SPACED COWBOY: A REFLECTION ON SLY STONE

Written By: KANDIA CRAZY HORSE

On Friday, June 6th, 2025, three days before Sly Stone joined the Ancestors, I received in the post a lost album by his band, Sly & the Family Stone, called The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967 (High Moon Records). When I was giddy to get a press release last week announcing this project, there was no sense that Sly would soon be leaving this earthly plane, and his loss is a shock, especially amidst Black Music Month. So this earliest live recording of him and his hyper-legendary group that
transformed soul, pop, funk, rock, gospel & psychedelia is most welcome.

The First Family was captured at Redwood City, California’s venue, Winchester Cathedral, where Sly & the Family Stone served as their resident band between December 1966 and April 1967. Their debut album, A Whole New Thing, would be released in October 1967. This live album will be available digitally, on CD, and LP, with the latter formats containing liner notes by producer Alec Palao, interviews with Sly Stone and his family
of band members, and unearthed photos, etc.

The First Family features the Family Stone that would soon be world- renowned in another year, minus sister Rose. The release’s opening track “I Ain’t Got Nobody (For Real)” has most of the hallmarks of their later songs, including funky organ and percussive horns. It is plaintive but upbeat. This set is devoid of banter between tunes, but Sly Stone kicks it off with a brief introduction: “This is an original tune!” Song two, a cover of “Skate Now,” has a great breakdown with tambourine from Jerry Martini. Next, Joe Tex’s “Show Me” is like Sly being backed by the Mar-Keys and Bar-Kays, who supported Otis Redding live and in-studio. A few songs forward on an
actual cover of Otis’ “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” it foreshadows the tandem vocals that would become a key part of future Family Stone songs. And| their take on the traditional standard “St. James Infirmary” is dominated by wonderful trumpet from Cynthia Robinson that sounds pathos. Emerging from the period of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, when white hippies were appropriating black and indigenous cultures, these vintage soul covers foreground how Sly Stone would ultimately revolutionize music globally through his synthesis of the sonic styles au courant in that city then.

There’s been a lot of energy around Texas-born Sly Stone in recent times between the drop of this live album as a Record Store Day treasure in April 2025, the October 2023 release of his autobiography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) A Memoir, and the Questlove documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) from January 2025. I am still making my way through the tome, but I did see the documentary. I felt the first half charting his ascent was good, but the part that delved into Sly’s later years and dissolution suffered from not having him present in the film. Another demerit was the fact that Questlove did not challenge his friends
like D’Angelo to actually break down exactly what the nature and burden of black genius is and how it affected Sly or themselves as artists. Fortunately, in the obituary, Sly’s family has related that he recently completed the screenplay of his life story, and it will be shared with the world.

Almost immediately after the news circulated that Sly Stone had walked on and I posted some favorites of his songs – “Jane Is A Groupee,” “Stand!,” “Spaced Cowboy” – I thought of his friend and sonic contributor: Kentucky-born singer-songwriter Jim Ford. Sly said of Ford that he was the “baddest white man on the planet.” Ford dated my beloved Bobbie Gentry and perhaps composed one of her hits. Born in Paintsville, KY, he stated that
he came from a “very raw coal-mining background” and ultimately escaped it to follow the lures west to the Golden State. Out there, befriending them like Jimi Hendrix, he met indigenous musicians Pat and Lolly Vegas – later of Redbone – and collaborated on music with them. In an interview the month after I was born in 1971 on The Dick Cavett Show, Sly cited Ford’s
“beautiful” songwriting after stating: “In order to get to it, you gotta go through it.” When Dick Cavett queries, “Who said that Emerson or Thoreau?” Sly replies, “Jimmy Ford.” Apparently, Sly’s favorite Ford song was “Go Through Sunday.” Well, my most cherished of his tunes are “Harlan County” (“In the back hills of Kentucky, I was raised, in a shack on Big Bone Mountain”), “Big Mouth USA” (the slow country version), “I’m
Gonna Make Her Love Me,” the aptly named for our “roots are rising” times “If I Go Country,” “Harry Hippie” (also recorded famously by Bobby Womack), “Happy Songs Sell Records, Sad Songs Sell Beer,” and the stellar country-funk of “Rising Sign.” I must pause here to thank my brothaman, DJ Duane Harriott, and his fellow former Other Music employees in NoHo NYC for turning me on to Jim Ford when his lone 1969 album Harlan County – including arrangements by Lolly Vegas -- was reissued.
My most beloved country singers of all-time are Jim Ford, Gram Parsons, Kris Kristofferson, and Tom T. Hall. Among them, Ford is unique for having served as an inspiration to and worked with Sly Stone on his magnum opus There’s A Riot Goin’ On – he is in the album’s cover collage. Sly and Jim these two visionaries, were meant to make music together. Now they are together again in the Spirit World.

On his beloved song “Everyday People,” Sly Stone told listeners that “I am no better and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do.” His sister Rose declaimed “different strokes for different folks.” My favorite quote posted to my Facebook profile has always been: Different strokes for different folks & so on & so on & scooby-doo-bee-doo-bee Oooohhh sha- sha [“We got to live together!”]. This is what I truly believe.

I was born into a household and social milieu where Sly & The Family Stone’s music was ubiquitous. Sly’s impact on black music was everywhere on the radio and the stereo so seamless it seemed to have always been that way. Yet it wasn’t until I was around 13 years old and first saw the film of the 1969 Woodstock festival on PBS that the full magnitude of what the Family Stone had been was made clear. In thinking about Woodstock, it’s the black and brown performances that stand out and endure the most: (my prime musical influence) Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix, Santana. And Sly, who came along with other psychedelic rock bands from San Francisco, exploding onstage at 3 am on August 17, 1969, driving through “You Can Make It If You Try,” a “Music Lover” medley, and the much-celebrated “I Want To Take You Higher.” The performance is so indelible and framed by the filmmakers such that it perpetually resonates as the apex of the Family Stone’s career in my mind. Sly provided a benediction for the freedom- seekers of Woodstock Nation.

Sly Stone revolutionized black music specifically and music in general with his funk and rock & roll innovations in the 1960s just as his black rock peers, Arthur Lee did with psychedelia and punk, and Jimi Hendrix did with upgrading the blues and by inventing eco-metal. James Brown is the progenitor of The Funk, but Sly took it in new directions and subsequently influenced everyone from Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, the Jackson Five, The Temptations, Betty Davis, Parliament-Funkadelic (George Clinton was a close friend & collaborator), Earth Wind & Fire, and Stevie Wonder down through the songlines to Prince, Human League (“(Keep Feeling)
Fascination”), Public Enemy, Glen Scott (hear his melancholic and spacey “The Way I Feel,” which quotes Sly’s “Loose Booty” with its refrain “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego”), Kendrick Lamar, and OutKast.

Sly Stone told Dick Cavett on another appearance in 1970: “everyone is an influence.” Yet few have had such a vast and stalwart imprint on popular music and culture as Sly, whose changes were not solely sounds and souls but also sartorial, as one of the male commentators in Sly Lives! ratifies. Sly was also a cosmic traveler who espoused a world view of black and white, men and women all living and being together on higher ground. Sly Stone influenced me through his particular genius; my song “Soul Yodel #3” from my debut solo album Stampede was directly from the Source of his “Spaced Cowboy,” which features him in soulful honky-tonk mode yodeling. I have also written a “Soul Yodel #1,” which I hope to record before the end
of 2026.

As a still-emerging artist in country-adjacent music, I have been in the trenches for ages, striving hard to make great music inspired by
Appalachian folk and other southeastern elements as an indigenous creator in a space counter to what the New York Times’s “In the Age of the Algorithm, Roots Music Is Rising” article from earlier in June did to belatedly acknowledge a long-standing “trend” and anoint certain come- lately old-timey and honky-tonk acts as predominant in the roots music sphere. When I reflect on my efforts, I can’t help but identify with the following “Underdog” lyrics by Sly Stone’s from the same year as the new live album since he deserves to be firmly situated on the rock & roll Rushmore and have symposia devoted to him and his works, among other laurels:

“Hey dig!
I know how it feels to expect to get a fair shake
But they won’t let you forget
That you’re the underdog and you’ve got to be twice as good (yeah yeah)
Even if you’re never right
They get uptight when you get too bright
Or you might start thinking too much, yeah (yeah yeah)
I know how it feels when you know you’re real
But every other time
You get up, you get a raw deal, yeah (yeah yeah)”

Today, as I have been scribing these reflections on Sly Stone, I saw the sad news of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson walking on. It’s so unbelievable within days of each other, we should lose the two certifiable musical geniuses of the 1960s. And I also happened to see both Sly and Brian live in their later years. Considering their mutual drug abuse and mental issues it was miraculous to see them in fine form. I fell in love with an ex at Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds Tour installment in Philadelphia, PA at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts on Bastille Day 2000. Sly’s the Family Stone featuring Sly himself I also saw for free in Lenapehoking (NYC) at
BB King Blues Club off Times Square in late 2007. The chance to see Sly Stone in person was life-altering in itself, but to also see him play was divine. I don’t recall the setlist, but the excitement of the Family Stone experience persists.

At a time when America is again turbulent and its people in turmoil, the loss of Sly Stone feels like a shot straight to the heart. His open heart remains manifest in us all. As I delve further into his catalog anew, digging on other favorites like “Luv ‘N Haight,” “Runnin’ Away,” and “Time For Livin,” I ponder how I will continue to work Sly as inspiration into the music I make with my Native Americana trio Cactus Rose NYC. It is clear I must harken to his deep humanitarian messages and consider how to channel the ways he utterly transformed the world. And above all, follow Sly Stone Spaced Cowboy’s prime directive unto the Cosmos: everybody is a star.