear that idea apart to even begin to express himself freely but never quite shook anyone’s pining for his art to be more or less in line with what the industry thought Black music sounded like: Motown, jazz, and gospel rolled up in a ball. When he fell short, he met an “I told you so” for having too much proverbial dip on his chip. But the broad public response to the trials of the Wilsons by contrast — from Brian’s mental anguish to the early-’80s addictions and death of singer-drummer Dennis — was one of empathy. America grew up with these boys and tarried with them through light and dark times. Though Wilson’s journey was full of chances to make good on a sterling back catalogue, leading to wonderful work in the aughts and after, Stone’s 21st-century path wound through periods of illness and houselessness. Both, nevertheless, lacked the linear roads to recovery that make for suspenseful narrative retellings. Just as there was no simple explanation for what made them preternaturally gifted at playing and producing incredible music, there was no easy solution for the sky-high anxiety that comes with being branded as a literal genius in yearning, impressionable youth.
The tortured-genius thing feels like old industry razzle-dazzle now. There’s no magic curse offsetting any great gift; here are only talented people abruptly gaining the attention of millions and slipping out of and/or into typical dysfunctions. Wilson and Stone paid dearly for not feeling beholden to all the ideological rules and partitions of their heyday, and the wisdom in the art is deadly obvious now, quietly guiding the traffic overhead like trusted, unassuming city architecture. In the wake of their late-’60s upheaval, artists could create with a slightly wider berth; by the mid-’70s, it was understood that you should give someone like Stevie Wonder a lot of money and ease off breathing down his neck about content. (But even he clawed his way to that freedom.) By the ’90s, the unseen auteur is the bedrock of indie rap; barbershop psychedelia and Honda rock are beloved by everyone from Jersey indie rockers Yo La Tengo to teen pop star Aaron Carter. But it sure took ages to appreciate how smart but also fallible Stone and Wilson were, to sincerely grapple with what “Everyday People” is saying: “I am no better and neither are you.”
*This story has been updated to correct when Sly Lives! was released and a lyric from “Everyday People.”
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