Sly and the Family Stone didn’t have an easy task in front of them when they stepped onstage at Woodstock. It was 3:30 AM, several hours past their scheduled start time, the grounds were soaked and muddy after a pissing rainstorm earlier in the day, and they were terrified to even touch their equipment because earlier acts in the night, including the Grateful Dead, had been badly electrocuted.
But Sly Stone — who died Monday after a long battle with COPD — knew this was a moment to prove himself on the biggest stage possible. “As I flew in I couldn’t see the whole crowd, but you could see enough people dotting the landscape that it was hard to believe that there were even more,” he wrote in his 2023 book Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir. ‘Goddamn.’ I said to myself. ‘Goddamn. What the fuck is this?’ So many people, an ocean of them without any land for miles. When something is that big a deal, be sure you’re ready.”
The band had been gigging practically nonstop since forming in 1966, and their landmark LP Stand! — featuring “I Want To Take You Higher,” “Everyday People” and “Stand!” — hit just three months earlier. And less than a month before Woodstock, they dropped the single “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” In other words, this was a band at the absolute peak of their powers.
They opened for a high-energy, euphoric rendition of “M’Lady,” and the set only grew in intensity from there. The Woodstock movie showcased “I Want To Take You Higher, the climax of their blazing, ten-song performance.
“What we would like to do is sing a song together,” Sly Stone told the crowd. “And you see what usually happens is you got a group of people that might sing and for some reasons that are not unknown any more, they won’t do it. Most of us need to get approval from our neighbours before we can actually let it all hang down. But what is happening here is we’re going to try to do a singalong. Now a lot of people don’t like to do it. Because they feel that it might be old-fashioned. But you must dig that it is not a fashion in the first place. It is a feeling. And if it was good in the past, it’s still good.”
He was speaking the language of the nearly 500,000 hippies in attendance, and they all responded by dancing together in the mud. “The call, the response. It felt like church,” Stone wrote in his memoir. “By then the film crew was fully in place. The horns went up into the sky. When the show was over, we were wet and cold…By the next day it was clear that Woodstock had been a big deal, and that we had been a major part of that deal. The festival had put a spotlight on lots of groups, but us and Jimi [Hendrix] the most.”
Even though the Who directly followed Sly and the Family Stone, he was absolutely right. A huge percentage of Woodstock attendees cite Sly and the Family Stone’s set as the best moment of the entire weekend. (By the time Hendrix played on Monday morning, the place had largely emptied out. No matter what people claimed later, not many people witnessed his set live.) But everyone saw Sly and the Family Stone, and millions more followed once the movie hit.
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It’s no secret that Sly Stone faced many sad and difficult times in the years that followed. But he achieved musical immortality that night at Woodstock. It showcases the power of live music better than perhaps any other performance ever captured on film.
From Rolling Stone US
