The founder of Sly and the Family Stone, a one-time San Francisco DJ who started the groundbreaking funk band that’s now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, died Monday morning in Los Angeles from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

There was already likely to be a revival this summer of the music of the chart-topping 1960s and 70s funk band Sly and the Family Stone. One of their first concerts ever, recorded in Redwood City, was a lost recording that was recently found and will be released as a live album this coming July. But now that inevitable revival is going to happen earlier, and for a much sadder reason, as NPR reports that the group’s founder and frontman Sly Stone died Monday morning from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 82.  

“Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” Stone’s family said in a statement picked up by the Chronicle. “While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.”

Sly Stone was born as Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas in 1943, but has family moved to the East Bay town of Vallejo while he was still an infant. It was Vallejo where he acquired the nickname “Sly,” when a schoolteacher misspelled his name as “Slyvester,” and also where he formed his musical chops in teenage gospel choirs and doo-wop groups.

This 2023 Broke-Ass Stuart article on Stone’s Bay Area DJ career details how he grew to fame at San Mateo’s KSOL (still exists, now a Spanish-language station) and Vallejo’s KDIA (now a Christian talk show station). Stone would mix Black artists with tracks by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, similar to how his newly formed group Sly and the Family Stone was one of the first race- and gender-integrated groups to gain widespread mainstream popularity.  

They had their first Top Ten hit in 1967 with "Dance to the Music.” The following year, they released the album Stand!, from which "Everyday People" hit number one on the Billboard chart. That album also produced the Top Ten tracks “Stand!,” "I Want to Take You Higher" and "You Can Make It If You Try" (as well as the single "Don't Call Me N*****, Whitey", which did not chart). They also played Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival (memorialized in the Questlove documentary Summer of Soul) in 1969, popularizing the track “Hot Fun in the Summertime."

But drugs and tumult tore the band apart, and Stone reportedly had a habit of traveling with a violin case full of cocaine and PCP. Band members who were not addicts would quit, Stone simply replaced them with addicts he could better work with. That led to Sly and the Family Stone frequently pulling no-shows or incredibly brief performances, and some painfully awkward TV appearances on the Mike Douglas Show and The Dick Cavett Show. Even as recently as 2008, at a show in Santa Rosa, Stone told the audience 22 minutes into the show, “I gotta go take a piss. I'll be right back.” He did not return to the stage.

In 2011, the New York Post reported that Stone was living in a van in Los Angeles.

A separate Questlove documentary called Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+. And as far as Sly Stone’s musical legacy, consider that Sly and the Family Stone’s music was sampled by the LL Cool J (“Mama Said Knock You Out”), Janet Jackson (“Rhythm Nation”), Cypress Hill (“Insane in the Brain”), the Beastie Boys (“Egg Man”), Beck (“Sissyneck”) and KRS-One (“Sound of Da Police”).

Also very significantly, Dr. Dre’s 1991 track “Deep Cover,” which samples Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song,” was the very first recorded track on which we heard a rapper who at the time called himself Snoop Doggy Dogg.  

Related: Tony! Toni! Toné! Co-Founder and Oakland Native D'Wayne Wiggins Has Died [SFist]

Image: American musician Sly Stone and model-actress Kathy Silva laugh during their wedding reception at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, New York, June 5, 1974. (Photo by Oscar Abolafia/TPLP/Getty Images)