Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 18, 2007



Sly & the Family Stone was an American rock band from San Francisco, California. Active from 1967 until 1983, the band was pivotal in the development of soul, funk and psychedelia. Headed by singer, songwriter, record producer, and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone, and containing a number of his family members and friends, the band was the first major American rock band to have a multicultural lineup, giving African-Americans, White Americans, males, and females all roles in the band's instrumentation. In the preface of his book on the band, For the Record: Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, Joel Selvin sums up the importance of Sly & the Family Stone's influences on African-American music by stating that "there are two types of black music: black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly Stone". During the early 1970s, the band switched its sound to a grittier funk sound, which was as influential on the music industry as their earlier work. The band began to fall apart during this period because of drug abuse and ego clashes; as Sly Stone and his bandmates delved deeper into drug abuse, the fortunes and reliability of the band deteriorated, leading to its dissolution in 1975. Sly Stone continued to record albums and tour with a new rotating lineup under the "Sly & the Family Stone" name from 1975 until 1983. (more...)

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